Dinner with Persephone (27 page)

At a hotel near the restaurant where I am meeting Marina and her father for lunch, an old lady is looking for a taxi. She refuses to move out of the way when a minibus from the hotel drives up to the corner to park. “You’ll drive foreigners,” she says, and spits, “but not your own people. I won’t move for you.” The driver leans out of the window and asks her sweetly to move out of his path. “I’m laughing at whatever you say,” she retorts bitterly.

Marina and her father are drinking ouzo at a table in the sunshine. They are arguing over a proposed change in the law that would allow Greek stores to stay open on Sundays. Her father is
vehemently for it—“It will be good for business,” he says, “and besides, the merchants should be free to choose what they will do. Why should they be interfered with?” The church is violently opposed, and so is Marina. “And if a merchant doesn’t want to open on Sundays, but everyone else does? How can he compete? Anyway, we should not let business rule our lives, and take a place that culture and music and food and conversation should occupy, we don’t want lives like the Americans who do nothing but work, freedom is everything to Greeks.” “And I say we are not free when we are told when we may open our own businesses and when we may not.”

It is chilly, but Greeks prefer to sit outside unless it is actually snowing. All around are cries of
Khronia polla
, many years, because today is the name day of all the men named Nicholas, who are being congratulated by their lunch companions. Nicholas is the patron saint of the Greek navy; sailors and ships receive special blessings today. “Were you afraid during the earthquake the other night?” her father asks me. There had been an earthquake measuring 6 on the Richter scale. I had been reading a novel when the room began gently but firmly to elongate and compress, as if it were made of elastic someone was stretching. I could see the room’s disproportionately large chandelier swaying, my laptop computer sliding a bit on its table, but the rocking had been gentle and stopped before I understood enough to be afraid.

“
Akhh
,” Marina says, turning the pages of a newspaper, “murders. Here is a man who thought his upstairs neighbor was making too much noise and went up in the elevator and killed him. And here is a man in Kavalla, who shot his mother to death and then killed himself. He was unmarried, and the authorities say he was afraid he would be the first to die, so his mother would be left alone in the world.
Akhh.
Well, at least Clinton is good news. He has Greeks around him, so he cannot hate the Greeks, like everyone else, because we refuse to let another race usurp our heritage, because we are not fooled by the tricks of people who are not Europeans but pretend to be. Here, we know who is who. I am Greek—I am Europe.”

“And Clinton will not want war in the Balkans,” says her father. “Or anywhere. He is a pacifist, you know. He would not fight in Vietnam.” Very carefully, as you would replace an egg in a bird’s nest, I say that he is not a pacifist. “What, you didn’t know?” says Marina’s father. “He is of the Baptist faith, and it is against their religion to go to war. This has always been against their religion.” I dissent again, having done adequate time at youth crusades and revivals in the South to have known a number of fairly bloodthirsty Baptists, not to mention some who would be insulted by the suggestion that they preached pacifism; but my experience is as nothing to the man’s belief in his belief, to the doctrinal national refrain,
panda einai etsi
, it is always this way.

Marina gives me a letter of introduction to an icon painter she knows on the island of Andros, where I am going for the weekend, and asks if I will be back in Athens for the nationwide day of Macedonia demonstrations. “Be back before then, you will never be able to travel on that day, and besides, it will give an interesting impression to you. The whole nation will be together, like villagers around a central square—even children’s teachers will take them to the demonstrations.” “It will be a national holiday?” I ask. “It doesn’t have to be declared. It is a day for history itself, not stories about history. Anyway, my sister is a teacher, and there are many days when she doesn’t have class, the teachers strike, the students strike. You know what she says is the motto of the Greek school? ‘We also give lessons.’ ”

Later I meet Aura, who is taking me to a benefit reading given by a famous actress named Dandoulaki. She is waiting for me outside the theater, gloating with mischievous delight over the recently published results of a study of Greek sexuality. “One out of two women have at least one extramarital affair,” she shouts like a joyous gospel, to the bemusement of passersby. “They must, my dear, they must. I did. Of course, then I married my affair. The study doesn’t say about that. But the best of the study is this: Two out of six couples will develop affairs with people in their ‘immediate family environment.’
I cannot tell you how many people I know who divorced to marry their sisters-in-law, and things like that. My dear, the Greek family is even closer than its reputation boasts. It’s delicious.”

