by Alison Fell
‘Right you are, sir!’ said Kyriaki.
Outside the window a woman pushing a double buggy stopped to answer her cellphone. From the buggy two identical faces gazed in, pop-eyed, at Vasilakis. Reaching the window, he saw them and stopped in his tracks, a soupy smile spreading over his face. When he fluttered his fingers at them, the infants opened their mouths and wailed in unison. As the decibels reached fever pitch the mother, cellphone still glued to her ear, bent down to investigate.
Kyriaki was grinning openly. Catching her eye, Yiannis wanted to laugh, but thought better of it.
Vasilakis turned and appealed to the room – What did I do? – his hands spread wide, his face a picture of perplexity.
*
As the car bumped down the track Kore mewed faintly but, Yiannis thought, uncomplainingly. She was no longer in pain, Wiltraud had assured him, although he must be careful to keep her on antibiotics for a week.
‘If she is to be spayed,’ she’d said, ‘it should be soon. You will consider this?’
Her earnest blue eyes were so concerned for Kore’s welfare that guilt made him say he would, but in the moment of saying so, intellect had cringed before instinct, and he knew that he couldn’t, that his gut was Greek beyond reason.
In a rocky field on the left of the track two perched goats regarded him with hauteur. Part of the boundary wall had collapsed, and through the gap a man appeared, hefting a boulder. He was booted, sinewy in shorts; his hands were protected by industrial gloves but his head was bare under the blasting heat of the sun. His straight light hair was streaked with grey and tied at the nape with a red kerchief.
Yiannis slowed down and raised a hand as he drew level. ‘Earthquake damage?’
The man set the rock down on a pile of similar grade and straightened up. There was white dust on his forearms and an English slogan on his T shirt. Yiannis read it with interest.
Cool eyes regarded him from behind rimless glasses. ‘We have got off lightly, I think.’ The shrug, he thought, was something more than stoical: this time was the lugubrious implication. The accent was precise, unmistakeably German. Yiannis summoned a commiserating smile. Far below lay the white houses of Katomeli, and the coiffured blond curve of the beach; beyond that was the sea, vast and calm and, at least for the moment, perfectly irreproachable.
‘Lovely spot,’ he observed – a prelude, he hoped, to a little pleasant conversation, about cats, maybe, or communes.
The German glanced briefly at the vista and, with a nod that was barely courteous, bent to retrieve his mallet and chisel.
Yiannis’ eyes roved inquisitively, taking in a flask, a spirit-level, a small canvas rucksack. Arbeit macht frei, he thought sourly: you could always trust a German to get the job done properly. No doubt this new wall would be meeter and fitter in every way than the home-grown original. Like all cops, he was accustomed to the cold shoulder, and made a point of wishing the guy an affable Good Day. As he could have predicted, his yassous went unanswered.
He eased in the clutch and drove off thoughtfully. BEE WARNED, the slogan on the T shirt had said, THE FUTURE DOES NOT NEED US.
21
After the heat and bustle of Heraklion, the beach at Panomeli is a sleepy familiar haven. A late afternoon haze hangs over the sea; some way out, a group of sunhatted local yia yias float, gossiping, their rubber sandals double-parked along the shoreline.
Ingrid and Zoe lounge at the water’s edge, cooling their feet in the shallows. A few metres higher up the beach, near a scatter of short-stemmed lilies which seem to have sprung up overnight, the Wilson-Wilsons are playing Snap in the deep shade of their umbrella. To their right Trish Ottakar, her ample breasts baking in the sun, is absorbed in Nabokov; to their left Mr. Shapcott sits neat and upright in a white cotton sunhat. He’s reading The Silence of the Lambs, but without conviction, Ingrid suspects. As if someone has told him this is the kind of book you read on holiday, when really he’d prefer something more substantial, like Chomsky or Said, or Fiske’s essays on the Middle East. She has the impression that, behind his sunglasses, he’s keeping a beady eye on them.
‘Alice didn’t have a clue what the signs meant,’ she continues, ‘No one did back then. So she indexed all of them on tiny slips she cut out of old scrap paper, plus all the sign-groups, and filed them all in cigarette cartons.’
