by Alison Fell
‘Ah yes!’ said Yiannis, dazzled. His head nodded understandingly; of their own accord his lips stretched into a smile. It struck him that there was nothing Zoe could have said that would not have evoked the same response. ‘I killed him,’ for instance, or ‘I cut him up and ate his liver.’ He sensed that he wasn’t alone in this. Men held their breath when Zoe spoke; their eyes were awed and clung to her. He was only one more eager cockerel among the legions who would from now on queue up to make fools of themselves over Zoe.
He focussed his attention reluctantly on the Laurie woman. His respect for Mr. Shapcott had increased.
‘I woke late, for once.’ Her voice was flat. She folded her arms and looked at him unsmilingly, as if resolved neither to charm, nor to be charmed. ‘So I’m afraid I’m no use to you.’
The antagonism didn’t entirely surprise him. To be seated next to Zoe was an unenviable fate for any woman, let alone one so, well, implacable, somehow. He had a vague impression of blondness: spiky blonde hair, blonde lashes, cool white-blonde hairs winking on brown forearms. There was a long scratch on her right shin, another on her ankle. He made a mental note that Ms. Laurie – she was definitely a Ms, he decided – had been rambling among thorns.
‘I see. So you saw nothing?’
‘That’s right.’
Subjected to her pale censorious gaze, Yiannis felt exposed. His skin prickled, as if scenting a change in the weather. He folded Gaylene’s list in four and flattened the edges with a fingernail, trying to suppress the knowledge that his susceptibility to Zoe had been closely, cynically observed.
20 metres away, the car radio crackled out a call sign. He clipped his pen into his top pocket and rose to his feet.
‘Thank you for your time. You’ve been very helpful. Should you need to contact me for any reason, Lynda has my cellphone number. But now, if you’ll excuse me.’
A ripple of activity spread through the group. Class dismissed. People stretched and sighed and picked up their beach bags. Yiannis said a brief goodbye to Lynda and strode off the terrace with relief, remembering only at the last minute to say his Yassous, and wish them all a very pleasant evening.
7
Pericles can’t help noticing that his friend the Sergeant has barely eaten anything – some salted nuts, and a few potato-chips, washed down with Coca Cola – although the kleftiko is fragrant with thyme and garlic, the lamb falling off the bone at the tap of a spoon. Sergeant Yiannis has ordered wine, too, a half-litre of red in a squat tin jug. Pericles digs out the last of the marrow from the bone, wondering if he can bring himself to decline dessert – which would be polite, since his companion is paying, but the rice puddings in the cold cabinet look so delicious with their crisp burnt-sugar topping that it will be hard to resist them.
His friend the Sergeant is a man of few words. The television set blares from its high shelf in the corner, and from time to time he glances without interest at the basketball game which is happening in primary colours on the screen. Pericles is a little sorry for him. He looks so tired, smoking his cigarettes, waiting with his good manners until Pericles finishes his meal. Pericles eyes his epaulettes with admiration and a pang of envy, for he misses his own Postal Worker’s uniform, its badge with the winged insignia of Hermes the messenger. Of all the losses in his life, this is perhaps the one he regrets the most.
When he was in Nea Poli jail a magpie had come to share his breakfast, a magic bird with a gleaming gold eye and a petrol sheen to its feathers. Every morning he would feed it crumbs of bread through the bars, and it would reward him with bright scraps of stolen silver. When he looks back on these months, sometimes he wishes that he could have his day in Court again, so that he could tell the truth and nothing but the truth, as he has come to see it. That he was no more a thief than the bees are who gather nectar for the hive. That, like them, he was only stocking up, he was storing. His mother had taught him, as the war had taught her: that a well-stocked cupboard was what stood between you and catastrophe. She had also impressed on him the importance of book-keeping, so that when the Sergeant arrived with his sorrowful face Pericles could account for every single item: its weight, its worth, its dimensions, its provenance.
