Sophie and the Sibyl

by Patricia Duncker

  He tapped the roof of the cab with a vigorous bang and they lurched away towards the distant dome of Christendom, embraced by Bernini’s colonnades. The river’s lead stream matched the sky. Sophie noticed with distaste how poor many of the people lurking in the streets near the banks seemed to be. Filthy children hung with rags, who wore no shoes, picked their way through piles of discarded waste and rotting vegetables. The smell of fresh human faeces and urine drenched their path. Professor Marek snapped the windows shut and they jolted onwards in the airless black box, stifled.

  How welcome then were the gardens and fountains of the Vatican! Many of the daily visitors surged past them, warily glancing at the descending sky, their faces shiny with sweat. Professor Marek patted his brow with a handkerchief soaked in lavender as they paused inside the fine spray from the fountains. At the high doorway he produced a letter for the guards covered in purple stamps and declaimed a short paragraph in rapid Italian. The result was instantaneous: peremptory bows and formal greetings, then they were whisked through the arching halls at an extraordinary speed.

  Max, seated on a camp stool before a fabulously decorated sarcophagus, from which he was copying the inscription, rose at once to meet them. Sweaty and dishevelled, he shook hands with the Professor, kissed Sophie, and then began to button up his collar. As the two men stood talking Sophie wandered away between the tombs and statues. The giant, cavernous galleries echoed above her, cooler than the outside world, but filled with torpid, stagnant air. Beyond the rows of eternal stone tombs, the inhabitants of which had long since dropped to dust, and through a high wooden doorway, loomed the white shapes of blank-eyed statues, crowding one another, like a mob frozen in flight. Gods and men jostled each other aside. A row of busts lurked at eye level, backed against the wall. But the great statues, larger than life, all faced towards her, uncanny, unbending, rigid. An athlete cradled a discus; another stretched every marble muscle, flinging an absent javelin into empty air. Here stood one of the Gorgons, her head a mass of broken snakes, her giant hand curled around a pot. A dying man, one stone arm raised across his face, reached out to her with his other arm. She noticed that two fingers, whiter than marble, even in the murky dusk, had clearly been restored. Her soft glove stroked his expiring foot. She peered at the contorted body above her, as he sank down in pain, his shrinking genitals disguised by a plaster fig leaf. These torsos, buttocks, straining throats, knees buckled, arrested in stillness, nevertheless disturbed her, like an oncoming army, arms lifted, heads thrown back.

  ‘Sophie!’ Max called through the galleries. She must see the best pieces: the Apollo, the Sauroktonos, or The Boy with the Lizard, the sitting statue, called Menander, the Faun of Praxiteles and the old Faun with the Infant Bacchus. A selection of marvels awaits us! As they strolled, perspiring, through the vast halls, cluttered with the reliques of antiquity, Max and Professor Marek talked incessantly in lowered voices. When they reached each artistic phenomenon the torrent of learning crystallised into dates, details and the informed observer’s pedantic commentary.

  ‘These portraits are Roman copies of Greek originals. The dates are of course approximate. Apart from this one, which is indeed a very famous statue. Also a copy –’

  Sophie looked up and stared into a particular face, austere, severe, the face of a judge; but there was a detectable tremor in the mouth. She leaned against a neighbouring plinth and concentrated. The blank eyes gazed into hers; a courageous face, immediate, modern, uncorroded by time.

  ‘Who is that man?’ she demanded.

  Professor Marek also gazed at the face, reverent, and for the first time the little man ceased to fidget and stood quite still.

  ‘This, my dear, is the poet and philosopher Lucian, Governor of Bithynia and Phrygia, later of Caria and Lycia. A native of Gaul. He survived Nero’s reign and spent his last years at his villa in the south. He left some wonderful descriptions of his beloved estate in his personal letters, his fish ponds, olive groves and vineyards. But my colleagues working there in France cannot locate the site with any certainty.’

  ‘He was a Stoic,’ Max added quietly, ‘educated at Athens in the Greek schools. He never embraced the new religion, but it is known that he protected the Christians in his household.’

  Sophie swung round to face Max.

  ‘You know him? You’ve seen him before?’

