by Alison Fell
He snaps the cellphone shut and poises on the balls of his feet, as if about to launch into a brisk zembetiko.
‘Signome. I have to go, I’m afraid.’
‘Ah yes,’ she says, with a commiserating nod.
Yiannis scans 180 degrees of terrace for signs of disorder and, apparently finding none, says curtly, ‘There’s dancing tomorrow at the Medusa. You’d like to come, maybe?’
Sweat flares and cools almost immediately on her skin. She curves her shoulders forward, resisting the urge to clamp her arms across her breasts. ‘You’ll be dancing, I take it?’
Now he looks simply perplexed. He glances at his watch and then at her. ‘That wasn’t exactly the idea.’ The skin of her face feels hot and papery, as if his eyes could set it alight. ‘You’re in Stella, aren’t you?’ She nods, startled, but of course it’s his job to know these things, isn’t it. ‘I’ll pick you up around eight, then.’ He raises a hand in salutation and, turning away, speeds past the raffia-roofed bar and melts into the darkness.
A night bird calls from a bush. From somewhere behind her comes the click of backgammon counters. She lights a cigarette and gazes at the remains of her dinner: half a dish of skordalia, a mound of courgettes, three large sardines staring her out. The Greeks haven’t quite got the knack of solitary dining; they invariably serve enough for two.
Inside the mezzanine there’s the flash of a digital camera: the birthday party, if such it is, is in full swing. The men are grouped together at one end of a long table, the women and children at the other. The men, whether young or middle-aged, are all well-fleshed; they sit squarely in their chairs with their elbows spread wide, bellies stuck out, and flip-flops kicked off under the table. They stroke their chest-hairs, their arms dangle expansively, hands busy with cigarettes or worry beads.
She sits back and listens to her own breathing, trying to spread out to fill the space.
Below the terrace there’s the flicker of a torch, and Ken and Glenys come puffing up the steps, Ken resplendent in an England shirt with a red crusader cross and a pair of crop pants printed with pink flamingos.
‘There you are!’ cries Glenys, pulling out a chair and collapsing into it.
Ken indicates Ingrid’s empty glass. ‘What’ll it be, then?’
‘I’m okay, thanks.’ She shows him the tin of wine, which is almost half full.
‘Was that our friendly local plod, then?’ His eyes are on her, keen and blue in the solid tan of his face. He leans over the back of Glenys’ chair, palpating her shoulders with his big builders’ hands. ‘The best laid plans, eh?’
‘Oh give over,’ Glenys chides, pouting up at him.
‘What?’ says Ingrid, baffled.
Glenys grins apologetically. ‘To be honest, I had you paired off with that Shapcott chap.’
‘You did not! The man’s a pain.’
Ken grins triumphantly and gives Glenys a conclusive little pat.
‘What did I tell you?’ Fishing his wallet from an invisible pocket in the flamingo trousers, he says, ‘The usual, love?’ and winks over her head at Ingrid. ‘She likes her banana daiquiri, does Glenys!’
33
As the car bumped up the track to the commune he scanned the article in that morning’s Messoghios.
On the Queen’s mating flight, he read, which lasts an average 13 minutes, only the fastest and strongest drones can keep up with her. Because of the intricacies of his anatomy, the drone can mate only when the rush of air forces open the lower part of his abdomen, freeing his genitals to enter the Queen’s open vulva. There is a pop – his genitals are torn from him after he enters; his abdomen ruptured, he falls to earth paralysed, his male organ left behind dangling from the Queen like a trophy.
‘Charming!’ he snorted. This time Hourdaki was really scraping the barrel.
Above the text was a line drawing from the Museum, subtitled Goddess and priestesses dressed as bees dance together on a golden seal buried with the dead.
‘Makes you think, though, sir.’ Mouzakitis took one hand off the wheel and cupped his genitals protectively. ‘The queen does it with 17 drones, did you see that bit? Till she’s got enough, you know, for a lifetime?’
Yiannis threw the newspaper into the back seat. For a second he was surprised that Mouzakitis could actually read. ‘Hourdaki’s source must have dried. She’s just filling the space with any old shit she can dredge up.’
