People will believe in anything.
We followed Dan like idiots, shuffling through the rain, as he led us toward a cavern in the side of a granite hill. This, he explained, was the Plutonion, the entrance to the Underworld, ruled by the god of the shades, Hades. The ancients imagined it was through this cavern that the dark god had dragged Persephone, carrying her down into the realm of the dead to be his bride and queen. So began the myth that led to the Mysteries.
We entered the dry mouth of the cavern, glad to get out of the rain. Although one corner recessed into the dark, the cave itself was shallow and seemed an unlikely entrance to hell. The hippie picnickers had left bits of trash behind—an empty bottle of Roditis, the discarded husk of some blood red fruit, and the paper wrapper from a loaf of bread—but beyond this the cave had nothing to offer other than a roof to the rain.
We turned our backs to the flinty walls and stared out over the ruins.
“What now, Tyrant?” Phoebe grumbled.
Dan didn’t have an answer. Our day-long search had come to an end—a literal and dispiriting dead end. Phoebe’s cryptic prophecy remained a puzzling riddle, as remote as Persephone in the Underworld.
I glanced back at the garbage on the ground. “Maybe we should have brought along some bread and wine. Had ourselves a picnic.”
“Bread and wine,” Phoebe said. “Demeter and Dionysus”—she turned and looked down at the red piece of fruit—”and Persephone.” She squatted to examine it, poking it with her finger. “Dan. Look.”
He crouched beside her. “It’s a pomegranate,” he said.
I bent down between them and saw the mush of red seeds. “So what about it?”
“Whoever had this picnic had some knowledge of the myth,” Phoebe said.
Dan stood up and explained. “It was a rule of the Fates that if anyone consumed food or drink in the Underworld, they were doomed to spend eternity there. When Zeus commanded Hades to release Persephone, Hades tricked her into eating four pomegranate seeds. That’s why she had to stay in the Underworld four months out of the year.”
“That’s not the way I heard it,” Phoebe said. “There was no trick involved. The pomegranate is a symbol of love, and for Hades it was a gift of love, which Persephone gladly accepted. She had come to love her husband as much as he loved her. She may have returned to her mother every spring, but she always came back to Hades.”
“True love?” I said.
“Very much so,” she said.
Dan disagreed. “Hades abducted her,” he said. “A blatant crime of passion. He stole her virginity. That’s the meaning of the pomegranate. Crush the pink husk and out pours the red seed. The allusion couldn’t be clearer. That’s why it’s traditional at Greek weddings to crush a pomegranate under your heel.”
“A patriarchal tradition,” Phoebe said. “You talk the talk about partnership, but you’re clearly a dominator at heart.”
“I’m just calling it what it is, Phoebe.”
“You’re calling it the way you see it,” she said. “And you see everything in terms of sex. It’s juvenile.”
“People always put down as juvenile what they’ve tried to suppress in themselves. But you can’t ignore the most basic fact of life. You can’t hide from the obvious truth.”
“The myth of Demeter and Persephone has nothing to do with sex. It’s about the pure and tender love of a mother for her daughter. That’s the obvious truth.”
“It’s about the fecundity of nature,” he insisted. “Why does she go back to Hades? Love, pomegranates? Who the hell cares? The point is she goes back to sleep with him).”
Phoebe and I stared at Dan. Even he seemed surprised by his own loss of temper. He strode off into the rain.
We watched him cross the deserted ruins, heading back toward the entrance. Phoebe stood motionless beside me. Whatever it was that had been going on between them had apparently just come to a head.
She glanced at me uneasily. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Hey, it’s okay…”
We stared out at the rain. I forced myself to wait for her to speak.
Finally she did. “There’s a reason he chose me as the Oracle,” she said. She looked directly at me. “It’s not just because I’m his girlfriend.”
I looked back at her for a long moment, trying to understand. All this talk about sex—or the lack of it. “You mean…”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
I continued staring at her. I think my mouth was open.
“No,” she said. “I’m not gay.”
I swallowed. “So, you and Dan…”
“No. Never.”
I looked at the ground, then looked back at her. “Just Dan, or…?”
“No one. Ever.”
She turned and peered back out at the rain. I looked out there, too.
“The line about Aphrodite,” I said.
“He thought it meant we should—finally…”
I looked at her. She seemed to be struggling with the idea.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “How could making love with me have anything to do with the kykeon?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think it does,” I said. “So, what did you tell him?”
She looked at her fingers a moment and picked at the ridge of a nail. “I told him what I’ve always told him: I’ll only give myself to the man who truly loves me.”
I folded my arms, then unfolded them. “You don’t think it’s him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.
“How will you know? “
“I’ll know.”
“True love?”
“True love.”
We stood there for a while before she said we should go. The rain felt somehow warmer as we entered it again, crossing through the maze of ruins, heading back to Dan. I couldn’t stop thinking about what she had said, how wrong I had been about her. Her hair was soaked as we walked through the rain, and I thought again about the dip in the spring, the look I had seen in her eyes that night, the kiss we had shared in the adyton. I wanted so badly to tell her what happened, but knew it could only be trouble. And they already had enough of that between them.
