The Bed That Cannot Move

The old woman climbed the stairs laughing to herself, eager to tell her mistress that her husband was home at last. Her knees moved fast and her feet stumbled over each other in her hurry. She stood over Penelope’s head and spoke.

“Wake up, Penelope, dear child. Open your eyes and see the thing you’ve wanted every single day. Odysseus has come home — late, but home. And he has killed the proud suitors who wrecked his house, ate up his goods, and pushed his son around.”

Wise Penelope answered her. “Dear nurse, the gods have made you crazy. They can take a wise person and turn them foolish, or set a foolish one straight, and now they’ve twisted your mind. You were always sensible before. Why mock me, when my heart is already heavy with grief? Why wake me from such sweet sleep with this wild talk? Sleep had wrapped my eyelids and pinned them shut. I haven’t slept so deeply since the day Odysseus sailed off to that cursed city no one should name¹. Go back downstairs. If any other woman in this house had woken me to babble such nonsense, I’d have sent her off with a sharp tongue. Your old age protects you.”

But Eurycleia would not back down. “I’m not mocking you, dear child. It’s true. Odysseus is here — he has come home, exactly as I say. He was the stranger they all insulted in the hall. Telemachus knew his father was back, but he kept it secret, so his father could take revenge on those violent men.”

Penelope’s heart leapt. She sprang from the bed and threw her arms around the old woman, crying. “Then tell me, dear nurse, if he’s really home, as you say, how did he get his hands on those shameless men, one against so many? They were always crowded together inside.”

“I didn’t see it, I didn’t learn how,” Eurycleia said. “I only heard the groaning of men being killed. We women sat trembling in the back of our locked rooms, the doors fastened tight, until your son called me out. His father had sent him. I found Odysseus standing among the dead. They lay on the hard ground all around him, piled on top of each other. The sight would have warmed your heart. Now the bodies are heaped at the courtyard gates, and he’s purifying the lovely house, burning sulfur² over a great fire. He sent me to bring you. So come. After all the misery you’ve both endured, it’s time your hearts had joy. The long wish has come true. He’s here, alive, at his own hearth, and he found you and his son still in the house. The suitors did him wrong, and he has paid every one of them back.”

Penelope held herself in check. “Dear nurse, don’t crow too soon. You know how welcome he would be in this house, to everyone, but most of all to me and the son we share. Yet this story can’t be true the way you tell it. It was some god who killed the proud suitors, furious at their cruelty and their wicked deeds. They honored no one, good or bad, who came among them, so their own recklessness brought their ruin. As for Odysseus, far from Greece he lost his way home, and lost his life as well.”

“Child,” said the nurse, “what a thing to say! Your husband is at his own hearth at this very moment, and you swear he’ll never come home. Your heart never trusts anything. Let me give you one more proof, then — the scar³, the one a wild boar tore in his leg long ago with its white tusk. I felt it while I washed him. I wanted to tell you, but he clapped his hand over my mouth and, cunning as ever, wouldn’t let me speak. Come with me. I’ll stake my own life on it. If I’m lying to you, kill me by the cruelest death you can name.”

“Dear nurse,” Penelope answered, “the plans of the everlasting gods are hard to read, however clever you are. Still — let’s go to my son. I want to see the dead suitors, and the man who killed them.”

She came down from the upper room, her heart turning over and over. Should she keep her distance and question her husband, or go straight to him, take his head in her hands and kiss it? She stepped through the stone doorway and came in, then sat down across from Odysseus in the firelight, against the far wall. He sat by a tall pillar, eyes down, waiting to hear what his strong wife would say once she had truly looked at him.

She sat a long while in silence. Her heart was full of wonder. One moment she searched his face and seemed to know him; the next, the dirty rags on his body made him a stranger again.

Telemachus could not bear it. “Mother — hard mother, with a cold heart, why do you sit so far from my father? Why don’t you go to him, sit close, ask him things? No other woman would hold herself back from a husband who came home after twenty years of suffering. But your heart is always harder than stone.”

“My son,” Penelope said, “my heart is stunned inside me. I can’t speak to him, or question him, or even meet his eyes. But if this truly is Odysseus, come home, the two of us will know each other well enough, and better than most could. We share signs that no one else knows, secrets hidden from everyone but us.”

Odysseus, who had endured so much, smiled at that. He turned to his son. “Telemachus, let your mother test me here in the house. She’ll soon see clearer. Right now I’m filthy, dressed in rags, so she scorns me and says I’m not the man. But you and I have to think hard about what comes next. When a man kills even one person in his own land, a man without many friends to avenge him, the killer still has to flee, leaving family and homeland behind. And we have killed the very pillars of the city, the best young men in all of Ithaca. Think about that.”

Clear-thinking Telemachus answered. “You see to it yourself, dear father. They say no mind on earth can match yours for cunning; no living man could rival you. We’ll follow you ready to fight — and I don’t think we’ll come up short on courage, not while our strength holds.”

