The Ballet of Dr Caligari Read online

  It was another cloudless, crystalline Greek day, as I set out, Leichenfeld’s guidebook in hand, to explore at leisure the Sanctuary of the Great Gods. I found a rather listless Greek official lounging by the little museum and bought a ticket to the site: ten drachmas, and Eleusis had only been five.

  Wandering over the site, I could occasionally see where there had been excavations, but for the most part the place was green and overgrown. It was May and the vegetation had not yet turned yellow in the withering heat of a Greek summer. The place was larger and more complex than I had expected. I saw the foundations of innumerable buildings: colonnades, temples, treasuries most of them built in honour of the Great Gods by some Hellenistic despot or other. The Sanctuary had had powerful friends.

  One of the last buildings I came to was a large round structure which, according to my guide book, was the Tholos of Olympias. Though the walls had not remained standing to a great height it was somehow impressive, unusually large for a circular classical building. Beside it a series of steps led down into a space surrounded on all sides by finely-cut dressed stone: ‘possibly a ritual bathing area,’ said the guide. On these steps sat the man I had seen at the bar in Chora and in the dining room of the hotel. He had a large drawing board on his knees and a neat array of sharpened pencils, rubbers, pens and ink bottles by his side on the step. He was drawing a long rectangular slab of masonry on which a number of human figures had been carved in low relief. They were women in flowing robes, either processing or dancing in one direction. The leading figure carried what looked like a small curved knife.

  The draughtsman looked up at me, shading his eyes against the sun. His normally pink complexion flushed even pinker.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to disturb you.’

  ‘No, no no! Not at all!’ The voice was high, cultivated and a little pedantic with its clipped enunciations. ‘I thought you were English when I saw you arriving at Chora. The way you negotiated your way through those dreadful Greek schoolchildren— “blood will tell,” I thought!’ He gave a short nervous laugh.

  There was a pause and I wondered if he was going to apologise for not having offered me a lift up to the hotel the previous day. He must have heard me asking how to get there.

  ‘Are you and your wife involved with the excavations then?’ I asked.

  ‘What? My wife? Oh, I see! Oh, dear me, no! Oh, good lord, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!’ Again, the nervous laugh; but this time it was longer, and even more nervous. ‘No, I am a confirmed bachelor. For my sins! Ha ha! No, the lady you saw was . . . is . . . Madame Leichenfeld. The widow of . . . Er . . .’

  ‘Dr Dietrich Leichenfeld who wrote this?’ I said, holding up the guide book.

  ‘Exactly so! Yes. You’ll see some of my drawings in there. Let me show you.’ I handed him the book, he searched through it, then gave it back to me open at a half page illustration. He nodded several times, obviously proud of his achievement. It was a reconstruction of the large sacred enclosure known as the Temenos of Seleucus, complete with sculptures and a solitary woman in classical dress walking in the shadow of its long colonnade. She too carried a knife, The drawing was meticulous, elegant, a little soulless. In the bottom left hand corner he had left his signature in tiny capital letters: S.P. WHITTLE.

  ‘Mr Whittle?’ I said.

  ‘Yes! That’s me. I also teach Classics at Sedburgh. This is more . . . what you might call . . . a holiday task. Interesting enough. Rewarding in its way, but it has its frustrations. It’s extremely irritating having noisy Greeks and their even noisier children scrambling all over the place and peering at my drawings. Then one of their brats goes missing and they come back and start jabbering at me as if I’m to blame. You’d think it’s a quiet life being an archaeological draughtsman, wouldn’t you? Believe me, it’s not. Take up a nice peaceful profession, like road mending with a pneumatic drill. At least nobody will want to ask you dam’ fool questions in a foreign tongue.’

  Having unburdened himself of this he sighed and asked me a few questions about who I was and what I was doing here. There was another pause after he had taken in all he wanted to hear. I asked him whether ‘Madame’ Leichenfeld was in charge of the excavations.

