Dinner with Persephone (10 page)

I am leaving the trip after the ferry crossing that will set the bus down on its route to Ioannina, an important town where Byron spent a good deal of time, near the Albanian border. At the ferry, there is anarchic shouting and near collision as the cars and tour buses and trucks with beer and produce fight their way on. The man directing the vehicles onto the ferry couldn’t care less about the vehicles’ schedules; his job is to fit as many as possible onto the vessel, not to worry about who should precede whom. It is an accustomed tense situation for Leda; she has to fight for her bus so that her travelers won’t lose their connections on the other side if she isn’t aggressive enough to get them on the scheduled ferry. And the restaurant booked to give this group lunch on the other side will have wasted a morning’s worth of labor and food if the promised clients don’t arrive. I watch my friend, who I know has great reserves of tenderness, mercilessly badger the ferryman on the ground to find a place for her bus. She has an obligation to meet; he does not, and only her will and persistence will make that important to him. It is an ordinary, exhausting circumstance of Greek daily life, in which simple transactions that might elsewhere be understood as reciprocal obligation are here dependent on patronage, permanent or temporary. It is strange to think that the business of getting us on the ferry will be partly the result of Leda’s resoluteness, but also of accident—what the ferryman feels like. He continues to wave other vehicles onto the ferry, and she continues to surround him. “My bus is next, my bus has to be next,” she says furiously. The ferry attendant glares at her, and says, “What do you think I am doing, playing with the little bird? You think I am masturbating here?” She answers, “I don’t know. Please find a place for my bus now.” He waves us on, and we sail briskly across the water, parallel to a ferry sailing from the other side, a constant daily traffic, here where seas are genuine highways.

After lunch I say goodbye to Kharalambos and his grandparents take pictures of us. An amorous plumber from Famagusta also begs for them to take a picture of him with me. “Embrace me, embrace
me,” he cries jovially as they adjust the lens, and I know precisely to what uses this picture will be put in stories of his summer vacation.

I make my way back to Athens, and arrive to pandemonium. Two Greek athletes have unexpectedly taken golds. Both come from politically charged regions of the Greek diaspora. One is a weight lifter from southern Albania, or northern Epirus, as the Greeks call it, who has only recently emigrated to Greece. The other, the first Greek woman to win a gold medal, is Pontian, her family Greeks from the Black Sea region of Pontus. The newspapers can’t print enough pictures of them, and all the appliance shops selling TVs play videos of their victories over and over. Pyrros Dimas, the weight lifter, has the naive, pure, handsome face of the ideal Greek son, and like the perfect Greek son who worships his mother, he calls out at the moment of maximum effort, when he strainingly hoists the barbell overhead, “For Greece!
Yia tin Ellada!
” His is the idealized victory. But it is the counterpart phrase shouted by Voula Patoulidou, the runner, that enters indelibly into the language, is repeated in revues, shows up in political cartoons, becomes the refrain of a pop song, and will clearly never be forgotten. It is another reminder that Greece is the country of the double, that the famous Greek light has an eternal twin in the Greek shadow. When Voula Patoulidou astonished herself and the other competitors, breaking through the tape on the track to win her gold, she shouted in a voice strangled for breath, but audible, “For Greece, for fucking Greece!”

M
ail in Greek apartment buildings is set out by the deliverer on a communal table in the lobby. Mine has been freely opened while I was away, and a CD someone mentions in his letter to me is missing from his package. It is a common complaint among people I know, who have often failed to receive packages I sent them, and it seems not to be felt here as theft, but more as the seizing of an opportunity—“I saw it first.”

