by Helen Dewitt
I said Clinical!
THERE’LL BE SIX GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL
She said & isn’t this rather morbid—
I pointed out that if she were thrown into a tank of man-eating sharks she would not think it morbid to consider the possibility of exit from the tank.
After all we both when it comes down to it we both think it’s a marvellous film, she said pleasantly.
I was afraid she might give some other example but luckily the train pulled into Moorgate and this was her stop.
SIX GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL
SIX GREEN BOTTLES
[Could be worse. He could be singing 100 bottles of beer on the wall, instead of a song that not only counts down, but starts at 10.]
277 degrees above absolute zero.
I said All right, we’ll take the Circle Line again, and we had another argument about Cunliffe.
I: Look, there’s no point in bringing a dictionary when there is no place to put it. You can’t use it if you are holding it in your lap with the book on top. We tried that before and it didn’t work.
L: Please
I: No
L: Please
I: No
L: Please
I: No
L: Please
I: No
The ideal thing would be to go somewhere with tables, such as the Barbican or South Bank Centre—but it is impossible to go to either without being faced at every turn with bars and cafés and restaurants and ice-cream vendors, all selling expensive appealing food which L wants & we cannot afford.
Please No Please No Please
I thought about another day like the last 17, 10 hours of marvellous wonderful far too young what a genius; I thought about another day like yesterday, more marvellous wonderful far too young what a genius plus nonsense about elite bands not to mention 10 hours explaining every single word/visiting toilet inaccessible to pushchair/ smiling pleasantly through 273 verses (10 + 0 + –262) of the green bottles song. Could I be sure that he would not start up again at –263 or rather would anyone familiar with the child offer even straight odds that he would not? No.
So I said All right, forget the Circle Line. We’ll take Cunliffe and we’ll go to the National Gallery, but I don’t want you to say ONE WORD. And no running through doors that say No Entry or Authorised Personnel Only. We’ve got to be inconspicuous. We’ve got to look as though we’ve come to look at the paintings. We’ve been looking at the paintings and our feet are tired so we’re just sitting down to rest our feet. We’re just sitting down to rest our feet so we can get up and look at more paintings.
Natürlich, said the Phenomenon.
I’ve heard that one before, said I, but I put Cunliffe under the pushchair along with Odyssey 13–24, Fergus: Dog of the Scottish Glens, Tar-Kutu, Marduk, Pete, WOLF!, Kingdom of the Octopus, SQUID!, The House at Pooh Corner, White Fang, Kanji ABC, Kanji from the Start, A Reader of Handwritten Japanese, this notebook and several peanut butter and jam sandwiches. I put L in the pushchair with Les Inséparables and we set off.
We are now sitting in front of Bellini’s Portrait of the Doge. L is reading Odyssey 18, consulting Cunliffe at intervals—infrequent intervals. I have been looking at the Portrait of the Doge—somebody’s got to.
I have brought things to read myself but the room is so warm I keep falling asleep and then jerking awake to stare. In a half-dream I see the monstrous heiskaihekatontapus prowling the ocean bed, pentekaipentekontapods flying before it, Come back & fight like a man, it jeers, I can beat you with one hand tied behind my back (heh heh heh). Strange to think Thatcher could work on three hours sleep, five hours & I am an idiot. Should never never never have told him to read all those things—but too late to retract.
I think the guard looks suspicious.
Pretend to take notes.
No sooner were Liberace and I in his bed without our clothes than I realised how stupid I had been. At this distance I can naturally not remember every little detail, but if there is one musical form that I hate more than any other, it is the medley. One minute the musician, or more likely aged band, is playing an overorchestrated version of The Impossible Dream; all of a sudden, mid-verse, for no reason, there’s a stomach-turning swerve into another key and you’re in the middle of Over the Rainbow, swerve, Climb Every Mountain, swerve, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, swerve, swerve, swerve. Well then, you have only to imagine Liberace, hands, mouth, penis now here, now there, no sooner here than there, no sooner there than here again, starting something only to stop and start something else instead, and you will have a pretty accurate picture of the Drunken Medley.
The Medley came at last to an end and Liberace fell into a deep sleep.
I wanted to clear my head. I wanted strangeness and coldness and precision.
I listened for a little while to Glenn Gould playing pieces from The Well-Tempered Clavier. In recording sessions Gould would often make nine or ten different versions of a piece, each note perfect, each perfectly distinct from the others in character, and each note played bears the mark of all those to which it was preferred. I am not really capable of replaying a fugue in my head so I listened to his queer performance of the C minor prelude, Book 1, which begins with each note staccato, and then two-thirds of the way down the first page the notes suddenly run very smoothly and softly, and then I listened to Prelude No. 22 in B flat minor which I could never play without the pedal. I think that though perhaps it should not be played with the pedal it should at least be played legato, and yet the harsh abruptness with which Gould plays this piece displaced with its coldness, its lack of ease, the wilful expressiveness with which Liberace wearies the heart.
