Dinner with Persephone (19 page)

We drive to a village called Theologos, named for the evangelist Saint John, where a couple live who supply Kimon and Elpida with eggs and produce. In the nineteenth century, this was a principal town of Thasos—the Turkish quarter is still an identifiable part of town, despite the cycle of mutual massacres visited on each other by Turks and Greeks. The houses strongly resemble the houses on the Macedonian mainland, with their tweedy stone walls, slate roofs, and the arched doorways peculiar to Thasos. These are houses built for the severe cold of the Macedonian winter, the roofs pitched to release their burdens of snow.

The farmer and his wife are sitting on their first-floor terrace, chickens pecking in the small orchard beyond the wall, large marmalade cat sunning himself at their feet. They are eating string beans cooked in garlic, oil, and tomato, along with bread, cheese, and wine. The farmer’s wife, dressed in the sacklike flower-print house-dress that is the daily uniform of village wives of her generation, stands when she sees us, and greets us with the traditional phrase of welcome. Her husband remains seated and nods his head at us. They work like a team producing two effects—she shows deference to the visitors, he shows benign indifference. When she moves to bring extra chairs, I see she is wearing socks but not shoes, and an ace bandage around her left knee. Her husband pops a whole clove of raw garlic into his mouth, and satirically offers me one. I say no thank you, as he knows I will, and he downs another clove like an aspirin tablet. His wife brings in a silver tray with three crystal dishes of the local sweet made of Thasos walnuts in sugar syrup, while her husband and Kimon discuss the Maastrict agreement. “It will only benefit the capitalists,” says Yiannis the farmer, “the people will gain nothing. We must get rid of Mitsotakis and put Andreas back in. Andreas is the only one who cares about the people.” I ask what in his lifetime has been the best Greek government. “Not one time, not ever, has there been a good government in Greece,” he answers. He asks me what he can tell me about the island. I want to know if there are reminders of Mehmet Ali’s childhood time here. Yiannis says, “Was he brought up here? I hadn’t heard. But I am
agrammatos
, unlettered. You are educated. If you read it in your books, that’s how it was. But whether or not you find Mehmet Ali’s village, at least you will swim today at Aliki. And you will see the way the burned side of the island once was. It was sabotage, you know.” I ask if the arsonists had ever been found. “No,” he says. “They were professionals. But it was the Turks. Or maybe the Italians, to destroy tourism.” It is a traditional Greek analysis, the rival in the East or the rival in the West.

Elpida and I go into the kitchen to help pack up the eggs Elpida buys here every week. On the wall hangs a picture of Jesus walking
through wheat fields, and on the floor are huge barrels of oil from the family trees. Yiannis’s wife offers to sell me a container of this private stock, and funnels it into a plastic bottle for me. “You are of Greek descent,” she says, and I say I am not. “No, no,” she says, “I can tell because of your Greek. It is always the women who keep the language—I have a nephew and niece who were raised in Zimbabwe—he doesn’t speak a word of Greek, she speaks well. The language the women keep like
prika
, like the furniture and linen we inherit to take into our houses when we marry. A part of you is Greek, or you would not have held the language.” It is an impeccably antique Greek piece of popular belief, shared by Plato. I can and do find it later in my notebook, a line from the
Dialogue of Cratylus
74: “It is the women who retain the old forms of speech.”

Yiannis loads us with figs and pomegranates from his trees, and we drive off through shady secretive hamlets, one on the verge of restoration, with goats roaming through the foundations of the stone mountain houses, magnificent views of both sea and mountains, and a pretty marble fountain in its square. The interior villages are hidden enclaves that reveal themselves to you unexpectedly, often built on sharp slopes, and designed to be as invisible and inaccessible as possible to marauders and probably to Ottoman tax collectors as well. We stop for a minute in one where the mimosa-and-pine-scented air has a cakelike sweetness. An old lady comes down the path accompanied by five goats. She tells us that only five families live in this village in winter. In summer, the foreigners come who own many of the houses, but in winter, the goats outnumber the people. We wish her “Good winter,” and drive on through the heat to the cove at Aliki, divided as so much in Greece seems to be. On one side there is a site with the ruins of a classical temple, where a fury of waves lashes the rocks, a site for propitiation. You can see blocks of marble in the sea, possibly scheduled for transport in the seventh century, since Aliki was a center for marble export to ports all over the Mediterranean. On the other, the water smiles, smooth as a porcelain platter. The
swimming is dreamlike, in a bay with the serene texture of lake water combined with the salty originality of ocean water. “It is
pétillant
, isn’t it,” says Kimon, surfacing from a dive, “gentle, but vital and festive like a
blanc de blancs.
”