  ‘‘Oh, goodness yes! You see Leichenfeld—he died just over a year ago—was a rich industrialist. I expect you’ve heard of Leichenfeld Pharmaceuticals? He always had this passion for archaeology. About ten years ago he left his sons by his first marriage to look after the business and came out to finance the diggings here. He became very involved. He met his second wife in Thessaloniki actually, but Madame—her birth name is Aspassia Aidonides—actually comes from Thrakonisos.’

  ‘Did Leichenfeld die out here?’ Whittle looked away.

  ‘I believe so. I wasn’t around at the time. Oh, no! I was at Sedburgh. For my sins! Yes. He was a good archaeologist, I think. Full of enthusiasm. . . . Full of ideas . . .’ A pause followed during which Whittle seemed to be debating with himself whether to confide in me. He looked at me once more and spoke, this time in a subdued tone, as if afraid of being overheard.

  ‘He became obsessed with the existence of what he called the koile aguia.’

  Whittle was searching my face for signs of curiosity and I obliged him.

  ‘A couple of years ago, six months before he died, we uncovered a midden which contained a large number of potsherds— black figure calyxes and amphorae mostly—dating from around 500 BC. The midden was situated not far from the great Temenos of Seleucus and was obviously a dump where they had thrown all the vessels containing offerings that were no longer required or had got broken. There were one or two interesting inscriptions incised on them. The most complete of these ran something like this: “Hipponikos made this offering, having returned from the koile aguia.” And again, on another: “the Great God (or Goddess)”—then something, indecipherable—“may he (or she) bring me back safely from the koile aguia”. And there were other more fragmentary inscriptions on several of which parts of the words koile and aguia could be made out.’

  I had been searching the very inadequate Ancient Greek Dictionary in my head, and had come up with a rough translation. ‘Koile Aguia. . . . Empty . . . Street?’

  Whittle made a pedantic face: I knew I had not got it right. ‘Hmm, yes. That is a perfectly adequate literal translation, of course, but it can also mean . . . Well, we puzzled over it for some time until Dr Leichenfeld—I think it was—suddenly remembered Pindar . . . Ah, yes! You haven’t gone up to Oxford yet, have you? You won’t have read any of the Odes of Pindar. Tricky stuff. Look at Olympian Nine, lines 33 and following; translates roughly as: “Death keeps not the rod unshaken wherewith he brings down men to the hollow city of the dead.” Koile aguia in Pindar’s highly poeticised language translates as “hollow city”, you see. Of course, this was tremendously exciting, because Dr Leichenfeld believed —and I think I follow him here—that those potsherd inscriptions were actually referring to the secret mystery rites of the shrine, mysteries that had remained unrevealed for nearly two and a half thousand years! Well, Leichenfeld became a man possessed. He conceived all sorts of theories about this hollow city, but the one he became fixated with was this. I won’t give you all his reasons but here it is. He was convinced that there was an actual hollow city underground, in subterranean caves, carved out of the rock beneath our feet, and that its entrance was somewhere to be found on this very site. This would account for the legend about the entrance to the Underworld . . . Persephone and so on. . . . He believed that the would-be initiates were taken down into the Hollow City by the Leucoparthenoi—the white maidens—and there underwent an initiation ceremony which in some way replicated their final journey through the underworld in death. Now we know that something like this happened at Eleusis, the other great site of Ancient Greek mystery religion, but this one, he thought, was on a much vaster scale. Of course, you might say, that was just the good Doctor’s megalomania talking, but there were some possible indications. Ha
ve a look at this.’

  Whittle leapt up, looking about sharply as he did so. After mounting the steps, he clambered over the remains of the Tholos wall and furtively beckoned to me to follow him into the centre of the rotunda. There he indicated what looked like a large smooth paving stone in one corner.

  ‘Get out your handkerchief or something and brush away the sand and what not from that stone.’ I did so. ‘That’s right. Now what do you see?’

  I could see some very faint marks incised on the smooth stone surface. They looked geometrical in that they consisted of straight lines, right angles, and a few regular curves, but they did not look exactly like decoration.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ asked Whittle.

