The element -inth in Greek

by Alison Fell

  He stood with the sheets in his arms, staring at Dora’s neat body, the small breasts in their lace, the fuck-me G string cutting between her buttocks, and, perversely, he exploded. Dropping the sheets on the floor, he grabbed Dora by the arms and jerked her to her feet.

  ‘Are you listening to me? Look around you! Do you see dust, do you see disorder? Do I look like a man who can’t look after himself?’

  He saw the shock on her face, and let go, trembling. As he stepped back his foot caught the edge of the cat’s dish, which spun across the floor, spilling lumps of meat and jelly. Fleetingly it occurred to him that Kore had left her food untouched, and that this was something out of the ordinary. He watched the cat-bowl shatter against the fridge.

  Dora began to cry. She ran into the bedroom sobbing and gathered up her clothes. Yiannis followed her, one part of him stricken by remorse, the other part frozen with resentment. Karen, who was physically courageous to the point of recklessness, would never have cowered away from him; she would have spat and kicked, she would have punched him in the face.

  ‘Dora, I’m sorry.’ His voice was leaden. He watched her haul her dress over her head. Her bedraggled face emerged from the red material, but as the folds slid down and settled over her hips she wouldn’t look at him. Next door in the kitchen the washing machine started its cycle, toiling and moiling.

  ‘You’re such a shit, Yianni.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, half-hoping she would lash out or somehow lose control, yearning for the sheer relief of it. He tried to smile at her. ‘But look, you were right. We have to talk.’

  Dora’s eyes darted at him. She went to the mirror and began to brush her hair with harsh, tugging strokes. He felt her fear fully now, and how it entrapped him. She’d decoded his words with perfect accuracy, but he couldn’t take them back. He waited, his fists clenched, hating the power she had to turn him into her Lord Judge and High Executioner.

  ‘So that’s agreed, then?’

  ‘If you say so.’ Dora hurried her feet into her sandals and, chin up, swung her bag over her shoulder.

  ‘We’ll have dinner, right, and we’ll talk.’ He moved closer, meaning to touch her, to reassure, or at least to reinvoke some principle of friendship, but his hand froze in mid-air and wouldn’t obey his command.

  ‘Whatever you want!’ she cried. Shrugging wildly, she fled past him, ran down the hall, and slammed the front door behind her.

  In the kitchen the smell of cat-food was overpowering. He’d thrown the shards of pottery into the bin and scooped up the scattered food mess with kitchen paper. Then he fetched mop and pail from the cupboard and, still in his underpants, began, painstakingly, to wash the kitchen floor.

  17

  Ingrid’s towel glitters with sand, like the fleeces once used for panning gold by the shepherds of ancient Colchis. The scratchy grains have found their way into her crevices, and in between the pages of Prehistoric Crete.

  She’s decided that she’s a little in love with Hutchinson. Dubbed ‘The Squire’ – ‘tall, pacific, kindly’ – Hutchinson had succeeded John Pendlebury as Curator of Knossos in the late 1930s, and remained in the post until the war forced the British School to evacuate the Villa Ariadne. The voice of the author of Prehistoric Crete has a kind of radiant modesty. Not for him the dashing heroics of the one-eyed Pendlebury, who famously demanded 10,000 rifles from the War Office to arm the Cretan Resistance. Instead, when Germany joined with Italy against Greece, Hutchinson closed up the Villa and shipped his ailing mother home to England, via Cairo, on a destroyer. It can’t have been a very comfortable journey.

  On April 30th, 1941, the night before he sailed away with his mother, ‘The Squire’ dined with John Pendlebury at the Officers’ Club in Heraklion. Three weeks later the Germans invaded, and by 22nd May Pendlebury was dead, wounded in the Battle of Heraklion, captured, and summarily executed. Other Aegean archaeologists had also been co-opted by Allied Intelligence – Carl Blegen of Pylos fame, for instance, and of course John Franklin Daniel – but they had survived

  The heroic paradigm, thinks Ingrid. Always it raised its head, subtly depreciating all other narratives. And of course there’s no denying the allure of derring-do, even if it leaves poor Alice in the wings, sitting out the war at Brooklyn College, chivvying her girls through Juvenal and Catullus. As far as she knows, Alice waved no soldier off to war, drove no ambulance, sweated in no armaments factory; her adventures, like Hutchinson’s were strictly of the intellect.

