Dinner with Persephone (4 page)

The Byzantine emperors, though, in the eastern empire, were the emperors of the crossroads—not only did the Byzantines have to claim to Rome that they were the real Romans, but they had to declare to their rivals in the Middle East—the Persians, the Jews, the Arabs, and the Turks—that they were the Roman Empire. Partaking of both the cultures of the West and the East, but fully integrated with neither, Byzantium was a transvestite empire, partly both but also neither, the Empire of the Crossroads, whose preoccupation with dual natures of all kinds, from its man-gods to Diyenis Akritas, its own epic hero, the biracial knight of the border, is its most ineradicable legacy to modern Greece. Diyenis (of two races) Akritas, the medieval Greek hero, son of an Arab chieftain and an aristocratic Greek lady, was to have been the subject of the second part of Kazantzakis’s
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel.

A boy calls for customers to riffle through his stock of used CDs—the one in his right hand has a picture of one of the finest current pop singers, and I go closer to read the title:
Our National Loneliness.

Walking away from the perfection of the produce, I wander past stalls selling utensils of the worst possible design, waste bins with lids that don’t fit, plastic colanders that would melt on contact with boiling water, cheap clothes in punitively ugly prints. I can’t find the simplest glass mixing bowl, only greasy plastic, so I turn back, changing my plan for the eggplant and olives—in any case, the genius of the flavors will overcome the limitations of the cook, like a person thrust from private life into fame. My marketing is snatched from my arms suddenly by a wiry, sixtyish man, whose eyes behind
his old-fashioned glasses are brown like weak coffee, and anxious. He shoves a hand under my elbow and pulls me toward the street. “You must come with me, you must come with me,” he says urgently. My thoughts are of fire, riot police, terrorists. “What is happening?”

“Hurry,” he says, “hurry up. I want to have coffee with you.” A struggle ensues over my packages, which I win, thanks to my new height. Having stepped through the mirror to this country, I find that I am no longer small as I was in the United States, but have become magically taller than average. “Where are you going?” he calls after me. “You will be perfectly safe. I am a doctor.”

“But I am perfectly healthy.” I escape down a side street past a grim-looking restaurant full of men reading newspapers and eating hot food. It is a genre of restaurant you find tucked away in city neighborhoods, patronized by old bachelor and widower habitues, with no wives or mothers to cook for them. The men settle at their separate tables as if they were distinct worlds, eating in silence, in a kind of public solitary confinement.

Another person calls to me, this time a girl in blue jeans standing on the corner beside a stack of books piled on an upended crate. “Do you need a new one?” she asks.

“What are they?” I slow down, shift my packages, and climb toward her. Athens is all ascent and descent, like San Francisco, and readjusting your balance is what walking is about as much as covering distance. She holds up a volume and flips the pages. “Dream books.
Oneirokrites.
”

Actually, I did bring one. But it was written in the second century, the
Oneirokritika
, a handbook of dreams collected by a professional dream interpreter named Artemidorus, who traveled in Greek cities, and recorded and classified the dreams people told him in order to make a manual of the art of dream interpretation for his son. It is a social history of shocking intimacy, a study of the unconscious lives of people of another world, trying to divine the future through their dreams, while we, so far away, try to divine the past. The
Oneirokritika
was translated into Arabic in 873, and was an inspiration
for the great dream book of Ad-Dinawari, published in 1006; in the West, it was an inspiration for Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams.

“I do have one,” I say, “but it’s old.”

“You are foreign?” she asks, and I nod. “How long have you lived here?”

“Two days.”

“Then you will need a new one. You will have new dreams here.”

That was true, so I counted out the drachmas, and slipped the book into my string bag next to a kilo of white peaches. I passed another jewelry store—there is a remarkably dense concentration, maybe five within a space of nine blocks or so, in this modest middle-class neighborhood—thinking of a story about the great Greek poet George Seferis, who on a summer’s visit to an island, I think in the 1970s, encountered a woman holding a jar of honey in one hand and a tattered book in the other. “Take my honey, my boy,” she said, “and when you get back to Athens, send me a new dream book, this one is worn to pieces.” And I struggled to pay attention to the aggressive Greek traffic, while remembering another traveler’s experience made me careless. The importance of these
oneirokrites
was mentioned by an Oxbridge classicist named Lawson, who visited here around the turn of the century and wrote a book examining the survival of pre-Christian practices in the contemporary Greece he visited, a study which is also a travel book of great charm. Lawson’s book is in many ways as much an experience of traveling in an Edwardian gentleman’s England as it is of traveling in Greece, as all travel books are as much retracings as they are journeys forward, explorations too of the country left behind, which may be just as unknown as the territory ahead.

