Dinner with Persephone (12 page)

Elvis has a small car and is in the mood to run up to Mount Pendeli for lunch. He is clearly homesick, and his eyes light up when I offer him one of the boxes of grits I brought. “That would be great,” he says, “they just have
koulouria
, the sesame bread, and coffee for breakfast, and I can’t live on that until lunch.” We head first for the monastery of Kaisariani, on Mount Hymettus, and the traffic is not so bad, because the city has emptied for the death and funeral of the Virgin, the second great festival of the Greek year, in its way as important as Easter. As at Easter, people try to go home for August 15,
dekapende Augustou
, to their villages or islands, or to make special pilgrimages to churches associated with the Virgin, a lady who has often been sighted here, although she also never set foot on Greek soil. The neighborhood of Kaisariani is still known as a leftist, working-class neighborhood, and there is a Communist Party office with a prominent banner in its central square. It was a heroic center of anti-Nazi resistance, and its streets were named nostalgically after towns in Asia Minor by the refugees who settled it in the twenties. The monastery of the same name (and as is often the case in Greece, nobody knows the provenance of the name, so folklore is free to breed its own origins) is a popular Sunday refreshment for Athenians, the urban equivalent of a country outing—on the grassy plateaus of the mountains, Athenians picnic, play soccer, and gather the olives the signs strictly forbid them to pick. The Kaisariani
monastery made such a cherished Athenian expedition that it was nicknamed “Seriani”—stroll—and found a place in a couplet about the three monasteries on the edge of Athens that all Athenians can repeat: “In Seriani, strolling—and in Pendeli, honey—and cold water that angels drink flows in Dafni.”

On the walk up the slopes to the monastery, an eleventh-century foundation, I try to imagine the
nyfopazaro
, the “bride bazaar” that was set here well into the 1930s and maybe beyond, depending on whether the person you talk to finds the memory embarrassing. Eligible young women would be strolled up and down the green paths by their parents, getting together afterward to discuss whose eyes met whose with the most significance. That bride bazaar, as many women of refugee descent will tell you, was not just an offshoot of sexual conservatism, but an arena for desperate maneuvers. The refugees were in an odd social position to begin with, often held in contempt by the “autochthonous” Greeks, who had in their turn felt held in contempt as provincials by the Asia Minor Greeks, who viewed themselves as cosmopolitan. Many of the refugees too were in the schizophrenic position of blaming the government which was giving them shelter for the disaster which had brought them here to begin with. The refugees were considered suspicious, possibly disloyal to Greece, undesirable social connections; and to complete the chaos, the dowry system on which marriage was based was completely shattered because the refugees had lost all their property in Turkey, burned or appropriated, while their prospects for compensation were indefinite. In a world in which marriage was the only future for a woman, and a woman without property was virtually unmarriageable, the situation of the refugee girls was abysmal. Kostas sent me in the mail the other day copies of two popular songs from that era, from a collection a friend of his of refugee descent has made. They are tragic pop songs, in a way you get used to in Greece, where people dance and sing for pain as much as for pleasure. In one, a rich boy marries a
prosfigoula
, a little refugee girl, and his mother is so angry that she fries two snakes and feeds them
to the girl, poisoning her. The second one is the most nakedly cruel song about marriage I have ever encountered, sung by a potential bridegroom—“If your mother doesn’t give me promissory notes and cash, then we’ll have clashes,” he sings in one verse. “If your mother doesn’t give me a house and a car, you’ll never have me for a husband. If your mother doesn’t give up her own house to me, I’ll marry someone else.” And if her mother succeeded in bringing off the marriage? I wondered on this beautiful late-summer afternoon, in this serene oasis overlooking the mass of Athens out to the Saronic Gulf. These landscapes are as full of hidden events as people’s daily lives are full of hidden dreams.