The floor just beyond the front door of my apartment is thick with leaflets and advertisements, those wellsprings of modern national mythologies. I pick up one with a drawing of an olive-laden branch, in which the olives have been subtly reshaped so that they now have nipple-like tips. “As necessary for our children as mother’s milk,” the ad reads, “the Olive the honored one.”
Timi
, honor, prestige, public recognition, is as crucial a Greek word as
fthonos
, and I read on, realizing that this scrap of paper promoting olive oil is a miniature dissertation on ideal national values. “Nothing can be compared with olive oil,” it proclaims, and there again is the popular Platonism, for which to be incomparable is a condition for perfection. “Liquid treasure, Homer called it, Hippocrates
described it as healing medicine. Today all doctors declare unanimously that olive oil is a spring of health and life for the young and the old.” There the eternal wisdom of the ancients is confirmed by modern science, whose technological powers are seen in their turn to be neither novel nor challenging, but comfortably rooted in antiquity, both elements present in the olive, which, it is hinted, is a source of immortal life. There is a subliminal reminder here of the use of olive oil in Greek baptismal rites, in which the godparents and priest wear aprons to protect themselves from water splashes and oil stains—and baptism, of course, is the first requirement of the modern method for attaining immortality.

The other leaflet that catches my eye is one for a
paidikos stathmos
, a day-care center—in literal Greek, a children’s station, as one would use the term “first-aid station.” Buildings with signs identifying them as children’s centers are ubiquitous, since now that Greek women often have salaried jobs outside their homes, nearly one in eight Greek children are looked after by either private or state-run child-care centers. This one is a school, with credentials from the Department of Education, and its assurances are revealing, and touching. The rarity and value of parks and gardens in Athens underlies the eager declaration, “Our two buildings are immediately opposite a garden—they are sun-drenched because they are not adjacent to tall apartment buildings, and we have yards with real earth and sand!” The school asserts that it possesses a wealth of contemporary educational material for children, an important claim in a country where some schools are so overcrowded and badly equipped that their students go to school in shifts, and often rely on
frondisteria
, private schools offering lessons in special subjects, for their most intensive academic training. And finally, this school offers English, to be learned, it asserts, within games, and not in formal lessons. “In no case,” the school guarantees, “will the English language function at the expense of or to the detriment of Greek.” Reading these claims makes me think of the bittersweet nature of promising. How defensive these promises
are—against overcrowded urban life, against irresponsible unqualified centers that mishandle and exploit children, against encroachments on national identity. There can be abundance and joy in making promises, but there is also an element of tragedy in a promise, a gate locked against some threat or danger. The mixed elements are acutely present in the common form of the Western marriage service: the great inner freedom and generosity of the promise to love, which is however made in the face of danger, the external threat of death.

I run down Spyro Merkouri street for a downtown trolley—I am to meet Leda at Mignon, the signature department store of downtown Athens, and then keep an appointment for lunch, via letters of introduction, with a journalist. It is amusing to be running down a street named for the actress Melina Mercouri’s grandfather, who was a beloved mayor of Athens, or “mayor of the Athenians,” as the office was known in the early years of the century. Her own international fame as an actress and spokesman for Greece obscures for outsiders how deliberately she is sustaining a legacy, a legacy with modern roots, not antique ones. Reminiscences of Spyros Merkouri give a tinge of color to the monochrome picture outsiders have of Athens as it entered the twentieth century. His office was run like a reception room—hung with portraits of War of Independence heroes in foustanella kilts, and populated with peasants in regional costumes and Europeanized businessmen sweltering in black coats, communally following the Greek-Ottoman tradition of doing business through personal petition. Spyros Merkouri christened babies all over Attica, as modern Greek politicians continue to do, where the godfather relationship is a canal of trade and mutual advantage, and a stronger method of vote getting than bribery. Mayor Merkouri was said to be keenly conscious of his position as an advocate of Hellenism,
ellenismos
, that mysterious sense of national mission whose essence is a source of conflict to any table full of Greeks; and he had the modern Greek’s sense of the work of archaeology as patriotism, convincing the Athenian citizens
to fund the restoration of the famous “Treasury of the Athenians” at Delphi.

Mignon reminds me of nothing so strongly at first as of local department stores in southern towns like Jackson, Mississippi, or Mobile, Alabama. It must have once seemed a high-storied proof of urban sophistication, a place where people would come in from the country to buy winter coats and have city outings—it even has a floor with a book department, tables piled with coffee-table books about Macedonia, and many-volumed collections of the lyrics of the Greek
rembetika
songs, a fusion of Turkish and Greek music and themes something like the blues, that came to life here when the Ottoman Greeks were driven out of Turkey in the twenties. There are illustrated children’s books with stories from Herodotus and Aesop, and a book about the Gulf War, an imaginary letter written by a dead Iraqi child to “George Bush, Chief Zionist.”

