Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  When we cross back into the village, we hear accordion music, and on the rise of the street, a group of seven men and women, from yiayias to young boys, are dancing, forming an open circle that is not complete, round but not closed. Some other members of their party are sitting at a table nearby, drinking wine and pulling bits of lamb from their roast. They are singing a song to the tune of “Roll Out the Barrel,” apparently a legacy of British rule here, and one young man calls out, “Khionia polla. Do you want to join our dance?” The fresh-faced young boy plays another tune, and we dance in their circle. One of the older men who has had a legitimate holiday idyll with the wine picks choice bits from the lamb carcass to offer to me, and fixing his sleepy-looking bloodshot eyes on me, tells me I must stay in Greece. “Greek people are the best, you like them the best, you must stay here,” he says, while everyone around the table applauds the fresh-faced young boy playing the accordion, and has a turn with a request. He plays a charming Theodorakis love song, all pots of basil and kisses, and a popular anthem called “Greece Will Never Die.” Someone else sings a ballad about an accordion player who is shot dead as he plays, by a volley of bullets from a vanful of Nazi soldiers; whenever the singer hears the strains of an accordion, the song says, the memory awakens in him the defiance of fascism, fascism will not be tolerated, he sings. The wine has taken the older man all the way back to his childhood, and he insists we stay for one more song, although it is now seriously time for us to leave. He stands up, swaying slightly with wine, and sings a song he must have heard as a boy: “Hitler, don’t boast how you conquered Crete …” We all exchange kisses, and as we set out for our third Easter dinner, we hear the man launch into another song: “The Duce puts on his uniform and his elegant hat with all the feathers … Akhh, Ciano, I will go crazy, Ciano, who told me to try to fight with Greece …”

  THE DREAM OF LOVE AFTER THE DANCE

  An army barracks housing the soldiers who guard parliament and the presidential palace is set in one corner of the National Garden, and a pedestrian walking down the busy thoroughfare of Vassilis Sofias, or Queen Sofia Avenue, is often startled by the sudden resolution of trees and bushes into the shape of a soldier in camouflage, carrying a huge machine gun. “Ah, I like your earrings,” I hear from between the iron railings one evening as I walk past, on my way to a dinner party. This communiqué could only have come from the fierce-looking figure in combat boots on the other side of the fence, whose eyes never stopped scanning the street. The literal-minded might hear that whisper as a breach of discipline, but who could criticize the guard’s power of observation, or feel less safe under the protection of a soldier with an appetite for life?

  I had noticed the imposing but rather ugly Edwardian Benaki mansion as I walked downtown, as I had many times, with two kinds of frustration, first because the museum it houses, which concentrates on modern Greek life, was closed for renovation, and second because it dramatized for me how poor a sense outsiders have of modern Greek biography, and how this deadens our imagination of the nation’s history and character. This plutocrat’s mansion, rather like a burgher’s overfed mansion in Saint Louis, had begun to be a rebuke to me every time I walked past it, particularly after I realized that one of the Benaki daughters, Penelope Delta, had been something like the Louisa May Alcott of modern Greek letters, although under special Greek conditions—she belonged to the generation of Greeks who wrote in demotic Greek and quite literally invented modern Greek literature, like those Israelis who invented a language and a literature for their new nation. Penelope Benaki Delta, born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1874, and buried in Kifissia, a green and wealthy suburb of Athens, in 1941, had virtually created the children’s book in modern Greek, with the works she wrote and published between, roughly, the years 1909 and 1939. It is one of the paradoxes of modern Greek history that a nation so obsessed with its antiquity has a children’s literature produced almost entirely in the twentieth century, and an adult literature not much older. Her children’s books are fascinating, partly because of her particular charm as a narrator, partly because of the rare glimpses they give us into the social and domestic lives of the well-to-do Greeks of her period, and partly because of her utterly conscious effort, along with the other writers of her generation, to create a nation through literature. Penelope Delta writes not only to create Greek children’s literature, but to create Greek children, to make models for them of Hellenism, and of what they should be as Greeks.