‘Talk about low-tech!’ Zoe shakes her head wonderingly at the dark ages.
‘Exactly. Just imagine what she could have done with a Mac.’
Zoe is a surprisingly attentive student, and Ingrid is enjoying the tutorial. She thinks of the Script archive, the three of them working, monkish, among the tousled shelves: archaic listeners to dead voices. Yet here is Zoe, hanging on her every word, telling her that she’s seriously considering archaeology at Uni – after her gap year, of course.
‘What it did mean, though, was that she was the one who cleared away a lot of the bullshit and made room for an analysis of the linguistic structures.’ She draws the sign-groups in the smooth damp sand. ‘For instance.’
‘If you look at the three alternative endings you can see the inflection clearly. Like – America, American, Americans.’
‘Or Latin cases,’ Zoe says intelligently. ‘Dative, vocative, and stuff.’
Ingrid nods, pleased. ‘That’s what Alice thought, originally. ‘‘Kober’s Triplets’’, the guys called them.’
Zoe pulls a face. ‘Yuk. Sexist or what!’
‘Isn’t it just? Cruel too. She was a spinster, she didn’t have children.’
Zoe gives her a fleeting, long-lashed glance. ‘Have you?’
‘Kids?’ Ingrid is transfixed, momentarily, by Zoe’s graceful body, perfectly unselfconscious in its sky-blue bikini. She shrugs, feeling defensive. The women of Zoe’s generation are so organised, their courses plotted years in advance: college, career, partner, mortgage, children. They expect – no, demand – to reap all the benefits of equality. And good on them, too, she thinks, feeling vaguely that she has let Zoe down. She could, of course, point out, Cassandra-like, that everything isn’t always possible, but the prospect threatens to put her on a par with the yia yias, so complacently asexual in their outsize bathing-suits, gossiping away the early evening.
‘I got married too young, I guess. And divorced … and now, well.’
‘You’re not saying you’re too old?’
‘I’m 43.’ Old enough, certainly, to be Zoe’s mother.
Zoe gapes. ‘But you can’t be! You’re too … cool.’
‘Bless you!’ says Ingrid, charmed.
‘No, but I really envy it, you know,’ Zoe goes on winningly, ‘I see you up at the Shoestring, like, totally absorbed, totally fascinated by your subject. Must be so great, having a vocation.’
Not that fascinated, Ingrid thinks, but does not say. Right now she doesn’t feel like dwelling on the downside of Alice’s life – the loneliness, the constant chilly excitations of the mind. In the glow of Zoe’s admiration her own life has taken on a winsome sparkle, and for the moment she wants to bask in it: to preserve, at least for a little longer, not only Zoe’s illusions, but her own.
A large brown and white dog comes splashing towards them along the strand.
‘Sweetie pie!’ cries Zoe as it hurdles her outstretched legs. ‘Look, he’s just a puppy!’
He’s a St. Bernard, in fact, huge and friendly and far from home. His paws are fat and floppy, his brown eyes melt with interest and concern. The owner follows, barefoot, saronged, carrying a large string bag and a coiled leash, a raggedy straw hat crammed over her brown braids.
From the other direction a black spaniel puppy appears, chasing a ball thrown by a thin tanned boy in his early teens. The two disproportionate dogs meet, sniffing; the woman cautions her dog in German, but the St Bernard has made a unilateral decision to play. The spaniel looks terrified, and shrinks back, shivering, behind the boy’s legs.
The two owners shrug and smile. When the boy says something in Italian t
he woman shakes her head in apology.
‘I don’t speak.’
In the string bag Ingrid sees the blue-black spines of sea-urchins, coiling and uncoiling.
Once the St. Bernard has ousted the smaller dog he chases it in and out of the sunbeds and then both dogs career back down to the water’s edge, showering Ingrid and Zoe with sand.
Everyone is looking now; even the Wilson-Wilsons have abandoned their card game to watch the show.
Mr. Shapcott is suddenly on his feet, gesticulating. ‘Darling, don’t touch it!’
‘It’s a friendly dog,’ Trish Ottakar protests, raising her sunglasses to stare at him.
Mr. Shapcott turns on her. ‘You like dogs, then?’
