The element -inth in Greek

by Alison Fell

  41

  Yiannis would have preferred to wait to hear Ingrid’s take on the thesis, but when Vasilakis asked for an update, you provided it, and when he summoned you to Chania, you went.

  The building which housed the Serious Crime Unit had recently been renovated, with the addition of silent, efficient lifts, and double-glazing on the windows to mute the bustle of the street below. The air-con, tuned to U.S. levels, flowed icily through his nostrils, putting a spring in his step.

  Vasilakis had greeted him warmly, and ordered drinks from a young woman constable: coffee for Yiannis, mint tea for himself.

  ‘For the digestion,’ he said, patting his paunch. ‘At our age, you know …’

  They gossiped for a few moments about the Devil’s Triangle while they waited for the drinks to arrive. On the desk Yiannis saw a framed snapshot of a young woman with a chubby infant in her arms. With an effort he remembered her name.

  ‘It’s Viktoria?’ he asked, recalling that Vasilakis’ daughter had been caught up in the anti-global protests in London some years ago; there had been a photograph of her cavorting on the steps of the Stock Exchange, in green dreadlocks and a pink tutu. The photo had eventually found its way into the pages of Haniotika Nea – another little scoop, he remembered, for the many-tentacled Martha Hourdaki.

  ‘It is.’ Vasilakis gazed adoringly at the snapshot. ‘So I’m a grandfather now, Yianni, how about that?’

  ‘A boy?’ said Yiannis with a pang. Vasilakis was only a year older than he was: a proper age, indeed, to be a grandfather.

  Vasilakis nodded. ‘They’ve called him Andreas.’

  ‘Congratulations, sir!’ said Yiannis.

  The drinks came with a saucer of loukoumi, baby-pink and powdered with icing-sugar. Vasilakis bared his teeth at the sweets and pushed the saucer towards him.Yiannis shook his head and was about to light a cigarette when he saw the No Smoking sign on the wall.

  ‘So – this hippy Halcyon of yours.’ Vasilakis tapped the report Yiannis had faxed through from Heraklion. ‘How involved do you think they are?’

  ‘They know a lot more than they’re saying, sir. For a start I’d lay a bet that the Kruja kid didn’t move out two months ago. I think he was there a lot more recently than that.’

  ‘And there’s no question he had company that night?’ Vasilakis curled his lip. ‘Our mysterious Melissa.’

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking, sir.’

  Yiannis thought of mentioning the strange bee reference in the thesis, but in view of the Hourdaki connection he decided against it. If he was going to send his boss’s blood pressure sky high, better to wait until the evidence was so solid that he could no longer avoid it.

  ‘Well!’ said Vasilakis, rubbing his hands together enthusiastically. ‘I think it’s time we pulled them in for questioning, don’t you? Ask them nicely, of course … but make sure you put it out to the press, see if we can rattle a few cages.’ He took a sip of his mint tea and gave Yiannis an avuncular grin. ‘First thing is to get the paperwork on your side. Check everything – residency, bank statements, business licences. Scare them a bit. They run some kind of clinic, don’t they? So, medical qualifications, whatever you can drag up.’

  Yiannis tried to conceal his pleasure. ‘And DNA samples, sir? From the women?’

  Vasilakis nodded. ‘I’m trusting you on this one, Yianni.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’said Yiannis. On second thoughts he took a piece of loukoumi from the saucer and popped it into his mouth. It was firm, yet gelatinous, and definitely tasted of roses.

  ‘You’ll have Abbot and Costello, of course.’

  ‘Fine, sir,’ said Yiannis insincerely. Abbot was obvious, spatially speaking, so he supposed the runty Kounidis must be Costello.

  ‘And I’m putting Kyriaki back on it full time. Poor girl’s been a bit strung out lately, she needs a change of scene.’

  ‘The ambulance shooting?’

  Vasilakis shrugged.‘Well, that too. Her fiance dumped her.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir,’ said Yiannis.

