Dinner with Persephone (35 page)

Our conversation has turned to the war in Yugoslavia. Lambros says that he is appalled by the footage shot by Western television journalists, which makes the Serbs look like aggressors. “The Greek coverage will show you who the real victims are, the persecuted Orthodox of Serbia. The other stations that use the Western images give the impression the westerners want people to have. In any case, the Serbs are being hunted down because they don’t bow down to the interests of the foreigners who fomented this war,” he says. I have seen several stories about young Greek men volunteering for the Bosnian Serb army, to join battle in what they perceive as a religious war. “I know journalists who work for our own national television station,” Lambros tells me, “who have reliable information that these skirmishes you see are staged, who say that if you freeze and enlarge the pictures, you can clearly see the hands of the director at work. And as for Sarajevo, my same friend tells me that
there is only very confined damage, and that the Western journalists simply shoot the same ruins again and again to give a false impression of devastation.” This, too, or variants of it, I have heard before; it is an article of faith in certain circles, believed in fiercely, like the doctrinally settled title Theotokos, God Bearer, given to the Virgin Mary, whose role as the mother of deity is emphasized here, it seems to me, even more than her virginity. Lambros wants someone to argue with him, but no one will. He says threateningly, “It isn’t fanaticism. It isn’t fanaticism. Orthodoxy is a stain that can never be removed from us by laundering. It is not a religion, it is a way of life, it comes from the depths of man’s soul.” The waiter brings another carafe of wine, and Lambros quiets, remarking that the sea reminds him of the Panagia. We drink the wine and eat mussels, looking out over the glittering water to a passage to the hidden open sea between the cliffs. The glory of the Greek landscape is how uncannily it seems to enact the processes of thought and perception it inspires, taking the eye on radiant, inconclusive pilgrimages. The bright cold spring sunshine fills the seawater full of orbiting stars flickering.

A
  philosopher is taking me on Cicero’s and Pausanius’s walk around the precincts of the Academy, where they recorded seeing the tombs of Pericles and other Athenian great men. I stop to buy a paper with a favorite cartoon strip, “The Wild Babies,” which today pokes fun at Greek dealings with God. The wild child wants good weather for the traditional kite flying on Kathari Deftera, and shouts into the sky, “Make the wind blow,
re
God, make the wind blow,
re
!” using
re
, a particle that conveys a certain coarse, even at times contemptuous, familiarity;
re
is something you aren’t to call your parents. The next drawing shows a downpour of rain drenching the child and his kite, and in the last frame, the child says, using a diminutive endearment, “Okay,
Theouli mou
, my dear little God, I get it! A thousand pardons for the
re
!” The child takes no account of one kind of disrespect, freely dictating to the deity, but concludes that God is upset to be called by the wrong title. He sees it not so much as a breach in his behavior, but as an insult to God’s
filotimo.

The Academy district is now a working-class neighborhood, mostly six- and eight-story apartment buildings, with a crushed little white house and garden occasionally to be seen on a corner, and
some poignantly irreparable nineteenth-century neoclassical houses. With their unhinged wrought-iron gates and missing patches of wall covered with the last of their elegant terra-cotta ornaments, they have the air of nineteenth-century opera heroines maddened by unattainable love, like Lucia di Lammermoor. My friend points out to me what is thought to have been the garden of Epicurus—now a squat apartment building with underwear, blue jeans, and bath towels printed with jungle animals hanging from the laundry lines on the ascending balconies. We finish the walk at Colonus, the place where Oedipus entered the earth to die after Theseus granted him sanctuary. It is a park now, with lovely views of Mounts Parnis and Pendeli and the Tourkovounia, the Turkish mountains, as they are called. A handful of children are playing on a swing set, while a group of teenagers in leather jackets set off gunshot-sounding firecrackers that they have left over from the carnival celebrations. A boy of about six runs with a kite to the bench where his heavyset, black-clad grandmother is sitting, to harass her to climb to a higher point on the hill where the kite will fly more impressively. She doesn’t want to move from her perch, but he clambers onto her lap and kneels on her heavy thighs, putting his arms around her neck. He whispers and cajoles. She doesn’t smile and her eyes do not soften, but stare into his, with implacable acquiescence. He climbs down and pulls her along, like an earthbound kite. She breathes heavily as she follows him higher onto Oedipus’s hill at Colonus.

