Pandora(30)

HESIOD

Works and Days

Translated by Thomas Cooke (1743)





CHAPTER FOURTEEN





There is a hiss of compressed air. Dora gasps and drops the lid, the sound echoing dully across the walls. The smell of stale earth is warm and pungent. She is reminded of dusky tombs, fusted rooms – familiar yet not – her memories of them fragmented as if filtered through a sieve.

But there is no voice. Nothing to explain her whispered name, the other sounds that came before and after. The room now is completely silent.

Dora feels a rush of disappointment. What did she expect? What did she want to happen?

‘Stupid,’ she mutters, and Hermes utters a low squawk as if in reply, angling his head in agreement.

She raises the candelabrum, balances on tiptoe, peers over the rim of the vase. She means to see if there is something inside but it is too tall, she cannot see, and so instead Dora raises her hand to run it along the inside lip. The vase feels rough to the touch, and in the quiet of the basement the sound of pitted terracotta rasps loudly against the soft cushion of her palm.

On the chair-back, Hermes grows restless. He chitters, ruffles his feathers. Then the bird spreads his wings and flies to the floor, begins to peck at the lid as if foraging for food. Dora watches him, notes with vague interest that the lid has not broken. Not even a crack. But Dora shrugs, turns her attention back to the vase.

The carvings, she notes, are quite spectacular. A series of images running all the way down the vase, each one wrapping itself around it to form a seamless image, separated by the meandros borders and Grecian patterning Dora has tried, without success, to replicate in her sketches. She bends to squint at the topmost scene.

Zeus, King of the Olympian gods, sits majestic on his mighty throne. At his feet a bounty of fruit and wine and honey. Dora begins a slow circle of the vase. A village of men. Some appear prostrate, as if sick or dead. Another male figure – Prometheus, this time – holding a fennel stalk, lit with flame. The village again. This time the men are upright, celebrating around a roaring fire. Back to Zeus. The great god has his fist raised to an unrepentant Prometheus.

Dora has returned now to her original position. She looks to the next scene.

Here are Prometheus and Zeus again, journeying to the foothills of a mountain. Here, Prometheus bound to a rock. And here, two eagles perched on the Titan’s chest. The eagles alone now, transformed into vultures. Devouring him, again and again.

The scene below depicts Zeus with another man tending a kiln: the Olympian blacksmith, Hephaestus. She takes another turn around the vase, sees the transformation of unruly clay into the form of a woman, given the breath of life. And then the last scene, that of the goddess Athena blessing this new creation with all the wonderful gifts to be found in the world.

Dora knows the story, of course. Her mother recited the legend many times to her as a child during the warm comfort of bedtime. This vase depicts the creation of her namesake – the first mortal woman – whose curiosity unleashed the sins of mankind into the skies like a plague.

‘Pandora’s Box.’

She speaks in a whisper, but in the confines of the basement the words seem louder somehow and bounce from the walls, almost as if they have a power of their own, and all of a sudden it appears too much for Hermes; Dora hears the magpie let out a harsh cry, his talons scratch sharply across the stone floor, and she turns just in time to see the bird flee up the stairs and out through the door, his black-and-white feathers a blurred silhouette against the dim light of the shop.

Dora stares after him. Never has Hermes acted so oddly. The attack on Mr Lawrence was his way of protecting her, she knows. This is more difficult to make sense of. She sighs, shakes her head. She will find him in his cage, no doubt, his little head tucked deep into his wing, fast asleep. Dora will check on him later. But first …

She sets the candelabrum on the floor, sinks cross-legged in front of the vase. Dora raises its lid, turns it over in her hands. It is a heavy thing with a deep, hollow groove running around the inside rim. The border decoration is an elegant repeating pattern of an ouroboros – a snake swallowing its own tail – the symbol for eternity. Otherwise there is nothing remarkable about it. Nothing, at least, that could have fascinated Hermes for so long.

With a little shrug Dora places the lid face down beside the base of the vase. Then, fingertips tingling, she reaches for her sketchbook and begins to draw.



Later that morning, after the sun has risen and made its speedy retreat behind a sheet of sleet-grey cloud, Dora emerges from her attic room and braves the company of her uncle. Hezekiah is already seated for breakfast, holding aloft a china cup as Lottie pours from a pot of steaming tea. They both look up as Dora makes her entrance, and from the expression of reserve that has shifted, liquid-like, onto their faces, Dora is convinced she has interrupted a conversation she was not meant to hear.

‘Late rising today,’ Hezekiah notes, reclining into his seat, and Dora – whose heart is knocking furiously against the cage of her chest – says nothing, pulls out her own chair and sits. Lottie ambles to the other side of the table, plunks the teapot down in front of Dora and turns immediately away to the sideboard.

Dora keeps her head down, cannot look at either of them, fearful that if she were to meet their gazes they would perceive her duplicity, somehow know exactly what she has done.