  ‘Yes. This is a copy of the original statue. We now have a duplicate in the Museum at Berlin. The original was larger than life-size and the sculptor was Greek. But so far as we know the portrait was taken from life. The first statue stood in the middle of the temple complex at Miletus guarding the way to the marketplace. It is said that he used to teach there, in the open air. He wrote in Latin and Greek, but knew many other languages. I’ve read all his work, all the writing that has come down to us, at any rate. And he is one of the first commentators on the early origins of Christianity. Some say that his future vision of our religion was prophetic.’

  ‘When did you go to see the statue in Berlin?’ Sophie persisted. Max blushed.

  ‘Last year.’

  ‘And was Mrs. Lewes with you? Did she explain who he was?’

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’

  ‘It shows. In the nature of the information,’ snapped Sophie. Professor Marek missed the significance of this exchange, but not the writer’s name.

  ‘Ah, Mrs. Lewes! The famous writer. A very great lady, my dear. Max, you are her publisher, are you not? Her knowledge of the Greeks is second to none. And she cares for scholarship, as a man would do. The deepest questions matter to her. She has earned my most profound respect.’

  Sophie glimmered before the white statue, humiliated by her own ignorance. She had never read the Romans or the Greeks. And until that moment she had never heard of Lucian. But now, standing there in the Vatican Galleries, she made a unique and strange decision. Facing Lucian, and stepping back so that his stare encountered hers, and no one else, she made a silent vow. I will learn your languages and read your work. Then we’ll see what you have to say to me, and only to me. First hand, and not through the minds of others.

  Max gently touched her elbow. She shook him off, but just as she did so the great windows blackened, as if a curtain had fallen, and a blaze of white light lit up the crowded halls of white figures. The thunder crashed over them, the building appeared to heave and sway, and the statues shook, frozen before their empty sepulchres. One of the Vatican guards, a blazing torch held aloft, flickered towards them down the long corridors. They hastened through the great halls, abandoning the lifeless marble bodies. The torchlight illuminated moments in marble, a swirling robe, a naked breast, a tense, extended nostril. By the time they reached the portico the rain, blowing grey sheets of water, flooded the gardens and pavements. The majestic piazza, abandoned, empty, became a rushing gutter of storm rain.

  Professor Marek continued to astonish. He reached into his little briefcase and drew forth a gadget that looked like a telescope. Two rapid clicks and the thing unfolded into a vast black umbrella with a shooting-stick handle and a metal cap at the crown.

  ‘Voilà!’ he cried, a contented magician whose best trick has worked. ‘We shall attend the evening service at St Peter’s, for the candles are already lit.’

  And far above them, mingled with thunder, they heard the pealing bells.

  Sophie kept her vow. She sat down in the library at her own house in the Jägerstraße and attacked classical philosophy, poetry and theology. She burrowed into the commentaries and variorum editions. She attended an intricate series of public lectures on ancient bas-reliefs and black figure vases at the Humboldt-Universität. She learned Ancient Greek. She found Latin easier, because many grammatical structures resembled Italian – she had even been hailed in Rome by leering hucksters crying ‘Salve, Madonna’. And the alphabet danced before her, strange, but not alien. By Christmas she could read both Propertius and Homer in the original, with very little hesitation. Max found himself delighted and men
aced by this burst of classical scholarship, and assured her that she would be welcome to assist him in his studies.

  ‘Well,’ she smiled, ‘let’s see if I can spare any time from my own. And from my horses.’

  Why was she doing this? Max had no idea.

  ‘And are you going to produce a pamphlet on problems in Homeric grammar?’ he teased her, rearranging one of her coiled braids. Sophie smiled again, but her expression, enigmatic, reserved, gave nothing away.

  Max’s young wife, glamorous, fashionable, busy, and in demand, ran his household like a stringent quartermaster. He returned neither to Hettie’s Keller, nor to the card tables. Too many events, of an interesting and unexpected nature, occurred at home. Sophie welcomed anyone to her table who had something important and original to say. Pretentious fools or women with affected manners were not suffered at all, and some high-society people, who took enormous offence at the fact, were never invited again. And they whispered their criticisms: Mon cher, she fills her salon with Jews and painters, and you can have no idea who you might meet. This was true. Many of the dramatis personae that had flocked about the Sibyl now sought out the young Countess. Klesmer and his wife became frequent musical visitors, but so did the rapid Professor, whose growing friendship with the Countess was as powerful as it was unforeseen.

