I followed. My parents often argued about where they were heading. My father did not have a good sense of direction, but he was determined and forceful, which meant we could go quite a ways into nowhere before he would agree that he’d been wrong. I was glad that didn’t happen this time. Two hours outside was enough.
The museum was cool and dimly lit. The polished marble floor gleamed as if it were water, a refreshing effect. There was a tempting bench at the entry, but my father ignored it. “Elgin missed some friezes,” he said, “and I want to see them. They’re in here.” He barreled on in.
I was more interested in the statues. Grownups liked basrelief, I’d noticed. I didn’t like it at all. It made me feel itchy and unsatisfied, whereas they—even A.A., whom I thought of as a better sort of grownup—would stand and Oooh at it for much too long. I wondered what they saw and why I didn’t see it.
My father established himself in front of a long wall of friezes. I took a look and felt my usual urge to get away. Part of what I didn’t like was that it was too busy, as if the sculptor felt he had to make up in surface activity what was missing in depth. These reliefs were blurry and blunted. I could see why they’d been put inside. Some parts looked as if they’d been sandblasted almost flat.
I left my father and went to see the many large figures that stood on plinths around the room. There were lots of stiff young women who looked like cousins of the caryatids, except their drapery was unrealistic and their smiles were more realistic. Still, something about their expressions was peculiar. Like the caryatids, they were staring out into oblivion in a way that said: I am ignoring you. They seemed happier about it than the caryatids were, though. There was a wonderful man with a little calf slung across the back of his neck. Both of them were smiling in that unfocused way. The man looked Egyptian to me. Maybe it was his stance, which was the same as the Egyptian gods in the long hallway at the museum in Boston: one foot forward, but both legs still embedded in stone, as if the figure were being born out of the marble, or trapped inside it.
Beside the man with the calf was a boy, standing straight with both arms by his sides. He too had one foot forward, but his legs were free. He’d escaped from the stone. He had a kind of Egyptian hairdo. Long, tight curls made a triangular frame around his face that reminded me of a pharaoh’s headdress. And, like almost all the statues there, he had a half-smile that was benign yet chilling in some way.
I leaned closer to read his caption. KOUROS, it said.
Leaning, I felt a wave of buzzing. First a light, fuzzy feeling, then an effervescent spinning, then a deep, thick blackness that swooped over me. And then, nothing.
Nothing and nothing. A half-smile floating. A smooth, clean shiny pillow for my head.
I was lying on the marble floor. I was still buzzing, but not as loudly, and a number of faces were hanging above me, saying, “Water,” and “Wasser,” and “Nero, nero”—Greek for water, one of the few words I knew.
My father was cradling my head so I could drink from the cup held by a small old woman in black. She was talking excitedly in Greek. A German said, “It’s too hot for a child today.” One of my ears felt very sore.
People helped me to stand.
“Are you okay?” my father asked. “You can stand, right?”
I nodded. I looked down at where I’d fallen and saw a few drops of blood, maybe five or six.
“I cut my ear,” I said. It was scratched and still bleeding, inside, in the shell. “On him,” I added, pointing.
The kouros kept smiling. It must have been his toe, on the foot that was forward. I must have scraped into it on my way down.
The old woman put the hem of her black skirt into the cup of water and cleaned the blood off my ear with it. Then she patted me on the shoulder and said something to me with a big smile.
The German who had objected to my being out in the heat translated: “She is saying the gods love you,” he said.
My father looked displeased with that idea and with all the fuss. “All right,” he said. “I think we’d better go home now.”
“Why?” I asked the German. “Can you ask her why she says that?”
The German asked her, but she didn’t answer.
Another German came over with a present for me: his newspaper, which he’d folded into a hat. “This is for the prevention of sunlight,” he said.
