by Alison Fell
‘The amazing thing is, Katharina was pregnant on the ship.’
‘Yeah? When was your scholar born?’
‘December 1906. So she was – what? Two, three months?
Gerry crouched beside her chair, studying the screen. ‘They could have been in a hurry to go before she showed. Could be why they sailed then.’
The first trimester. A risky time, surely, to undertake such a journey. Yet against all the odds, Alice had hung in there, had survived the long train journey from southern Hungary to Rotterdam, and the discomforts of the 10 day sea voyage.
Conceived in Hungary, born in New York. For a moment she felt ridiculously proud of Alice. Even as a foetus, she’d shown remarkable tenacity.
Coming up from the subway at Lexington Ingrid found the station awash, water sluicing down the stone steps from the street. She picked up a sushi takeaway at the Korean healthfood bar on the corner of 51st and Third, and emerged into a thunderous downpour. Passing the Fire Station she noticed soapsuds sailing along the gutter. They’re doing their housework, she thought – washing their lovely fire-trucks. Until she saw that the suds seemed to be foaming miraculously from her own feet.
After the Ellis Island trip her favourite Goretex boots – olive green, Italian – had developed a salty tidemark around the toes. She’d squeezed shampoo on them, scrubbed them with a nailbrush, and set them to dry on the radiator. And now the ingrained shampoo had reached critical mass in the deluge. It was like something out of the Marx Brothers. Each squelching step she took set off a new bout of lather, leaving a trail of foam like the wake of some transatlantic liner.
Her plane to Austin was at 7am next morning. In the hotel lobby she signed off her bill and ordered a 5am cab to Newark from the Bell Captain, a dapper Italian with the habit of sang-froid, who called her Ma’am and studiously avoided looking at her shoes. She pressed the elevator button for the 7th floor, looking neither to left nor right, daring anyone to stare at her.
Even before she opened her door she could hear that her neighbours were in residence. Within minutes of entering she was aware of a qualitative change in the proceedings. She pulled off her sodden boots and sat on the bed, listening. There were no giggles at all this time, which implied less tickling. She thought she could hear slaps. The shriekers, if she wasn’t mistaken, had turned into spankers.
On the wardrobe door her clothes hung ready for the morning – lighter clothes, in lighter colours, like a ghost of her summer self. Tomorrow she’d be deep in the heart of Texas; tonight would be the last night of serious annoyance.
She packed her holdall, set the alarm for 4am, and got into bed with a certain optimism. Spanking was more visceral than tickling; perhaps it would bring things to a head, or at least speed up the whole performance.
For a while she lay in darkness, urging the couple on in a fairly neighbourly way, even contemplating in passing a parallel with her own pursuit of equally elusive – if more intellectual – goals. But then her thoughts segued, predictably, into self-criticism, for time wasted, and meagre successes. If she’d found out so little about the Kobers wasn’t it because her method wasn’t up to scratch? With only six days in the Texas archive, she couldn’t afford to wander up any more blind alleys. She’d have to take a more logical approach, work out her plan of action, stick to it.
Just as she was drifting off, the Wheee! rang out, and she sat up with a jerk and yelled ‘God’s truth!’ at the wall. They’d blown it again: that gay girlish whistle was a sure-fire signal. This time she felt personally let down, their failure rankling all the more because, just for once, she’d let herself harbour hopes of success.
She punched her pillow and lay down again, wide awake and seething righteously, because nothing, after all, was as infuriating as sheer bloody incompetence.
The New York City Census for 1930 is handwritten, in tiny copperplate script. The page is divided into 30 columns which detail colour, ethnicity, country of origin, language spoken, even whether the family had ever lived on a farm. At 662 Southern Boulevard in the Bronx, Franz Kober is listed, and below him his wife Katarina, daughter Alice E., and son William J. William is listed as a student, Alice as a Latin teacher, having graduated from Hunter College just in time for the Stock Market crash and the great Depression. Franz’s occupation is hard to decipher. It appears to be ‘pressing’ in the ‘upholstery’ industry.
