by Alison Fell
‘Aren’t you going to read it?’ she asked, with such schoolgirlish eagerness that he wanted to pat her on the head and give her the gold star she so clearly wanted. His mind stopped a millimetre short of picturing her at fifteen, sixteen.
He shook his head, smiling. ‘Later. You’ve got your copy?’
She shrugged and patted her briefcase.
‘Then I think it’s time we got out of here, don’t you?’
‘Hang on a minute.’ Opening one of the binders, Ingrid extracted two pages from a section at the back. ‘I think you should xerox this bit.’
In the car he slipped a bouzouki cd into the player and beat time on the steering wheel as they crawled through the evening traffic. At the lights at the top of Ikarou he glanced over at her, smiling with disbelief. She looked so demure with her briefcase on her lap, bloused, trousered, and ladylike – deceptively so, he thought, but did not say.
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘I’m just checking you’re actually here in the flesh!’
Ingrid laughed. ‘Well I’d say so. Although I couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure.’
She asked permission to light a cigarette, and blew the smoke conscientiously out of the window. He watched her covertly, finding it hard to transpose her unfamiliar presence into the known confines of his house, let alone into the unknown spaces of his future.
Beyond the perimeter fence of the airport the coastal strip was a desert of dishevelled sand dunes and old concrete Air Force bunkers. A light haze of benzene fumes spread a glittering veil across the sea.
‘Amnisos!’ Ingrid exclaimed, pointing out a battered signpost.
He looked at her, surprised. ‘You want to go there?’
‘Just for a drink, maybe? You know it was the ancient port of Knossos?’
Yiannis hesitated, thinking about the shopping and, more particularly, the cooking, which wasn’t a task he liked to hurry. He was also conscious of the mounting pressure of the case. Judging by what Vasilakis had said, there would be very little resembling leave from now on, so he could kiss goodbye to his days off, and thus, he feared, to time he wanted very much to devote to Ingrid. Amnisos, as far as he knew, was a dump, but she was gazing so longingly at the wind-blasted landscape that he made a snap decision. He signalled left and turned off on to the winding road that hugged the coastline.
Ingrid nodded, smiling gratefully. ‘I could really do with some air.’ As she spoke an Airbus 340 blundered overhead, straining to slow down in time to rendezvous with the runway.
Yiannis laughed. ‘As long as you’re not too fussy about the quality.’
A couple of kilometres to the east, almost directly under the flight path, the village of Amnisos comprised a straggle of houses, a handful of shops, and one or two beach tavernas.He stopped beside one which was little more than a concrete platform roofed with corrugated plastic sheeting. Seaward of the concrete a few tables and chairs had been placed on a strip of sand. The place was deserted, which was no surprise to Yiannis. Ingrid, however, was already out of the car, and heading with a singularly determined stride towards the shore.
He left the car windows open and followed her past tubs of wind-tattered geraniums to a table at the edge of the sea.
‘It’s okay here?’
‘Exaretiko,’ she enthused. She had moved a white plastic chair so that the waves lapped at its very ankles, and now she slipped off her sandals and, grinning happily, submerged her feet in the sea. Linking her fingers, she stretched both arms above her head.
‘A-mi-ni-so’ she recited, ‘A-mi-ni-si-jo, A-mi-ni-si-ja.’ She wriggled her shoulderblades, her breath sighing out in a small explosion of contentment
He raised his eyebrows, waiting for a translation which didn’t come. ‘Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.’
Ingrid’s eyes sparked at him. ‘Sorry – Amnisos, Amnesian men, Amnesian women. It was in one of Kober’s triplets. You could say Amnisos was the word that cracked the code.’
He gazed at her, baffled. ‘Amnesian’ conjured up memory and the loss of it; for a second he imagined gangs of geriatric citizens tottering along the shore, beachcombing for scraps of a long-lost past.
‘Ti thelete?’ A youth in flip-flops had wandered across the road from the zacharoplasteion and now presented himself in front of them, his eyes flickering over Ingrid’s indecorous feet.
‘Tha ithela mia portakalada,’ she enunciated gravely.
