Dinner with Persephone (39 page)

Easter is known as Lambri, the Radiance, but it is also has strong filaments that bind it to darkness; it is a time of delicate and ambiguous relations with the dead. Songs warn that the dead in their dark
underworld must not find out that the living are celebrating Easter, so as not to grieve them or make them jealous, as if the living were keeping the sad secret from them that rebirth is something only the living can experience. But in this labyrinth, tradition contradicts tradition; another belief holds that the souls of the dead are liberated from the underworld on Great Thursday of Holy Week, permitted to inhabit the spring flowers and commune in secret ways with the living for the fifty days, until Pentecost, when they have to endure another separation. A mournful folk saying is attributed to the dead: “May all Saturdays come and go, but may the Soul Saturday of May never come.” The next day, Pentecost Sunday, is the day of their return to the darkness, a day of special prayers for the dead, and oddly, of the first swim of the season, a return for the living to an intense summer physicality, and life lived outdoors, immersed in nature.

In wealthy sections like Kolonaki and Kifissia, silver and china gleam on polished tables in furniture stores, in imagined settings for Easter dinner, a
grande bouffe
after a long fast. A beggar on my trolley home walks down the aisle, saying, “Good people, don’t let Easter be my crucifixion. Give me something, or resurrection will come too late for me this year.”

In my neighborhood, enormous five-foot-tall red eggs appear outside several toy stores, with
Kalo Paska
, Happy Easter, inscribed on the side. But it is above all the wishes on the street for
Kali Anastasi
, Good Resurrection, and the rows of candles to be lit at the moment when “Christos Anesti,” Christ Is Risen, is sung at the midnight service, that fix the season for me. There are lyrical candles wrapped with ribbon and dried flowers; enthusiast candles in the shape of tennis rackets, cameras, paintbrushes, boats tied with fishing net; candles in the shape of ice-cream cones and lightbulbs and magic swords; candles wrapped in the Greek flag, with toy soldiers or bride dolls or Karaghiozis shadow puppets tied to them. There is one in the shape of a hulking wrestler, his massive wax forearms flexed, a banner draping his chest identifying him as “Macho King
Randy Savage.” Another looks like an open toy box, but both box and toys are to go up in flames. I buy a candle in the shape of a radio, its wax antenna covered in silver glitter waiting to be lit, for a friend who has an encyclopedic knowledge of popular music. The shop owner wraps the candle carefully and puts it in its own box, stamped with the legend
Christos Anesti
, Christ Is Risen.

Remembering the different flavor of an Easter I spent in Florence, I think about the way ethnicity is a kind of manufactured genetic inheritance, a genetics of sensibility, constructed out of landscape and food and family, history, illusory continuities, coercion, ambition, pleasures, and the terror of death. Easter, I realize, is the most concentrated distillation of Greek ethnicity I have experienced, a holiday commemorating a tortured death becoming an eternal festival, ending as unending joy. It gives that most Greek sensation of simultaneity, of a struggle for simultaneity, of a world felt as desperately divided which struggles to hold itself together between past and present, oriental and European, man and woman, Turk and Greek, death and life, Christian and pagan, divine and human. Even the language has more than one compound yoking together anguish and joy. It is the mental world of a circus rider standing with one foot on two horses, trying to keep them running at the same pace and rhythm. Easter, unlike Christmas, is a time of agony as well as joy, a time when the struggle to keep joy and tragedy from dismembering each other is at its height, when you must mourn and rejoice at the same time, like the myrrh-bearing women who go to Christ’s tomb in tears and are told, He is not here. They can never not mourn what has happened, even though they are overjoyed at the Resurrection. The Easter candles in all the windows promise this painful beauty, of light glowing and disappearing. It is like Greece to offer candles of sea blue and pomegranate crimson, decorated with flowers and presents, as if light was a marvelous toy you could hold in your hands and play with; it is like Greece, too, to give, with such universal festivity, gifts as tragic as candles—in the end you have nothing.

I look for a cab since I am meeting teacher friends for dinner. A handful of posters washed down a nearby wall by the afternoon rain lies underfoot. They advertise a weekend party at a gay club, with an image of ten faceless male bodies wearing white jockey shorts, grouped crotch to crotch and crotch to ass. My friends and I are supposed to meet for a drink at a bar which is gallantly attempting a Mexican theme. A leather saddle hangs over the door, and behind the crescent of the bar, bartenders pour drinks with choreographed moves like Tom Cruise’s in the movie
Cocktail.
The waitress circulates with complimentary shot glasses of tequila, and Greek boys in the white T-shirts and black leather jackets time-warp fifties getups favored by the under-thirty set, bob their heads and smoke, singing along with a jukebox song, their melancholy Levantine faces unchanging in expression as they join in at the refrain, “Ay Caramba.”