My father thanked him in German, and they had a stuttery-sounding conversation for a few minutes. The first German joined in. Now that he saw my father could speak German, he was less disapproving. The three of them chatted while I stood still, holding my new hat and feeling around inside my ear. I kept my back to the kouros. I didn’t want to look at him. I wasn’t exactly afraid of him, but I felt it was better to avoid his enchantment—the whatever-it-was he’d exerted over me that had made me fall down.
The old woman in black had retreated to a three-legged stool in the corner near the friezes; she must have been a museum guard. As my father and the Germans began to conclude their conversation, she scuttled over to me again. She had an apricot she wanted me to take.
My father shook his head in the Greek manner, jerking it up and saying, “Oxi, oxi.” “Thank you,” he added, but he didn’t look very grateful.
She jabbed her hand at me and said something insistent.
“From her own garden,” one of the Germans explained.
“Fine,” said my father. He put his hand on my shoulder. “We’d better get you home for a rest.”
Going down was easier, and the paper hat helped more than I’d thought it would. My father walked beside me, pausing a few times to ask me—to tell me, really—“You’re okay, right?” And I was. I held on to the apricot, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat it. It made me nervous, as if it might be part of the Acropolis spell.
“What does kouros mean?” I asked my father.
“Young man,” he said. “A beautiful young man.”
Then he said, “You’d better not eat that apricot.”
“Why?”
“Fruit isn’t safe,” he said.
“We eat fruit all the time,” I said.
“We eat oranges. You peel oranges. We don’t eat fruit you can’t peel, especially if you can’t wash it.”
“Why not?”
“You could get the runs,” he said.
We walked on a little. “Those Germans were classics professors from Tübingen,” he told me. “They were actually quite nice. We’re going to have lunch with them in Kifissia someday soon.”
We passed the photographer with his box camera. The trip was over. My father decided we should take a taxi home and walked off to the corner, where several Mercedes-Benzes idled in a diesel haze.
I took a bite of the apricot. Just one. It was very sweet and the juice ran down the side of my mouth. Then I put it on a chunk of a column that was lolling around at the foot of the hill.
“There,” I said, to any kouroi or gods who were waiting for an offering.
The car was fixed and the apartment was rearranged to my mother’s satisfaction or, “As good as it’s going to get.” Sunstroke and enchantment were behind me, and so were the long days of traipsing around with my father. My mother would not put up with that sort of rigorous program. Anyhow, now that we had the car, we could drive right up to what we wanted to see and afterward eat a two-hour lunch on a terrace under a grape arbor with a cat asleep in the corner and then spend some time in the little store beside the taverna looking at handwoven bags and shirts. Or, if we hadn’t gone too far away, just go home and take a siesta like normal citizens.
My father, of course, wanted to go too far away immediately.
“Let’s go to Mycenae,” he said.
I perked up. I really wanted to go there.
My mother said no. “It’s too far,” she said. “It’s too hot. And there are bandits.”
“There aren’t any bandits,” said my father. “Honestly!”
“George says there are. He says the whol
e Peloponnese is riddled with them. He says he’ll take us down there in the fall, when it’s cooler.”
My father frowned. “It’s barely the Peloponnese,” he said.
“George says we need an escort,” my mother repeated.
“When was this, anyhow? When were you and George having this conversation?” my father asked.
My mother blew one of her special I-don’t-care-what-you-think smoke rings.
“What do the bandits do?” I asked.
“Rob you, of course,” said my father.
“Sometimes they take you hostage,” said my mother.
“Annette!” My father dropped his hand on the vast mahogany dining table with a thud. “This is nonsense.”
“Mmm,” said my mother.
My father tried again. “Let’s go to Meteora,” he said.
“I think we should wait until, maybe, October.” My mother finished her cigarette. “When it isn’t as hot.”
“It’s in the mountains. It is the mountains,” my father said. “Is there anywhere at all that you would be willing to go? Epidaurus? How about Epidaurus?”
“Epidaurus is in the Peloponnese,” she said. “Sounion, that could be a nice trip.”
