Dinner with Persephone (23 page)

“Yes, but there’s a difference,” says the other man, mesmerized by the performance. “The Greeks use vaseline, the Turks use spit.”

As soon as you are aware of the light in the mornings on the waterfront of a Greek island, you hear the wet slaps of the fishermen beating octopus against the rocks to tenderize it, an act that is the source of many sexual double entendres, since “to beat” is also slang for “to fuck.” “What needs to be pounded to be made tender? An octopus and a woman,” says one riddle. I sit down for breakfast at one of the seaside tavernas—the chairs of the table next to me are draped with the drying bodies of octopus, as is the railing across from me. The octopus legs stir slowly in the morning breeze, a skull with eight weaving crossbones swaying beneath it. Passengers are beginning to board the ferryboat to Athens. A group of Greeks bearing gifts has just surged aboard: bags of fruits, island flowers, Naxos Gruyère and the Naxos yogurt, the dairy equivalent of pâté, all probably destined for relatives in Athens tonight. Some of the passengers may have doctors’ appointments; while there is a small hospital on Naxos, anything chronic or serious has to be handled in Athens—if it’s really serious, a helicopter or plane takes you from the island. The doctors write out a prescription for you to go to Athens just as they would for Darvon—and the government medical plan is supposed to pay if the doctor sends you to Athens. On the deck, I watch the Scandinavian and German tourists, their faces blank in repose. But the convention of the Greek face is different; it is the norm to show a face worked with emotion, like the faces of actors and actresses, even in repose. An obviously Greek man standing at the railing shows animated features, his eyes widening, his forehead wrinkling, even distorted by his responses to what he is looking at. Greeks, with their strong eyebrows and thickly modeled
features, look like theater actors trained to project emotions to even the back rows, with their open expressions a kind of makeup, a concealment through dramatization of their private thoughts, as effective as the blank tabula of the northern European face.

I look toward the Protopapadakis statue, and think how often in Greece the mental path into the past seems wide and paved, while the path flowing in the opposite direction is unmarked or simply disappears. The Naxos guidebooks focus on antiquity and on village traditions such as trying to provoke a dream image of your future husband by eating salty food on certain feast days; the man who offers the sleeper water will be her husband. But of the history of Naxos from medieval to modern times there is virtually nothing, not even a mention of that intriguing figure Joseph Nasi, the Sephardic Jew who was made duke of Naxos by a Turkish sultan in 1566. Appropriately for Dionysus’s island, the appointing sultan was such a great wine lover that he was known as Selim the Sot, while the future duke of Naxos’s fortune was founded in part on a kind of bootlegging—he supplied the sultan with wine, and controlled the wine trade in Turkey, where imports of alcohol were nominally banned by the sultan, in keeping with Islamic law. But he and Naxos seem to have found each other mutually repulsive, since he only spent a brief time here in the Venetian fortress before returning to Constantinople.

I walk aimlessly inside the medieval town walls, where the houses are joined together like segments of one vast dwelling. I relish the green and blue painted doors, and the coats of arms on marble pediments. A woman stops a young mother on the street to examine her new baby. She gives it no compliments, careful not to risk the evil eye, but calls after mother and child, “May it live for you.” For us, wishes are
niaiserie
, the “Wish you were here” scribbled on postcards is a code with us of insincerity, as the “Best wishes” closing a business letter can be. But here, a wish brings you even for a short time into a relationship of intimacy with someone, the intimacy of common humanity, of being at risk in a world of lucky or
terrible events. When I bought a cassette player in Athens, its façade gleaming black with silvery buttons for sophisticated commands, the machine was handed to me with the wish “
Kaloriziko
,” may it be well fated (or well rooted, since
riziko
, the word for fate, is related to
riza
, the word for root), as new acquisitions are wished into place. I pause outside a shop where a handsome carved wooden mirror and a cleanly made painted chest have been placed on the edge of the narrow sidewalk. Inside, more furniture and mirrors are strewn around in various stages of development, a carved leaf here, the beginning of a spray of wheat there, pieces of the world the craftsman is transferring into wood, onto chests for household storage and mirrors for faces to look into. The man offers to show me the chest I am admiring, but I tell him I cannot buy it. He is hoping that my hesitation means I want to bring down the price, while I wish that it were a ploy. But it isn’t. Misunderstanding, he tells me the price, which is high. Instinctively, I mutter “
po po po
,” the Greek “oh dear, oh dear,” which you helplessly pick up if you live here more than a month. “Not
po po po
,” he says, offended. “It is worth that price and more.” Nothing destroys fluency faster than the presence of anger—only the truly native speaker or linguist of long standing can manage both anger and grammar, and I am upset, too, that he thinks I meant my head-shaking at the price as a comment on his work rather than my checkbook. We resolve the moment of hurt in the Greek way, with a wish. I ask shyly if he himself made everything I see. Yes, he answers gruffly, I do it all by myself, every piece. And I lose my stammer and say, “
Yia sta kheria sas
,” health to your hands, which means health to your gift, may your talent flourish. He looks at me with surprise at this sudden homecoming in his language. His cheeks flush with pleasure, and he nods at me warmly, thanking me. “Your Greek was broken, but your heart is whole,” he says. I have made the right wish, which is all I have to give, and as it turns out, all that is necessary.