  She was born into a wealthy and powerful cotton merchant’s family in Alexandria, in one of the corners of the world whose cotton industry had become critically important to Europe during the interruption of cotton production in the United States during the American civil war. The Greek community of Alexandria had the reputation of being the richest and most exclusive foreign contingent in the city; the Baedeker guides of the day referred to the Greeks of Egypt as its “aristocrats,” and Alexandrian Greeks like the Benakis, who arrived in the nineteenth century, felt less like colonials than like fundamental Alexandrians, invoking Alexander the Great’s foundation of the city, forgetting that Alexander the Great was himself a colonizer in Egypt. The Greek state was only sixty-odd years old when Penelope was growing up, poor, struggling, and bordered by Turkish-held territory. The Alexandrian expatriates helped sustain the Greek government and state enterprises with infusions of cash, and along with other expatriate communities, endowed charitable foundations and schools.

  It was Penelope Delta’s generation which succeeded in expanding Greece to its current boundaries, including her own native island of Chios, and tried and failed to reestablish a neo-Byzantine empire in the place of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. When Penelope was a girl, her first glimpse of Turkish soldiers was on a visit to Chios, and she writes of how the sight of them in their red fezzes inspired a voluptuous hatred in her and the other children of the family. Chios, which claims to be the native island of Homer, was a steadily prosperous island under Byzantine and later Genoese rule. Its seamen were so skilled that Columbus is said to have learned the craft of navigation from Chiotes. When the Turks took the island, they followed their customary policy of leaving a profitable property largely to its own devices, governing with a light hand and enjoying the taxes generated by the Chiote production of silk, wine, and mastic, a natural gum produced by trees which grow exclusively on Chios, used throughout the Middle East as an ingredient in pastries and confections, and so popular in the mastic-chewing harems that various sultanas held the property rights to select Chiote mastic groves. The island is so close to the Turkish coast that one of Penelope’s Chiote uncles, a strong swimmer, used to make a package of his business clothes, tie them to his head to stay above water, swim across to the busy Turkish ports of Chesme and Smyrna, dress there, go to work, and swim back home. Because of the laissez-faire Turkish jurisdiction on Chios, the island was lukewarm about joining the Greek uprising against the Turks in 1821. It was in fact Greek troops from the neighboring island of Samos who first invaded the island, to pressure the Chiotes to join the rebellion.

  The Turks, for their part, were stung by the betrayal of their leniently treated island, as if it were an unfaithful Greek wife who had been given every indulgence; a Turkish fleet descended on Chios in March of 1822, and the Turkish soldiers slaughtered at least twenty-five thousand citizens, by official execution and freelance murder. Appealing women and children were sold to harems and slavers. This was the massacre imagined in the Delacroix painting that created its image for the West. Penelope’s maternal grandfather, a young man at the time, took his wife and children to sanctuary in a church, but when the Turks arrived, they took his family with them. He himself escaped and hid for weeks among the tombs, along with little children whose parents had been killed—they would emerge at night to scavenge for food, and then burrow into their hiding places again. He never saw his first family again, and presumed that they were burned to death when the Ottoman flagship was blown up in revenge by a famous Greek naval comm
ander, Kanaris. But Penelope fantasized, in a turn of the imagination common to Greeks, that they might not have burned up, but that somewhere she had Turkish counterparts, a throng of little Turkish cousins. Her grandfather’s second wife was completely illiterate because her school-age years were marked by political violence; she called her husband “Sir,” and had sixteen children with him. Penelope remembers her in Alexandria, sitting in a velvet armchair, listening to the Benaki children recite mournful poems to her about starving children and freezing lambs.

