The element -inth in Greek

by Alison Fell

  Yiannis laughed. For a second he felt almost dizzy with relief, just to see Ingrid at his side, warm, soft, and smiling at him like an ordinary mortal. She tapped the cat’s brow lightly, as if bestowing a curse or a blessng. ‘As for this little honey-breather, she’s going straight into my rucksack!’

  ‘No way,’ he said automatically. ‘She’ll never leave me.’ The emphasis had been unintentional. He leaned over to tickle the cat’s snowy belly, avoiding Ingrid’s eyes. ‘Exhibitionist,’ he scolded her. As if sensing a change in the atmosphere, Kore righted herself, slipped off Ingrid’s lap, and strolled out into the darkness.

  Yiannis was getting tired of sitting sedately, thigh to thigh on the sofa. It was getting late. Moths which had come in through the open windows banged blindly at the lampshades.

  In the silence he touched his fingertips to the nape of Ingrid’s neck. She closed her eyes, shivered, and went absolutely still. When he took her hands and pulled her to her feet she looked at him from some distant, dazed place.

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ he said, and led her through to the bedroom, where nothing, by any stretch of the imagination, could be said to be sedate.

  44

  Ingrid wakes to the sound of a shower running. When she opens her eyes she sees a white cat sitting on the end of the bed, washing itself. Then Yiannis pads into the room, a sarong tied round his waist.

  ‘So who were you fighting with?’

  ‘Fighting?’ she says, taken aback.

  ‘In the night.’ He towels his wet hair, grinning at her. ‘I barely escaped with my life.’

  The image that floats back to her is of someone or something creepily sewn up in a sack, like a pauper’s corpse. In the dream she was flailing around, feeling for light switches in the blackout. A smothering darkness, an invisible assailant so swaddled and padded that she couldn’t land a punch on it.

  ‘Coffee’s on,’ he announces, drawing back the curtains. ‘If you get up now I can give you a lift.’ He has brought her a bath-towel, a thick fluffy navy-blue one which is pleasingly masculine. ‘Hungover? he enquires, clean-shaven, clean-limbed, and smiling sweetly through a sunbeam.

  Groaning, she shields her eyes with her hand. Although she wasn’t drunk last night – she had no more than a couple of glasses of wine, and a Metaxa after dinner – she’s dull and decentred, at the stage of knowing that depressives shouldn’t drink at all. Hungover, though, isn’t exactly what she feels. What she feels is belligerent. She only wishes he’d give her a reason to be.

  She remembers lighting a cigarette afterwards, Yiannis with his hands clasped behind his head, watching her. ‘It’s a bit like sleeping with Jean-Paul Belmondo’ he said pleasantly, and chuckled. Or perhaps she dreamt that too. She decides to resent him in any case, for putting her at a disadvantage. ‘Too much pleasure,’ she complains, ramping herself up against the pillows. ‘Mr. Knox always gets his revenge.’

  Yiannis laughs. ‘Sorry about that!’

  ‘What else do you expect from a Scot?’

  She watches him pull a pair of spanking white pants from the dressing table drawer. Smirking, he drops the sarong and steps into them. His penis dangles, relaxed. The colour isn’t that aggressive sort of red, but a smooth cafe au lait tinged with rose. He opens the wardrobe and takes out his black trousers; inside she glimpses a uniform jacket on a hanger, its bright buttons glinting behind polythene. The trousers go on, then the short-sleeved uniform shirt.

  At the bedroom door he pauses, tucking the shirt primly into the waistband of his trousers. She wonders where he keeps the bulky belt that holds the radio, the holster, and the gun.

  ‘Do Scots take milk in their coffee?’

  ‘They do. At least this one does.’ She knows she should smile but she isn’t going to.

  She gets out of bed and picks up the navy-blue bath-towel. The cat blinks up at her, purring. The only mirror in the room is on the inside of the wardrobe door. She stands in front of it, warming herself in a shaft of sun. The sight of her body reassures her. Her stomach is flat between her hip bones; her breasts, on which no child has suckled, would certainly still pass the pencil test. Against the suntan her nipples are innocently pink: no sign of Kruja’s vulture-beaks or weasel skulls, nothing that could possibly scare the pants off a man.

