Dinner with Persephone (30 page)

When we leave, the dance floor is crowded; many of the dancers are mouthing the English words to the tune the band is playing: “This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York island …” In Athens, they are dancing at lavish weddings to American protest songs from the Depression.

A
s Christmas, or I should say New Year’s, approaches—since Protokhronia is more like our Christmas celebration, and Christmas is a foreign fruit grafted on the Greek tree—the small, cell-like empty storefronts in my neighborhood, which are inhabited only by perpetually renewed populations of wild kittens, old cardboard boxes, and stray wine bottles, turn into magical chambers glittering with Christmas ornaments. The street cats are an insoluble Greek problem, since the Greeks disapprove of sterilizing animals—I heard a distinguished teacher of mine, educated at the Sorbonne, and known throughout Athens for the skill and imagination with which she teaches this difficult language, agonizing with her father over the decision to sterilize a beloved male cat named Achilles. Her apartment was at that point overrun with Achilles’s children, who barely left a corner for her, but her father pleaded with her, “Don’t ruin him.” The alternative, though, is this, streets full of hungry, scavenging stray animals breeding new stray animals, who are often given poisoned food, or killed in other ways, or driven, like the storefront kittens, to some unnameable elsewhere.

I am glad to be walking outside, since I am always cold in my apartment. This is not a severe winter in southern Greece, although northern Greek villages are snowed in; but southern Greek houses are sensibly built to capture as much cool air as possible against the summer heat, and mine is very successful. And in my building, as is common, the heat is only turned on three times a day, so I shiver indoors and sleep in an embryonic tuck. I stop to look at the gift book offerings for children in a shop window—it features a book displayed in many windows and catalogues this year:
I, Alexander: King of Macedonia, Son of Zeus, Conqueror of the World.
The cover is in lurid blood and earth colors, and shows Alexander in girlish-boyish beauty, a reddish fringe of beard contrasting with his blond curls, perhaps to make his sex less ambiguous, his eyes staring with furious determination. A label is fixed to the book, a breathlessly worded reminder that a free poster of Alexander of Macedonia comes with each book.

I go in, to buy a translation of
Little Women
(Mikres Kyries) for a friend’s daughter, and leaf through it, relishing the Greek version. Amy, accused of being an affected niminy-piminy chit in American, in Greek is criticized for her use of high-toned Katharevousa words. The saleswoman asks, “Is it a gift?” and when I say yes, wraps it with genius. It is something that moves me about life here, this love of anything to do with gifts—you are invariably asked when you make a purchase here if it is a gift, and it will be wrapped in glory if it is, with a characteristic “second gift” fastened to the package—a wand with a tiny gold rose, an evil-eye charm, a tiny ship. My package is fastened with a tiny ceramic pomegranate, the key image of this season here, and a measure of the emotional difference between the Eastern and Western holidays. The fruit sellers at the farmer’s markets display pomegranates dyed gold on their tables, along with branches of gold- and silver-dyed leaves. Flower sellers offer pomegranates wrapped in silver foil for you to smash against your threshold with all your force on New Year’s Eve, to spread the seeds of good luck, and to have an abundant year, and gift shop tables are
covered with brilliant red candles in the shape of pomegranates. In jewelry shop windows, there are pomegranate-shaped pendants, and silver pomegranates to give as gifts, cast open to show their abundant silver seeds. Again, I am reminded that the world of the unconscious is different here than in Scandinavia, in Mexico, in Benin, as is the imagery of daily life that we take with us into our dreams and bring back with us transformed, to change the world of reality.

Modern Greek dream books always catalogue pomegranate dreams, as Artemidorus did in the second century. And other divinities are present at this feast which now celebrates the birth of the baby boy Christian god: the pomegranate is a symbol of the promise that the Queen of the Dead will return to earth, bringing spring with her, before she retreats again into the underworld. Persephone’s pomegranate means nothing in the West as a mark of this season, but in this part of the world the pomegranate has a long history as a charm that mediates between life and death. In Egypt, a wall painting of Pharaoh Seti, the father of Rameses II, shows him offering to Osiris, the first god of the Egyptian pantheon to die and return to life, a tray holding bread, wine, and pomegranates. Here of course, the pomegranate is the fruit of Persephone, or at least, I realize, in this dual-natured country, half of it is. The other half belongs to Hades, since this fruit is also the King of the Dead’s, which he offers in order to ensure that she will remain with him in the kingdom of the dead—the pomegranate is a fruit neither of death nor life, but of the inseparability of the two. And perhaps, in a way impossible to document, since the art of myth is in part the art of shredding documents, the pomegranate came to memorialize the end of women’s sharing in divinity, which the various monotheisms chose to personify as exclusively male. Perhaps Demeter mourns, in the form of her daughter assigned to the underworld, her own lost publicly acknowledged divinity—the ambiguous figure of Mary reflects this loss, an underground divinity, with the constant official assertion that she is not a goddess, and the constant private
invocation of her in popular worship. Or perhaps not, depending on which six seeds preoccupy you, the six Persephone ate or the six she did not. Myths are malleable, molded utterly by how we interpret them, unlike literature, with its changing but indissoluble links to history and to social life.

