Dinner with Persephone (6 page)

What is unnerving about this evil-eye prayer is that the evil eye seems to be a product of both evil and good—at times to come from malice, at others to arrive simply as a response to a human gift, beauty, or virtue or good fortune.

“So remember,” says the Smyrniote, who has to go back to his office, “don’t compliment anyone unless you say
ftou ftou ftou
three times, because unless you show that you cancel out the compliment by spitting, you might accidentally bring the evil eye on them.”

The rest of us finish a bottle of the wiry Greek white wine, and the conversation gets dense with things for me to see and do and read. “You must watch
Lampsi
(The Shining), the most famous Greek soap opera,” says the Mustache’s wife, “it will be wonderful for your Greek.” Her husband glares at her. “Well, it will,” she holds her ground. “They repeat so much to keep you up with what you missed.”

“Soap operas,” the Mustache says contemptuously. “Imitation American soap operas. Has she seen the Parthenon? Are you going to take her to the son et lumière?” he roars at Theo and Leda. “The Acropolis at night, now that is beautiful. You should see the illumination, have dinner together afterward, and then come back to walk around late in the neighborhood. Maybe Patricia will hear the marble
girls cry.” He hardly needed my questioning look as a motive to explain. “You know of course, that the English
milordi
”—a hellenization of “my lord,” whose Greek ending gives it an inexplicably sarcastic air in the hearing—“stole one of the kores who stood on the Porch of the Maidens and held up the Erectheum. They say they bought it from the Turks, but it was not the Turks’ to sell. And you know we are going to have it back. Melina—Mercouri—will get it back for us. But anyway, when the
milordi
stole the kore, the Parthenon was a Turkish fortress. Greeks were only allowed there with permits, so we couldn’t defend all our treasures. And the
milordi
wanted the rest. So they sent a party of Turks up there at night in secret, to take the other girls away in the darkness. But when the Turks climbed up there, they heard the girls’ voices calling and sobbing for their sister, and when they got closer they heard anguished screaming like women being raped, and they dropped their shovels and ropes and ran away. The
milordi
couldn’t bribe them to go up there again, and some of those Turks went mad, supposedly, they could never stop hearing the screams of women they couldn’t see, and the screams were terrible, violent, because it is so hard for marble to cry. So people who live in this neighborhood used to claim that on certain nights they heard the marble girls crying for their sister who was kidnapped by force, and they say Greece won’t be Greece until she comes back again.”

“Gentle madam, no,” says my inner voice silently and oddly as I look at the crusading insistent exaltation in his face. The phrase’s source floats to the surface of my mind: a moment from
Antony and Cleopatra
, that play about passion and illusion in which the pair have to destroy each other because their love is sustained by myth, not life. Cleopatra says of Antony, “His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear’d arm/ crested the world; his voice was propertied as all the tun’d spheres … Think you there was, or might be, such a man/ as this I dreamed of?” Her attendant answers, “Gentle madam, no.”

The party begins to break up because we are nearing siesta time, still very much a part of the Greek summer, even if it is beginning
to disappear in the cities in wintertime. But the Mustache is still wound up about the
milordi
and wants to tell one more story about them, so while Theo fiddles with his car keys, the Mustache tells me a story he says he had from his grandfather.

“Where do you think the
milordi
came from?” he asks me rhetorically. “England,” I reply helplessly.

“Wrong, at least in my grandfather’s story. They came from Greece. They are pre-Christian Greeks, a remnant of the ancient idol-worshippers. He said you could tell they had never been Christian because you never saw them crossing themselves, as all Christians do. One time when he was visiting me here and we were riding the trolley near the English church downtown, we saw English people carrying cages and cats and leading dogs into their church. A woman on the trolley asked out loud, ‘Are the English Christian?’ And my grandfather said not very patiently, ‘Of course not, woman. You don’t see that they take their animals to church?’ He explained his idea to me, that when the other Greeks became Christian, the
milordi
would not give up the old gods, and so they took all their wealth and emigrated to Europe. And those people are the ancestors of the
milordi
, and that is why they fight with us in our wars, and why they came back to take the marbles of the Parthenon with them to England, it is the old sympathy in their blood. And that is why they have houses here and so many of them feel the need to visit here every summer and to pay homage, just like they used to, to the ancient stones.”

