Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  The publisher turns out to be a small wiry man from Kefallonia, with a book-crammed office. I walk around the shelves to get an idea of what he has published, when suddenly there is a helping hand on my hair, then one on my shoulder, then one on my breast. I dodge away, having been trained in Anglo-Saxon–style martial arts, of which the basic underlying principle is to deny that anything has happened. So I crowd the room with remarks, telling him I am fascinated by children’s literature, and trying to interest him in how little most of us really know about Scandinavian literature. I keep leaping out of his reach into intellectual frontiers, past a huge pictorial history of Salonika, and a solemn-looking Koran in Greek, as he bears down on me, his face sour with determination, only slightly unbalanced by clutching a camera, and shouting, to the consternation of a few people on a sofa in the waiting room, “Kiss me, kiss me on the mouth!” Molon lave, I think drily, “Come and get it,” reverting to the legendary phrase of Leonidas to the Persians before the battle at Thermopylae, so beloved of all my Greek teachers. I am thinking, of course, of the practical problems the conference tables and desks and bookshelves present me in not getting kissed, but I am also thinking how this confirms an intuition about how kissing and not kissing are not only physical but metaphysical problems. This confrontation concerns something perhaps even more fundamental than the liturgy of sexual flight and pursuit. We are enacting an ancient argument, I realize, about the nature of reality, as the Kefallonian stumbles around his own obstacles of tables heaped with books, clutching his camera, his automatic flash making miniature explosions as he attempts to capture me in poses that could look convincingly welcoming. He is arguing that I am an image, as he chases me from corner to corner, and that his camera can prove it. I unfortunately, frustratedly, am sure that I am real—the proof that I am not an image is that I cannot disappear from this situation, however much I want to. In this crisis, my life does not pass before my eyes—his does. Because it is clear too that I am not even, in these circumstances, a feminine image. For this wiry old Kefallonian, I am an image of himself—he looks into the pool of me and sees his own face, thirty or forty years ago, sees his own trim torso, his own incontestable vigor—if he could touch me, he would have that lost young body of his back. By the magic which turns an image into a seer, I see that he is trying to turn me, at any price, into a young island boy—himself, once upon a time. But too many people are now sitting beyond the smoked glass doors of the reception room for him to continue his pursuit without public embarrassment, and I run down the stairs into the sunlit street, having witnessed again that historically cultivated Greek passion for the icon, one key to understanding not only Greek daily life, but Greek politics.

  The bus’s route to Heaven City runs through the cinnamon-colored Macedonian countryside, thick with sunflowers. I would have liked very much to be in this countryside for Anastenaria fire-walking, held every May, when women and men who have been possessed by the spirit of the emperor Constantine, who appears to them in dreams, often dressed as a policeman, army officer, or doctor, dance and walk across hot coals.

  Domed beehives along the road look very much like the doll-house-sized Orthodox shrines scattered on small lanes and busy highways here, often commemorating traffic accidents—these look like small churches full of God’s honey, and remind me of the story every Greek schoolchild knows about the bee and Agia Sofia. No architect brought the emperor Justinian a plan for the Church of Holy Wisdom that he liked. One day after mass, the patriarch handed the emperor the antidoro, a piece of blessed but not consecrated bread given after services in the Orthodox Church, which fell from the emperor’s hand. He bent down to pick it up, but could not find it. Suddenly he saw a bee with the antidoro in its mouth fly out the window. He issued an order that whoever had a beehive was to lure into it the bee with the holy bread. It happened that an architect had a beehive, and it was there the bee took refuge. But when the architect looked inside, he saw not a hive, but a great domed church, with a holy altar inside on which lay the antidoro, completely modeled by the bee through the grace of the antidoro it had held in its mouth. It was the plan of the church of the beehive that was submitted to Justinian and became the great church of Byzantium, Agia Sofia.