  Her Benaki grandparents fared differently during the massacres. The Benakis were originally from Mani, the region I visited for the Independence Day celebrations. They had scattered during an eighteenth-century attempt at revolution, and their Mani fortress was destroyed. Her grandfather, who was of the first generation to be born in Chios, could sing a song that began, “I am a son of the Benakis, who come from Kalamata.” He was eighteen at the time of the slaughter, and his choice of refuge reflects his Mani heritage, perhaps, unlike her more urban Chiote grandfather, who chose a church to shelter his family. Antoni Benaki fled to the mountains with his brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews. On the road, they realized the Turks were approaching fast, and found a cave to hide in. One of the babies cried, and in a phrase familiar in many Greek ballads, Antoni whispered to his sister, “Either quiet it or smother it.” The Turks discovered them in the cave, and drew their scimitars to murder them. But a Turk who had been a former servant of Antoni’s father recognized him and claimed him as a slave before the other Turks, warning them not to touch him, and gave him a place as a deckhand on his boat. He treated Benaki fairly, and soon Benaki was able to buy the caïque from his family’s former servant with the money he had saved from his earnings. He then made trips to Alexandria, where he discovered and bought back all his sisters but two, who had been taken by the Turks into the depths of Asia Minor. One was lost without a trace, and the other, after a time, made her way back to Chios, leaving behind the two children she had had with her captor. After some years, when those boys were grown up, they set out to find her on Chios. They told her that they wanted her to return with them, that they were now independent and could give her a life of comfort. She answered that she loved them, “But you are Turkish children, and I am a Greek woman … so much blood divides us,” and could not be persuaded to return with them, though they visited her often; and she had a poor and lonely life in Chios, “faithful in her faith and in her ethnicity to the end,” as Penelope put it. Her Benaki grandmother was taken at age six by the Turks and sold to an Egyptian harem. She had a mole on her forehead, and her relatives found her again through the distinguishing mark. When, after her marriage, she wanted to have it removed, her husband forbade her, telling her, “That sign saved you from the harem. With that sign you will die.” They are a forbidding-looking couple in their photographs. The wife wears a miniature of her son, not her husband, at her neck, as if it were a scapular, a charm of protection and power, a proof of her right to exist. Husband and wife both wear their faces like self-portraits, ruthless, bitter, humorless expressions, with indomitable stances and implacable gazes. What they permit their faces to reveal is threat, and they have hewn into their faces what they value—invincibility, pride, lethal honesty, contempt for others and for any tendernesses, absolutism, the sense of honor as a way of exacting a tribute from the world as much as giving something to it.

  It was the slaughter in Chios which pushed Penelope’s branch of the family to Egypt. By the time she was born, her father had a Liverpool factory and a commanding position in the Greek colony at Alexandria.

  Penelope’s Alexandria was a mansion in the Greek colony, beyond whose walls she could hear the chants of Arab beggars. Although her upbringing was luxurious, her world was one of jagged fragments which she could never fit together to make a whole. There was the odd circumstance of living a life of power and privilege in a country in which her only contacts with the indigenous population were as servants or beggars. She commented that beating Arabs was not only permitted, but obligatory, and the anecdotes she tells of her father beating their gardener for an imagined presumption, and of a British officer slashing an Arab’s face with a whip, provoke the thought that the roots of Islamic fundamentalism may not lie in the Koran, but in Europe.

  There were other splinterings in her affluent life. Although the Greek community had a grandiose sense of its power and importance, it also was tormented by a sense of inferiority in relation to the western Europeans in Alexandria. The Greeks felt self-conscious about their struggling, weak, and very new state, and both envied and mistrusted the French and English contingents in Alexandria. There was a glamour for them in the manners and lives of western Europeans, a sense of more secure and established traditions, and perhaps a half-acknowledged yearning for a less punitive family life than the tyrannical Greek family structure allowed. The Benaki children grew up under the tutelage of various English and French governesses and teachers, and it was a source of shame later to Penelope that the Greek community of her day had a reputation as energetic capitalists whose passion for business left them indifferent to cultural affairs. She was embarrassed that the Greek community had no school of their own. Girls were not sent on to high school, but kept at home to learn housekeeping; boys were given higher education in Roman Catholic schools, where sometimes, as in her brother’s case, they were proselytized. The Greek schoolteachers sent by the state were of such a poor standard, Penelope said, that none of the parents would entrust their children to them. Penelope grew up speaking English, French, and scraps of Arabic, like the brothers and sisters in one of her most famous novels for children, whose governess admonishes them perpetually to “Speik Ingliss,” as the Greek children hear her command. The children’s Greek lessons were all Katharevousa, which made them dislike the Greek books they read and distanced them from the spoken language of their own countrymen. It was as if American children’s only instruction in English were in the language of the Tyndale Bible, all doths and spakes; and the result was that the Benaki children wolfed down their French and English books, but opened their Greek books only under orders. The stories Penelope describes herself as having a “mania” to write during her girlhood, with deaths and catastrophes on every page, were written in French. Penelope wrote her journals in French, too, until she was a grown-up married woman; and even as a prominent author, she anxiously pressed other Greek writers to assess her Greek, while many people say the Benaki children spoke Greek with foreign accents. This was not peculiar to Penelope’s family—she records that all the Greek children of her acquaintance spoke English and French among themselves and with their parents. In fact, speaking Greek, among the very people who considered themselves, as Greeks, the “foam of the cream” in Alexandria, was the mark of someone who had had no cosmopolitan education—“Greek letters were for those who didn’t know foreign languages,” Penelope remarked, and domestic life reflected the doubleness of the Greeks’ image of themselves. The children’s clothes were marked with their initials in English, and when Penelope was asked as a bride how she wanted her silver wedding gifts monogrammed, she stunned her circle by asking that they be engraved with her initials in Greek.

