The Riddle of the Labyrinth (33 page)

As she examined the lists of women, she noticed something else. The “woman” logogram was sometimes accompanied by the words
and
. As Kober also observed, whenever the word
appeared, the masculine form of “total” was used before the tally. Whenever
appeared, the feminine form was used. Therefore, she concluded,
meant “boy,” and
meant girl. (The lists turned out to be records of food rations dispensed by the Knossos palace to slave women and their children.)

By solving the gender problem for people, Kober also solved it for animals. The animal logograms of Linear B also took two forms, one with a barred stem (
and
), the other with a V-shaped stem (
and
). In lists of animals, she noticed, the masculine form of “total” was used in connection with barred signs, the feminine form with V-shaped ones. With this single observation, she was able to assign meanings to logograms that had remained undifferentiated for nearly half a century:

AT THE START of 1949, Michael Ventris, amid the press of architectural duties, appeared to withdraw from the fray. “I shall probably give the problem a rest for a bit now, so hurry up and decipher the thing for us!” he wrote Kober that February.

She scarcely had time. Before her second trip to England, Kober had experienced the first glimmer of health trouble. “I just finished my last set of examinations yesterday and my eyes are bothering me—something that never happened before,” she had written to Emmett Bennett in June 1948. Around this time, uncharacteristically, she began to make mistakes in her normally careful transcriptions. “About my errors. I must apologize,” she wrote in the same letter. “I don't usually make such silly mistakes.” To Sundwall, she wrote in February 1949: “I am ashamed at the number of errors I have found in my copy. If there is ever time enough, I will go through it carefully and send you the corrections—but that will not be before this summer.”

But by then, she was feeling even worse. In April 1949, when a package arrived containing the initial batch of galley proofs of
Scripta Minoa II
, she set it aside at first. “This year has been a nightmare,” Kober wrote to Myres in May. “More and more work at school, and no prospect of a let-up till the middle of June. I haven't had time to do anything else. And, in addition, I am so worn out that for the first time in my life I'm worrying about my health. I hope to recuperate during the summer. One of the reasons I sent the proofs back without correction was that I was feeling too ill to face the thought of checking. I've felt guilty ever since. Here they are.”

With characteristic determination, Kober, who inclined toward plumpness, embarked on an uncompromising regimen of dieting in an apparent attempt to restore her health. Meanwhile, she continued to work—on her own research and, increasingly, on that of others. In August 1949, Bennett mailed her a list of Knossos inscriptions about which he had questions. “If you have the time would you go through them and check, say with your blue-green pen all those which you would accept,” he wrote her. “The business is probably a full day's work so don't put it ahead of anything important.” In retrospect, the request reads like a bitter joke: Kober had less than a year to live.

KOBER'S WORK WITH MYRES—or, more precisely,
for
Myres—was even more time-consuming. For months she had been sending him parcels containing her hand-copied Knossos inscriptions, hemming in the loose pages with things like packaged soup. After each parcel was assembled, there came the chore of mailing it: She lived so far out in the reaches of Brooklyn that the nearest post office was more than a mile away. (Kober appeared, like many lifelong New Yorkers, not to have known how to drive.) To mail a package she either had to walk to the post office or wait until a neighbor had time to take her.