  Next door Yiannis is clattering in the kitchen, talking to the cat in Greek. ‘I’m making toast,’ he shouts, ‘if you want some.’

  *

  The sun glares through the windscreen straight into her eyes. She puts on her sunglasses and pulls the visor down. A flatbed truck is bowling along ahead of them; on the back of it a wheelbarrow lies upside down on a mound of gravel. Chained to the side of the truck, a snouty hound perches precariously on top of the mound; it looks like the dog on the old HMV label, the one that smiled ingratiatingly at the bullhorn. It looks happy, she thinks, in its chains.

  ‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ Yiannis says suddenly. ‘You could stay till the end of the month, at least.’ His eyes flicker at her, questing. ‘I can have a word with Gaylene. It shouldn’t be a problem to change the ticket.’

  For a moment she’s speechless. But of course he can do that sort of thing – pull strings, call in favours. Swing it for her, so that she’ll be well and truly beholden. She fumbles in her bag for her cigarettes, takes one out, and lights it with an unsteady hand. HMV, she remembers, stands for His Master’s Voice. When the truck ahead signals and swerves sharply to the right the hound corrects expertly, like a pillion rider. Just watching it makes her feel queasy. She knows she’s as capable as the next woman of following a man around abjectly, like a dog.

  To the north the expanse of the sea breathes out, glimmering. From here, London feels like a planet you’d never want to land on, a toxic grid of noise, dirt, interference. She pictures the return: the descent through cloud-stricken skies, the cramped 30’s semis of the suburbs, the testosterone Turks blasting their horns at pedestrians on the zebra crossings in the Square. All the hyped up kids on the buses, texting, bellowing, chucking Macdonalds’ cartons on the floor. Gnawed spare ribs sticky with barbecue sauce, whole heaps of chips under the seats. Who but a masochist wouldn’t choose to stay here in blueness, on a sea-girt island rising from the haze?

  ‘Look, I’ll be sorry to leave, of course I will, but …’

  ‘But?’ Yiannis echoes, impatience thrumming in his voice. The air is so dry that the smoke stings her throat; she gives up on the cigarette, crushing it out in the ashtray. After a moment he announces, ‘You’re not happy in your life.’

  Her first instinct is to lie, to invoke fictitious Summer Schools, Publishers’ deadlines. The more she compares her life to his, the more it loses substance, won’t stand up to close scrutiny, and the truth – that no immediate commitments, personal or professional, call her back – threatens to leave her without a leg to stand on.

  ‘What gives you that impression?’

  Yiannis shrugs at the road; his profile has a dark-browed, determined look to it. ‘I know this.’

  She looks at him incredulously. ‘Which means I can change it, just like that?’

  Yiannis clicks his tongue against his teeth. ‘Change!’ he says haughtily, ‘Change is the one absolutely certain thing in life. Of course, whether it will be the change you want …’

  This Socratic pronouncement stops her short. ‘How fatalistic can you get?’

  He eyes her, his face sardonic. ‘What else do you expect from a Greek?’

  She sees the Panomeli signpost approaching at speed. Sighing, Yiannis signals and turns left on to the old road.

  ‘So where are we going with this, Ingrid?’

  The Apollo Studios loom up ahead; on the balconies people are already breakfasting, tilting their faces to suck up the early rays of the sun.

  ‘Going with it?’ She looks at him, dismayed. ‘Isn’t it a bit soon for …?’ For what, she wonders: regrets? Apologies? Ultimatums? A sluggishness seems to have overtaken her mind; in her lap
her fingers are tentacled together, thoroughly entangled, as if she’s literally wringing her hands. ‘Can’t we just leave things … as they are?’

  As soon as she’s said it the heat rises to her face. She’s heard that lame old line too many times not to know it simply won’t wash.

  When Yiannis steps on the brake she braces herself against the dashboard. The car swerves, and stops with a jolt half-way up the verge. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ she cries.

  He snaps the ignition off, throws his hands in the air, and thumps them down on the steering-wheel. ‘Is this how it’s done in London? Is it? You’ll sleep with me, but you’ll never say my name?’

  In the wing mirror a crocodile of white-legged tourists straggles out of the gate of the Studios. Encumbered by buggies and airbeds, they’re heading along the road towards the car. The engine, taken by surprise, ticks and cools.

