Dinner with Persephone (29 page)

From roughly the 1870s on, educational societies in Greece published handbooks and tracts invoking the medieval rivalry between the Bulgarians and the Byzantines, which culminated in the Bulgarian defeat by Emperor “Basil the Bulgar-Slayer,” and sometimes portraying the Turks not only as infidels but as a largely black race. Societies founded to promote Hellenism sent representatives to speak to prominent Europeans, and missionaries to Greek communities in Turkey. According to the philhellene observer William Miller, writing in 1912, Greek elementary school geography maps labeled the region between the Danube and the Aegean not as the “Balkan” but the “Hellenic” peninsula. “On the Macedonian question,” Miller wrote, “most Greeks are chauvinists; they are only willing to hear their own side of that difficult racial problem, and they are, with rare exceptions, so strongly prejudiced against the Bulgarians, that argument is hopeless, and the philosophic politician
who thinks that there may be something to be said on both sides is apt to find himself labelled as a Bulgarophil. & You will hear politicians talk about Alexander the Great, and base arguments on his Macedonian realm, as if he were a contemporary of M. Deliyiannis [the prime minister at that time], and I once listened to a very hard-headed currant merchant from Patras solemnly denouncing Demosthenes as a bad patriot and a traitor to Greece, because he had called Philip of Macedon a ‘barbarian’ and thereby injured the Greek argument that all, or most, of the Macedonians are Greeks.”

The modern nation of Greece was made up of painstakingly expanded borders, a process that continued for roughly a century, while the population continued to experience sudden shifts, like the arrival of many Egyptian Greeks as a consequence of President Nasser’s efforts in the 1960s to bring Egyptian business under Egyptian control. Issues that concern borders, as a result, send Greece into frenzies. The issue of Macedonia is so fraught that both Greek and foreign university scholars have received death threats from within Greece for publishing history papers that were perceived as challenging the nationally acceptable view of Macedonia.

Television reporters are questioning groups of schoolchildren and their teachers near me. “What do you think of today’s demonstration?” one asks a ten-year-old. “It shows that Greece is united and proves that Macedonia is always and forever Greek,” he says, and his classmates wave their plastic flags. The teacher adds, “It is important for all Greeks to take part on this historic day.” What is unnerving, though, is that there is no possibility for any kind of critical assessment of the occasion, much less dissent. The schools were closed for the very purpose of being here, and the teachers presiding over their flocks, with television reporters expressing avuncular approval of the patriotic answers, are disturbing. I can’t imagine what would happen to a teacher—or a child—who said something like, yes, the borders must remain stable, but the rhetoric is offensive, or who suggested that a compromise on the name might be possible, or said that the purpose of schools was to foster a climate
of intellectual inquiry. Here where schools are tightly controlled by government and church—the state, teachers tell me, determines the material to be taught in each class, down to the number of pages covered per lesson, while the official title of the minister of education is “the minister of education and religion”—the social and professional consequences could be severe. It is ironic that this demonstration, while fervently supported by many of the participants, is also functioning as a form of social and academic censorship. I remember another passage from William Miller, written during the period before the Balkan Wars, when the fate of Macedonia was still undecided. Miller wrote about the University of Athens that one third of its undergraduates came from “enslaved Greece.” “It is this factor,” he said, “which gives the University its real importance, and which makes it the spoiled darling of the Greek governments. For every Greek from beyond the present frontiers of the kingdom who has studied at Athens goes back to his native town or village imbued with the ‘Great Greek Idea’. & We can scarcely wonder that no punishments are meted out to students who indulge in political demonstrations, or that the Prime Minister turns a sympathetic ear to the Macedonian alumni, who ask to be relieved from all fees, on the ground that their homes have been devastated by the Bulgarian bands.” This matches perfectly fears I have heard Greeks express about the consequences if the Skopje republic is accepted with the name Macedonia—the geography textbooks in the new state’s elementary schools will be printed with maps incorporating Greek Macedonia, and the children will be taught that the name is proof of an ancient historic claim to lost territory they must recover.