A
n intense energy is exchanged between the living and the dead during the Lenten period before Easter, as if in some ways, the prescribed fasting is a kind of death for the living, making them clairvoyant, and narrowing the boundaries between them and the dead. Soul Saturday is a day especially devoted to the dead, when their graves are tended, and they are fed
kollyva
, the food of the dead. As I walk down heavily trafficked Hymettus Street to the Protonekrotafeio, where I collided when I first arrived with the funeral of the actress Jenny Karezi, I see an unusually heavy concentration of taxis. They are pulling up at the various gates, dropping some families off and picking others up. I walk to the entrance along one wall of the cemetery, staring up at a huge sign with the Playboy logo and the admonition to “Read
Playboy
every month,” and smelling over the gasoline fumes the strong perfume of incense wafting from inside. The flower shops outside the gate are doing substantial custom, and a beggar with a crutch stands sentry, asking all the entrants for money. I see no men in the crowd, just a cluster of women wearing black—the departing group are clutching plastic bags of trimmings from the newly pruned and cleaned grave greenery, and from
some of the bags, silver edges of the trays on which the food of the dead was served gleam dully. As you enter the main gate, you have a clear view of the Parthenon, a sense of the strange logic of this country, this other world, ruled from here and from there by parallel sets of ghosts. The flower sellers inside the gate are offering bouquets of orange and yellow marigolds, branches of apple blossoms, white carnations. I buy a bunch of tongue-pink hyacinths. It would make me uncomfortable in the presence of people performing private rituals not to have some purpose of my own, so I decide I will walk until I find a grave that seems to call for remembrance; that way my wandering will not be prying, but a quest.

I move through the rows flanked by masses of grave sculpture, a city of stone people. I pass busts of Balkan War soldiers with the generic sternly mustached face you see in sculpture and medallions and even photographs. Beyond is the shrinelike grave of Korais, the advocate of Katharevousa Greek, and a champion in Europe for the creation of the modern state. There is a life-sized sculpture of a girl student in uniform sitting at a worktable, a stele with a relief of a woman in ancient Greek dress clasping hands with a man in a modern suit, a life-sized sculpture of a man lying on his deathbed with two children sitting on either side of the bed. In some rows there is almost no greenery; in others palms and, more beautiful, orange trees covered with golden oranges grow out of the graves. Scattered throughout the cemetery, priests wearing colored silk embroidered stoles over their cassocks are chanting private memorial services. A woman in black stands at the foot of a grave, fork in hand, eating
kollyva
from a china plate, while another, dressed in unfamiliarly formal clothes, puts her hands on her hips to shift her tight girdle. On benches at intervals, impoverished-looking people are selling candles bound together in groups of three to symbolize the trinity. “Go in goodness,” a candle seller says to a man who lights them and puts them in a container at the foot of his family’s grave. On another bench, a woman is selling small paper bags of
kollyva
, for those who didn’t bring it from home. An old
mavrofora
, a black-clad woman
with a black kerchief, sits facing her family grave, holding a burning candle, and staring. I am still looking for a grave that looks as if it needs my flowers. I pass a grave with a portrait bust of the woman it holds portrayed as the head of a sphinx, and another with a large goddess-sized sculpture, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence to which a color photograph is attached—an advertisement by the sculpture company, with its address, telephone number, and the name of the sculptor. Among the labyrinth of graves, I notice the memorial of a member of parliament, with a photograph of the man in a smiling pose, smoking a pipe, displayed in a stone casing on the grave. Directly on the marble slab some relative, perhaps, has placed a crystal bowl, with the real wooden pipe the man in the picture is smoking. I turn down an alley and see a tomb inscribed with one name in Roman script between a row of names in Greek script. When I go closer to see what this configuration means, I see it is the name of George Polk, the American journalist who was murdered in Thessaloniki in 1948, and whose cruel death caused so much suffering; an innocent man, experts on the case say, spent his life in prison for it, because the right-wing Greek government authorities and the Americans who backed them during the cold war were determined to assign the blame to a political scapegoat. I had seen the famous photograph of Polk’s body after it was recovered from the Thessaloniki harbor, openmouthed, limp as a scarecrow, a picture that forces you to imagine what it must have been like to realize, as he must have, that you were going to die this way. I leave my flowers here, to cover with some tenderness this untender death.