As they approached the commune he saw that a new notice had appeared on the gatepost, exhorting visitors to turn off their mobile phones.
‘Did you see the notice?’ Mouzakitis asked.
‘What notice?’ said Yiannis.
The porch of the house was deserted, apart from the St. Bernard dozing on the deck. This time it was not Margrit who came to the door, but Wiltraud, dressed in a white blouse, narrow black skirt, and black heeled pumps, like an office girl setting out for the city. She had makeup on, and her long braids were coiled neatly on top of her head.
Yiannis presented his warrant, and the two of them followed her inside. When she pushed open the door of the room it was immediately apparent that the burnt-down candles had been replaced with new ones. He turned on her angrily. ‘My instructions were that no one was to come in here.’ He pointed to the tall new candles. ‘I explained quite clearly that nothing should be touched!’
‘I’m sorry. Perhaps the twins have come in? They like to melt the … stubs?. you know, to make new ones.’
Oh very cute, thought Yiannis: an everyday tale of recycling folk. He looked suspiciously at the cardboard boxes under the desk. Were they exactly as he had left them? ‘And Margrit – where is she today?’ He could not keep the sarcasm from his voice.
‘She took the children to the dentist,’ Wiltraud said. ‘They should be back soon, I think.’
Yiannis drew on his gloves and waited while Mouzakitis did the same.
‘What are we taking, sir?’
‘Just the boxes.’ The room would be contaminated to hell: Margrit had been using it for months, not to mention the kiddies practising their little handicrafts. On second thoughts he said, ‘And bag the bedcover.’
Wiltraud had taken a bunch of keys from her handbag and now stood in the doorway, clinking them impatiently.
‘I have a clinic in town, Sergeant. If I don’t leave now I will be late.’ There was just enough hauteur in her voice to chase from his mind any remaining gratitude for the rescue of Terpsikore. He remembered how coolly Margrit had asserted her rights, and decided he’d had enough of the master race, with their rotas and schedules and verboten notices. They’d had him dancing to a German tune, so now he would introduce them to a Greek one, make them hop and skip about a bit.
‘The procedure,’ he said icily, ‘is this. You will wait until we have finished here, and the room is secured. Then I will fill in a receipt form for the articles, which you will read and sign, and of which you will retain a copy. Then, of course, you will be free to go.’
Even Mouzakitis, who was hoisting two of the boxes in his ample arms, raised an eyebrow at this piece of pomposity. Yiannis was pleased to see that Wiltraud looked as shocked as a schoolgirl, and was almost standing to attention. How gratifying for her, he thought, to be face to face with a fascist at last.
34
From Brooklyn College, she’d calculated, the walk home down Flatbush Avenue would have taken Alice fifteen minutes door to door.
To the European eye, 1050 E.43rd Street wasn’t exactly a pretty house. It was too narrow for its two and a half storeys and steep pitched roof, rather like a house that had been sliced in two, and separated from its other half by a lane which revealed it was also too deep for its width. The facade was of glazed bricks, their pinks and blues and yellows faded to the watery, ersatz shades of an old tinted photograph.
Aspirational was the adjective that had come to mind. Alice the single professional woman had bought a house that was too big for her – bigger by far, certainly, than the cramped teneme
nts of her childhood.
She’d been aiming the camera when a black man emerged from the front door and ran down the steps, cell phone clamped to his ear. She’d opened her mouth to explain why she was standing in the road, snapping away like some shady realtor, but the man rushed past her, dismissing her with a glance, and jumped into an SUV parked at the curb.
She’d written from London to ask if she might be allowed to see the house, but no one had replied. Most likely the current owners had seen her letter as some kind of scam – a philologist (a whaaaat?) who deciphered ancient scripts (are you kidding me?). Watching the SUV drive off, she wished she’d been quicker to accost him. It seemed like a chance missed – to get inside, to see how many rooms there were, and how disposed; to step into Alice’s ivory tower (surely in the room at the top with the small dormer window) and imagine her typing at her desk, or on summer evenings knitting on the stoop, reading her detective stories.
