Back to Delphi

by Ioanna Karystiani

  Phone call, three rings, on the fourth she stuck the receiver to her ear.

  - It’s Yukaris again.

  His voice against the background of other voices, a dutiful voice.

  - Why, who else would it be?

  - Anything worth reporting?

  - The tour has been postponed for tomorrow. He wasn’t willing.

  - It’s not the end of the world.

  - As if he has no response to, takes no pleasure in, or doesn’t recognize my effort. His indifference is alarming.

  - Call it numbness, the numbness of the first day. He’ll be right on cue as of tomorrow.

  - Spare the irony.

  - I’m sorry. But you are asking for rather a lot, yourself.

  - I’ll spend the night sleepless with worry.

  - BACK TO DELPHI - 51 -

  - He will as well. Perhaps even me, he added after a short silence, then he put an order in for a jar of local honey and rang off with the admission, my girl, you are remarkable.

  In two minutes he called back, asked if our boy looks left and right, Viv didn’t answer, he apologized and ended the call leaving her even more uncertain about the afternoon, the evening, the day that was coming and the one after that.

  On opening the balcony door, the pine tree forest appeared before her, dark, thick and silent, only some buzzing, wasps, bumblebees, carpenter bees, the expected soundtrack of any sunny afternoon in the countryside.

  Viv rolled back her sleeves and leaned against the warm railing, to test if she was soporific, it would be a godsend if it came over her for half an hour. Besides, from that position, in every respect legitimate and expected from the tenant of an idyllic pension in May, she could stretch one ear to Linus’s room and keep an eye on the terrain of the parking lot. If he elected to go out on his own, he wouldn’t use the main entrance, he’d go out the back, even though Yukaris had personally pointed out to him in the morning, don’t go anywhere without Vivian and don’t put her in an invidious position, she has taken on a grave responsibility.

  A grave responsibility is what it was all right, which was the reason why every five minutes she stuck her hand in her pocket, making sure the car keys were still there.

  Linus didn’t slip outside in the afternoon, didn’t go out in the early evening, didn’t even lift his shutters, he missed dusk and he missed the sweet nightfall, the sound of television was heard for about twenty minutes at around nine and his mother perked up somewhat and in order for him not to go to sleep hungry, she sent a double toast and fruit to his room with the frau, his lordship was unlikely to snap at a strange woman and send her away.

  The strange woman, naturally, had been taken aback by her

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  two visitors who, instead of going for strolls and drinks, plenty of wonderful choices all around, opted for staying cooped up in their rooms, could Takis be suffering from a love affair gone wrong? she’d asked Viv who, standing by the door to the small kitchen, had shrugged, though love affairs have gone by the wayside with today’s youth, they split up with one girl today and pick up another tomorrow, the German woman quipped as she arranged chips and three green leaves around the toast. Why don’t I put some ice cream with that, my treat, no ice cream, no, he is not at all partial, Viv stopped her.

  She invited Mrs. Xenia for a drink, let me treat you then, she renewed her offer, dark beer, very cold, she made the suggestion as appealing as she could, I have cherries, too, she upped the ante, and ten different kinds of pralines, she labored to hogtie the evening’s live target, she failed, the customer had a headache.

  - Mrs. Xenia you are condemning me to make do with some book, again, and it’s a great sin to spend beautiful evenings on one’s own.

  Viv agreed, but she had sinned, she was sinning habitually and serially, thousands of evenings on her own like an isolated tree in the wilderness.

  Many hours later, daybreak was fingering her shutters, horizontal stripes initially gray, touched in a bit by dawn with pink, then by the day with gold.

  In bed, facing toward the closed balcony doors, she was counting the thin slices of the Friday morning, listening to the birds dynamically reporting for duty, smelling the honeysuckle that wound itself on her railing and rubbing her left arm that had gone to sleep, a casualty yet again of her sparse and anguished sleep, she began to think of people, random strangers, who’d never have to face a day like the one she had coming.

