by Alison Fell
Outside the shadows were long and low, the setting sun a dazzle in the driving mirror. By the time he reached Panomeli the sun had gone and the first bats were flitting about the rooftops. He stopped for a moment at the corner of main street, considered picking up some cigarettes at the Minimarket. There was a light on the balcony that had been Ingrid’s, but was no longer. A tall, elbowy man was leaning on the railing while a woman in a sarong poured drinks. These new arrivals need never know about the tragedy that had happened in the village; seeing only the unsullied face of Panomeli, they’d be able to enjoy the peaceful idyll they’d paid for. From this distance he couldn’t see what age or nationality they were, but the mere sight of them was like a slap in the face.
Only a masochist would hang about here, yearning after shadows, gloating over what was gone. Abandoning the idea of cigarettes, he turned right up the track that led to the Zois smallholding. He parked where the track ended in a dusty turning-circle, and took the torch from the glove compartment. Up ahead every light in the house was burning, but as he climbed up the path he heard none of the usual night sounds, no cluckings or brayings, no clattering of crockery, nor threads of music from the radio. The silence had a dense quality that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
When he rounded the end of the terrace he saw a squat, gnome-like figure silhouetted by the light from the open door. Old Androula sat on a small straw-seated stool, knees akimbo.
‘Kyria Zois?’ he called out ‘Are you all right?’
Androula turned her head towards him but did not speak. She wore an old-lady print house dress and, with it, what appeared to be a pair of large leather riding-boots. ‘It’s Sergeant Stephanoudakis,’ he said, approaching cautiously.
‘I know you,’ she said accusingly. ‘Nikos’s boy.’
He switched off his torch, so as not to dazzle her, and shielded his eyes from the light blazing from the door. It took him a moment to make out the object cradled in the lap of her dress. It looked like a cleaver, of the sort used for chopping up soup bones.
Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he got hold of the knife and carefully lifted it out of her lap. She glanced dully at it, but made no move to resist. There was blood on the blade, dry and crusted. Crouching beside her, he said gently, ‘Can you tell me what happened, Kyria?’
Androula made a clicking sound with her teeth, as if to say it was beneath her dignity to answer.
‘Is your brother at home?’
‘How should I know?’ Even in the shadow he could have sworn the expression on her face was one of satisfaction.
A low whistle came from the tin-roofed woodshed attached to the side of the house. He switched on his torch and went over to try the door. Although the padlock was open, the door refused to budge. There was a tiny unglazed window in the wall.When he shone the torch through the beam fell on a figure squatting on a pile of logs.
‘Open the door, Asterios!’
‘No way! And you can stop shining that bloody thing in my eyes!’
Switching off the torch, Yiannis spoke into the cobwebbed gloom. ‘Look, why don’t you come out, and we can discuss things calmly.’
‘I can’t, can I.’ Asterios’ voice was sulky. ‘She’ll kill me.’
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ Yiannis snorted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Take a look at the chicken run if you don’t believe me.’
A narrow path, overhung by foliage, led along the side of the house. Yiannis pushed his way through briars and vine tendrils and emerged at the back of the building, where the torch illuminated a kitchen garden with rows of neatly staked tomato and aubergine plants. Beyond it a cleared patch of ground was enclosed by a wire-netting fence. Inside all seemed quiet, the plywood coop exuding the silence of deep sleep.
The acrid smell of droppings made his eyes water. He saw that the gate hung open on its hinge. He stepped gingerly inside the pen, momentarily startled by what he took to be a plastic toy perched on top of the gatepost. His skin prickling with the sensation of being watched, he made himself go back and shine the beam on the post.
Had it been possible for a bird’s features to show expression, Yiannis would have said it was one of deep insult. Supported by the ruff of neck-feathers, the cockerel’s head sat atop the post, its eyes imperious, its scarlet crop proud as the plume on a hoplite’s helmet.
