Upstairs, I call the doctor and make an afternoon appointment. Staring absently at my bookshelf, I have a sudden enlightenment about the source of the déjà vu. It comes from the twelfth-century chronicle of the life of the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus. His niece Anna, who wrote the history, recorded that he fell gravely ill after a horse race, “and as a result of the strong wind which was blowing at the time the humours [of his body] subsided, as it were, left his extremities and settled in one of his shoulders.”
THE SISTER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
The taverna is in the poet Palamas’s old neighborhood. Palamas has something of the position for the twentieth century that Solomos had for the nineteenth—not necessarily for his art, but as a figure for the nation, an incarnation of the country, since this is the land of the Logos, where what exists must first be spoken into being, and where what is threatened can survive in the underwater of speech alone until it is safe to come back to the surface. It is hard to use the word “poet” in American English without there being a kind of automatic recoil of unpleasant associations, affectation, fancy doublespeak, hypocrisy, constriction, compulsory Sunday school culture when you would rather be outside playing. It is an example of a word which is cognate in both languages, but is actually barely translatable because it has such different connotations. In America, if you conjure up memories of statues in Washington and New York, they are of Lincoln, Washington, General Sherman, but it is hard to find a memory of one of Walt Whitman. I don’t know of a street named for him in New York or Washington, much less a town. But all over Greece there are villages with streets or squares named for Palamas and for other poets. It is not necessarily that people like poetry any better here, but that the figure of the poet represents something different. One equivalent might be someone like Arthur Ashe, an artist who was an exemplary figure, whose genius revealed the connections between tennis courts and courts of justice, whose game was brilliant and exciting because it described the world, and who performed the ultimate athletic feat of living what he thought.
All over Greece, but particularly in Athens, the ideal taverna recreates a miniature, perfect dream village in a state of feast, the tables set out in a plaza under shady thick-trunked old plane trees, the moon if possible shining peacefully through their branches, the wine flowing from barrels, the kitchen abundant with home cooking, long tables crammed with families drinking, singing, joking, not struggling to earn the money for this abundance, not preoccupied with the latest village slander, not fighting over an inheritance, not leaping up with an unsheathed knife or ready gun to settle a new chapter of a family feud. It is the village as the village never was, and as I walk through the door that opens off the city street full of parked motorcycles, periptera, and small neighborhood grocery stores, I enter exactly this dream of a village square. I pause for a moment before I go in, to look at a newspaper story. The Greek Olympians, Voula and Pyrros, have been awarded the highest Greek decoration by President Karamanlis—the Golden Cross of the Order of Honor. It evokes the crucial modern Greek symbol of the golden baptismal cross, as if these two are baptized by the state and have now become the nation’s godchildren. And it also uses that charged word in the Greek vocabulary, honor, a word for which many throats have been cut here. In the American equivalent, the highest American civilian decoration, the word is “freedom.” A decoration, maybe, must use a costly word, a word people have lived and died for.
It is eleven at night, but wide-eyed babies are dandled at the tables and children run back and forth, true to the elongated Greek sense of time. I see my parea, the Greek word for company that has the sense of a kind of momentary family, at a table at the far end of the courtyard. There is Kostas passing through Athens from Brussels, Aura and her Dutch husband, a TV producer friend of theirs, some other people I don’t know, a woman and a fairy-tale old man, with white hair, brilliant blue eyes, and an air of sharp wintry vigor. They wave me over and pour me a glass of retsina; this place stakes part of its reputation on its own barreled wine, and while I am not a great retsina drinker, it can be bracing with blunt country food. It is wine’s equivalent of seawater, which sounds like an insult but isn’t; a breathtaking mouthful of seawater has a dazzling vital bitterness, like retsina’s. Kostas hands me a package of French books from Brussels, to take to his mother, an art historian, and his father, a professor of law, on the island of Thasos, where they have a summer house. “So you are on your way to Kavalla and to Thasos,” says Marina, who runs two art galleries, a winter one in Athens and a summer one on the island of Skiathos. Her son goes to the island school for half the year and the city school the other half, like many Greek children, and is annoyed to have to be back in the city for September, when the swimming is at its best. “Yes,” Marina says, stroking his hair while he glares at her, “we are some of the many Greeks who have eaten the seeds of the pomegranate and live our year in the pattern of Persephone—six months on earth, six months in hell. I hate to be back in Athens, too. Akhh, I envy you to be going to an island as beautiful as Thasos.” Her Akhh reminds me that we can’t even sigh the same way—modern Greek has no equivalent to our h sound, so what is “Ah” for us is Akhh for them. Nor can we laugh the same way—I have a vivid comic memory of the first time I saw a Greek translation of the comic strip “Peanuts.” “Xa, xa, xa,” said Snoopy in the punch-line frame, laughing in Greek.
“My father is Macedonian,” Marina says, and the old man at the table nods to me, “and his village is not so far from Thessaloniki. You are lucky to be going to Macedonia, there you will see real Greeks.”