Now he stores away only what the shopkeepers will give him: dry goods that have passed their date, cornflakes and batteries, boxes of cube sugar, broad beans in battered tins. Saturday evenings after stock-taking are the best times for salvage. Some goods like fruits can also be gathered in the orchards and hedgerows, and ever since he moved down to his mother’s bedroom the bare floor of his upstairs room has been kept free for windfall apples and pears, which must be turned and tended, and watched weekly for bruises and worms.
On weekend nights he draws his chair up to the kitchen table and enters each new item in a squared exercise book, like the one he used for arithmetic at school. He has always had neat handwriting and a head for figures, and it pleases him to fill in his columns, left to right, the first for type and brand name, the next for calorific content, and the next for bar code, and the last two for marked price and place of origin. Or, if the pickings have been poor, he may check the labelling system on his kitchen shelves, or sit in the lamplight and browse through the pages of his old ledgers.
When he thinks of his latest acquisitions, guilt flows over his mind like a mist. For these are items without a type, unbranded. The gemstone with its engraved surface, like a franking-stamp. The perforated clay thing which looks like a salt-cellar without a space inside for the salt. Items without price or provenance. Every day he stares at them, and then at his columns, whose blankness has begun to merge in his mind with a growing vagueness about how he came by the objects in the first place.
With a flick of his finger the Sergeant summons a rice pudding, and Pericles strikes at the burnt crust with his spoon. As he eats he studies the menu, the day’s prices. Psari at 10 euros the kilo, horiatiki at 1.50. The new menu is stiff and shiny and made up of three leaves, so that it sits on the table like an altarpiece. One leaf is in German, one in English, and one in Greek. Brot, he reads, bread, psomi.
‘Lipon,’ says the Sergeant at last, passing him a cigarette. ‘So how’s tricks, Pericles? Seen anything on your rounds this week, eh?’
Pericles frowns, considering. After a moment he shakes his head solemnly. ‘No, sir. Just the runners.’
This morning they’d come again, playing their game, tossing a clay ball or pomegranate between them as they ran. Appearing suddenly and soft-footed, alighting silently, like the magpie, their oiled skin as darkly glossy as his wings.
‘Joggers?’
Pericles thinks of their odd garb, their wasp-waisted leather belts, like the belts worn by weight-lifters.
‘Foreigners,’ he says, deciding that it was not Greek they had spoken to him. ‘Two of them.’ Remembering the silence around them, and how they came unaccompanied by headsets or music, he adds, ‘Quiet. Their hair is long, like girls.’
The Sergeant quirks an eyebrow. He is smiling.
‘Been fraternising with the Neo Chori lot, have we?’
‘No sir, not the Germans.’ Pericles frowns at the mention of the hippies. They have money to buy land and Toyotas and goats, but not a cent of it has ever come his way. ‘These ones are kind. They give me things.’
‘What kind of things, Pericles?’
Pericles shrugs. ‘Just things.’ A wave of irritation sweeps over him as he tries once again to classify the enigmatic objects in his mind. ‘How do I know what kind.?’
He can read the exasperation on the Sergeant’s face, and a kind of panic builds in him, for he has not only failed his friend the Sergeant, he has also failed himself. Because no matter how hard he tries, he can find no name for them, no rhyme or reason.
Sergeant Yiannis sucks on a cigarette and sighs out the smoke. Lifting his briefcase on to his lap, he pulls out a photograph and slides it across the table to Pericles.
‘Either of your runners look like this?’
&nbs
p; Pericles stares at the half-open eyelids, the frozen features. Emptiness flows from the photograph and hollows out his being. He thrusts it away from him, shaking his head in shock.
‘This is a dead man, sir!’
‘Okay, my friend,’ the Sergeant says hastily, returning the photo to the briefcase. ‘Okay, you can calm yourself down now.’ He pours the last of the wine into Pericles’ glass and snaps his fingers for the bill. When the waitress has whisked away their plates he lays two 5 euro notes in front of Pericles. ‘These things they gave you, Pericles. I’d be interested to have a look at them.’