A scholarly solitude, an elderly mother to care for: this was certainly the impression given by Alice’s letters, but now Hank Yoakam, bless his little cowboy boots, has forwarded the email, and Pamela D. has opened the door, has filled the gloomy little house with characters. After months of effort – apparently fruitless – to find a single living relative, the emergence of a great-niece has come as quite a shock. Pamela D. is the granddaughter of John Gruber, Katharina’s brother, which in Ingrid’s reckoning actually makes her Alice’s second cousin, but no matter.
On the balcony she tries to reconstruct the Gruber family tree. According to Pamela, the Gruber forebears ‘came down the Danube in the time of Maria Theresa’, and settled in the Banat region of Southern Hungary. Although they were ethnic Germans, since political boundaries kept changing and school was taught in one language one year and another the next, they also spoke Hungarian and Romanian.
Alice’s grandparents, Michael and Catherine Gruber, had married in Budapest, and of their five children four had emigrated to the USA. Bertha, the eldest, had left first, followed soon afterwards by Katharina and Anna, and finally by Pamela’s grandfather John. Joseph, the youngest, was the only sibling to stay behind, although Anna – Anna the eighteen-year-old cook of the Statendam manifest – eventually returned to Hungary.
‘Family was their life’, Pamela has written, ‘and they all liked to visit one another.’ She herself was seven years old when Alice died, and what she remembers of her own youth is ‘grandparents, aunts and uncles – their accents, their laughing faces, card games, food and friendly ways – what a group they were!’ ‘Tante Katie’ – Katarina – she recalls as ‘kind and very loving,’ as were her grandmother Susanna, and Aunt Bertha. All the women were ‘great cooks’, reportedly having cooked for some of the wealthiest familes of Europe.
In Ingrid’s mind Katarina Kober had etched herself as a timid widow, elderly and rather frail, but now, as Tante Katie, she emerges as a jolly, fulsome 60-something, a competent housekeeper and gourmet cook. It’s suddenly begun to sound like a very comfortable ménage at 1050 E. 43rd Street. Alice the breadwinner was well fed and watered; she probably never had to lift a finger. Many a working woman, Ingrid imagines, would have envied her. So much for her own attempts – as assiduous as any matchmaker’s – to provide Alice with a sexual life, or at least with the comfort of a partner. Instead, here she is, ensconced in a kind of matriarchal hive, one that was evidently doting, industrious, and fiercely protective.
Alice enfolded, Alice looked after hand and foot. Alice with nephews and nieces to fuss over.
As an only child, from a family of late (and, it seemed, reluctant) breeders, Ingrid finds this new nexus hard to swallow. It’s a bit like learning Greek: at first you see the sounds phonetically, in the familiar Roman letters, then, much later, you feel the alien Cyrillic alphabet gradually muscling in to take their place. Nor is she sure she really wants to absorb it. Rather than being relieved to discover that Alice was far from deprived on a daily basis, she can’t help feeling, perversely, that she’s been deceived.
When Alice was anticipating the Indo-European job at the University of Pennsylvania, hadn’t she told John Franklin Daniel that she planned to go home at weekends for the first year, so that her mother wouldn’t be ‘completely alone’? She’d hardly made a single mention of her brother William – ‘Cousin Willie’, as Pamela calls him – who now turns out to have been living, for at least some of the time, right there in the Brooklyn house. It’s as if he didn’t exist. Yet here he is, large as life, his notepaper headed with the E.43rd Street address. ‘A mathematical type’, according to Pamela: an inventor, a consultant engineer who designed cockpit breathing apparatus for the U.S. Air Force. Here he is on the golf course, playing volleyball on the beach, setting up a telescope in the back yard to show the Brooklyn stars to little Pamela and her brother.
Nor had Alice made any reference to the greater Gruber clan, to their cooking and joking, to the card-games conducted in umpteen noisy languages, to the fragrances that must have drifted up from the kitchen – caraway and chives, roast goose-liver and sour cherry soup. The image she projected in her letters was of someone who dwelt exclusively in an exalted realm where nothing quotidian, nothing domestic, was allowed to trespass on the meeting of true minds.
Hungarian cooking was famously heavy: goulash soup with noodles, curd dumplings with bacon, pancakes in paprika-cream sauce. If Alice was a plump wee body, perhaps that was because they were stuffing her like a goose.