A moth dive-bombed the torch beam, and he jumped back, stifling a gasp. If it was a joke it was a bad one. With a premonituon of what he would find, he re-entered the gate and began to patrol the inside of the fence, sweeping the beam ahead of him. As he’d feared, the cockerel wasn’t the only sacrifice. Mounted along the ramparts like the victims of some medieval siege, the chickens’ heads kept their eerie watch from every fencepost.
Stumbling on something, he stabbed the torch beam down into the darkness, where drifts of downy feathers foamed around his feet. What had appeared in the glancing torchlight to be a midden heap now revealed itself as a pile of headless corpses. He stepped back smartly, shaking his head in disbelief. For a moment he stood in the killing fields, asking himself what furies had possessed the old girl, had fuelled her with the energy required to carry out an organised massacre.
Round at the front of the house Androula was still ensconced, rocking slightly on her stool. Picking up her walking stick, he helped her inside and sat her down at the kitchen table. She looked down at her hands, shook her head at the crusted blood, and turned them over to examine the palms.
Yiannis put the kettle on and searched the cupboards for tea, chamomile if possible. He filled a cup, put it on the table, and sat down opposite her.
‘Did you threaten your brother, Kyria?’
Androula gave him a look of pure derision. And of course it was derisory. Asterios might be getting on a bit but he was fit and sinewy, with the cunning eyes of a jackal. The role of cowering victim simply didn’t suit him.
Feathers adhered to the blood spatters on Androula’s once-handsome boots. Yiannis began to feel profoundly sorry for her. As she sipped her tea the colour returned to her face, and bit by bit he elicited a narrative that was interspersed by bitter outbursts.
‘Who’s looked after him for fifty years?’ she cried. ‘And he thinks he can just put me out on the street?’
He filled the washing-up bowl with water and found a towel. There was a sliver of carbolic in a plastic soap-dish. ‘Why don’t you clean yourself up, Kyria, while I have a word with him. Is there anyone you could stay with tonight?’
‘Sofia,’ she said petulantly, gesturing towards the telephone in the hall. ‘I want to see Sofia!’
Yiannis went round to the woodshed and banged on the door until Asterios slid back the bolt. He felt for the light switch and flicked it. Asterios blinked and scowled in the glare of the naked bulb; moss and lichen clung to his trousers and his singlet was smeared with cobwebs, but there wasn’t a bruise on him. He hardly looked like the victim of a serious assault.
‘Your sister tells me you were planning to sell the house.’
‘Don’t listen to the mad old witch! It was the meadow, not the whole bloody house! Anyway, what does it matter now? Manoli’s in jail, isn’t he? It’s all fallen through.’ Although his jaw jutted pugnaciously, a whine had entered his voice. ‘So she’s got her own way, hasn’t she? I was only thinking of the future, and see what thanks I get for it!’
Yiannis looked at him sternly. ‘I’m taking your sister down to her niece’s house. I suggest you stay up here and cool your heels.’
Asterios’ mouth fell open. ‘Up here?’
‘Unless of course you’d feel safer in a police cell? I can always take you down to Katomeli.’
‘What the fuck have I done? She’s the one who ought to be locked up!’ He spat on the floor and glared at Yiannis, hunched as a gnome, hostile and venal.
Choosing to ignore the provocation, Yiannis said coldly, ‘And in the morning you can start thinking about how to clean up the mess.’
&n
bsp; ‘Me? It’s all her doing, not mine.’
‘Don’t tell me, tell the Magistrate,’ Yiannis snapped, ‘if that’s the way you want it!’
Asterios shrank visibly: the threat of the courts had hit home. The old sod knew as well as he did that there were laws which regulated the disposal of property, but none that stopped you slaughtering your own chickens.
‘It’s a health hazard out there. See to it!’
