In winter stalagmites of frozen urine reach up out of the latrines. The river freezes, the Chinese heat fewer bunkhouses, and the Americans and Brits are merged. Blewitt grumbles that they’re already packed tighter than two coats of paint, but Zeno feels excitement as the British prisoners shuffle in. He and Rex meet each other’s gaze, and soon their straw mats are next to each other, up against the wall, and every morning he wakes with the promise of finding Rex on the floor an arm’s reach away, and the knowledge that there’s nowhere else for either of them to go.
Each day, as they climb the frozen hills, cutting, collecting, and carrying brush for firewood, Rex produces a new lesson like a gift.
Γράφω, gráphō, to scratch, draw, scrape, or write: the root of calligraphy, geography, photography.
Φωνή, phōnḗ, sound, voice, language: the root of symphony, saxophone, microphone, megaphone, telephone.
Θεός, theós: a god.
“Boil the words you already know down to their bones,” Rex says, “and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.”
Who says such things? And still Zeno steals glances: Rex’s mouth, his hair, his hands; there is the same pleasure in gazing at this man as in gazing at a fire.
Dysentery comes for Zeno as it does for all of them. The minute he returns from the latrine, he has to beg permission to go back again. Blewitt says he’d carry Zeno to the camp hospital but the camp hospital is just a shed where so-called doctors cut open prisoners and put chicken livers inside their ribs to “cure them” and that he’d be better off dying right here so Blewitt can have his socks.
Soon he is too weak to even make it to the latrine. At his lowest point he curls on his mat, locked in a thiamine-deficiency paralysis, and believes he is eight years old again, at home, shivering atop the frozen lake in his funeral shoes, inching forward into the swirling white. Just ahead he glimpses a city studded with towers: it flickers and gutters. All he has to do is step forward and he’ll reach its gates. But each time he tries, Athena tugs him back.
Sometimes he returns to awareness long enough to find Blewitt beside him, force-feeding him gruel and saying things like “Nuh-uh, no way, kid, you do not get to die, not without me.” At other hours it’s Rex who sits beside him, wiping Zeno’s forehead, the frames of his eyeglasses held together with rusted wire. With a fingernail, into the frost on the wall, he scratches a verse in Greek, as though drawing mysterious glyphs to scare away thieves.
As soon as he can walk, Zeno is forced back into his duty as a fireman. Some days he is too weak to carry his meager bundle more than a few paces before setting it down again. Rex squats beside him and with a piece of charcoal writes Ἄλφάβητος on the trunk of a tree.
A is ἄλφα is alpha: the inverted head of an ox. Β is βῆτα is beta: based on the floor plan of a house. Ω is ὦ μέγα is omega, the mega O: a great whale’s mouth opening to swallow all the letters before it.
Zeno says, “Alphabet.”
“Good. How about this?”
Rex writes, ὁ νόστος.
Zeno rummages in the compartments of his mind.
“Nostos.”
“Nostos, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course, mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A nostos also means a song about a homecoming.”
Zeno rises, light-headed, and picks up his bundle.
Rex buttons his piece of charcoal into his pocket. “In a time,” he says, “when disease, war, and famine haunted practically every hour, when so many died before their time, their bodies swallowed by the sea or earth, or simply lost over the horizon, never to return, their fates unknown…” He gazes across the frozen fields to the low, dark buildings of Camp Five. “Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible.”
Out on the ice of the Yalu far below, the wind drives the snow in long, eddying swirls. Rex sinks deeper into his collar. “It’s not so much the contents of the song. It’s that the song was still being sung.”
Singular and plural, noun stems and verb cases: Rex’s enthusiasm for ancient Greek carries them through the worst hours. One February night, after dark, huddled around the fire in the kitchen shed, Rex uses his piece of charcoal to scratch two lines of Homer onto a board and passes it over.
τὸν δὲ θεοὶ μὲν τεῦξαν, ἐπεκλώσαντο δ᾽ ὄλεθρον ἀνθρώποις, ἵνα ᾖσι καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδή
Through gaps in the shed walls, stars hang above the mountains. Zeno feels the cold at his back, the light pressure of Rex’s frame against his own: they are hardly more than skeletons.
θεοὶ is the gods, nominative plural.
ἐπεκλώσαντο means they spun, aorist indicative.
ἀνθρώποις is for men, dative plural.
Zeno breathes, the fire sputters, the walls of the shed fall away, and in a crease of his mind, unreachable by the guards, hunger, or pain, the meaning of the verse ascends through the centuries.
“That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”
Rex looks at the Greek on the board, at Zeno, back at the Greek. He shakes his head. “Well, that’s just brilliant. Absolutely bloody brilliant.”