“Then here’s what I think is best,” said crafty Odysseus. “First, wash and put on clean tunics, and tell the slave women to dress as well. Then let the singer take up his clear-toned lyre and lead us in a lively dance, so that anyone passing on the road, or any neighbor who hears it, will think there’s a wedding feast inside. No rumor of the suitors’ slaughter must spread through the town before we’ve gotten out to my farm among the trees. Once there, we’ll see what plan the gods of Olympus put in our hands.”

They did exactly as he said. They washed and pulled on their tunics, and the women dressed. The singer took his hollow lyre and woke in them a hunger for sweet song and graceful dancing. The great house rang with the beat of dancing feet, men and women in their fine belts, and outside, people who heard it said to each other, “So she’s married at last, the queen so many courted. Hard woman — she couldn’t hold her husband’s great house together until he came home.” That’s what they said. They had no idea what had really happened.

Inside, the housekeeper Eurynome bathed great-hearted Odysseus and rubbed him with olive oil, then wrapped him in a fine cloak and tunic. And Athena poured beauty over him, head to foot, made him taller to look at, and broader, and let his hair tumble down in thick curls like hyacinth flowers. Like a skilled craftsman who lays gold over silver (a man Hephaestus and Athena have taught every art, so his work comes out lovely) she poured grace over his head and shoulders. He stepped from the bath like one of the immortals, and sat down again on the chair across from his wife.

“Strange woman,” he said. “The gods of Olympus gave you a heart harder than any other woman alive. No other wife could keep her distance from a husband home at last after twenty years of suffering. — Nurse, make up a bed for me. I’ll sleep alone. This woman has a heart of iron in her chest.”

Wise Penelope answered him. “Strange man, I’m not being proud, or scornful, or even very surprised. I know perfectly well what you looked like the day you sailed from Ithaca in your ship with long oars. — Very well, Eurycleia, make up his sturdy bed for him, outside the bedroom he built himself. Carry the bed out here and pile it with fleeces, blankets, and bright bedspreads.”

She said it to test him. And Odysseus, stung, snapped at his faithful wife.

“Wife — those words cut me to the bone. Who has moved my bed? That would be hard even for a master craftsman, unless a god himself came down and shifted it with ease. No living man, not even in his prime, could pry it loose, because there’s a great secret built into that bed, and I made it, no one else. An olive tree with long leaves was growing inside the courtyard⁴, thick as a pillar and in full strength. I built my bedroom around it, walls of close-set stone, roofed it over, fitted it with snug double doors. Then I cut away the leafy branches, trimmed the trunk down from the root, smoothed it with bronze, skilled and careful, and straightened it to a line, and made it into a bedpost. I bored it through with a drill. Starting from that, I worked the whole bed until it was done, inlaid with gold and silver and ivory, and I stretched across it a strap of oxhide, dyed bright crimson. That’s the secret I’m telling you. And I don’t even know, wife, whether my bed still stands where it was — or whether some man has cut through the olive’s root and moved it somewhere else.”

Her knees went weak, and her heart melted, as she recognized the proof he had given — the sure signs only he could know. She burst into tears and ran straight to him, threw her arms around his neck, kissed his head, and spoke.

“Don’t be angry with me, Odysseus. You were always the most understanding of men. The gods gave us sorrow; they begrudged us the joy of staying together, enjoying our youth and reaching the edge of old age side by side. Don’t be angry now, don’t blame me, because I didn’t run to you and hold you the moment I saw you. My heart has been cold with fear all this time, afraid some man would come and trick me with his words. So many men scheme for what they shouldn’t have. Even Helen of Argos, born of Zeus⁵, would never have slept with a foreign man if she’d known the warrior sons of the Greeks would bring her home again. A god drove her to that shameful act; she never set the ruin in her own heart until then, the bitter ruin that brought grief to us as well. But now you’ve named the clear signs of our bed, which no one ever saw but you and me and one single attendant, Actoris, whom my father gave me when I first came here, who guarded the doors of our snug room. You’ve convinced me — and my heart was hard.”

She made him long, more than ever, to cry. He held his lovely wife, the true companion of his heart, and the tears came. As land is welcome to swimmers when Poseidon has smashed their good ship at sea, driven by wind and crushing waves, and only a few struggle out of the gray water to the shore, their skin caked thick with salt, and they climb onto land overjoyed, the worst escaped, so welcome was the sight of her husband to her, and she would not let her white arms loose from his neck.

Rosy-fingered Dawn would have found them still crying, if Athena had not thought of something else. She held the long night back at the edge of the world, and kept Dawn on her golden throne waiting at the streams of Ocean, would not let her harness the swift horses that bring light to people, Lampus and Phaethon⁶, the colts that draw the morning.

