I write short stories in the sardonic and whimsical tradition of Australian short rural fiction - Banjo Paterson et al - published in my 'Short Stories in the Mail' series. Irreverent fun. Here, for a change of pace, a new story on a Voynich theme...:-)
A team of Voynich researchers arrive in town.
The Voynicheroes moved into town some time after the heavy rains of 06. Yanky Al said they arrived on a bus from Shepparton, looking supercilious, one inhospitable afternoon. They had, in any case, soon taken daily residence in Yanky Al’s café which was, for a time, the go-to coffee and lemon slice emporium of the district, which explains his interest in their arrival.
For most people – at least after a while – it seemed as if they had always been there as yonder fixtures, this being the steady ambience of rural living. They were generally invisible, sitting in the corner, and there were times when I did attend Yanky Al’s myself and took no notice of their intense deliberations. Their corner was astrewn with texts and bookish paraphernalia, along with note pads and pencils and a wasteland of spent coffee cups waiting for a waitress. Their heads were very often down, immersed, unless they were tossing idle thoughts at each other, sometimes sedately, other times in a frenzy.
In the early days customers would ask Yanky Al: “What’s with them?” pointing over.
And Yanky Al would say: “Voynicheroes!”
“Oh!” would say the customer, and that would be the end of it.
Many people would be thinking “Well, at least they’re not Lutherans…” but would be too modern to say so.
There were six of them on any given day, including a husband and wife team. It transpired that they had diverse expectations. They were roughly divided into linguists and cryptologists – a visible divide. One was Spanish, while the husband and wife team were amateur codebreakers originally from Adelaide. That is assuredly a heady mix from the outset, and it is hard to imagine how they emulsified their talents. What they all shared, though, was a morbid obsession for a medieval manuscript of dubious description, illustrated with herbal enigmas and a script of untranslated curly things on stilts. It demanded all their vigor. They were gaunt creatures, cerebral and distracted.
For reasons for which I can still give no real account, I took it upon myself to learn something of their ways, and so the local curiosity would be directed somewhat to mineself.
On the whole, I tried to mollify and report a placid demeanor. They pored over their tome, I thought, with admirable application, even though, as far as I knew, they had never managed to actually translate so much as a single syllable of the thing. I said it was like that myth where the guy rolls his rock to the hilltop.
“I suppose,” the locals would say. And then they’d say something unhelpful like: “I just don’t like the pompous one.”
I would ask them to narrow it down.
“The Voynich manuscript,” I’d explain, “is like one of those ink-blot tests where people start seeing the warped contents of their own sensorium.”
I was consulted, in this regard, by Constable Jenkins – Nobby, the ‘Knob’, The Nobster - who was in his uniform but was having one with me. We were on the far side of the café but could see the Voynicheroes debating parallels at their distant table.
“Should I move them on?” he asked me, looking responsible but happy to outsource a policing issue.
"They seem harmless enough,” I opined.
“A job for the social workers then?” he concluded, “Or else the psych team?”
I noted that several of them, according to Yanky Al, already seemed to be on meds and it wasn’t making any discernible difference.
He said he was worried about the danger they posed to themselves more than anything. But then he asked, “What about the naked ladies?”
Was this a cell of fetishists leering over medieval porn? Did we really want that in our town?
Nobby was, in fact, running a small business of anonymous proportions himself, along with the other constables, for pocket money, and didn’t want any trouble.
I noted that the study of the manuscript had not aroused any overtly sexual behavior, thus far.
“Perhaps I should do them for vagrancy,” he said.
The real mystery of the Voynicheroes was: where did they sleep? No one knew. Did they sleep? That was another question. Some people said they slept under railway bridges, or they had a campervan hidden in the malee scrub. More likely, some thought, they retired into mine shafts and recalibrated nightly in the privacy of old diggings. In any case, they’d be at Yanky Al’s first thing, and start the day with double shot cappuccinos.
The whole undertaking was fueled on copious amounts of coffee.
“Facken kants,” said Yanky Al in his accent.
He quickly developed a low tolerance for Voynicheroes.
“They come in here every day with their paleography and their medieval inks and Latin verbs, and frighten all my customers with codicolgy. Facken kants.”
He was trying to run a low brow establishment. He thought of selling coffee as no different than dealing drugs and didn’t like to snobify it with intellectual associations. He was from New York. The thing that really galled him was that none of them ate his lemon slice. “Facken kants,” he would say. (Innocently, no one actually knew what this meant – no one local spoke fluent American, but we knew it was an expression of disdain.)