Yiannis turned to go, railing inwardly against the moral depletion of the human race. Briefly he saw the world through Wolfgang’s spectacles, as a place bled of all goodness and terminally infected by fear, greed, and hypocrisy. Let Asterios stew in his own juice for a while, he thought, contemplate the rights and wrongs of the matter. In the doorway he added with sarcastic emphasis, ‘I presume you won’t be pressing charges.’
60
Throughout the spring of 1949 Alice Kober ploughed on, sending out flyers to announce the inauguration of the Center for Minoan Linguistic Research and visiting Philadelphia to confer with Rodney Young, who had replaced John Franklin Daniel as Curator of the Museum’s Mediterranean section.
College continued to weigh on her, as evidenced by her complaints to Myres about ‘silly chores’ like marking. ‘My, I am sorry for myself!’ the letter concludes, ‘Will stop weeping on your shoulder.’
By May she was clearly struggling, and wrote to Myres, ‘This year has been a nightmare. More and more work at school, and no prospect of a let-up until the middle of June,’ finally confessing, ‘I am so worn out that for the first time in my life I am worrying about my health.’
With the end of the semester in sight, Kober resumed her technical correspondence with Johannes Sundwall. Perhaps the prospect of a respite from college brought some relief, for she writes of her hopes to visit him in Finland ‘when I go to Crete, if I ever do. I am hoping that the Heraklion Museum will be ready by the summer of 1950, but I have been waiting so long that it seems more like a dream than something that will actually happen.’
Kober still hoped, with Myres’ help, to obtain casts and photographs of the Heraklion inscriptions for the Minoan Research Centre, although it is not clear when or if these negotiations began. Her frustration with Evans’ photographs of the Knossos inscriptions continued, and she suspected duplication in his drawings.
‘I am coming to the conclusion that he often drew fragments, and later joined them to other fragments, so that I am suspicious of many of the smaller fragments which are identical with parts of other inscriptions, and am also beginning to suspect that even fragments which do not look identical in the drawing may be only different drawings of the same inscription. This sort of thing is dangerous, because one can so easily base theories on what seems to be cogent evidence, only to find that the evidence is wrong. As I now suspect, at least 100 of the fragments will have to be eliminated. Then too, as I continue my working, I am beginning to suspect that a larger number of the drawings than I first supposed are not Evans’ at all, but Myres’ – or those of somebody else. If my suspicions are true, the publication of SM11 before the originals are checked may do a great deal of harm.’
In mid June Kober wrote to Myres that she hoped to take a short break before plunging into Minoan again, as her health had not yet improved, adding wistfully, ‘I want England, an ocean voyage … but this summer I shall stay home and rest.’
Rest, however, did not improve her condition, nor, apparently, did the ‘rigorously self-imposed system of dieting’ later mentioned in an obituary by Kober’s ex-Hunter College Professor E. Adelaide Hahn. By the end of August the news was worse. Kober reported to Myres that the doctor had ordered her to hospital on July 27th where, after three weeks observation, she had undergone an operation, and had only just returned home. She also sent a handwritten note to Sundwall, explaining why she had not written for so long, and might not be able to write for a while, confiding, with typical understatement, ‘I have not been feeling well for some time.’ This was the first Sundwall had heard of Kober’s failing health, and one can imagine his shock at receiving the news that his indefatigable correspondent had been operated on, and was still ‘too weak to sit at a typewriter.’
While Alice Kober fought to regain her health, in London Michael Ventris, who had recently qualified in Town Planning, joined the Ministry of Education as part of a group of architects allocated to the design of new schools.
He had not given up on the Minoan scripts, however, and spent his lunch breaks looking for similarities between Linear B and Linear A signs, filling his architect’s sketchbooks with lists of L.B signs and their possible Etruscan parallels. Later that autumn, conscious of the approach of 1950 – the 50 year anniversary of Evans’ discovery of the scripts – Ventris circulated a questionnaire to scholars all over Europe and the USA, aiming to collate their responses into a ‘progress report’ – later to become known as The Mid-Century Report – on the current position with the Minoan scripts.