“B
e careful no one takes you for a transvestite in that neighborhood—it’s their
agora
,” Kostas said jokingly when I told him I was going to a wedding reception at a hotel on Syngrou Avenue. “If you wear your gold lamé, then I can’t answer for the consequences—a woman who looks glamorous on Syngrou Avenue is in all probability a man. Have fourteen eyes when you are in that neighborhood,” he says, telling me to be cautious in an idiom he particularly likes, because it reminds him of Argos, the many-eyed guardian of Io.

Shattered bricks, broken concrete, fragments of glass, and iron pipes big enough for people to hide in block the entrance of the luxury hotel where the wedding reception for a publisher’s daughter and a shipping tycoon’s son is being held. The heels of my gold evening slippers sink into the quicksand of the street debris after the taxi lets me out across the highway from the hotel. A small party of explorers has formed from a fragment of the thirteen hundred invited guests to make an attempt to find the hotel entrance, which was hidden by the litter of construction materials. A chauffeured Mercedes discharges another group of elegantly dressed lost people.
Someone sights a way in, and reports to the band of searchers, who follow him following a child in a silver satin flower girl dress, down two flights of escalators, past posted security guards, and through the receiving line. Waiters hover with glasses of champagne; the guests are symmetrically divided by gender. On one side of the room, a fortress of black-suited men smoke and transact; on the other, women whose hair has been braided and souffléed by craftspersons who obviously have a taste for baroque fountains wear brocades and sequins that are eerily like the festival ceremonial robes of priests, which in Greece are glittering landscapes of gold thread, jewels, and brocade. Huge bars, surrounded by guests, anchor the room, and the entire length of the far wall, which I estimate to be a quarter of a mile long, is lined with linked buffet tables. Monumental floral arrangements, which include tags at their bases with the name and telephone number of the florist, are placed like perishable sculptures at the corners of the dance floor. In the middle of the dance floor, as if on an altar, is a nine-tiered cake, roughly eight feet tall.

The weddings of wealthy Greeks are extraordinarily drawn-out affairs, since time is made between ceremony and reception for the wedding party and guests to change from their grand church clothes to grand evening clothes. And since the ceremony itself proceeds at a stately pace, with the repetitive chanting and actions performed in the triple patterns that are emblems of eternity here, a wedding can be an all-day business. For this and for other reasons, my friend Aura doesn’t want to drive out to the green glade of Agia Filothei, probably the most popular wedding church in Athens, booked months in advance. “I simply cannot feel comfortable listening to a ceremony which is founded on an insistence that women are inferior to men. I don’t even like to say I am married in Greek. I am happy to say it in French or in English, but in Greek, I feel the twinge of etymology—
pandremeni
, married, descends from the ancient Greek
ip-andros
, to be under a man, to be subject to him. So in Greek, I can’t be married, since I don’t agree to this. But you
go—it is a marvelous opportunity for you to observe the precise moment when social ideology is transformed, by the alchemy of the liturgy, into divine commandment.”

I am struck, as Aura promised, by the almost badgering emphasis on the wife’s secondary position, both with her husband and in creation itself, the constant admonition that she must obey her husband in all things, that he is her head. As the bride and groom stand at the altar, both wearing wreaths of small white flowers that are linked together by a satin ribbon, as if it is a new umbilical cord, the groom is exhorted to love his wife as if she were his own body, and the bride to fear the man, to stand in awe and even in dread of him, at which point this bride stamps firmly on her groom’s foot, in a traditional gesture of defiance. An image of an old embroidered wedding coverlet I saw on a visit to Crete with Kostas makes me momentarily lose the thread of the ceremony.