My father was silent for a minute. Then he said: “Why can’t you just come out with it? You could say, I want to go to Sounion, and forget all that guff about bandits. You could state at the outset what you want, and then I wouldn’t have to guess.”
My mother glared at him.
“I want to go to Sounion,” she said. “Okay? Happy?”
“Okay,” said my father. “We’ll go to Sounion.”
My mother got up from the table. “I’ll call George,” she said.
“What’s George got to do with it?” my father asked. “It’s not even fifty miles away. We don’t need George.”
My mother was already dialing. “We do need him,” she said.
My father shook his head. “Pirates? Werewolves of Sounion? What’s the problem?”
My mother and George fixed it for the day after.
“The roads are extremely bad, he says,” she told my father. “He’ll lead us.”
“Every road in this country is bad,” my father said. “Nothing special about that.”
George and his solicitude were a gift from Doxiadis, the mysterious outfit where he and my father worked, though they never seemed to do any work. A few days a week, my father went there for an hour or two in the morning, came home for lunch, went back for another brief spell, and was home long before dinner. When I asked him what Doxiadis was, he said, “Urban planning.” “What does that mean?” I asked. “Think tank,” said my father. “They think big thoughts.” “What do they think about?” I asked. “They think about how to bring Greece into the twentieth century,” said my father. Then he laughed. “That will take a few centuries,” he said, “so they’ll never catch up.”
Doxiadis was a person as well as the name of an institution. Once I saw him get out of a taxi at the entrance to our building, delivering my father home in the evening after an unusual day of real work. My view from the fourth-floor balcony was partial: bald head, long, lavish overcoat (it was December), graceful, gesticulating arms. From above he looked somewhat like a spider. Doxiadis—either the man or the company, or perhaps they couldn’t be distinguished—had found the apartment for us, had arranged an end-of-the-summer cruise to Crete for us (this was the trip my mother had in mind when she said her “shrug” would be good for an evening on a boat), and had commissioned George to protect and guide us. Unlike George’s office job, this required a lot of effort.
George was in his mid-thirties, several years younger than my parents. He was quite short, as if he’d been underfed in his youth, and probably he had been. He’d made up for that in the postwar decade. His thin arms, narrow shoulders, and stalky legs attached to a solid, round middle composed of baklava, octopus, and retsina. Mustache, aviator sunglasses, suit and tie on all occasions, and his otherworldly courtesy could not quite disguise the nervewracked, melancholy inner George.
I liked George, in part because he treated me with as much formality as he did my father. My mother elicited something quite different from him—love, possibly veneration. Another reason I liked him was that his hunger made for a lot of refueling stops. He was the opposite of my father. Going on a trip with George was more about eating something delicious than seeing something beautiful. Few of his country’s monuments impressed him. Many Greeks were like that. George could eat moussaka sitting beside a rather well-preserved temple to Zeus and never turn his head to acknowledge it.
But Sounion: “This is my favorite spot,” he said. “I am delighted we are going there. Also, on the road is an exceptionally good place for barbounia. The little red fish—I don’t know their English name.”
“We probably don’t have them, so there isn’t an English name,” said my mother.
“Could be,” said George. “Or possibly, you don’t eat them. Poor countries are happy to eat what rich countries consider inedible.”
“Oh, right. The tragedy of Greece.” My mother always poked fun at George’s gloom.
“But it’s true,” he said, smiling. Then, to my father: “I have taken the liberty of leaving the Fiat at home to spare it the trip. May I ride with you, in the American car?”
“Sure,” said my father. “Anyhow, it’s easier than trying to follow you.”
George refused to ride in the front with my parents.
“I will direct you from the back,” he said. He wedged himself into the worst spot, straddling the hump in the middle, between my sister hugging her stuffed owl and me staring out the window.