A
thick Albanian-Greek dictionary is displayed in the window of the local school textbook and supply store, I notice as I pass. It is an acknowledgment of some tacit kind of the growing population of illegal alien Albanians, who surge over the border in the hundreds every day, and whom the Greek police round up and return by the busload. And another Balkan knot—the Greeks and the Albanians would like to be differentiated from each other absolutely, but there are parts of Greece, for example, the island of Hydra, that were populated largely by Albanians. There are villages in what is now Albania that are largely Greek. Albanians served as Turkish henchmen during the Ottoman years, but a number of Greek revolutionary war heroes were of Albanian descent. And the foustanella, the famous Greek kilt, is said by many to be a version of the Albanian warrior’s costume, and is sometimes called the Albanian kilt. The Balkans did not and still do not seem to have the Western notion of national borders; villages dominated by different ethnic groups intricately veined the region, and the Balkan notion of borders seems based on the notion of the ethnic enclave of the village—which, if this is true, explains why nationhood here has been
wrought through three predominant patterns: federation, colonization, or genocidal slaughter.

I am on my way to pay my electric bill, which now comes in an envelope stamped with the Star of Vergina and the legend “Macedonia—The Eternal Greek Light,” and my rent, which is an event requiring an entire afternoon—Leda tells me that that is nothing; paying her monthly rent needs a full-scale evening visit, with a bottle of wine and sometimes a card game. I am back on schedule, after a bout of flu—or of nothing, according to the Greek diagnosis. I had canceled a dinner since I was sick, and the hostess asked me, “What are your symptoms?” Coughing, body aches, sore throat, clogged nasal passages, fever. “How many degrees?” she said. A hundred and one, I answered. “And what is normal on a Fahrenheit thermometer?” Ninety-eight-point-six, I said, feeling too feverish for all this medical inquiry. “Oh, then you don’t have a fever,” she said. “Don’t I?” I said weakly. “No,” she said, “fever would be much higher, a hundred four, or a hundred five.” So I learned that in order for fever to qualify as Greek fever, you must in fact be dying, your brain cells on the point of being comfortably medium rare. In fact, I’m not entirely sure there is such a thing as illness in Greece. Illness is what has killed someone. Life is suffering, illness is death.

Cooped up in the house, and feverish, at least by my standards, I watched a Greek TV melodrama called
Nemesis
, about a Greek émigré who has made a vast fortune abroad, and returns to revenge himself on the family responsible for his father’s death. There is the conventional, almost obligatory scene of a woman being slapped or punched, here by her husband, which is repeated daily in so many variations that it has come to seem that Greeks have an appetite for this kind of scene, as Americans do for high-speed car chases and gunfights. The style of acting too is utterly different. A Greek actor never tries to give the illusion of not acting, the hallmark of the American style, embodied in someone like Spencer Tracy. He conveys first of all that he is playing a role, that characters who are acted out are people who are represented because they have a special fate,
a distinction. If anything, a Greek actor or actress constantly shows the way in which his character is singled out, through gestures or speech, through a sense that a unique destiny is a kind of stardom.

My landlady, Kyria Ioanna, is a terrifyingly good housekeeper: her parquet floors are polished to daunting perfection, the hang of the fussy lace embroideries on her furniture is straight as a marine’s spine, the fussy crystal knicknacks everywhere are translucent, and the wooden tables gleam, free of dust, a condition almost impossible to achieve in Athens. The odd little functionless squares and pennants of cloth like oversized napkins hung on the backs and arms of furniture are taken very seriously at Kyria Ioanna’s, and in other middle-class Greek living rooms. I am guessing that this is a middle-class memory of the great importance and value of fine fabric in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Perhaps these are tapestries and silk tunics, which were so valuable that the Goths who sacked Rome demanded them as part of the booty, evoked on a smaller scale, as silver-plate place settings evoke grander silver services. One reason the ceremonial vestments of priests and altar cloths, stiff with gold and landscapes of embroidery, are so elaborate here is not just that they are decorative, but that they were once immensely valuable, they were part of the church’s financial treasures, and evidence of its powerful patronage.