“The only real Greeks,” her father says, “are Macedonians. We are not,” he whispers, “part Slav or Albanian or Turkish, like these others, we are the pure Greek race descended from the ancients.”
“Is that old man telling you that Macedonians are the only true Greeks?” calls out a dark-eyed man from the far end of the table. “Be careful, there is a Cretan at this table.”
Someone from a village of Epirus, the region bordering Albania, responds by reciting the names of famous schools and charities and museums founded by wealthy Epirote benefactors—“Without us, the modern Greek nation does not exist. We are the blood of the Byzantines who fled Constantinople after the Franks’ Crusades.”
The old man pats my hand and mutters, “The Cretans have taken a lot of air into their brains, but the fact is that most of them are descended from Saracen Arabs.”
Kostas winks at me and says under his breath, “There are actually no Greeks at this table, with one exception. There are actually no Greeks in Greece, with one exception. Remember my yiayia, Anastasia?” I had met her in Athens the summer before, at the wedding of Kostas’s oldest sister. Anastasia was brought up in Constantinople, and she had explained the guests to me. “You must not have the impression that these people, my dear, are real Greeks. I look at them and think, Get on your donkey and go home to your little village. I don’t know what Greeks these are, who beat their children and don’t know how to cook the foods of civilized people. The real Greeks are from Constantinople and from Asia Minor, my dear, we were never Turkified, we remained what we had always been, the creators of Orthodoxy, and the rulers of the eastern Roman Empire.” When Kostas steered me away, he said, “You notice that she was dramatizing—but she was not playacting. It’s a strong difference.” I do remember, and I whisper back that I now know how to neutralize all heated discussions about Papandreou and Mitsotakis and their two parties—surely neither of them is really Greek—and the government itself, how can it represent Greece, if no one in it is truly Greek? “You’d be surprised,” Kostas says, “how often just that line of criticism is taken up.”
Marina has taken her father’s head in her hand, and turned its profile to me. “You see this profile? All true Macedonians can be recognized by this profile—they all have the profile of Alexander the Great. You will see this in Macedonia, and you will see why Macedonia is Greek.” She too is dramatizing, but not playacting.<
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Her father is monitoring my plate and wineglass, with the warmth and absolutism of Greek hospitality. The Greek traditions of filoxenia are always written about as something conferred on the guest, but they are also a demonstration of the absolute power of the host; there is an element of force in this hospitality, perhaps shared by all Ottoman peoples, if the Turkish proverb is evidence: “The host is the sultan.” In Greece the guest is not asked what he wants, but shares what the host gives.
Greek taverna meals don’t come in individual but in communal portions, and are shared out at table. “Patricia,” says Marina’s father, “do you want onions in your salad?” He holds on the serving spoon chunks of onions, Greek onions that fuse fiery strength and sweetness, like Samson. “No thank you,” I answer, “the onions here are very strong unless they’re cooked.” “Patricia,” says the father, with the unwavering unaggressive certainty of someone who has set out to help someone else in sore need, “it’s true they’re strong, but they are invaluable for the cholesterol count, they help prevent rheumatism, and they are critical for the free healthy circulation of the blood. So I think you must want onions in your salad.”
Kostas kicks me under the table. “Yes,” I say, masquerading as someone who has made a choice, “I think I will have onions in my salad.”
“Thasos, Thasos, Thasos,” says Aura. “So you are flying to Kavalla, and then you take the ferry?” I nod. A song has started at another table, a Hadjidakis song called “Let’s Take a Walk on the Moon.” It is one of the most endearing features of Greek life, this unselfconscious singing that is present in every corner of Greek life. Greek bus drivers travel with stashes of their favorite tapes, and Greek dinners often end with song—in a nation so fraught with verbal argument, song is a way to agree. “Well,” says Aura, “in the waters off Thasos, you may very well meet the sister of Alexander the Great, who is known to frequent them, according to reports. And do you know how to answer her when she asks after her brother’s health?”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” I say, “but I was under the impression that Alexander the Great was—dead.”
“A pa pa pa!” cries Marina, and Aura leans forward. “Is Jesus Christ dead?” she asks. “His tomb was empty, no? And Alexander has no tomb, for all the claims people have made that it is found. And I know, because my grandfather worked in a cotton firm in Alexandria, and every office boy spent his weekends digging for the tomb of Alexander the Great. Now, as I say, you may very well encounter members of the Macedonian royal house where you are going. So let me do you a favor and save your life. There is a certain etiquette which is required, since they are a temperamental family.
“The images you must have seen by now of the Gorgona, the giant mermaid, with the magnificent cascades of hair and the beautiful breasts, rising from the sea holding a ship over her head in her two hands? Well, that mermaid is the sister of Alexander the Great.” I had seen many of these images painted on wood or on ceramic plaques—the toy and gift store on my street has some hanging in the window—but I had thought as I passed that she was a kind of odd marine counterpart to Saint George, rising up from the sea to rescue a ship in the way he had thrown down his lance to kill a dragon. I hadn’t realized her genealogy was so distinguished.
