Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  “I didn’t say you weren’t,” Manolis replied crossly.

  She showed him the basket she had been holding behind her. “I brought bread and cheese and marinated bulbs. And a little wine. Because you didn’t come home for the midday meal yesterday.”

  “I was thinking about other things.”

  “I have often watched you thinking. May I sit beside you?”

  “Well…”

  “Thank you.” She settled herself with the lunch basket between them. “Now tell me about these broken pots.”

  So, taking a deep breath, having already developed a fondness for lecturing—and with Elpida’s green eyes encouraging him to suppose that she was fastening upon his every word—he did.

  Elpida looked nothing like Money-Coutts. Money-Coutts was of average height, and she dressed in slacks or sensible skirts and military-style blouses, while Elpida was as tall as Manolis and full-figured, and she wore long black skirts that dusted the ground. Money-Coutts had brown hair cut short and fair skin that burned pink in the Mediterranean sun. Elpida was brown all year round, and her curling hair was raven black, and her eyes were as green as beryl, her eyebrows thick and dark, her nose bold, her lips wide and mobile. Money-Coutts had straight brows and a thin nose and a rather blunt mouth; she was an English beauty. Elpida was a Greek.

  A beauty, oh yes. Manolis wondered how he had missed it before. But her full metamorphosis in his imagination—from childish cousin to desirable female—happened slowly.

  She came to visit for an hour or two every day for the rest of the summer, bringing their midday meal, which always included some delicacy. She made him talk about potsherds and tell her about the Minoans—whatever he had learned from Evans and the Pendleburys—and he wondered if she was really as interested as she seemed.

  They gossiped about the English. When it came to Money-Coutts, Manolis spoke cautiously, but Elpida spoke with innocent delight of how happy Mercy was with her Greek fiancé, how sad Mercy was to be parted from him. Everything she said seared Manolis’s heart. Before long his heart was so thoroughly seared that it no longer bled, and he looked back at his infatuation from a distance.

  Meanwhile little accidents occurred in the basement storerooms of Knossos: Elpida paused to adjust a shoe just as Manolis entered a corridor, so narrow he could not help but bump into her; Elpida dropped a serving spoon as they sat eating on the basement floor, and her breast lightly brushed his arm as she bent to retrieve it; he stopped in that same narrow corridor, and she collided with him, and he shocked himself by turning and kissing her clumsily—and was shocked again when she responded urgently for an eternity, several seconds at least, the two of them pressing as much of themselves against each other as they could manage, aided by the constrictions of the ancient walls, before she broke away and stepped back, staring at him, saying nothing, her eyes and mouth hungry, nevertheless shaking her black curls decisively and backing away.

  That time he turned and left the palace; they left separately and secretly, as they always did, and she did not come back before the summer ended and the school year began.

  After school on a cool October evening, as they walked past the palace toward Knossos village from the stop where the bus had left them, he shared a secret with her. “I have been studying the Minoan writing. The clay leaves.”

  “Oh Manoli!” Her face was bright with excitement. “How did you get permission?”

  “I have the Squire’s keys.”

  Her expression cooled. “That’s forbidden.”

  “Perhaps the English own the land where the palace stands, but do they own the past?”

  “What have you done?”

  He told her. He had been going into the labyrinth on mornings when he was supposed to be at school, or evenings when he could claim to have been delayed. Slipping silently through the pines, into the ruin, he had opened the padlocks and swung back the wire-screen doors and helped himself to the stacks of clay tablets upon which the Minoan scripts were inscribed.

  Strange writing carved on sealstones had first drawn Arthur Evans to Crete in the 1890s. On the island the sealstones were called milkstones, because village women valued them as amulets to ensure the flow of mother’s milk; often Evans could not persuade the women to part with them, no matter how much money he offered. Later, digging in Knossos, he found a trove of similar writing, including thousands of inscribed clay tablets not much bigger than willow leaves, baked hard and burned purple in the conflagration that had destroyed the last palace.

