Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  “So now you know, Patricia, that in Greece when you hear a story, you must expect to hear its shadow, the simultaneous counterstory. Because as you said, Marina, we have eaten the six pomegranate seeds here, and all our stories come in two versions, and the story that is told in hell will sound different from the same story as they tell it in heaven. And you know that in Greece you must never use the past tense when you are speaking of Alexander the Great, although you also know that he is dead. We are telling different stories at the same time. So if you see the mad mermaid, what will you say?”

  “He lives and reigns.” We overhear the strains of another familiar song starting at a table, one of the loveliest and most elegiac of modern Greek songs, set to a poem of Seferis’s called “Denial,” everyone here knows because the Theodorakis melody is so treasured. “We were thirsty at noon, but the water was brackish …” Once begun, this song is irresistibly taken up. Sophisticated Marina and her white-haired father are singing it with their heads close together, as if in intimate conversation: “With what heart and spirit/ what desire and passion/we lived our life …” There are ghosts in this haunted language, there is a ghost in this song, in the form of the word for desire, pothos. The ghost is the ghost of Alexander, whose association with the word pothos, irresistible longing, is so strong that classical scholars have written monographs about it. Alexander’s urge to cross the Danube, and his urge to make the pilgrimage to the oracle of Zeus-Ammon in Egypt to be formally proclaimed a son of Zeus, are both described with the word pothos. It is Alexander’s word, the logos of Alexander. The song is ending: “With what heart and spirit/what desire and passion/we lived our life. A mistake!/So we changed our life.”

  Pothos, Alexander’s word, has a special nuance, almost as if desire and ambition were fused together, as if a lover had an ambition as well as a desire for his object, a nuance which makes sense in a world in which the very ambitious, like Alexander’s mother, declared that their children had been conceived in lovemaking with gods. I imagine I can feel Alexander trying to escape his word, like a firefly in a glass jar. But the dead are in such different conditions than we are that the boundaries of a word are enough to contain them. It was a coincidence hearing this word sung after the dinner-table stories, and a coincidence that I, through accidents of reading and childhood accidents of experience that began this journey, am here tonight to recognize it. I have a mental glimpse of the kind of connect-the-dot drawings that show you the shape of a constellation in books that teach you how to recognize them. The Greeks made their constellations out of myths and immortalities, but I am not Greek, so I trace my own out of history and mortality. I draw my imaginary line between two fireflies who have traveled an immense distance, a firefly conqueror audible for a moment in a word it was in his character to speak, and a temporary firefly consciousness who recognizes it. Mine is a constellation of fireflies.

  MIRRORS AS BIOGRAPHERS

  Off Constitution Square downtown, the police are beating demonstrators who are protesting against the privatization of the buses. It is impossible to judge from the footage on the morning news how the beatings began, but the scene of at least fifteen policemen attacking one demonstrator and beating him to his knees with nightsticks, the tear gas masks on policemen’s faces, the threatening of the television reporter and chasing of the cameraman following him were unambiguous images, whatever their origins.

  One of the worst fires recorded in Attica, which started last Saturday, so fierce that it had a twenty-kilometer blazing front, closing down the highways between Athens and northern Greece, seems to have been set deliberately. A government spokesman and several local government and environmental officials blame the fire on an organized plan by arsonists who work for land developers and real estate speculators. The mayor of a town called Kalamos turned in an arson device with a full gas cylinder found near a gas station to the local fire squad.

  Arson is one of the ugliest traditions of modern Greece—nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts almost uniformly record the Greek use of arson to settle property claims, to clear land for farming, and the indifferent, almost contemptuous Greek attitude toward trees, produced in part by the scarcity of fertile farmland, and by the centrality of cultivatable land to the marriage dowry. Even William Miller, a profoundly philhellenic historian and resident of Greece at the turn of the century, wrote exasperatedly that the expatriate Greek millionaires ought to turn their attention to reforesting Greece and reeducating the Greeks about forests rather than building the grand urban monuments they often favored. In the Greece of the 1980s and ’90s, the protection of forest land is still regarded ambivalently—over forty percent of forest land in Attica is involved in contested claims, and the state’s own commitment to protect the land is as ambivalent as the citizens’. Sometimes the ambivalence extends even to the people hired to protect the forests. I was told about one part-time forest fighter who set fire to a forest in Akhaia; he explained to the judge that he was afraid the new government plans for forest management would eliminate his job.

