Dinner with Persephone (50 page)

N
ow that it is high summer, Athens has moved out of doors. Tavernas are full at two in the morning with family parties, including young children, eating in gardens and savoring the cool night breezes. Some of the smaller streets are looped from house to house with grapevines that shield the street from the summer sun, and the
laiki agora
, the farmers’ markets on the streets, are filled with the magnificent Greek white peaches and melons, while competing vendors praise the perfumes and colors of their fruit with the chant “
Aromata kai khromata.
” Athens is above all a city of the personal, personal passions and tastes, loyalties and hatreds, and even straightforward information here has an atmosphere of personal declaration. An elegant dress shop in Kolonaki, whose windows I have often passed covetously, announces its summer closing with an exuberant handwritten message in the window—“We are not going for a coffee! We are not going to the square across the street! We are going to the sea! Goodbye for the month!” And I myself am saying goodbye to Stamatis, who is going to France for his summer holiday; I am leaving for the island of Mitilini tomorrow to spend the summer holidays honoring the
Panagia with Kostas, and when Stamatis returns from France, I will have returned to the States.

We meet in Fokionos Negri, an endearing neighborhood with a traffic-free area full of greenery and restaurants of unpretentious charm. “What a zigzag route you are following,” he says, “but it is right for Greece, where my favorite of our proverbs is the question, ‘Are we sailing straight, or is the shore crooked?’ And now you have sailed around the crooked shores of Athos, the most Islamic place in Europe, where the Virgin Mary keeps her harem. And there, in my theory, is where, in all probability, the murderer of Taktsis went to ground.” “Why on earth would you think that?” I ask. “Because the civil courts have no jurisdiction there, for one thing. And for another, the place has a reputation as a refuge for criminals—there is a church canon which states that any male Christian, that is to say Orthodox Christian, may choose to enter a monastery no matter what crime he may have committed outside it, and that he may not be obstructed in this choice. So that’s my theory.”

I tell him I will be spending the most important of the summer holidays, which westerners call the Assumption of the Virgin, in Mitilini. “Mitilini is a lovely island,” he says approvingly, “and you must try to see Chios too, while you are in the neighborhood. But the key to the feast is in the icons which invariably show Mary dead on her bier, and Christ behind her, with her soul in his arms in the form of an infant. Because this holiday is about the death of woman as goddess, and the appropriation of her divinity by Christ, who becomes a greater mother than his mother, the male mother who gives immortal life, the great gift men waited in vain for women to give, holding his own infant mother in his arms. You can find this appropriation of womanhood in the sacraments—in holy communion, for instance, when Christ’s flesh and blood become food, previously the magic of the female mother. But her milk nourishes children who will die, and his blood, replacing her milk, gives immortal life to those who drink it. And baptism, in which the child is reborn, with even the new amniotic fluid of holy water, through
a man. Christ, the divine transvestite, is the mother who makes the child live forever. This is why the Orthodox Church—and the Roman—are so vehemently opposed to women priests. It destroys the magic substitution they made to obtain immortal life, what you may call their
idées crucifixes.
If a creature who can become pregnant touches the flesh of Christ, she will render his body mortal, the old failure of her pagan divinity may corrupt his, and return him to manhood from deity, as she was returned to womanhood from deity.”

I start to ask him how he will spend his time in France, but he breaks in. “I remember now you asked me how I read the image of the Jew Iefonia you saw in the Kimesis fresco at Mystras. I say it is not garden-variety anti-Semitism, which is basically a response to Jewish anti-Gentilism. After all, if a child comes to school and announces it is the chosen child and declares all the other children’s lunches dirty food, it is likely to be bloodied by the end of the day. So I don’t think Iefonia is this. I think his punishment at the hands of the angel for touching Mary is an expression of our resentment of the imposition of monotheism. Because the establishment of Christianity here can best be compared with the establishment of communism in Russia. Imagine the legislation against the pagan universities where the philosophers taught, imagine the jobs that were now given only to Christians, or people with solid Christian connections, not polytheists, just like the jobs that were given only to party members, imagine the arrival of soldiers to take the treasures from the polytheist temples, imagine the soldiers Constantine posted outside the caves all over the countryside to prevent polytheists from worshipping inside them. We needed Iefonia, and the accusation that he and his kind had killed a god, in order to distract ourselves from the truth that there is no more detailed record in religious history of the attempted murder of gods than our own. We tried to kill not one, but twelve. Not, I think, with great success.” He looks at his watch, and calls for the bill, which I have only ever succeeded in paying here through the wildest subterfuge. “And I
wish you a good journey,” he says, “but I warn you of what the novelist Vassilikos says about Greece—that it is the place where when you are here you long to leave, and the minute you leave, you yearn uncontrollably to come back. I know. When I am in Greece, I think about my month in France. And in France, the whole month, of Greece.”