  But as the years and then the decades went by, Sir Arthur published only part of what he found. In 1909, in Scripta Minoa, he described tablets with so-called hieroglyphs, and others bearing the script he called Linear A, but he never published more than a few samples of the script he called Linear B. The unpublished tablets stayed locked in the basements of Knossos.

  There Manolis crouched in the darkness, copying the signs in his notebooks, working late by the light of a shuttered lamp.

  “What have you learned with all this spying?” Elpida’s eyes were bright with concern, but equally with curiosity.

  He stopped in the road and turned to face her. “I would not have told you if I couldn’t trust you.”

  “You can trust me”—she reached out to touch his arm, but there was a green glint in her eye—“as long as you let me go there with you.”

  A few days later he whispered to her to slip away after the dinner chores and join him in the palace. Elpida’s cousin Phylia saw them with their heads together and smiled wickedly, but Elpida said, “Don’t worry about her; she won’t tell.”

  They crouched together in the cold basement; above them, snow fell silently through the pines. It was early November, the winter’s first snowfall. He held up a leaf of burnt purple clay he had been sketching by lantern light.

  “I’ve copied dozens of these. I mean to copy out all the most characteristic tablets, sign for sign.” There was a way of relating the signs, he told her, a translation that might produce meaning—a thin meaning, devoid of sounds and devoid of reference to things—but at the very least a meaning of relations among signs. “It’s why the roots of words are units, but the beginnings and endings of words change by rules. It’s why the order of words in different languages is different, but always according to rules…”

  “Do you know the rules?” She looked at him with an intensity that insisted he go on.

  “Only a few.” He could not find words for his conviction that underlying everything in language was mathematical regularity. “There must be almost three thousand of these tablets stacked in the palace magazines. Only a few hundred are Linear A. So I started with Linear B.”

  “Uncle Manolakis says Sir Arthur said you shouldn’t try to interpret them.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not saying the writing is Hittite or Babylonian or something.”

  “Uncle Manolakis says Sir Arthur said the tablets aren’t poems or letters, just lists of animals and things.”

  “Elpida, never mind what Sir Arthur said”—he was bold enough to take her hand and squeeze it—“let me show you what he meant. Some of these have a picture of the thing they’re about, a chariot or a tripod or a storage jar.” He tapped the fingers of his free hand at a hieroglyph on the clay tablet. “The signs for numbers are plain enough: a tripod—that’s three-footed—or a two-eared or a three-eared or a four-eared jar. Numbers up to ten. John claims they used ratios and percentages.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  He showed her more tablets. The Minoan scribes had often separated words with slashes in the clay, which made it possible to compare signs even if the words were meaningless.

  “A lot of words are repeated with three different endings. I’m trying to copy every example I can find.”

  Elpida leaned closer and, in comradely fashion, laid her hand on the back of his neck. “If you want to be finished before Easter, let me help you.”

  For a
moment he said nothing, because he was not thinking about copying signs. He leaned toward her, but she pulled away and turned her face aside, with a groan that was a promise.

  He said, “Yes. I could use some help.”

  On winter nights, after the evening meal was finished and cleared away, they pored over their schoolbooks by the light of an oil lantern on the table in the Akoumianakis kitchen. Not everything in their notebooks was schoolwork.

  Sister Phylia pressed them hard, wanting to know just what they were doing, and only when she left them in peace could they take stock of their progress.

  By March they had determined that the endings of some of the words on the tablets changed in specific ways—five kinds of words, each with three endings: five sets of signs that consistently changed to three other sets of signs.

  “Nouns,” Elpida said. “Tripod, jar, chariot…”

  “And the changes are declensions,” Manolis agreed. “Which means we can pull them apart.” He sketched a grid in his notebook and wrote alpha, epsilon, iota across its top and 1, 2, 3 down its left side.

  The signs of Minoan script were syllables, not letters of an alphabet. By laying out a grid—vowels along the top, consonants down the side—and by putting each sign onto that grid according to the way it behaved in the supposed declensions of the supposed nouns, Manolis and Elpida began to prize apart the relations among the sounds of Linear B. They could do that even though they could not know how those sounds sounded, much less what they meant.