  It’s too hot to read, now, even under the shade of the umbrella, and also windy, everything flapping and flying.

  She pays 5 euros to rent one of the red fibreglass canoes that live on the shelving pebbles by the jetty, and launches it into the shallows. Lining up the prow, she leaps in, digs hard with the paddle, and sets sail for the horizon.

  The wind is stronger farther out, whipping up some sprightly waves. On the beach of bare-breasted ladies a gust uproots an umbrella and sends it spinning dangerously on the gyre of its pole, wreaking havoc among the sunbathers.

  The canoe bucks suddenly as the waves slap against the prow. From the beach it must look quite dangerous – particularly if you don’t know these broad-bottomed ones are almost impossible to capsize. The thought makes her feel adventurous: the dancing dip and rise of the canoe, the tossed sea telling a story of heroics and risks. She wedges her feet against the sides for purchase and throws all her weight behind the paddle, feeling the dark spine of the sea flex under her.

  Farther out the waves abate, and she coasts on a rolling swell, the deep water indigo on the downslope and gun-metal grey on the rise. The shore is distant now, the land losing its grip on her. Spray has soaked her bathing suit and shorts, but the sun beats so fiercely on her head that she dunks her cap in the sea and clamps it back on. Her drenched hair pours runnels over her shoulders; light refracts through the water-drops on her sunglasses. Turning the canoe through 180 degrees, she points the prow at the shoreline and paddles with the weight of the waves behind her.

  50 metres out from the beach she hits the breakers, catches one, and rides its momentum into the shallows. When the hull scrapes bottom she jumps out into the surf, and in what she hopes is a seamless sequence of movements, throws the paddle inside, grabs the prow, and hauls the canoe clear of the waterline

  Farther along the beach the Giffords are standing up by their sunbeds, watching the exhibition. Rinsed and triumphant, she waves to them, already thinking ahead to the pleasures of the Shoestring – her pens, her notebooks, how she’ll sink into work like others sink into love.

  *

  Asaminthos: bathtub, or lustral basin

  Erebinthos: translated shyly by Kober as membrum virile

  Kerinthos: bee-bread or pollen

  Labyrinthos: maze, large structure, even the Palace of Knossos itself

  In her unpublished monograph, The Element -Inth in Greek, Kober has methodically tracked down every Greek word containing the Cretan -inth or -inthos suffix, from Akalanthis – an archaic name for Artemis – to Zerinthos, a cave connected with the sacred rites of various goddesses, all of whom, Kober suggests, were manifestations of an ancient, chthonic goddess.

  For once, Alice Kober has allowed herself the luxury of speculation, of wondering, of romancing a little. Yes, her word catalogue is exhaustive, her foot-noting as meticulous as ever, but in the ‘Inth’ monograph her enthusiasm for the language of meadow and mountain shines through. Her tone is light and spacious, and, one might argue, inflected by a vigorous, almost a heroic longing. We can almost smell the minth and the hyakinth, hear the bees in the heather, see the water glistening on cave-wall or naked skin. This is not the forensic investigator of the Linear B script, but a young woman of imagination, with a taste for the infinite – a woman who has not yet completed the serious work of reining herself in.

  Apparently Kober had got as far as circulating the -Inth paper for peer review, for in the margins she has collated the responses of her old Hunter C
ollege Professor Ernest Reiss, and also – profusely – the comments of John Franklin Daniel, the man she appears to have admired above all others.

  Among Kober’s private papers a University of Pennsylvania notebook belonging to Daniel reveals the similarity of their preoccupations in the early 1940s. The notebook contains a review of Evans’ magisterial Palace of Minos, Volume 1V of which, published in 1935, dealt with the three Cretan scripts.

  In the notebook we see Daniel puzzling over a Linear A inscription which appeared with remarkable regularity on votive objects and, in the earlier hieroglyphic form, on sealstones.

  This inscription, which Daniel believed to represent the name of the Mother Goddess, was later dubbed the Minoan Libation Formula, and was to be a focus of interest to scholars for the next 30 years.

