The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  ‘Cem Arkin’ll tell you all about him if you really want to know. Anything Cem says, you can believe. The rest is mostly fantasy and rumour. A stick to beat the Greeks with, in fact.’

  ‘Did Cem know him?’

  ‘Of course Cem knew him. He was Cem’s uncle. Tolga Arkin’s brother. That’s why we have the Uktu Hall in the university. Hasn’t anyone taken you round there yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Dobie was thinking that Seymour, after all, had also been a stranger to the island. Had he picked up a stone, or stones, that everybody else had missed? Was that the sort of thing his lawyer whatever-his-name-was had in mind? If so, it was all much too … ‘I haven’t completely got my bearings yet, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘Well, you’ll be seeing it this evening, anyway.’

  ‘Will I? Why?’

  ‘We’re all going there for the meeting.’

  ‘What meeting?’

  ‘The senior staff bunfight. Didn’t you see the notice in your pigeonhole?’

  ‘What pigeonhole?’

  Hillyer quite suddenly decided he needed another beer. He called the waiter over. ‘Someone should have told you but obviously no one did. The administration people always get their knickers in a twist when the Rector’s away in Turkey. And it’s just an informal get-together, anyway.’

  ‘Ah.’ Dobie nodded. ‘Casual. I see.’

  ‘Well, not all that casual because Tolga Arkin will be looking in so we’ll all be in our best bibs and tuckers. Full academic dress in fact. And you’ll be the person he’ll be chiefly wanting to meet because he always likes to have a word with the new arrivals. There’ll be drinks, of course, and a spot of nosh and— Ah, yes. Two more lagers, please.’

  Dobie now needed another beer, too. He had a deeply ingrained dislike of these social occasions, probably stemming from the time when as a newly appointed Assistant Lecturer he had inadvertently poured the best part of a sticky gin and tonic into the small gap at that moment inconveniently appearing at the waistband of the then Vice-Chancellor’s fashionably tight-fitting trousers. He had been, he remembered, thinking about something else at the time.

  Which was something that he still found it very easy to do, given the peculiarly fascinating nature of the problems with which he had made it his profession to be concerned. You might, by way of example, readily concede A to be a matrix with characteristic polynomial P(gk) = (-l)n (gk– gk1) (gk - gk2) … (gk - gkn), allowing J to be a Jordan matrix similar to A. Then if the formula P(J) = Z be derived through those successive steps with which every schoolboy is familiar, the Hamilton-Cayley theorem can obviously be applied to obtain an alternative method of calculating the inverse of a non-singular matrix A. That, of course, would be clear as daylight to the meanest intelligence. Surely, then, the students might not unreasonably be requested to prove that the trace of A is self-evidently the sum of the kth powers of the characteristic values of A and, further, to prove various properties of the trace – always bearing in mind, naturally, that trace A is demonstrably the sum of the diagonal elements of A. However …

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I shouldn’t assume the students to be familiar from the outset with the canonical forms for similarity. So I’ll limit myself to the consideration of square matrices only when discussing linear transformations and so remain strictly within the requirements of the syllabus.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Berry Berry said, somewhat absently. ‘Admirable, admirable.’ One would have said that he had other matters on his mind. That was odd.

  ‘And,’ Dobie said, ‘I’ll assume the scalar field to consist of either the real or complex numbers. It shouldn’t be difficult for them to discern which theorems can in fact be extended beyond these restrictions and I can direct investigation in such a way as to make heavy use of similarity.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Similarity … Similarity …’ Berry Berry settled the glass of orange juice he was clutching in a nearby niche, craning his neck the while to peer over Dobie’s right shoulder. ‘I think that’s … Yes, I think I’m being summoned to the presence. Excuse me for a few moments, if you’ll be so good.’