Inside, she tells me, there are several generations of Greek art and thought, actresses and actors, singers, directors, dancers, writers. She introduces me to a famous woman novelist, author of a best-seller that made her considered a spokeswoman for her generation—the woman is thin and dark, wearing an expensive coat, projecting an air of important pessimism. I meet an actor appearing in a production of
Hamlet
, which conjures up unpredictable private images, since the Greeks pronounce it “Omelet,” and a heavy-bearded essayist wearing a beautiful ring made of a Byzantine coin. There is a good deal of laughter over a recent interview with one of the handsomest of the new crop of actors, a promising romantic lead, who responded when asked a question in the past tense about Alexander the Great, “Who dares to speak of great Alexander in this tense?” A crush of television cameras and magazine photographers record the scene—many of the conversations I overhear are decorated with ornamental phrases in English, in a way that reminds me of E. M. Forster’s British intelligentsia in novels like
A Room With a View
, setting Italian expressions into English conversations. The men stare sternly, almost confrontationally, when they are introduced, but this style no longer unnerves me. They don’t follow the convention of smiling during the introduction—instead they look at you with an accusing expression, and say they rejoice to meet you, if they are older, of
yia sas
, if they are younger or bohemian. But the smile doesn’t accompany the meeting—military installations don’t smile. The women, on the other hand, are frenetic, aggressive laughers, who make the room flash with inscrutable and unpunishable mockeries.

It is striking that there is no outside to this gathering, no meetings, only reunions, another reminder of the dramatic difference in scale between a country this size and America. “Everyone here has slept with everyone else,” Aura whispers to me wickedly. The
actress Katia Dandoulaki, who wears jewelry magnificently, as if the pieces were decorations for heroism, begins to read from a volume of poetry. Like all Greek actors and actresses, she has to work constantly to make a living, doing television and film work at the same time she is starring in a play. Even important figures in Greek theater regularly appear in TV soap operas, as does Dandoulaki. It must create a completely different set of problems for these performers, whose faces are ubiquitous here, who are never out of the public eye, not so much in their private but in their professional lives. Dandoulaki has a superb voice, with a landscape of variation in the timbre and inflection: she is reading an elegiac poem, and is making full use of the language’s sense of radical separation between past and present; Greek verbs are accented differently and change forms in the present and the past tense. She shapes the planes of her cheeks and the muscles at the corners of her mouth the way a coloratura shapes every note, and she has a distinctive way of crafting a facial expression so that it lingers for a moment, almost separate from her own features, before it disappears into another invisible but ongoing existence. It is another lesson in the different quality of the Greek school of acting. Aura’s husband, a Dutch cinematographer, tells me he is constantly aware of the peculiarity I perceive. There is a sense less of communicating individual personality than of revealing a concealed divinity; the player doesn’t seem to develop a character through time from the interaction of event and personality, but instead to incarnate, to be the vehicle for the presence of something timeless. I think back to the Feast of the Metamorphosis in August. For us, heirs of the western Romans, the idea of metamorphosis comes through Ovid, and conjures up change, permeability, transformation. But the Greek image is in the repeated icons of the metamorphosis of the human Jesus, revealed as eternal god—perhaps the model for this acting style, the ultimate feat of theater.

