Dinner with Persephone (51 page)

As we drive, Pericles’s radio plays a song of unrequited love, the Greek no,
okhi
, with its round absolute
o
sound making a world in which what has been proposed will never come to pass, the
okhi
punctuated by the
aaaakh vaaakh
sounds that transcribe Greek sighs, very different from the quality of our gentle resigned sighs, that leave us like the perfume of dying flowers. Greek
aaaakhs
bleed and flood and empty the body, and I am reminded that Greek sounds of laughter, refusal, and desire are very different from ours. A song of
the great Greek singer of the sixties who calls herself Katie Grey comes on. Her style is something between a torch singer and a Patsy Cline, with a voice of passionate flexibility, and her life, by all accounts, has been a drama to match. She is singing one of her classics, “Whoever is brought up in strangers’ hands knows what pain is … strangers’ hands are like knives.” We turn onto a narrow dirt road to reach our fishing village, the distance between us and the coast of Turkey narrowing to what looks like swimming distance. The radio of its own accord now emits songs that sound like the
mikrasiatika
, Asia Minor Greek songs I know, but these songs are in Turkish. “From here,” says Pericles, “the reception is better for the Turkish station than for the Greek one.” We nearly collide with a speeding car, and then with a truck full of farm produce speeding on the pebbly road, and Pericles says, “You know why our accident rate is so high?” Greece is one of the European leaders in automobile accidents, and the newspapers and magazines steadily report the accident statistics. “Because of drinking and driving. Family problems, business problems, they drink and drive. Just here a friend of mine, a farmer, drove a tractor off the road last winter and lay under it until dawn, bleeding to death.” We pass his friend’s farm, and Pericles points out the memorial, and further on, the tractor that killed him, isolated like an animal so savage it needs a pen to itself. “God pardon him,” Kostas says to Pericles, in a traditional phrase of blessing for the dead. “God pardon him,” Pericles echoes.

“As for me,” he says, as if wanting his stories not to end with death, “I got married this summer.” We congratulate him, and he says, “But don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret. You see, my wife is fifty, and I am forty, and my boss doesn’t like me to go out with her. So I tell him that she is just my girlfriend, that I sleep with her maybe once or twice a month, to do her a favor,” he says, miming a look of sexual condescension. “You see, he knows,” he says, pointing to Kostas, “but you don’t, that here it is all
zilia
, jealousy, and
koutsombolia
, gossip, maybe I don’t get the good jobs and the big fares if they
don’t like how I live. In America, it’s very free, isn’t it, the life there, you can do just what you like. I watch
The Bold and the Beautiful
every day in winter when we live in Athens, and I see how free it is.” Again, I marvel at the utter faith in the image I have met so often here. “But you know, I love this nice woman so much that it surprised me, I wanted to marry her. When I met her in Athens, she was so shy she couldn’t say a word. I asked my friends, ‘Why does this nice woman have nothing to say?’ And they told me her story, how she came from a famous military family, and her house was like a soldiers’ camp. They didn’t let her wear short skirts, they would slap her if her blouse wasn’t fastened all the way up to her neck. They arranged for her to work in the Middle East, and for all her youth her life was being picked up to go to work, and picked up by car to go back to her apartment. She typed during the day and watched television alone at night. Her brother became a general, with medals on his chest, and he would taunt her when she came home for Easter, telling her, ‘You cannot marry until I marry, the younger doesn’t marry before the elder, and I will never marry.’ He is sixty-one, and he never married. Can you imagine such a story? But when I met her I liked her so much, and her style is good, she doesn’t look fifty, she keeps a good figure. And in our house, you don’t mind my telling you this, she often wears only a slip all day, or walks around naked, from having been kept in her clothes like a prison all her life. At first, she didn’t believe I could want her, and then she said, But you must have children, and I am too old now for children. And I said, Don’t worry, I have a boy, I had him with a Swedish girl, they come once a year to see me. So I don’t need children. And an older woman is what I want, you know they know how to do things in the house that the younger women don’t any more. At five, she gets up, brings me my coffee, makes my bed, always the clean house, the clean clothes, and she knows how to do this beautifully. Every day she cooks a special meal. Today she is making me
imam baildi
with four cheeses. Then at night, we drink Bacardi and Coke, we dance, we start the love machine, sometimes we stay up
all night, like she is making up for so many years. And she is always so warm with me, I come home, and cuddle next to her, and she says, How is my sweet boy, it’s like having a mother. And she told me, I understand if sometimes you want a younger woman, you can sleep with your Swedish girl when she comes, can you imagine a wife so unselfish as she is? Our only trouble is her family, we have tried to make peace with them, but they hate this good woman, they call her names you wouldn’t believe, her brother calls and screams how she is a whore, who wants nothing more than to eat penis, that she is a whore who takes a young boy for her lust, and now marries without permission. Once we had her mother to visit, and I swear, this woman spent the night looking through the keyhole to our room. My wife makes a little noise during
erotas
, and the mother says in the morning, ‘All night I hear you, whore, like a bitch in heat.’ And then we had friends to dinner, and the mother says in front of them, ‘I suppose tonight you all four fuck each other.’ So I told my wife, ‘It is over with your family, I am your family now.’ I hope you don’t mind my telling you about all this, but I am so happy with her, and I need to tell someone about my secret, and it looked to me like you would understand.”