  ‘I don’t know. Some sort of hieroglyphic writing? A code?’

  ‘No. Not exactly. What does it remind you of?’

  ‘Well, it looks a bit like . . . A ground plan?’

  ‘Aha! Yes. Precisely. That is what Dr Leichenfeld believed. And there are several of these, very similar, dotted around, inscribed on paving slabs. There are resemblances between these maps—as I might call them—and the general plan of the buildings you see around you here in the shrine, but there are crucial differences too. These plan things, for instance, are much more complicated. Labyrinthine, you might say. Unless you knew the way, you might get lost in them. Especially in the dark. Mmm?’

  The look he gave me had no warmth. I had the feeling that the information he was imparting had a purpose, but that it was for his own benefit rather than mine. I asked if Dr Leichenfeld had actually found the entrance to the Hollow City.

  ‘We don’t know,’ he said abruptly. I saw his eyes stray away from me to a point beyond my left shoulder.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said brushing the knees of his trousers quite unnecessarily. ‘Mustn’t stand around here gossiping. Must get on! No peace for the wicked. . . . Time and tide . . . Etcetera.’ Again his eyes strayed from me. I looked round and saw a figure standing between two Ionic columns about fifty yards away. The sun was in my eyes, but I identified her from the tall, slender figure, the headscarf and the film star dark glasses.

  ***

  On returning to the Xenia from the site I was informed by one of the Blue Overalls that I could, after all spend another night there, but that I would have to occupy another room. I agreed and was shown the new room to which my belongings had already been moved. This one was almost identical to the last, except that it did not face the sea but looked out across the valley where lay the remains of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods.

  One of the odd pastimes I had invented for myself during my travels was the ‘nocturnal visit to the ruins’. I would take a torch and, in the dark, visit archaeological remains by its light. The strange shadows cast by the torch and its selective illuminations often created the illusion that I was walking by night in a living city, or that I was paying homage at a shrine whose god still breathed and demanded blood. Aided by imagination and silence, it would turn dusk into an ancient evening. That night I decided to go to the Sanctuary of the Great Gods.

  I supped late and alone in the dining room: Whittle and Madame Leichenfeld had perhaps had their meal earlier. When I had finished I took care to leave the hotel unnoticed. I am not quite sure why, but perhaps the carafe of retsina had heightened my sense of the dramatic. There was a near full moon, and so I hardly needed my torch. My whole body embraced the silence and the stillness. For a while, as I wandered among the moonlit ruins, occasionally stumbling over a stone or two, but not letting it bother me, I barely thought at all; I simply was. I don’t share Longfellow’s opinion that ‘the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts’. He may have imagined that his were, but mine in those days were brief or blissfully non-existent.

  I had walked some distance, had rounded the Tholos and was just approaching the little Ionic temple erected in honour of the Great Gods by Arsinoe, wife and sister to Ptolemy of Egypt, when I heard a noise. It was not a particularly alarming noise, but it was strange to hear it at night, and it brought me to my senses. It was the sound of heavy stones being moved. I switched off my torch and stood still, just listening, to make sure I was not deceived. No. Someone in the dead of night was shifting rocks or blocks of masonry and dropping them onto others.

  It was hard to tell the direction from which the sound came, but it seemed to be emanating from beyond and to the left of the Ionic temple. I placed myself carefully so that I could escape easily if I were challenged and then switched on my torch again. The beam swept across the Ionic columns and into the space beyond where it encountered nothing, literally nothing, neither earth nor scrub, nor stone. I switched off the torch and looked once more without its aid. The noise of moving stones had stopped.

  Beyond the temple was a black space which reflected nothing. It was an absence, an emptiness without form or content. For several moments I stared at the void. It seemed to drain me of thought and will. Then the noise of rock moving began again; this time, nearer. It came horribly close, like someone suddenly breathing into your ear. I turned and did not stop running until I had reached the drive of the hotel. There I paused to catch my breath.

  I did my best to look normal when I walked into the hotel, but the Blue Overall behind the reception desk gave me a very searching look.