  A number of the villages on the way to Heaven City have religious names, like Saint John the Baptist and Great Panagia. Heaven City itself is a small town with a medieval tower, beautiful beaches, and a large transient population of monks—we pass a pickup truck full of produce driven by a pony-tailed, black-hatted monk. Other monks board the men-only ferry for Athos itself, where no women or female animals are allowed, with the exception of some female cats that make kittens to control the children of the ungovernable female mice. Athos is supposed to be the garden of the Virgin Mary, who doesn’t want to share her property with other women. The story goes that the Virgin Mary made a sailing trip to Cyprus, accompanied by Saint John. She had been eager to see Lazarus, who after his resurrection lived on the island. But a storm broke and the tempest carried her to Athos. One monastery commemorates the exact spot where her ship touched the shore, where there was at the time a temple of Apollo. At the moment her ship anchored, the statue of Apollo that stood in the temple called out ordering all men down to the harbor to do homage to the mother of the great god Christ. This kind of prohibition of women surely has pagan roots—the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, in his hymn to Zeus, writes of a temple on the spot where the goddess Rhea gave birth to Zeus, where “no fourfooted creature that needs the help of the patron goddess of childbirth,” or any woman, approaches the holy place, a hill called Rhea’s childbearing bed. I would have liked to have been able to see some of the monasteries, the one of which the Virgin Mary is the abbot, her icon hanging on the back of the abbot’s throne, and the fresco showing the ship of the church battling the attacks of Muhammad, and the pope, who tries to use his pontifical cross as a grappling hook to draw the ship to him, and the final panel, in which Christ commands Saint Paul to cast anchor, and Orthodox priests draw the ship to shore. I have never seen it reproduced, and wonder if it is only a fable. I would have liked to have seen the icon of “the terrifying Protectress” that turned back an invasion of Turkish soldiers. But all that I can see on the little excursion boat that makes a semicircle around the holy mountain are occasional trucks, and paranoid-looking fortresslike monasteries. It reminds me of the gated and barbed-wire communities of South Africa.

  I go to a tiny island later for a swim, what an island would be if it were a cottage. There I swim in a cove so calm you can swim laps, the waters clear as thought should be. An excited cry goes up from some children snorkeling farther out, “Octopus, octopus!” On the beach, there is a family group of a young couple and new baby, returning Greek-Americans from their accents, and some older Greek relatives, surely parents, and possibly some aunts and uncles. The baby is being given serial nurturing by all the female relatives, who fight gently over the changing of the diaper. But when it comes off, two of the women cry out in shock. The baby, apparently, is circumcised. The woman in a bathing suit relentlessly printed with purple flowers wrings her hands, and cannot stop herself from repeating, “Why did you ruin him? How could you ruin him?”

  THE SLEEPING VIRGIN

  Now that it is high summer, Athens has moved out of doors. Tavernas are full at two in the morning with family parties, including young children, eating in gardens and savoring the cool night breezes. Some of the smaller streets are looped from house to house with grapevines that shield the street from the summer sun, and the laiki agora, the farmers’ markets on the streets, are filled with the magnificent Greek white peaches and melons, while competing vendors praise the perfumes and colors of their fruit with the chant “Aromata kai khromata.” Athens is above all a city of the personal, personal passions and tastes, loyalties and hatreds, and even straightforward information here has an atmosphere of personal declaration. An elegant dress shop in Kolonaki, whose windows I have often passed covetously, announces it
s summer closing with an exuberant handwritten message in the window—“We are not going for a coffee! We are not going to the square across the street! We are going to the sea! Goodbye for the month!” And I myself am saying goodbye to Stamatis, who is going to France for his summer holiday; I am leaving for the island of Mitilini tomorrow to spend the summer holidays honoring the Panagia with Kostas, and when Stamatis returns from France, I will have returned to the States.