Pericles crosses himself as we pass a simple white chapel overlooking the sea and enter the village. We want to look in the chapel where a famous novelist named Myrivilis wrote a book called
The Mermaid Madonna
, for an icon of the Panagia as a mermaid that inspired him. But it is not in the church. I ask the proprietress of the local souvenir shop, who is reading a novel by Marguerite Duras, where we can find the icon. She smiles and says, “You can’t. It’s a dream. Only Myrivilis’s dream. There was never such an icon.”

After a lunch of white wine and stuffed sautéed zucchini blossoms filled with feta cheese, egg, and fresh mint, we go up to the nearby town of Molivos, romantically beautiful topped by a castle that sits on a great, dynamic rock, the cluster of stone houses below it looking like infant castles it is giving birth to. A mule carrying panniers of zucchini looking like torches with their flame-colored
flowers passes us on the cobbled street. We pass some fine marble public fountains, with marble plaques over them expressing wishes and identifying the donors in Turkish, in the Arabic alphabet used before Atatürk’s reforms. Mitilini was occupied by the Turks until 1912, and until the Asia Minor catastrophe maintained a constant social interchange with the port of Aïvali across the water, one of the towns on the coast of Turkey where large numbers of Greeks lived. Over the fortress in Molivos is another inscription in Turkish, and a Greek family panting outside after their climb look up at it. “What is it, this writing?” asks the thirtyish wife, holding the hands of her two children and catching her breath. “What language is this?” She is free not to know. Across the blue waters the coast of Turkey faces us, looking at Turkey in Greece. And I wonder if tomorrow, when we go to Aïvali, we will feel Greece staring back, looking at Greece in Turkey.

Early next morning, we take a bus to Mitilini town to catch the daily ferry to Aïvali. There are only six passengers on the bus after we board, and a woman climbs on after us, wishing the bus driver and the passengers a general
kalimera.
Hanging over the windshield dangles a gold evil-eye charm, a madonna, a pomegranate, and a decal of the Playboy bunny. The bus driver is wearing the gold bracelets and neck chains favored by Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Israelis, more of the golden chains which link Greece to the East. The graffiti along the road have changed topics from the spring graffiti, and now written everywhere in PASOK green ink is the sentence “The selling of Greece will not be tolerated,” a reference to the opposition party’s plans to sell off the national telephone company to private investors. Two elderly gentlemen take front seats, diagnosing each other through information like a pair of social doctors. “You have grandchildren?” one asks the other, who replies, “My daughter is making my first grandchild now.” They discuss the care and feeding of pigs, which leads almost inevitably to political discussion. “Andreas will make souvlaki of us all, if he is prime minister again,” the one on the right predicts. At a village two stops
later, he descends, calling to his new acquaintance, although he is probably going no more than ten minutes further, “Have a good journey, and a good week,” using the polite plural you. An army tank has broken down, so the road is filled with soldiers—Mitilini is so close to Turkey that it is one of the prime sites for military duty. We arrive in town in time to wander a bit in the market district, where I see something I can’t stop looking at, a turn-of-the-century needlepoint sampler: worked in red and green threads, the color of fruits, there are two ornamental alphabets, Greek and Roman, row by row, as if they were sown seeds germinating, waiting to find their way into the fruit of speech. The letters of both alphabets are decorated with leaves and petals, and at the bottom of the sampler, the young girl has signed her work in threads with her name, Eleni in Greek, Helen in the Roman alphabet. She has made a work of art of her double heritage. Kostas goes inside to see if he can buy it for me, and arrange to pick it up later from the shop. The shop owner pours us out two coffees, quotes a justifiably unaffordable price, and says in any case that the shop is closing for several days. He smiles a restrained smile with his mouth, but an overjoyed one with his eyes, and asks if I have seen what is in the corner of the shop. It is a gleaming baby carriage with an awning. “It is for my first grandchild, who was born yesterday,” he says. “My daughter and son-in-law have waited ten years, and had given up hope. Can you imagine our joy? After ten years, there is a child at last. So the baby will come home tomorrow, and my wife and I will be there to welcome our grandchild.” We congratulate him, and he inclines his head. There is a stateliness, a dignity in the face of joy that I think is as wonderful as dignity before sorrow. It communicates the more subtle bravery joy demands, the willingness to give oneself fully to joy without the illusion that you are no longer at risk. It demands a greater steeliness, since there is nothing more terrible than the destruction of what is most precious to you, than the loss of your greatest joy. In loving so fully you expose yourself to hell itself; the courage of heroism is not courage so ultimate as this grandfather’s,
or this young couple’s, who must now love in a way that leaves them completely vulnerable.

