“What’s he doing?” I asked Gunilla.
“He wants to be petted,” she answered in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.
“And it works?”
“Just look at what’s going on.”
It worked. Why had I never thought of that? The students, particularly a blond young man called Leopold, were totally captivated by the old dog. Leopold scratched behind his ears and took pictures of him; the wretched dog was enjoying himself so much that I began to suspect he was employed by the Greek tourist board. A four-legged actor in the world’s most beautiful theater.
We are no longer a country but a tourist resort. Even our animals are at the service of visitors. How did things end up this way? I shouldn’t have thought about it. But I did.
I hid my sadness from my wife, who was busy taking a photograph of me.
We drove from the old Epidaurus to the new, which is by the sea. On the promenade, all the shops displayed signs in English, and the restaurants were serving pizza and Chinese food. Gunilla bought yet more postcards. The heat was beginning to get a little too much. A group of around forty people had settled down at the tables in Mike’s taverna, and were engaged in a lively discussion about what they were going to eat.
“It’s not a matter of life and death, boys and girls, it’s just a bit of food,” said a skinny man in a straw hat.
“Shut up,” he was told.
They were Greek retirees taking part in the “social tourism” program. The distance between what I was looking for and what I found was growing all the time. Greece was changing without asking my permission.
The class differences were much more marked now than I remembered. The rich were richer and the poor were poorer. Great big luxury cars were parked outside the upmarket restaurant, while outside the modest taverna there were only dusty mopeds. Large private yachts were anchored in the harbor. Impressive newly built villas had appeared here and there. A short distance inland you would find scruffy little houses and tents.
It felt as if I didn’t have the right to an opinion. I was a foreigner. The only thing I could say was that the country I remembered was gone.
I too had changed. I wasn’t the twenty-five-year-old who went off to Sweden. I was an elderly man who had lived in Sweden for over half a century. Even if I rediscovered the Greece I remembered, I was no longer sure I would like it.
* * *
We spent the night in the old, peaceful, and very appealing town of Nafplion, which had also been a capital city in the nineteenth century. The hotel was called the Grande Bretagne, and was extremely pleasant. The staff operated in several European languages, but very little Greek was spoken. The receptionist addressed me first in German, then in French, and finally in English. There was a time when I regarded it as a compliment if someone couldn’t see that I was Greek.
We went up to our magnificent suite with its antique furniture and the decorative lamps that spread a warm glow throughout the two rooms. It was late in the season, which was why we could afford it. Gunilla chose her side of the enormous double bed, which could easily have accommodated two more adults.
“It’s so big we might need to speak to each other on our cell phones,” she said.
Then we took a walk in the old town. It was a warm evening, and there were plenty of people out and about. Gunilla discovered an Italian gelateria, and what Swede can walk past one of those? The assistant spoke Italian to us, in spite of the fact that I addressed him in Greek. That gets on my nerves.
I’m not a fan of ice cream. Gunilla loves it and chose carefully from a range of different flavors with the help of two young female assistants who spoke French to her.
I sulked.
A while later we sat down in a café, and the scene from the gelateria was repeated. I spoke Greek to the waiter and he answered me in English. I got slightly peevish and said, “I speak a little Russian too.”
“So do I,” he replied in Russian.
Another surprise awaited us in the restaurant where we had decided to have dinner. We had chosen it from the outside based on one simple criterion: there was no music playing.
We were considering what to order when the waiter joined in our discussion in almost impeccable Swedish. He had worked in Sweden for several years but had left because “Greece might have all the problems in the world, but it retains life’s sweetness.” I asked him if I could use his words on my Twitter feed, and he had no objection.
We were treated like royalty, and this was also reflected in our check.
He wasn’t wrong. Life in Greece does have a sweetness, which is difficult to define. What is it? There is an immediacy between people that can occasionally be troublesome but is mostly beneficial. There is always room around a table. A restaurant is never fully booked. A carafe of water and a basket of bread always appear before you even have time to think. The staff move like lightning, especially the pretty young women. But all this presupposes that you have money. If you don’t, life becomes grim and bitter. I had lived that life, and it was the reason why I had boarded a train to Sweden. It was also the reason why I hadn’t come back.
“I couldn’t give a damn about life’s sweetness. It’s dignity I want. Without that even honey tastes bitter,” I said to my wife.
Sometimes she’s had enough of me.
“And what do you expect them to do?” she snapped.
I have to admit that I didn’t have anything sensible to say in response. Besides, the food was sinfully delicious.
We returned to the hotel and Gunilla smoked her cigarette while we watched the city’s Venetian fortress on the small island of Bourzi sink into the darkness. I was sinking into absolute alienation in roughly the same way. I wasn’t even allowed to speak my language in my own country.