I have a personal affection for Lawson, for his both sympathetic and independent imagination and his gently satirical turn of mind. I like him for confessing to seeing a nymph in an olive grove near Sparta: “Had I possessed an initial faith in the existence of nymphs and in the danger of looking upon them, so lifelike was the apparition that I might have sworn as firmly as did my guide that it was a
nymph we had seen, and might have required as strong a dose as he at the next inn to restore my nerves.” Later, on the island of Mitilini, I would hear an earthy Greek rhyme recorded by Lawson about a superstition of the bad effects Christian priests have on virility, warning that “if you see a priest on the road, hang on to your balls.” With endearing Edwardian discretion, Lawson had rendered it into Latin:
Si per viam sacerdoti occures, testiculos tuos teneto.
And I remember just now that Lawson had often seen advertisements in Athenian newspapers for new editions of some
Megas Oneirokritis
(Great Dream Interpreter), the same title as the book I had just bought. “In isolated homesteads,” he wrote, “to which the Bible has never found its way, I have several times seen a grimy tattered copy of such a book preserved among the most precious possessions of the family, and honored with a place on the shelf where stood the icon of the household’s patron-saint and whence hung his holy lamp.”

I just have time to put down my shopping and run for the downtown trolley on the neighborhood’s main wide avenue, dodging the underworld of stray Athenian cats. A moving van is parked outside of one of the apartment buildings, stacks of cardboard containers resting on a dolly next to it, and two sweaty black-haired men approaching it carrying a dining table. The word “Metaphors” is painted on both its sides in brilliant blue. Here it means transportation. I will never be able to use the word again without the image of a meaning heaved onto the back like household furniture to be carried to its new residence.

The trolley is of Russian manufacture and populated with women on their way to the city center for errands and shopping. It runs past the small neighborhood park, a glowing oasis that smells like a herbalist’s.
Drosia
, I heard someone murmur from a bench under one of the trees yesterday, the Greek word for dew, for freshness and cool, a word that like a trembling molecule is set into the Greek notion of erotic desire. It is extraordinary to realize out of what local materials and experiences large ideas are made—that the dream of a desired body, the imagination of an embrace is shaped here by the
searing merciless heat and stone that irritated Cicero; here the word freighted with the greatest weight of longing is
dipsa
, thirst, and in love poems lovers drink the dew from each other’s lips, and are refreshed in each other’s arms as if dew fell on them. I felt my whole body undertake the translation, yesterday, the new sense of what longing and desire might be, when I stood inside the park in a dense pool of wavering emerald shadows, where the darkness was not nocturnal but fertile. Leaving the street to find this was like kissing someone you have waited to kiss for a long time.

Most of the ladies cross themselves three times as they pass a church, built in the cruciform Byzantine way, with a dome whose Pantokrator, the image of Christ the ruler of everything, can be imagined from outside without entering. It is an odd fact that except for details regarding particular saints, you know from outside the pattern of decoration in an Orthodox church; in my New York neighborhood, there are Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and Jewish temples, but I couldn’t guess at their interiors without peering in.

I have a copy of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
on my lap, which I brought with me, along with Artemidorus’s
Oneirokritika
, Boswell’s
Life of Samuel Johnson
, a cookbook of Claudia Roden’s, and a few others. But the barrage of new sights from the window makes it hard for me to concentrate on anything else.
Huckleberry Finn
is suddenly lifted out of my hands and examined by a stout middle-aged lady wearing brown support hose and an arsenal of jewelry. She puts it back into my hands with neither prelude nor farewell, and communicates her finding to her seat partner. “
Galliki glossa
,” she says firmly, “French,” gesturing toward me. “A French girl.”