  Late one night Elpida asked, “How many languages do you know?”

  They were sitting in the kitchen in the dark, having blown out the lamp, and he could hardly see her, just the sheen of her black hair limned in the moonlight through the window, but he could smell the Rethymniot soap she washed with and the wild herbs she cooked with and the too-clean, too-scrubbed odor of the hand-me-down clothes she wore.

  “From schoolmasters and their books I learned what the conquerors spoke—Indo-European languages, mostly, and Turkic and Arabic.”

  Rapt in the cold darkness, she wanted him to tell her more, to tell her everything. He thought she meant everything he knew about languages.

  “I can hardly wait until John comes back,” he said, “to tell him what we’ve found…”

  On a sunny April morning in 1939, John Pendlebury took a stroll with Uncle Manolakis and his grown sons on the heights above the Kairatos stream, which skirts the palace of Knossos to the east. Manolis, the youngest, the foster child, brought up the rear. The wheat was green and the grapevines were putting out translucent new leaves; the chalky yellow earth was spangled with wildflowers, anemones and crocuses and asphodels and irises in a dozen shades of red and white and purple, bending and trembling in the warm breeze from the south which blew at the men’s backs, surrounding them with perfume as they talked of the war.

  A month ago, Germany had occupied Czechoslovakia. A week ago, Italy had invaded Albania, and it was clear that Mussolini lusted for Greece. A few days ago Micky Akoumianakis had enlisted in the army, and his younger brother Minos had applied for the navy.

  “The first strike will be from Albania,” Pendlebury said, as if he relished the event, “but Crete controls the entrance to the Aegean, and the Italians hold the islands to the east and north. So we’ll be next.”

  Old Manolakis pulled his wide straw hat farther down on his forehead to shade his eyes from the glare. “Will you be on Crete when the Italians come, John? This year you left your wife and children in England. That was wise of you. Next year, I think, you’ll be in England with them.”

  Pendlebury struck the dirt with his walking stick. “England can’t stay out of this fight. I know this island better than any Englishman alive.”

  “Better than any Cretan alive.”

  Pendlebury put on a humble face. “Modesty requires…”

  “The map of Crete, I meant to say,” Manolakis added, which brought a laugh from his sons. “Cretans don’t have much use for maps. We know of your affection for us, John, but after all, you are an Englishman.”

  “Let’s talk cartography then,” Pendlebury said, hiding his hurt. “If I were an Italian general trying to take Crete…”

  “You would be wise to have written your will,” said Micky fervently. He was of late a law student at Athens.

  “Bravely spoken, my child,” said Manolakis. “Strive to contain your ardor while our English friend tells us what’s on his mind.”

  Pendlebury slashed through the wildflowers with his stick. “I want you to see this place as I see it, Old Wolf. Mountains to the east and west. Iraklion to the north, with the best airfield on the island. To the south the wide beaches of the Messara—the only place where landing craft can come ashore in numbers. And right here, the road that connects them.” With his stick Pendlebury gestured across the stream, where the ruins of Knossos were exposed; from the palace narrow traces of the ancient paved road extended north and south, and beside it the modern road. “This ridge commands the center of Crete as it did four thousand years ago. Any enemy of Crete must take these heights. Any defender of Crete must hold them.”

  “We have long understood this,” Manolakis replied. “Perhaps as long as the English. Perhaps longer.”

  “You are with me, Manolaki?”

  “Why would you think otherwise, my child?”

  “We’ll slaughter them before they reach Yannina,” said Micky.

  Nobody could find a suitable reply to Micky’s martial boast. But Mussolini’s troops were one thing. If (more realistically, when) Hitler and the Wehrmacht got into it…

  Young Minos said, “Surely the women have made us a meal by now.”

  The women had. The men ate on the jasmine-scented terrace of the Villa Ariadne, and when at last they had fallen silent, exhausted by their warlike passions and lulled into sloth by the lavish midday meal, Pendlebury, whose skin had the high bronze color that made him seem to glow in the afternoon sunlight, turned his skewed gaze upon Manolis, who had not said a word during their tour of the heights.

