Eleven Steps

by Xenocrates, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Four

From the couch to the door of the house it was eleven steps, and from the door to the edge of the court it was four. Manes had known this for twenty-six years without ever having counted it himself. He knew it because the old man had never in all that time carried a lamp inside his own house. He went out every night in the third watch to stand in the court and look at the sky, and came back, and lay down; and once, early on, when Manes had offered him a light, he had said, Eleven and four. Keep the oil.

So the passage was kept clear. That was the first of Manes's duties and the one he never thought about: the stool against the wall, the water-jar in its corner, the chest of books in the recess where it could not be walked into, and the bronze basin by the door, on the left, upturned to dry once the evening washing was done.

That night he had washed the old man's feet as always, kneeling, and the feet were as they had been for some years, long and yellow and cold even in summer, the nails thick as horn. He had dried them and was carrying the basin out with the water still in it when Krates's boy came running across the garden to say that Polemon wanted the big lamp in the exedra, because they were going to sit late over something. Manes put the basin down where he stood, to free his hands. He took the lamp across. Polemon kept him there to hold it while they hunted for a place in a roll, and then to trim it, and when he came back the house was dark and the old man was asleep, and he lay down on his mat across the threshold and slept too.

The sound woke him: one long note of bronze, then water, then the flat soft sound a body makes, which is not like any other.

He found the lamp by feel, burned his fingers on the brazier getting a light, and went in.

The old man was on the floor of the passage, on his side, at the seventh step. The basin lay against the wall with its mouth toward him, still rocking a little. There was water everywhere, black in the lamplight, running in a thin bright tongue across the floor toward the recess.

"Manes," the old man said. His voice was ordinary. "The chest. The water is going under the chest."

Manes stood with the lamp.

"Lift the chest first," the old man said. "Then me."

He set the lamp on the stool and dragged the chest out of the recess, and it was heavier than he had thought, and he held it against his body with both arms, the rolls shifting inside it like something alive, and looked for a dry place, and there was none. In the end he carried it out into the court and set it on the stone bench under the stars and came back. The old man had not moved. His eyes were open and he was looking at the basin.

"Now," he said. "Not the left leg. Do not touch the left leg."

Three

The physician came out from the city at first light, a Koan with clean hands, and felt along the thigh. The old man did not make a sound; but Manes, who was holding the shoulders, felt the whole body go hard as a plank under his palms and then, slowly, by an act of will, not hard. The bone was broken high, near the joint. The physician bound it with splints and linen and said what he could say, which was little, and took his fee from Polemon at the gate; and Manes heard him say there the thing he had not said in the room. At eighty-one, a thigh. He had seen one heal once, in a younger man.

Polemon came back in and stood at the foot of the couch.

He was a big man, heavy in the shoulder, and when he stood still in a small room the room seemed to wait for him to move. Manes had known him since he was a young man who smelled of wine at the third hour. He was not that now. He had taken on the old man's habit of looking at a thing for a long time before he said anything about it, and Manes watched him look at the floor of the passage, which was dry now and swept, and at the basin, which Manes had put back by the door on the left, upturned, where it belonged.

"How did it happen?"

"I went out," the old man said, "as I go out. There was a basin in the passage at the seventh step, and I did not see it."

Polemon waited.

Manes, in the doorway, waited too. He had waited all the dark end of the night, sitting by the couch with the lamp out, for his name. He had heard it said once in the passage, Manes, the chest, and since then nothing; and he understood that the old man was keeping it, as he kept everything, to set down in its proper place at the proper time.

"I did not see it," the old man said again, "because it was night, and I had no lamp, because I do not carry one. It is the same passage it has been for twenty-six years. I am not the same."

That was all. Polemon looked once at the doorway, and Manes looked at the floor, and when he raised his eyes Polemon was looking at the old man again.