  She pondered on how the heck one describes a smooth life

  and of what it might consist. She came up with a few plausible answers as she washed, dressed, gathered and checked her things and her money, all of it in a hurry, seven minutes by the clock.

  A smooth life is one where you open the window in the morning and have the luxury of wanting to gaze up to the end of the sky and where, at night, you turn the lights on feeling pleased to be back at home. A smooth life is that of people who eagerly buy a loaf of fresh bread, who enjoy a good haircut, who are talented at frying two eggs, who kiss and are kissed with some frequency, who give or receive a small slap without taking it to heart, who break their leg and friends come to write silly things on the plaster, who always cast their vote no matter what, who know the refrain to the golden oldies, who dream of an exotic trip and slowly put the money together for it, who play with their cat every day and remove one by one the ticks from their dog, who take pride in their children’s engagement, who take their grandkids to Halloween parties, who bring the parental home up in the country back from the brink of collapse, who bury their parent with due honors.

  / /

  - We see here a copy of the navel of Delphi. The decoration in relief on its surface represents the agrinon , a fabric made of woolen stripes which covered the navel and which in antiquity was placed in the holy of holies of Apollo’s temple. According to the myth, Zeus let two eagles fly from Olympus in opposite directions and after they had circled the earth, the two birds met at this point. The navel symbolizes the belief that Delphi was the center of the world, that one you might remember from school, you were a very good student, Linus, up until, the phrase was cut short at that point.

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  There were no other visitors in Hall I of the Museum, the halls next to that were empty as well, Viv and Linus were the very first to arrive, at eight in the morning, after walking with comparatively greater ease along the still sleeping streets of the township and the tiled pedestrian walk that led to the site.

  Earlier, at the small dining hall of the pension, while sitting still in their chairs waiting for breakfast, Viv had presented three articles she had cut from magazines with the mysterious E of Delphi and hieroglyphs, Lilliputian symbols and signs, ancient scripts from Minoans, Black Pharaohs and Easter Island, which wise experts on antiquity and linguists were still laboring to decode.

  She had the forethought while in Athens of collecting a variety of materials, small surprises to break up the awkward silences and to simultaneously fertilize her offering at the Sacred Valley so that it might take root and bear fruit.

  Linus would look over it in puzzlement and, surely, would comment on this or that, Viv had counted on two or three responses, like, where did you unearth this, mighty strange writing and, how long have you been involved with this subject?

  In actual fact, Linus had lowered the dark glasses for a matter of seconds, just enough to pierce her with a chastising glance.

  Immediately afterwards, she was given a different opportunity to improve the mood, with the freshly squeezed orange juice and the free-range eggs which were fully up to her expectations for a bracing breakfast, not for herself, of course, she couldn’t care less.

  Her first thank you for the great service, to Sabine, came at the serving, the second thank you at the gathering of the plates and glasses and alongside it came the prompting to her son, say thank you, talk with her a bit, to freshen up your German.

  - You are mad and need
to have your head examined, his response in a low, though not angry, tone.

  - BACK TO DELPHI - 55 -

  The stroll to the Museum was made in peace, amid the unthreatening racket of the sparrows and swallows minus the unwelcome racket and presence of busloads of people, coming all the way here to have a closer look at the ancient celebrities.

  The guards were having coffee and tossing out short exchanges about real estate and construction, what with the antiquities and with the ski resorts in nearby Mt. Parnassus, moneyed folks were drawn to Delphi and to the adjacent village of Arachova from the world of show business, enterprise and politics, and putting up villas and setting up compounds for their weekends of luxury

  The navel of the Earth, the frieze in relief from the first century A.D. with Hercules against the Lernaia Hydra and the Giant Anteus and again Hercules wresting the horses of Diomedes and fighting an Amazon made no impression on Linus, who took the five steps to first this side and then the other, next to his mother, stopping wherever she did and listening to her recite the relevant information, memorized to a T since a long time ago, for his sake.