In 1948, setting off on that second trip to Oxford, she’d crammed her trunk with foodstuffs – not for herself, she pointed out, but for Myres and her other English friends. ‘I plan to be austere for 6 weeks,’ she wrote, ‘it will do me good.’
It strikes her that Pamela may be able to help with the Death Certificate. As a relative, surely Pamela will be granted the access flatly denied to Ingrid, and also – despite his U.S. citizenship and top-flight credentials – to Professor Henry ‘Hank’ Yoakam? Since Pamela lives in Manhattan, it should be easy enough to call personally at the Public Health Department in Worth Street.
Cause of death is what she needs. Place of interment. Death, though, is a delicate matter – far more delicate, even, than sex. She’ll have to be circumspect.
Across the waste ground she can see two generations of Giffords taking a late lunch in the oleander shade of their terrace. Down on the beach a large family of newly-arrived blonds – Dutch? Swedish? – seem to have claimed the sunbeds vacated by the Giffords, dragging them out of the pairs so painstakingly arranged by Androula and rearranging them in a solid phalanx along the shore-line.
Her concentration is shot now, her mind overstuffed with new input. Anxiety kicks in at the pit of her stomach. Jumping up, she clatters the dishes into the sink and sets feverishly about the washing up. The shape-shifting Grubers, she decides, have unsettled her.
She imagines Yiannis surrounded, Yiannis on the dancefloor, egged on by his extended family, his parea. For all she knows he might come mob-handed, complete with accoutrements. With the best of intentions, he might try to fit her in like some deserving stray, oblige her to be grateful for his Cretan hospitality.
In the bedroom she hurries the sheet smooth across the bed, gets the iron out of the wardrobe, and plugs it in. The symbols on the foreign temperature dial are indecipherable. She spits on the iron to test the heat and slides her green silk skirt on to the ironing board.
Another scenario comes to mind, one that’s more intimate, and even more alarming. On second thoughts, a skirt might make too strong a statement: there’s always the risk he’ll think she’s making too much of an effort. She hasn’t forgotten how he cut her dead the other morning, but now, it seems, he expects her to jump to his command.
As she stands with the iron in her hand a drift of wind from the open French windows excites the material of the skirt, lifting and slithering it along the ironing board. In a sudden flash of temper she considers calling the whole thing off. Silk is such a supple, elemental thing, but s
ilk is so easily crushed.
35
Aglaia had kept a table at the edge of the dancefloor, and when Yiannis asked instead for something on the periphery she gave him an old-lady smirk and winked slyly. He let Ingrid go ahead of him, observing her shoulders with their fine spray of freckles, and the shape of her hips under a skirt that was silvery-green in colour, like the underside of an olive leaf. He scanned the bare upper part of her back for tattoos, and was relieved to find none: tattoos, on the whole, repelled him, being too reminiscent of brands on livestock.
The restaurant was already crowded, but not, as far as he could judge, with Greeks, which would at least cut down on the gossip-mongering. Through the throng he saw the shaved skull of Jaap Jansen, who was deep in conversation with a Turkish-looking type with bleached teeth and hair lustrously layered in the style of the tallest, prettiest BeeGee. Where had he dug him up? Yiannis wondered. He caught a glimpse of two angelic blond heads before Wiltraud turned full face to stare at him. As he acknowledged her he saw Ingrid nod and smile in greeting.
‘You know her?’ he said, surprised.
‘She gave me a lift to Anemospilia, up on Mount Yuchtas.’
He pulled out a chair and waited while she sat. ‘You were hitch-hiking?’ It sounded more disapproving than he’d intended. ‘So what took you up there?’
‘I’m not sure, really. Chasing ghosts, you could say.’ Her earrings were Greek, he noticed: little silver dolphins with chips of turquoise for the eyes. The sort you could pick up for a few euros anywhere in the islands. He was surprised by the brilliance of her smile.
‘You know the story, then?’
‘The human sacrifice?’
‘And do you believe it? Speaking as an archaeologist, I mean?’ Signalling for ouzo, he lit a cigarette.