The dream pomegranate of both the Greeks of antiquity and the modern Greeks is an ambiguous fruit. It is not a good omen for Artemidorus, meaning “wounds because of their color, tortures because of their prickles, slavery and submission because of the Eleusinian legend.” The modern dream books differ—some foretell, for those who see pomegranates in their sleep, charming and pleasant erotic adventures, because it is a symbol of the return of spring and fertility. Others interpret it as a symbol of danger, that if you see someone offer you a pomegranate, it is a sign that your life is in danger, that some underworld force may be reaching out to seize you, as Hades did Persephone. One says that an open or broken pomegranate foretells wealth, but without joy, and that a pomegranate full of seeds foretells a powerful love that will not end in marriage. But the modern dream books, even when they present a pomegranate as a sign of warning, present this old dream as a symbol of a new reality—the idea of an erotic relationship, the idea of an erotic marriage, the idea of erotic choice, militantly discouraged for both men and women under the system of arranged marriage and profound social and professional segregation in place in Greece until recently. The pomegranate may foretell relationships that fail, or charming adventures, but either way it suggests the existence both of erotic pleasure and erotic married love inconceivable under the old system. There are dreams that change, and the world changes with them; the world changes, and the dreams the old world inspired become untranslatable.

I walk on to Plaka, the old quarter, lovely without tourists as I’ve never seen it, on a chilly winter day, with its trees studded with bright flame-colored Clementines, thinking about the pomegranates, about the irony of the presence of the old gods at the feast
of a god whose champions tried to destroy them. I pass a demonstration by a group holding a huge red banner and chanting—this one seems to be against fascism, but I don’t stay to find out who they are, because there seem to be as many police as there are demonstrators, and I am aware now of their notorious readiness to “make you eat wood,” in the Greek idiom for beating. I stop at a magazine stand to look at the holiday issues—the cooking pages of the women’s magazines are a regular anthology of EEC country recipes and customs,
bûche de Noël
, Christmas pudding,
pfeffernusse.
New images in Greek eyes, the primitive beginnings of new dreams. One of them reprints a twentieth-century classic, a popular Christmas story called “Christmas at Missolonghi,” by a woman who virtually invented children’s literature in this country, Penelope Delta, the daughter of the extraordinarily wealthy Emmanuel Benaki, whose cotton-based fortune is enshrined in monuments like the famous Benaki Museum in central Athens, and Benaki Hall, at the Athens College preparatory school.

I buy the magazine, curious about the story, and turn around at a tug on my arm to see Eleftheria, a girl I run into from time to time at my gym, when I go for a workout and a steam in the
hamam
, as the steam baths here are called. She shows off a pair of Versace leather trousers she found on sale while visiting her Marine boyfriend in the States. “Four women cursed me on the way down here today,” she says proudly. “I think my new pants must look nice. You know how it works here, half of the people are going
‘Ftou, ftou
, may the evil eye not see you,’ and the other half are going ‘
Katara mou
, you have my curse for all eternity.’ ” We walk together out of Plaka, while Eleftheria riffles through my magazine, discoursing like a wine connoisseur on the qualities of Lancâme, Estée Lauder, Cover Girl, and Chanel makeups. She shows me a new palette of eye shadows she got for her name day last week. “Saint Eleftherios—Saint Freedom, Saint Deliverance—the patron saint of pregnant women and of prisoners.” She smiles. “If you go to a maternity hospital, you will see his icon everywhere, and when you make a
wish for a pregnant woman, you wish her a good liberation.” We wander toward Hermes Street, a name that reflects the neoclassicism of the new Greek state—in both substantial and provincial towns, the major commercial street will often be called after Hermes, the ancient patron god of commerce, reflecting the determination to revive a consciousness of ancient Greece, to regain a place in Europe through classicism, eluding the impossibility of being reintegrated through the awkward symbols of Byzantium: Byzantium and western Europe had, after all, evolved into political and religious enemies; the Greek Orthodox prayer book has a special prayer for a ceremony marking the return to Orthodoxy from the errors of Roman Catholicism, a circumstance that periodic control of Greek territory by Catholic powers, and the frequent education of Greek boys in Roman Catholic schools and universities, must have created often.