  No questions at all, neither admiration, nor a second look, the dark glasses did not turn in the direction of the exhibits, as if they rejected them, at certain moments they might rest on the bases on which they were propped, at others they focused on his sports shoes.

  - They’re not tight, are they? Viv asked, staring against her best intentions at the white shoelaces. Linus advanced half a meter without a yes or a no.

  The bronze sirens, the figurines of naked athletes, the small statue of the sheep in the same hall and the statue of the cow, the two bronze griffin heads, the three bronze shields and the remainder of statues in Hall II didn’t affect the young man’s mood, though Viv colored her reports with such zest and intensity that the guards glanced at her puzzled, a fifty-year- old, first thing in the morning, all fired up, pointing, insisting,

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  comparing, parroting everything in the relevant publications for the benefit of the unspeaking and morose youngster.

  In the Hall of the Sifnians’ Treasure the mother sat the son before the Sphinx of Naxos and obliged him to listen to how that enormous marble statue, of a height of seven and a half feet, lion body and legs, birds wings and a woman’s head with braids, all in the color of dirt, was an offering to the Oracle in 560 B.C. by the citizens of Naxos who were then in control of the whole of the Cycladic Islands.

  The Sphinx, an emblem of their island, as a votive offering, would safeguard the navel of the Earth like the python used to, until Apollo slew the dragon, or dragoness. Chances are the serpent had been female.

  Like an elementary schoolmistress, Viv kept up the lesson in mythology, dragging her only student around the statue and pointing out that the fabulous sculpture was representative of the Greek spirit which humanized monsters, mythical beings with a demonic personalities, imbued with the capacity to avert evil.

  - Fine, that’s enough for now, let’s go, Linus interrupted, but Viv had no intention of quitting her fight, she took his arm, dragged and planted him in front of the caryatid at the frontal frieze of the Sifnians’ Treasure, the girl with the inward looking eyes and the half-bashful, half-sleepy smile.

  - The indentations in the hairdo and the diadem indicate she wore metal jewelry, she pointed out with her finger the little holes, then lowered her hand and waved it before the bust, the white chiton is gathered in rich pleats, she concluded and breathed in avidly, she had ended up short of breath in order to say it all, there was barely any oxygen left in her lungs.

  She stood pale and unmoving for a bit, Linus became aware of her discomfiture, gave in and walked ahead into Hall III, to stand in the middle of the room, dominated by two archaic kouroi. Viv’s courage picked up, she followed him and mollified him, that’s it, we walk along, we see, we marvel, with a

  - BACK TO DELPHI - 57 -

  measured step always and seeing everything through our imagination, like the archaeologist Andronikos puts it, the imagination is of the essence, especially in order to form the image of this place with the five hundred statues that Nero snatched and the many works of art that Great Constantine lifted from here, to decorate his new capital.

  Before the barely awake hordes of tourists descended, the next hour was taken up with the porous stone friezes fronting the circular temple, the bull statue out of hammered silver, the gold wires from the decoration of the ivory and gold statues, the armless and headless busts, the elaborations, aryvallos is the small, lidded oil container for the athletes in training, enagismus is the offering of aromatic substances to the dead for the cleansing of the soul, with a five-minute breathless delirium by Viv on the column with the three dancers, the sacred ballet a gift by an unknown donor, marble from Pendeli, diaphanous clothing, column capital with acanthus leaves, another five minutes on the breathless beauty of Antinoos, marble from Paros, the evolution of the portrait in Hellenistic sculpture and, finally, ten minutes of a merry-go-round the bronze charioteer with the inlaid eyes of glass and stone.

  Viv also cast a sideways glance at Linus’s eyes behind the dark glasses, closed again, she didn’t let on, nor was she upset, she pointed out the long priestly chiton, the strip holding back the hair, the reins in the extended right hand and, tireless, without forgetting the basics about the statue’s origin, part of a complex with four horses and a child leading the chariot to the races, an offering by Polyzalos, winner of the Pythia Games, tyrant of Yela and one of Deinomenes’s four sons who beat the Carthaginians in 479 B.C., she recommended short stops a little this way, a little that way and to the back and at quite some distance farther away, for the purpose of exalting in the multiple aspects of the masterpiece.