As with Easter, it had been difficult to decide where to spend the holiday of the Kimesis, the Sleeping of the Virgin. I had been very tempted by the island of Kefallonia, where in one village dozens of snakes, called the “snakes of the Virgin,” slither toward the church dedicated to the Kimesis, climbing onto the faithful, the holy bread, and the icons. When they don’t appear, as in the two years of severe earthquakes, it is considered a bad portent. And I would have liked to have seen the ceremonies in some regions where the Virgin is given an Easter, with funeral ceremonies and processions like Christ’s at Easter time, marking one season in Greece with man’s resurrection, and another with a woman’s. But I had wanted to see the paintings in the Theophilos Museum of one of the patron saints of modern Greek painting, and Mitilini was a particularly favorite island of Kostas’s.

I buy some magazines for the ferry, which at this time of year feature special travel sections suggesting excursions to places where there are miraculous icons of the Theotokos, one of which is on Mitilini, along with letters from people who were saved by the Virgin’s intervention. One woman living in Canada sends a photograph of her son, resurrected by the Virgin when he was three years old and three days dead. In the lounge someone is playing a radio, where a suavely weary announcer celebrates the Virgin, in terms that remind me of a charming hymn to Artemis by the Hellenistic Alexandrian poet Callimachus, in which Artemis, sitting on her father Zeus’s knees, and clearly his pet, asks him to make her a goddess of many names. The announcer says, “She has been the fellow warrior and benefactress of our race, the holy guide and the sweetly kissing one during our struggles and suffering, the tender mother and the fierce defender of whoever needs her. We call her the Guide,
the Sweetly Kissing One, the Life Giver, the Portrait, the Athenian Woman, the Woman of the Sea, the Panegyriotissa, the Virgin of the Festivals, the Peponiotissa, the Virgin of the Melons, when her church is near melon patches, the Virgin of the Cold Waters, when her church is near a spring. But whatever name we call her, she is the mother of Greece and of the Greek people.” The announcer pauses to take an audible drag of his cigarette. Always when I am reminded of the great gift of the Greek language for epithet, I think that the language is something like an iconostasis, picture related to picture, stories concealed in the twining imagery. “She is the invincible commander, the highest general in battles, the doctor for the sick, the protectress of all who are suffering unjustly, the food and drink of those who hunger and thirst, the co-ruler of Heaven and first of all the Saints …” August is particularly the Virgin’s month, the August 15, 23, and 31 holidays known collectively as the Virgin’s. The official name of August, like July’s, respectively Augustus and Julius here, reminds me powerfully of the new ordering of time that came with the Roman emperors these months were renamed for, but in the popular view, the days of August are given to the Virgin Mary like bars of gold. In old print shops, you can see prints of fruit or sheaves of wheat, with the traditional verse “August, my lovely month, come twice a year.” This is the month that gives the greatest feeling of security, overflowing abundance, of ease and earned pleasure, when the farmers have stored in their cellars grains and corn, hay and feed for their animals, wood for their fires. August is the month of the richest eating, with its seemingly endless fruits and vegetables, “so many you need shawls to gather them,” one verse says. In Greece it is a month in which you might imagine life would never end. But it is also a duplicitous month, a month also commemorated in foreboding verses about getting winter clothes ready, about the short days beginning, the summer
meltemia
gales prefiguring the sharp winter winds.

The walls of the ferry lounge are decorated with posters of the Greek museums, a glowing Theophilos magical realist view of Mitilini town, and a poster for a wax museum in the northern town
of Ioannina, where I have been on a trip with Leda. The memory of the animated wax death of Socrates still sends us into paroxysms of giggles: at intervals the wax Socrates would point to the cup of hemlock, and with the same regularity, the friend holding the cup would roll his mechanical eyes. We strike up a conversation with a young soldier who is on the way home for the holiday. He sees that Kostas is reading a book about Chinese art, and he produces some of his own work, drawings of men dancing the
zembekiko
with rapt self-absorption, and some studies of a soldier sitting on an iron cot, masturbating. His face glows when he talks of Matisse, and darkens when he talks about what has gone wrong in the world. “The fault is with humanism,” he says, “the humanism of the Renaissance, which places man at the center of the Universe where God should be, man in all his arrogance, egoism, and materialism. This is why we are in a world where we destroy the environment and value money above life, this idea of the greatness of humanity.” It is hard to imagine a more arrogant and uncomprehending dismissal of humanism, whatever its flaws, I think as we drink coffee with the round-cheeked soldier.