  We meet in Fokionos Negri, an endearing neighborhood with a traffic-free area full of greenery and restaurants of unpretentious charm. “What a zigzag route you are following,” he says, “but it is right for Greece, where my favorite of our proverbs is the question, ‘Are we sailing straight, or is the shore crooked?’ And now you have sailed around the crooked shores of Athos, the most Islamic place in Europe, where the Virgin Mary keeps her harem. And there, in my theory, is where, in all probability, the murderer of Taktsis went to ground.” “Why on earth would you think that?” I ask. “Because the civil courts have no jurisdiction there, for one thing. And for another, the place has a reputation as a refuge for criminals—there is a church canon which states that any male Christian, that is to say Orthodox Christian, may choose to enter a monastery no matter what crime he may have committed outside it, and that he may not be obstructed in this choice. So that’s my theory.”

  I tell him I will be spending the most important of the summer holidays, which westerners call the Assumption of the Virgin, in Mitilini. “Mitilini is a lovely island,” he says approvingly, “and you must try to see Chios too, while you are in the neighborhood. But the key to the feast is in the icons which invariably show Mary dead on her bier, and Christ behind her, with her soul in his arms in the form of an infant. Because this holiday is about the death of woman as goddess, and the appropriation of her divinity by Christ, who becomes a greater mother than his mother, the male mother who gives immortal life, the great gift men waited in vain for women to give, holding his own infant mother in his arms. You can find this appropriation of womanhood in the sacraments—in holy communion, for instance, when Christ’s flesh and blood become food, previously the magic of the female mother. But her milk nourishes children who will die, and his blood, replacing her milk, gives immortal life to those who drink it. And baptism, in which the child is reborn, with even the new amniotic fluid of holy water, through a man. Christ, the divine transvestite, is the mother who makes the child live forever. This is why the Orthodox Church—and the Roman—are so vehemently opposed to women priests. It destroys the magic substitution they made to obtain immortal life, what you may call their idées crucifixes. If a creature who can become pregnant touches the flesh of Christ, she will render his body mortal, the old failure of her pagan divinity may corrupt his, and return him to manhood from deity, as she was returned to womanhood from deity.”

  I start to ask him how he will spend his time in France, but he breaks in. “I remember now you asked me how I read the image of the Jew Iefonia you saw in the Kimesis fresco at Mystras. I say it is not garden-variety anti-Semitism, which is basically a response to Jewish anti-Gentilism. After all, if a child comes to school and announces it is the chosen child and declares all the other children’s lunches dirty food, it is likely to be bloodied by the end of the day. So I don’t think Iefonia is this. I think his punishment at the hands of the angel for touching Mary is an expression of our resentment of the imposition of monotheism. Because the establishment of Christianity here can best be compared with the establishment of communism in Russia. Imagine the legislation against the pagan universities where the philosophers taught, imagine the jobs that were now given only to Christians, or people with solid Christian connections, not polytheists, just like the jobs that were given only to party members, imagine the arrival of soldiers to take the treasures from the polytheist temples, imagine the soldiers Constantine posted outside the caves all over the countryside to prevent polytheists from worshipping inside them. We needed Iefonia, and the accusation that he and his kind had killed a god, in order to distract ourselves from the truth that there is no more detailed record in religious history of the attempted murder of gods than our own. We tried to kill not one, but twelve. Not, I think, with great success.” He looks at his watch, and calls for the bill, which I have only ever succeeded in paying here through the wildest subterfuge. “And I wish you a good journey,” he says, “but I warn you of what the novelist Vassilikos says about Greece—that it is the place where when you are here you long to leave, and the minute you leave, you yearn uncontrollably to come back. I know. When I am in Greece, I think about my month in France. And in France, the whole month, of Greece.”

  As with Easter, it had been difficult to decide where to spend the holiday of the Kimesis, the Sleeping of the Virgin. I had been very tempted by the island of Kefallonia, where in one village dozens of snakes, called the “snakes of the Virgin,” slither toward the church dedicated to the Kimesis, climbing onto the faithful, the holy bread, and the icons. When they don’t appear, as in the two years of severe earthquakes, it is considered a bad portent. And I would have liked to have seen the ceremonies in some regions where the Virgin is given an Easter, with funeral ceremonies and processions like Christ’s at Easter time, marking one season in Greece with man’s resurrection, and another with a woman’s. But I had wanted to see the paintings in the Theophilos Museum of one of the patron saints of modern Greek painting, and Mitilini was a particularly favorite island of Kostas’s.