  *

  On the way back from Chania he reviewed those items he thought were in the fridge, and those he still had to purchase. He would do lamb kebabs with peppers, he decided, roast sweetcorn, sardines with fennel. He’d have to hose down the fly-blown garden chairs, fire up the old barbecue and hope it didn’t punish him on grounds of grave neglect.

  His body, meanwhile, occupied that no-man’s-land between memory and imagination. His lips smiled dreamily, his palms on the steering wheel felt tender and alert. Although he couldn’t actually remember Ingrid touching him there, the inner margins of his arms seemed to possess a prickling life of their own, as if there was an invisible seam beneath the skin along which his body, originally conjoined with hers, now itched to be restored to its greater Platonic whole.

  He was aware of oleanders twinkling at the roadside, a tanker gliding far out at sea, heading for Souda Bay. As he came over the headland the main beach of Georgiopoli came into view, jam-packed with sunbeds and umbrellas. The smaller beach to the west of it, the one favoured by Greeks and a few discriminating tourists, was tranquil and poplar-shaded. The sand there was almost pure white, the water cooled by two deep clear streams which flowed down from the heights of the Lefka Ori. He and Dora had canoed up the larger stream one blistering afternoon, and had spotted huge turtles, peaceful and purple-shelled on the sandy bottom. There was a good fish taverna at one end of the beach, and at the other a rickety bar roofed with palm-leaves, with a sign in English announcing it as The Cretin Club. He’d never had the heart to tip off the owner.

  Just past the Georgiopoli turn-off a rescue truck passed him at speed: there was some kind of blockage on the westbound carriageway, about 500 metres ahead. As he got closer he saw an ambulance, police motorbikes. A tour bus was angled across the inside lane, its nose half way up the verge. Sprawled across the tarmac was the steel mesh of a snare, its trident-like teeth glinting in the sun. A second snare had become entangled with the back fender, and trailed behind like a wedding veil. Slowing, he flashed his lights and did a tight U turn.

  There was a strong smell of burning rubber, although fortunately no sign of flames. He got out and went over to a traffic cop who was standing with arms akimbo, staring bemusedly at the front axle of the bus.

  ‘They sure know how to make a tyre, these Germans! Bloody bus went straight through three snares before we stopped it.’ When he kicked the tread the tyre subsided, expelling a breath of acrid air.

  ‘What’s up?’ said Yiannis.

  ‘He only stole it, didn’t he!’ The cop jerked his head at a youth who sat on the verge, holding a wad of cotton wool to his forehead; a paramedic crouched beside him, fiddling with a blood pressure cuff. ‘We’ve been chasing the wanker all the way from Heraklion!’

  The boy looked all of 14, hardly old enough to shave – just a skinny schoolkid in laundered shorts and a blood-spotted white T shirt. A school satchel spilled books on to the scrubby grass beside him.

  ‘Drunk?’ Yiannis asked.

  The cop shook his head. ‘Not a trace. Says his girlfriend dumped him. Spots the bus with the keys in the ignition and decides to take a joyride.’ He shrugged lugubriously at the queue of cars. ‘So here we are.’

  Traffic cones had been laid in an arc, and two officers were directing the backed-up westbound traffic into the eastbound lane. In both directions the long flat ribbon of the road lay under a luminous haze of exhaust fumes.

  ‘A rush of blood to the head, eh?’ said Yiannis.

  ‘Hormones, more like.’

  Yiannis looked at his watch. It was already 5.30. ‘You’re okay here?’

  The officer’s sigh was long-suffering. ‘Yeah, we’re good.’

  Yiannis said his yassous and got back into the car. Angry citizens glared at him as he slipped back into the eastbound lane and accelerated past the growing queue. In his rearview mirror the sun-struck scene receded: they were beginning t
o winch the bus up on to the flatbed. With its muzzle suspended a metre clear of the road, its great glossy bulk looked netted and helpless, like a felled bull.

  42

  She reads with growing fascination, snorting sceptically from time to time, shaking her head in exasperation at the audacity of the thing. If Kruja were her student, she’d have a thing or two to say about his wilder extrapolations, and the way he bases them on highly selective evidence. Certainly she’d be going through the footnoted references with a fine-tooth comb.