  He sidled away with a curious crab-like motion, leaving Dobie soundlessly mouthing abstractions into the void. Aware of the pointlessness of this procedure, Dobie turned to take cognisance of his present surroundings, of which for the past ten minutes he had been largely oblivious. Ah, yes (as Berry Berry had said). The Uktu Hall. Quite so. During those ten minutes, as he now saw, quite a large number of people had entered the room and seemed to be cluttering up the place as ineffectually as he was himself. Some faces he recognised, but most of them he didn’t. This was to be expected and perfectly normal. He himself wasn’t drinking orange juice but was on his third (or was it his fourth?) Cuba Libre and would soon have reached that satisfying stage wherein all academics look exactly alike. It is, as he well knew, vitally important to distinguish between the relations of equivalence and similarity, but this is easier to do in mathematics than in real life. For Dobie, anyway. ‘Ah, yes,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Equivalence. Similarity. Quite so.’

  He could at least still distinguish his colleagues from the two or three plain-clothes policemen at the far end of the room who had taken up defensive positions rather like his own, their backs to the wall. The security men weren’t wearing gowns and hoods, for a start, and were notably more nattily dressed than most of the academics present, though Dobie himself saw no cause for self-recrimination in that respect, having earlier irreproachably attired himself in his lightweight summer suiting, a subtly iridescent goose-turd green in colour, with trendily heliotrope silk shirt and pale pink knitted wool tie, his gown being safely if a little over-obviously secured at the front with three large safety pins borrowed from the lady who came in to do the cleaning. He had, of course, something of a reputation as a snappy dresser. Apart from the security policemen, the only person in the room who wasn’t wearing hood and gown was the large broad-shouldered gentleman with the Captain Haddock beard who was now approaching him at a rate of knots, towing Professor Berry in his wake like an attendant remora.

  Tolga Arkin’s eyes, Dobie thought (having found himself eventually able to focus upon them), were singular. Well, no, he had two, of course, one on each side of his nose, but they were … remarkable. Unusual. Of a peculiar dull opacity, almost as though their pupils were made of metal, and yet intense, as if looking out at you from the windows of a burnt-out spaceship. The eyes of one who travelled through strange seas of thought alone, or maybe of an Ancient Mariner or a Flying Dutchman, something like that. Dobie briefly had the sensation of being gripped by them as by a pair of powerful hands poised to squeeze the juice from him as from a lemon; strangely enough, it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant feeling.

  ‘… Professor Dobie, I believe. Delighted to welcome you to the island, Professor. You have to be one of our most valuable intellectual acquisitions to date.’

  Dobie had not often been regarded in so flattering a light but a becoming modesty, he felt, might best be affected. ‘It’s a great pleasure to be here, Minister.’

  ‘Your first visit?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I hope,’ Tolga Arkin said, gripping Dobie lightly just above the elbow and drawing him a little to one side, ‘you’ll be able to do a great deal while you’re here to widen our horizons.’ It was a gesture that betokened confidentiality rather than secured it but was also, in its way, more than mildly flattering. ‘What the Rector chiefly needs here are academics of international repute, figures of recognised standing. Such as yourself. They can deny this university political recognition for as long as they wish – and no doubt they will – but they can hardly deny us intellectual and cultural recognition with scholars of your calibre on our staff. And in the long run I regard that as more important. I hope you agree with me.’

  His eyes continued to massage Dobie gently but firmly, forcing Dobie to reject the possibility that these remarks were being addressed to some
one else standing directly behind him. ‘Er, well, mathematics … Yes. I mean yes. I do.’

  ‘That’s splendid. That’s great. You know, your paper on matrix theory in the American Mathematical Monthly some years back … Really most enlightening. I think we must have several mutual friends at MIT. Professor Bridewell, for instance? Ray Bridewell?’

  ‘Yes, I still hear from Ray Bridewell once in a while.’