  What Daniel rendered as e-sa-sa-la would later be rendered as ja-sa-sa-ra – a persuasive reading, since the similiarity to the names of other goddesses of the East Mediterranean – the Luvian Ashasara, the Hittite Ishasara, and the Canaanite Asherat – was hard to ignore. That Kober had involved herself in this particular debate is evident from her observation that the Hieroglyphic version Daniel discussed in his notebook would have to be read from right to left and from the bottom up to obtain the same reading as the Linear A version.

  A letter from Alice Kober to Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation explaining that Daniel was intending to publish her -Inth monograph in the American Journal of Archaeology, suggests that Kober and Daniel had been acquainted at least since the very beginning of the 1940s.

  John Franklin Daniel had been appointed Curator of the Mediterranean Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in 1940, and was awarded his PhD there, on the Cypro-Minoan scripts, in 1941. In the summer of that year Alice Kober attended Professor Speiser’s courses in Old Persian and Akkadian, but even if she and Daniel did not encounter each other in the Classics department of the U. of Pennsylvania, such like-minded scholars would certainly have met at one of the half-dozen learned societies of which both were active members – societies like the Classical League, the Linguistic Society, and the Archaeological Institute, which jointly convened annual Christmas meetings hosted in turn by Yale, Cincinnatti and other top-rank unversities across the States.

  After being appointed to the University of Pennslvania as a lecturer in Greek, Daniel was released for war service. In 1942 he entered the OSS – the forerunner of the CIA – became a Commmanding Officer in Cyprus, and by 1943 was Lieutenant Colonel. It is tempting to imagine Daniel as an American version of the legendary John Pendlebury of the British School: a latter-day Homeric hero from the upper crust of Ann Arbor, bounding around the Mediterranean in baggy shorts. Tanned, athletic, with a devastating collegiate drawl.

  In 1940 Daniel had married, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, one Ellen Alix du Poy. The name evokes gracious colonial mansions, stud farms, magnolia-shaded lawns – all the ease and privilege that was absent from Kober’s background in the tenements of Yorkville and the South Bronx.

  After the war, as Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Archaeology, Daniel was clearly a mentor to Kober, even a close friend. But one is tempted to wonder if there was a time when Alice the woman – the younger, dreaming Alice glimpsed in the -Inth monograph – had aspired to more.

  18

  The sunset had left its gold rim on the crouching profile of Mount Yuchtas. At the bottom of the garden, among the lemon trees his father had planted in the ‘50s, Yiannis smoked in the darkness, gazing up at the pinpoint lights of Neo Chori.

  He had hosed the shrubs and the tree roots, but although the coolness of the water still hung on the air, there was a dryness in his mouth and a restlessness in his mind: a need for something unknown that was queasy, painful, and familiar. Only in the Karen years had it abated, alhough even then it could reappear on a certain kind of evening, one that was too pleasant, perhaps, too domestic: the sun sinking over the low hills beyond the western suburbs, the laughter of the neighbours in their yard, the sharp chlorine smell of swimming pools. The sheer smugness of the nice New World.

  After work he and Karen would sit on their patio, flanked by banksia trees from which gaudy parrots noisily spat pips. They drank homemade lemonade opaque with crushed ice, made from lemons which were not Greek, which had ripened under a sun that moved contrarily across the northern sky.

  At times like these the foreign light glinted mockingly, as if to say there were no secrets here, at least none it would unlock, and from his hollowness arose the thought that the paradise he was living in was one without shadows, and therefore bereft of dreams. When he’d tried to confide his unease in Karen, her face dulled with a kind of guilt he hadn’t understood, at first. Her answer was flat, defensive. The dreamtime was the province of the Aborigines, she said – as a matter of fact it was all they could bloody call their own.

  Karen had spent her childhood in Tasmania, and one summer before they were married she’d persuaded him to take a hiking holiday down on the South West coast.

  He remembered the vineyards and orchards – sweet to his European eye – that bordered the Entrecasteaux channel, the oddly named villages: Sandfly, Snug, Tinderbox.

