Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  “Kyrie, would you tell me how carefully…I mean, how long you were able to study Professor Blegen’s tablets?”

  Pendlebury’s face lost its cheerful expression. “You’re a bright lad, Little Minos, but do keep in mind that everything you know about ancient Crete you learned from me.”

  Manolis hesitated before he nodded.

  “I suppose this is some sort of adolescent rebellion,” Pendlebury said grumpily. “Now I don’t sympathize with that. Sir Arthur would be very unhappy to know that you’ve been poking about in the tablets. He would consider it a breach of trust. Why, he practically tore Sundwall’s head off, that poor old Finn, for copying tablets out of the museum without his permission.”

  “Nobody else knows what I’ve done.” Manolis’s heart sank as he lied. Elpida knew, and understood.

  “Well, then.” Pendlebury’s hands twitched where they rested on the notebook. “You’re not a philologist, child, you’re a gifted and utterly untutored mathematician. This was a damned clever attempt at deciphering a sort of code, I’ll give you that, even if it is all wrong.”

  “As you say.” Manolis reached for the notebook. He had to pry it from under Pendlebury’s fingers, while Pendlebury fixed his glassy stare on the boy.

  “You and I have a greater problem than deciphering the Minoan script, Androulakis.”

  Manolis didn’t answer. He was mulling the year’s hard work his mentor had just dismissed.

  “Despite your best efforts to the contrary, they’re going to graduate you from that high school,” Pendlebury continued, undeterred. “A few weeks from now—and don’t think your teachers haven’t considered this—you’ll be cannon fodder. As for me, granted that I’m impossibly softhearted, but I don’t like to imagine you in the passes of Epirus, chasing Italians through the snow.”

  Manolis looked up, sensing an affront. “Micky’s going into the army. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “I admire Micky,” Pendlebury said, “but Greece can spare a lawyer for the front lines. You’re a different sort. Sir Arthur would prefer to have you at Oxford, but I think he’ll go along with me when I put you up for Cambridge.”

  Manolis could only stare in confusion. Oxford? Cambridge? In his lap the notebook in which he had painstakingly begun the decipherment of Minoan Linear B lay forgotten. “Cambridge?”

  Pendlebury took another swig of green wine. “Assuming they’ll have you,” he said, sounding genuinely cheerful.

  19

  Anne-Marie kept a thumb in the sheaf of pages and went into the kitchen, a room Minakis had added to the back of his grandmother’s house. She found him drying the lunch dishes and arranging them on the shelves of a varnished pine cabinet.

  “I’m curious,” she said.

  He turned and smiled, encouraging her.

  “You said you don’t believe anything in the past could have happened differently. If you had deciphered Linear B, that certainly would have rewritten history.”

  “I didn’t decipher Linear B. Like many others, Elpida and I made a start.”

  He closed the dish cabinet and turned, leaning against the counter. “Of course Pendlebury was wrong, spectacularly wrong. Blegen’s Pylos tablets were the same script as the Knossos tablets, the same as the tablets Wace found at Mycenae, which Ventris and Chadwick later used to prove that Linear B was Greek. John’s authoritative bullheadedness forever put me off the track.”

  “I see your point.” Anne-Marie suppressed the other questions that teemed in her mind and quietly left him to the dishes, while she went back to the reading of his scribbled manuscript.

  On the last day of August 1939 I left the harbor of Elounda in a flying boat…

  I said good-bye to Elpida on the pier where Micky had driven us. I hardly dared to look her in the eye; neither of us expected to see the other again.

  With a horrible roar of engines the airplane lifted from the bay. I looked down in naive wonder at the sea and the islands and the cloud tops passing below. My head should have been full of mythological images, of Daedalos and Ikaros fleeing Crete, but I was thinking of Elpida.

  When I had told her of Pendlebury’s response to our work with Linear B, she was angry on my behalf—chiding me for giving up too easily, for fearing to offend Sir Arthur. I protested that that wasn’t the reason, that Blegen’s cache from Pylos had persuaded John that the Minoan script was unique, just as Sir Arthur maintained. I believed him, I said.