Theo is now very anxious to get on the road for home, so we leave with thanks and embraces. I run into a pharmacy before it closes for siesta to buy a tube of sunscreen. The sales clerk hands it to me in a bag printed with the Star of Vergina and the slogan “Three thousand years of Greek Macedonia.” We weave through the traffic, and when someone cuts in front of us, Theo leans out the window, pulls at an imaginary penis, and shouts, “Masturbate, masturbator! Play with it more! Keep masturbating!” There is a startlingly rhetorical, formal quality to Greek insults, almost as if the speaker were trained to take a theme and elaborate on it. It is a quality taken to its
height in the orations of John Chrysostom, a Byzantine church patriarch who was a master of ornamental invective, as are a number of high-ranking contemporary Greek clerics. I wonder if I am hearing in Theo’s imperatives of contempt a trace of the Byzantine schooling in rhetoric, in which a student had to deliver patterned speeches both of praise and insult.

Shutters are closing at my apartment building for the quiet hours, and I climb the stairs as quietly as I can, looking forward to a nap myself. I am just drifting off when a fight erupts, a trio: two women—one mezzo, one soprano—and a man, a baritone. The mezzo’s accusations rush like fountain spray, while the soprano’s defense joins her and then rises above her even more spectacularly like a fresh jet of water from a new source in the fountain—there is twenty minutes at least of this, with the man’s voice weaving between both. Every time it seems to subside there is a fresh outbreak, and I am amazed at the inexhaustible jets of fury. It is a terrifying opera for someone vulnerable in the language, since you are conscious of the prospect that the fight will escalate and you will be swept into it, without the right words to soothe or mediate. This is how babies must feel when their parents fight—the sense of helpless endangerment, of being an inarticulate witness to something that may destroy you, of being captive in speechlessness, like being adrift in an ocean and seeing a rescue ship, but knowing you can’t call loudly enough for it to hear.

Sure enough, my doorbell rings, and there is a spluttering woman standing there. “Did you hear my radio, did it disturb you?” she shrieks at me.

“Not at all,” I say, which seems to calm her.

“It is those Albanians below, they always cause trouble and blame it on me. They are not used to life among civilized people. But you will say you did not hear a radio if anyone asks.”

Since I did not, I will. She retreats to her own apartment.

Albanians at the moment have the reputation of being the Joads of Greece, ignorant dustbowl characters who are perceived as
threateningly, desperately, criminally poor. Albanians pour across the borders to work illegally in Greece, and Albanian gangs supposedly rob, rape, murder, and carry their internecine quarrels into Greece. The Greeks also accuse them of maltreating the Greek minority in Albania, and there is an inflammable border dispute about southern Albania, a region which the Greeks say was unjustly incorporated into Albania and which is called here “northern Epirus,” to emphasize that it is part of the Greek region of Epirus. When I was looking for apartments to rent in the newspapers, I came across a number of ads with the proscription “No Albanians.”

I want to try to sleep again, but the prolonged fighting was too nerve-wracking. The Mustache’s bitter remarks about the Olympics are still in my mind. On an impulse, I reach for my new dream book. The entry I am looking for shows a definitive break with the world of Artemidorus. Koka-Kola—“This vulgar, banal, and unhealthy drink that has imposed Western industrialism throughout the world has passed already into the world of dreams where it is a familiar symbol; an inauspicious dream. If you see others drinking this manufactured beverage in your dream, be on guard of superficial relationships. If you yourself are drinking it, your motives toward them may be suspect without your having realized it.”

I hear shutters beginning to open on the courtyard, sounds of televisions and radios. A woman emerges onto her balcony and signals to a neighbor across the way with a “
Pssst, psst
, Katerina,” exactly like Leporello in
Don Giovanni.
I had never thought about how brilliantly Mozart understood the community of balconies until now. My own telephone rings. “I knew you would come here,” says my friend Kostas. I had known Kostas in the United States, where he went to college, and has some family, and I had seen him struggling with the dilemma of where to settle. In the end, with no clear resolution, he returned to Thessaloniki, the northern city which is Greece’s “second capital,” where he practices law now. He jokes now that it should have been London, and not either Thessaloniki or Boston, because he can’t get a high enough dosage of Shakespeare in
either. Kostas loves Shakespeare probably more than anyone I know, with an almost sports-fan-like fanaticism, and his conversation is usually full of hidden Shakespeare, like those drawings in children’s books where you are supposed to find how many clocks or cats are hidden in the picture. I had thought about Antony and Cleopatra earlier this afternoon, and now, with impeccable Shakespearian telepathy, Kostas is on the phone.

