“E,” he says to me, using a sound that is as distinctively Greek and as untranslatable as “uh” or “uhm-hmm,” sounds you don’t hear on these shores, “the prika part is over like sheep stealing, which is also against the law, is over. And we have a patron saint of sheep stealing, Saint Mamas. We had a lot of practice under the Turks in appearing to obey laws. With us, men obey some laws and women obey men. Maybe prika will disappear, but right now it has only changed its shape. Now the ideal is a girl who has a civil service job, because they can’t be fired. Or a job with a multinational; prime real estate is always attractive. But there are changes, too. The boy now has to offer something; he should show he can earn a decent living, or have a good degree, or at least be a kalo paidi, a decent guy, whereas before, all he really had to do was have a pair of balls. You’ll see if you stay here that prika is still around. But it’s more fun to talk about Dionysus, who took Ariadne without prika. Do you want to hear the story?” I nod that I do.
“When Dionysus was still an adolescent, he set out on a journey towards Naxos. Since it was a long way away from where he was, he needed to break the monotony of the journey and sat down on a boulder to relax. From the boulder as he looked down at his feet, he saw a plant beginning to grow directly in front of him, and the shape of its leaves and stems was so beautiful that he decided to take the plant with him and transplant it when he reached Naxos. So he uprooted it and carried it along with him. But the sun was burning hot and he was afraid that the plant would wither before he reached the island. He stumbled on the bone of a bird in the road, and got the idea to put the plant inside the hollow of the bone to protect it from the sun. Then he went further on his way. But held in his divine hands, the plant continued to grow, and it flourished so quickly that it spilled out below and above the bird’s bone. So he had the same worry that the plant would wither and pondered what to do next. Then he happened upon the bone of a lion, broader of course than the bird’s bone, and he fit inside it the bird’s bone with the green plant. In a little while his divine force made the tendrils of the plant spill out of the lion’s bone. He caught sight of the bone of a donkey, even larger than the lion’s bone, and he sheltered the two other bones and the plant inside it. Holding the three bones with the plant growing as rapidly as a river rushes, he arrived in Naxos. When he was ready to put the plant into the good dark soil of our island, he observed that the roots of the plant were tightly bound around the bones, and he could not separate the plant from them without destroying its roots. So he replanted it, leaves, bones, and all, just as it was. In just a little time the plant took root and flourished and became a vine that put forth grapes. From these vines, the god made the first wine and gave it to the people to drink. And the miracle of the drink came from the way the god had brought it to Naxos. Because when people drink wine, at first they sing and rejoice like birds. And when they drink more, they become as strong as lions, and as ready to fight, and when they drink still more, they act exactly like asses.” Basil hits the table with his fist, loving his punch line. I think it is funny too, but more because it seems comic to hear such a moralizing Christian story about that outstandingly amoral god, Dionysus. The god of frenzied inspiration is here used to convey the village equivalent of a message against drunk driving. The god’s gift of wine here is received with admonitory folk proverbs and wry skepticism, and he is admired as villagers would most admire him, for his magical fertility, divine agricultural powers.
We pay, and drive on to the church of Panagia Drossiani, the Dewy Virgin, the Virgin of Refreshment, probably named for the soft coolness of the glade where the chapel is built on its hill. Inside, there are two pictures of Christ as the Pantokrator, ruler of all, painted in the apse, and so two Saint Georges and two Saint Dimitris accompany them. The picture of the Panagia is unusually expressive. She looks surprised to be here at all in this position of prominence, her eyes wide, brave, and a little frightened. I wander into a dark chapel at the back of the church, looking around by the light of a candle. Against the wall are discarded silver icon casings, a stiff silver costume, an empty brocade some saint has abandoned. And there is a round, freestanding church candelabra, some of its candleholders bent and broken, lying against the wall, as if someone had fought with it. When we come out of the church, the old woman in black clothes who is caretaking it urges me to look at her embroidery. Her white pieces are as fine as stitched snow, but I don’t very much like the Greek fashion of throwing squares of ornamental cloth over every possible undraped surface, as if the furniture were naked and needed aprons of fig leaves. Basil calls out from the foot of the steps, “You’ll need at least one piece for your prika,” teasing me into the purchase. All the talk about prika made me curious about the other world, the dreamworld of alternate phenomena that accompanies all the realities of Greek life, and I looked up prika later, in Angeliki’s, Kostas’s sister’s, dream book, which dates from the fifties at least, since it was her mother’s. There is a mix of interpretations—if you dream of getting prika, the dream is unlucky, and you will be deceived in some financial dealing. If you are giving prika, expect money from a relative abroad, while marrying without prika is worst of all, meaning some enemy will step in to destroy a cherished hope. If you dream of any of the many fasts ordered by the church, the dream foretells that you will marry without a dowry. I wonder what happened after 1983, after prika was made illegal as a part of a marriage transaction. My own dream books were published then, and when I look up the dream, I can’t find it. As it has been removed from the legal code, it has lost its status as a dream.
