The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  Next morning while Dobie was breakfasting Zeynep brought him in a letter. Zeynep was a valuable acquisition – or Dobie thought so, anyway. Built somewhat on the lines of a roly-poly pudding with small sparkly blackcurrant eyes, she and her husband, a one-armed Cypriot bandit called Ali, ran the little lokanta bar just round the corner where, as Dobie had discovered, he and the other inhabitants of the compound might lunch on extremely tasty lamb chops with mezes. Ali also doubled as the compound porter, his chief task being to ensure that the main gate was (more or less) punctually closed and locked at midnight, while in the mornings Zeynep, as she would have put it, did for Dobie, Hillyer and Cem Arkin, sweeping out the tile floors energetically and providing on occasion certain useful articles, such as safety pins.

  ‘Bloke on a bark jus’ brought this in.’

  ‘A bark?’

  ‘A motor bark.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Dobie said, propping the communication up against the coffee-pot to await his attention, this being for the moment exclusively directed towards his breakfast egg. Zeynep had spent, it seemed, some ten years of her joyous youth in Australia and curious things had happened to her native Turkish vowel sounds down there in Melbun. She always referred to him, for instance, as Derby. Dobie didn’t mind this but found that he had to exercise caution, since her manner of speech was horribly infectious.

  ‘Wotcha think of Sourpuss then, Derby?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I said ’owyer lark living ’ere in Sourpuss? Not much lark England I don’t suppose.’

  ‘Well, no. No, it isn’t. Not much like Strylia either I wooden have thought.’

  On an earlier occasion he had questioned her about the house’s previous occupants. ‘Ow, I mean how did you use to get on with Martin Seymour? Was he narce?’

  ‘Not to ’er ’e wozzen. Led ’er a dog’s laugh.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Always farting together, they were. Gawd, we use to ’ear them farting right round the corner.’

  ‘Good heavens.’

  ‘Aunty social it woz.’

  ‘I can well believe it.’

  ‘An’ then at times ’ed get varlant.’

  ‘Beg pudden?’

  ‘They’d ’ave reely varlant arguments. No, it wozzen narce.’

  Zeynep’s command of the English language, though vivid at times, was certainly totally different to Tolga Arkin’s, whose fluency and phraseology had (if you discounted the lurking trace of a Californian nasality) struck Dobie as being almost perfect. Of course Arkin’s concept of Sourpuss as an eventual repository of a fast-vanishing British culture and code of behaviour seemed far-fetched to the point of being preposterous, but wasn’t it, Dobie thought (dismantling his second egg), in a way a logical extension of one of Seymour’s less violent arguments? If throughout its history Cyprus had been able to do precisely that, accepting and adopting in succession the Greek, the Roman, the Venetian, the Ottoman and goodness knows what other cultures, then why not – eventually – the British? Dobie certainly couldn’t see why not. They drove on the left here, didn’t they?

  But then cultural history was another of the things that Dobie didn’t know very much about. He regarded it indeed as a new-fangled and altogether airy-fairy field of study, even worse than literature in some respects and lacking in all the essential qualities of a true academic discipline, such as mathematics. Yet even Berry Berry, who in his youth had produced some interesting work on the solution of equations in integers and who beyond all question was a competent, if not absolutely first-rate, mathematician – even Berry Berry, unprovoked, had burbled on interminably the other day about burial customs and pagan survivals and so forth. Perhaps that only meant that he was a Cypriot first and a mathematician second. That, if so, was reprehensible but understandable. Seymour, though, was surely different in every way.

  Dobie poured himself out coffee and reached for the letter. It was, he thought, some missive from the university. He was wrong. It wasn’t.

  He unfolded the sheets of typescript and read them and then read through them again while his coffee got cold.

  POLIS MÜDÜRLÜGÜNE GAZI MAGUSA KUZEY KIBRIS RECORDED STATEMENT of— Mr A.L. Seymour

  INVESTIGATING OFFICER— Insp. Ibrahim Kenan

  I am Adrian Leigh Seymour, twenty-eight years old and currently resident at A6 Tuzla Gardens (University of Salamis compound), region of Famagusta.