“Are you Christmas shopping?” Eleftheria asks. “Yes,” I say, and she says, “I have a bit more time—we still exchange our gifts on January 1. And we do something that will be gone in another generation. We give the men the women’s gifts and the women the men’s gifts, and then swap afterwards. So when my brother’s name is called out, he gets, let’s say, a pair of earrings, but I get a tie. I don’t know why, maybe because Protokhronia leads up to carnival, when everyone masquerades. Lots of people used to do it. But I am having trouble with gifts at all this year. I am saving for another trip to the States, and besides, we girls have so many expenses, don’t we? You have your lipsticks, your tights, your sanitary pads, and then your light-days pantiliners.” Eleftheria has just finished a course in manicures, pedicures, and face masks, and she tells me she spent the weekend practicing on her mother, and while she was resting with a Chinese hair-nourishing treatment on her head, her boyfriend called from the U.S. “I told him, ‘I miss you,’ and asked ‘Do you miss me?’ And he said he did. When I put down the phone, I bounced up and down on the bed, and I was shouting, ‘Thank you,
Panayitsa mou
,’ and my mother came in to see what was going on.”

We pass a temporary Christmas store which features in its front window a huge ceramic music box which lights up to show a scene of three blond children revolving in a snowy landscape, while a selection of Western Christmas carols plays. The base is marked “Made in China.” There are tables full of matchbox-sized calendars for the new year, which offer poems, or recipes, or extracts from the lives of unfamiliar Orthodox saints, on the back of each tear-off sheet. And there is one of the many editions of a kind of almanac sold at this time of year, not only in the stores but on the trolleys and buses. The one offered here is a very homely, farmer’s and housewife’s version. “Who Were the Real Greeks?” reads the title of one article. Stacked high on another table are Christmas books for children, blending the three names in use for the seasonal bringer of gifts. Greek children used to have gifts only at New Year’s from Saint Basil of Caesarea, a thin, ascetic-looking man from Asia Minor who is a patron saint of education, and is often shown in icons carrying a pen and writing tablet. But now he is part of a holy trinity of gift givers, with Europe’s Saint Nicholas and America’s Santa Claus. A fat stuffed toy looking like the American Santa Claus I know is sprawled across a tower of Christmas books. He has a string at the back of his neck, and I pull it to hear his greeting. “Merry Christmas,” he says, “Agios Vasilis is coming.
Xa, xa, xa.
”

I say goodbye to Eleftheria and walk to the theater where I am meeting Aura and her husband, in a crumbling district with boarded-up neoclassical houses, without any sign of domestic life, waiting for their inheritors to negotiate them into high-rises. Hans points out a ramshackle neoclassical cottage, which he tells me is a famous brothel. The whole neighborhood has a doomed and painful loveliness, the air of Violetta in
La Traviata
, especially bleak because rescue seems so possible. After the play, we go to the Les Halles of Athens, to a restaurant in the central meat market that opens around midnight and closes around six in the morning, a place for truckers and market employees and intellectuals. Aura is talking about the recent remarks of a magisterial elderly actor named Dimitri
Horn; the surname sounds German, and I am reminded that there are a handful of well-known Greek families with transliterated German surnames, some of whom are said to have been part of the retinue that accompanied the Bavarian prince Otto who was assigned the monarchy of Greece shortly after the War of Independence, as the choice of the great powers of the period. “I remember it for you because his mood and tone were so Greek. He was asked about his future plans, and he replied, ‘At my age people have no future.’ Can you imagine an American actor saying that, there where you are trained to say death is not death, it’s just a new opportunity to live without breath? We have a sense of the irrevocable that you don’t. Maybe because our lives are more controlled than yours are, surely because we lost a world. The last question they asked him was if there was anything he would like to forget. And what did he say? ‘Everything, forever.’ ”