The rent of the property was $55 a month, compared to the $36.50 paid by the Kelly family in No. 661, so one assumes that the Kober’s apartment had at least two bedrooms. At No. 663 there was an Italian family with seven children, aged from 15 down to 3 – Noni, Ernestina, Vito, Amelia, Ella, Victoria, Nico. The Kobers’ other neighbours were Poles, Palestinians, Russians; the block would have been cramped, each stairwell a cavern of noise – hardly a place that would foster a single private thought, let alone a first-class intellect. It was perhaps from sheer necessity that Alice Kober developed such formidable powers of concentration.
The Kobers’ block was part of a huge development of 6 storey tenements, bordered by East 149th Street to the west, and Leggett Avenue to the east. Straddling Leggett Avenue was the hauntingly-named Casanova Street station on the old Harlem River El; in its shadow were workshops and businesses – a cabinetmakers, a piano factory.
Searching for the warp and woof of Alice’s early life – although one suspects that this reticent, enigmatic woman, who in letters mentions hardly a single personal detail, would not want us to know – one conjures up a picture of coal-carts and pawnshops, of gas lamps lining the sidewalk, and the girdered structure of the El casting its spider-web pattern on the cobbled streets below. Above, the hulking apartment blocks with their water-tanks on the roof, their armature of fire-escapes, their pulleys festooned with sheets, blankets, petticoats.
In the 1933 New York City Directories, the Kober name appears at the same address, but this time the head of household is listed as Kober, Alice E., instructor Brooklyn College, Women’s Division. As a male, Franz would have been listed as such even if unemployed, and the absence of his name seems to imply that he had left the family home during that period.
In fact the 1935 Death Index shows that Franz – who has now become Fred – died aged 62 on December 17, 1935, of carcinoma of the stomach, in St Francis’ Hospital in the Bronx. The doctor attending noted that he had undergone no operations, had received no prior treatment, and had died on the day of admission. The address given on the Death Certificate is 2134 Third Avenue, in the area of upper Manhattan now known as El Barrio. That this address was supplied ‘by the deceased’ suggests that no member of his family was present when he was admitted.
Fran’s occupation is recorded as ‘superintendent’, which suggests that he may have become a night watchman or janitor of a warehouse or factory – a far cry from the ‘weaver’ or ‘upholsterer’ of earlier listings. The Depression had thrown millions out of work, and no doubt an immigrant from Old Europe could come down in the New World as easily as he could go up. It is possible that the immigrants’ dream of ‘a land of equality, where the gentleman works works alongside the labourer, where every man is a mister, and every woman can wear a hat and gloves and walk about like a lady’ – may have failed Franz Kober in the end, and even that illness, alcohol, or other factors led to the breakdown of the family.
It is tempting to speculate about the effect such an estrangement might have had on Alice Kober’s sense of herself as a woman, and while we will probably never know the truth about his demise, it is notable that nowhere in Kober’s correspondence do we find any reference to Franz, nor, when she died 15 years later, were her ashes interred in Ferncliff Cemetery beside those of her father.
Although it was cancer that killed both father and daughter, it is not known what kind of cancer Alice suffered from. We know that she chain-smoked, and certain American scholars have taken this as a sure indicator of cancer of the lung – not least because, in an era before computer data-bases, Kober filed her Linear B sign-lists in Fle
etwood cigarette cartons, Fleetwoods being her favourite brand. But one might also be tempted to draw a parallel with the brilliant biochemist Rosalind Franklin, another dedicated workaholic, whose beautiful X-ray photographs of the crystalline structure of DNA led to the discovery of the Double Helix, but who died of ovarian cancer before she could share the Nobel Prize glory enjoyed by Watson and Crick.
Like Kober, Franklin had worked at the top of a field that was almost exclusively male, had played by male rules, and had been forced to absorb, if not actually accept, male chauvinist prejudice. Neither woman married or had children, and since both had seen their femininity used to undermine or belittle their achievements, it would not be surprising if they had felt the need to suppress something that was so clearly disadvantageous. Here it might be worth bearing in mind that elements which are denied or suppressed tend to erupt in some other, somatic form, and in the absence of solid proof one cannot rule out the possibility that Alice Kober, like Rosalind Franklin, was cut down in her prime by a cancer that was gynaecological in origin.
