The element -inth in Greek

by Alison Fell

  ‘Sofia says to me, oh Auntie, it’s only the old field he’s talking about, not the house, and that husband of hers says, Asterios is the man of the family, it’s his duty to secure your future. But it’s my field he wants to sell to the English, Panagia-mou, left to me because I didn’t have a husband to look out for me, my mother told me herself a week before we buried her. ‘‘And what do you want with that stony patch of thistles?’’ he says. ‘‘It’s as barren as you are, you old fool. You can’t grow a grape or even graze a goat on it. Show me the deeds,’’ he says, and he hands me the key of the bureau because he knows I don’t know about these legal things. ‘‘Find me a document to prove it. Find me a signature.’’ And when I told him he was going against the word and wishes of his own mother, what did he do but smile as if he was glad of it. ‘‘It’s your word against mine,’’ he said. Even though the woman’s long since dead he’ll cheat his own flesh and blood to get back at her.’

  Androula’s hands are cramped from gripping the prie-dieu. She kneads them together and feels the pins and needles pricking inside her fingers. The very thought of Asterios makes the blood boil up in her head. It strikes her that if he was the one who’d gone away to join the andartes, rather than her own Vagelis, things would never have come to such a pass. For a moment she sees her brother mown down and lying raggedly against the City Wall and the vengeful vision makes her cross herself and beg the Panagia to forgive her for a sinner.

  ‘I’m at the end of my tether, Panagia-mou. I’ve waited on him hand and foot, I’ve done my duty. And this is the thanks I get?’

  Androula tries to catch the Panagia’s eye, but her lids are downcast and keep their counsel. She gazes enviously at the votive offerings which crowd the altar: with all those pleas and prayers clamouring for attention, how will the Panagia ever hear her voice? If only she had a bright tin token to offer – a house or a field, even a thistle. For if the Panagia wouldn’t reach down from her heaven and help an old woman, who on God’s earth would?

  48

  On the drive to the south coast Ken keeps the windows shut and the air-conditioning on: the day has turned into the hottest yet, windless and unsparing. The winding road over the mountains is mercifully quiet, the hill villages deserted, for those with any sense have shuttered their houses against the midday heat and are lunching in the leafy shade of their terraces. At the last moment the elder Giffords had thought better of the trip, opting instead for a lazy afternoon at the beach. Ken and Glenys, however – those indefatigable sight-seers – pooh-poohed the idea that a mere 40 degrees Celsius might be a deterrent; they’d missed out on Anemospilia, so they weren’t about to forgo a trip to Phaistos.

  Pa-i-to, thinks Ingrid, dry-mouthed from her brief valium doze, swigging water in the back seat.

  Ken has brought CDs for the journey, old standards like Blondie and Fleetwood Mac. When ‘Heart of Glass’ comes on he sings along in a creditable falsetto, while Glenys jigs around in her seat.‘Yeah, swing it, Debbie!’ he whoops as the track ends. ‘Now there’s a lass who didn’t need to sing in her underwear. Not like some of the slappers nowadays. With what they’re earning you’d think they could afford a frock, eh?’

  ‘They’re just kids,’ Glenys objects. ‘They don’t know any better. It’s these money-men, isn’t it, telling them what to do.’ She stares straight ahead, her chin tilted belligerently.

  Ken shoots a glance at her and says no more. When he catches her eye in the mirror Ingrid looks away quickly. The Giffords have a daughter at college, she remembers; Ashley, she thinks, is her name. She pictures her own First Year students at the Institute: curvy girls with tumultuous hair, who trot into lectures in hotpants. Perhaps Ashley is the slapper he’s sniping at.

  The road breasts a high bluff, and the sea glitters darkly on the horizon. Ken stops the car on the gravelly shoulder.

  ‘Now there’s a view and a half! You girls want to step out for a smoke?’

  On all sides the land falls away, revealing the pale line of the Aegean to the north, the Libyan sea to the south.‘Two seas!’ says Ingrid, stretching her arms wide at the edge of the bluff.

  ‘It’s grand,’ Glenys agrees. They light up and smoke quietly. From the open door of the car music tumbles out and spills over the juniper-clad precipice.