Foti and Roula are fuming, not because I am late, but because parliament, which recently raised the issue of making the registration of religion on the national identity cards optional instead of compulsory, has withdrawn the proposal, so that all Greek nationals must continue to be registered by religion. “Of course, Easter is a hopeless time of year to debate this kind of reform,” Foti says, “which is precisely why the church-owned MPs wanted to have it now. But it is a violation of our rights. Not to mention a disgrace in an EEC country that vividly remembers the Second World War. No one should be forced to record religion, which is a private matter.”

“Not here, it isn’t, my
pallikari
,” says Roula. “Our constitution says it was drafted ‘in the name of the consubstantial and indivisible Holy Trinity.’ ” They both light cigarettes. “They left it in even when it was revised in the eighties.” I am curious about what kinds of points were raised in the debate, since in my country, and I suspect in a number of other EEC countries, this is a clear violation of the constitutional right to religious freedom.

“The favorites of the church said the usual things: that the Holy Mountain demanded obligatory registration, that we would lose
our identity without it, that Orthodoxy is not a religion, it is a way of life, that the bones of the heroes of 1821 and Gregory the Fifth would groan if the identification were removed. You see we can’t even register as unaffiliated; if you don’t declare a denomination, you are recorded as Orthodox, even if you are a devout unbeliever. And as for Gregory the Fifth—you’ve seen his bones in the cathedral here?” Gregory the Fifth, a nineteenth-century patriarch of Constantinople, was hanged by the Turks at the outbreak of the Greek revolution in 1821, and later canonized by the Orthodox Church; I had been to see his bones in their ornate reliquary, where he is honored as a saint exemplar of the fusion of religion and nationalism. “And as for Gregory the Fifth, if his bones grind, it is not over our identity cards, but over our state. Because Gregory the Fifth published in 1798 a pamphlet praising the Ottoman government as crucial to Orthodoxy, a blessing preserving it free of any taint of heresy. ‘Liberty …,’ he wrote, ‘deprives Christians of worldly and divine blessings.’ He exhorted the Greeks to guard the religion of their fathers and the government of the sultans. Frankly, if you want my opinion, the best-preserved fragment of the Ottoman Empire is the Greek Orthodox Church.”

It is dizzying, traveling in this perpetual hall of mirrors.

“Even I,” Roula says, “as a believer, find this situation dangerous. Because as some of the opposing MPs said, the identification can too easily be used for purposes of discrimination, which it is a simple matter to disguise or deny. I am Orthodox, but other people must not be penalized if they are not. Just in March, a teacher in Thessaloniki was fired because he didn’t participate in school prayers or cross himself. Think of the message this sends to other teachers. And the church meddles in teaching; the Ministry of Education here is called the Ministry of National Education and Religion. Greek schoolchildren have compulsory religious teaching at school, and the church has many particular positions on thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud, particular social preferences. If you look at the Christian ethics textbooks, they are coercive, you see very clearly which
answers you are supposed to give. This makes the act of questioning meaningless, which along with our emphasis on rote learning in other subjects, sets a pattern in motion—repetition comes to have an emotional meaning for us, of allying ourselves with authority, of never being afraid of a question, because we already know the answer. And all kinds of hidden favoritisms can come into play here, with real consequences for a student’s future, not to mention the curtailment of free inquiry, although you will hear differently from many people, who say the church has no power. The fact is, the church affects our intellectual training, the patterns of our thinking, sometimes in barely perceptible ways, even when it is not a question of religious doctrine. We do not learn to think, we memorize, we theologize, we declare unalterable doctrinal positions. We don’t think, because we know. And to tell the truth, we also have to be very circumspect discussing this with colleagues. Nor, I’m sorry to say, will you be able to come with either of us to a class. We have both asked our supervisors, and both say that it is against the law for you to visit a class without the permission of the Ministry of National Education and Religion. And my supervisor told me not to trust you, that you would only write bad things about Greek schools. So it’s impossible, we would only get in trouble, the suggestion wasn’t received well at all, and in any case, I doubt you’ll get permission.”