“
To teras
,” Elvis says, “the monster,” looking out over the jumbled white buildings of the city—it looks like something breeding under a microscope, chains of molecules making unpredictable new connections. Exactly as if the city didn’t exist, a donkey is standing impassively in front of the view, while a man loads the baskets on its back with olives. Elvis and I look at the monastery kitchen and baths, and listen to the finale of a tour group’s lecture inside the church—a group of retirees who have different outings every month, they smilingly tell us. “So you see,” the guide concludes, gesturing toward a fresco showing the
myrrofores
, the three women bringing aromatic oils to anoint the dead body of Christ, “Byzantine art is just as good as Renaissance art, only different. I hope you will remember that as you continue to learn more about the treasures of Byzantine art, which is the true fruit of the ancient Greek heritage.” The group applauds. I see a striking icon of a scene I don’t recognize. It is a picture of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus, sitting in a womb-shaped fountain raised on a column. The fountain is pierced so that four streams of water flow into a kind of pool below her—it is an icon of a type which represents Mary as the Zoodokhos Pygi, the Life-Giving Fountain. There is a special feast day to celebrate this aspect of the Virgin, and apparently this kind of image is linked to a particular medicinal spring outside the walls of Constantinople, and often with other healing waters too. It is a jarring
image, this Christian Aphrodite, who is not rising from the sea but is enclosed in a cramped basin she can’t even stretch out full-length in, in water to which she has no physical relation—she is not rising in naked splendor from infinite water, but squatting in a kind of birdbath. And she perches in her water fully clothed, so heavily draped and veiled that her only visible flesh is her sober face.

“Let’s go on up to Drosia, where they make good
peinerli
,” Elvis says, adding more ragged edges to the world by talking Turkish (
peinerli
, Turkish for bread and cheese, is a kind of French bread pizza, brought here by Asia Minor refugees) and Savannah at the same time. I want to have a long look at the Pendeli monastery, with its exhibit of materials from a “secret school” which operated intermittently under Ottoman rule, teaching Greek and the principles of Orthodoxy, often under cover of darkness. Depending on who is telling you, they were either the stratagems through which the Turkish aim to render the Greeks illiterate slaves was outwitted, or hotbeds of sacralized nationalism—the view of them probably differs from region to region, too, since the relationship between the local Turkish and the Greek populations differed from place to place. But in any case the folklore image of the secret school, with its tender-faced boys tracing Greek letters by candlelight under the tutelage of a wise priest, is the one conjured up when people say the phrase, and matches the famous Greek children’s song about them: “My dear little glowing moon, shine so I can walk and find my way to school, so I can learn my alphabet, the letters and the other lessons, and things about God.” I heard two famous Greek poets, both known for their wit and the number of their lovers, launch into this once after a winy dinner, both in startlingly piping boyish voices, as if they had recovered their childhood pitches, both changing the last line so it ran “and how to kiss girls.”

Elvis is starving and hurries me out of the monastery into the car—on the way out, I notice stacks of books for sale by Mr. Angelchild’s hellenizing monk. We find a restaurant with a pine-scented garden and
peinerli
and Elvis tells me why he is here. “It’s
kind of surreal,” he says. His father is Greek and divorced his mother when Elvis was a teenager. His mother was devastated and lost custody of her son when she started drinking too much. He stayed with his father, but when his father married a French tourist passing through Savannah, and they began to have babies, Elvis was shipped off to his Theia Eleftheria—his Aunt Freedom—in Greece, who was overjoyed that her brother’s marriage had failed, but furious that she was saddled with Elvis. Elvis hoped his Greek blood would make him wanted here, that the whole nation would turn out to be a family, but he came back as a teenager when adolescent social structure is as highly organized as insects’, and he couldn’t find friends comfortably, with his poor Greek and strange childhood, so his poor Greek took much longer to improve. His girlfriends have been older women, friendlier to him than the teenage girls who don’t want to take romantic risks with a boy who has no clear prospects. “Theia Eleftheria curses me every day to my face, and has since I was fifteen. I’m a
tembelis
, a lazy bastard, I go with older women, I drink too much wine. I’m a pervert—anomalous, she says in Greek, which sounds pretty funny when you’re drunk. But nobody could live with her and not get drunk. Every day I say please don’t give me potatoes with dinner, and every day like clockwork I get them. So I don’t eat them. Because I hate them. Then even more, it’s pervert, ungrateful shit, stinking drunk, stray dog. The neighbors can hear her fine. Last night she screamed at me, ‘When will you go to work, you drunken scum? You can’t dye Easter eggs with farts! You have to have money for the colors!’ She rapes me—that’s how women rape you, with words, they rape your whole life. And she knows I have nowhere else to go. I’m thinking of joining the Greek army—they have like divisions or something for diaspora boys with not great Greek, and afterwards you get a passport, and maybe the connections for some kind of job.”

I ask him if he thinks about going back to the States.