  I am not sure what I was planning to do the next morning, but I had it determined for me before I had entered the dining room for breakfast. The Blue Overall at reception handed me a large brown manila envelope. There was no writing on it.

  I entered the dining room and said good morning to Madame Leichenfeld, at her usual table. She was wearing a charcoal dress with belted waist and gently gathered skirt, and was drinking black coffee. She made no acknowledgement, but I was sure she was watching me covertly, so I waited till I had got back to my room to open the envelope. As I had somehow expected, it was from Whittle.

  It contained two full plate photographs, both of Whittle’s drawings. I recognised them from the style and the initials S.P.W. in the corner. The first was sketchier and more expressive than any of his designs I had hitherto seen. It depicted what looked like some sort of cellar or undercroft, vast in size. The low and rather irregular roof was held up by a line of stout Doric columns that extended infinitely into an obscure distance. In recesses between the columns were a number of grotesque classical sculptures. I spotted Cerberus, the Chimera, Pan and the she-goat, and others, but between two of the columns was a black doorway towards which a draped figure of indeterminate sex was crawling on its hands and knees. The second photo seemed to be the ground plan of some kind of building complex, similar to but more detailed and elaborate than the scratches I had seen on the paving stone in the Tholos. One notable feature was an arcade of columns which stretched the whole length of the diagram. About half way down the colonnade an entrance was marked which gave access to a labyrinth of passages. In the centre of the labyrinth was a circular space which Whittle had marked by hand with a blob of red ink. On the back of the diagram some words had been scrawled hastily in pencil: ‘If you do not see me today, go again tonight.’

  I folded up both pictures, put them in my inside pocket and went out to explore the site again. I went first to the Tholos but saw no-one. On the steps where I had first seen Whittle I found a tiny bottle of red India ink, that was all. Naturally I explored the area beyond the Ionic temple, but could see nothing. It was just scrub, punctuated by a few fallen slabs of masonry. Here and there I noticed that attempts had been made at excavation, but there was nothing of interest. Beyond that point there was an olive grove where a donkey cropped its stubborn grasses, after which the ground rose slowly towards Mount Aidoneos, the highest peak of Thrakonisos’s central massif. Distant sheep bells clanked peacefully from its slopes; the donkey brayed like a sick man in distress.

  The rest of the day I spent alone on the beach, swimming and reading. Towards evening I paid a second visit to the little chapel on the hill above the sea. The coffin had gone, and I al
most persuaded myself that it had never been there. At supper Madame Leichenfeld and I were the sole occupants of the dining room. She wore black, relieved only by a small rope of pearls. I drank mineral water.

  The moon shone full, but clouds had blown in from the East and sometimes they muffled the light. I believe no-one had seen me leave the hotel. Was I afraid? I don’t remember. All I know is that I could not possibly have turned back; something pushed me onwards. When I was standing by the Tholos I shone my torch. I swung it onto the Ionic temple and then to the left where the beam met void and was gobbled up by it. I turned the torch onto the ground just ahead of me and began to walk forward.

  By the time I had gone twenty yards or so, the temple was on my right and I realised that the ground was sloping downwards, quite gradually at first. I kept my torch on the way ahead of me. Presently I came across some wide shallow marble steps and I continued on my way down. Silly things kept slipping into my mind, like the tag of Virgil, ‘facilis descensus Averno’, the way down to Hades is easy. The steps became steeper and began to twist and turn. I descended into the earth.

  For a while darkness completely enveloped me. If I pointed my beam anywhere but at my feet, it met nothing; it did not even cast a faint shaft of light through the surrounding blackness. It was a long descent, in my mind that is, because I had no idea what the clocks would have to say about it: I had left my watch at the hotel.

  Finally I stood on the black earth and felt rather than saw a faint grey light surrounding me. I switched off the torch so as to see my general surroundings better. What I saw gave me the impression that I was on the lonely street of a great city at night. To my right a long colonnade of marble Doric columns stretched into the distance. It resembled the drawing that Whittle had sent me, but the effect was far vaster.