  A few metres away a granite stone, roughly carved, squats at the roadside. There are names on it, painted in black, and a date. 1943. A bunch of dog-daisies withers on the ground beside it. Ingrid counts ten names on the stone; four are from one family, six from another. ‘Martyrs,’ she explains, when Ken comes over to join her. ‘They massacred whole villages up here.’

  ‘No getting away from history, is there?’ Ken stands with his hands in his pockets; his voice, for once, is dour and humourless. ‘And now they’re crawling all over the beaches, eh?’

  The prejudice jars, but she decides it isn’t worth the argument. After all, she’s taken advantage of the subtler forms herself. In Greece the older generation often assume she’s German. Yermanika? they ask suspiciously, eyeing her hair. Ochi, Skotsesa, she shoots back, knowing this puts her firmly on the side of the angels. Everyone loves the Scots, with their castles and kilts. The Highland Regiments with their piper, marching to the rescue. The war graves near Chania are full of them.

  She stubs her cigarette out on the sole of her boot and stows the butt in the pocket of her shorts. ‘Fire risk,’ she says when Ken looks quizzically at her, although it’s simply a matter of respect.

  The car park on Kastri hill is almost empty. They park under an olive tree and buy tickets at a kiosk beside the cedar-shaded Tourist Pavilion. Spread out across the levelled summit of the hill like a table laid for the sky-gods, the site has a lofty overview of the sea and the rich crop-fields of the Mesara plain. When they come out on to the Central Court, the sun hits them like a blow.

  ‘My word!’ says Glenys, groping in her bag for her digital camera. The court – 55 by 25 metres, the printout says – is south facing, edged on three sides by the low foundations of walls. From the north-west corner a broad flight of steps, partly carved out of the rock, leads down to the theatral area. At the south end the paving has fallen away because of earthquake or erosion; a clump of pines leans out over the abyss, next to a single mimosa tree.

  The first thing that strikes her is the contrast: no tour-groups or guides here, none of the scaffolding or roped walkways which keep visitors at a safe distance from the frescos and artefacts of Knossos. The second is the silence. There’s hardly anyone around – maybe a dozen other visitors scattered around the site, aiming cameras or sitting, hushed, on the tumbled walls, as if succumbing to an invisible spell.

  Remembering her role as tour-guide, she consults the printout. What they’re looking at, she tells the Giffords, is for the most part what remains of the Second Palace, built after the first was devastated by an earthquake. Even so, it predates Knossos, and constitutes the earliest palatial building in Crete.

  Ken whistles. ‘2000 BC! You wouldn’t credit it, would you?’ He smooths a hand across a concave indentation on the top of a low stone pillar. ‘Oil lamps, you think? For their son et lumière?’

  When Glenys aims her camera Ken steps aside, but she beckons him back. ‘No, stay there, love. You too, Ingrid.’

  Slipping his arm around Ingrid’s waist, Ken squares up to the camera. She can feel the damp heat of his skin through her T shirt.

  By common consent they take shelter under the shade of the pine trees.‘Mercy me!’ says Glenys, mopping her face with a kleenex. She sinks on to a bench and flaps the front of her blouse to cool herself.

  In the rubble around the tree carved stones lie higgledy-piggledy. Ingrid crouches down to examine a triangular stone incised with a trident glyph. Nearby are other glyphs – a broken Z, chevrons, crosses. Ingrid checks the printout, but there’s no reference to the carved signs. She takes out her notebook and begins to sketch, as if drawing the things will somehow lay bare their meaning.

>   ‘Crikey!’ says Ken as he leans over her to peer. ‘That your Linear B, is it?’

  ‘It looks more like a cross between Hieroglyphic and Linear A.’ She grins up at him. ‘Then again, it could just be 4000 year old graffiti.’

  ‘They don’t give you much of a clue here, do they. Not like they do at Knossos.’

  Somewhere she’s read that the word ‘clue’ derives from ‘clew’, meaning a ball of thread or yarn. It came to mean ‘that which points the way’ because of the Greek myth in which Theseus used the ball of thread given him by Ariadne to find his way out of the labyrinth.‘They’re a bit light on the labelling side,’ she agrees, although actually she prefers it that way: at least no one’s trying to tell you fairy tales. She hands the printout to Ken. ‘Want to have a look?’