  Linus lowered his glasses slightly, opened his eyes and, for

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  a long time, stared flabbergasted not at the charioteer but at his mother, struggling and sweating with the effort of not mixing up the works, the deities, the artists, the donors, the dates. He felt sorry for her. The poor woman was stressed to the breaking point, she’d organized an entire operation that was meaningless, not possible to avert evil nowadays or to cleanse the soul, easily done, possibly, for certain ones among the dead, certainly impossible among the living.

  Yet, the operation was still in progress regardless.

  After two quick coffees at the cafeteria table that was most secluded under the umbrellas and as the throngs of Greeks and foreigners thickened and the place resounded with the voices of sprightly kids demanding cold juice, Viv and Linus, consistently wordless, fully morose and unwaveringly disbelieving towards one another, fled discreetly along the pathway that led to the antiquities out of doors.

  It was almost ten, the sun was already burning and the rest of the tour loomed ahead scorching as well.

  7C 7C Tf

  Tell the king that the artful flute has fallen to the ground ’ that Phoebus no longer has a residence, nor prophetic laurel, nor a speaking spring; for the speaking water has been silenced .

  The final and very melancholy oracle by Pythia to Oreivasius, an envoy of the Emperor Julian, before the curtain went down on the ancient Apollonian worship, at the close of the fourth century A.D., Vivian Koleva did not recite it by heart, she’d rather read it from the booklet, after completing her presentation of the Castalia Spring, when it was engraved on the sides of the two perpendicular Phaidriad rocks, the one going by the name of Flemboukos, the other by that of Rodini, why it was called that, who bathed there, what Pausanias mentions, what it was that the oracles, the first professional psy-

  - BACK TO DELPHI - 59 -

  chics, chewed in order to give their ambiguous edicts, laurel leaves, Linus, the ones we put in lentil soup and meat stew, the same ones woven into wreaths on the monuments to the fallen.

  All of this with a one minute pause, her cell phone, the instructions she gave, don’t scratch yo
ur legs, you’ll only draw blood, the itch will be taken care of with an Atarax.

  Linus at a distance, his back turned to her, looking at the mountains while she went on with her soliloquy, she felt under obligation to not leave unfinished what she had prepared with hard work, rehearsals and fair expense, so, with a voice growing increasingly faint she finally arrived at the closing of the hours-long saga, nor a speaking spring; for the speaking water has been silenced.

  This was at the end of three hours of walking under the full sun, with stops at every manner of ruin and ten or so speeches about the Gymnasium, where sophistry, rhetoric, astronomy etc. were taught, about the five-thousand-seat theater, the Pythian Games, musical contests in the guitar, the lute, recital etc., about the Recess of Crateros, the Rock of the Sibyl, the Rock of Gaia, the Stone of Lito, the Stone of Cronus, libations of oil, offerings of raw wool etc., about the treasures of various donors, the names Antiphanes, Onatas, Aggeladas, Vrasidas, Epameinondas, Proussias, Philopimin, Lysippus, Leocharis, were coming thick and fast and so were the mix-ups, who was who, where, when and what exactly they had done, Viv didn’t get distinctions, that’s not what she was after, anyway.

  Some of it was the sun that had completely fried her brain, and it was also Linus’s total unwillingness to take part in any of it.

  - Touch the stones, see if you don’t feel something, she had invited him twice, he had walked on.

  - Why don’t you read yourself the votive inscription, she had suggested before the pillar of the Athenian’s colonnade, he had not.

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  - Stand next to the pillar, it’s Dorian, being tall and thin you look like it, she had said at Apollo’s temple, it has remained standing for centuries, don’t you fall yourself before you make thirty, she had pleaded, that was no concern of his either.