Aïvali, the Turkish coastal town, was the home of the important Greek novelist Venezis, and of the neo-Byzantine painter Kondoglou, whose bitterness toward the West must surely have been colored by the loss of his childhood home in 1922. Like many others, Kondoglou found refuge in Mitilini, where many families have Aïvaliote roots. On the ferry, I study a postcard of the popular painter Tsironis’s image of Aïvali, framed in painted flowers and laurel leaves, with a superimposed image of the painter Kondoglou hovering above it, also wreathed, both like the kind of photograph of the dead you see on the walls of houses all over Greece, where keeping their images before the family’s eyes functions as a proof of the survival of the living as much as a remembrance of the dead. In their daily seeing of the image is the proof and reminder of their own consciousness, their eyes light the candle of life as only the living can. The dead can only be looked at by the living, they cannot look back.

We sail into Aïvali, which is held between two outstretched arms of land like an infant. As you sail in, you see an island with a ruined Orthodox church, one of those maritime churches so often overlaid on sites dedicated to Poseidon, shrines for sailors to acknowledge as they embarked and as they returned home safely. Some of the Greeks on the day excursion are going with the special purpose of photographing grandparents’ houses to which they can never return.

As we put into port, a sailboat passes us on its way out, flying the bright red Turkish flag with its crescent moon, its thin curve the sign of a fault line that opened into an abyss, so that between Aïvali and Mitilini, where there was once a short span of sea, there is now a gulf. We are processed through the customs house under the obligatory picture of Atatürk, who wears a fur coat, with a mocking expression in his eyes, the color developed in the photograph designed to make them a supernaturally piercing blue. As we assemble
to meet the bus for Pergamon, we are surrounded by Turkish boys and men, no women entrepreneurs among them. One of them whispers to me, “Fruit of Dalloum, fruit of Dalloum,” and I wonder if this conceals some voluptuous suggestion, until I see his partner holding a stack of men’s T-shirts and underwear sealed in factory packages marked “Fruit of the Loom.”

Pergamon was a spa sacred to Asclepius, like the ones on Kos and at Epidaurus, and it has the usual elements of Asclepiad spas: statues, therapeutic baths, and theater. These spas must have been very like Baden-Baden in the nineteenth century, and Canyon Ranch or the Golden Door today, with their mixture of entertainment, physical and mental therapy, designed to improve the health of the patient by refreshing him mentally as well. There is a soldiers’ encampment directly in front of the site: as Greece keeps concentrations of soldiers at its nearest points to Turkey, so Turkey keeps soldiers at its points nearest Greece, it seems. We walk to the theater, where there is a small cultural skirmish between a Greek tourist and the Turkish guide, a pleasant young woman whom I imagine as having a taste for historical novels, who is telling us about the theater’s fine acoustics, saying that they resemble the acoustics of the theater at Epidaurus. The Greek lady in shorts says rather severely, “Yes, possibly they do, but Epidaurus is known to have the best acoustics in the world.” Another lady echoes her, “We have learned this in school.” Vans filled with camera equipment overlook the site, and a handsome group of men and women in bright clothes with strong makeup are ordering the same drinks again and again as they are filmed for a soft drink commercial. Along the road as we drive to the restaurant where we will have lunch, we pass women wearing Turkish trousers bent over in the fields, hanging laundry, bringing dishes of food to groups of men seated under trees. It is clear that the women’s trousers are garments designed for work—they allow the woman to work bent over, in strong winds, and in any position her labor requires without exposing any flesh. They are practical, not romantic garments, and
I am reminded of a Turkish proverb I read once, “A woman for work, a boy for love, and a melon for ecstasy.” Along the road there are also many coffee houses, where men are drinking at tables set under trees. As in Greece, the women do not sit in coffee houses, and I am struck that so many of them are wearing, in this heat, ground-length housecoat-like overgarments, and by how many of them are fully veiled. The men in the coffee houses look up at the women in our bus, unveiled and unswaddled, with angry speculative stares. Cars pass us on the road, but none are driven by women; they sit in the back, swaddled in the housecoat garments, with their heads covered, the winds thick with dust circulating through the open windows of the cars. The Eastern negative mysticism about women driving cars, being free to come and go, seems to be operating here. Along with cars and passing trucks, I see men driving horsedrawn wooden carts on the precisely laned asphalt, as Mercedes and Toyotas speed by them.