Manes knew what this was. Everyone at the Academy knew, and half of Athens: that once, when the old man had been called to give evidence in a lawsuit and had gone up to the altar to take the oath, the jurors had stopped him, and said that from this man they would take the word without it. It was told as a story about honour. Manes had always heard it as a story about exactness. The old man did not say what was not so. Nor did he say what had not been asked. There was a basin in the passage and I did not see it. Every word of that could have been sworn at any altar in Attica, and there was a hole in the middle of it the exact shape of a man.

Two

In the days after, Manes did not eat.

It was not a thing he decided. He had swept the floor of the exedra every morning for twenty-six years, and wiped the benches, and filled the water-jars at the back, and all that time the old man's voice had gone on over his head, steady and unhurried, like rain on a roof heard from inside. Manes had not listened to it. He had not been able to help hearing it. And there were things in it that had gone into him the way the smell of the cypresses had gone into his cloak, without asking.

That there were three kinds: gods, and men, and between them the others. That the gods were good and did not change, and took no pleasure in howling or in pain. That the others were not all of one sort. Some carried prayers up and answers down, and were kind. But there were also, in the air about us, great and powerful natures, hard and sullen, which took pleasure in beatings and lamentation and fasting and foul words. The black days of the calendar were theirs, and the festivals where men tore their clothes, and not the gods'; and if they were given these things, they did nothing worse.

And that the souls of good men, when they died, went up to be among the others.

Manes had worked it out lying across the threshold that first night, with the lamp out and the old man breathing in the dark behind him, and he worked it out again every night after, and it came out the same each time. The old man was going to die. Everyone in the garden knew it by the fourth day, from the smell of the room and from the way Polemon no longer went back to the city at night. When he died he would go up, because if any man's soul went up it would be his. And he would go up with the seventh step in him. Manes could not see how a soul could carry a thing like that and stay among the kind ones. A broken thigh, and the fever after it, and at the very end the passage he had walked blind for twenty-six years turned against him: that was a wrong, and a wrong sat in a soul the way a stone sits in a shoe.

So he fasted, which was one of the things they liked. He ate nothing, and carried the old man's bowl out each evening with the share still in it that had always been his, the barley and the few olives the old man left, and in the court he tipped it onto the earth under the bay tree where nobody walked. And at night, when the old man slept, he went out and stood in the court where the old man used to stand, and struck himself on the breast with his closed hand, not loudly, as the women do at funerals. He did not know how many blows they wanted. He gave what he could.

On the sixth night, when he came back in, the old man was awake.

"Eleven," he said out of the dark.

Manes stopped in the doorway.

"Last night it was nine. The night before, nine. Come and light the lamp. I do not want to talk to a door."

Manes lit it. The old man's face in the small light was not one Manes knew well yet, it had changed so much in six days: the bones standing up under the skin, the eyes gone deep. But the eyes themselves were the same. They went over Manes once, from the hair to the feet, slowly, the way they went down a page.

"And you are not eating."

"No, master."

"Where does the barley go?"

"Under the bay tree."

The old man looked at him a while longer. Then he said, not as a question, "Tell me who it is for."

Manes told him. He told it badly and in the wrong order, and some of it in his own Phrygian, which the old man did not know, and twice he stopped altogether. But he told the whole of it, the three kinds and the hard sullen ones in the air and what pleased them, and the seventh step, and the stone in the shoe. And when he came to if they are given these things they do nothing worse he heard that he was saying it in the old man's own voice, the slow one from the exedra, and he stopped, ashamed.

The old man was silent for a long time. Manes had seen him silent for an hour together, every morning of his life, on the bench in the court, and this was not that silence. This was the silence of a man who has found his own words lying in a place where he did not put them, and is reading them there for the first time.

"Where did you hear that?" he said at last.

"Sweeping."

"Yes," the old man said. "Yes. Of course." He shut his eyes and opened them again. "Then let us do it properly, since you have it from me. There are three kinds. Gods, and the others, and men. Who put the basin at the seventh step?"

"I did."

"Which of the three are you?"

Manes did not answer.

"Which?"

"A man."

"And who walked into it?"

"You, master."

"Which of the three am I?"

"A man," Manes said. And then, because it was true and he could not keep it back: "Now."

