Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 36

Actually, one of the Inner Cabinet was a rather approachable lady called Mary. Mary was like the ‘aunty’ to the team, a rather laconic, unflappable lady of older years. She acted like a guardian, protector, and mother figure to the Commissariat, all rolled into one. I think I remember once someone telling me she might have been somehow related. Whatever the association, Mary prevented the over-enthusiastic Management from becoming involved with any kind of imbroglio and being battered senseless by irate creditors, workers, staff and friends alike. Mary could recognised the tell-tale signs of anyone becoming agitated - any slight involuntary quivering of the head, a combative positioning of the feet, any knotting of the brows or clenching of the fingers – which preceded an all-out show of belligerence. At the critical moment she would physically interpose herself between whoever it was and their tormentor and gently push them away from the seat of the fracas, and quietly say, like a prayer, “Don’t lose your cool. I’ll take care of it. OK? Just don’t lose your cool.”

And amazingly calm would be restored, and whatever the problem was, it would recede under Mary’s soft voice and gentle persuasion. Those involved lived to fight another day.

Mary tried valiantly to supervise a trench or two as well, and approached the workers in the same casual way, speaking to them in a kind of pidgin Turkish but with a full East Coast New England accent.

“Oh, say, Moo-stafa, would you just kaldir the taş over buraya. Çok mersi,” (would you lift the stone over here? Many thanks!).

“Oh Fewsi, would you just temiz the toprak from around that pillar?” (would you clean the earth from around that pillar?).

Somehow, her temperate approach worked, and the toprak would get temized. If any of us had a domestic problem, it was to Mary we would go

28