  Professor Marek never ducked controversy. When Heinrich Schliemann’s first ecstatic newspaper reports reached Berlin in 1873, claiming that he had discovered Troy, using only Homer as his guide, the philologists and scholars roared with condemnation and derision. Two voices in the German Academy supported him, Professor Wilhelm Dörpfeld and Professor Kurt Marek. The latter faced a challenge concerning his views, proclaimed from university podia and in copious newspaper columns, across Sophie’s supper table, and declared for all to hear:

  ‘The professional mistrust of the successful outsider is mediocrity’s mistrust of the genius. And the mediocrities,’ here he fixed his antagonist with a savage glare, ‘are in the majority, and usually, comfortably settled on the seats of power.’

  ‘Hear, hear, sir,’ cried Klesmer in English, who happened to be sitting next to him. The two men shook hands, like conspirators. Frau Klesmer, Miss Arrowpoint as was, hastily called attention to the vast, engraved silver samovar, which had begun to bubble gently, and enquired after its exotic origins. The company marvelled at the samovar, a wedding gift from Russian admirers of the Graf von Hahn, who were (shockingly) rumoured to be anarchists.

  Professor Marek, although already in his early fifties, remained unmarried, and having no immediate family to impede him, turned up at odd hours, bringing Sophie gifts of books, pottery and antique jewellery. A serpent bangle from Crete which polished up well gleamed golden on her arm, a treasure she removed only at night.

  ‘The Professor claims it was once worn by Aphrodite herself,’ laughed the Countess as she stood in her dressing room, admiring her reflection, then she flung Max a seductive glance. Max could not sit quietly in his wife’s presence without touching her, her hair, her shoulder, her elbow, her fingertips. What a peculiar relief he had discovered in retreating to the uncomfortable austerity of his almost empty rooms in Wolfgang’s house. He laid out his books and set to work. But always, as soon as he reached home, he bounded into the hall, bellowing Sophie, Sophie! Has the Countess returned from her ride? Has she gone out to Wilhelmplatz? Is she in her sitting room? Or in the library? Or is she ordering everybody into action in the kitchens? And once he had found her he stood back, bashful as a boy, glancing sideways, as she hurried towards him.

  The archaeological expedition to Miletus and Priene, now handsomely funded by the Graf von Hahn, set forth by sea from Marseille, early in March 1874, with a mountain of crates stacked in the hold. Professor Marek had at last gained permission to investigate the temple complex of the lost city, and the shrine to Athene on the hill, supposedly part of a little town, never excavated or even built upon since its destruction, probably by earthquake, for all the columns of the temple had fallen at the same instant. The layers of paper required in order to gain access to this place, accompanied by bribes, politely described as fees, eventually reached depths that resembled the earth and rubble that littered the site itself. Professor Marek placed more faith in Pausanias’s descriptions than in the rhapsodic beauty of Homer, who declared that the gods themselves had built the walls of Troy. Pausanias, pounding through Greece in the second century, described many of the ancient cities as already ruined. Sheep, tinkling with bells, roamed the courts and palaces where great kings had once ruled. The estuaries silted up and the sea level dropped; so the Greek cities on the Aegean coast shifted their ground. They either moved closer to the sea, or curled inwards, and lay abandoned, their fine, chiselled stone becoming houses, mosques and barns. Pine trees sprouted through the marble pavements, goats grazed in the baths and theatres. The stadium returned to fields, covered with flowers in the early spring. The ruins, peacefully overwhelmed by the natural world, presented an image of irresistible decay, mutability incarnate, a fulfilment of that unbroken promise that all things must pass.

  A small guest house in the fishing port, commandeered to host the visiting Europeans, put out several flags, one Greek, captured after a set-to with a Greek vessel that had trespassed into Turkish waters, and one American of unknown provenance, which was all they had. Professor Marek thanked the landlord in perfect Turkish. Max fervently hoped that the beds would be clean, and watched the maids, abject before the young Countess, as she stalked the terrace, entranced by the glittering aquamarine of the Aegean.