  The trouble is that the sheer obsessiveness of the piece is infectious. Seeds and sickles, the castration complex – all heady stuff in this day and age. It’s a far more absorbing read than the dissertations she usually supervises – by students with an eye on their career prospects, who’re careful to parrot the pet ideas of their professors and quite content, it seems, to document minutiae until the cows come home.

  Cigarette ends mount up in the ashtray. The fluorescent strip-lights bolted into the barrel-vaulted the ceiling are giving her a headache.

  She follows the trail of the sperma, from the Harvest-hymn of the Canaanite goddess Anat to the royal funerary rites of Middle Kingdom Egypt. She learns that barley seeds were sown in silt-filled wooden moulds made in the form of the god Osiris. The ‘Coffin Texts’, from which Kruja quotes at length, specify the number of days the seeds must be watered until they sprouted, which apparently marked the moment when the dead monarch transmuted into ‘the life that comes from Osiris.’ Without pausing for breath, Kruja’s whistle-stop tour of the Near East proceeded to Syria, where women sowed ‘Adonis gardens’ of herbs and barley in yearly rites to commemorate the death of Adonis/Tammuz, Aphrodite’s lover.

  Outside the high barred windows, bare summer legs pass by on the pavement. Sunbeams slant off the polished bodywork of parked cars. Without a doubt, Kruja’s compass is far too ambitious, his arguments totalising, and his conclusions dubious. But couldn’t you say the same of Graves, of Gimbutas? Their work doesn’t exactly meet the rigorous criteria of scholarship, but they’ve never been off the best-seller lists. In fact she can think of several publishers who’d snap the thing up – the same ones, naturally, who wouldn’t touch her own little book with a bargepole!

  To be cynical about it, Kruja’s material is quite sexy enough for a bidding war – which with the best will in the world couldn’t be said of Alice Kober. Nothing sensational about Kober’s devotion to solid proof and peer review: nothing that would sparkle or catch the light. Just careful clearing of the ground, and progression in minute, shadowy increments. A stark contrast, indeed, to Kruja’s wild epiphanies.

  Chalk and cheese, she thinks. Logic and analogic: the old antithesis of science versus art, ritual, the ecstatic imagination.

  Linear B as Left Brain, Linear A as Right.

  Chapter 3 has her referring to the appendices at the back of the binder. There’s a photocopy of one of Mellaart’s drawings of the excavations at Catal Hoyuk. The huge clay breasts that protrude from the walls of the underground chamber look every bit as lethal as they sound in Kruja’s text. Plastered white, with those beaky, persecutory nipples. Breasts that symbolise the power to give life, but also the power to snuff it out.

  According to Melanie Klein, the mother’s breast was feared and hated by the infant just as intensely as it was loved. Ingrid has a nodding acquaintance with Klein’s theories, but no desire at all to snuggle up to them: if you want to sleep at night, there are some strata of the psyche you’d do well not to excavate.

  In Mellaart’s drawing, the chamber looks like the ideal dreamscape of a sado-masochist. The stone benches in the chamber resemble nursery cots, fenced in by barricades of horns. Kruja is arguing – with noticeable relish – that the benches were the loci for sacrifice. Ingrid is inclined to agree. Between the horns there’s a space about 2 metres long, and just wide enough to tie a young man down.

  The more she reads, the more a sense of disturbance grows in her. If Kruja is so in thrall to his themes, isn’t there something perverse – perverted, even – in his entrancement? She feels breathless and overcharged, and shifts uncomfortably in her seat. The poor kid is dead, and that’s bad and sad enough. So why this reflexive urge to giggle? Taking off her glasses, she smooths her brow with her fingers. For a second she teeters on the edge of hilarity, as if Kruja has tapped some gleeful sadistic source in her.

  Maxine, she decides, would have summed him up. Back in the old days, Maxine had been merciless. While Ingrid was doing her Teaching Certificate, Maxine was working shifts at a feminist magazine in Bloomsbury, manning – or rather womanning – the switchboard.

  A surprising number of her callers, she said, were men.