THE THREE of us barely said a word on the long ride back to Athens. The traffic in the rain was a misery. We were each left to our own passing thoughts, as remote and inaccessible as the passing signs, an alphabet soup of Greek.
Phoebe didn’t sleep in Dan’s bed that night. She slept on the couch across from the kitchen. I was so close I could hear her breathing from my ratty little mattress on the floor. At one point, I thought I might have heard her crying, but that was very likely just a dream. I woke up from a number of dreams that night, and Phoebe was at the heart of every one of them.
She left early to catch a bus the next morning. The bus would take her to the metro station, the metro would take her to the port of Piraeus, and from there she’d take a ferry on to Crete. Dan walked with her to the bus stop. I stayed back at his apartment, drinking the bitter coffee he had brewed, staring out his iron-barred kitchen window, wondering if I would ever see her again. I don’t know how they said their good-bye, whether they promised to get together again, but I decided that I wouldn’t ask Dan about it and that I had to stop thinking about her.
Dan spent the next week buried in books at the university library, searching for the meaning of the oracle. He started looking into chemical correlates of Aphrodite, from ancient Greek aphrodisiacs to the brain functioning of people in love.
One night he came home with a copy of an Italian research study that examined levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in people who had recently fallen in love. The study showed a drop in serotonin levels similar to patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He said love also triggers the dopamine system, which is linked to psychosis and schizophrenia. In addition, it activates regions of the brain associated with risk taking and rage.
“Sounds like a mental illness,” I said.
“
It’s more like a drug addiction. It shuts down the rational part of the mind. “
“Yeah,” I said. “It drives you crazy.” The two of us nodded sagely.
While Dan made his daily excursions to the library, I wandered the meandering streets of Athens. Before our trip, the city had felt vibrant and intriguing; now it seemed ghostly and gray. The life had gone out of it, or gone out of me. I felt most at home in the ruins.
The day before I was to leave for Rome, I hiked the north slope of the Acropolis and found again the Sanctuary of Aphrodite and Eros. I had brought along the Cupid candle Phoebe had given me, and now I placed it neatly into a niche in the rock and lit the white wick with a match. The air was very still and the flame burned perfectly. I stood back to admire the offering, the mischievous god of love in the dead rock wall, his cherub head flickering with life.
Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn…
For a moment I tried to conjure up the memory of Phoebe, but all that came into my head were details—the delicate spattering of freckles on her cheeks, her towel-dried hair radiating like a freak, the mole I had noticed on the back of her neck, the way she had picked at her fingernail. The memory of her standing in the nude by the spring—an image I was sure would never leave me—had lately begun to fade from overuse, like a photograph too often exposed to the sun. The searing blaze of my desire had abated; all that was left now was the sentiment of longing, glowing like a cinder in my heart.
I opened my eyes to the flickering candle. It will burn itself out eventually, I thought. Or succumb to the next passing breeze.
Even gods must yield.
As I turned and started walking off, I noticed a glint of color in the achromatic wall. It was very near the place where Aphrodite’s name was etched, the letters Phoebe had traced with her fingers.
I moved closer. A smile came to my face.
It was Dan’s sexy, plastic Aphrodite.
Something about it was different. On the shelf in the souvenir shop, in the chorus line of deities from the Greek pantheon, the figurine had looked like a Vegas showgirl. Here, however, set high up in a niche in the wall of this ancient garden, the goddess of love and beauty looked divine. It may have been the angle, or the late light, or the state of mind I was in, but the statuette seemed almost alive.
For a moment, I allowed that Aphrodite might be real. Not a living, breathing goddess, but something more than a metaphor, or a symbol of romantic love. Aphrodite was a force that took possession of the soul. She was like all the gods as the Greeks thought of them: an energy that suddenly inhabits the heart, that lifts you out of the ordinary, out of the tired routine of existence and into a torrent of emotion. The sudden infatuation, the convulsive burst of laughter, the frenzy of a homicidal rage. The gods were a power that came from above and rattled the cage of our bones.
To feel the pangs of love was to be possessed by the goddess of love. To assuage the pain of love, then, one must appease this goddess. Dan’s little offering, I had to assume, had been made with Phoebe in mind. An appeal to bring her back to him or to break her stubborn chastity. Of course, it might also have been a simple wish to solve his dissertation. Maybe it was all of these; I really didn’t know. I couldn’t even say what I was doing there myself. I didn’t want to come between Dan and Phoebe, but I couldn’t seem to let go of her, either.
Dan had said Aphrodite was the oldest of the Fates, those mythical weavers of destiny. If that were true, then perhaps our offerings were a gesture to fate—a bow in acquiescence, a humble plea for guidance.
Sometimes that’s all you can do.
WHEN I got back to the apartment that night, I made no mention of what I had seen or where I had been. Dan had returned from the library looking as glum as ever. His research seemed to be going nowhere, and Phoebe weighed on his mind. Dispirited, the two of us went out for our farewell dinner, more from a sense of family obligation than brotherly camaraderie.