Liberace was still asleep. His head lay on the pillow, face as I had seen it, skull encasing a sleeping brain; how cruel that we must wake each time to answer to the same name, revive the same memories, take up the same habits and stupidities that we shouldered the day before and lay down to sleep. I did not want to watch him wake to go on as he had begun.
I did not want to be there when he woke up but it would be rude to leave without a word. On the other hand almost any note would be impossible to write. I could not say thank you for a lovely evening because you can’t. I could not say hope to see you again because what if he took this as encouragement to see me again? I could not say I had a horrible time and I hope I never see you again because you just can’t. If I tried to write a short note that said something without saying any of these things I would still be there five or six hours later when he woke up.
Then I had an idea.
The thing to do, I thought, was to imply that we had had an interesting conversation which just happened to be interrupted by the fact that I had to leave (for some sort of appointment, for example). Instead of marking the close of the occasion the note should present itself as a further element of a conversation which was still in progress & only suspended. The note should appear to assume that Liberace was interested in things like the Rosetta Stone & should purport to answer a perceived scepticism as to the possibility of putting together such a thing in such a way as to be generally comprehensible, thus presenting itself as part of an ongoing discussion to be resumed at some unspecified later date. All I would have to do was write down a short passage of Greek, as if for this interested sceptic, with translation transliteration vocabulary and grammatical comments—taking pains, of course, to write the latter as if for the type of person who can’t get enough of things like the middle voice, dual number, aorist and tmesis. I am usually not very good at dealing with social dilemmas, but this seemed a stroke of genius. It would take about an hour (comparing favourably with the five-hour unwritable note), and the final tissue of false implication would practically guarantee (while avoiding gratuitous cruelty and yet not departing for one instant from the truth) that Liberace would never want to see me again.
I got up and got dressed and I went into the next room and got a piece of paper from his desk. Then I took my Edding 0.1
pen from my bag, because I was going to try to fit it all on one page, and I sat down and got to work. It was about 3:00 a.m.
You seemed to doubt that a Rosetta Stone would be possible (I began casually). What do you think of this?
So far so good. It was only 3:15, and here already was more help for the decipherer than the Rosetta Stone ever gave Champollion. In fact I could not help thinking how much easier life would be if I proceeded without further ado to a noncommittal Ciao, rather than struggling hungover and sleepless with grammatical detail. And yet the text as it stood looked so thin. Apart from the transliteration, it offered nothing not readily available in the pages of the Loeb Classical Library. It was completely unconvincing as a message in a bottle and besides, it would be only too obvious that it could not have taken more than 15 minutes to write. So it would still be necessary to leave a note unless, of course, I left a more plausible sample of the gift to posterity, and I wrote
Μυρομνω grieving [masculine/feminine accusative dual middle participle] δ’ ρα and then, and so [connective particles] τ them [M/F accusative dual pronoun] γε emphatic particle δν seeing [M. nominative singular aorist participle] λησε took pity [3rd person singular aorist indicative] Kρονíων the son of Kronos (Zeus)
and I still did not have something on the page that could be concluded with an airy Ciao.
It was also useless as a message in a bottle because full of unexplained grammatical terms which should really be explained or taken out. But I could not take them out without writing it all out again, and I could not explain them without going on for pages. But what if I had got carried away going through the passage word by word and not noticed this problem till later?
κινσας moving [masculine nominative singular aorist participle] δí and [connective particle] κρη head προτ … μυθσατο addressed [3rd person singular aorist middle indicative] ν his θυμν soul/spirit/mind/heart [masculine accusative singular]
Ah δειλ wretched [masculine/feminine vocative dual] τí why σφï you [2nd person accusative dual] δμεν did we give [1st person plural aorist indicative] Πηλï Peleus (father of Achilles) νακτι king [masculine dative singular 3rd declension]
θνητ mortal [masc. dative sing. 2nd declension] μες you [2nd person nominative plural] δ’ [connective particle] but, yet στòν you are [2nd person dual indicative] γρω ageless [M/F nominative dual] τ’ … τε both…and θαντω immortal [M/F nom. dual]
‘forsooth’ [exclamatory particle] ïυα so that δυστυοισι wretched [M. dative plural] μετ’ with νδρσιν men [M. dative plural] λγε’ [= algea] pains, sorrows [neuter accusative plural] χητον you should have [2nd person dual subjunctive]
ο not μíν introductory particle γρ for τí anything [neuter nominative singular] πο anywhere στιν is [3rd person singular present indicative] ïζυρτερον more miserable/ wretched [neuter nom. sing, comparative] νδρς than man [M. genitive singular after comparative adjective]
πντωυ of all things [neuter genitive plural] σσα as many things [neuter nominative plural] τε particle showing generalisation γαĩαν earth [fem. accusative singular] πι upon [here postpositive] πνεíει breathe [3rd person singular present indicative dependent on neuter plural noun] τε κα both and ρπει creep [3rd person sing. pres. indicative]
λλ’ but ο not μν emphatic particle μυ by you [2nd p. dative plural] γε emphatic particle κα and ρμασι chariot [neuter dative plural] δαιδαλοισιν glittering, cunningly made [neuter dative plural]
‘’Εκτωρ Hector Πριαμíδης son of Priam ποχσεται will be carried [3rd p. singular future passive indicative] ο not γρ for σω I will allow [1st p. singular future active indicative]
It seemed to be rather longer than I had expected.