We walk afterwards along the small roads behind the cove, through what seem to be clouds of wine-scented air, and find the answer when an old woman beckons to us from a walled garden above the road. Wait there, she says, and we do, until she comes to the fence to hand us bunches of wine grapes from her harvest. They are the absolute inch away from being wine that genius is from being wisdom. “This month is called the Vintager,” says Elpida. “Have you ever noticed the profusion of the religious holidays and saints’ days during important agricultural months? I mean in September, the month of the vintage, and of the fruit harvest, there are one or two or more every week. We farm the supernatural in proportion to how much we are farming the natural.” We stop at another beach at sunset, and walk it for a while. A grandmother in black knits under a tree, while her grandchild stares meditatively at the sea. We walk past brilliant blue gallon olive oil tins planted with red geraniums, and tables in little pavilions and under trees where families eat watching the shore until it gets cold. A seagull runs clumsily away as we advance—he makes us feel untrustworthy, with his seeming idée fixe that we are determined to struggle with him over the fish he has caught. “When I walk here,” Kimon says, “I see something invisible. And astonishing. A complete reversal of fortune, an economic change so profound that the whole social structure is changing with it. As we walk past these families, who now own prime coastal property, realize that until the first waves of tourism in the sixties, this was the poorest land you could own. Rich farmland was desirable, but sand? The daughters of these families had to be either nice-looking or cunning, because they had no property of value to bring to marriage if this was what they brought. And now these undesirables are potential millionaires.” “Like the oil booms in
Texas,” I say. “Yes. Just think of it,” says Kimon, “people who were once despised courted, new members of parliament, peasants suddenly the parents of
jeunesse dorée.
”

When we drive back to their house, in a fishing village as compact as a quatrain, Kostas calls in high spirits over an interview he has read in the paper with a prominent classicist. Classicists appear regularly in the pages of newspapers and journals, partly because the kind and degree of teaching of ancient Greek in the schools is constantly debated here, and alters according to which party is in power. It is an issue that seems to divide fairly evenly along right- and left-wing lines, with the right wing favoring the compulsory teaching of classical Greek, and the left wing preferring that it be elective, proposing that the presence of classical Greek in modern Greek, if the language is intelligently taught, is itself an education in ancient Greek, adequate for people who are not going to be professional classicists, getting a full knowledge of the ancient language through its different dialects and periods. The right wing on the other hand seems to believe that the meaning of being Greek is held in the amber of fifth-century Attic Greek.

The special urgency of Kostas’s call, though, is because he knows I will enjoy the professor’s response to a request to find a classical equivalent for the refrain of a pop song hit of the summer, “I feel high when you’re near by.” The classicist suggests a line from section 536b of the Platonic dialogue called
Ion.
“And listen to the end.” Kostas reads the question, “ ‘Is ancient Greek a living language?’ And the answer comes, ‘Not exactly living, but immortal.’ I knew you’d like it. What are you going to do tomorrow?”

What we are doing is climbing up to the theater of Dionysus, placed with especially brilliant intuition, since the ring of marble benches of the theater slopes down toward the stage, resembling the cliff beyond, which itself slopes gently toward the larger circle of the sea, so that the landscape continues the theater. “There is a theater made by men and one by nature,” I say to Kimon. The audience sitting in the theater of Dionysus, looking beyond the stage to
the corresponding sea, realizes that this theater is for the drama of art, but the sea, the theater beyond, is for the drama of life.

We buy a cold drink from an enterprising man poised on the path with an ice chest, and walk back down to a panoramic site overlooking the Aegean. A clean white chapel with a red tiled roof has been built here, shadowed by pine trees. Two ferryboats are crossing in opposite directions, one for Thasos, one for a mainland port called Keramoti. A man is line fishing from a craggy rock wrinkled like the poet W. H. Auden’s aged, drink-raddled face. The waters from here are all possible blues, milky, washed with emerald, blue black, aquamarine.