The quilt was bordered with square after square of tiny churches embroidered in colored thread; they proceeded inexorably as armored tanks around the bedcover. I could tell from his face that the aggressive coverlet made Kostas nervous, with its endless triumphant repetition that legitimate marriage had been achieved. The power hidden in those toylike churches declared that lovemaking in this bed might have been, without this quilt, romantic adventure, but was now, for good or ill, destiny. Kostas had joked about the admonition in the marriage service to woman to fear the man; “They don’t have to warn us to fear the woman, you see; it goes without saying.” But no matter who fears whom, I thought, this moment introduces a power struggle into the very heart of a ceremony that should celebrate the mutual love and mutual respect of the partners. And as I watch the bride and groom make their ritual three circles around the altar while we pelt them with rose petals, sugared almonds, and rice, I realize that, for me, the strangest element of the ceremony was that no pledges were made by the bride and groom, who do not speak. Our ceremony is based on the asking and answering of questions, this one on exhortation. It occurs to
me on the way to the reception that the absence of questions may reflect the tradition of arranged marriage here, evading the issue of the bride’s and groom’s consent.

At the hotel, I catch sight of the friends I am meeting, and join their table while we wait for the bride and groom to make their entrance. Two Americans who introduce themselves as Tweedledum and Tweedledee sit down with us; Dum looks like an expensively dressed Woody Allen; he wears a costly gold watch, and carefully chosen Italian glasses, which magnify his tiny dead eyes, the eyes of a flesh-eating fish, with neither scruple nor bitterness over lack of scruple, eyes in which nothing is left but will. Dee is a particularly late-twentieth-century American character, with a boyish face achieved as if through a kind of plastic surgery of the soul: he is an artist whose art has been to create an audience and sustain his own celebrity, specializing in pornographic pictures of himself with his wife. He tells me he lives part of the year in Munich, and I ask why. “Because the sex is good in Munich,” he answers. “Did you hear what I just told her?” He nudges Dum. “I told her I live in Munich because the sex is better there.” Dum nods with distracted admiration and beckons for another glass of champagne. “It’s very fertile in Munich,” Dee says. “Even the cows are dripping with milk. That’s why the sex is so good. In Africa, the cows are dry and bony, but in Munich they are fat and luscious and full of milk.” He nudges Dum again. “Did you hear what I just said? About the cows in Munich?” He urges me to go to an exhibition of his work in Athens. “You’ll really be surprised. Just go. I promise, you’ll get a big surprise.”

Suddenly the strains of Mendelssohn’s wedding recessional, in an arrangement so dictatorial and pompous that it sounds like the music radios play after military coups, strike up. The bride and groom walk on a white carpet through the throng to the cake—the groom is stalwartly dark and handsome, and solicitous of the bride, like a danseur presenting the prima. She is wearing the most artful dress I have ever seen, arranged on a series of wire hoops, covered with net studded with brilliants. It looks as if she is dressed in galaxies,
stars draping her breasts and bare rich shoulders. Dee leans over to Dum. “Do you think Romeo fitted the dress himself?” Dum replies, as the couple cut the cake in every kind of photograph, and begin to do the work of their wedding, moving around the room. “If he knows how important Ari is in the art world, he must have knelt at her feet with pins stuck through his tongue.”

On both sides of the room waiters wheel up rounds of ice six feet in circumference, some holding beds of oysters, others bottles of vodka and aquavit; waiters circulate with trays of caviar on toast. Every luxury from other climates and other countries that is most unattainable in Greece is offered. The room breaks up into different
pareas
, close-knit circles—the tycoon’s
parea
, the grandparents’
parea
, the
parea
from Athens College, the most prestigious school of Greece, which routinely turns out not only future prime ministers but future opposition leaders. A band begins to play: “I like to be in America, everything free in America,” sings the leader, moving on to an Elton John song, and some Latin numbers, popular for dancing here. Quadrilingual buffet tables begin to function, offering smoked salmon, pâté, tender rare beef, almost impossible to find in Greece, asparagus—not one Greek dish or wine is offered, although the scene calls up images of the outsized festal cooking equipment, vast cauldrons and enormous trays used for public celebrations that I have seen in some villages. Ari, I think, is feasting the village. There are no toasts, no speeches; the whole occasion is the display of abundance, which seems all at once heroically generous, aggressive, and panic-stricken. Even the
koufeta
, the sugared almonds given as favors at Near and Middle Eastern weddings, are not wrapped in the usual tulle and satin ribbon here, but offered in monogrammed crystal boxes.