  Prior to her decease I was the legal husband of Derya Tüner (aged thirty-two) also resident at the above address and being employed as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Salamis.

  I am a writer and occasional journalist and have otherwise no fixed employment in the Republic of North Cyprus.

  I wish to make of my own volition the following statement.

  WHEREAS

  On the evening of Friday 20th July I was at home working in my study until my wife returned at some time shortly after midnight. She said that she had been visiting a friend. She prepared a meal which she ate but I did not as I was not at that time feeling hungry. My refusal to eat, however, provoked a quarrel between us. After the meal she retired to her bedroom and I went back to my study. The time was then approximately 1.15a.m.

  Being somewhat disturbed by the quarrel and finding myself unable to settle down to work I took intravenously a small quantity, approximately one gram, of a cocaine derivative. This is my frequent practice on such occasions. I then worked at my MS for as I estimate three or four hours but I have the impression that I also slept intermittently. I do not have a clear recollection of this period.

  At the end of it I left the study intending to go to bed. On reaching the top of the stairs I observed that the door of my wife’s bedroom was open. I looked in and saw that she was asleep. I then entered the room and placed a pillow over my wife’s face and held it there until she died of asphyxia. She made very little attempt to struggle.

  I did not switch on the bedroom light on entering the room because at that time I had no intention of disturbing her sleep but as the curtains were drawn and there was bright moonlight within the room I was able to observe her and my own movements clearly. I may have moved around the room for some little time before picking up the pillow. I cannot say if when doing so I had the intention of killing her. I assume that I must have. However throughout this time I think that the work upon which I was engaged was uppermost in my mind.

  Afterwards I returned to my study and continued to work for some little time before falling asleep in my armchair. I did not return to the bedroom at any time to check on my wife’s condition or go upstairs again for any other reason. I was satisfied that she was dead. But I felt no satisfaction in the other sense of the word nor did I feel any regret or remorse. I did not feel in any way personally involved. As I recall it, my thoughts, as I have said, were uniquely centred on the work I had in hand. I concede that this is very strange and I cannot now offer any explanation for it.

  I awoke at around 7.30 a.m. the following morning in the knowledge of what had been done and, having made myself coffee in the kitchen and drunk it, I telephoned the Police HQ in Famagusta and informed the duty sergeant that a crime had been committed and of what nature. Inspector Kenan and a police sergeant arrived half an hour later and confirmed the truth of my statement.

  In reply to Inspector Kenan’s questions I stated further that I was fully aware of my wife’s infidelities to me on various occasions, she herself having admitted them to me, but that I attached no great importance to these and certainly did not kill her for any such reason. I am a bad-tempered but not a jealous person. Questioned further as to my motives I could only say that I had felt a state of affairs to exist that could not be allowed to continue. I acted therefore in self-defence. I cannot explain the matter more precisely.

  There followed Seymour’s signature, a neurotic squiggle if Dobie had ever seen one – not so very unlike his own, in fact – and the name and signature of the officer who had prepared the document, the
latter illegible and the former unpronounceable. Dobie sighed heavily and treated himself to a mouthful of lukewarm coffee. It tasted horrible. He’d have to make some more.

  He wasn’t familiar, to put it mildly, with every detail of the Judges’ Rules, which probably didn’t apply here anyway, but now that he had read the transcript (twice) he thought he could see clearly enough what the nice lady had been driving at. It was a most inadequate document. It wasn’t even properly dated. And apart from the issue of legality, the actual wording was … Well, it was a great deal more intelligible than all that Mask of Zeus rubbish, but that was about all you could say for it. Very strange it was, in Seymour’s opinion. In Dobie’s, too.