We ate down the street at my favorite taverna—a small, warm place where I’d had my first meal in Athens, the dinner where Dan had introduced me to Phoebe. That night, we had all shared a delicious beef and rabbit stifado, a stew the proprietor had assured us was a classic of Greek cuisine. We proceeded to get very drunk on Roditis and gabbed until two in the morning. When everyone else had left and all the chairs were up, we watched the old Greek owner dance alone in the middle of the empty room. Dan called it the hasapiko, the “butcher’s dance.”
I remembered it like it was yesterday.
Greeks dine late in the evening, and on this final night we arrived so early there were no other patrons in the place. The old Greek did his best to be welcoming, but he seemed to sense our gloom. When he found out I was leaving in the morning, he walked off wordlessly, filled a carafe with red wine from a cask against the wall, returned and poured us both a glass, and set the carafe on the table.
“Gift of Dionysus,” he said, then headed off to cook our meal, what would be my final stifado.
Dan raised his glass. “To the gods,” he said.
I raised mine. “Amen.”
At the very instant our glasses clinked, Dan’s cell phone rang.
Both of us thought immediately it must be a call from Phoebe.
We were wrong. The call was from Dionysus.
7
BASRI PASHA was an old roommate of Dan’s. In his undergrad days at the University of Chicago, the two of them had shared a graystone two-flat with an older female law student from southern Illinois, and a Chinese-American physics major moonlighting as a waiter in Chinatown. Basri was the youngest son of a wealthy shipping family from Istanbul. He had been sent to America by his father to obtain a first-class business education, with the idea of grooming him for senior management in their Miami or Long Beach office.
Basri, however, had other ideas. Though his family was not particularly religious, he had been raised in a Muslim country and felt constrained by its moral strictures. He also had a devilish streak. Confronted with the freedom America presented, he was soon applying the business skills he learned to nefarious and licentious purposes. He imported marijuana from a cousin in Miami and sold it in the South Side clubs. His clients began calling him the “Istanbul Express.” For a while he became a kind of campus pimp, connecting a couple hookers he had met in the Checker Board Lounge with nerdy foreign students who could never get a date. The parties at his Hyde Park apartment were legendary. He hired live bands and exotic dancers, ran a cash bar, and charged an entry fee. He created a hash hookah lounge in the basement, the infamous Den of Iniquity. Although he pissed off the neighbors and had to pay off the cops, he always managed to have a good time and seemed to come out on top.
So it came as a surprise when, two months into his third year, “the Pasha” left the university suddenly to return to Istanbul. Dan found out later his cousin had been busted and the Chicago connection uncovered by the Feds. Dan didn’t see him again until the following June, when Basri invited him to work over the summer as a dive tour guide on Key Largo, a boating operation connected to his family. The two of them worked together for months, reviving his cousin’s lost business.
In the years since then they had kept in touch with each other, but it wasn’t until Dan moved to Greece in pursuit of his doctorate that he started seeing Basri more often. The shipping magnate’s wayward son had finally found a role in the family business, one for which he was eminently suitable. He had been given command of a fabulous yacht with a staff of six and the run of the entire Mediterranean. His job: the entertainment and lobbying of EU bureaucrats, port authority officials, and municipal politicians. “Twisting arms with a velvet glove” is the way he put it, though Dan described it as nothing short of bribery.
When he called during our farewell dinner in Athens, Basri was crossing the Aegean Sea with some Greek girls he had met in Istanbul. He told Dan they were heading to some Pan-Hellenic Greek Women Something-or-Other, and would be picking up their friends on the island of Mykonos, the
libertine, sex-and-sandals capital of Greece. The friends they were meeting were all women, too, he said—too many women for one man; he felt obliged to share them. When Dan mentioned he was having dinner with his brother, Basri insisted he bring me along. We could join them for some partying on Mykonos. The two of us could stay on his yacht.
As Dan hung up, he stared at me, dumbfounded.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The answer to the oracle,” he said.
BEFORE LEAVING Rome, I’d been freelancing as a tour guide, a gig I had started entirely on my own as a way to earn a few dollars. I had begun by hanging out on St. Peter’s Square, offering free tours of the Vatican to English-speaking sightseers. The Blue Guide provided my expertise, but I soon came to add little flourishes of my own—Michelangelo sleeping with his boots on, or the story of the crazy Hungarian who took a hammer to the Pietà, or the reason the remains of St. Peter’s corpse didn’t include his feet. After a couple hours of these tantalizing tidbits, my spellbound patrons, steeped in Catholic guilt, felt obliged to pay me something—or to hire me for my far superior Roman Forum tour.
I did well enough to be noticed, and eventually I was offered a staff position with the Renaissance Tours organization—a job I had accepted and was planning to begin when I made my return from Athens.
This was the reason for my hesitation now, a hesitation Dan thought absurd.
“Yes, babysitting tourists in the Vatican. What a rare opportunity. That kind of offer may never come again.”
I also wasn’t wild about getting on a boat. As I now reminded my brother, I had very nearly drowned on one. And for this trip there’d be two boats to board: first the ferry to Mykonos, then Basri Pasha’s yacht.
Night of the Furies Page 7