Neveryona (61 page)

Last week, when I got back from my vacation trip across the Canadian Rockies, I found – finally! – Professor Kermit’s reply, sent in care of me. Professor Kermit’s description of the state of your letter on its arrival in the desert (see below) does not even approach the state of his on its arrival here! Besides the indecipherable over-stampings, there was clearly a heel-print on it. At one point the letter had obviously been wetted, Lord knows with what. (Visions of incontinent camels are called up just by the smell!) As well, the whole had been ripped in half and the envelope badly taped together. The sheets inside were still in two pieces. Because of the wetting and the generally deteriorated state of the air-letter paper, I decided it might be best if I transcribed it for you. I just wouldn’t trust it to another trip through the mails. Also, Kermit does not exaggerate about his handwriting. With diligence one can make it out, though the transcription
took me a full three days and about 25 consultations with various friends over this or that squiggle, masking a j, y, or g; over that or the other near-contourless line, ghosting an m, n, or u. (I recall Hyder Rollins’s labor over the hen-scratchings of the ‘Keats Circle’ and gain new respect!) I hope you don’t object. If you could see the state of the original. I’m sure you’d understand.

My best wishes,
(signed:) Samuel R. Delany

[Transcription follows:]

June

My dear Hoequist,

Your letter, dated February, reached me yesterday – and it is June! Though would you believe, not one of us here at the dig has been sure precisely
what
day of June it has been for two weeks now? Sometime when the next provision caravan passes through and I can start my answer to you off on its circuitous way back to New Haven (I just assume you are at Yale, in the shadow of that great, transparent library where writing is at once displayed, displaced, and entombed, like a gleaming metaphor of its own historical position), perhaps we here will be able to orient ourselves again. But since Professor Wellman, hauling that architrave from the cinder basin, smashed up his Seiko LED, we have truly dwelt in a land without time. My own watch has only its sturdy little Donald Duck hands, semaphoring about the day – and no date window.

Really, we could be living in the middle ages, here at the site, rather than in the last quarter of the 20th Century. (It
is
the 20th Century, isn’t it?) Unless you are familiar with the absurdly primitive techniques expediency
makes traditional for the archeology of this region, I doubt you would believe the arrival of your letter: in the haversack of a pack camel, the envelope crumpled, soiled, opened at least three times (as is all the mail that reaches us here – a fraction of that which is sent, I’m sure), and re-sealed and over-stamped with the blurred colophons of Iraqi Government Security (why all our mail must go by way of Iraq, which does not even border on this country, to reach us here, is beyond me – unless it’s because the wealthy Kuba family of that nation, still out of favor, has footed part of the expedition’s costs), in runny blue and screech orange. In this half-excavated oasis, two hundred miles from any place with a pronounceable name, much less a post office, I feel I am sequestered in some parallel world of the sort Leslie used to make me smile over when we had our separate rooms in that shabby student house just outside Ann Arbor. (Field work delayed my doctorate until 1968, when I turned thirty-one, the same year that the then-nineteen-year-old Ms Steiner took her first advanced degree in math.) How many hundreds of years ago
is
that now? Communicating with what I’ve nostalgically taken to thinking of as civilization could not feel more exotic here than if I were sending up smoke signals to be seen from Mars.

Indeed, in terms of communication your letter brings me information that you apparently assume I have been apprised of long since, but which, alas, I simply had not known. For example, yours is the first indication that the ‘article’ I wrote at Leslie’s somewhat hysterical behest, two and a half years ago in a tent on the icy foothills of the Kapwani Mountains, has actually been published.

How bizarre. How unexpected.

There, as far away from anywhere as I am now, I drafted it in long-hand at a single marathon sitting over the back of some foolscap sheets, on the other side of
which was a mimeographed proposal for a UNICEF grant to study water-tables in the suburbs outside Leah-Sohl, that had somehow ended up among the paleontology journals I’d stuffed in the book-carrier on the side of my canvas suitcase. Leslie stood outside the while, puffing and pacing in the snow, waiting a good four hours for me to finish it – that is, when she was not spatting with Yavus, who’d come skulking up the blustery slope behind her, all the way from Ephesus, where she’d apparently picked him up again, a continent or so away. Research assistant indeed! The only pay Yavus ever received back at the museum was for unloading boxes from the rickety army trucks that occasionally carted in crates of artifacts, that summer we were all together in ‘Stamboul. That pay, incidentally, came directly out of
my
meagerly lined pocket! Oh, yes, he can be an entertaining, even an affectionate, companion from time to time, nor is he without a certain street-wise humor that, of an evening’s stroll together down Istiqlal, can be quite charming. But Leslie is a rather heavy young woman – whereas I am a thin, even gaunt, middle-aged man. And Yavus, our handsome black-marketeer, simply made his choices along the lines to be expected of his class and race. But really, I am just assuming you know our – how shall I say? – broad-beamed Hypatia? Is a better term ‘large-bottomed’? Perhaps a generous-breasted, round, brown Venus of Willendorf’? How she gets to the places she does leaves me awestruck! Once she simply ‘dropped in’ to say hello at the bottom of an Afghani cave-complex I was excavating with old Pace and young Dr Kargowsky. The circles in which her work or mine – not to mention the overlap – is likely to attract attention are notoriously small. Though in print we feign an impersonal formality, really – everybody knows everybody! I wouldn’t be surprised if, at one time, I had actually met
you
, Hoequist,
perhaps at some university conference or other (the arrival in blistering heat by commuter plane; Professor Rockeye’s archaic ’52 MG taking us to our limply chenilled guest rooms) held in the Indian Artifact Museum: two adjoining classrooms in the upper corridors of Fopping-Twee Hall, converted into a display area by the over-enthusiastic anthropology elective of 1938, its wall-hangings and glass cases dusted religiously, once a year, during Spring Intersession, ever since. What college would it have been … ? There was the obligatory under-ripe Brie on the cheese board and sherry in plastic champagne glasses – with a stack of paper cups at the table corner, in case. If I recall rightly, Professor Widenose, in very dirty sneakers, kept apologizing for the failed air conditioning. Professor Parsnip yodeled out the conclusion of a story I’d heard her begin some years ago at another conference (with the same name, a different number, and the identical Brie and sherry) about her 1957 exploits among the Grungy-Grungy of the Lower Muddypigpuke. And sitting in the corner, working through her sixth champagne glass of Christian Brothers, bored out of her corn-rowed natural, was Leslie, the tedium relieved by (for her, and just a wit less for me as only about one out of three was launched – dazzlingly! – my way) the smiles of that shy, white-blond, six-foot-seven Adonis of Polish-Ukranian extraction, as at home on the gridiron as he was in the stone-quarries, where, since his fifteenth year, he had taken an annual summer job, but here, in this high and humid eyrie of abstraction, just the most engaging bit out of place. I found all this out by a gambit which began: ‘And what is your connection with our little group? Are you one of Leslie’s star students?’ Oh, no, he was just well, hell, thinking of giving Professor Steiner a hand, if she really
did
decide to go off and dig in that Peruvian pot-hole next September. Above that
bronzed check, with its faint, ephebic scars from a boyish brush with acne, between those gray-gold lashes, his blue eyes were challenged by nothing else in that room save his own (size thirteen and a half! Later I had an opportunity to check) adidas.

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 chivalary, 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.

Trampoté
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’ Lower East Side, and among which, as a child, Yavus once carried tea and şalep.

Some of your other points, however, strike me as the potshots of a sniper emboldened by two or three direct hits who would not 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 Malliá 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.