I must say this bothered me as well, the slice. Yanky Als lemon slice was legendary, and rightly so, whereas his coffee was just a watery black amphetamine that you only drank because you’re hopelessly addicted. It tasted like sheep dip. It was the lemon slice that gave Yanky Al’s its wdespread southern reputation. There were people who drove all the way from Colac for a piece!
Yanky Al thought it was best described as “gangster”, apparently a recent idiom. I would oblige him with this appellation. I would bite into a slice and he would look at me and say “What do you think?” and I would say “Gangster.”
“Facken right!” he would say, pleased.
Yanky Al, yanky as hell, we would say.
As for the manuscript, he had prejudiced opinions. It was now residing in Yale, and that was enough to drive him to scorn. Being American, he had opinions about such things. “Yale? Facken kants!”
The naked ladies that worried the Nobster were so many nympha, blonde and rosy cheeked, bathing in the raucous and doing odd things in organic watercourses, all across the inner pages. There were theories, some of them lurid, none of them good.
Then suddenly, there they are adrift among the shining stars, still as naked as you please, some of them wearing nothing but a ring. Romping maidens! Fleshy watersprites of the zodiacal reaches!
But what did this have to do with the armadillo on page f80v?
As I told Nobby, it looked like some early quattrocento north Italian women’s business to me, and was unlikely to have prurient intent. Women have cycles, I explained to him. It is perfectly legal, and these days so is sitting around in coffee shops talking about it. “The Arabs,” I told him, “have an astrology based on the 28 days of the month.”
He was comforted by this but still regarded the Voynicheroes as borderline undesirables in his book.
How they could swill coffee and overlook the lemon slice was confounding in itself. It annoyed the fack out of Yanky Al.
Similarly, I would – on lingering afternoons – act somewhat as interpreter for various discreet onlookers, who were not malicious, but more intrigued. Heather of the Cardigans was one. She was a smart woman. She had been on extended sick leave from the Education Department after a nervous breakdown for going on five years and didn’t seem ready to return to work. I would think to myself, ‘Well, Yanky Al’s coffee isn’t going to help a nervous breakdown,is it? …’ as I watched her drink automatic refills on given days.
She would glance over at the Voynicheroes doing their thing.
“What are they doing now?” she would ask me.
I would duly interpret via body language and the known intrigues.
“I think,” I would say, “the linguists are saying the Recipe Section is full of Latin abbreviations and the cryptologists are saying it’s a simple substitution code with lots of nulls.”
“I see,” she says. “And what about the Spaniard?”
“He says it's Spanish,” I explain.
She would straighten her cardigan and think intelligent thoughts and say, “I’m glad no one has worked it out.”
But therein is the bug. What if Roger fried his Bacon in a hidden cipher? What if Leonardo of the da Vinci Code invented herbal potions to cure the entire human race? It’s a sunflower far from home in sunny Mexico! claims the Spaniard pointing to a page in Herbal Section A. In doing so, he casts doubt upon the conventional chronology and the entire edifice of science. Who supervised the Carbon-14 dating anyway?
It cannot help but straggle. Good minds had been absorbed for long-legged lifetimes. There were second generation Voynicheroes. It had started running in families. Evidently, there was a lot of it in Shepparton. What we were seeing was the overflow.
One day I ran into Les Lickman from Lickman Legal at the counter. His interests were financial. “How much is it worth?” he says to me, meaning the aforementioned medieval document with naked ladies.
“Uncle Rudolf paid 600 ducats and lived to regret it,“ I said. “Mr Voynich himself expected an arm and a leg.”
Yanky Al, who was listening, was about to say something anti-Semitic but was deflected into making short blacks for a table of road-lagged cyclists in lycra up from Ballaarat. It was distasteful anyway. He preferred customers who didn’t obsess over early renaissance manuscripts.
Lickman said it sounded lucrative, and yet, as he said, it attracted layabouts who didn’t like the lemon slice.
I said it was such a conundrum it could open up like a vortex.
What was most disagreeable, of course, was that Voynicheroes are nerds and speak a sub-literate comic-book English awash with Star Trek allusions. When you apply that to a late medieval astrological herbal of Latinate provenance on vellum you get something really annoying.