  Farther south, though, the weather had turned bad. Bracing blasts of wind chased cold rain north from the Antarctic; rainbows arched above tall eucalyptus trees whose grey trunks wept desiccated tongues of bark. The coastal footpath was obstructed by dense groves of buttongrass and the bleached branches of fallen trees. Detouring around a silty inlet shadowed by rain forest, they’d stumbled on to an Aboriginal Reserve. Too late, they’d noticed the grassy burial mounds, the midden of oyster shells. A new weatherboard hut with a tarpaulin roof flew the Aboriginal flag. None of this, they agreed, had been marked on their map.

  A thousand miles from the mainland, the wind had a southerly edge to it, and the first few spots of rain had begun to fall. In the lee of the hut a group of men and women were drinking tea around a brazier. They seemed ill-dressed for the climate, in sandals, T shirts, skimpy leggings.

  Yiannis had wanted to beat a retreat, but one of the women beckoned them towards the fire.

  ‘G’day,’ Karen called cheerfully, taking off her rucksack and going over to warm her hands. They drank sweet black tea from tin mugs, crouching down beside the brazier, looking out across the sand.

  To the south, nothing but sea-kelp between them and the pack-ice of Antarctica.

  Tongue-tied, he’d handed round his cigarettes. His spoken English still in its infancy then. When something large leapt and splashed out on the water he said effortfully, ‘Big fish. What kind is it?’

  There was a rustle of laughter. ‘She’ll be a penguin, mate!’

  ‘Not from these parts, is he?’ he heard someone ask Karen, and Karen laughed too.

  ‘Nah, Greece,’ she said, as Yiannis nodded like the village idiot. ‘He’s a Greek, this one.’

  A noticeboard was nailed to the door of the hut. On the board were laminated photographs, clippings from local papers, even a feature article from the Sydney Morning Herald. He read English better than he spoke it, and he could understand enough to get the gist.

  The article was about the genocide of the entire Aboriginal population of Van Diemen’s Land, some 5000 in all. In 1837, he read, the few survivors who hadn’t died of disease or despair were transferred to their final settlement here at Oyster Cove, where, no longer a threat to the white establishment, they were dressed up and paraded at official functions. The last survivor, Queen Truganini, had died in 1876. As far as he could make out, her skeleton had been put on display in Hobart Museum, where it had remained until the Land Rights movement began in the 1970s.

  In the old photograph Truganini’s face, framed in a Victorian white lace bonnet, was so black as to be almost featureless. Conscious of curious eyes on him, Yiannis put his hands in his pockets and shivered. He couldn’t have felt more displaced.

  And then the pick-up truck had drawn up, stirring whirlwinds o
f dust. On the door was the logo of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

  The man who jumped out wore Rangers’ green. He had cropped pale hair and a furry dab of stubble on his chin; he was young and white and there was nothing accommodating about him. He advanced on them, jerking his thumb at the flag that flew on the hut.

  ‘This is Aboriginal land! You can’t just walk in here!’

  Karen put down her mug and looked at him levelly. ‘Yeah, sorry mate. We lost the path. Looks like you’re not on the map yet.’

  It had taken Yiannis a while to adjust to the pugnacity of Australian women. He saw the warning signs in her – the hands thrust into the back pockets of her jeans, the shoulders dropped, the mettlesome glint in her eye.

  The Ranger’s face was tight with anger. Yiannis sensed his inexperience. No way could a guy like this tolerate a public challenge to his authority.

  ‘Sign says No Trespassing, it means No Tresspassing!’

  Karen took a step forward.

  ‘Beg yours? Like you’re saying we can’t have a yabber?’

  She gestured towards the group at the brazier, but their hosts had fallen silent, drawing their hospitality back into themselves, eyeing her in the same way they eyed the Ranger, with a kind of neutral expectation. Clearly they were interested in the outcome, but Yiannis sensed there would be no support from that quarter.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, scooping up Karen’s rucksack and handing it to her.

  They exited by a newly cindered track, through a checkpoint they hadn’t noticed earlier. After a while the dirt road became a blacktop which led stubbornly inland. Karen grumbled along, stopping now and then to examine the apparently impenetrable forest for any sign of the coastal path.