It was recently the name day of my new baby goddaughter in New York, so I show Kimon pictures. Name days are still important here, though I notice that the bakery shop windows, in Athens at least, make a point of displaying birthday cakes. “Choosing a godparent is still a complicated business here,” says Kimon. “For a politician, it means almost a guaranteed vote in exchange for protection, still. You would want to choose the strongest person whose power connected to your interests—let’s say a shipbuilder would choose a man who owned a forest. But you would also have to calculate that your children couldn’t marry each other according to church law, so the one alliance ruled the other out. But who do you think the best godfather would be, Patricia, if you were choosing?”

“I don’t know—the prime minister? Elias Lalaounis, your Tiffany?”

“Maybe. But there is a famous fairy tale, a
paramythi
as we call them, about the search for the ideal godfather, that says that even picks like yours are unstable. Would you like to hear it?”

“Please.” Kimon lights another of the endless cycle of cigarettes he smokes—they seem to be an alternative for many Greeks to the worry beads which are becoming too nostalgic to make use of; the sheer self-consciousness of carrying them defeats the purpose of relieving tension. I look out over the brilliant blue-green anarchy of waters, a symbol since antiquity of the unreliability of patronage,
from Odysseus, whom Poseidon hated and sea nymphs unexpectedly pitied, to Onassis, whose vast fortune and dynasty was founded on water.

“There was once a villager, a farmer who had a few acres of olive trees and a patch of vineyard, but barely eked out a living. So when his son was born, he was naturally anxious to find the most influential of all godfathers for the boy. For what a dowry is to a girl, a godfather is to a boy. ‘Ask the head of the village,’ said his father-in-law, ‘he will not refuse you, and he is not only the most powerful man here, but knows officials in Constantinople.’

“ ‘No,’ the farmer said respectfully but decidedly, ‘I want a godfather for my boy who is both more influential, with broader connections, but is also completely reliable. You and I know the head of the village can be bought for the right price. I want someone absolutely just, so my child will never be cheated at the moment when he needs sponsorship most. Tomorrow, I will set out on a journey to find the perfect godfather for my son. I ask you to oversee the planting while I am gone.’

“The next morning, the farmer set out on foot, carrying on his back a bottle of the wine from his own grapes, and the cold lamb and pie of wild greens that his wife had made for him. Have you had
hortopitta
, Patricia? I will ask Elpida to make us one—it is a pie made of fresh-picked wild greens and sheep’s cheese, the most elegant of dishes of the cuisine of poverty. We learned our wild greens especially well during sieges. Well, anyway, you will like
hortopitta.
So the farmer was walking along the coast road, thinking about the godfather problem, when he overtook a royal procession, horsemen and bearers carrying a sedan chair draped with velvet curtains and jewels and hanging silver lanterns, like the sultans used for short trips. A tall old man with a massive head, pure white hair, and a long white beard stepped out onto the ground, towering over the farmer. ‘Where are you going so far from your acres?’ the old man asked the farmer. ‘Your worship, I have just had a son, and I am going in search of the perfect godfather, because I want my boy to have every advantage.’

“ ‘I offer myself as your new son’s godfather,’ said the old man.

“ ‘But I am looking for a godfather who is perfectly just, and who will have my boy’s welfare at heart.’

“ ‘I am the man you are searching for,’ said the magnificent old aristocrat.

“ ‘What is your name, sir?’ the farmer asked.

“ ‘I am God,’ said the old man.

“ ‘Then, with respect, you are not the person I would choose for my son’s godfather.’

“ ‘Why not?’ the old man asked. ‘Isn’t the name God the synonym for justice?’

“ ‘No, my Lord. You give riches and pleasures to the evil, and hardship and pain to the good. You accept bribes. Just look at your velvet and your silver lamps. You are unpredictable. And you have influence only in certain circles. You are not the right godfather for my little son.’ And the peasant went on his way, leaving God standing with His retinue on the coastal road. He ate some of the lamb and drank some of the wine from home, and spent the night in a field under the open sky. The next day, he continued his journey, and his path crossed the path of a tall, athletic man wearing a coarse homespun tunic. ‘Where are you going, countryman?’ asked the man in the tunic. ‘I am going to seek a godfather for my newborn son, a godfather who is perfectly just and will not fail him.’