  I buy some magazines for the ferry, which at this time of year feature special travel sections suggesting excursions to places where there are miraculous icons of the Theotokos, one of which is on Mitilini, along with letters from people who were saved by the Virgin’s intervention. One woman living in Canada sends a photograph of her son, resurrected by the Virgin when he was three years old and three days dead. In the lounge someone is playing a radio, where a suavely weary announcer celebrates the Virgin, in terms that remind me of a charming hymn to Artemis by the Hellenistic Alexandrian poet Callimachus, in which Artemis, sitting on her father Zeus’s knees, and clearly his pet, asks him to make her a goddess of many names. The announcer says, “She has been the fellow warrior and benefactress of our race, the holy guide and the sweetly kissing one during our struggles and suffering, the tender mother and the fierce defender of whoever needs her. We call her the Guide, the Sweetly Kissing One, the Life Giver, the Portrait, the Athenian Woman, the Woman of the Sea, the Panegyriotissa, the Virgin of the Festivals, the Peponiotissa, the Virgin of the Melons, when her church is near melon patches, the Virgin of the Cold Waters, when her church is near a spring. But whatever name we call her, she is the mother of Greece and of the Greek people.” The announcer pauses to take an audible drag of his cigarette. Always when I am reminded of the great gift of the Greek language for epithet, I think that the language is something like an iconostasis, picture related to picture, stories concealed in the twining imagery. “She is the invincible commander, the highest general in battles, the doctor for the sick, the protectress of all who are suffering unjustly, the food and drink of those who hunger and thirst, the co-ruler of Heaven and first of all the Saints …” August is particularly the Virgin’s month, the August 15, 23, and 31 holidays known collectively as the Virgin’s. The official name of August, like July’s, respectively Augustus and Julius here, reminds me powerfully of the new ordering of time that came with the Roman emperors these months were renamed for, but in the popular view, the days of August are given to the Virgin Mary like bars of gold. In old print shops, you can see prints of fruit or sheaves of wheat, with the traditional verse “August, my lovely month, come twice a year.” This is the month that gives the greatest feeling of security, overflowing abundance, of ease and earned pleasure, when the farmers have stored in their cellars grains and corn, hay and feed for their animals, wood for their fires. August is the month of the richest eating, with its seemingly endless fruits and vegetables, “so many you need shawls to gather t
hem,” one verse says. In Greece it is a month in which you might imagine life would never end. But it is also a duplicitous month, a month also commemorated in foreboding verses about getting winter clothes ready, about the short days beginning, the summer meltemia gales prefiguring the sharp winter winds.

  The walls of the ferry lounge are decorated with posters of the Greek museums, a glowing Theophilos magical realist view of Mitilini town, and a poster for a wax museum in the northern town of Ioannina, where I have been on a trip with Leda. The memory of the animated wax death of Socrates still sends us into paroxysms of giggles: at intervals the wax Socrates would point to the cup of hemlock, and with the same regularity, the friend holding the cup would roll his mechanical eyes. We strike up a conversation with a young soldier who is on the way home for the holiday. He sees that Kostas is reading a book about Chinese art, and he produces some of his own work, drawings of men dancing the zembekiko with rapt self-absorption, and some studies of a soldier sitting on an iron cot, masturbating. His face glows when he talks of Matisse, and darkens when he talks about what has gone wrong in the world. “The fault is with humanism,” he says, “the humanism of the Renaissance, which places man at the center of the Universe where God should be, man in all his arrogance, egoism, and materialism. This is why we are in a world where we destroy the environment and value money above life, this idea of the greatness of humanity.” It is hard to imagine a more arrogant and uncomprehending dismissal of humanism, whatever its flaws, I think as we drink coffee with the round-cheeked soldier.