Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  When the kamaki has given up, I take a path up to the cottage-sized chapel overlooking the sea, knowing I have time before the bus comes. A tiny taverna is perched like a bird’s nest on a ledge overlooking this village’s dramatic sea, going up in white flames on the rocks. Strange how in one village the sea shows war, in another, peace. A woman is baking bread in an outdoor oven and a very pregnant dog walks up the path with me. The chapel is Saint John’s, as its principal icon shows. The door is loosely fastened by wire, and inside, the debris of God’s housekeeping that women do here is scattered on a small table—fresh candles, matches, olive oil, and at the foot of the altar, a tiny vase of fresh flowers. Outside there is a small cemetery. The graves are decorated with plastic wreaths of flowers, and set into the tombstones are old photographs of country couples, the men in peaked caps, the women with black shawls draped over their heads. Marble tablets lie flat over the graves, carved with funeral messages, looking as if someone had left a note for the deceased on a memorandum pad. The very banality of the messages—“We think of you far away, and wish you a good journey”; “Though you are gone, you are never out of our thoughts”—is a measure of being alive. Only the living can enact banality, it is out of the range of death. The coffins, I think, must have been brought up here over this rough, hilly track by donkey carts.

  In the afternoon, I meet my Aegina hostess and her other guests for the last swim of the season; the water temperature is changing, from the slight champagne chill the Aegean has even on the hottest summer day, to hint at an approaching numbing coldness. We eat cheese pies and drink one of the stony Greek whites, a laconic wine, on a beach known for a single Doric column that overlooks it. This beach was familiar to Samuel Gridley Howe, the husband of the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” who took part in the Greek War of Independence, and found employment for the hungry in building a mole here, which still does its work. When Howe’s project was finished in 1828, he wrote in his diary, “I have enriched the island of Aegina by a beautiful, commodious, and permanent quay, and given support to seven hundred poor.” The passing of the afternoon makes a fairy tale for us; as the sun sets, spilling great golden sheaves of light onto the darkening sea, the moon rises, a distillation of pearl, in a perfect balance of day and night—for about a quarter of an hour, we swim between the sun and the moon.

  I look around the table at everyone who has just come out of the sea, faces smoothed by the swimming, their lips with the faint unconscious purely physical and private smile that people have when they’ve just been kissed. We have that involuntary physical intimacy that irradiates a group of people who have just finished a beautiful swim. An outsider could look around at us and know what each person looks like after sex. We all look as if we had just made love.

  POLYTECHNIC NIGHT

  The morning paper features an ad for a car called the Passat Macedon, photographed against a backdrop of a marble relief of Alexander the Great riding on Bucephalus—“It has all the qualities to conquer you,” promises the slogan.

  Tonight is the anniversary of the student protest against the junta at the University of Athens, the Athens Polytechnic, on November 17, 1973, when the military drove tanks into the crowds of protesters, and several students were killed. I have seen the grave of one of them, buried with honor at the Protonekrotafeio, the great central cemetery. Many people have told me this was the turning point of the junta years, at least symbolically, that this was the moment the junta was seen by both the right and the left wing as an enemy of Greece itself, killing the Greek future. The memory of this day is such a grave one that it is commemorated by an official nationwide school holiday.

  A number of people have also told me to stay at home tonight, and as much as possible today, since it is a day when anti-American feeling runs high, since the United States supported the Greek junta and played a shadowy role in planning the coup that put it in place. Warnings have come from enough people, both acquaintances and real friends, for me to take them seriously. One well-known student participant in these protests, who is now a radio commentator and author, is interviewed in the paper. When asked if the legacy of the 1973 Polytechnic is still alive, he answers, “Yes … like Alexander the Great.” An impossible, and sometimes faintly demeaning, comparison is often drawn between the current generation of students, whose moral world is more ambiguous, and the ones of that moment of stark and utter heroism when what was calculated was sheer risk, not the patient estimation of good and evil embedded in each other that the work of peace requires. But it has always been harder to work out how to live a good life than how to die a good death.