We stop for a coffee at a village in the Melanes Valley, the site of another monumental kouros, who sleeps like a king of fertility waiting to wake up in the spring and impregnate the world. The kouros at Apollonas was austere, broken, his site made him tragic, but this one’s pastoral setting, reigning over the marvelous garden just below him, rich with pear trees, lemons, planes, cypresses, sunflowers and marigolds, turns the atmosphere pleasantly ribald. “Does your boyfriend wish he were this big?” Basil grins at me, gesturing toward the endless stone body of the kouros. “Perhaps he does,” I say drily. “And do you also wish that he were?” Basil persists with mock scholarly interest. “How can I not wish for him what he wishes for himself?” I say with pious obedience, and we climb down to drink coffee in the flowery shade.
Back in Khora, the generic name for so many of the main towns on Greek islands, I walk back to my hotel to call Kostas, which I have promised to do at least once a week when I am on the road. “Succulent, very tasty, akhh, my little mother,” one man says as I walk by, confident that I hear things only in my own language, whatever that might be; he uses an adjective that descends from the ancient Greek word for homecoming, nostos, used of Odysseus’s return to his motherland; someone fancifully told me that the meaning of the modern word evolved because homecoming was for Odysseus as sweet as the savor of home-cooked food. Homecoming is invoked often as one of the sensations Greek men yearn for erotically—whatever Greek women might yearn for, it is not this, since home cannot yearn for itself, food can have no appetite for itself. In the collections of modern Greek ballads of xenitia, exile from the homeland, in the voices of the men who have had to earn their livings outside Greek territory, I have naturally not found one in which the singer is a woman, among other reasons because Greek women did not vote until 1956 (remarkably, Turkish women could vote in the 1930s), and until 1983, lived under legal disabilities that evoke the status of women in certain Islamic countries. As late as 1890, Greek women were forbidden by law to become scientists, merchants, or civil servants. And until 1983, a husband exercised an absolute authority within the family; a young person could not be issued a passport without the written permission of a male who held paternal authority, and in the event that the father of a family was incapacitated in some way, decision-making power was not transferred to the wife, but controlled by a “family council” acting in conjunction with a court of law. The husband wa
s also entitled to choose where his wife would live. So the women in xenitia ballads either long for their men to come home, or ask for permission to accompany them and are refused. “There where I’m going, my girl,” says one song, “women cannot journey. /You would meet there unmarried Turks and married men from Europe/who would ravish you and murder me.”
As I travel here, I am losing the illusion that I know where I am. Words are like the facets of diamonds, showing only the shades of meaning in a language that history and experience, prejudice, ideology, politics, myth, desire, have cut out of them. It seems there is something poignantly and fruitfully incomplete in each language; each has its partial brilliances and inadequacies, each is a dream of the truth.
English and Greek have words for east, west, man, woman, but they don’t mean the same things or produce the same sensations. Even in translation, we often are not saying the same things, as the trouble over the Christian creed, which ultimately split the churches, demonstrated. Key Greek words and Latin words simply could not be made to render the same nuance. This can be true within Greek itself, where Greeks pray in Christ’s Greek prayer for artos, their daily bread, but they eat psomi. And the home Greeks yearn for is not the mystical better world of true freedom and dignity across the Jordan of African-American gospel music. Nor is it the storybook Jerusalem of the Jews, the place in which the Old Testament stories are perpetually relived and therefore true, nor is it the transfigured cottages of Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. It is not the home of the pioneers of the American West, which must be sought through the hardships of a physical and spiritual journey, and in the end be created, since it can be found in no other way. The home of the Greek ballads is a literal place, the familiar place where you grew up, where your mother and father were, where you were known as a boy, your childhood, your neighborhood. Perhaps it is also the place where you don’t have to be a hero, the place where you are always a boy. “Buy shoes from your own neighborhood, even if they are patched,” runs one popular Greek proverb. The xenitia songs also give wonderful through-the-looking-glass glimpses of America seen from the other side—there are the grim ballads about the stormy ship’s passage to New York, the loneliness of wandering New York like scattered birds, not knowing anyone, the comic defiance of the son who declares to his mother that he will fall down and die before he will consent to go to Chicago, the son who pleads that he doesn’t want to die in America, the jealous songs of local youths who have to compete for girls with wealthy gray-haired men who have returned from America to choose, at last, young brides, spending freely, sporting dyed mustaches, and playing the pallikari.