  ‘We must join forces,’ Tolga Arkin said. ‘We’ll try to persuade Professor Bridewell to join us here. Might he be attracted, do you think? It’s my experience that really first-rate academics are often more easily lured by clear-cut objectives than by inflated salaries. Worthwhile objectives, that is. Maybe your arrival here does something to prove my contention.’ His eyes released Dobie for a few seconds, flickering across the room before flickering back again; the effect was that of a torch being swiftly directed otherwhere, then as swiftly returning. ‘That’s what I find lacking in so many British and American universities these days. Any sense of an objective, a true cultural objective. I don’t even see how you can develop such a sense in societies allegedly dedicated to the multicultural educational philosophy. You know, here in Cyprus we’re very proud of our British heritage, our old-style British heritage. Since I came back here I’ve been constantly reminded of Wordsworth’s great sonnet: “We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake …”

  ‘Um, ah,’ Dobie said, mentally adopting the hedgehog-like posture with which he normally greeted citations of literary classics. He’d really had enough of that sort of thing from Hillyer that morning. ‘Yes indeed.’

  But Tolga Arkin hadn’t finished yet. ‘“The faith and morals hold which Milton held …” Well, Shakespeare’s English gets pretty short shrift in London and Los Angeles these days, wouldn’t you say? And as for faith and morals, bearing in mind that Milton was a Puritan … It’s surprising, perhaps, that Wordsworth made no mention of Newton, another Cambridge man after all, though of course he did so elsewhere …’

  Dobie brightened a little. He had certainly heard the name of Newton mentioned on several occasions; some kind of a bloody physicist or other with pretensions in the field of elementary mathematics, pre-Einsteinian of course and so virtually neolithic. But what had this Milton got to do with anything? Some vague connection with antiseptic medicine flickered for a moment at the back of his mind, only to be summarily dismissed. ‘I see,’ he said, untruthfully, ‘what you’re getting at. I think.’

  ‘What I’m getting at,’ Tolga Arkin said, allowing those deep-set eyes to twinkle jovially, ‘is that whatever antics they may be getting up to in other places, British culture is alive and well and living right here in Cyprus, just as it is in India and Pakistan and quite a few parts of the world where the feminists and anti-elitists and deconstructionists haven’t screwed things up yet. We’re taking up the torch, so to speak, that you and the Americans have dropped. Not the power, of course, that you still possess – power in the political sense. We don’t want that. No use to us. But the culture. The sense of tradition. The old-fashioned patriotism, if you like. The belief, the faith, the morals, all those things. Whatever it is those goatbangers on the other side imagine they can get from Greece. But of course they’re chasing mirages – pan-Hellenism, Byzantinism, all those figments of the past. And now they’re beginning to realise it themselves. The torch they’ve been reaching for, it’s been out for centuries. Nowadays you read the language of Aeschylus and Demosthenes on the corn flake packets. Without Makarios, they’re like the Iranians without Khomeini. Headless chickens. No, it’s Western culture that we want to model ourselves on. A scientific culture where humanistic values are still respected. Both here and in Turkey. But we’ve got the advantage of having had the British here for eighty years and we’ve learned a great deal already. A lot, but not enough. We’ve some catching up to do. That’s where you come in, Professor, and my good friend Berry here, and Ray Bridewell, too … If you want him, we’ll get him. I promise you. I have an objective, too, you see. We all have.’

  The lighthouse beam moved at last away from Dobie, focusing itself with an equally blank intensity upon Berry Berry.

  ‘I don’t say we never stumble. We do. We have our setbacks. But we recover from them. Right, Berry?’

  ‘We certainly do our best, Minister.’

  ‘I’m thinking, of course, of that unfortunate business with Derya Tüner. Even though we’ve secured so very adequate a replacement … Well, when all’s said and done; it takes many years to develop a fine human intelligence and only a matter of seconds to dispose of one. That’s the real tragedy of existence, isn’t it? But even though we must be moved by it when it happens, we have to recognise it as inevitable. Part and parcel of the human lot. And I think we do, don’t we? Everybody here, I mean?’

  ‘Some more than others, of course.’

  ‘That’s to be expected,’ Tolga Arkin said. Dobie had the impression none the less that this was not quite the answer he had expected; Berry’s tone had certainly seemed a little morose.

  A moment later Dobie found his hand being gripped again by Arkin’s in a warm, dry, somehow conspiratorial clasp; the great man then moved away to rejoin various other attendant lords, grouped a little stiffly in their black gowns over by the far wall. The visitation, it appeared, was over. ‘Phew,’ Berry Berry said, confirming this supposition.