  “You have to believe him,” she replied. “He is your sadalos.” She meant that without a powerful sponsor, a patron for whom one must be prepared to sacrifice even one’s convictions, no Greek can hope to prosper. It was then that I told her that Pendlebury and Evans had offered to send me to university. This time she was angry for her own sake, and left without saying another word.

  When I went up to the Nail—everyone knew it was the last season—Elpida stayed at Knossos. I was surprised that she insisted on riding to Elounda with me in Micky’s automobile. She was silent the whole trip. My last image of her was of brooding silence.

  Three days later I was in Cambridge, a labyrinth of stone and brick passageways, darker than usual, because while I was en route Britain had entered the war—windows were blacked out, and no lights were displayed at night. But I was a connoisseur of labyrinths; I was intrigued by those damp and echoing passageways.

  Having known members of the British School in Crete, I thought I knew the English. Not so. I found myself surrounded by pink-cheeked schoolboys, so earnest at their sports, so quick to trade insults, so susceptible to drink. We were required to wear black gowns that made us resemble beardless monks, and like monks we were locked inside fortresslike colleges after curfew. Yet—and this was strangest of all—we had the freedom to consort with respectable women without a chaperone, a freedom I found almost too terrifying to contemplate. In Crete, dishonor was death. The most dangerous thing that Elpida and I had done in the basements of Knossos was not to rifle Sir Arthur’s crates of Minoan tablets but to be there alone together. In England it was not punishment that terrified me. It was English girls.

  In some ways I benefited by my foreignness. I was impervious to English class distinctions, which were based upon one’s pedigree and accent. I was a barbarian; anyone who dealt with me had to form his opinion de novo. Most simply consigned me to the category of wog. Among the others I made a friend or two.

  This was the Sitzkrieg after the collapse of Poland, the so-called phony war, but tension was high as everyone waited for the next blow to fall. Greece was no democracy, but it was democracy’s ancient home, and the fact that it was menaced by the Italians was in my favor. The English were more sentimental about my homeland than I was, possessively so. Lord Byron was often quoted. I was amazed to learn how many Greek treasures the English had benevolently removed during past upheavals—mainly, I gathered, to protect them from us Greeks.

  During the month of September I took tea with the Pendleburys every week at their home, although John was often away, busy recruiting officer candidates among the undergraduates. Through some complicated system of favors I never understood, I found myself not at John’s old college but at King’s, better known for its theater than for its mathematics. Alan Turing was a grand exception; had Britain not entered the war a day before I arrived I might have had him as a tutor. But the code breakers had already whisked him away.

  I had two whole rooms of my own in a narrow tower, with a view through stone casements of neatly mowed grass three stories below. How alien that tame growth seemed to me! Inside my cramped but private rooms I learned to boil water on a gas ring, trying, without success, to acquire a taste for tea.

  I was the only one of my class to propose an exhibition in maths. My don was a harmless young “moral philosopher,” the Cambridge term for a scientist, whose head was in the clouds of Boolean algebra. The university lectures saved me. G. H. Hardy made a profound impression—he was the mathematical purist who sponsored Ramanujan, the Indian genius.

&n
bsp; Opposite was Wittgenstein of the famous leather jacket, enamored of using ordinary language to destroy mathematical proof. In his seminar I heard for the first time the famous Liar’s Paradox: “‘All Cretans are liars,’ said Epimenides the Cretan.” I didn’t take it personally. This Epimenides was no doubt from Sphakia, a notorious nest of thieves.

  As for my free time, a train ride would take me to country the English thought wild—lakes, moors, granite tors, chalk cliffs overlooking the green sea—and I walked through my loneliness in a wet landscape as exotic as the moon.