We dock a little after dawn in Mitilini town with its delightful neoclassical houses, ornate tiles covering their doorsteps, probably from the period of the Balkan Wars, when tiles like these were made in Piraeus. The day is still waiting for the full seal of sunrise, a sunrise that comes like the fulfillment of a great promise, like Prince Hal becoming King Henry the Fifth. We pass one tiled entrance which reads
Khairete
, the old but still used greeting, which literally means “rejoice,” written in an oceanic script of waves and swags and flourishes, and bordered by pleasant cherubs, who anchor themselves by holding on to the ends of the word. In a niche carved over one formerly impressive door is a bunch of carved and painted wooden grapes. On another door hangs a bunch of garlic, stabbed through with a fork, to pierce the evil eye. It gives me a new question about the nature of the evil eye, reminding me of Polyphemus the Cyclops in the
Odyssey
, who was stabbed through the eye by Odysseus. I have always wondered whether the
Odyssey
wasn’t full of hidden sexual jokes, remembering a Greek epigram which refers
to female genitals as the eye of the Cyclops, and this particular
gouri
against the evil eye, of a kind I haven’t seen before, makes me wonder if there isn’t also some sexual undercurrent in the metaphysic of the evil eye.

We have a coffee, and find a taxi driver to take us to the other end of the island to the fishing village where we will stay, with a stop at Panagia Petra, painted by Theophilos, with its church, like our Lady of Vertigo, madly placed on a jagged cliff, as dictated by the Virgin Mary in a dream. A long time ago, the story goes, a sea captain of Mitilini had an icon of the Virgin. He didn’t realize that his icon was miraculous. The village of Petra that you see today was covered with the sea, and only a jagged piece of the cliff on which the church is built today was visible. One night the sea captain dreamed of the Virgin, who told him she wanted to live on this very cliff. The captain took his boat out, and sailed along the coast, trying to find the cliff she had meant. Suddenly the boat stopped moving, although there was a good breeze. The captain called out, “Come help us travel, Panagia!” And when he looked to his left, he saw a radiant light glowing on the cliff, and in the center of the light, his own icon, miraculously suspended in the air. The captain sailed closer, wanting to recover his icon, and as he approached, the sea itself lowered and the cliff got higher, as if the earth were sculpted into a new shape. Still, the captain was determined to have his family icon back, and he clambered onto the cliff and managed to secure it. The next day when he was fishing, the boat again stopped dead in the waters, and the icon disappeared again. Again, he sailed toward the cliff, and saw it on the peak. This time, after he brought the picture down, he nailed it to his mast. That night he dreamed of the Virgin again. She said, “Nail me to your mast if you want, but I will always run away, back to the rock where I want to build my house.” And in the morning, when he went down to his boat, the icon had disappeared from the mast.

Meanwhile, the Virgin had appeared to another person, a young village girl, and told her to go the mayor and tell him to build a church on the rocky cliff of Petra where every day the waters
receded even more. The girl went bravely to the mayor, but he paid no attention. Again the Virgin appeared to her, and again, she tried her luck with the mayor. He didn’t lift a finger to help. Then the Virgin beat the girl, and warned the mayor in a dream that she would harm him too, if he didn’t build her church. His baby sleeping in its cradle was seized with racking spasms. When he saw this, the mayor begged the Virgin for mercy and promised that she would have her church. The baby immediately recovered. When the craftsmen went to look over the site to plan the church, they had no idea how to handle the problem of making a stairway up the rock to make the church accessible. Suddenly the icon of the Virgin began to move around the cliff top as if it had invisible legs, and it made an architectural design using twigs that it collected. So the craftsmen built according to its plan. Finally the church was done, and the day of the first liturgy arrived. The priest sprinkled all the corners of the church outside and in with holy water, and after the service, a young apprentice to the church builder ascended the stairway up the cliff, carrying a tray of
raki
and glasses for the craftsmen to celebrate their good work. But the boy slipped off the steep stone steps, and fell screaming.
Panagia mou
, everyone shouted at once, and ran to the edge of the cliff to look. As they got to the edge, they saw the boy rising through the air with the tray of
raki
, and the white towel draped neatly over his right arm, just fluttering a little in the breeze. When his feet touched the solid cliff, he walked toward the craftsmen, holding out his tray. None of the
raki
had spilled from the glasses.