Cassandra by Christa Wolf

Author:Christa Wolf [Christa Wolf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907970276
Publisher: Daunt Books
Published: 2013-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

What does she want, then: to be immortal? A woman? What dim memories are stirring in the Greek man, to create women like this?

We land at two in the morning. The first Greek man we meet is waiting for us beside our friend; his name is Dionysus. Half dazed with exhaustion, we climb for the first time, in the darkness, into the vehicle which will become our second home in Greece, and which it would be unfair of me now, provisionally, to call a ‘minibus’ simply in order to call it something. In my memory the road from the airport to the centre of Athens is studded with a dozen lamp stores, bizarre islands of light in the pale morning twilight. Then, without transition, the single bright lamp over the round table in the room of our friends, N. and C. A table thickly laid with food which we can only sample because of our exhaustion. The Greek banquet. The first swallow of retsina on Greek soil. Transferred in the darkness from one table to another, we know nothing of the cellar taverna at the corner where the dark, lean waiter draws off this wine from huge barrels set into the wall; nothing of the maze of narrow streets surrounding the house; nothing of the little crammed shops where C. buys flour for the pita bread, vegetables for the filling, goat cheese for the salad; we have seen nothing of the orange and olive trees whose fruits we are eating. Welcome to Athens.

How many different bloodlines have gone into the makeup of this group who sit around the table, under the spell of hospitality? Greek, Turkish, Rumanian, German, Polish forebears all have their share in us. I cannot help thinking how the banquet came into being in the dawn of time, under much the same circumstances as these, the first time one clan shared a modest surplus with another clan, not without expecting to receive a gift in return. That is why the ancient Greeks had no choice but to go to war when Helen was abducted by the Trojan youth Paris: because Paris carried off the wife of his host, Menelaus. Did Homer and the others who handed down the cycle of legends about Troy suspect that in following the myth they were helping to conceal the actual facts? Did they suspect that the Achaeans’ struggle against the Trojans – whoever they were – was about sea trade routes, about access to the Bosporus which Troy controlled? So Western literature begins with the glorification of a war of piracy. But who could wish that Homer had not existed, or would want him changed into a historiographer who stuck to the facts?

What race does Cassandra belong to? Aeschylus’s chorus, and Clytemnestra too, suspect that she does not know Greek. But she herself leaves no doubt about that. When the chorus leader pretends not to hear her grisly prophecy that Agamemnon is doomed to die at his wife’s hands, she urges

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