“I knew you would come,” he repeats, “I knew it in the States.”

“How did you know that?” I ask, familiar with his bouts of both real and imaginary omniscience.

“I knew it because you love
A Winter’s Tale
most of all the Shakespeare plays,” he says cryptically, and we arrange to meet on his impending trip to Athens.

“Kosta,” I ask, “do you have an
oneirokritis
at home?”

“My sister does at her place.”

“Would she let me borrow it for a few weeks?”

“I think so, but you know Artemidorus, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I say, “I have his book with me, but there are dreams in it that nobody can dream anymore. I know what you dreamed of in the second century. But I want to find out what you’ve dreamed of since.”

“Well, I will see if I can wrest the book from Angeliki’s grip. And until I get there, keep in mind what Emmanuel Roidis, our great unread nineteenth-century novelist, said about my country: ‘Every nation has its cross to bear: In England, for example, it’s the weather. In Greece, it’s the Greeks.’ ”

I
  tear off a slice of the flat bread I bought yesterday from a Lebanese bakery—it leaves floury traces on the cutting board. My electricity is “on vacation,” as they say here, because of sympathy strikes with the bus drivers. The hours that different neighborhoods will be without power are posted in the newspapers and announced on news bulletins during the day. Hospitals, merchants, schools, commuters, all suffer from the power cuts, but they are in an odd way an expression of a national ideal, that all experience should be communal, both in family and in political life.

I use my hours without electricity this morning to wander in my neighborhood, beginning to find my way around. The hills of Athens make it a labyrinth, easy to get lost in. You can be near a familiar main avenue and be utterly unaware of it, wandering in a cul-de-sac that seems to have no relation to your landmark. That is true of the language too, which is a language of enclaves. When you learn Greek, you aren’t learning one language, but two or three, and there are uncountable ranges of patois.

I discover a street that is like a miniature village, which has grapevines bearing grapes strung from house to house. In Athens
what you tread on underfoot is most likely to be figs, or oranges or lemons that drop from the fruit-bearing trees onto the streets. On another corner, a man is changing a hubcap with communal advice from his building, and I hear someone practicing a Schubert song with a pretty touch. At the summit of a hill, there is a fine neoclassical mansion, stucco wreaths under the windows, handsome entrance doors unhinged but held together by a piece of wire between one handle and another, a cat lying thirstily in the overgrown garden. The neoclassical houses followed the Bavarian king assigned to Greece by the great powers after the country earned its independence from the Turks. Otto, the son of the classicizing King Ludwig of Bavaria, who had envisioned Munich as the “Athens of the North,” reimagined Athens as—Athens. The city had begun to lose all but its symbolic significance when Constantine created the eastern Rome in Constantinople in the fourth century. Athens did not give him the geographical advantage in building an eastern empire that Constantinople did, and its association with the old gods that Constantine had abandoned made it even more inappropriate as the imperial capital of a newly conceived empire of religion. Under the Ottomans, whose most significant cities remained Constantinople and Thessaloniki, as they had been for the Byzantines, Athens metamorphosed into a provincial Turkish village. Otto and his Bavarian architects set out to rebuild it—few houses were left standing after the years of the War of Independence, so they had a remarkably blank canvas, in a dilapidated Turkish town with hardly an important public building. They set about to reinvent the city, and although there are those who claim they fatally misunderstood the site, and turned Athens into the Munich of the Mediterranean, the domestic scale of the neoclassicism they inspired is endearing—these villas can take so many tones and responses toward classical architecture, witty, tender, mocking, silly, affectionate. The neoclassical houses of Athens are like a flock of young girls wearing their first evening dresses and their first formal necklaces and earrings—some graceful, some giggling, some
of them awkward in their mother’s “classical” clothes. These houses give a youth back to a city that can seem exhausted.