“Oh, look what a pretty blouse she has on,” says one housewifely-looking woman to another as I climb the staircased streets typical of a fortress town like this to get to my hotel. This must be what people mean when they say they wish they could attend their own wakes, this power to overhear whatever is said about yourself while remaining invisible. When I call Kostas, he sounds depressed, so I tell him the Christian fable I heard about Dionysus today at lunch. He knows it but not anything about its origins. “Sometimes these stories, which in our cultural politics are supposed to prove our direct descent from the ancient Greeks, ‘the greatest people in history,’ as the voice of the son et lumière at the Parthenon says, actually came to us through the European travelers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They would be astonished as they passed through villages that villagers knew nothing of the ancient mythology they themselves were brought up on, and would tell them stories out of ancient Greek literature, which would then evolve into folk tales, or be grafted onto them. I remember an anecdote about a Philhellene fighter during the 1821 War of Independence, who told some klepht leader that he reminded him of Achilles, or some such compliment. And the klepht said to him, ‘Who was Achilles? Did the musket of Achilles kill many?’ But we will never know the proportions of import and export in these stories, because, and often by design, we are poor historians and great fabulists. We accuse you of having no grasp of history; Greeks have even less sense of history than Americans, only a kind of imperialism with regard to the stories of the past. Who else would be so blindly possessive of antiquity that they would call their air force academy the School of Icarus, invoking a patron who after all couldn’t fly and falls to his death because of faulty equipment? We never realize how inadvertently comic this makes us, like a nouveau riche showing off the correct acquisitions that are supposed to make him seem cultivated. When I was in the States, I laughed whenever I was reminded that the Greek-American men’s association calls itself ‘The Sons of Pericles,’ a magnificent faux pas if you remember your Protagoras. The legitimate sons of Pericles were such duds that Plato uses them as examples to prove virtue cannot be inherited. And I am tired of us today.”
“What makes you tired?” I ask.
“Because the police are beating the transportation demonstrators here, and now, apparently with the approval of higher-ups, have taken to removing their badges so no one will be able to identify them in complaints. And the minister who should be responsible gave one press conference to say this was all right, that policemen should not be required to wear badges ‘in order for their job to be easier,’ and then reversed himself after the outcry to say they would after all wear badge numbers, that he originally hadn’t had enough information. But what’s most depressing is that getting beaten up is taken for granted here. I’ve been beaten up, for God’s sake. I was just looking at an interview with a former government minister who was asked if he’d ever been beaten by the police. Of course, he said, during the struggles for union with Cyprus in the sixties. But then the police wore badges. Children in schools are slapped and punched and hit with belts. In the nineteenth century, they were actually tortured. Have you read Patoukhas?” I say I haven’t. “It’s a turn-of-the-century comic novel by a Cretan writer in which the hero runs away from school after being tortured by the monk who runs the school with falanga, a method in which the soles of the feet are beaten which was used elsewhere by the Greek communists who tortured Nicholas Gage’s mother Eleni during the civil war. Here’s a Greek proverb, knowing your fondness for them: ‘Beating comes from paradise.’ In which case, God is a sadist. I’m sorry, but it drives me wild to see this as an accepted part of civil life here, no matter what party is in power and closing their eyes to it. And of course I would rather that you not see it.”
“I know. And I wish you hadn’t seen the tapes of Rodney King.” I had been in Greece when the videotape of that beating was first broadcast. “But we can’t stop corruption we won’t see,” I say, struggling for a grip on this rock face.
“I know,” he says. But I can tell he doesn’t feel better. “In any case, there’s a bon mot circulating that you’ll enjoy. Someone recently asked a clever political cartoonist whether the country has a future. Well, he said, we have a past. You can’t ask for everything.”
I go out for a sunset walk along the harbor, to see who is represented by the two modern statues—I hadn’t recognized either of their features when I’d passed them before. On the base of one statue is a relief of Shakespeare—this is a scholar of English, Michaeli Damiralis, who spent part of his life (1857–1917) translating Shakespeare into modern Greek. The lateness of these dates is one measure of how intermittent the contact has been between Greece and the West, as is the introduction of the first piano on mainland Greece, also in the nineteenth century. It is hard to imagine Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin all arriving together at the same moment along with the renewed consciousness of the classics of Greek antiquity, all seen through the prism of romanticism.
The other statue is of a government minister named Protopapadakis, executed in 1922 along with five others for criminal, even treasonable, mismanagement of the Asia Minor campaign. The meaning of the statue is unreadable—does it mean that Naxos is in agreement with the substantial number of both Greeks and foreign diplomats who saw the executed men as scapegoats and their
deaths as shallow vengefulness? Or does it mean that Naxos views its native sons on the Greek mother principle, as the best boys in the world no matter what their failings? I won’t ever know. I wander back through the bazaarlike jumble of patisseries, tavernas, and jumble shops—“We buy gold, silver, used books,” one tantalizes. I walk upstairs to the common salon of the hotel, where a group of people, some Greek, some foreign tourists, are watching a music program—a Rubensesque Turkish man, dressed in spangles, is rolling his hips in the motion of the belly dance, and licking his lower lip with a suggestive tongue between lyrics. Pousti, someone says, using the Turkish word for passive homosexual, which is the standard Greek term too. It strikes me, hearing the word, and watching the man’s feminine movements, that the scandal of this act is its violation not of the sexuality of the individual but of the culture. In these two cultures with their deification of masculinity, the most illicit desire a man could have would be not to desire a woman but to desire to be like a woman. The daring is in the suggestion that a man might have a desire to be feminine, something that is forced here to be inadmissible, through popular imagery, and behavior and religion—it is terrifying to think there might be freedom as well as subjection in being a woman. The same man who said pousti, confident that nobody but his neighbor hears him, jokes, “What they call Greek, we call Ottoman love.”
“Yes, but there’s a difference,” says the other man, mesmerized by the performance. “The Greeks use vaseline, the Turks use spit.”
Dinner with Persephone Page 17