‘I like animals, yes – and people,’ she replies coldly. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I don’t like foreign dogs,’ he snaps, taking a few steps towards the water. ‘Zoe, please. You never know, with rabies.’
‘Oh Dad, it’s not a stray,’ Zoe scolds, as the panicked spaniel hurtles into Ingrid’s lap and cowers there, trembling.
Instinctively Ingrid cradles it, surrounding it with her body: bare skin aginst sleek black fur. She wags an admonitory finger at the St. Bernard, which skids to a standstill and waves a hopeful paw at the fugitive. The spaniel’s head is hot and smooth against her breast. She thinks of the Potnia Theron, the Mistress of the Animals. If the spaniel were a baby, it would be suckling.
‘Got to get a picture!’ Zoe scrambles to her feet, runs to her sunbed, and returns with her cellphone.
The puppy’s heart pounds against Ingrid’s ribs. It turns its head to gaze at her, its brown eyes seeking reassurance. ‘He’s only playing,’ she urges, and the spaniel, plucking up courage, bats a paw out from its sanctuary. Zoe is down on her knees in the sand, aiming her cellphone, as the delighted St. Bernard skips back four-footed and flattens its muzzle along its paws.
But enough is enough. The woman snaps the leash on to the St. Bernard’s collar and coaxes him away, and Ingrid, opening her arms, surrenders her charge to the teenager. After a moment’s hesitation the spaniel goes to him, waving its tail furiously, a bit of bravado in its waddle. Eyeing its departing adversary with what looks like regret, it even feints and growls at Zoe’s cellphone.
Zoe sits back on her heels, giggling. ‘What is he like?’
She can still feel the imprint of the puppy in her lap, its vanished heat a shadow on her skin. In the snapshot, though, nothing will be missing: the dog will be there, and the smiles, and the sea – a happy holiday moment captured for posterity. A small surf breaks across her calves, an echo of some far-out passing craft. Kober’s Triplets have all but disappeared, rubbed out by a criss-cross of paw tracks and scuffed up sand.
She thinks of Yiannis, wonders if, long after the memories have faded, the photograph will fix on her face the aura of the morning, its secret sense of possibility.
22
In March 1947, preparing to set out on her first transatlantic voyage, Alice Kober brimmed over with excitement. To Myres she wrote ‘I’ve timed myself, and I think I can copy between 100-125 inscriptions in a 12 hour day.’ Mindful that England had been suffering an arctic winter, she added a postscript:
‘I forgot to check my rate of work when my fingers were stiff with cold. I know it isn’t a joking matter. But I feel, whatever the situation will be, I can cheerfully endure for 5 weeks what I learned to endure during the war.’
Alice liked England, and to Henry Allen Moe wrote sympathetically of its post-war privations.
‘One of the tutors at St. Hugh’s spent a week of her Easter vacation reweaving the elbows of her only decent tweed jacket. Sir John uses the gummed paper on the outside of a page of stamps to cover errors and changes in the ms. he’s getting ready to publish. He can’t get erasers or ink-eradicator. I left him everything I had in the way of writing equipment. He protested very feebly, and ended by saying the things would be ‘‘most welcome’’. All this in one of the countries on the winning side. Travel is most enlightening.’
There is further evidence of Kober’s capacity for empathy with the privations suffered by her European colleagues in her letters to a new correspondent, Professor Johannes Sundwall of Abo University in Finland, whose work on the Minoan scripts she had admired for many years. Among the densely typed pages of technical discussion on Linear B, there are mentions of parcels she is sending, of oranges, sugar, Nescafe, even ‘‘rum-chocolates’’, in the hope that Sundwall is not a ‘‘teetotaller’’. ‘(Kennen sie das wort? Es meint einer der ken Alkohol drinkt.)’
On March 28th an airmail letter, addressed c/o Sir John Myres, 3 Canterbury Road, arrived in Oxford. In it was what, with hindsight, one might characterise as perhaps the biggest failure of judgment ever made by the Guggenheim Foundation. Kober had requested a continuation of her Fellowship, in order to give her the time she thought she needed to complete her initial cataloguing of the Lnear B script. Henry Allen Moe wrote regretfully that the Committee had decided not to grant the renewal.