M
y chore is to open a bank account and then join my friends Leda and Theo for lunch in Plaka, the lovely, crowded old quarter of Athens, at a restaurant owned by a man who calls himself simply the Mustache, or for specificity, the Mustache from Olympia.

The bank is affiliated with my bank in the States, and I explain to the raven-haired representative with the dramatic makeup that I will be here for a year and a bit and would like to open an account. I hand her letters of recommendation from the American bank officer and my employer, and she takes them off to her supervisor. When she returns, she says, “We open accounts in dollars under the following conditions: You must deposit at least fifty thousand dollars in the account. Or you must be of Greek descent.” I am puzzled, since this appears to be a branch of an American bank, and ask the reason for these unexpected conditions. She says certainly, she will ask her supervisor, and after a conference with him, she returns. “There is no reason,” she says.

“Okay, thanks, I just wanted to be sure,” I say and gather up my letters.

“But try the National Bank of Greece,” she says, “I know for a fact that they have the kind of accounts you want. Many Greeks from America and Australia use them.”

I find my way to the National Bank of Greece with obedient confidence and am told there that only the bank I have just come from offers the service I want. “Many Greeks from Australia and America use them.” The bank representative then offers to translate any of my magazine articles into Greek, assuring me that he has the “competence of the University of Michigan.” It is a puzzle I can’t work out; there seems to be no uniform law, and no common reservoir of information about it, not even a sense that information is being deliberately withheld in order to increase some unknowable advantage. I try a third bank, and after a substantial wait, sit down with the bank officer, in shirtsleeves, as most Greek businessmen are during the hot summers, and turn-of-the-century-style mutton-chop whiskers. I hand him my letters of recommendation and my passport and wait for the verdict. “Why do you want to open an account here in Greece?” I direct him to the letter from my employer, which verifies that I will not be taking a salary from any Greek source, and tell him I have business here.

“You? You have business here? What kind of business can you have here?” He bursts out laughing theatrically, shuddering with stagy hilarity.

“What makes you laugh?” I ask him, and he picks up my passport, opens it, and begins kissing my passport picture, making sure I can see that he is using his tongue. I do have business here, though, and I am engaged in it at this very moment—my business is to remember you, I think. I give up for the day on my bank account, and walk to Plaka, cooling my temper. The bankman’s arrogance and the coarse insult interest me less than his presumption—the phenomenon here for me is how unmistakably he is not thinking. He is dogmatizing, sure that he knows all that is essential about me. And this very certainty conceals the powerful drive to make me conform to his sure and certain knowledge of me—he is using it
like a policeman’s cosh. He is certain he knows how I am arranged, as if I were an Orthodox church—he has even, in a secular style, I think with bitter amusement, kissed my icon.

When I arrive at the Mustache’s restaurant in Plaka, on a street with many of the handsome neoclassical buildings that were the architecture of preference for the new Greek state in the 1830s after its Bavarian king arrived bringing his Munich classicism with him, a group of friends and strangers is sitting inside, drinking cold drinks and watching the television over the bar. The choice outdoor tables are given over to tourists, and whenever there is a flurry of activity, one of the Mustache’s friends will hop up behind the bar to fix a tray or carry a plate. If a party speaking a language someone at the table knows well arrives, the Mustache will call out “German, Maria, or Italian, Ari.” But English is most in demand; the largest number of foreign tourists visiting Greece are Britons, some 1.1 million of them every year. After a spate of interpreting and waiting on table, the volunteer returns to the group table with its sips,
mezedes
, and conversation—there is something touching about this arrangement, in which working never arrests friendship. The Mustache hands me the token of the honored guest, the television remote, and a program guide, and tells me to choose any show I want. I channel surf for a moment out of curiosity. There is a trailer for a Greek detective movie—in two separate scenes, different women are slapped so hard they are knocked off their feet. I click forward to the Greek MTV channel. In the pop song video, a man backhands a woman until she finally falls to her knees. Leda shuffles the pages of the program guide and points to a comedy called
The Boss
, whispering to me that our host watches it every day, and signals me to choose it. It turns out to be a sitcom starring Tony Danza, about a household in which a woman earns her living as an executive and a man works as a housekeeper. In America, the show is called
Who’s the Boss?
It is a comedy about equality; in this household, the question is more stable than the answer, which shifts between both, one, the other, and neither.