The Secret History - Donna Tartt [100]
In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. It was why I admired Julian, and Henry in particular. Their reason, their very eyes and ears were fixed irrevocably in the confines of those stern and ancient rhythms—the world, in fact, was not their home, at least not the world as I knew it—and far from being occasional visitors to this land which I myself knew only as an admiring tourist, they were pretty much its permanent residents, as permanent as I suppose it was possible for them to be. Ancient Greek is a difficult language, a very difficult language indeed, and it is eminently possible to study it all one’s life and never be able to speak a word; but it makes me smile, even today, to think of Henry’s calculated, formal English, the English of a well-educated foreigner, as compared with the marvelous fluency and self-assurance of his Greek—quick, eloquent, remarkably witty. It was always a wonder to me when I happened to hear him and Julian conversing in Greek, arguing and joking, as I never once heard either of them do in English; many times, I’ve seen Henry pick up the telephone with an irritable, cautious ‘Hello,’ and may I never forget the harsh and irresistible delight of his “Khairei!” when Julian happened to be at the other end.
I was a bit uncomfortable—after the story I’d just heard—with the Callimachean epigrams having to do with flushed cheeks, and wine, and the kisses of fair-limbed youths by torchlight. I’d chosen instead a rather sad one, which in English runs as follows: “At morn we buried Melanippus; as the sun set the maiden Basilo died by her own hand, as she could not endure to lay her brother on the pyre and live; and the house beheld a twofold woe, and all Cyrene bowed her head, to see the home of happy children made desolate.”
I finished my composition in less than an hour. After I’d gone through it and checked the endings, I washed my face and changed my shirt and went, with my books, over to Bunny’s room.
Of the six of us, Bunny and I were the only two who lived on campus, and his house was across the lawn on the opposite end of Commons. He had a room on the ground floor, which I am sure was inconvenient for him since he spent most of his time upstairs in the house kitchen: ironing his pants, rummaging through the refrigerator, leaning out the window in his shirtsleeves to yell at passers-by. When he didn’t answer his door I went to look for him there, and I found him sitting in the windowsill in his undershirt, drinking a cup of coffee and leafing through a magazine. I was a little surprised to see the twins there, too: Charles, standing with his left ankle crossed over his right, stirring moodily at his coffee and looking out the window; Camilla—and this surprised me, because Camilla wasn’t much of one for domestic tasks—ironing one of Bunny’s shirts.
“Oh, hello, old man,” said Bunny. “Come on in. Having a little kaffeeklatsch. Yes, women are good for one or two things,” he added, when he saw me looking at Camilla and the ironing board, “though, being a gentleman—” he winked broadly—“I don’t like to say what the other thing is, mixed company and all. Charles, get him a cup of coffee, would you? No need to wash it, it’s clean enough,” he said stridently, as Charles got a dirty cup from the drain board and turned on the tap. “Do your prose composition?”
“Yeah.”
“Which epigram?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Hmn. Sounds like everybody went for the tearjerkers. Charles did that one about the girl who died, and all her friends missed her, and you, Camilla, you picked—”
“Fourteen,” said Camilla, without looking