The element -inth in Greek

by Alison Fell

  Daniel’s lobbying, however, met with opposition in the form of Professor H. Lamar Crosby, head of the Classics Department, who requested more information about Kober. Daniel wrote hastily to Alice saying that Crosby would be ‘bowled over’ by one or two recommendations from well-known scholars.

  ‘He will be impressed if you can get somebody with a big name to write and tell him that you are wonderful. His trouble, strictly confidentially, is inertia. He is a very nice man, but he is also a lazy one. I gave him your opus on -INTH to look at but he was ‘‘too busy’’ to read it and just glanced at it a bit. Is there anyone at Harvard who can speak up for you? Crosby is very much under the Harvard spell.’

  Cvs and references were duly mustered and sent to Philadelphia, where they were retyped by Daniel, with numerous carbon copies for tactical distribution.

  Daniel had been asked to organise an independent Department of Archaeology at the University, and envisaged Alice’s appointment as straddling the Department of Indo-European Linguistics, ‘of which you will be commander-in-chief’, and Classical Archaeology, ‘of which I would be presumably c-in-c’, an arrangement which would allow them to be ‘completely independent of the fuddy-duddies’.

  Always hard-headed, Alice Kober was cautiously making plans. If the job actually materialised, she would not resign from her Brooklyn position, but instead would try to get a year’s unpaid leave. In the meantime she intended to keep the house she shared with her mother in Brooklyn, and come home at weekends, so that Katharina would not be ‘completely alone.’

  ‘In that way I can find out how it really works out, and if I’m not as good as I think I am, can retire gracefully at the end of the year, to everybody’s relief, and come back here.’

  Daniel’s irreverence, however, was infectious – ‘My own Chairman is a fuddy-dud,’ Kober confided, ‘and you can leave out the fuddy’ – and there is no mistaking the warmth of her postscript: ‘I’ve never told you I’m grateful for all you’re doing. I am. It’s been fun, too.’

  By now Daniel’s expectations were running high. The committee on the Indo-European appointment were ‘very strongly impressed’ by the Minoan research library project, and although one member was not yet convinced that Kober was the proper person for the Professorship, ‘if we can convince him that you are qualified to teach IE (and I think we can), then I feel that your chances are excellent; I might almost go so far as to say that it would be in the bag.’

  Not only did the University of Pennsylvania have world-class scholars like Speiser and Kramer, it had big plans for expansion in Anthropology, Indic Studies, and Egyptology. Daniel wrote fulsomely to Kober about his ambitions for the Archaeology department, and proposed a rough schedule that was far lighter than she could have dreamed of – four two-hour courses in Linguistics, of which only two, or three at the most, would be given in any one year, with a course in Minoan scripts for Daniel’s department. It was all graduate work, in very small classes; for the first time Alice would have a timetable which would allow her to concentrate on her Minoan.

  Her response was immediate:

  ‘Your latest letter has me sitting here with my tongue hanging out, and that’s bad. I’m trying to preserve my equilibrium, so that I’ll be happy no matter how things turn out. You’re heartless.’

  The temptation, it seemed, was almost too much for her.

  ‘I’ve resolutely refused to think how wonderful it would be to have people like Speiser and Kramer right there in case Minoan starts swerving toward Semitic, Hurrian, Sumerian etc., and an Egyptologist on top so I can finally get to read it. Now you add a course in Minoan scripts!!!’

  Just before Christmas, Daniel wrote anxiously that there had been a ‘slight setback’ and urged Kober to ‘do everything in your power short of throwing hand-grenades to get E. Adelaide Hahn to send her testimonial immediately.’

  What was still needed was a strong endorsement, not of Kober’s Minoan expertise, but of her ability to handle Indo-European, and in particular Greek and Latin linguistics.

  Daniel also advised Alice to do some lobbying of her own. The joint meetings held by the Classical societies were a regular Christmas feature; this year they were to take place at New Haven.

  ‘Our entire Classics Department will be at the meetings and I trust you to take full advantage of the opportunity to make a favourable impression on Heffner and Crosby.’