“What happens is this,” Aura continued. “She swims up to your ship and grasps the edge of the deck with her hands; then she asks, ‘Is great Alexander living?’ And you answer, ‘He lives and reigns, zei kai vasilevi.’ Or ‘He lives, he reigns, he rules the world.’ And then she will take your ship in her hands and take you herself where you want to go, swiftly and safely; she will still the waves, and teach you the music of the sea. Which is why our songwriters when they introduce a new song say ‘I learned it from the Gorgona.’
“But if you tell her that Alexander is dead, then she will go into a rage, and pound your ship with her huge fist down onto the floor of the sea. Or she will be grief-stricken, and begin to cry and chant mourning songs, mirologhia, the speech of fate, as we call them. And no one will survive, because when the mermaid mourns, everyone drowns. The mermaid’s mirologhia become powerful typhoons, and she tears out strands of her shining hair, which become bolts of lightning, and her sobs make the huge swells that wash over ships during storms. And speaking of liquid, we need another carafe, don’t we?” Marina’s father gets up out of his chair to marshal the waiter, and watching his movements, it occurs to me that we don’t observe fully if all we see in an aged body is weakness. He moves with a special vigor and force belonging to age, which is not an energy drawn from the shreds of youth, but of accomplished will, a strength coming from an expert judgment of the relation between him and his object, a calibration of just how much force it will take to get something or someone to do as he wills them to do. His aged body is a kind of physical philosopher, the components of motion are wordlessly analyzed as knowledge and practice come to play a role in his getting out of a chair.
The waiter brings us more wine, and when everyone’s glasses are filled, Kostas lifts his glass to Aura and says, “Well told. You are doing a great service for our guest by teaching her this story. Because the story teaches that if you are Greek you have to learn to lie in order to live. Because we all know that Alexander is in fact dead, but we are doomed to keep saying he is not in order to survive. And the only Greek who doesn’t know he is dead is the Gorgona, and she is mad. That is in another part of the story, the part you haven’t told, Aura, about how it happens that Alexander the Great’s sister is a mermaid.
“After Alexander the Great had conquered all the countries he knew of in the world and taken all their treasures, he called together the magicians and astrologers and interpreters of dreams who advised him, because as Patricia knows, Alexander never went on a campaign without a dream interpreter, and said to them: ‘Where can I find the library where the Fates store the scrolls of all the destinies of all living beings? I have conquered every kingdom on earth, but I have not yet conquered the Empire of Time, and only with that conquest will I live to enjoy what I have achieved.’ And a great dream interpreter said to him, ‘Your Majesty, you are the most powerful mortal on earth, but what the Fates, those great poets, write cannot be unwritten, only a little edited, its grammar corrected, a phrase polished. There is only one thing I know of that you can do to be sure that you will live to rejoice in your kingdom and your glory—if you want to live as long a life as the mountains have lived, you must become immortal. And that is a difficult thing to do, very very difficult.’ Alexander the conqueror said to the dream interpreter, ‘I didn’t ask you if it would be difficult, I asked you if it would be possible.’ His adviser replied, ‘Well, then, Your Majesty, within the borders of Greece, your own kingdom, exists the immortal water, and whoever drinks it need fear death no longer. But you must risk your life in order to obtain it. You must pass between two mountains that clash together and pulverize whoever tries to escape. Many athletes and aristocrats have been crushed there in their quest for the immortal water. And if you clear the passage between the mountains, you must descend under the world of Greece itself, where you will find a sleepless dragon who guards the immortal water day and night. You must kill the dragon and take the water and pass again through the grinding mountains.’
“Immediately Alexander mounted his horse Bucephalus, the horse who could fly although he did not have wings. Together they overcame the trials and Alexander took the glass carafe with the immortal water and brought it back to his palace in Macedonia. But the great hero forgot that having the immortal water was one thing, and guarding it was another. He gave the carafe to his sister while he rested from his arduous feats, and she tripped as she was taking it inside the palace and spilled the immortal water. By chance some drops fell on a hill full of wild onions, and that is why onions have such great keeping powers, and can be kept all winter without rotting.
“After Alexander had rested, he called for his sister to bring him the immortal water to drink. She, having thought
the carafe held ordinary water, told him that she had tripped and spilled it, but would bring him a fresh carafe. The great Alexander went nearly mad with rage, and he cursed his sister for depriving him of immortal life. He cursed her to live forever a half life, half woman, half fish, able to live fully neither on the earth nor in the sea. God heard him and changed her into a mermaid that people on ships see swimming through the waves. And she is so crazed with guilt because she caused the death of her brother that she compulsively stops ships to ask them if Alexander is living and will destroy anyone who says he is not.
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