  ‘Say it now, Ingrid!’ Seizing her hands, Yiannis yanks her round to face him. ‘Say ‘‘Yianni’’!’

  Instinctively she resists, and there’s a small ridiculous scuffle which she lets him win, if only because the first of the tourists are passing by: a sunhatted guy with a paunch, and a fat young woman pushing a toddler in a buggy. They glance shyly at Yiannis’ uniform and murmur hopeful kalimeras. Receiving no response, they exchange affronted looks and plod on silently towards the beach.

  When she realises he’s still pinning her by the wrists fear rises up in her throat and mushrooms hotly in her head. It isn’t exactly a fear that he will harm her, more a sense that some crucial control barrier is about to crumble and leave her drowning and defenceless. She wrenches her hands from his grasp and gropes for the clip of her seat-belt.

  ‘Fuck off Yianni!’ she shouts, and dives for the door.

  *

  Head down, keeping her eyes on the road, she marches back to Panomeli. Disappointment seething vengefully in her veins. In the village the Minimarket, unusually, is already open, the Flagstaff minibus parked outside. Through the tinted windows she glimpses the Harknesses, and a solitary Trish Ottakar. Clearly the Lasithi Windmill trip is somewhat undersubscribed.

  When she goes in to buy stamps Lynda spots her from the office and hurries through, brandishing a card.‘Can I nab you for a second? Just to sign this for Kylie?’

  The card is elaborately quilted in some kind of shiny fabric, with an inappropriate pink silk bow; it looks like the kind of thing you’d send for a christening. All that’s missing is the stork. The legend in Greek says Get Well, but Kylie Wilson-Wilson isn’t going to know that, is she.

  Opening it out, she scribbles her message next to the others – Hope you’re feeling better. I. Laurie – and hands the card back to Lynda.

  While Demosthenes sorts out her change she stares at the phone cards on the shelf above the till. 10 euros, 25 euros, in little stacks secured by elastic bands.

  The post-box is a flimsy tin affair mounted on a telegraph pole across the road. She sticks a stamp on her mother’s postcard and stuffs it into the slot with no great confidence that it will get there, rather than end its days in some Cretan hedge or horse-trough.

  We’ll soon have you on your feet, says her mother’s voice, twanging with false cheer, and her mind flashes on the clay feet of the statue, stolid as shoe-trees on their wooden shafts, waiting to be slotted in. You’ll be as right as rain in no time. Such an odd expression, she thinks, particularly in a place like Dunelg, which had so much rain it was hard to see anything right about it

  At the time, her response to both rain and remarks about it seemed to be silence. It wasn’t so much that she refused to talk, rather that what she felt and the words to say it parted company, quite politely, like lukewarm acquaintances who’re secretly glad to see the back of one another.

  Her mother was only trying to help, of course: the trouble was that up till then she hadn’t exactly given grounds for confidence. It was Aunt Elsa who’d come to pick her up from the Halls of Residence: Elsa the ‘tough cookie’, as Greta called her, who could always be relied upon in emergencies. Ingrid used to fantasise that Elsa was her real birth-mother, that through one of those family pacts not uncommon back then, Greta had stepped in to save her unmarried sister’s bacon.

  Not that Elsa would have had a spare minute to be a mother. Without a husband to fall back on, she’d worked all her life, first as a Warden in a Young Offenders Unit, later as a Probation Officer in Perth. Now, in ‘retirement’, she’d transformed her back garden into a plant nursery, specialising in magnolias.

  On the drive back to Dunelg Elsa fed her cigarettes and peppermints, and didn’t try to break the silence, not until, unloading Ingrid’s suitcase from the boot, she sighed and said, ‘Doctors don’t know everything, pet. Although in my experience they think they do.’

  From Aunt Elsa’s lips, the words had the ring of authority.

  She remembers a head like a china egg, pale hooded eyes behind half-glasses. Outside, the drizzle clearing to unmask a high blue Edinburgh sky. Sun shafting in through the tall Georgian windows, casting a decisive sheen on the desk and lancing off the doctor’s gold wedding ring.

  You smoke so much because you want to bite and tear at the penis.