  Ivo Kruja himself would be hard put to weave a narrative from these bare traces. On one account, though, his instincts were correct. Mother Nature takes pride of place here: the transit of the sun and moon across the sky, the cycle of the seasons, of sowing and reaping. The smell of the minth and the hyakinth. On the basis of something she can’t yet define, she feels a strong affinity with the place. No amount of scepticism can diminish the sense of being brushed by microscopic vibrations from the past, as though atoms of ecstasy have been stamped on the very air.

  Among the tangled tree-roots is a stone with a glyph that resembles a pair of spectacles on legs. When she bends to study it the eyepieces stare right back at her, mocking her with their emptiness. She straightens up abruptly, feels the wash of dizziness. She wonders for a moment if Yiannis finds her as incomprehensible as she does herself.

  A few metres away Ken stands splay-legged by Glenys’s bench, turning the site-map this way and that. They’ve been rubbing in sun-lotion, donning sun hats in brilliant colours. ‘Sunken grain-pits,’ Ken recites, pointing. From the mimosa shade she sees them move out into the dazzle of the Great Court, Ken’s orange baseball cap a bright blot against the bleached paleness of the stones.

  When she rejoins them, Ken is standing on a low wall gazing down into what remains of a small oblong room. Glenys is inside, sitting on one of the stone benches that line the walls. ‘ ‘‘Dressing chamber for athletes or performers’’,’ Ken reads. ‘So it’s their locker room, yeah?. You can just see the lads getting their kit on.’ Glenys calls him inside for a photo and he poses, grinning, on the bench, belly thrust out, arms spread along the low wall. He might be in an Essex pub with England on TV: all that’s missing is the pint.

  It’s Ken who leads the way down the stone staircase to the theatral area. At the bottom he turns to squint at the steps. ‘Now that’s what I call skill. See that convex curve? Same as they did on the Parthenon.’

  ‘But a lot older,’ Ingrid points out, pedantic. ‘By about 12 centuries actually.’

  ‘Well it certainly gets my vote.’ He flattens one hand to a vertical and the other to a horizontal and squints judiciously. ‘That’s about 20 centimetres, I reckon’

  Pleased that the craftsmanship has gained his professional seal of approval, she agrees that it certainly is a masterly piece of construction

  There are more glyphs on the paving stones where the bottom steps abut the north wall. She crouches in a hot sliver of shade and sketches busily, pausing to smile up at Glenys, who has wandered over with her camera. Maybe later she can compare these proto-signs with actual Linear A signs: not that she’ll be able to make any sense of them, but at least she might feel more like a scholar.

  A ring-tone jangles out, startling her. Ken fishes his mobile out of his pocket and clamps it to his ear.

  ‘It’s not Ashley, is it?’ Glenys’s hand has flown to her throat; under the pink sun-hat her face is beaded with sweat.

  Ken shakes his head irritably and turns away. He begins to pace, his voice booming out across the bare courtyard. Glenys is hugging her bag to her chest and gazing around distractedly, as if muggers might be lying in wait among the ruins.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ingrid asks.

  Glenys nods, putting a brave face on it. In her eyes there’s a lost, anguished look. ‘Just a bit wobbly, love. Think I’d better go up to the caff and cool off a bit.’

  ‘I’ll join you in a minute, okay?’ Ingrid says, glimpsing for a moment what it must be like to be a parent, to be gripped by fear for your nearest and dearest.

  The acoustic of the court amplifies Ken’s voice to performance pitch. The dissonance grates on her nerves. But in any case her concentration is shot now, she’s only going through the motions.

  ‘I’ll seriously consider that,’ he’s saying, ‘Yeah, definitely, definitely.’ He turns and paces back towards her, blind-eyed, his forehead creased tightly into a frown. ‘Look, mate, I’m a hundred per cent person, okay?’

  She finds Glenys on the terrace of the Pavilion with a frappé in front of her, her bag and sunhat booking the other chairs at the table. ‘Better?’ she asks, claiming a chair and sinking into it with relief. Glenys has washed and powdered her face, and looks somewhat revived.