The limitations are innate. No one, for a start, mangles language like a linguist. And cryptologists are, by definition cryptic. They’re completely inclined to find a hidden agenda in their own thoughts. They like to pretend they’re spies.
Jedi jokes, anyway, don’t work on Yanky Al. Nor in general are people of the district science fiction fans. Eavesdropping from a nearby table one day, I was able to establish that several of the Voynicheroes spoke Klingon.
The real problem was all the weird canisters in the misplaced pharmacological section. No one had the vaguest. Professors had ruined their careers publishing wild speculations about it. They looked like storage vessels but, according to some, had the aperture of later scientific instrumentation and were possibly nuclear fusion generators on a medieval scale. Others thought they were empty and merely an enticement. The Spaniard thought they were for pickling olives.
For a time, it did seem as if things might get out of hand. Yanky Al – being devout – overheard them discussing things slightly unkind to one of the popes and took exception. He accused them of being Protestants. “Facken kants.”
He told me once that - growing up in New York - moving to a rural town in southern Australia on the far side of the world running a fashionable coffee emporium under the incessant sun had been his one idle dream.
Shepparton, on the other hand, was full of Albanians, and all sorts, once the fruit picking begins.
I should have known and reassured him, though, that mysteries have a tendency to rot upon the tree. There is such an abundance of puzzles in those 220 pages, nymphs notwithstanding, that it is statistically impossible to assemble six insufferable egoists together and not expect them to start fraying at the edges. The stitching comes undone.
Before Yanky Al could take real exception for their blasphemies, I noticed they had settled into camps, one side of the table not speaking to the other. It was the linguists versus the cryptologists in a Cold War. The Spaniard claimed an uneasy neutrality. As for the couple from Adelaide, their marriage was in trouble. The sheer scope of the conundrum – the script is completely unique and unknown outside of the said manuscript – baffles experts, self-appointed and otherwise. No unsteady truce can bear that mystery. Sooner or later everyone starts insulting each other. That’s just the nature of it. It is a quarrelsome text.
And so, prior to it becoming necessary for Yanky Al to draw the line and evict them, and send them back to Shepparton to pick apricots, the Voynicheroes started quarreling amongst themselves, and their multidisciplinary approach dissolved like clouds of vaporized vegetable gelatin. The linguists – feeling bold – declared that there are vowels! At this the cryptologists went ballistic, unleashing a barrage of non-linguistic behaviors that surely say the contrary. They had graphs! The Spaniard claimed that Spanish has lots of nouns. The couple from Adelaide agreed on the opium poppy but disagreed on just about everything else.
Heather of the Cardigans came in again one day when I was there indulging. She saw the Voynicheroes in their corner at an impasse. “What is it, a language or a cipher?” she wanted to know, as if it must be a settled simplicity and I must know. I told her it isn’t and I didn’t.
Yanky Al, listening in, demanded that they must have some idea.
“None,” I said. “Look at them!”
I nodded over at the Voynicheroes in their paralysis. It seemed, by this time, there had been a total breakdown of communication. A dire entrenchment.
“Is there any marginalia?” asked Heather, astute.
“Yes,” I said. “In German.”
“What does it say?”
“No one knows,” I said. “No one can agree on a single word.”
“Oh for fack sake!” said Yanky Al, more convinced than ever that he should evict them.
I said I didn’t think it would be required.
“Any assembly of Voynicheroes,” I said, “contains the seeds of its own tantrums of pettiness.”
As soon as one of them says ‘That’s it, I’m only talking to qualified linguists from reputable universities from now on’ – thereby making everyone at the table schmucks – it unravels quickly into a bitter little cesspool. This lot from Shepp were no exception.
“I’d say they’ll be gone within a week, Al," I prognosticated.
Heather reaffirmed again that she was happy everything was so unresolved, and she hoped the medieval author was having a chuckle like an elf at our lame rural perturbations.
I was generally right. They were gone within a fortnight. It is the curse of the Voynich. Yanky Al saw them get back onto a bus to Shepparton and they were never seen again. They came and went like the fashion of baring your bum crack with your low strung hipsters. It is hard not to laugh, but in the end no harm is done.
“Imagine,” said Yanky Al, “coming all the way over from Shepparton and not having the lemon slice.”
“I know,” I said, “That slice is gangster!”
R.B.
© Copyright R. Blackhirst 2022
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