  ‘They start off all supportive,’ she complained, ‘wanting to do their bit for ‘the Movement’, saying how much they admire strong women, and so on, and if you don’t stop them right there you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll end up begging to lick your Doc Martens or hoover your living-room in the buff!’

  Maxine’s theory was that those sad and ludicrous masochists had been lurking under the surface all along. Hosts of them, like lugworms waiting for the tide to turn. ‘Poor lambs. Must have been tough on them, having to be macho for so many millenia.’

  Although it’s already 5 o’clock it’s still hot as hell in the basement. Her linen trousers stick damply to the canvas seat of her chair. She checks her face in her compact mirror: her skin looks bleached under the strip-lights, the few freckles standing out blackly. In her eyes there’s a glazed, hectic expression.

  It’s time to take stock, to deliver her considered opinion. She kicks off her sandals, rolls her trouser legs above her knees, and tries to be objective.

  Kruja is attempting to lay out a bold cultural-anthropological hypothesis about the origins of modern civilisation and gender relations. Arguing from the first instances of animal domestication around 7000 BCE, he proposes a parallel development in human populations. This is along the lines that, just as management of the herd meant controlling the disruptive sexual energies of the male animal, so the burgeoning human settlements of the Neolithic, first, killed off a proportion of males in infancy and, later, castrated a substantial proportion at the onset of puberty.

  With regard to Neolithic religious cult, Kruja argues for

  (a) a symbolic transfer of potency from the now-conquered wild bull to an all powerful ‘domestic’ goddess (unfortunately oikos, with its larger connotations of homeland, clan, settlement, has no direct equivalent in English).

  (b) fertility cults of death and rebirth, arising from a new dependence on the agricultural year, with its revolutionary technologies of sowing, reaping, threshing etc.

  To back up his arguments Kruja employs an impressive battery of references from recent work in animal paleopathology, forensic archaeology, and skeletal analysis.

  He then attempts to trace a continuum from the castrated/dismembered gods of the Near East to the Kouretic cults of Crete, although in the Cretan story the emphasis seems to be less on actual physical dismemberment than on offertory rituals of tribute and submission.

  The young male as intermediary vis-a-vis the Goddess is not new territory, but, having taken as his starting-point such a radical premise, Kruja pushes his conclusions much farther than most scholars would care to venture, and certainly farther than anything produced by the ‘Engendering Archaeology’ feminists, whose work he draws upon.

  However, his argument falls apart somewhat in the final – unfinished – chapter. It’s possible, of course, that he simply ran out of time, or out of steam, but frankly, if I were his supervisor I would have serious concerns about some kind of mental breakdown.*

  *See Appendix 23, which I’m 90 per cent sure is a fiction. Kruja has given the source as Book V1 of Diodorus Siculus, but this is completely spurious, given that Books V1 to X1 of Diodorus were lost centuries ago. It’s also written in the first person, which Books 1-V certainly were not, and which in any case is unlikely
to have been in usage in such a form as early as 60 BCE. It looks very much as if Kruja, for whatever reason, has simply abandoned academic discourse here, and taken refuge in overheated fantasy.

  43

  Yiannis got to the Chania Gate just in time for the rush-hour snarl-up, and sat sweltering under the shell-scarred section of the CityWall where martyrs had been made, once, and where nowadays the gay fraternity liked to cruise riskily by moonlight.

  Since it was now too late to detour via the Market he went straight up Kalokairinou to the station, where he found Ingrid, not in the basement, but sitting at a borrowed computer in the bustle of the Co-ops office.

  ‘Just finished,’ she said, glancing up at him; she looked flushed and pleased with herself, bright with the patina of collective industry. ‘How many copies do you need?’

  ‘Can you do four? Sorry, five – you’ll want one for yourself.’

  She pressed Print and stood up, flashing a smile at the young constable who stood waiting to reclaim his machine.

  Downstairs Yiannis collated the copies and filed them in the dossier. The air seemed cooler than before, and the ashtrays had been emptied; he saw that Ingrid had procured a fan from somewhere, which was more than he had managed.