  Forest ranger posts are understaffed and fire roads are often neglected, while the government rarely defies the builders and developers who seem to start construction on sites almost as soon as fires have died down. Whole towns have risen up on land acquired by arson. And the claims on protected land, which because they are rarely based on solid documentation can be neither effectively refuted nor proved, are an unexpected demonstration of the enormous force of myth as a political weapon. Perhaps the most familiar and the first full account of the power of the imagination over political action in the matter of appropriating land is in the Old Testament, in which the Hebrew people destroy communities and attack the gods of other peoples living on land which they believe belongs to them, according to a story God has told them, a story into whose maw bodies continue to be thrown. In fact, following a tangled skein of irony, one of the classics of Zionism, Yehuda Alkalai’s The Third Redemption, published in 1843, which helped inspire the resettlement of modern Israel by the Jews, itself drew inspiration and practical ideas from the Greek Revolution of 1821, an effect the Greek revolutionary leaders, Christian nationalists who had uneasy relations with the Ottoman Jews and who often spoke disparagingly of them, can hardly have intended. And the Jews, whose Hanukkah is, among other things, a feast celebrating the rejection of Greek culture, in opposition to a royal successor of one of Alexander’s generals, Antiochus IV Epiphanes (“Greeks gathered against me,” runs one line in the Hanukkah prayers), seem to have formed their modern nation, at least in part, on a modern Greek example, in an ironic convergence of Zionism and Hellenism. Stories that seem perfect strangers to each other often intersect unexpectedly, like those couples whose chance encounters destine them to marry. And it may be that we should approach stories with more caution; many of them live longer than we do. I have read that in some areas of Greece, the claims on forest land by people who assert it is situated on ancestral property amount to more acreage than actually exists. “We also have ancestral claims on the many mansions in heaven,” Kostas told me during one dinner in Athens. “Where the standard language is the koine Greek of the New Testament. Just think what the consequences would be if Christ had spoken Latin.”

  I watch another news story as I am getting dressed to run errands before I catch the afternoon plane to Kavalla. There are shots of foreign dignitaries being greeted in front of the presidential palace. My eye is jarred when I am faced with this world in which the images of authority are so different, and would only become recognizable by living here. The building that here evokes jeers, or affection, or anxiety, is delicately scaled, to my American eye, looking like a substantial Mediterranean summer vacation villa. I walk past it at least twice a week, and it shocks me to pass so close to it, close enough to see in full detail the faces of the heads of state as they shake hands for the camera. There are always TV camera vans and cars parked across the street from the palace, their doors open as the reporters and cameramen loung
e with one foot on the sidewalk, radios playing, cigarettes lit.

  As I watch the television producing images that correspond to the ones already in the viewers’ experience, I realize that television is a technological extension of the mirror—every time I turn on a Greek program, with its different manners and inflections, symbols and conventions, it is like looking into a mirror and seeing not myself but a complete unsuspected world of other beings, like having dreams that belong to someone else’s life. I have been thinking about mirrors, second-century mirrors and twentieth-century mirrors. Artemidorus’s second-century clients dreamed of them, and so do the twentieth-century dreamers in my oneirokrites. The difference is in what they expect to see in the mirrors. The twentieth-century mirrors show unexpected reflections, images of other people, or of animals, or of landscapes, worlds within faces—our mirrors have been tutored by surrealist painters. The twentieth-century mirrors are themselves unstable; the dreamer may be looking for his reflection in a shattered mirror, something the second-century dreamers don’t seem to do. Artemidorus’s mirrors are more obedient and static, as are the faces of his dreamers, which seem to remain their own, although their reflections can be distorted, or can seem uglier than they really are. “Standing in front of a mirror and seeing one’s reflection in the glass as it actually is means good luck,” he writes, but I suspect him here of one of the flashes of deadpan irony I think I recognize in him. A philosopher of dreams, above all, knows that no mirror shows us as we are, since, like Snow White’s stepmother, we never look into them without a wish. We can only hope to catch a partial glimpse of our true reflections in the responsive expressions on another person’s face, and only then on the condition that we recognize that another person’s face is not a mirror.