8
When researching immigration into the USA in the early years of the 20th century, the first thing one learns is that names are negotiable. Clearly no immigrant wanted to take the risk of contradicting officialdom, opting instead to bow to the power of the scribe, to say Yes Sir, and let him write down what pleased him. On her birth certificate, for instance, Alice Kober is listed as Adele – presumably by a registrar who lacked an ear for foreign accents. Her father appears as Franz on the 1914 Naturalisation petition, as Francis in the New York City Directory of 1930; by 1935, on his Death Certificate, he is listed as Fred. His wife, Alice’s mother, appears as Cattalina, Katharina, and latterly Catherine.
Surnames, one discovers, are equally slippery. In New York’s Municipal Archive, and also in the North East Region Federal Archive, the Soundex system with its grouped homophones is an essential key to the labyrinth of indexes.
In the dim white bedroom, a mist of tangled sheets. It’s almost dusk. She takes off her reading glasses and arcs her arms above her head, stretching.
Shutters creak open on the balcony above, and a light goes on. She hears a woman’s voice, muted, scolding. ‘Mucky socks,’ it accuses, ‘Shaving water.’ The young Mrs. Wilson-Wilson certainly has the knack of adding discord to a day.
The auras of the partnered, like the Single Supplement, are an occupational hazard for the solo traveller. She finds herself waiting for retaliation, for some sign of spunk from the hen-pecked husband.
In New York the walls of her hotel room were too thin to block out next door’s noises. Nightly her neighbours engaged in bouts of irritable sex. The woman giggled and squealed a lot, and in the mornings greeted the dawn with a girlish Wheeee of pleasure, as if to assure herself or her man that she was simply tickled to death to be having such a wild time in a cheap hotel in Midtown Manhattan. They were on a mini-break, she’d decided, from somewhere far away and bible-bound: Utah, perhaps, or Nebraska.
Downtown, a keen east wind razored across the Brooklyn Bridge. Outside City Hall she’d found nowhere to sit, nowhere to smoke, nowhere to think – only a tiny locked park with bare trees and a few skinny crocuses. April in London meant municipally easeful spaces – parks with lawns and lakes, petunia beds, magnolia trees bursting with starry blossom. Here, though, the message was all too clear: New York was a place to make money, or spend it.
Unkissed by the prince of profit, the public sector was the Cinderella of the city, ill-funded and ill-esteemed. The Fire Department seemed to be the sole bastion of civic pride and confidence. The Fire Station near her 51st Street hotel was spick and span; inside, heroic scarlet-and-chrome fire trucks stood in polished ranks, primed and ready for disasters.
The cavernous lobby of the Surrogate Court building was windowless, the walls and ceiling faced with ginger-coloured ormolu; on either side of the entrance a dusty bronze eagle crouched astride a globe. The security guards had trouble with ‘Municipal’ and ‘Archive’; ‘Hall of Records’ was what swung it in the end. She passed through the magnetometer, stuck her new blue security pass on her lapel, and was directed to Room 103.
‘Whadya wanna research?’
The desk-clerk had his hands on the place where hips might have been expected. He was potato-shaped, with low-slung trousers and a peeled red face which gleamed with sweat.
Ingrid replied in her best British Library whisper. ‘Alice Kober, the classical scholar, died 1950.’
‘The whaaaat?’
‘Archaeologist?’ she offered, thinking of the security guards. On the wall behind the desk a row of high windows, dimmed with grime, had been painted shut. An L shaped bank of microfilm scanners jutted into the room, while free-standing carousels occupied much of the remaining floor space. Two of the walls were lined with grey metal filing cabinets and, on a third, shelves of ledger books reached almost to the ceiling.
She filled out her slip and paid $5 for a scanner. The machines looked ancient, and most of them were occupied; coats and mufflers festooned the backs of the chairs. There was an old-fashioned iron coat-tree in the corner but no one was using it.
‘Do you happen to have a sheet of instructions?’
‘No,’ the clerk barked, clinking the keys on his belt.
No ma’am would do nicely, she thought. ‘And if I can’t work it?’
The clerk eyed her wearily. ‘Then I guess we might have to show you.’
New York lesson 1 – never look lost. Lesson 2 – forget hallowed silences. It’s the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices.