  Along with the bread and cheese in my tidy British knapsack, I brought books. What one reads gets entangled with where one reads it. Just as I will always associate Treasure Island with a shepherd’s hut on Dikti, I will always associate Principia Mathematica with the highest peaks of the Pennines—half as high as Dikti but wild enough in their own damp way. I could afford such books because Pendlebury had arranged a grant, in which I overindulged, buying too many expensive volumes. In my rooms I read constantly and “sported my oak”—undergraduate slang for keeping one’s door closed so as not to be disturbed.

  Among the few people to whom I opened my door was Richard Wingate, three years my senior and also a maths exhibitionist. Our don had introduced us, and after one of Hardy’s lectures we exchanged a few words; next time we went to a shop in town for a pastry. In Richard I had found a rare thing, a friend—one I hoped who could translate the unspoken languages of an alien universe. He was a diminutive but graceful young man, his hair always trim, his suits always spotless and crisp, and he had a lurking sense of humor.

  He was an Etonian with many old-school connections, and he soon offered to introduce me to his undergraduate society, the Epistolarians. The dozen or so members met in one another’s college rooms or occasionally in hired rooms in restaurants, dandied up in evening clothes—where, after a supper of raw beef and burnt pudding, someone would be tapped to give a speech on a topic such as “free will versus determinism” or “moral conscience versus social custom.”

  Having attended three or four of these meetings as a guest—wearing borrowed togs—one night without warning I was called upon to speak. I managed to suppress stage fright long enough to give an impromptu talk on “the utility of absurd propositions,” consisting of a few scattered musings on Maxwell’s demon and Zeno’s paradoxes suggested by my recent discovery of Russell and Whitehead. My wholly unoriginal conclusion was that thought experiments, even when they appear to violate common sense, give rise to fresh ways of thinking. Afterward Richard seemed much stimulated, perhaps more by sherry than by anything I had said—I had no idea whether he or anyone else had grasped what I was talking about. No matter. It was made known to me, in the crab-scuttling manner then in fashion among English undergraduates, that I was welcomed into the club.

  I spent Christmas of 1939 with Richard and his family at what he called their city digs, a town house in London that was the grandest private dwelling I’d yet seen. Richard was the presumptive heir of a textile fortune; his father, who had been granted some kind of nonhereditary title, was an admirer of Oswald Mosley, the British fascist, and over supper the old man thundered that we Greeks would do well to admit the moral superiority of the fascist philosophy and the natural and historical hegemony of the Italians over the Greeks. I mumbled something about sovereignty. What more could I say? Metaxas’s government was a dictatorship as oppressive as Mussolini’s.

  Whereupon Richard launched himself upon a defense of the Greece yet to come (a vision of which I had heard nothing) so vigorous that his father ended by accusing him of Communist sympathies. When Richard replied, “What if I am a Communist?” his father threw down his napkin and left the table.

  After a few moments of silence, Richard and his mother and I finished our supper by discussing the season’s theater.

  Richard’s mother fondly thought of her grown boy as a toddler; in that big house we were put in twin beds in the same upstairs room. Nothing remarkable to me—I was used to sleeping anywhere, with whatever donkeys, dogs, cats, sheep, goats, or strangers happened to be on the premises.

  I had already fallen asleep when a movement awoke me. I found Richard beside me in my bed, sliding under the sheets. “Manoli,” he whispered, “do you have any idea of my feelings for you?”

  “We do get on awfully well,” I said in my best British, trying to understand exactly what he meant.

  Evidently this was not an adequate response, for Richard pushed closer and began snapping the elastic of his underpants in what I suppose he thought was a provocative fashion. “Have you ever made love to another man?” he asked, with tremulous urgency.

  “Actually, I have never made love to anyone.”

  “But you must have wanted to.”

  “A man? I don’t see how it’s possible.”

  “Oh, it’s possible,” he replied. His breathing was now quite ragged. “Let me show you.”

  I sat up and almost fell out the far side of the narrow bed. “No. No thank you, I mean. I’m not really interested. I mean my interest is strictly academic. I mean…”—by now I was practically stuttering—“I mean I’m really not interested.”

  He was quiet a moment. Then he asked, in a wounded tone, “Have I done anything to offend you?”