The questionnaire contained 21 questions, most of which invited the kind of naive speculation Kober had firmly resisted in her own practice.
Question 1 alone must have exasperated her beyond measure.
‘What kind of language is represented in the Linear B inscriptions and to what other known languages is it related?
Is the relationship close enough to be a positive help in decipherment?
Is the language European? If so – what is its position within the present classification of IE languages?’
In the event, Kober replied flatly, ‘I have no intention of answering the questionnaire. In my opinion it represents a step in the wrong direction and is a complete waste of time.’
Emmett L. Bennett Jnr., whose work method, like Kober’s, focussed on internal structural patterns, was less curt but no more encouraging.
‘I find that there are very few questions I can answer. I have so far assigned no values at all to the signs of Linear B, or A, and therefore cannot speak of the language, or answer the questions that presuppose that something of the language has been detected.’
Bennett goes on to reiterate Kober’s principles of investigating the frequency and combination of signs and the principles of their formation and function – a position echoed in Johannes Sundwall’s response.
‘The most important task for the present seems to me to be that of using Miss Kober’s classification lists to draw up surveys of the Knossos inventory records and of their contents.’ Like Kober, Sundwall was all too aware of the inadequacy of the material available for research and goes on to stress that ‘It is not sufficient for Myres to publish Evans’ drawings of the texts: they must be accompanied by photographic reproductions which make it possible to check the accuracy of the transcriptions. Otherwise the whole work remains, to a greater or lesser extent, unreliable.’
Sundwall adds that he has not heard from Miss Kober for some time, and is afraid that she may not yet have recovered from her operation.
‘One has come to place a reliance on her painstaking work with the texts, and she is perhaps more than anyone familiar with them and with the formulae peculiar to the lists.’
Undeterred, Ventris collated the responses (translating most of them himself) and circulated the resulting report – albeit glossing Kober’s refusal to contribute by referring readers to her resounding article in AJA 1948, The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory. Although in fact the responses to the survey show little consensus, the tone of Ventris’ 20 page conclusion is stubbornly upbeat, and shows his ability to cling to improbable hypotheses, restating his belief that Linear B and A were related to the other Pelasgian dialiects of the Bronze Age mainland and islands – a non-Indo-European Aegean group of languages of which Etruscan and Lemnian were the only survivals. He signed off by offering his best wishes to all scholars, and his hopes that a satisfactory solution would soon be found, adding that he was forced by pressure of other work ‘to make this my last small contribution to the problem.’ With that, Ventris declared his intention
to return full-time to architecture.
Through the autumn and winter Kober doggedly continued to plough her own furrow. If she had scaled down her college work to some extent, she continued resolutely with her research. There were proofs to correct for Scripta Minoa II, and since Myres was keen to prepare Evans’ Linear A finds for publication – a project he and Kober already referred to as Scripta Minoa III – she also had to deal with the batches of Linear A texts which arrived through the post.
Her correspondence with Myres over this period shows mounting irritation about his inaccuracies, and the complaints she had voiced earlier to Sundwall now burst out at Myres himself.
‘I mailed the B proofs of pages 17-32 to you at the beginning of the week. It took me a week to go through them, and I am still far from satisfied. You still list as separate signs with separate numeration, signs that probably do not exist. At the same time, in too many cases to make for accuracy, you list different signs together, as though they were simple variants of one another.’
By February, Kober is scathing. ‘As you see, the number of errors – both of omission and commission – is enormous.’ In what is more or less a footnote she explained that she had been forced to take sick leave until September, adding, ‘My doctors are not encouraging about an early recovery.’
It is perhaps a mercy that the doctors told neither Kober nor, apparently, her family, that her illness was terminal. By now unable to leave the house, she penned a note to Sundwall explaining that although she found writing very hard, she would do her best to ‘answer anything to do with Minoan as soon as possible, but please excuse me if I am slow.’
In April, debilitated by pain, her frustration with Myres boiled over.