  In effect Daniel was telling Alice Kober to shmooze. For a woman who appears to have been well aware that she had been blessed with a first-class intellect, being judged by second-raters must have been galling enough, let alone having to kow-tow to them. Her pride smarting, she retreated into defensive scorn, writing back:

  ‘As for Crosby and Heffner – well, I’ll do my best at the meetings. It will be hard. Neither has ever written anything I remember.’

  And perhaps it was frustration that fuelled the uncharacteristically feminist query:

  ‘Don’t you think a lot of the opposition is really based on the fact that I’m a woman? Even if it isn’t openly mentioned.’

  In the meantime Daniel had become embroiled in interdepartmental in-fighting, and on Christmas Eve he wrote furiously to Alice, complaining that, in their determination to block her nomination, Crosby and Heffner had been drumming up inferior candidates.

  ‘I am not being unduly bitter when I say that their controlling criterion seems to be mediocrity. They are third-raters themselves and simply do not want to get people who will show them up.’

  His account of Crosby’s machinations makes disturbing reading.

  ‘On the day that I last wrote you, he called a meeting of the department but timed the notices so that I did not get mine until after the meeting. He didn’t try to get me on the phone. At this meeting the department decided unanimously that you wouldn’t do, and that Messing was their candidate.’

  Only by petitioning both Deans had Daniel managed to get the decision overturned. The fact that the fight had become so dirty appears to have made him even more determined to win. He was also at pains to assure Alice that her sex had no bearing on the situation.

  ‘[Dean] Williams even went so far as to say that it was a point in your favour, since it was time to rectify our male exclusiveness of the past.’

  Daniel had not been in the O.S.S. for nothing, and one can only admire the guile with which he assesses the weaknesses of the opposition and lays out a strategy. He reiterates his advice to Alice to tackle Heffner, who is ‘weak, lazy and impressionable’, and even Crosby, who ‘in the long run will have to be overridden, but it is certainly worth trying to bowl him over.’

  That the whole business had taught Daniel a lot about human nature – the ‘genus professoricus’ as he wryly puts it – is clear in his casually damning account of another department member.

  ‘Don’t waste too much time on McDermott, though a smile would help. He has been an assistant professor for seven years and he told me perfectly frankly that he felt he had to oppose any appointment at a higher rank than that, because it would shut him out forever. Isn’t that nice?’

  The Christmas Conventions – a professional and, no doubt, a social must – were held jointly by the American Philological Association, the Archaeological Institute, and the Linguistic Society of America. The 79th Annual Meeting took place in New Haven from December 29th-31st. John Franklin Daniel stayed at the Graduate Club on New Haven Green, a beautiful clapboard building in the Federal style. Built in the 1800s, it was red-tiled, white-painted, and tree-shaded. In 1947 it was also all male.

  Although no stranger to austerity, Alice Kober was staying at the Taft on College Street, at the time one of New Haven’s finest and most modern hotels. She was 41, single, and on $6000 a year – which, given that her counterpart in an English university might have taken home £600, was a more than decent salary – so who could deny that she deserved, just for once, to spoil herself?

  Records exist of the proceedings of the convention – for instance
, at the dinner held on Tuesday 30th, Daniel, with Oscar Broneer and H.T.Wade-Gery, gave a symposium on the Homeric period. (Daniel was about to publish the Homeric issue of the American Journal of Archaeology.)

  There is no record, however, of who networked with whom, who danced, flirted, or drank martinis, or whether Alice Kober managed to ‘bowl over’ Crosby, or anyone else for that matter.

  We do know, however, that she talked to Oscar Broneer, who warned her that the prospect of seeing the Heraklion tablets in the coming year was ‘none too rosy.’

  As Kober felt even more strongly than Myres that Evans’ transcriptions should be checked against the original tablets, Crete had been high on her agenda for the following summer. Fuelling her urgency, as she confided to Johannes Sundwall, was the fear that a nuclear ‘war to end war’ would soon wreck what was left of the world. Understandably, she was disappointed by Broneer’s discouraging news.

  A letter she wrote some weeks afterwards reveals that she had also been feeling ill during the convention, and had only seen Daniel in passing. She had heard nothing from him since New Haven and, assuming from his silence that the ‘Kent job business’ was over, had waited six weeks before writing. Despite its apparent forthrightness, the letter exudes depression, and there are glimpses of a vulnerability Kober rarely reveals.