  Dr. Stein and his antique Freudian claptrap. He’d seemed such a puny little man, and so very old – at least as old as her father. He wore a spotted bow tie and a silk waisctcoat patterned with fleur-de-lys, and regarded her over steepled fingers, unsmiling. Half an hour into the assessment he said flatly, You should settle down, find a good man. Have six children.

  What he really meant, of course, was: That’ll settle your hash. In the leather armchair she chain-smoked, sweating under his unblinking stare. Trying to put a curtain of smoke between them, trying to blot out the eyes which said he was the Word and the Law and she was a nympho and a nobody.

  The day is blowsily bright and inviting, but Ingrid wants nothing to do with it. What she wants is to crawl into bed with a valium (‘valium for flying’ says the medical record on the Health Centre computer screen), blot out all light and sound. Opt for the anaesthetic silence of the stones.

  When she thinks of Yiannis her head aches, and so does her heart. The good man, to whom the Dr. Steins of this world would have her submit – those old school Freudians, so fixated on their precious phallus. As she climbs the stairs to the apartment it strikes her that what Dr. Stein said might not actually have been the penis, but my penis. You want to bite and tear at my penis.

  Dream on, she thinks, with a small shock of embarrassment. No doubt he’d have said the exact same thing to Alice.

  45

  That Alice Kober was undaunted by her failure to obtain the Indo-European post at the University of Pennsylvania is evident in a letter she wrote to Johannes Sundwall in June 1948, shortly after hearing the news of her rejection. In it she expresses her satisfaction that plans for the Minoan Institute, albeit revised, are going ahead, and seems sanguine about the absence of a salary, writing airily, ‘Money means very little to me, as far as Minoan is concerned.’ She outlines her ideas to form a kind of co-ordinating centre for the collation of casts and photographs of the insciptions, and includes a list of the scholars she thinks should be invited to join – Myres, Blegen, Emmett Bennett, Carratelli, Peruzzi, Grumach, Bossert, Hrozny, Ktistopoulos, and Ventris.

  ‘Quite truthfully, there are a few I would rather not ask, but do not see how it can be avoided’

  One wonders if Blegen was one of the scholars she would have preferred to snub, since she had only recently received the Pylos transcripts, at second hand, as it were, through Sundwall.

  ‘It was most kind of Professor Persson to make them available,’ she writes, ‘though I confess that it was most unkind of Professor Blegen to give copies to some people and not to others.’

  On July 21st Kober set sail for England on the Mauretania – ‘I was fortunate enough to get passage, although only in First Class, and it makes me shudder to think of what it will cost’ – and on July 28th she arrived in
an England inured to post-war austerity, lugging suitcases which contained not only her Linear B files and reams of writing paper, but also luxuries like coffee, sugar and tinned meats for her British colleagues.

  Thanks to her tireless work of creating in the ‘cigarette-carton’ files the equivalent of a modern computer data-base, Kober now knew more about the signs, texts, and patterns of Linear B than any other scholar of the time. Nevertheless, the work that awaited her in Oxford was fraught with problems. She had repeatedly tried to persuade Myres to eliminate signs that Evans had mistakenly read, and still thought that Myres’ own signary often ordered signs in categories that relied on arbitrary judgements. Alice Kober was not someone who had any patience with the arbitrary, as we can see from her peremptory description of her method of compiling the Linear B sign-lists.

  ‘I discard all readings not in agreement with photographs immediately. I am interested only in what the Minoans wrote. When I have no photograph, I accept what other people say is there. As soon as I have a photograph, I discard these. In the case of a dubious sign, I consider my own guess to be as good as anyone’s, but I record the sign as dubious.’

  Earlier in the year Kober had added to her list of correspondents Emmett Bennett Junior, Blegen’s former Doctoral student, to whom he had entrusted the analysis of the Pylos tablets, and who was, in Kober’s words ‘A very nice young man when he can be.’ In June she had borrowed his dissertation from the University of Cincinnatti library and, in a pre-xerox era, spent 2 weeks reading and absorbing the contents.

  Bennett, meanwhile, was continuing to labour on the thousands of text characters found on the Pylos tablets, with the aim of establishing a list of syllabic signs, and a second class of pictographic signs he believed were used as logograms.