  “Ready for a few months of honest toil, boffin? Ready to trade the books for a bit of hod carrying and sherd washing?”

  “I’m eager to go back up to Lasithi.”

  “Not eager for the dirt and the pots, I venture.” Pendlebury poured cloudy green wine into his tumbler and offered him the jug, which he refused. “Not, I fear, on account of Money-Coutts.”

  This brought drowsy chuckles from the Akoumianakises, who had kept an ear open while contemplating their digestions.

  “For the mountains,” Manolis said, his face hot.

  “To the mountains, then.” Pendlebury sipped his wine. From Pendlebury, who never apologized, his live eye upon Manolis signaled a concession.

  Manolis was not appeased. “Have you done the three peaks of Dikti yet, kyrie?”

  “This year, I hope.”

  “I have, twice. Let me know when you decide to try again.”

  Pendlebury straightened in his chair. “You mean to race me?”

  Manolis shrugged. “We’ll compare times, if you like.”

  “I have never yet met a boffin I couldn’t outrun.”

  “Have you met a boffin you could not outthink?” During the pause that followed Manolis ignored the grins and whispers of the others and concentrated on Pendlebury, who studied the tumbler in his hands a long while before he looked up and smiled dangerously.

  “Try me, my child.”

  When the Akoumianakis men had gone off to Knossos village, Manolis withdrew the notebook from his sakouli and spread it open on the table in front of Pendlebury. “I put the signs on the grid according to the declensions. Vowels across the top, consonants down the side. Five vowels, alpha, epsilon, iota, omikron, probably upsilon. The consonants, I’m not sure of. There are at least fourteen.”

  “Which Indo-European language?” Pendlebury asked, peering at the inked matrixes.

  “Kyrie?” Surely it was a trick question. “Any of them. Persi
an. Anatolian. Greek.”

  Pendlebury looked up. “You speak classical Greek, do you, Androulakis?”

  “Oshi,” Manolis said, emphasizing the Cretan pronunciation. “But I have a lexicon.”

  Pendlebury harrumphed, turning his attention back to the grid ruled on the page, its interstices filled with carefully copied Minoan signs. Some were simple and universal—a flail, an ax, a circle with a cross inside, which was the primitive mandala—but many were as intricate as Chinese ideograms. “Ingenious, truly ingenious. We ought to call you Minos, if that weren’t your foster brother’s name. Little Minos, then. Minosakis.” Pendlebury let the book fall closed. “You’re not the first, of course.”

  “Kyrie?”

  “Not the first to propose that the scripts represent an Indo-European tongue. You’ve been preceded by a long line of distinguished scholars. All as mistaken as you, I’m sorry to tell you. Minoan is Minoan, Little Minos. Distinct. Unique.”

  “You’re right about Linear A, sir. There don’t seem to be any of the—”

  “Look here, child, there’s no important difference between A and B. A couple of dozen signs fell into disuse, a dozen new ones were added; fundamentally it’s the same script, refined a bit for use by a new class of clerks. Today we would call that sort of person—what’s the fashionable word?—a bureaucrat.”

  Manolis said, “I don’t think they are the same language.”

  Pendlebury laughed. “Let me tell you the news. On my way here through Athens I met with an American who’s been digging in the far west of the Peloponnese. He’s found a Mycenaean palace that he claims is Nestor’s Sandy Pylos. You know who Nestor was?”

  “Homer’s famous windbag.”

  “Quite. At any rate, Professor Blegen uncovered an enormous cache of tablets and brought a couple of hundred with him to Athens. He was good enough to let me have a look. They are inscribed with the Minoan script”—Pendlebury tapped his fingers on Manolis’s notebook—“but the signs aren’t combined in the same way. Maybe our Minoans taught Nestor’s savages how to write. Perhaps their language was Indo-European. Perhaps it might even have been a barbaric form of Greek. It wasn’t Minoan, though. It wasn’t the language on our Knossos tablets.”