  Some comment, Dobie felt, was required, but he didn’t quite know what to say. ‘Does he, er … always go on like that?’

  ‘He rather got the bit between his teeth today.’

  ‘He certainly makes an impression.’

  ‘Yes, he does.’ Berry had retrieved his orange juice and was golloping it greedily. ‘Though somehow one always feels a little more comfortable when he’s moved on somewhere else. I expect that’s how people felt about Napoleon.’

  ‘For very different reasons, surely.’

  ‘I don’t think reason comes into it very much. No, it’s instinct, if anything.’

  Dobie peered contemplatively past the rim of his own half-empty glass. Rather surprisingly, Tolga Arkin had left him with an after-impression of a profound and disturbing inner melancholy, a quality that his words and bearing had surely done nothing to reveal. Maybe that was what Seymour had meant by … ‘He doesn’t seem,’ Dobie said, ‘to be really at ease with himself. Perhaps that’s it.’

  Berry glanced sideways at him, almost in surprise. Dobie was quite familiar with that kind of a glance; Kate sometimes flashed her eyes towards him in just that way when she thought he’d said something percipient. Of course, that didn’t happen very often. ‘That’s probably true. Tolga never relaxes. He pushes himself hard. He always has.’

  ‘That’s how you get to win a Nobel Prize.’

  ‘I’m sure. But in fact I’ve never met any other. Have you?’

  ‘Well, yes. There were seven Nobels at Harvard when I was a postgraduate. In fact I was at MIT but I used to sit in on Marcus Dowling’s lectures.’

  ‘Brilliant, no doubt.’

  ‘I found them almost entirely unintelligible so they must have been. But he had this remarkably … challenging personality.’

  ‘Like Arkin’s?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  Berry was now staring rather lugubriously at the oil portrait that hung on the wall almost directly behind them. Dobie had noticed it earlier; it was placed in so dominating a position that he could hardly have avoided doing so. But now that he had met the original, he felt himself to be in a better position to offer comment. ‘He’d have been a good deal younger when that was painted, I suppose.’ And of course the neat black beard made a difference. ‘I can see that it’s a pretty good likeness but it doesn’t get that oddly perturbing quality … whatever it is.’

  ‘But that isn’t Tolga, you see.’

  ‘Not …?’

  ‘No. That’s his brother. Uktu. This is the Uktu Memorial Hall. Uktu was killed fighting the Greeks, back in ’7
4.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ Hence the peculiar paramilitary uniform, the beret tilted at an angle across the broad forehead, shading the deep-set eyes. ‘Hillyer was telling me about it this morning but somehow I … Stupid of me.’

  ‘Well, they were twin brothers. It was a natural mistake.’

  There was, as Dobie had now seen, a small brass plaque underneath the portrait. Saying simply, UKTU 1943-1974.

  ‘He led the resistance movement,’ Berry said, ‘when the Greeks tried to take over. It wasn’t his real name, of course – he had a nom de guerre like Grivas and all those thugs with EOKA. Uktu means victory in Turkish. Actually it is a man’s name in Turkish, a proper name, I mean. But not his name. His real name was Necdet. Not that it matters.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter but it’s a little confusing.’ Not more so, though, than everything else.

  ‘Well, you know what happens to wartime heroes. They get forgotten. So we’ve got this Memorial Hall here, though really I suppose it’s more to please Tolga than … And you’re right, it’s not a very good painting. It was done from a photograph, of course. Much later. After he was dead.’

  Dobie turned away. His concern wasn’t after all with dead heroes or murdered girls or with eccentric British junkies or even with Nobel prizewinners-cum-politicians; his concern wasn’t either with the dead or with the living. He didn’t know much about Milton and Wordsworth and he didn’t remember much about the troubles of ’74. He knew something about mathematics, though. Eternal verities, chalked on a blackboard. OK, he was a specialist. A man of limited interests.

  But he liked it that way.

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