  I see on the news that people have been laying wreaths since early morning on the site of the Polytechnic building. The youth vote is being courted on all sides; the opposition party is sending representatives to visit the site and make speeches, the majority party has promised a large donation to restore the Polytechnic building, badly in need of repair, partly because of student riots last year.

  On my way to see a friend with a new baby, I buy some quinces to make the most magical of Greco-Turkish dishes, quinces stuffed with lamb, cinnamon, and rice. A neighbor stops me, to admire a necklace I am wearing of multicolored stars. “Is it from Macedonia?” she wants to know; the Macedonia issue is at fever pitch, and the stars the Greeks see at the moment are all stars of Vergina, like the ones from King Philip’s grave treasures, whose outline has been adopted by the new republic for its flag.

  On the corner of Hymettus Street, a men’s clothing store offers Yves St. Laurent accessories. In front of the big glass window, a gria, an old lady wearing the widow’s black dress, stockings, and head scarf, is selling flowers from brightly colored plastic buckets, and from a huge basket on wheels, sesame-coated koulouria, the bread rings that are eaten throughout the Near and Middle East, wherever the Ottomans governed. A man walking home with loaves of bread is hailed frantically from a car—“Yia sou, my Sotiris, yia sou.” Sotiris waves back: “How’s it going, mine, how’s it going, you great big one?” Greek affection is possessive; a family is often just called something that translates as “my ones.”

  The baby, who likes to slow dance, will not have a name until he is baptized, a year or maybe two years from now. For the moment, he is called Kourkoumbini, after a popular pastry dusted with powdered sugar. He will be called this exactly as if it were a given name, and I enjoy it so much that I would find it a wrench to give it up for a conventional Yiannis or Constantine. There are different rationales for this practice of the delayed name; in some parts of Greece, it was a safeguard against evil spirits, who might come and take the tender child if they had something as concrete as a name to go by. In Zakinthos, unbaptized babies were called Drakos, or Drakaina, Dragon, something far less appetizing than Kourkoumbini, in order to frighten off evil spirits who might be tempted to interfere. Kourkoumbini, like all Greek babies, lies between East and West even on his changing table. Nicknamed for a Turkish pastry, he sleeps on Mickey Mouse crib sheets, with Winnie the Pooh wallpaper overhead, while on his changing table, the Vaseline and Johnson’s baby powder share the surface with an icon of the Archangel Michael. My friends fiddle with their television set, which gives information in Russian, Greek, French, Czech, Italian, and Magyar. A game show is playing—when the male contestant calls out the right answer, the host shouts, “Triumph! Triumph!” and they kiss each other on both cheeks. My friends invite me to stay for supper and tell me there’s a drakulariko (after Dracula), a monster movie, on television, but I am nervous about Polytechnic night, and go home, where I amuse myself by reading an advice column in a women’s magazine. A sixteen-year-old wonders whether to sleep with her boyfriend. If they break up, and she is no longer a parthena, who will marry her? Another asks how to stop her boyfriend from making so much noise during sex—her neighbors come to their windows and call out, “Shame to you, we all have children at home.” The adviser tells her, apparently following Greek convention, that men are usually more row
dy during sex than women. Another woman of thirty-two, who has had a series of bitter experiences in love, asks whether or not to accept a proposal that has come her way through a matchmaker, and to make the kind of marriage her grandmother did.

  The morning news makes me glad I chose to stay in—Polytechnic night was full of violence. Some five hundred self-styled “anarchists” ran through the city center, smashing shop windows and throwing Molotov cocktails into the central post offices and various banks. They bombed shops, bus-ticket kiosks, and a New Democracy (conservative) Party office building. Twenty-six people have been arrested and riot police are posted outside the Polytechnic until further notice.