I
  wanted to be in Mani for Independence Day, since some of the most famous warlords who fought with their more or less private armies to harry the Turks out of Greece came from here; after independence was won, with so much Maniote blood, it was men from Mani who helped destabilize the new state by assassinating its first prime minister, in the pattern of Greek duality, fighting both for and against Greece.

Peloponnesians, and people from Mani in particular, feel possessive about their role in the Greek uprising, so I wanted to see how the holiday felt there, and signed on for a week’s walk led by a talented mountaineer who is reputed to know every trail, hidden or public, in this part of the country. A few days before we set out, I went to the Museum of National History, a museum mostly devoted to the War of Independence.

We set out on a cold and brilliant late-March morning, making our way to the small seaside town of Kardamyli by the usual patchwork method of bus, taxi, legs, and patience. We look as if we will be on schedule for our connections, but a long line of stilled buses and cars on the road to Kalamata brings our smooth progress to an
end. Three police officers, having a lovely morning, saunter over to us from where they have been chatting and smoking, and tell us that the road is being dynamited this morning as a safeguard against rockfalls and landslides. It will take three minutes, they tell us, the famous
tria lepta
that are a sure sign that the time they are supposed to define and limit is completely fluid and anarchic. We settle in for a leisurely wait, some of the passengers getting out by the side of the road to smoke. There is the first of a series of crashes, as if monumental dishes were being dropped, and a very old man sitting across from me grins a gap-toothed grin, and says waggishly, “Mystras tumbled down,” referring to the crumbling ruins of the last outpost of the Byzantine Empire, which seem unsteadily stacked on their nearby hill, blocks that are the toys of historians. The passengers around him laugh at his joke, an applause he has orchestrated and accepts with pleasure; but when he sees my smile, he waves his hand toward me, and says, almost wonderingly, to the company at large, “She laughed.” The superb sensation of understanding and of being unexpectedly understood is just as fresh to me as it is to him, the miracle of our being intelligible to each other. We exchange greetings, and he notices that I am shivering a little and pulls his window farther up. Late March is full spring, but even here in southern Greece, it is also a month of downpours and a scorpion’s tail of cold. “I see you’re cold,” the old man says to me. “Well, March is a month with two faces. And do you know why? Because when all the months got married, March was the one who insisted on having two wives. So he married a Greek wife, but also a
hanoumissa
, a Turkish woman. The Greek wife was beautiful, but she was poor, and the Turkish woman was ugly, but very rich. So when March is spending time with the Greek woman, the day is fine, but there’s no profit in it; but when he spends time with the Turkish woman, the day is miserable, but rain pours down like silver coins, and makes the soil rich for the summer harvest.”

As we drive into Kalamata, walls and telephone poles are plastered with handbills advertising a play called
Mana … Mitera …
Mama
, three of the Greek words for mother. The central square is being readied for Independence Day celebrations—bunting in blue and white and Greek flags are being arranged, and microphones are being tested. A group of schoolboys wearing foustanellas begins rehearsing a klephtic ballad, one of the folk ballads about the Greeks who formed bands of both thieves and guerrilla warriors in the mountains during the Ottoman period. Although they are always patriotic heroes in the songs, the tradition of thievery was a serious problem for the new state, and even the countryside around Athens was notoriously dangerous, known for both robberies and kidnapping for ransom. From the square’s temporary bleachers, a solo voice sings a passage in the sinuous vinelike oriental scale of Greek folk music, and a British hiker leans forward and asks the leader of the group, “Is that a call to the mosque?” Along the road leading to Kardamyli, there are hotels and tavernas with names like the Sydney and the Melbourne, testimony to the double life of emigration. Bouquets of purple flowers grow out of cliff faces, and a cliff facing the coast forms a great gray wave, as if the mountains were commenting on the ocean. We clamber off at the central square and a bulky man sitting at the central
kafeneio
opposite ambles comfortably over to the car. Without greeting us, he reads our luggage labels, and examines over the leader’s shoulder the papers he is going through. He stares at each of our faces, and then saunters back to his table without a word.