The Letters of Odysseus to Kalypso

They started out very calmly, hello, Kalypso, how have you been, do you still have that necklace I made for you out of shells and dolphin tendons. Pretty quickly he began adding in short vignettes about his kid and some hunting trips they had been on, or how they’d gotten together on a Saturday afternoon and fixed a broken yoke. Then the kid stories stopped and he started telling her all about his fears—someone was in the house last night but he couldn’t catch him, someone was killing his beeves, there was a knife under his pillow he hadn’t put there, real chilling things.

The paper had aged. It was the color of weak tea. Or, of course—it had been dyed the color of weak tea: I always forget that they were a hoax. Paired with each letter in Greek was a separate page, written longhand in English. My boyfriend’s father kept the letters in plastic bags, wrapped in an old raincoat—an oily brown coat with large pockets and a dirty plaid liner, the kind of coat that used to be called a mackintosh. He admitted that he had been the one to store the letters in the raincoat; he did not, or could not, explain why, and I did not press him. We had taken seats across from each other at his small kitchen table. The table itself was a rough and polished oak, round, low. It was as though we were reading at a table below deck, in the hero’s ship with black sails.

“Where did these come from?” I had asked my boyfriend’s father.

“Margaret,” he said. His wife—my boyfriend’s mother—had died three years before I moved to Scotland, of a sort of muscle cancer. I have seen pictures of her. She is a plain, stolid looking woman, a serious looking woman whom I feel I would have liked. She worked as the Classical Antiquities curator at the City Museum of York; when she died, my boyfriend began his studies at St Andrews in Scotland and his father moved back to his homeland in order to be closer to his son. Her handwriting, in the notes she made on the translations, was small and upright, letters like small stoic soldiers.

In her early years at the museum, my boyfriend’s father said, his wife had received a packet of letters that purported to be the letters Odysseus had written to the goddess Kalypso after he had returned to reign on Ithaka. They had been sold at auction and donated to the museum. My boyfriend’s mother translated, read, and analyzed each one. She concluded, and everyone agreed: they were certainly a hoax. But my boyfriend’s mother liked the letters. She signed them out from the museum, and she decided to keep them. When she died, my boyfriend’s father found the letters among her work papers. He, too, decided to keep them, but, at the time I was with him, had not read them. He asked me if I might like to have a look at them, and if we might not read them together.

I never asked, “Why did you keep them?” but it was a question I wanted to ask.

One of my favorites was a letter Odysseus had written pretty early on, just after he had gotten back home to Ithaka. His dog had died, and he was feeling bad about that, but didn’t really feel like he could complain to his wife about anything because she had had such a sad twenty years herself.

Kalypso, [the translation read] when I was with you, I used to stay awake late, after we had had sex and you were sleeping. I would leave the bed and go to walk along the beach in the darkness of night. Your island was beautiful all the time, but it was never more beautiful than when I was exhausted from loving you and satisfied from it, and the ocean was moving and splashing in the dark. But then I would become cold and...