“The church also has particular political positions,” Foti says, chain-smoking obsessively, and hands me a pamphlet circulating at his school. It is called “A National Concern” and tells a banal story of a Greek high-school teacher who shocks his class with the information that the
Harvard Encyclopedia
contains an “anti-Hellenic” essay which suggests that the Macedonians might not have been Greek. The teacher then exclaims, “All this is typical propaganda of Skopje! The so-called Macedonians have secret agents in the United States, Canada, and Australia as well as all over Europe.” Proofs that the Macedonians were Greek to the bone are provided, evoking for me early Christian doctrinal arguments between monophysites and
diphysites over the dual or single nature of Christ, arguments which seemed themselves to be in part coded political struggles over matters of authority and ethnically related beliefs in the Byzantine Empire.

“I have students who should be encouraged to see political and diplomatic problems in all their complexity, writing essays with jingoistic phrases like ‘our enemies the Skopjans,’ ” Foti says. “And the position on the Yugoslav situation is presented the same way—bishops rail that the Orthodox Serbs are being persecuted at the hands of the Vatican and of Islam, and Karadzic comes here and says in press conferences that he is leading a religious war to defend the true faith. And for the students, it may very well work to their practical advantage to agree with these interpretations for better grades, and good records, and university and careers. It is always better not to rock the boat in laying the foundation for a career. Now turn the pamphlet over.” It is a reprint from a magazine for teenagers distributed free of charge by the Orthodox Missionary Association of Saint Basil the Great.

“Even for me, this is terrible,” Roula says. “When God takes political positions, people get murdered. So say a prayer that you in America never have a state church. And,” she says, with conscious irony, “
Kali Anastasi.
”

W
hile the waiter is writing up the bill for our lunch, Stamatis remembers he has a present for me that I could not appreciate until after Mystras. “Now that you have met our warrior goddess, the Invincible Commander,” he says. “These you can buy all over Greece, it’s a popular picture, made in the eighties.” He hands me a postcard of a painting done in a crude blend of folk, Byzantine, and western European styles, which shows a monumental Mary wearing a traditional Greek dress. She has a dreamy almond-eyed prettiness, looking a bit like the actress Anouk Aimée. The baby Jesus she holds is a tiny full-grown man, dressed in a foustanella, his face almost a miniature copy of hers. She holds him with one hand, and with her other hand steadies on her shoulder a gigantic shotgun, its double barrels ornamented with silver.

“Why did you choose Corfu for Easter?” he asks. “There are much more interesting places to spend the holiday, like Pyrgi on the island of Chios, where they slaughter live lambs and you are up to your elbows in blood. You could understand that there is some dialogue, unacknowledged on both sides, going on between Orthodoxy and Islam. I would like to see their
kurban bairami
, celebrating,
I think, the sacrifice of Abraham—with the same business of bringing the lamb home to make a pet of it, and then slaughtering it for the feast, both feasts of blood sacrifice. Chrislam.” I tell him I chose Corfu because I was intrigued with how invariably middle-class Greeks recommended Easter there, out of the hundreds of Easters of Greece that are like varieties of wildflowers. I was curious, I said, about what they imagined I would enjoy.

“Well, I wouldn’t have sent you there,” he said, “you won’t feel the full brunt of Easter, but you will have some of it. I will tell you the three keys:
cherchez la femme
, look through polytheist eyes, and don’t leap to conclusions about who is being resurrected. Easter is something accomplished between a woman, a man, and an immortal father. I was reading an excellent book recently by an American classicist named Laura Slatkin, which I recommend to you. She looks at the events of the
Iliad
through the triangle between Zeus, Thetis, and Achilles. Thetis, you remember, rescued Zeus at a moment when he was about to be overthrown; her reward might have been to marry the greatest of the gods, but there had been a prophecy that she was destined to bear a son greater than his father. So the only way Zeus could survive Thetis’s maternity was to see to it that she would only bear mortal children. Therefore, he forced on her a marriage with a mortal, with whom she conceived Achilles. As Miss Slatkin points out, Achilles might otherwise have been the ruler of the universe, that Zeus’s divinity depends on Achilles’s mortality. Very like the Christian triad: Jesus Christ did not die to save man; he died to save God. There were changes, of course, one enormous change being the exile of woman from divine status. Long before Jesus, it was Persephone who descended into hell, and brought life joyfully back to earth.