Something moved at the corner of the old man's mouth. It was not quite a smile. "Now," he agreed. "So a man set it down, and a man walked into it. That is a debt between men. It is not owed upward. You cannot pay it into the air with barley on the ground. Whatever is in the air, it lent you nothing."

"Then what is owed?"

"Did you put the basin back?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"By the door. On the left. Upside down."

"Then that is paid." The old man closed his eyes. "Go and get your barley. Not from the ground. Bring it here and eat it where I can see you."

Manes brought it. There was cold barley in the pot, and he took a bowlful and sat on the floor by the couch and ate it with his fingers, and the old man watched him through half-open eyes, the whole bowl, to the end, as he used to watch the young men in the exedra work a figure through to the end.

When it was finished Manes said, "Master."

"Yes."

"When you are among them. Will you be one of the kind ones?"

The old man was a long time answering. Manes thought he had gone to sleep.

"Ask Polemon," he said. "In twenty years."

One

He died nine days later, in the morning, in his eighty-second year, with Polemon on one side of the couch and Krates on the other, and Manes at the foot, where he could reach the feet. They were cold. They had always been cold.

The women came out from the city for the laying-out, as women do, and washed him and dressed him, and when it was time they began the lament, high and hoarse, striking their breasts and dragging at their hair, as they had been hired to. Polemon let them go on for a while. Then he went and spoke to the eldest of them, quietly, and paid her the whole of what had been agreed, and they went off down the garden with their faces dry and their voices put away, a little puzzled, counting the coins.

They gave him to the fire at the edge of the grove and put the bones in the ground, and the young men went back to the exedra, and Polemon sat on the bench in the court for an hour every morning and said nothing, and Manes swept.

At the end of the month, on the night when there was no moon, he took a piece of bread and an egg and a little salt fish and went out along the road.

He could not have said why. He had eaten every day since the barley. He had set the basin by the door each night, on the left, upturned, and walked past it in the dark without looking at it. But the night without a moon was Hekate's night, when the houses of Athens set suppers out at the crossroads for her and for the dead who go about with her; and he had set one out every month of his life before he came to the Academy; and the old man was dead; and he went.

Where the Academy road met the road to Kolonos there was a three-faced pillar with a flat stone at its foot. The stone was bare. In the shadow of the pillar a woman sat with her knees drawn up, in a cloak that had been other people's, waiting, as the poor of Athens wait at the crossroads at the dark of the moon, to see what the rich will leave for the goddess.

Manes stood in the road with the supper in his hands.

He knew what he had come to do. He was to bend and set it on the stone, and turn without looking, and go home. He knew that she would eat it as soon as his back was turned, and that this was a thing people laughed at in the theatre. He looked at the stone. He looked at the woman. She did not hold out her hand. She only watched him, as a man is watched who has not yet made up his mind.

Which of the three are you?

He crossed the last of the road and put the bread and the egg and the fish into her hands, and turned, and went home.

The house was dark. He did not light the lamp. He went in at the door, past the basin on the left, and walked the passage slowly, with his hands at his sides: eleven to the couch, which was empty and made up; and turned; and eleven back to the door; and four to the edge of the court.

He stood there, where the old man had stood every night for twenty-six years, and looked up. There was no moon. There were the stars, all of them, each in its place, more than he had ever tried to count.

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A note on the sources: Xenocrates' seventy books are lost. That he died in his eighty-second year after stumbling at night over a basin (λεκάνη), that he gave an hour of each day to silence, and that the Athenians let him alone give evidence without the oath come from Diogenes Laertius, Lives IV.2; the jurors stopping him at the altar is in Valerius Maximus 2.10 ext. 2. His view that ill-omened days and festivals of beating, lamentation, fasting and foul speech belong not to the gods but to "great and powerful natures, obdurate and morose," which, given these things, "resort to nothing worse," is reported by Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 26. The poor eating Hekate's suppers at the crossroads is in Aristophanes, Wealth 594–597. Manes, the physician, the woman at the crossroads, the eleven steps and the last days in the house are invented.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Xenocrate per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Xenocrates, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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