Then Odysseus said to his wife, “We haven’t reached the end of our troubles yet. There’s still more labor ahead — a great deal of it, hard, and I have to see it all through. The ghost of Teiresias⁷ told me so, that day I went down into the house of Hades to ask about the way home for my men and myself. But come — let’s go to bed now, and take the sweet gift of sleep together.”

Penelope answered, “Your bed will be ready whenever your heart wants it, now that the gods have brought you home to your own house and your own land. But since a god has put this in your mind, tell me the task. I’ll learn of it later anyway, I think; better to hear it now.”

“Strange woman,” said Odysseus, “why push me to tell you? Well — I’ll say it, and hide nothing. But it won’t gladden your heart. It doesn’t gladden mine. Teiresias told me I must travel to city after city, carrying a well-made oar⁸, until I reach men who know nothing of the sea, who eat their food without salt, who have never seen red-painted ships or the smooth oars that are wings to a ship. He gave me this clear sign, and I won’t keep it from you: when another traveler meets me and says I’m carrying a winnowing-fan on my bright shoulder, then I must plant the oar in the ground and make fine offerings to lord Poseidon — a ram, a bull, and a boar that mounts the sows, and go home and offer perfect sacrifices to all the immortal gods who hold the wide sky, each in turn. And death will come to me far from the sea, a gentle one, when I’m worn out in comfortable old age, my people prosperous around me. He told me all of it would come true.”

“If the gods will grant you a better old age,” Penelope said, “then there’s hope you’ll escape your troubles at last.”

So they talked. Meanwhile Eurynome and the nurse spread the bed with soft blankets by the light of blazing torches. When the bed was made and ready, the old nurse went back to her own room to rest, and Eurynome, who kept the bedchamber, led them to their bed, a torch in her hand. She brought them to the room and went away, and they came joyfully to the rites of their old bed.

Telemachus, the cowherd, and the swineherd stopped their dancing feet and made the women stop too, and they all lay down to sleep through the shadowy halls.

When the two of them had had their fill of love’s delight, they took pleasure in talking, telling each other everything. She told all she had endured in the house, looking on at that ruinous crowd of suitors, who killed so many cattle and fat sheep for her sake and drained so much wine from the jars. And Odysseus told all the griefs he had brought on other men and all the misery he himself had suffered. She listened with joy, and sleep never fell on her eyes until he had told the whole of it.

He began with how he beat the Cicones first⁹, and then came to the rich land of the Lotus-eaters; all the Cyclops did, and how he made him pay for the strong companions the monster ate without pity; how he came to Aeolus, who welcomed him kindly and sent him on, but it was not yet his fate to reach home, for a storm snatched him up and carried him back over the fish-filled sea, groaning hard; how he reached Telepylos in the land of the Laestrygonians, who destroyed his ships and all his armored men, while Odysseus alone escaped in his black ship. He told of Circe’s cunning and all her tricks, and how he sailed in his ship to the crumbling house of Hades to consult the ghost of Theban Teiresias, and saw all his old companions and his own mother, who bore him and raised him as a child; how he heard the Sirens singing their endless song; how he came to the Wandering Rocks and dread Charybdis and Scylla, whom no men have ever passed unharmed; how his crew killed the cattle of the Sun, and how high-thundering Zeus struck the swift ship with a smoking thunderbolt, and all his good men died together while he alone escaped death; how he came to the island Ogygia and the nymph Calypso, who kept him in her hollow caves, longing to make him her husband, feeding him, promising to make him immortal and ageless for all his days, but she never won over the heart in his chest; and how he came at last, after so much suffering, to the Phaeacians, who honored him in their hearts like a god and sent him home in a ship to his own land, giving him bronze and gold and clothing in plenty.

That was the last thing he told her before sweet sleep came over him, relaxing his body and easing the cares of his heart.

Then Athena thought of something more. When she judged Odysseus had had his fill of his wife and of sleep, she roused Dawn on her golden throne from the streams of Ocean to bring light to people. Odysseus rose from the soft bed and gave his orders to his wife.

“Wife, by now we’ve both had our share of hardship, you here, crying over my hard road home, while Zeus and the other gods pinned me down with pain, far from my own country, however much I longed for it. Now that we’ve come to the bed we both wanted, take care of the goods that are in the house. As for the flocks the arrogant suitors devoured, I’ll seize many myself in raids, and the Greeks will give me more, until they’ve filled all my pens again. But now I’m going out to the wooded farm to see my noble father, who grieves so deeply for me. And to you, wife, sensible as you are, I give this order: at sunrise the news of the suitors I killed in this house will be everywhere. Go up to the upper room with your women and sit there. Look at no one, and ask no questions.”

He strapped his fine armor over his shoulders and woke Telemachus, the cowherd, and the swineherd, ordering them all to take up weapons of war. They obeyed and armed themselves in bronze. They opened the doors and went out, Odysseus leading. There was light on the land by now, but Athena hid them in darkness and led them quickly out of the town.