  ‘First, I did try to see you the last morning of the meeting, and saw you at least five times, but each time you were deep in converstaion, and didn’t see me. I didn’t want to interrupt. The last time you were just saying to someone ‘‘Let’s go upstairs where we can talk without interference’’. I saw you go up, and decided I’d go home, because I still wasn’t feeling right. Something I et [sic] no doubt.’

  A common-or-garden hangover, one might assume, but there is no evidence to suggest that Kober was a drinker. It may be that the stress of an occasion on which so many hopes depended was simply too much for her.

  With hindsight, however, despite the casual quip about ‘something I et’, one is tempted to suspect that something rather more sinister was at work. What appeared at the time to be an ordinary stomach upset may well have been the early warning signs of the malady that was to lead to her death a mere two years later.

  She empties her ashtray into the wastebin and carries half a cup of cold coffee out on to the dark balcony. The air is less stuffy there, but hardly cooler; it’s the thought of Alice the wallflower that makes her shiver.

  Ingrid imagines her in something mauve, her hands clasped before her waist, a clunky handbag like the Queen’s dangling from her wrist. Her hair bobbed and permed, perhaps, for the big occasion, it’s enough to make you weep. Invisible Alice, waiting and watching, and never being seen.

  No one likes to go unnoticed, and sallow, stocky Alice didn’t have glamour on her side. Impossible not to empathise with her as she hangs about, excluded, and finally, gathering the rags of her pride, flees from the convention.

  Did Alice actually feel any of the emotions she imputes to her? She’ll never know, of course, and, empathy or no empathy, she has no right to fill in the gaps. It’s supposed to be a biography, not a fairy tale, and although she hates settling for these scholarly, mincing constructs – ‘one’ this and ‘one’ that – she can’t risk assigning to her subject feelings she’d probably have strangled at birth.

  The holiday apartments are silent and shuttered; all the tourists, sated by sun and swimming, are fast asleep. Glasses clink, though, on the terrace of Demosthenes’ house, where an oil lamp glimmers through the canopy of vines.

  She hadn’t been able to face another night out with Hutchinson. The inevitable corner table with its single place setting, the pretence of reading. Not to mention the fear that Ken and Glenys would turn up and take pity on her. Instead she stayed in and composed a meal from odds and ends – fried potatoes and aubergines, with slices of hard-boiled egg and rounds of raw red onion – and ate it on the balcony with the moon for company.

  Solitude, after all, has a lot to be said for it, and it’s a whole lot easier to compose a meal than it is to compose a life.

  She fetches the Metaxa from the kitchen and pours two inches into a tumbler: brandy to warm her, brandy to blot out a scene fraught with possibilities for humiliation.

  Pantremeni o eleftheri?

  He blanked you, Ingrid. Get over it.

  The moonlight on the sea is pearly, like nail-varnish. She raises her glass to toast it ( hasn’t she always secretly believed that the moon is restorative?), letting the alcohol release all the wishes she could wish for Alice, all the pretty things that ought to be restored to her.

  Here’s looking at you, Alice, she says, willing the moon to work its magic, invoking her in her gleaming, princessly aspect, in her element -Inth.

  28

  Sofia wiped over the oilcloth on the kitchen table and dusted the plastic begonias for good measure. Ever since Andonis phoned from the depot she’d been going like a maniac. She’d rushed Spiraki up to Androula’s, and begged first Marta, then Kristina, to cover for her, so that Kyria Evnochides wouldn’t need to know she’d taken the day off.

  It was typical of him, she thought, not to warn her in advance. Surely he could have phoned from Patras, or even from the ferry, given her a chance to sort things out.

  She’d hardly had time to throw the lunch together, let alone blow-dry her hair and apply some blusher – Andonis hated to see her looking peaky – before he came bounding in the front door, grabbing for her.

  ‘First things first,’ he said, ‘the shower won’t run away.’

