Leslie, at five-foot-one-and-one-quarter, has a mind like a steel trap and usually one to six stunning creatures in tow, from — should one put this more delicately? — the less intellectual strata of the societies she goes careening through. How she does it, with that bottom and those teeth, I’d give my own last wisdom tooth to know…which was, incidentally, twinging again last night.
This desert is not the place for a toothache.
But we were talking of the Kapwanis, the snow. I remember Leslie said to me, ‘Kermi — ’ She will call me after that ingratiating green absurdity that hops through those hopeless children’s puppet extravaganzas, while I, out of what in this day and age must be misguided chivalry, do not respond in kind — ‘Kermi, just say that Yavus was the research assistant who brought the Codex to my attention.’
‘Leslie,’ I said, ‘we were all sweating together down in that basement storage room. Yavus was going to use the damned thing to roll one of his super-dooper Turkish knockout bombers, when you snatched it out of his hand!’
‘Oh, Kermi, please…!’
Anyway, I finished writing; and they made preparations to spirit it off down the mountainside, after leaving me a full ounce and a quarter of very fine hash, which she begged me not to consider payment for toning down any of the more risqué elements in the tale of her discoveries that I just might have been tempted to throw in for ‘human interest.’ They left then, the fur around her parka hood blowing in the snow-flurry, Yavus’s hood thrown bravely and idiotically back from his hawk-profiled, darkmaned head (it was cold that evening!), the two of them chattering on about bus schedules in Ha’bini — as if those people had any better grasp of time than we do here at our desert site today.
But that is the article’s genesis.
As to the informational points you raise in your letter, I feel a little foolish, Hoequist, claiming that I had no library or references at hand when I scrawled the piece for our brilliant but impetuous mathematician/cryptographer friend. But that is the case. Also, some of the errors you cite I’m sure are simply a matter of the decipherment of my none too limpid handwriting.
Transpoté indeed!
I know I wrote Telepoté, regardless of what ended up in print!
Others, I suspect (and regret), were just those little slips of a mind cut off for months from all civil converse. Yes, of course Ventris was an architect, not an engineer. Of course Linear B was found outside Crete at Pylos and Mycenae — why else would they call it Mycenaean Greek? I know, poté means ‘never’ in modern Greek, not Homeric (and usually, though not always, takes a negative particle). But that whole afternoon we had been speaking Demotike, in deference to Yavus, whose English, though brave, once it gets beyond ‘Change money!’ grows too surreal for comprehension. Leslie, as I’m sure you know, speaks everything, from Turkish to Aramaic to Ukrainian to conversational Coptic. Though I can read, somewhat haltingly, at it, I have no spoken Turkish to speak of. Where Yavus learned his very passable modern Greek, I don’t know, unless it was among the older merchants of the Grand Bazaar, with whom Greek is as common as Yiddish used to be in the open-air markets of New York’s Lower East Side, and among which, as a child, Yavus once carried tea and salep.
Some of your other points, however, strike me as the potshots of a sniper emboldened by two or three direct hits who would now try to raze the entire town. Over the past twenty-five years the upper edge of the ‘neolithic revolution’ has slid back and forth between 4,000 B.C. and 6,000 B.C. so frequently I’ve lost track. Such boundaries should be ‘muzzy’ enough for anyone. ‘Attic Greek’ is simply the school-boy term designating that period (not a geographical area) in the Greek language from which the best known (though, as we both know, not necessarily the best) Greek literature comes — Xenophon through Euripides. I simply used it to distinguish it from the earlier, dual- and digamma-plagued Homeric dialects and the later, impoverished patois of the New Testament. As far as ‘proto-Latin’ vs. ‘archaic Latin,’ your exegesis is interesting, and I am not unfamiliar with it; still, for most of us it is simply a preference in terms. (You are no doubt familiar with the ‘very, very old’ Latin pun: Eva est mala, which translates both as ‘Eve is evil,’ and ‘Eve eats apples’? Leslie likes apples too. Back in the snowy mountains, she brought a sack of them with her, along with the hash; I must have eaten three or four. And you know, that night, after they left, was the first time I ever had any trouble with this damned tooth!) Block-letter Greek? Well, that’s what we called it back at the Archeological Institute in Athens — to distinguish it from precisely those Byzantine inscriptions you cite. A Greek text found at ancient Ilium VI doesn’t seem too odd; certainly, there could have been interchanges between the Trojans and the Greeks in the centuries before Paris carted off Helen, especially since we have reason to believe that Greek was the trade language throughout Asia Minor for many, many hundreds of years before the poetic construct ‘Homer’ began to recite, regardless of what Anatolian dialect was in fashion at Ilium proper. Also, there have been enough archeology texts, guide books, and the like referring to the edifices at Cnossos, Phaistos, and Mallia as ‘neolithic palaces’ that I need not apologize for the term. As far as the similarity of the inks, which you question: well, Dr Yoshikami (her single eyepiece, her cotton swabs, the Exacto knife with which she took her scrapings…) did extensive chemical tests.
So there.
But to defend myself too heatedly is, I fear, to suggest there may be reason for your attack. There isn’t. And the truth is, we had sampled just a bit of the hash that afternoon over hard bread, apples, and yak butter — before I retired into my chilly tent to write the piece as we’d discussed it.
It was very good hash, too.
The only thought I ever really gave it, once it hurried off into the snow under the flap of Leslie’s red student knapsack, was whether or not she might take offense at my faint chidings in the article of her feminist sympathies. She already considers me the most depraved of racist Orientalists. (Probably right, too. I’ve found that blacks such as Leslie have a sense of these things. Goes along with their natural ability to sing and dance.) She didn’t have time to read it before she and her dark-eyed companion left. What we had discussed, of course, was how she would get the thing typed up, how she would of course get a copy of said typescript back to me for checking, to correct both the idiocies that invariably creep into any such transcription process as well as the inaccuracies I was bound to make under the twin pressures of Leslie’s entreaty and Yavus’s dope. (‘Kermi, I need it now. This evening. I won’t be here after six o’clock tomorrow morning!’) Of course I never saw it again. As I said, your letter was the first I’d heard of it in over two years.