Before the youth could smirk at this quaintly polite locution, Yiannis frowned at him and ordered a beer.
‘How so?’ he asked.
‘Well, an identifiable proper name was worth its weight in gold. Like Ptolemy and Cleopatra in the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphic.’ She hesitated fractionally, darting a sideways glance at him. Her hair was haloed by sun, gilt-edged as an ikon against the sombre blue background of sea. ‘Are you really sure you want to hear this? It’s pretty technical.’
Stroked by the breeze, he smiled hospitably. ‘No really. I’m curious now.’ Noticing that the wavelets were encroaching on the table legs, he put his feet up on a chair; when in uniform, you didn’t take your shoes off.
It was a question of word-endings, he gathered. The Kober woman had identified clusters of them on the Linear B tablets; meanwhile, the Ventris guy was trying out different sounds against the various signs, to see if he could come up with anything that resembled a known language.
The drinks came with a dish of small green olives wrenched too early from the tree. Ingrid drank deeply and wiped her mouth with her hand.
‘Since the triplets were only found on the Knossos tablets, he reckoned they might refer to local place names. Good guesswork, as it turned out.’
Ventris, she went on, had already allocated the values ‘a’ and ‘ni’ to two of the signs (hypothetically – it all sounded very hypothetical to Yiannis). Going on the basis of A-mi-ni-so, he’d postulated ‘mi’ and ‘so’ for the remaining two signs in the sequence. Then – by a process of reasoning which even Ingrid faltered over, and Yiannis didn’t even attempt to grasp (he’d always been useless at crosswords) Ventris had deduced other combinations. When applied to some of the sequences in the other triplets, these syllables had produced Ko-no-so (for Knossos) and Pa-i-to (for Phaistos).
‘Eureka!’ said Yiannis, who felt like giving the guy a round of applause.
Ingrid pursed her lips. ‘Well, not quite. But at least it put him on the right track. It’s what finally persuaded him that Linear B was actually an archaic form of Greek, not Etruscan or whatever.’
‘So what did your lady scholar make of that?’
‘Alice?’ Ingrid frowned faintly. ‘This was 1952. She’d been dead two years by then.’
A silver grey fighter streaked towards the coast, on an exact parallel with the horizon. It banked almost overhead and slunk down, shark-like, to belly-skim the sea. He had a split second to admire the plane before the roar caught up with them.
Ingrid ducked and covered her ears with her hands.
‘Jesus!’ she said, staring after it.
Her face was so affronted that Yiannis smiled wryly at her; he didn’t like to say I told you so.
*
Yiannis fetched the old leather bellows from the shed and gusted air into the stubborn black heart of the charcoal. The barbecue wasn’t responding to his persuasions; never a natural arsonist, he seemed to have lost skills learned at his father’s knee and perfected, or so he’d thought, in the back yards of Melbourne.
‘You’re actually going to cook?’ Ingrid had asked; she’d sounded so surprised that he immediately placed the patio out of bounds. If he was going to make an idiot of himself, he preferred to do it unsupervised.
Banished, she’d taken her ouzo down to the end of the garden, where she appeared to be communing with his father’s lemon grove. Watching covertly, he saw her pinch the fruit to test its ripeness, rub the gloss on the leaves between thumb and forefinger, and examine the undersides of the lea
ves for parasites, all with the kind of rapt attention she might have bestowed on an artefact dug up from some royal Mesopotamian tomb. Kore, meanwhile, sat at her feet, looking up inquisitively to see what on earth she found so interesting.
He was reminded of the way his father had pored over the intricate machinery of watches, their tiny cogs and springs. It struck him that he would have liked Ingrid, that they shared, in fact, some silent, avid quality of concentration.
He lit the citronella candles he’d bought and placed them on the table. The fennel and sweetcorn waited on a plate, sprayed with oil from the labour-saving aerosol Markos had recommended, and the souvlaki were ready on their sticks. At the check-out Markos had eyed Ingrid curiously, expecting, no doubt, to be introduced. Conscious that Dora was also one of his regular customers, Yiannis had denied him that particular pleasure.