  Newspapers here could offer a daily schedule of demonstrations, as they do television programs. The week’s protests go on—Greek farmers demonstrate against the government’s agricultural policies, blocking the Athens-Lamia highway, spilling milk in the streets of Thessaloniki, and blocking entrances to that city. Schoolteachers demonstrate outside the Ministry of Education, in a “severe confrontation” between them and the deputy minister of education. The medical school students demonstrate, ending in a fight between them and the riot police. According to one newspaper, a student leader called police officials to say that the police were obstructing a peaceful demonstration and threatening the students, and the officials replied, “Good,” giving the special squads implicit permission to start the beatings—women demonstrators said the police especially singled them out. I look in Artemidorus to see how beatings were imagined in the second century—the dreams of beating are favorable, he writes, if you strike only people you rule, with the exception of your wife. To dream of beating her is a sure sign that she is committing adultery.

  I am going out for a drink with a neighbor’s relative, a computer programmer who lives a few streets over. He was born and raised in this neighborhood, went to the local school, and has lived his entire adult life on the next street over, though he keeps his father’s house in a Peloponnesian village for weekends. I seize the opportunity to ask him about the names of some of the streets we are walking through to the café; it is profoundly disorienting to move through streets named for cities and historical events you know nothing about, as if space itself were full of conversation and references you can never grasp. But Christos doesn’t know what the streets commemorate either, or why the district is called Pangrati, or how to translate into Greek the café’s Italian name. They just are what they are. We stop to look at the headlines of the afternoon newspapers displayed on poles at the news kiosk—there is still a drama here in the changing headlines of the newspapers, an urgency expressed like the old-fashioned newsboys’ cries of “Extra, Extra!,” a sense that fates can alter absolutely between morning and afternoon. These are full of pictures of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who has been on a twenty-day trip to Greece, based on a yacht owned by the billionaire London-based shipping owner John Latsis. I have some letters to mail, so we stop outside the post office, where the domestic and international boxes are marked, to my permanent pleasure, esoterico and exoterico.

  We settle at a table inside the smoke-filled café, and order mezedes and a Cypriot red wine called Othello. Preparations are under way for a day of national demonstration about the issue of the name of Macedonia, and Christos is livid about the new republic’s declaration of its name. “They are robbers, they are thieves,” he says. “Suppose I just camped in your apartment and said it was my apartment.” “But,” I say, “that is not what they are doing, that is what you are worried that they will do.”

  “We will go to war if they keep the name, we will fight them,” Christos says, hitting the table with his palm. “Do you really think a war would be more fruitful than a political solution?” I want to know. “The European Community does not support Greece’s absolutist stand on the name, and Greece is straining its relationship with valuable allies. This doctrinal insistence on the name seems to me to be trying to practice politics as if the world were ideal, and not one of imperfect compromise. If their using the name Macedonia seems to you to constitute a territorial claim, then isn’t this the moment to get them to show their professed good will, to search together for a compromise name, and to firmly establish the borders with a treaty signed by all the European Community?”

  “Pay attention, pay attention,” Christos hisses, jabbing his forefinger in the air. “Macedonia is Greek. Do you think Alexander the Great was a Slav? What good will a treaty do; everyone knows where the borders are, and borders won’t stop their aggression. They want Thessaloniki.”