The following morning I awoke to an unfolding miracle. The sun was just rising, the sea mist lifted very slowly, and the mountains regained their massive splendor. It was like watching the creation of the world from the VIP seats.
I put on my wings—my Nike Air shoes—and set off along the stone pathway that curved around the hilltop above the city. I was completely alone. Suddenly I heard voices from the side on which the sea lay. I saw two fishermen, obviously old friends, because one calmly asked the other, “Shall we go to Kostas’s funeral today?”
My friend Kostas had also departed, and I almost called out, “Can I come with you, boys?”
Instead I leaned on the stone balustrade pretending to rest, while in fact I was secretly watching the two fisherman in their little boat, bobbing up and down on the morning’s gentle ripples like two swans wearing caps.
Nothing is more precious than a friend.
That’s what Aristotle said.
* * *
Our next stop was the medieval fortress at Mystrás, built by Vilhem Villehardouin in 1249. It towers above the surrounding landscape with death-defying boldness on top of a virtually inaccessible hill. It developed into a town that became known as the Florence of the East. It was here that Plato’s writings were rediscovered; they were eventually translated into Latin in Florence itself.
I wanted to show Gunilla this rare treasure, but her knee was too painful, and we had to make do with getting as far as we could by car. It was still breathtaking. From up there you could see the entire valley, the orange and lemon groves, the vineyards. The wind carried a mixture of glorious scents.
We took a short walk and soon encountered a dog, who barked rather sleepily, just for appearances’ sake. Then along came his owner—a thin man around fifty years old, who immediately asked where we were from.
When he heard that we were from Sweden, he picked a few ripe figs from a sinful old tree and gave them to Gunilla.
This gesture was so familiar that for the first time during our trip I felt something awaken within me. Rule number one: You offer a stranger something—a handful of figs, a glass o
f water, a bunch of grapes, anything to quench his or her thirst.
It struck me that maybe the sweetness of Greek life was exactly that: a hand that gives. From one person to another. From stranger to stranger. Memories from long ago flashed through my mind. My grandmother’s gnarled fingers as she pitted an olive so that I could safely eat it, my grandfather’s large palm with a little yellow caramel sitting right in the middle, my mother soaking a piece of dry bread and sprinkling sugar on it.
They were cruel, hard times, but there was always a hand ready to pop something edible into a three-year-old’s mouth.
Now the world was experiencing cruel, hard times once more.
Which hands would give, and which would take?
* * *
Life definitely has a sweetness in Greece, but there are elements that are nowhere near as appealing. For example, the endemic tendency to hide a fault rather than repair it. Large or small. And the constant reference to “the Greeks,” which serves as an explanation for everything. Why hasn’t the bus shown up? Oh, that’s just the way we Greeks are. Why is the driver so unpleasant? Oh, you know what your average Greek is like. Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, but I’m Greek too, and I’m nothing like that. In fact I hate that kind of attitude. You don’t hide a hole in the floor with a rug, you fix it. And no, I don’t know what your average Greek is like. I’ve never met that particular person. But I have met hundreds of wonderful people with just one fault: they say, “Oh, you know what your average Greek is like!”
Then we have the constant interrogation. Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here?
It’s very irritating, if you don’t understand it. A stranger in Greece is not a cause for concern but a walking news desk.
It was difficult to get up to Mystrás, but the fact that we got back down was little short of a miracle. The huge tourist buses had right of way on the narrow road. I stopped every ten minutes, inches from the bottomless ravine, and let them pass.
After a while we stopped for a cup of coffee. The waitress heard us speaking a foreign language and immediately asked where we were from. Sweden. Sweden? She had a cousin there who had not only moved overseas but had sadly since emigrated to a land even farther away, the land from which no traveler returns.
What was his name? When she told me, I gave a start. He was one of my first friends in Sweden. He had died of a very aggressive cancer.
“It’s strange how life makes connections,” the waitress said.
Undeniably. I was sitting there with my Swedish wife, and the woman serving us was a cousin of my friend who had died in Sweden.
I felt dizzy. It was one of those moments when life stops, or is compressed into a sharp awareness of the present.
This applies to writing too. A sense of the simultaneousness of life that brings with it a controlled dizziness. I missed it terribly.
On the way to my village, we drove past another place where I had spent part of my military service. I stopped at the sentry post.
“It’s forbidden to stop here,” the guard said, but he calmed down when he saw my white hair.
“I’ve stood where you’re standing,” I said in a friendly tone of voice.
His words made me remember something—the time when so many things were forbidden.
It was forbidden to spit anywhere, it was forbidden to swear, it was forbidden to behave in any way that offended “public decency.” The country was in a permanent state of readiness to counter a threat from the Communist countries in the north, and from Turkey.
It was a bitter time.
I had a sudden urge to turn the car around, to drive back to Athens and get on a plane to Stockholm.