It had also taken a bit longer to write than I had expected (two hours). This still compared favourably with a five-hour unwritable note. I wrote a final paragraph pointing out that for a real Rosetta Stone you would probably want to have a third column with Chinese but unfortunately I did not know any of the characters, and then I said that if he had ever come across the poem of Keats on looking into Chapman’s Homer he would probably be interested and surprised to see that this was what Chapman had written:
De dumty dumty dumty dum love saw their heavy chear,
And (pittying them) spake to his minde; Poor wretched beasts (said he)
Why gave we you t’a mortall king? De dumty dumty dum
De dumty dumty dumty dum de dumty dumty dum?
De dumty dumty dumty dum de dumty dumty dum?
Of all the miserable’st things that breathe and creepe on earth,
No one more wretched is then man. And for your deathless birth,
Hector must faile to make you prise de dumty dumty dum
and then I just said you see how easy it would be I hope you like it Must dash—S and after the S I put an illegible dashing scrawl because I thought there was a good chance he had not caught my name the night before.
Then I put this on a table where he would be bound to see it. It had seemed so plausible and suave when I had had the idea in bed, and yet now I wondered whether Liberace would realise that I was politely implying etc. etc. or whether it just looked outré. Too late, and so good-bye.
I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can’t do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness.
Whether Liberace liked the Horses of Achilles I do not know (going by his other remarks it would not surprise me to learn that he felt like Cortez gazing on the Pacific on reading the Chapman). It had made me happy to write down the passage, anyway, & I thought that I could now do this for the whole Iliad and Odyssey with interleaved pages explaining various features of grammar and dialect and formulaic composition. I could print them up for a few thousand pounds and sell them at a market stall and people would be able to read them regardless of whether they had studied French or Latin or some other irrelevant subject at school. Then I could do something similar for other languages which are even harder to study at school than Greek, and though I might have to wait another 30 or 40 years for my body to join the non-sentient things in the world at least in the meantime it would be a less absolutely senseless sentience. OK.
One day Emma invited me into her office for a talk. She explained that she would be leaving the company. What would I do? If her job disappeared, so would mine. I hadn’t been with the firm long enough to be entitled to maternity pay. Was I planning to go back to the States to have the baby?
I did not know what to say.
I didn’t say anything, and Emma made practical suggestions. She said the publisher was launching a project into 20th-century language which involved typing and tagging magazine text for computer; she said she had made inquiries, and thought she could get me smuggled onto this under my work permit. She said there would be no problem about taking the computer to work from the home since the office had been downsized out of existence. She said that she knew of a house whose owner could not afford to fix it and who was afraid it would be occupied by squatters if she did not rent it; she said that the owner would let me have it for £150 a month if I did not ask her to fix it. I did not know what to say. She said she would understand if I wanted to go back to the States to be with my family. I knew what not to say: I did not say no one could understand that, for I would have to be mad to do it. I said: Thank you very much.
I looked up to see how L was getting on. Odyssey 13–24 was lying face down on the bench; L was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t remember when I had seen him last. I thought of going to look for him, but then this would mean leaving the one place he knew to look for me.
I looked at the Odyssey to see how far he had got. My chances of not teaching him Japanese did not look good. I began leafing idly through White Fang.
After a while I heard a voice I knew.
Would you like to hear me count to a thousand in Arabic? said the voice.
I thought you said your mum was in Room 61?
She is.
Then we’ll have to leave it for another time.
When?
Some other time. Is this your little boy?
A security guard was standing in front of me, as was L.
I said: Yes.
L said: I went to the toilet all by myself.
I said: Good for you.
Guard: You’ll never guess where I found him.
I: Where did you find him?
Guard: You’ll never guess in a million years.
I: Where?
Guard: All the way down in the basement in one of the restoring rooms. Seems he must have nipped down the stairs and gone through one of the staff doors.
I: Oh.
Guard: No harm done, but you ought to keep a closer eye on him.
I: Well, there’s no harm done.
Guard: No, but you ought to keep a closer eye on him.
I: Well, I’ll bear that in mind.
Guard: What’s his name?
I wish people wouldn’t ask that kind of question.
When I was pregnant I kept thinking of appealing names such as Hasdrubal and Isambard Kingdom and Thelonius, and Rabindranath, and Darius Xerxes (Darius X.) and Amédée and Fabius Cunctator. Hasdrubal was the brother of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps with elephants in the 3rd century BC to wage war with Rome; Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a 19th-century British engineer of genius; Thelonius Monk was a jazz pianist of genius; Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath; Darius was a Persian king, as was Xerxes; Amédée is the first name of the narrator’s grandfather in A la recherche du temps perdu, and Fabius Cunctator was the Roman general who saved the Roman state from Hannibal by delaying. They all had names one should really not give to a child, and once he was born I had to think fast.