  There was an upstairs-downstairs atmosphere about being Greek. Above, the house was furnished with tables and chairs, linen, glassware, china, and silver imported from England, the library stocked with foreign literature. The cellar, Penelope remembers, seems to have belonged to Greece, with its great jars filled with olive oil, special earthenware urns filled with Chiote olives preserved in brine, flagons of raki from Chios, flower waters, rosewater, shelves full of Cretan soap (the olive oil–based soap that was once a staple of the Cretan economy), containers of figs and raisins from Smyrna, sweet wines, clay jars filled with Chiote mastic, and Penelope’s favorite, confections made from almond and sesame, stored among dry bay leaves for fragrance. Despite this abundance drawn from both the Greek and the western European worlds, Penelope felt scorned f
or her ethnicity. The feeling of inferiority, she wrote, was inflicted on them by foreign nurses and teachers, who expressed scorn for the Greeks’ general use of marriage as a purely financial transaction; it was compounded by teachers of “our own race,” foreign-educated children they knew, the boys’ Jesuit teachers. She was also wounded by a sense gleaned from the western European communities that Greece was not considered an influential, or even a politically mature, nation. She remembered with particular bitterness a cartoon of Greece she saw in an Italian paper, probably during the period in which Greece’s ambitions to win back the territories of the former Byzantine Empire, to become “Greece of the two continents and five seas,” had begun to be openly stated. The caricatures represented different countries in their military uniforms, and Greece was shown as a little foustanella-wearing child, crying with his mouth open and rubbing one eye with his fist. In front of him stood a bucket of water in which the moon was mirrored. The grown-ups surrounding the child asked him, “What do you want now?” and the boy called out, “I want, I want the moon!”

  Penelope’s novel Trelantonis (something like “Crazy Anthony,” “Wild Anthony,” or “Irrepressible Anthony”) gives an idea of the scale of the Greece of her childhood. It is based on the summer of 1881, which the Benaki children spent with relatives in Piraeus, which then had a quarter that was valued as a summer refuge for its sea breezes and the access it gave to the sea for health-giving daily swims. There the children lived in the third of seven houses built by Ernst Ziller—a German architect who had also designed a house in central Athens known as the “Palace of Troy” for the philhellene archaeologist Schliemann, in 1878, where Schliemann and his wife Sofia brought up their two children, Agamemnon and Cassandra. In the largest of the row of Ziller houses in Piraeus, as Penelope’s novel recorded, lived the king of Greece, who himself spoke Greek with a foreign accent. This was George I, a member of the Danish royal family, and founder of the Glucksberg dynasty, which never truly successfully rooted itself in Greece. No Glucksberg king ever had a hereditary connection to the Greek people. George had been a seventeen-year-old Danish naval cadet when the great powers of Europe selected him for the Greek throne. His accession to the throne had been revealed to him by a fish sandwich: he had left his house in Copenhagen carrying his lunch, consisting of sardine sandwiches which were carefully wrapped in newspaper so as not to leak oil. He happened to scan the paper as he unwrapped his lunch, and “read to my delighted amazement that I was King of the Hellenes.” Just before the Greek delegation formally offered him the throne, he was promoted from naval cadet to captain.