But Gunilla studied the map, then looked up and said, “We have a little way to go until we reach the village.”
* * *
We reached Molai shortly before three o’clock. It was an awkward time. Most people were eating, or lying down for a rest after their lunch. It suited me perfectly. I didn’t arrive in my village. I entered it. It was a locked room that I had to open with a key, which had grown increasingly rusty over the years.
My heart was already pounding as we turned off the main road. I wondered where the street with my name might be, but I didn’t need to wonder for very long. We came across it right away. At the sight of the sign bearing my name, I made a sound that I’ve never heard before. It wasn’t a scream or a cry, or indeed any kind of human sound. It was like the ice breaking in early spring. It was terrifying, horrible. Fortunately it didn’t last long. I scrambled up the wall as high as I could, to enable Gunilla to take a photograph of me with the sign and my street. A passing car braked sharply at the sight of an elderly madman high up on the wall, and I came to my senses.
“For this moment I wrote for all those years,” I said to Gunilla.
Her eyes shone.
“I didn’t even make a noise like that when I was giving birth,” she said.
It might have been an exaggeration, but she knew what I liked to hear. Dear Mr. Freud focused on women’s penis envy. I don’t know anything about that, but I do know that my sorrow at not being able to carry a child inside my body was great. I like to regard writing as a long-drawn-out process of childbirth, even if the analogy doesn’t quite work.
I also took pictures of Gunilla beneath the street sign while advising her not to post them on Facebook, because her friends would think I was dead. In Sweden we’re sensible. We prefer street names such as Terapivägen—Therapy Street—or Snickarbacken—Carpenter’s Hill. You have to be well and truly dead to have something named after you.
We carried on toward the square, which was more or less deserted. We took a short, hesitant walk, as if we’d never been there before. For me that was true, in a way.
I always arrive at my village for the first time.
* * *
An hour later we were at the impressive Alas Resort, where our hosts had booked a room for us. The trip from Molai to Elia, where the complex lay, usually takes less than fifteen minutes, but we couldn’t find the hotel. We asked two men who were working in the simple harbor at Elia, but they knew nothing about it. They weren’t local, they weren’t from the next village either; in fact, they were refugees from Albania. However, they spoke excellent Greek and were very helpful. They called an acquaintance and found out the relevant information, which they passed on to us.
The hotel was on the other side of the harbor. It was visible from a distance, but not close up. We had driven past the modest sign a dozen times without spotting it. Now we could see the hotel but no way of getting there. Eventually Gunilla discovered a secret track.
“But that leads to the sea,” I said.
“In that case we’ll have to swim across,” she replied.
It wasn’t quite that bad. Suddenly we saw an attractive building behind a magnificent bougainvillea, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.
“That must be the hotel,” I said, demonstrating my ability to jump to conclusions.
Once again I parked inches from the edge of a ravine and rang the bell. I could hear the sound reverberating, but no one came. We found a smaller door and rang that bell too. A short while later the door was opened by an elderly lady in a robe, with tiny red slippers on her feet. We had woken her in the middle of her siesta. She didn’t seem to mind—quite the reverse. She explained how to get to the hotel in a way I will never forget.
“Keep on going until the road runs out, then carry straight on.”
No sooner said than done. Ten minutes later we were there. The young woman at reception spoke perfect English, and she was good at her job. When I answered in Greek, she complimented me.
“I am Greek,” I said.
“It doesn’t show,” she assured me.
How would it show? I wondered. Should I bear the mark of Cain on my forehead?
O
ur room, or rather our suite, was very pleasant. Gunilla opened all the windows and inhaled deeply, as if she wanted to take in the entire landscape, then made the comment I have been hearing for almost five decades: “There’s no air in here.”
The first thing she does when she walks into a hotel room is to open all the windows. She’s like my mother, she wants air all the time. The second thing she does is to check whether there are enough hooks in the bathroom. She is rarely satisfied in this respect.
I called our hostess, the principal of the local high school, to let her know that we had arrived. We agreed that she would come over with some of her colleagues to say hello and to discuss the following day’s event.
They were due at nine o’clock in the evening. It was closer to ten when they turned up bearing gifts, like the Danaans in the Iliad. Figs, grapes, chocolate, books.
Gunilla was struggling to peel a large, beautiful fig with a knife and fork when the principal, who was also the director of the next day’s theatrical performance, pointed out that it would be easier to use her hands. Gunilla obeyed like a schoolgirl.
It was lovely to see that they were trying to make sure she didn’t feel like an outsider. She was given the opportunity to speak English, French, and German, although by the time we all said good night, much, much later, she was able to say “efkaristo poli,” which means “thank you very much.”
Many people have wondered over the years why Gunilla didn’t make more of an effort to learn Greek, and why I didn’t try to persuade her to do so, or why I didn’t speak Greek with my children.
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