The coals in the barbecue were giving out no more than a shy and hesitant glow. He picked up the bellows and redoubled his efforts; having hefted the charcoal from the shop, he wasn’t going to give up so easily. After a moment or two sparks began to scatter out like fireflies in the dusk, and flames licked around the nozzle of the bellows, sucking at the jets of air. A pungent smoke belched from the barbecue. He stood back and wiped sweat from his forehead, realising he should have started it earlier, given the heat time to consolidate.
Ingrid had drifted up from the garden, and now appeared through the pall of smoke.
‘Hephaestos at his forge,’ she observed, setting two lemons on the table. ‘I see we could be here for quite some time.’
‘Go!’ he said, waving the tongs threateningly.
Ingrid grinned at him and slipped through the open French windows into the sitting room. Cold-shouldering the sardines, the cat followed her. He could see the two of them inside, pale-haired and prowling in the lamplight.
He spread tinfoil on the grill and laid on the souvlaki sticks and the quartered fennel. Remembering that corncobs were best done on the bare rungs, he gave them an extra spray of oil for good measure.
Ingrid had reappeared in the doorway. ‘Is it safe to set the table?’
‘I guess so. Sardines don’t take any time at all, do they.’ He eyed the coals doubtfully; at least the meat was beginning to sizzle. He heard her clattering around in the kitchen. After a while she came back out carrying a tray of plates and glasses.
‘Just sit!’ she ordered, pouring him a glass of wine.
He drank gratefully and lit a cigarette. There was oil everywhere, on his fingers, on his shorts, a forensic splatter on his T shirt. Even oil-stains, now, on his cigarette. He watched her set out plates, napkins, cutlery.
Beyond the garden wall some girls passed by on the road, chattering about shampoos and earrings, and Ingrid cocked her head, listening.
‘You look so young’ she said suddenly. ‘In the wedding photograph.’
Yiannis felt his chest tighten. ‘I was twenty-five.’
‘That is young.’
‘Yes,’ Yiannis said.
‘Karen’s lovely. So full of life.’
As she said it he felt a surge of hopelessness; for a second he could have howled like a dog for his lost love, and his oil-stained fingers, even for the jilted schoolkid and his harebrained joyride. Apparently it wasn’t enough to have his heart broken, he’d wanted to break his stupid neck as well.
Jumping up, he seized the tongs and began to turn over the souvlaki.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.’
He shrugged, his back turned to her. ‘It’s time I put them away, anyway.’ Even to his own ears it didn’t sound convincing.
‘But why should you?’
Yiannis could think of no reply to this. He felt worn out suddenly, his nerves run ragged. He began to lay out the sardines carefully, in military rows. There was a smell of hot oil and charring fish. Kore stalked out on to the patio and sat at a safe distance, ogling him expectantly. He glowered back at her, weighed down by the pressure of wanting everything to be perfect. He began to transfer the souvlaki to a serving dish.
Ingrid had picked up a knife and was cutting lemons into quarters. After a concentrated silence she said, ‘So what happens to his things?’
He looked at her across the barbecue. Through the blue heat-shimmer she wavered like an apparition.
‘Kruja’s?’ he said reluctantly. A solitary priest, he thought, a decent burial paid for by the State. There were people whose job it was to arrange such things. He had no idea what would happen to the personal effects, and wondered dully why she had brought up the subject.
‘I’m not sure.’ He thought of the patched jeans, the socks and undershorts, the intricately woven waistcoat. A mother would have held them against her cheek, inhaling the smell of him; she would have traced each darn precisely, like a cartographer of pain.
Karen’s mother had cleared the wardrobe of trouser-suits and dresses, rarely worn; she’d packed them into black bin bags and driven them to the local St.Vincent de Paul’s. She’d distributed medical books, tennis raquets, and scuba gear to Karen’s friends, and arranged for the sale of the furniture. He’d never known what she did with the underwear she cleared from the chest of drawers. He had kept only the necklace he’d given Karen, a lozenge of New Zealand jade on a silver chain. That and her wedding ring.