  I pick up my dry cleaning before I go downtown for a haircut—I have had to change cleaners because the man whose shop I had been using asked persistently for a date with me, although he displayed on his wall not only a picture of General Plastiras, a prominent Greek military figure and politician of the twenties, but a color shot of his wife and two little girls. I asked him the last time to tell me the names of his wife and children, but his campaign carried on, and although there are certain kinds of men I find irresistible, my temptations don’t include married Greek dry cleaners. But the price of virtue is as always a high price—the white-haired dry cleaner I chose because he looked safely decrepit through his front window is charging me significantly higher rates.

  I try to flag down a taxi to take me downtown for my haircut, but the driver throws his head back like a horse refusing a bit, rolls his eyes, and clicks his tongue against his front teeth. It is the wordless no the Greeks share with the Turks—he is not going in my direction. The Athenian taxi system is, I think in some moods, one of the great arguments against the city. You can only get your ride if it fits the driver’s preference, and this involves you in shouting out your destination as he drives by, something you may not want all the world to hear. It is a terrible system for the discreet, the shy, or anyone sensitive to rejection. Still, I find a consenting driver, and am on time for my appointment with O Kyrios Emmanuel, as the master hairdresser is reverently called by his staff.

  The retention of the “Kyrios” and the formal definite article O has a certain drama in an environment where the title is usually so quickly dropped, and where newspapers and magazines routinely call former prime minister Papandreou “Andreas.” O Kyrios Emmanuel is artistic, “as a gift of nature, since I am from Alexandria,” he tells me, “and like many children of the city chosen by Alexander, I am a very old soul, both artistic and not easily impressed. I think I am now on my last incarnation, there is so little I have not seen. You, I think, must be a very young soul, in your first incarnation—I can tell by the way your eyes light up with joyful surprise at each new thing you hear, like a newborn who cannot believe the world is so beautiful.” I resign myself to the fact that O Kyrios Emmanuel has decided to give me a metaphysical haircut. I had been thinking this morning about mirrors, and now I am one. It may be that O Kyrios Emmanuel helplessly possesses the kind of brutal sentimentality that runs from antiquity through Christianity, that sees a face that shows its suffering as a wise face, probably a good face. But it is also true that wisdom is not only won through an appetite for suffering. O Kyrios Emmanuel believes I am transparent in the way an icon is—I may have seen people so corrupt that their lives could best be described as decompositions; it may be that I don’t choose to make my face a theater of pain; I may have fought as hard as a guerrilla soldier to keep a route to joyfulness open in my face—but for O Kyrios Emmanuel, I am a looking glass, in which he sees the image of his own honed judgment and the ancient wisdom he has acquired.

  While he is cutting my hair, O Kyrios Emmanuel gives me a portfolio to leaf through, of newly developed photographs he took on his summer vacation at Monemvasia, a famously picturesque town of the Peloponnesus, restored under the patronage of millionaires. They are elegant, a boat with a geometrized Mondrian-like reflection of itself in the water, a crashingly romantic shot of waves breaking over the rocks, but they are inane—Greece is often too beautiful to be a good subject for the cameras of amateur photographers, who capture its beauty only as decor, and miss what makes the best still photographs, the sense that they are moments out of a continuing story. O Kyrios Emmanuel tells me he is taking zembekiko lessons, learning the famous Greek dance you see mostly men dancing, with dramatic improvised solos. “We didn’t do this so much in Alexandria,” he says, “we had more of the tsifteteli,” the belly dance the Greeks took up from the Turks, whose arm movements are the signal of a dance in an erotic mood, even among teenagers at discos. I ask him to tell me about Alexandria, which lost the last mass of its Greek population in the 1960s, when Nasser set out to ensure that it would be Egyptians who profited from Egypt’s resources. “Perhaps it takes an old soul to feel it, but there you can feel the presence of Alexander as nowhere else, not even in Macedonia, which after all was only the country of his boyhood, not of his manhood. But Alexandria was a city that came to him in a dream, when he was given the omen that he had chosen the right site, through certain verses of Homer’s that were quoted by a white-haired man in the dream. And it was in Egypt that it was confirmed that Alexander was a god and the true son of Zeus. Oh, yes, there are proofs of it in his life story. You know, for instance, about the sign that occurred just before Alexander fought the Persian king Darius at the battle of Gaugamela? Alexander was addressing the troops, and inspiring them to victory over the barbarians. He raised his right hand and prayed that if he were the true son of Zeus the Greeks should be protected and should win this battle. There had been some debate about the right moment to attack the enemy, but at that instant an eagle, the bird of Zeus, flew down and hovered over Alexander’s head, then the bird itself led the Greek troops into the battle, which they won. You don’t believe this? There were eyewitnesses.” It is the first time that I have been told a story out of Plutarch while my hair is being blow-dried. He seems a person who would enjoy the small erudition of knowing the source, so I guess, since he hasn’t mentioned it, that he may not know it is from Plutarch—or that it is a story.