  Then it was straight into bed and everything over in minutes – hardly long enough to crease the sheets. Long enough, though, to imprint on them the smell of all the miles he’d driven, of autoroutes and exhausts, night lay-bys, and petrol stations that never closed.

  She began to lay out the mezedes. The stifado was in the oven, the beers icing in the fridge. Later he would kiss her and call her my lovely; later she might feel desire, but for the moment there was only anxiety.

  A whole week together, he’d said buoyantly. How could she tell him she’d never be allowed a week off work without prior notice?

  Andonis strode, sighing, from the bathroom, his skin fragrant with shower gel. He sank into his armchair, put his feet up on the pouffe, and plucked a newspaper from the pile she kept on the coffee-table in the hope that one day she’d get round to reading them. The hairs on his bare legs stood out stiffly, as if relishing the coolness. His face and arms were burnt dark from the sun in the cabin.

  She hurried to fetch him a beer, loving him suddenly for his impulsiveness, remembering how his impatience had always been the strong wind which blew her along. Sometimes, after Spiraki was asleep, she’d find herself on the balcony, holding conversations with the sea, her hands weaving his presence from the empty air. Without him she was just a boat without a sail, and that was the plain truth of it.

  When he took the beer from her she saw how his nails were broken and blackened with engine oil. She kissed the top of his wet head and turned quickly away.

  At the back of the kitchen drawer she found the linen napkins Androula had sewn for her trousseau, and stood there fingering them, all the absences welling up behind her eyes. Five years already, she thought – have we really been married for five years?

  She heard Andonis swear under his breath. He was staring at something in the newspaper.

  ‘Sofia? Have you seen this?’

  ‘Me? I never have the time,’ she said gaily, ‘I just save them up for you.’

  ‘It’s Ivo, I swear to God!’

  ‘Who?’ She dropped the napkins on the table and leaned over the back of his chair. When she saw the headline her hand went to her mouth. ‘The one they found up on Stavlakis?’

  ‘He was Albanian, poor bugger.’ Andonis shook his head heavily. ‘Nice lad, though, not like some of them. No drugs or any of that stuff. Said he was headed for some commune up at Neo Chori.’

  With a jolt Sofia remembere
d what Androula had told her.

  ‘The police have been round, Andoni. They’ve been asking questions.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Sofia! You didn’t talk to them?’

  Sofia shrank from his accusing tone.

  ‘How could I, Andoni? I’m at work all day.’

  ‘Well thank God for that, at least!’

  Andonis took a gulp of beer from the bottle and shut his eyes for a moment. She’d set a glass and a coaster on the coffee table but he hadn’t bothered with either of them. She watched him fumble for his cigarettes and light one with an unsteady hand.

  ‘But if you know him, Andoni.’ she said timidly, ‘I mean, shouldn’t we call, or something?’

  When he thumped the arm of the chair beer spurted from the neck of the bottle.

  ‘And get myself locked up? Are you crazy or what?’ Sofia stared uncomprehendingly at the foam, and the stain spreading brown across his white vest. ‘Who the fuck do you think brought him here?’

  29

  At noon Ingrid is ready to go, but the Giffords are definitely late. She smokes on the balcony, watching out for their hired red Renault.

  Inside the apartment everything is shipshape, sorted late last night in a sudden flurry that’s embarrassing. now, looked at with morning eyes. How ridiculous that, even when you know someone isn’t coming, you prink up your house for him, clear the draining board of dishes, arrange and rearrange the fruit in the bowl. Automatic preening. The dust shaved from the surfaces, until everything waits like a still life, hieratic.

  On the waste-ground across the road the cockerel, pecking among pumpkin flowers, sets up its mocking, discordant cry. She’s aware of the ordinary world, but distantly: a car horn on the Katomeli road, a guitar practising somewhere – a downswerving chord-sequence she recognises as the intro to All you need is love – the inevitable churn of a concrete-mixer. She’s seized, suddenly, by a sense of necessity, a twinge of truth that flies in the face of the evidence. Her mind has constructed a memory which may or may not be false – of a hospitable face, a hospitable nature. What it can’t do, however, is reconstruct the scene at the Museum; the details of this have vanished, like those in a novel read too fast, too greedily, so that all that’s left is the thrall.