“I’m scared to,” he says. “I’ve been here seven years now, and I don’t have anyone there at all. It’s too big there not to have anyone at
all. Here at least there is someone who hates me. Do you like poetry?” he asks me.

I tell him I do, and he pulls out a clipping he cut out of the newspaper about Cavafy, a reminiscence by someone who knew him in Alexandria. “When he got older, he used to have visitors come by candlelight so they wouldn’t see his wrinkles. And he served
raki
in pink glasses. And always held a sprig of jasmine to smell. That’s something I like about here. That this would be in the newspaper, just a human interest item. I saw another one the other day, a little headline that said ‘Persian poet in traffic accident; condition stable.’ That’s something nice. In America they have journalism; here the newspapers are more like personal letters about what happens. I think about doing that, if I can get my Greek good enough. Or maybe I’ll join the army and then be a poet. I’m in the ideal situation—like Solomos. Or Cavafy. His first language was English. It’s practically a requirement here that Greek be a second language for the national poets. It’s like they have to make themselves into Greeks. So maybe I’ll end up a poet. And a Greek.”

I
  would have liked to go to the island of Tinos, the Cycladic island known for its ferocious summer winds and its miraculous icon, for the Virgin Mary’s festival. But you need to secure a place to stay months in advance for this most elaborate of the pilgrimages, since some seventeen thousand or more people make the pilgrimage, and I was too busy with the arrangements I was making to settle in here and for my trips to Thasos and Naxos. Still, it is a disappointment, even though Kostas tells me some of the ceremonies from Tinos are broadcast on national television. Tinos is sometimes called Greece’s Lourdes, although it is another dramatic measure of the separation between the eastern and western Roman Empires that Tinos is a local pilgrimage, not an international one, and that while many westerners could dredge up the name of Saint Bernadette, partly thanks to the syrupy movie with Jennifer Jones, few would know the Greek nun Pelagia who was inspired to find the Virgin’s icon. It would be impossible to call Lourdes “France’s Tinos.” Greece is so far in sensibility from western Europe that it traditionally has not been included by the West in the geographical grouping “eastern Europe,” and just barely in the Balkans, thanks to the Balkan Wars
of 1812–13. Greece is neither western nor eastern Europe, but oriental Europe, where Europe and the Middle East live together, although they may pretend they have never met. In Lourdes the vision of the Virgin was the icon itself rather than a guide to a material icon, a physicalized demonstration of theological difference, of a thoroughly different imagining of what incarnation means, of different images of power, even different political ambitions.

Unlike the Lourdes Virgin, Panagia Tiniaka does not teach and offers no message to the world. What she does is perform miracles in exchange for offerings. There is a folk votive verse that people repeat when she is beseeched, varying the person prayed over: “Oh Panagia Tiniaka of the many lamps/watch over the sailor and I will give you thousands more.” The Lourdes Virgin is a shimmering apparition who appears like a sudden reflection of heaven on the face of the world; the Tinos Virgin, like so many Greek icons, comes from the underworld, buried in the earth or the sea—she does not descend to earth, but is resurrected from out of its dark depths, evidence of Greece’s eternity, and of its divine genealogy, of the mysterious presence of gods under its earthy surface. She is in some way Greece’s modern dream of coming back to life, since she was discovered in 1822, just one year after the Greeks rebelled against Ottoman rule and fought to make themselves what they had never been even in antiquity, a nation. Saint Pelagia, who was canonized in 1971, dreamed of a beautiful woman, dressed like a queen, who ordered her imperiously to dig for a miraculous icon of the Annunciation in a certain place on the island, and to build a church to house it. That it was an icon of the Annunciation linked it to the War of Independence, whose outbreak is celebrated on Annunciation Day. The festival here became even more politically charged in 1940, when an Italian submarine torpedoed the Greek battleship
Elli
in the Tinos harbor on August 15, the Virgin’s festival, an event which is commemorated in Tinos on this day as Pearl Harbor is by the Americans. What it touched off in the Greek imagination, this prelude to the Italian attempt to conquer Greece for the Axis powers,
appears in the many popular songs that commemorated the event, in which the attack is a reliving of the struggle between the Greeks and the Romans to dominate civilization, in its modern version an attempt by the Roman Catholics to possess the Orthodox Virgin, the true goddess of Christianity, who despises them for desecrating her feast, and proves her contempt by guiding the ill-equipped Greeks to their miraculous victory over the invading Italian army.