  ‘Much. That heat, it’s like you can’t breathe!’ A breeze trembles the winged branches of the cedar and ruffles the flowers on the oleander bush above her head. Geraniums grow in pots on the low balustrade that surrounds the terrace, interspersed by the blue-green spikes of lavender.

  ‘Heavenly spot,’ Ingrid observes, and Glenys nods vigorously as she sucks her frappé up through a straw.

  They watch Ken emerge at the top of the steps and make his way towards them, the cellphone still clamped to his ear.

  ‘Who was it, love?’

  ‘Just Manoli. Sounds like the old girl’s digging her heels in.’

  ‘You mean his wife?’

  ‘Sister. Turns out she owns a half share. Wish I’d bloody known that at the start.’ Ken kicks off his sandals and subsides into his chair. ‘Manoli’s trying to sort it with old Asterios. He’s a savvy lad, that one.’

  ‘Beer?’ asks Ingrid, getting up quickly.

  ‘You’re a star!’ He pulls off his baseball cap and drops it on the table. On the crown of his head his reddish hair is plastered flat with sweat.

  The interior of the Pavilion is cooled by whirring fans. She takes two beers from the cold cupboard, pays at the counter, and carries them outside. As she sets Ken’s beer down in front of him she sees that he’s been doodling something on the back of the printout. A house with a pitched roof, schematic, childlike. Over his shoulder she reads the legend, and wishes she hadn’t.

  She sits down beside Glenys and decants her own beer into a plastic glass. ‘Is that what he had up his sleeve, then?’

  Glenys doesn’t seem to register the disapproval. She glances at Ken, grinning indulgently.‘That’s him all over – starts off as a holiday home, now it’s a bloody construction company!’

  Minos Construction. Ingrid wonders whose bright idea it was to call it that. Is it naive of her, to be shocked? After all, most Brits see Crete as a paradise where profits are ripe for the picking. So who is she to sit in judgement?

  ‘In for a penny, in for a pound, love!’ Ken swigs beer straight from the can and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Putting his feet up on the lavender-laden balustrade, he assesses the view through narrowed eyes and chuckles contentedly. ‘Always did see myself with a Karaoke Bar, like! ‘‘The Lancashire Hotspot’’ – Manoli reckons it would go down a bomb.’

  49

  The Interview Room was some 15 metres square and contained a formica-topped table with tobacco stains decorating the edges, a moulded plastic chair for the interviewee and, facing it, two others which Yiannis and Kyriaki currently occupied. The interpreter, a capable Italian woman he knew by sight, sat a little to the side, on Kyriaki’s right. The walls of the room had been painted a dull institutional mustard, although the colour could equally have come from decades of nicotine. High in the wall a small wire-netted window gave out on to some kind of shaft and let in not light but a smell of canteen cooking and drains, and the
periodic sound of a flushing toilet.

  Yiannis shifted in his chair, unsticking the soles of his shoes from lino which clearly hadn’t been washed for weeks. Even if you were as innocent as the driven snow, five minutes in this fetid hutch would convince you of your guilt, there being no other possible reason for suffering such a punishment.

  Margrit sat straight as a sunflower in her yellow dress, her hands loose in her lap, her nostrils flaring minutely as her chest rose and fell in what he supposed to be some kind of yoga breathing aimed at repelling the miasmic exudations of the State. She had refused food but asked for water, which had been duly fetched; meanwhile, elsewhere in the building, her co-communards were being served an oleaginous and distinctly non-organic canteen meal. Yiannis wished them joy of it.

  Kyriaki had spread out the photographs like a deck of cards. She spoke curtly in Greek, which Ridotti translated. ‘We now know for a fact the the victim was Ivo Kruja, an Albanian student. Do you continue to deny that you knew him?’

  Shrugging, Margrit fixed her blue gaze on Kyriaki.

  ‘To us he was simply Pema. We do not ask for passports, Sergeant. We are an intentional community, not the Border Police.’

  Kyriaki scowled as Ridotti translated. ‘Intentional community’ was every bit as baffling when rendered in Greek. Yiannis wanted to tell her that she was wasting her time. Locking horns with Margrit was pointless: in any confrontation Kyriaki could only be the loser.