Read Online A Table of Green Fields by Guy Davenport - Free Book Online Page B

him about how close you and I have become, and about Samantha. The Korczak got through to him. He thought the Ariel old hat. He's the brainy one of us, you know. I've had to pass his parents off as mine. I was sure I'd slip up there. Did I?
    —No. Not even with Samantha talking to your, that is, to Nikolai Bjerg's mother fairly often. And I talked with her several times on the phone. Good God! What a talent for the criminal you two little buggers have. You have a career in espionage.
    —So here I am.
    —And where do your parents think you are?
    —I don't have any. I stay with an uncle, who's sort of not all there. The clothes I've worn here were all Nikolai's. I have some of my own now, from my pay from you for posing.
    Gunnar speechless for an uncomfortably long time. He went to the front door and locked it.
    —Could I have something to eat? Mikkel asked. I can fix it myself.
    —Let's fix something together. Ham and eggs, toast and jelly. Tall cold glasses of milk. But come upstairs first. Let's make you feel at home.
    —Gunnar.
    —Right here, Mikkel. I'll have to practise. Mikkel, Mikkel.
    —Are we friends?
    —Friends.
    Big crushing hug.
    —Sit on the bed. I've watched you undressing so many times, and now I'm going to do it, starting with these knotted laces which surely Nikolai tied, not you. Socks that smell of dough. Stand up. Now we unbutton one shirt with a whiff of vinegar underarm. Scout belt. Slides right through, right? Zipper. And by the God of the Lutherans, you're liking this. Pants and nice briefs down and off. Now you're in Nikolai's work clothes, but you've changed from Nikolai to Mikkel, with Shakespeare grinning down from heaven, don't you imagine? So I'm seeing Mikkel stitchless for the first time. But as it's chilly, let's, if I can find it, here we go, put this on you.
    —Sweat shirt. Royal Academy of Art. Golly.
    —Sort of covers your butt halfway to the back of the knees and swallows your hands. Here, let's add the American baseball cap and have our eats.
    —Gunnar.
    —Mikkel.
39
    The high fields of Olympos. Yellow sedge in a meadow. Sharp blue peaks beyond, seamed with snow. The eagle sank out of the cold sky and set him in the field of yellow sedge.
    But there was no eagle when he turned, heart still thumping so hard that he had to breathe through his mouth, only a man.
    —So, said the man, in a splendid Greek that was neither of the farm or the city, we are here.
    —Where be the eagle, Mister Person? It clutched onto me and grabbed me up away from my sheep, and carried me through the air. Closed my eyes, peed and prayed. Where be we?
    —On Olympos, that great place. We walk over that knoll yonder and into the palace that rules the world, save for some infringements by fate and necessity, love and time, which are tyrants over us all. Everything that's evil comes from the north. But in the south of time I am king.
    —Never been so mixed up in all my life. How do I git home from here, Mister Person? 'Cause that's all I aim to do: git home, and fast.
    —You will not age here, and when you go home your sheep will not have noticed you've been gone. I can splice time onto time, with a bolt or two of eternity.
    —Shit!
    —You need not even imagine that you are here, now. Because on Olympos there is neither here nor now. You are so many words written by a polished writer named Loukianos, of Samosata in Kommagene, who will live two millennia from now. Look you, here before the gate, these are friendly trees. The one will not grow without the other.
    The curving street inside the gate (it opened of itself) was paved with stones laid down when Ilion was a forest. They walked along narrow paths among trees which the boy Ganymed could not name until they arrived at a building with cyclopean rock fitted together in irregular hexagons.
    —It sure is foreign here, Mister.
    —A sweet soul, Loukianos. There was a time when he was an Aethiopian named Aisopos, who