Upstairs the Wilson-Wilsons’ glass door slides shut, privatising the one-sided quarrel.
Ingrid closes the file and keys shutdown. The speculation will have to go, of course. The trouble is that bare statistics don’t make a life, and in the absence of proof – she would have killed for a fragment of diary, a single personal letter – her mind piles supposition on conjecture, racing around like a rat in a trap. She’ll let it stand for the moment, but it really won’t do at all.
Outside on the balcony she lights a cigarette and smokes in the darkness. A pall of quiet hangs over the village; even the music of the Shoestring Bar seems muted. It occurs to her that the news will have spread by now: perhaps they’re all indoors, observing a funeral seclusion, murmuring behind closed shutters.
Without the blessing of sunlight the darkening sea holds a foretaste of winter. For a moment she can imagine the November rains, the empty holiday apartments locked up, the few remaining villagers booted and squelching.
It would be dreich, certainly. Every bit as dreich as Dunelg.
9
On Monday afternoon Yiannis drove over to the Mortuary Office, which was attached to the new hospital at Pepargni. He had spent the morning scrolling through Missing Persons reports, printing out any file that matched the victim. The pre 1998 material was held on microfiche in the basement of the Heraklion HQ, but luckily, in this case the age of the victim made it unlikely they’d have to go so far back.
The Press Release was due to go out in time for the evening bulletins; afterwards there would be call-in sheets to collate. Apart from the standard crazy calls, there would be fathers seeking sons, sisters seeking brothers, fiancées abandoned inexplicably on the very day of the wedding. Screening the calls was no easy task because, as he had learned, people in search of answers – closure, as the Americans called it – could convince themselves of almost anything. There was never a shortage of punters eager to claim a deceased, and sometimes it seemed to him as if any deceased would do.
Missing Persons had yielded a poor crop. There were two possibles: Demos Xenopontes, 18, a waiter, born Piraeus, and Hassan al Aswani, 20, from Cairo, a deckhand on Minoan Lines.
When he’d checked the Piraeus number he’d received profuse apologies from the Xenopontes mother. Demos, she’d confessed, had returned home in January, after a three-month loss of memory. A steel ladder had fallen on his head, so that he had forgotten his own name, and his boss’s name, and even the name of his own mother. Poor Demos still couldn’t tell her quite what he’d done in the interim, but she thought he might have worked on a construction site in the City of London, for he talked of a tower called Kanari Wharf, and an English pub with a parrot in it at Piccadilly Circus.
Yiannis made an effort to be stern. ‘You do realise, Madam, that it’s your duty to tell us. Otherwise, how can we ever close the file?’
‘Ah, signomi, Astinomos!’ she’d wailed. ‘I was so happy to have my boy home, everything flew right out of my head!’
The Cairo number on the Aswani file had been disconnected. Yiannis called Minoan Lines and got through to a secretary with hay fever who told him between sneezing fits that the Human Resources Department had recently moved offices. Nevertheless she would try her very best, she assured him, to track down the documentation. Twenty minutes later she called back to say the details had been temporarily misplaced.
Yiannis, who’d heard such excuses a hundred times before, stuffed the Aswani file into a cardboard folder; it was more likely that the documentation was incomplete, or had never existed in the first place. Even for casual workers the bureaucracy was cumbersome, and as long as the big shipping companies had schedules to keep, the Mediterranean would always have its share of Sinbads.
The cedars of Pepargni loomed up ahead, torn black flags on the crest of the hill. Yiannis passed through the Hospital checkpoint and parked in the restricted car-park beside the bleached concrete annexe of the Mortuary. He sat in the car for a moment, finishing his cigarette, thinking of the fat boy in the basement, who had divested himself of everything that could have helped to identifiy him. Did he do so out of a wish to meet his Maker in a state of nature, or because he really and truly didn’t want to be known?