  Of course you could account for the weirdness of his story by claiming he’d been honked out of his skull when he’d done it. A small quantity of a cocaine derivative, indeed. But then you might equally claim that the confession had been elicited from him under the same conditions, or at least before the effects of his drug intake had fully worn off. Reading it, that seemed quite likely. And even supposing him to have been really flying that night … that might explain the weirdness and most, if not all, of the discrepancies but it didn’t explain … It was hard to explain what it didn’t explain, even to yourself. It was just that you weren’t – to use Seymour’s own expression – satisfied. The nice lady obviously wasn’t. And Dobie wasn’t, either.

  What was he, then?

  Intrigued? Perplexed? Or …?

  He put the two pages of the typescript down on the table and stared for a while across the room. He wasn’t good at finding the right words to express the more subtle of his thoughts and emotions. But Seymour was, or was supposed to be. That was the point.

  THE MASK OF ZEUS

  by Adrian Seymour

  Of such moments was his own calendar composed; written not on perforated pages but across the heavens and in starry signs, moments foreordained, predeterminable, and yet … he chose them. He chose them as at this particular moment he chose to be made a man, to be made a man, in the likeness of Adrian Seymour, that pretentious fart Adrian Seymour … Pretentious? What nonsense. He didn’t choose to pretend to be. He was …

  Strangely enough these references to calendars and stars and to various obscure tamperings with the laws of temporality were the only elements in Seymour’s narrative that Dobie found perfectly comprehensible, recent developments in general relativity theory being after all one of his things and a field to which he’d made some respectfully regarded contributions himself. And in fact it could, he thought, only be through some kind of time-warp or star-drive mechanism that the world of an undergraduate dramatic society and the world, say, of Tolga Arkin could be made to coincide … and he sensed, furthermore, that only through establishing some such coincidence, or maybe point of similarity, might the Tuzla Gardens mystery eventually be resolved. The difficulty was, of course, that there wasn’t a mystery. The whole thing had been resolved from the start. But the nice lady had been absolutely right on one point: in mathematics, it isn’t what you do, it’s how you do it. The proper calculations hadn’t been written in to one side of the examination paper; there’d been shoddy work somewhere. That ought to be put right.

  There again, Dobie didn’t possess a literary mind or a literary imagination, as Hillyer and Seymour – whatever their other points of difference – presumably did. Normally, he found this lack to be in no way regrettable. But he was now aware that he was being brought somehow into uncomfortably intimate contact with a different kind of mind to his own and this was, he realised, both alarming and stimulating, like meeting a Martian. Again, two foreign worlds were being brought into proximity, but how? And how did you bridge the gap? It was all very puzzling.

  But it was clear that he was being – if you liked the word – challenged. Well, the life of a mathematician is a constant response to intellectual challenge, to the problems posed by an ultimately inscrutable universe. His reaction was therefore almost automatic. Or you could even say, predictable.

  He wondered if the nice lady had realised that.

  It’s funny, Dobie thought (but also sad), how many people imagine that mathematics consists of interminably applying fixed formulae to clearly defined problems and so ‘working them out’. Because it’s not like that at all. Half the time you don’t even know what you’re looking for until you’ve found it. A great deal more than half the time you spend looking at a blank sheet of paper and chewing the end of a pencil – the blunt end, hopefully – while you’re trying to see what the bloody problem is. You know it’s there all right but no, you can’t grasp it, you just can’t quite perceive how to formulate it …

  Mathematician’s block …

  Dobie didn’t have a literary imagination but it wasn’t difficult for him to envisage the frame of mind that Seymour’s story, if that was what it was, had at least on the face of it seemed to portray. He was very familiar with that state of mind himself. Frustration. The block. The inability to get anything down on that sodding sheet of paper. The incapacity to formulate the problem. Seymour had written a story – if Dobie was right – about being unable to write a story. A paradox. That was all right, paradoxes were meat and drink to Dobie.

  His special field.