  “I have the greatest affection for you, Richard. You are a good friend to me”—I came close to admitting that he was my only friend—“but I simply don’t…well, you see, this business…that is, I like women.”

  “You can’t really know that. You just said you’ve never had any experience.”

  “Nevertheless…I suppose I was born that way.” To myself, I sounded as if I were apologizing.

  He tried a different tack then, pretending cool amusement. “If you find my proposition so absurd, you owe it to yourself to expand your thinking. You were the one who argued for the utility of absurd propositions.”

  Which so agitated me that I recoiled and did fall out of the bed. “That argument is specious,” I said, leaping up again. “I was referring to thought experiments. This is hardly the time or place for a moral-scientific dispute.”

  “Not much of a Greek, are you?” he said in a snide tone, and when I asked him what he meant by that, he gave me a thumbnail lecture about the sexual and philosophical propensities of the classical Greeks, much of which was news to me. I could only reply that, since I was from Crete and the furthest thing imaginable from a classical Greek, I was sorry if I had disappointed him; now I hoped he would allow me to get some sleep. Whereupon he heaved himself out of my bed and back to his own, and I heard no more from him that night except an occasional expressive sigh.

  The next morning it was as if nothing had been said. Richard was as blithe as ever. We toured the city; at the London Zoo I saw my first polar bear—my first bear of any kind. I told him the story of the riddling game with Pendlebury (“Any polar explorers in your family, Androulakis?”), and Richard laughed, and I realized that I liked him very much and hoped the awkwardness of the night would not mar our friendship. When he saw me off on the train to Oxford the next day, he was all smiles.

  Sir Arthur Evans had invited me to visit him at Youlbury, his country home near Oxford, a snug, warm place on a hill, filled with treasures from his explorations and travels. He was eighty-seven years old and full of vigor. After we traded gossip—he wanted to know all about the Hutchinsons, what the Pendleburys were up to in Lasithi, the fortunes of the Akoumianakis clan, and so on—he engaged me in archaeological debate as if I had something sensible to say.

  I was tempted to open my heart and tell the old man what was on my mind concerning Linear B. I didn’t, and I lost my chance, and a good thing I did, for he was fierce on the subject and never changed his opinion. I left Youlbury with an attack of homesickness, the worst since I’d come to England.

  A few nights later Richard came to my room in the company of two football-playing Epistolarians whom he knew I disliked—whether he’d brought them or they
’d brought him I don’t know, but shortly they began trading crude remarks about the filthiness of Greeks generally and my own shortcomings in the way of appearance, intellect, and manners. Richard just stood by with a peculiar, sad expression on his face. I told him I wanted to speak to him privately.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said.

  After that I saw him occasionally across a lecture hall or on the far side of the refectory, but we never said another word to each other at Cambridge, and I never went to another meeting of the Epistolarians.

  My mood turned dark. I was depressed by Richard’s weakness and spite, by my loneliness, by the black weather, by the claustrophobia of blackout-shuttered nights, by news of Axis advances in the Low Countries. I asked myself why I was in England. Because at heart I wanted to be an Englishman? Answers that had been plain a few weeks ago now seemed facile.

  In mid-May, John Pendlebury was granted weekend leave from his army camp, and I was invited to supper. What a haven that small house was, overflowing with children and books, smelling of fresh bread and precious hoarded bacon! John, fresh from the train, looked magnificent in his cavalry uniform, crisp pinks and gleaming boots and shining brass buckles. His manner, always gruff but teasingly so, had taken on a martial edge. Nor did Hilda make apologies for him.

  After supper he interviewed me rather fiercely on my academic progress. I told him that I was holding my own in mathematics, but that try as I might, I was unable to persuade myself that philosophy was not trivial.

  “You are keeping secrets, Little Minos,” he said accusingly. “According to my sources, you are as famous among the dons as you were among the schoolteachers of Lasithi. The mathematicians speak of you in the same breath as that poor Indian, Ramanujan, who I’m told starved himself to death for love of numbers.”