The Secret History - Donna Tartt [9]
“You’re crazy.”
“No, they are. Look at the next sentence. We need a dative.”
“Are you sure?”
More rustling of papers.
“Absolutely. Epi tō karchidona.”
“I don’t see how,” said Bunny. He sounded like Thurston Howell on “Gilligan’s Island.” “Ablative’s the ticket. The hard ones are always ablative.”
A slight pause. “Bunny,” said Charles, “you’re mixed up. The ablative is in Latin.”
“Well, of course, I know that,” said Bunny irritably, after a confused pause which seemed to indicate the contrary, “but you know what I mean. Aorist, ablative, all the same thing, really …”
“Look, Charles,” said Camilla. “This dative won’t work.”
“Yes it will. They’re sailing to attack, aren’t they?”
“Yes, but the Greeks sailed over the sea to Carthage.”
“But I put that epi in front of it.”
“Well, we can attack and still use epi, but we have to use an accusative because of the first rules.”
Segregation. Self. Self-concept. I looked down at the index and racked my brains for the case they were looking for. The Greeks sailed over the sea to Carthage. To Carthage. Place whither. Place whence. Carthage.
Suddenly something occurred to me. I closed the book and put it on the shelf and turned around. “Excuse me?” I said.
Immediately they stopped talking, startled, and turned to stare at me.
“I’m sorry, but would the locative case do?”
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
“Locative?” said Charles.
“Just add zde to karchido,” I said. “I think it’s zde. If you use that, you won’t need a preposition, except the epi if they’re going to war. It implies ‘Carthage-ward,’ so you won’t have to worry about a case, either.”
Charles looked at his paper, then at me. “Locative?” he said. “That’s pretty obscure.”
“Are you sure it exists for Carthage?” said Camilla.
I hadn’t thought of this. “Maybe not,” I said. “I know it does for Athens.”
Charles reached over and hauled the lexicon towards him over the table and began to leaf through it.
“Oh, hell, don’t bother,” said Bunny stridently. “If you don’t have to decline it and it doesn’t need a preposition it sounds good to me.” He reared back in his chair and looked up at me. “I’d like to shake your hand, stranger.” I offered it to him; he clasped and shook it firmly, almost knocking an ink bottle over with his elbow as he did so. “Glad to meet you, yes, yes,” he said, reaching up with the other hand to brush the hair from his eyes.
I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me. Only the day before Francis, in a swish of black cashmere and cigarette smoke, had brushed past me in a corridor. For a moment, as his arm touched mine, he was a creature of flesh and blood, but the next he was a hallucination again, a figment of the imagination stalking down the hallway as heedless of me as ghosts, in their shadowy rounds, are said to be heedless of the living.
Charles, still fumbling with the lexicon, rose and offered his hand. “My name is Charles Macaulay.”
“Richard Papen.”
“Oh, you’re the one,” said Camilla suddenly.
“What?”
“You. You came by to ask about the Greek class.”
“This is my sister,” said Charles, “and this is—Bun, did you tell him your name already?”
“No, no, don’t think so. You’ve made me a happy man, sir. We had ten more like this to do and five minutes to do them in. Edmund Corcoran’s the name,” said Bunny, grasping my hand again.
“How long have you studied Greek?” said Camilla.
“Two years.”
“You’re rather good at it.”
“Pity you aren’t in our class,” said Bunny.
A strained silence.
“Well,” said Charles uncomfortably, “Julian is funny about things like that.”
“Go see him again, why don’t you,” Bunny said. “Take him some flowers and tell him you love Plato and he’ll be eating out of your hand.”
Another silence, this one more disagreeable than the first. Camilla smiled, not exactly at me—a sweet, unfocused smile, quite impersonal, as if I were a waiter or a clerk in a store. Beside her Charles, who