He stuck a skewer in the fennel and turned the corn-cobs over to check the rate of their cremation. It would be winter in Melbourne now, the South-Westerlies bringing their cold drizzle in across the sea. Hardly the barbecue season.
The sardines were almost ready. He squeezed lemon on them and watched the juices fizz and sputter on the tinfoil.
‘You’ve got a serious amount of food there!’ Ingrid observed, and they both started laughing, for it was true, there was more than enough to feed a family of five.
‘I really hope you’re hungry,’ he said.
*
Yiannis read through the photocopied appendix, his hand clamped firmly on Ingrid’s knee.
Not to fear the bee
nor to hate it
but to learn
to be meet and fit
to live in the honeycomb
The name of the eunuch is Melikertes, the honey-cutter, he who tends the hive on the west terrace.
This sour person must be flattered and sweetened constantly. Should he express a wish to have the blinds drawn over against the sharpness of the light, or a sudden thirst for a jug of barley beer, I must say yes please, and jump to it. Also must fetch for him his necessaries among which is the stinking urine of pregnant mares, said to wither the little growth left in the beard, and soften the ugliness of a face such as his.
Although I myself have seen no improvement, I must lie, and say yes to his queries, and hold the mirror before his face so that he may admire himself. He is like a great golden pear, with smooth nails, red lips, and long cunning toes like a monkey.
This person who is not my ally, unhappily must become so. His eyes feast on my oiled limbs as I flex in preparation for the somersault. His nostrils scent for my blood, just as mine smell his wish that my comrades will fail to execute the catch, and the bull trample and gore my fallen body, as is its holy nature.
This person deliberately leaves the palm-leaf screens ajar so that I may witness certain services he performs for the lady in the course of her bathing. Pride oozes from him like mekonium juice from a poppy – but how, tell me, is there cause for pride, when everyone knows he is only permitted to serve her because no issue can come from it?
Those of us who are eligibles are taught that the bees are the truest and final test, but all of us know the rumours. The bees may be pacified with cypress-wood smoke, or angered by echoes or cymbal-clashes. And he who has the trick of this can twist fate one way or the other.
Ever since the cutting of the forelock I have been made ready. Like a horse in a stable I have been bred for her, fed and watered for her. I have completed the tests of the taurokatharpsia for one year without a scar,
and can stand before her unmarked.
The eyes of the lady tell me I please her, but the last word will come, as the first did, from the bees.
The one that the bees love will be Prince of the Lilies.
‘Maybe he just downloaded it from some cheesy website,’ Ingrid suggested. Kore had draped herself along the back of the sofa. Her blonde head was inches from Ingrid’s, her green gaze fixed adoringly on her hair, as if she’d just discovered a long-lost sibling.
‘Maybe,’ he conceded, but he didn’t think so. He finished his Metaxa and set the glass down on the coffee table. Already his mind was sketching out a love story, a tale of trial and tribulation. The lover braving hell and high water to win his girl and find his happy ending.
Ingrid was looking at him dubiously. ‘The test by bees is pretty hard to imagine.’
‘Even if you wanted to imagine it!’ he retorted. The image of the body etched in his memory was one of abandonment, in every sense of the word. But if the corpse now turned out to have a voice, and that voice implied a degree of collusion? Something in him recoiled from the thought; he felt as though he’d stepped inside the sticky flesh, shared in its arousal. Squaring up the pages, he slapped them down on the coffee table to rid himself of the contagion.‘You reckon he was a bit unhinged, then?’
‘Well, don’t you find the castration stuff just a touch perverse? In a man, I mean?’
Yiannis thought for a moment. He said a little defensively, ‘And in a woman it wouldn’t be?’
‘Maybe more understandable, though?’
When he opened his mouth to object twin pairs of pale eyes stared back at him: a female cabbal, daring him to contradict. ‘Why do I get the feeling that you’re ganging up on me?’
‘You know what I really think? It may be a new variation but it’s the same old theme: all women are maenads at heart.’ Yawning, Ingrid seized the cat and transferred her unceremoniously to her lap, where she rolled on her back in ecstasy and showed off every shameless thing she’d got. ‘Isn’t that right, Kore?’