On the way to the appliances section, we pass a cafeteria where high school students come after school to hang out and play computer games. The whole place has an old-fashioned feel—in the dress department again, I am reminded of the rural South—what is impressive about the clothes is the racks of them, the glamorous abundance of the factory-made, industrial milk and honey. The dresses try at once to be appealing, through flowered prints, and chaste, through sheer ugliness of cut. When we get to the appliance floor, Leda tells me she will buy a hair dryer for me, since civil servants and their families and students get automatic fifteen percent discounts here. As the saleslady writes up the purchase, Leda fumbles in her wallet. “I have the wrong set of cards,” she tells the saleslady. “My brother is a policeman, but I don’t have the card with me.” The saleslady shrugs and subtracts the discount anyway. I am curious to see everything, so we wander down to the floor for personal and corporate gifts—all icons, for a range of possible namesakes, as heavily ornamented with silver and gilt as if they were Byzantine royalty, and shelves and shelves of good luck charms, brass evil-eye charms, gleaming horseshoes, blue glass cloves of garlic,
plaques embossed with the images of sailing ships, papiermâché pomegranates dangling from strings of blue beads, a world of wishes made visible, ropes of beads to cling to in a world of accident, stacks of lucky icons to be dealt like handfuls of cards in a sacred game of chance.

T
rucks equipped with loudspeakers are roaming around the neighborhood of the journalist I am to have lunch with, Kyrios Angellopaidi, whose name translates to Mr. Angelchild. Many Greek surnames grew out of village nicknames and contain buried fragments of village lore, local reputations, or local mockery. You come across people named Mr. Been to India, Mrs. Adopted Child, Mr. Little Fairy Tale. As I skimmed the newspaper this morning, a wedding announcement for Penelope the Barefoot caught my eye. The trucks are portable shops, advertising their wares over loudspeakers, selling fish, firewood, chairs for children and adults, flowerpots and furniture for the ubiquitous Greek balcony. I have arrived during the vacation of the neighborhood electricity, and Mr. Angelchild greets me downstairs, carrying a candle wrapped in tinfoil, and apologizing that we will have to climb five flights up because of the stilled elevator. His two clear-eyed children arrive home from school for lunch before our ascent, and they clamber after us, blushing excruciatedly over their father’s proudly goading them into displays of school English. Upstairs, Mrs. Angelchild has been interrupted in the preparation of our three-course lunch, but
she assures me we only have ten minutes to go until the strike moves over to the next neighborhood. When the lights come back on, I find that I am sitting on a red velvet sofa covered with plastic tarping, facing an enormous glass coffee table resting on the supports of four huge brass mermaids, four brass Barbies with fishtails. There are various diplomas and certificates hanging on the walls, an icon representing Constantine, the emperor who made Byzantium the capital of the eastern Roman Empire, and his mother Helena, and a lithograph of Kolokotronis, “the old man of the Morea,” who fought the Turks in 1821, and was a son of Mr. Angelchild’s own region. Mrs. Angelchild goes off to the kitchen, refusing all offers of help, and her husband brings out a bottle of wine. “You see what wine I am giving you?” he asks. It is a Macedonian rosé. “Come and look at the view,” he says, and I obediently go to the window. The neighborhood is a dusty outskirt, now frantically turning into a suburb. There are a few villas down the road, and an unfinished high-rise across the way. “And yet there is traffic, constant traffic, even here”—Dora Bakoyiannis, the prime minister’s daughter and a cabinet member, lives down the way, with an entourage of bodyguards and a flow of famous visitors. “I see many celebrities,” he says in a taxed tone, as if he is barely able to fulfill this responsibility along with his many others. He pours me a glass of wine. “That is a pretty necklace you have—it is Greek?”