“T
he Garden of the Mad,” reads a taverna sign just outside the port of Rafina, a place made familiar to people who haven’t been here through a song by Vasilis Tsitsanis, a songwriter so beloved that many rank him with General Makriyiannis and the painter Theophilos, or the anonymous composers of the “demotic” folk song, as one of the wellsprings of modern Greek art. Tsitsanis, considered perhaps the greatest master of the bouzouki, was also the great witness in song of the German occupation, the
katokhi.
There may be Greeks who cannot sing four or five of the most famous Tsitsanis songs, but I didn’t meet them; he is still such a presence in Greek music that a journalist conducted an interview with him in 1993, though he died in 1963. The Rafina song tells lightheartedly of a crab family broken up by a seductive bream, who takes Mrs. Crab to Rafina while her little crabs cry on the beach. In a way, the crab husband, who limps awkwardly to Rafina to retrieve his wife, and the pleasure-loving she-crab, who stays up all night and plays in the shallow waters with her new love, are like the lame Hephaestus and faithless Aphrodite, reduced to the scale of toys. Two can always play that game of puppet and master, even in modern
Greek theogony; intense bargaining with saints can be overheard in churches, even with Christ and his mother—
Panayitsa mou
, someone will preface a prayer, my darling little Virgin, and
Khristouli mou
, my dear little Christ, grant me this. I find the ferry for Andros, and the ticket taker waves me into the first-class salon, though I have only a second-class ticket. “I am the only Greek who keeps his smile in the winter, everyone else will make a
moutra
, a sulky frown, until the spring. But I smile, because we have Greece all to ourselves now until spring, and I say, let us take the opportunity to see for ourselves what the first-class salon is like to sit in.”

We dock at Gavrion, a listless, bored-looking port, lined with cheap harbor-view restaurants, and one pretty dovecote, a characteristic building of Andros and neighboring Tinos. The coastal road is the usual Greek meander, the kind of road that always reminds me of the pattern we call “Greek key.” The bus is filled with grandchildren coming for the weekend, a number of whom are dropped off at their front doors, before it continues, pulled up and down and through the loops and curves like an embroidery needle. When I visited Paros, I saw an island made of marble, but Andros is made of stone and silk. It is a piece of gray rock, veined with three fertile valleys, famous for its stone walls, medieval defense towers, and silky perfect spring waters, the famous Sariza waters of the village of Arikia. It was also, literally, an island of silk, since from the eleventh century to the eighteenth it was a center of silk production. The prayer I had read on the ferry to Naxos, exhorting the little silkworm to multiply like the descendants of Abraham, would have been heard here, where silk cocoons were suspended from grilles inside the rooms of Andriote houses, and a New Year’s wish for luck on Andros, I have heard, was once “May you have your weight in silk.” In the nineteenth century, the shipping industry made Andros a wealthy island, and created fortunes for families like the Goulandrises, the great museum makers of twentieth-century Greece. Andros town has a prosperous provincial handsomeness, with houses that incorporate Venetian architectural traditions like
the arcade, a memory of the long Venetian domination of the island, which here created a true feudal system, practiced with Greek overlords over a Greek tenant peasantry when the Ottomans forced the Venetians out. Andros was a privileged island, a profitable nest egg, under the Ottoman Turks, who seem to have had no wish to disrupt its smooth functioning. There is an air of public-spiritedness in the town, with a long main street for evening
voltoules
, the communal strolls still popular here; the intelligently organized museums, library, and old-age home give a sense of common endeavor and confidence to the place. I stop in the library, in an elegant bourgeois house given to the town by an important nineteenth-century benefactor named Kairis. The librarian allows me to go into the small room that holds Kairis’s own books, the core of the library collection—books in French, German, and Greek, encyclopedias, poetry, medical books. An island library, with knowledge brought by boat to furnish this world, it makes me think of Prospero’s treasured volumes in
The Tempest.
As I walk around the town, I see some workmen restoring a grand house near the main square. One beckons me inside, where they are putting vulgar plaster ornamentation on the ceiling, and painting the walls teeth-gritting lime green and swooning blue. One of the painters grins a gap-toothed grin, wipes his forehead, and says cheerfully, “Sickening colors, aren’t they? But that’s our commission.” Outside again, I pause at an imposing church, which reveals another facet of this public-spiritedness: carved in marble next to the entrance are a list of names, many recognizably famous shipping owners’ names, with the amounts of their contributions carved irrevocably beside them.