Unlike the Municipal Hall of Records, the North East Regional Archive on Varick Street was cool and quiet, oiled by Federal money, and if the security guards on the ground floor hadn’t actually smiled at her, at least they’d greeted her credentials with civility. The procedures, too, were reassuring in their familiarity – coat and briefcase in locker, pencils not pens.
The librarian – his badge, surnameless, announced him as Gerry – was red-headed, soft-spoken, with long musician’s fingers and a decorously slender wedding ring. Although he confessed he hadn’t heard of Alice Kober, he was clearly up to speed on the issues – the invisibility of women in the historical record, and so forth.
Twelve floors below, the Hudson river roiled soundlessly beneath the same piers on which the immigrants of the Old World had first set foot on the New. At Battery Point she’d queued in the pouring rain for the Ellis lsland ferry, while itinerant Africans hawked cheap Chinese umbrellas. In the Security tent she’d placed coat, cardigan, boots and briefcase in a green plastic tray; poker-faced, she’d submitted to the electronic frisking.
‘No one in the States jokes about security any more,’ her friend Maxine had warned before she set off. ‘Don’t even think about it.’
In the Ellis Island Museum there were photographs of the queues of immigrants, three deep, stretching from the dock to the vast Baggage Room, up a flight of stone stairs to the second floor, and into the great arched hall of the Registry. All of them wore tags pinnned to their clothing, – ship’s name, Manifest number – like goods marked down in a bargain basement.
Having already been scanned, cursorily, for obvious signs of illness, they would undergo the mental and physical health inspections, during which they would be examined for consumption, excema, scabies, imbecility, and have their eyelids turned inside out by the ‘buttonhook’ men, who checked for trachoma. Then, if they were deemed to be strong and without defect, and once it was established that they were neither anarchists, polygamists, convicts, nor idiots, the door of limitless opportunity would swing open to let them through.
This was the story known to every American – the heroic high point, perhaps, of its history. Certainly there had been xenophobia, there had been pressure on the immigrants to assimilate, to naturalise, to learn English. But on the ferry Ingrid had also sensed the idealism that still infected their descendants: a memory of welcome, perhaps, of being enfolded in a new and democratic embrace.
When the Passenger Record flashed up she shook her head at the screen. She printed it out and went to the desk to consult with Gerry.
Ship of Travel: Statendam
Port of Departure: Rotterdam
Manifest Line Number: 0001
Date of Arrival: May 29th, 1906.
‘I’m not sure this can be the right Franz Kober. 1906 seems too late.’
‘You should check the M
anifest on microfilm. It’ll give you a lot more detail. 0001. That’ll be, let’s see.’ He tapped a command on his keyboard. ‘Cabinet T715. End of the row on the left.’ He scribbled numbers on a slip of paper. ‘Roll 717, page 56.’
The scanner room was lit only by the bluish light of one screen, in front of which sat an elderly Jewish woman. An aluminium walking stick leant against her chair. Her face in the wintry glow was harsh with puzzlement, its shadows sharp as a woodcut. Ingrid threaded the film on to the spool and fast-forwarded. At page 50 she stopped and scrolled slowly through to 56.
The entries were in copperplate, column after column of them cramming the screen. In the top left hand corner the names leapt out at her.
Kober, Franz
Kober, Katarina
Below – proof, if proof were needed – was Gruber, Anna, 18, occupation: cook.
Katharina’s maiden name was Gruber. She had been travelling with her younger sister.
The entries flowed on across the page, the writing so neat and small, executed with such a steady hand. No fountain pens in those days – just bare nibs dipped in inkwells, blotting paper pressed down punctiliously on the page. She pictured the clerks in their pince-nez, labouring like drones from dawn till dusk, stone-blind, no doubt, at 40. She stared again at the arrival date. May 1906. Alice Kober had been born in the December of that year. Although absent from the register, she’d been present after all. The scholar-to-be of ancient writing systems had entered the country invisibly, had slipped like a little fish through the net of scribal surveillance.
Gerry put his head round the door to check on her.
‘It’s them, all right!’
‘It is?’ He came over, grinning at her excitement.