  ‘Miletus flourished for more than a thousand years. It is one of the twelve Ionian cities on the western seaboard of Anatolia.’

  Professor Marek, a specialist on the work of Thales of Miletus, had written a controversial tract outlining the philosopher’s belief that all things belonged in and to one another, that life and matter were inseparable, and that even the wild orchids, that now grew in the ruined sanctuaries of the philosopher’s city, possessed living souls.

  ‘I’ve looked him up in the library,’ cried Sophie, ‘and none of his writings survive. So how do you know what he thought?’

  Professor Marek urged his favourite pupil to try the Turkish coffee.

  ‘You drink it very sweet. Like a liqueur.’ Sophie wrinkled her nose.

  ‘No, my dear, that’s correct. We have nothing signed exclusively by him; five theorems are attributed to his hand. But philosophers are like planets. You see the influence one has upon another, even if the original celestial phenomenon remains invisible. Where would Socrates be without Plato?’

  Sophie had not yet tackled the philosophers. Instead she wolfed down bread and olives, while the smell of fresh fish on hot coals drifted across the veranda. Max listened to his wife jousting with her Professor and smoked a cigarette in the rocky gardens just below them. A flight of steps cut into the stone foundations of the guest house ended in the soft rush of waves against a small jetty. He watched a little purple rowing boat with a trim white prow, recently painted, rising and falling in the blue water.

  The Professor’s voice floated through the slats.

  ‘Well, Miletus must have been abandoned once the harbour ceased to be navigable. The estuary is gorged with alluvial deposits. But the shadows of decline and desertion can be very gradual and inconstant. We have no record of the earthquake that destroyed Priene. And the two towns are very close. The port was still being used in the fourteenth century when the Ottomans traded with Venice. But the main ruins now lie some two hours’ ride from the sea. And the protective digs on the river have been neglected. The site is partially flooded in winter.’

  ‘Really? So how are we going to get there?’ demanded Sophie, desperate for her dinner.

  ‘Mules and carts. That’s all arranged. Some of the workers who dug last year with my French colleague, Olivier Rayet, have been engaged to work with us. I am counting on the foreman’s experience.’

  ‘Max,’ shrieked Sophie
into the golden light of evening, ‘where are you? Here comes dinner!’

  The long jolting ride down rough tracks in bursts of light rain and sun hardly seemed worth the trouble, for Sophie’s first glimpse of Miletus, the ruined city of philosophy, revealed a vast, marshy flood plain. Columns and walls rose from the storm waters. The dead streets lay outstretched, sleeping, the geometric grid clearly visible through the brackish flood. The remains lingered beneath the murky levels in that very section of the city where they had permission to excavate, but Professor Marek had no intention of wasting time. He set up the campsite on high ground, marshalled his workers, and began digging behind the ionic columns on the sacred way where the damp ground sloped. The first trench, at least fifteen metres by five, at once revealed fresh walls and filled several crates with broken pots, but the pits immediately overflowed with rising water, and had to be baled out, like a sinking boat.

  The foreman’s son, a fifteen-year-old boy called Mustapha, was assigned to Sophie as her companion and guide. He fell helplessly in love with the beautiful white lady in the green hooded overcoat who sat astride her mule like a man and appeared indifferent to mud, rain and hot weather. She began teaching him French. Soon they gabbled cheerfully at each other in a mixture of languages as they trotted round the site.

  Mustapha led his captive Europeans up the flank of the wild hill to see the ruins of Priene for the first time. That day exploded into spring brilliance and heat. Here the only tracks through the pine woods and spiky flowering bush were made by goats. They left the mules in a clearing and battled up the steep ridge. Max followed Sophie and Mustapha through the fragrant mass, stumbling over broken white rocks.

  ‘Le pin d’Alep!’ cried Sophie, pointing out the Mediterranean pines and transforming the landscape into a French lesson. ‘Le bois est très résineux, mais fragile, car hautement combustible.’