  When I pay the bill, I discover that I am ten dollars short. So far, it seems that all bills in Greece are paid in cash. I go to the bank to get cash for my rent, I pay utilities at either the post office or their headquarters in cash. Checks seem not to be accepted, and my landlady tells me, although I can’t verify it, that it is actually illegal to send a check in payment through the mail. I tell O Kyrios Emmanuel that I will go to the bank for the extra cash, because I will be away for the month, but he waves me out airily, saying, “Bring the money whenever you remember it.”

  I stop on the way to the airport at one of the Alpha-Beta supermarkets, grand-scale food palaces with products imported from all over Europe that are said to have revolutionized the Greek diet, a mark of Greece’s membership in the EEC. I want to buy a particular brand of Swis
s chocolate for Kostas’s parents, who can find it easily in Thessaloniki, but not on the island of Thasos. Though the selection is luxurious, there is still a core of the foods that declare you are on Greek territory—olives, feta, loukaniko sausage, octopus, fresh capers, stuffed vine leaves, pastourma, the cured meat that in Turkey is still made with camel, tahini, the special Greek pastas, manestra, kritharaki, trakhana. As I am getting into the car with my purchases, I see a sign with the market’s slogan, “kai tou pouliou to gala,” a proverbial Greek phrase for recherché luxury, “there is even bird’s milk,” that dates back at least to the poet Menander, who wrote of Samos, a famously fertile island, that life was so abundant there that even the birds gave milk.

  At the airline terminal, a sign at the check-in counter tells passengers: “Macedonia is Greek and has been for centuries. Read history.” Tape-recorded bells announce the departure of flights for Rhodes, Kefallonia, Crete, Zakinthos, like a choice of dreams. But I board the plane for Kavalla, decorated inside with a bestiary of fish with wings, and fly over the Saronic Gulf at sunset, the water like blue space beneath me, into blue space above me. I pass the flight reading a men’s magazine with the young Marlon Brando on the cover, a kind of equivalent of Esquire, which presents itself with self-assured virility, and has had various staff members in and out of the government, I am told. This is one of the less considered consequences, maybe, of living in a small country—the web is very tight, and the relations between press and business and government almost inevitably more close-knit. I turn to the cover article on the Greek man and his mother, which leads off with macabre double-page color spreads of well-known TV and show business personalities and their mothers. Four plump, sixtyish mothers are pictured punishing their fortyish sons, pulling the men’s hair and boxing their ears. One is shown pretending to diaper her muscular son, his hairy belly dramatized by the white cloth, and the outlines of his adult testicles visible through his diapers. In another spread, a hefty comedian with a heavy beard and dark-ringed, exhausted eyes is sprawled across the lap of his mother, who wears a ladylike shirtwaist dress and carefully waved gray hair, as she lifts her hand to spank his half-bared buttocks. Each of the mothers describes the high points of her childbirth and describes what her son means to her. “He is all. He is everything,” says one; “He is more than everything,” says another, “he is above my life.”