Taking the lift down to the basement, he walked along the strip-lit corridor towards the autopsy suite. On his left were the solid steel doors of the refrigerated facility, where stone-cold corpses waited to be claimed. If after a year no one had come forward, they’d be cleared out to make way for the new arrivals, their remains decently disposed of. Their particulars kept on file for future reference.
Although not an insect buzzed or crawled in this hygienic underworld, he was aware of a constant low-frequency disturbance, no doubt from the refrigeration units, but unsettling all the same. To him the sucking noise made by the doors of the refrigerated safes was the sound of closure, of finality. He couldn’t help thinking of the souls behind them, engaged in their hopeless struggle against silence, still trying to tell him things, to name names and places.
I am so and so of such and such. Remember me.
He took a face mask from the dispenser by the door, and slipped foot-protectors over his shoes. Through the glass porthole he glimpsed the victim laid out on a steel autopsy table. He was relieved to see that the Y- shaped incision on the torso had already been sutured: at least he’d be spared the ghoulish process of weighing and measuring the organs.
Although he’d hoped that Theo Papaspyrou, philosopher and fellow movie-buff, would be on shift, it was Kallenikos who turned from the table to greet him, stripping off his surgical gloves and pulling down his mask. Kallenikos was tall and thin, with a crescent-moon curve to his long face, and a stance to match, as though he were recoiling physically- less from the world of the dead, Yiannis fancied, than from the palpable warmth of the living.
He had parked himself as far from the body as he decently could, but Kallenikos beckoned him closer. ‘He won’t bite, Sergeant. He’s the one who’s been bitten, remember!’ On his face was the defensive, sarcastic smile of the painfully shy.
Yiannis breathed shallowly behind his mask, wondering if any normal person could ever accustom himself to the all-pervading smell. ‘I was just passing,’ he mumbled. ‘Thought I’d look in to check if there was any news.’
The corpse had lost its initial puffiness, and the skin colour had faded to a bluish pallor. The fingertips were stained with ink. Yiannis could see now that he had been a very handsome boy indeed.
‘The news is that there’s not a lot, macroscopically speaking.’ Kallenikos leaned over the table and laid a proprietory hand on the lifeless shoulder. He seemed to be addressing not Yiannis, but the corpse itself. ‘Some signs of angio-oedema, but no pharyngeal or laryngeal oedema. So, death was a result of shock rather than asphyxia. Anaphylactic, I’d say, but I’ll wait for Immunology on that. We can’t be completely sure until the mast-cell tryptase tests come back.’
&
nbsp; Yiannis nodded hastily; he would have asked Kallenikos to explain, but his stomach was expressing an extreme reluctance to prolong this interview with the dead. Saliva flowed into his mouth, and he swallowed hard.
‘So the bee stings killed him?’
‘As I said, subject to microscopic findings. You’ll have the report by fax.’
‘I’m obliged to you,’ muttered Yiannis.
Escaping to the corridor, he dropped his mask and bootees into the disposal bin, and headed for the lab. Two of the young assistants were bending over a horizontal light-box, but Theo’s small side office was empty, the blank computer-screen bustling with post-it notes. One of them fluttered to the floor when Yiannis entered.
Autopsia: to look for one’s self
He stuck the note back on the monitor, along with a message asking Theo to ring him. Leaving the ziploc bag which contained the Davidoff packet on the desk, he closed the door gently and took the lift up to the ground floor. Once outside, he leaned against the wall for a moment, breathing in the warm and ordinary air, trying to banish from his mind the memory of the long white hand that had made a pet or a cat of a shoulder.
On his way to Police HQ on Dikeosinas Street Yiannis stopped off at the video-shop on Kalokairinou to pick up The Good Thief, which Theo had told him was a remake of Melville’s Bob le Flambeur, with the excellent Nick Nolte as Bob. A poster of the 1955 original had travelled with Yiannis to Australia and back, and since then had held pride of place on the wall of his living room: Fedoras and smoke, Colette Fleury in a transparent plastic raincoat, a beret glued to the back of her head.
If Bob the gambler drove a white Cadillac and kept a fruit machine in his wardrobe, in his dealings with the world, and particularly with women, Bob the man had an impeccable moral code.