If Alice Kober was downcast by the refusal, there are no signs of it in her response to Moe, although there may be an implied rebuke in her acid reporting of the lack of progress in the decipherment field.
‘Last year two more ‘‘decipherments’’ of Minoan were published, one by Hrozny, who has been ‘‘deciphering’’ languages right and left since he stated, long ago, and correctly, that Hittite was Indo-European, and so gave scholars the clue they needed for deciphering it. Since then, he has used the same system. That is, he states every unknown language is Indo-European. But I’d better not go on. Further nasty comments about it might be due to professional jealousy.’
Sir John Myres, aged 78 and housebound with arthritis, had asked Kober to go to Crete in his place and check the originals of the Knossos inscriptions, a task which had been impossible during the war years. The news from Heraklion, however, was discouraging. Shortly after Kober’s retun to Brooklyn, Myres received a letter from the Heraklion Museum to say that the inscriptions, buried for safekeeping during the war, could not possibly be available in 1947. To Moe Kober observed, somewhat caustically,
‘I suspect, although Sir John didn’t mention it, that the Greeks do not have the money to dig them up again. At least, I know other Greek museums have told people interested in various exhibits that they would not be on display until money was forthcoming.’
In an era before fax, email, and cheap transatlantic flights, international collaboration was a slow and difficult business. It was also hindered by scholarly rivalry and protectionism, which Kober had experienced at first hand when Carl Blegen had refused her permission to see the Pylos material.
She complained later to Sundwall, ‘although he [Blegen] criticised Evans bitterly for his slowness in publication and his selfishness in not permitting scholars to have access to the inscriptions, he himself seems to be following in his footsteps now.’
Although it is clear that she believed passionately in the free interchange of knowledge – at least between the very best minds in the field, of whom Sundwall was undoubtedly one – Kober was nevertheless forced to abide by the protocols of a league of squabbling gentlemen. At the cost of doubling her workload, she obtained Myres’ permission to make copies of all the Linear B inscriptions, but only with the strict proviso that they would not be shown to anyone before the publication of Scripta Minoa II.
On her return to Brooklyn Kober did her best to advance the dream of collaborative scholarship by sending an article by John Franklin Daniel on the Cypro-Minoan scripts to Sir John Myres, and encouraging Sundwall to submit an article – which she would translate – to Daniel, who was now Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Archaeology. Since Daniel was also Curator of the Mediterranean Section at the U. of Pennsylvania Museum, she passed on to him Sundwall’s suggestion that an Institute be founded for the study of Minoan scripts.
Living as he did in Finland, in the shadow of the USSR, Sundwall was very conscious of th
e effects of the last war, and also feared that a far more destructive nuclear war could be imminent. Minoan scholarship, he warned, could be safeguarded only if all the material currently available was brought together under one roof; that it should be an American roof seemed self-evident.
Where such an institute might be housed was a moot question. Brooklyn College, Kober argued, did not have the money or space to accommodate such project, and she did not want it ‘to come under Blegen, since he refuses to release the Pylos material.’
Although Franklin Daniel thought that Brooklyn was the obvious choice, since the material could be easily accessed by the woman who would make best use of it, he had no objections to Alice’s suggestion that the University of Pennsylvania be the host.
He also responded with enthusiasm to her offer to translate Sundwall’s article.
‘I hope you don’t intend to tackle the original Finnish, or maybe that presents no problem for you. His reprints and other publications will be most welcome as the first contribution to our ‘‘Minoan Institute of Epigraphy’’ (what are we going to call the thing anyway?)’
The Minoan Institute was not the only plot being hatched at the U. of Pennsylvania that autumn. When Kober commended Daniel to Sundwall as ‘a very energetic young man’, she wasn’t exaggerating. The retirement of Roland Kent had left a position vacant in Indo-European Linguistics, and Daniel was determined to impress upon his colleagues that Alice Kober was the prime candidate.
‘I am slowly boring from within toward this whole project, not the least part of which, of course, is trying to get you down here,’ he wrote, adding that although he saw no difficulty about setting up the Minoan Centre as such, ‘it would be rather lost without someone like you to look after it and use it.’