“Wait just a minute,” she says before she comes to the door. “I am boiling
horta
,” an archetypal housewifely activity, these wild leaves braised with olive oil and garlic being the Greek equivalent of greens and pot likker. Kyria Ioanna has the mistrusting, tense look of many Greek adults, their eyes ever bright with vigilance. She also has the familiar short, square middle-aged body without curves, a solid mass with no dip or indent, a
doulapa
they call them, like the squat wooden wardrobes that substitute for built-in closets here. During our first meetings, although her face would relax slightly when she saw me, I was struck by the absence of the convention of the American smile of greeting. Here the initial glance is harsh, probing, prolonged; a smile has to be earned, there is no assumption
that just your existence can be valued by a smile. There may be no reason to smile at your existence. This is true even of people you are not destined to meet, the frank assessing stare on the street, of which the stare of sexual invitation is only one variant. As you pass by a
kafeneio
at eleven in the morning, populated by men reading newspapers and drinking coffee, a mosquito net of stares drops over you, a world of unarticulated judgments.

Kyria Ioanna, though, and I have come to enjoy each other. She is a thoughtful, funny, strong, kind woman, with distinctively Greek manners, a combination of consideration, bluntness, and impulsive warmth, as well as keen estimation of the person opposite her. Greek courtesy has a fascination like no other. It is not a magnificent construction, a formal garden, like French courtesy, or a social contest following Marquis of Queensberry rules, like British courtesy, but a volatile fusion of refinement and passion, a tough but breakable ceramic fired at high temperatures.

I hand her the envelope, thick with drachma notes, which she counts in front of me, apologizing, and then she sweetens our transaction by pulling up a small table and setting on it a sweet, a glass of water, and a napkin. Today it is a piece of elegant chocolate
tourta
, left over from her son’s thirty-second birthday party. The cake is voluptuous without being blowsy, and has the fine calibration of bitter and sweet that is the mark of good confectionary. She likes to hear an account of my month, where I have traveled, what I have read, and enjoys measuring the progress of my Greek. I have just read a novel set in Greece during the German occupation, and Kyria Ioanna, who was a child then, says she remembers the October day in 1944 when the Nazi flag was lowered on the Acropolis, and the Greek flag raised. She remembers, too, the savage moral dilemmas of the war, the neighbors starving on the street while people indoors listened, barely able to sustain their own lives. And the black marketeers who profited and the endless cunning thefts of anything valuable to sell, chaos and random death, followed not by peace but by the Greek civil war, sniper battles and midnight
knocks on doors on the streets of our own neighborhood. I ask her if she remembers the funeral of the poet Palamas, one of the emblematic scenes of Greece’s modern history, retold in histories and novels and children’s books of Greece’s World War II, and a familiar image through the photograph of the poet Angelos Sikelianos delivering the famous eulogy with an anguished expression on his theatrically handsome face. “In this coffin lies Greece,” he began, and when he finished the crowd sang the forbidden national anthem, defying the German soldiers poised to shoot at demonstrating crowds. But it is not so much the literal event that makes this an emblematic modern Greek scene, but the different intensities of the details. It is a scene enacted by poets for many disparate reasons. Palamas is central because he was a demoticist, and the poet par excellence of modern Greece, not necessarily because of the aesthetic value of his poetry, but because of the role it played in inventing and defining modern Greek life, language, culture, and national identity. His work, like my modern dream books, is an encyclopedia of the key symbols, the icons of modern Greece. He, along with the other members of his circle, invented a way for modern Greece to proceed, finding parents, a house, and a heritage for this abandoned orphan. The history of modern Greece is above all the history of the forming of a nation. Knowing something of Palamas and his generation dramatizes what a cultural frontier Greece was, and how consciously they set about to settle it. It was not that there was no past, or that the Greeks were not its legitimate heirs because of ethnic dilution, as the nineteenth-century German scholar Fallmerayer, who asserted that the “race of Greeks” had died out due to invasions and intermarriage, claimed, but that the nation had not shaped the claims it would make on the past. It was there, but also beyond them, like my own heredity. The past was the Greek frontier, and the modern Greek sense of the past grows, above all, out of the invention and composition of their relation to that past. It was a task that had also faced the Christian Byzantines, who never worked out a consistent or satisfactory solution
to the problem of their relationship to the polytheistic classical past. And it is a task still confronting the present-day Greeks, and Turks as well, whose cultures are intricately permeated by each other in still unacknowledged ways, regardless of their history of mutual hostility, like the “black” and “white” populations of the United States.