Rocks, goats, a donkey pushed onward by a woman dressed in black, dust from the terrible road: Excursions in Greece were predictable. There was never anything but rocks and goats and donkeys and dust on the way to a broken temple or amphitheater. The countryside was a wasteland. Athens was different. Athens was alive. So what if the wrecked Acropolis brooded above everything, trying to remind you that time was coming to eat you up? Below it people were rushing around and cars were honking and waiters were pouring out tiny cups of coffee in a hundred cafés. Out in the hinterland we might as well have been on the moon. It was hard for me to believe that the ancestors of the old woman poking her donkey with a stick had built the temple whose remaining columns rose out of a nest of lizards and bracken off the road to our left, a site so minor we weren’t even stopping to look.
I didn’t like the red fish at the restaurant.
“It has too many bones for you,” George said.
I nodded.
Without looking up from his plate, George snapped his fingers. This was the Greek way of summoning a waiter. I always felt embarrassed on the waiter’s behalf, though I could see that everyone thought it was fine. Our waiter came over and George barked at him. In a minute he was back with a bowl of boiled potatoes and a plate of feta pockmarked with olives. It wasn’t a big improvement, but I ate it anyhow. I didn’t want to spurn George’s efforts.
Then it was back into the hot car, more dust and donkeys, all of us sleepy from food. The cicadas screamed so loud I could hear them through the rattle of the tires over the ruts and stones.
All of a sudden there wasn’t any road. Also, the light had become even brighter and whiter. A salty wind whooshed into the open windows of the Chevrolet.
“We’re here,” George announced.
My father stopped the car. “We just leave it here?” he asked. “There isn’t some sort of parking lot?”
“Not necessary,” said George. “After all, no cars, right?”
“Maybe if there were a parking lot, more people—”
“Everybody know it’s here,” George interrupted my mother.
“You know,” said my mother. “Some German tourist doesn’t know.”
Snorts from George. “So much the better,” he said.
“My mistake. A stupid example. Let’s say a French tourist,” my m
other said. “This is part of the trouble with Greece. It’s all so haphazard and disorderly. It’s unplanned.”
“You think perhaps there should be a souvenir booth selling small plastic columns on key chains?” George was teasing my mother, wasn’t he?
“I think a sign would be useful.”
George extended his skinny arm. “This way for panoramic view of the Aegean, sacred to Poseidon.”
“You can scoff, George,” said my mother, “but this is what Greece has got. This past is your future, and it’s foolish not to make intelligent use of it.”
“It will come,” said George. “The plastic-column key chains and the signs and the parking lots. And then”—he pointed at my mother—“you will be sad. You will be one of those who say, Oh, it was so wonderful before the parking lot and the sign. Won’t you?”
My mother laughed. “Of course I will. You’re right. But I’ll get to say that I was here before all that stuff. Also, I’m right too, and you know it.”
“Ah, life is impossible,” said George.
“We can agree on that,” said my father. “Do we go up this hill?” He took my sister’s hand and led the way.
My mother and George walked together, and I lurked in the rear. Blood-colored flowers were everywhere, dipping in the wind. “Are these poppies?” I asked.
“Yes, they are,” said George. “Don’t lie down in them because you will be drugged and fall asleep.”
“They’re anemones,” my mother said.
I wanted to lie down right away and go to sleep to prove my mother wrong. “Hurry up,” she said. “You’re dawdling.”
“The temple isn’t going away,” I said, but I picked up my pace a little.
And there it was.
Greece is too much for me, I thought. Greece makes me scared about how long time is, and it’s too hot and it’s boring and there are too many bones in the fish and now this. Why did my parents keep dragging me around to see things that were too big for me to contain?
Because there was so much less of it than there was of the Parthenon, it was more frightening and more beautiful. Below, the sea was banging and banging. Whirly winds dashed around the last, leftover columns; the rest had dropped into the rocky surroundings. The marble floor slabs had been colonized by clumps of coarse grass. There was a sweet smell of salty vegetation.
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