  Anticipation. Excitement. Of such things as these, he knew nothing, precisely because he knew everything …

  I am great Jupiter. And my words are thunder …

  ‘Oh, the idea’s anything but original,’ Hillyer said. ‘It’s been done many times before. But of course you have to relate the block to some other comparable situation in order to express it and … overcome it. Hemingway, Lawrence, Eliot. They’ve all done it. Indeed The Waste Land—’

  ‘He mentioned Hemingway. Seymour did. And Lawrence. Are they … Are they writers he admires particularly?’

  ‘Hemingway, yes. Certainly. Of course the tide of critical opinion has turned against Hemingway, and in my view, rightly so. But to be fair to Seymour, he didn’t pay much attention to critical fads and fashions. Or to anyone else’s opinion whatsoever. Self-centredness is a very valuable quality to a writer. So much so that not a few of them set out to cultivate it.’

  ‘It’s not a valuable quality in a husband, though.’

  ‘No. Or in a wife. And Derya was very much that way, too. A formula for matrimonial disaster, really.’

  But … of course, you have to relate the block to some other comparable situation … such as physical impotence, maybe? Or blindness? An inability to see what’s before your nose?

  I myself, Dobie thought, may be suffering from that right now …

  QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM straight across the board.

  All the letters you need, Dobie. You can formulate any problem and solve it with that little lot. Though 1234567890 may also come in useful. But:

  it all came to the same in the end. Stuck.

  Impotent …

  Of course sex figured in the equation somewhere. That was obvious. You didn’t need either the story or the confession to see that; all you had to do was study that photograph. Derya as Alcmena. What about Zeus? Well, you’d need some pretty obvious symbol of physical potency, wouldn’t you? to carry you through the barrier. Dobie’s recollections of classical mythology were hazy in the extreme but he was naturally aware, like everyone else, that Zeus had achieved considerable and deserved esteem amongst the ancients through his prowess in jumping just about every female in sight. The trouble was that this particular incident … Alcmena, now … She wasn’t the one with the swan? No. That was Leda. Castor and Bollocks. It was coming back to him now. Alcmena was …

  ‘She was the mother of Hercules,’ Hillyer said, a little severely. Dobie, his manner suggested, was not going to be allowed to confuse him on this point. ‘She was married to Amphitryon and Zeus took on the physical appearance of her husband in order to seduce her. With results to which I’ve already made allusion. Well, in fact she had twins, but Hercules did rather well for himself and not very much was
later heard of the other fellow. Surely you’re familiar with at least the outlines of the legend? It has,’ he added hurriedly, ‘nothing to do with Lady Macdougal. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Except that there is this play,’ Dobie said, ‘that I’m sure you know something about. It seems that Derya—’

  ‘Ah, Derya’s famous play, yes, the Dryden version. Well, that’s a travesty, of course. Dryden sent the whole thing up, as we’d say nowadays, for the benefit of a sophisticated but extremely lubriciously minded audience. I gather Seymour had a considerable success with it as a university production. Which doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘There are other versions?’

  ‘Oh, heavens, yes. Molière’s is the most famous, and probably Dryden’s model. But then there’s Kleist, Giraudoux, oh, any number of others. It’s a theme that seems to have a perennial fascination for dramatists, especially.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because it raises the basic problem of what constitutes a human identity. Actors, you see, in playing a part, in a sense they become someone else. Which is what Zeus does. To the point of becoming totally indistinguishable from Amphitryon, the husband he’s deceiving. You can even say that he is Amphitryon. In which case, then, where’s the deception?’

  Dobie found this hard to follow. ‘You mean like Sean Connery is James Bond?’

  Hillyer clicked his tongue, in sadness, however, rather than in irritation. ‘No, not really. Because everyone knows that he isn’t. Though perhaps you might say that the publicity people who used that slogan were trying to make the same point subliminally.’

  Dobie gave it up.

  No, he didn’t. Being of the bulldog breed.

  An actor becomes someone else when he’s on the stage. Yes, he could see that. At least his audience are able to believe that he’s someone else, however briefly. But surely a writer didn’t believe he was someone else when he was creating a character, did he?