  “But if they do,” I say, “the name is not a piece of magic that will magically secure the borders. You will just keep yourselves shouting across the borders like children having tantrums, ‘Is not Macedonia.’ ‘Is too.’ ” But of course in this part of the world, I think to myself, names are treated as magic, personal names, place names. A person’s name is a territorial matter, makes a claim to patronage, or states a claim on some property, attribute, or ambition. The Ottoman Turks for a long period wouldn’t permit any Greeks but the wealthy, and often pro-Turkish, Phanariot Greeks to name their sons Alexander. Some Byzantine Greeks took it as an evil premonition that the imperial family had “run out of names” and that a Constantine’s coming to the throne again in 1449 was the signal of the fall of what a Constantine had founded. And of course, Greece has itself made territorial claims through names. Maps published at the turn of the century, when the Ottoman Empire was tottering, identified great swatches of Turkey as Greece. And there is the case of the Greek border with southern Albania, which, whatever you think about the crude resolution of the border dispute, is a case in which Greece makes its territorial claim through a name. “Do you think that Skopje is using the name Macedonia in the same way that right-wing Israelis call the West Bank ‘Judaea and Samaria’ and that Greece uses the name ‘northern Epirus’?” I ask with tactless curiosity. “It is not the same at all,” he answers. “Macedonia is Greek. And so is northern Epirus. It has always been so, and will always be, whatever the usurpers of our history may claim.”

  We find a way to change the subject, but Christos gives me another glimpse of the politics of the Greek moyen homme. He is talking about Polytechnic night, and offers his solution to the disorder. The reason these anarchists run wild through the streets on November 17, he says, is that the Greek public is not yet ready to face the real solution, which is to have the MAT (literally, unit for the “restoration of order”) riot police surround the Polytechnic and without interference, beat some of the perpetrators to death. It is a surprise to hear the tone of the junta in the voice of a young man, but the junta could not have been simply imposed from outside, but represented one genuine political impulse in a country which has an authoritarian tradition, at times paternalistic, and at others dictatorial.

  “You must,” says Christos, walking back with me through the series of tiny squares that make little villages and definite sections of all Athens neighborhoods, where even now that the nights are chilly, people prefer to sit outside, “as a poet, scatter flowers on the paths of people’s difficult lives.” As he waxes lyrical, he is pushing me against the wall of an apartment building. “It would be hard for me to judge,” I say. “You’d probably have to read some of my poems.” “No,” he says, “I’m sure of it. We must all be grateful to the poets for the rose petals they leave on our rocky roads.” I am doing my best to convey disinterest, but he is much more interested in what he is doing than what I am doing.

  A series of rather mercantile compliments is produced, like putting coins in a jukebox. He arrives at “You are beautiful.” “Especially,” he says, “I like your hair. It is the kind of hair I myself would have, if I were a woman.”

  HOW IT ALWAYS IS

  “Naive English-speaking girl wanted for lessons,” says one leaflet in the current new crop on the telephone pole that stands on one edge of the little squares that make quartiers of Athens neighborhoods. Leaflets are everywhere, ingeniously paste
d on bank building pillars and on street lamps, advertising the openings of new clubs, benefits to save the Greek foxes, phone sex—“Choose from these story options: ‘The Mermaid’s Secret,’ ‘Naked Crete,’ ‘Sensual Days on Mykonos.’ ” There are black-bordered leaflets announcing funerals or memorial services for the dead: “Our much-loved and adored husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle, lawyer, MP of Akhaia, and minister. We are burying him tomorrow at the Holy Church of the Sleep of the Virgin. Wife: Alexandra. The children. The grandchildren. Sister. The nephews and nieces. The rest of the relatives.”

  The dead are remembered nine days, then forty days after their deaths, then in cyclical ceremonies, all for the rest of the departed soul, whom Greeks seem to expect to be restless—the dead legitimately return to earth during the forty-day period between Easter and Pentecost, and unlawfully and unpredictably as vampires. There is a whole range of vampire lore, anecdotes, remedies, curses. One of the most feared curses used to be “May the earth not eat you.” Vampires seem to function as a kind of underworld, criminal class of the resurrected—a body that hasn’t decomposed could be a sign of sainthood, but also that the deceased has become a vampire. They also seem to be an underbelly version of the much idealized Greek family, since their principal victims in the stories I’ve been told are family members, and since they often seem to be people who died with unresolved family quarrels. Vampirism here is a brilliantly simple metaphor for the tragic side of the blood tie.