Dinner with Persephone (15 page)

“What happens is this,” Aura continued. “She swims up to your ship and grasps the edge of the deck with her hands; then she asks, ‘Is great Alexander living?’ And you answer, ‘He lives and reigns,
zei kai vasilevi.
’ Or ‘He lives, he reigns, he rules the world.’ And then she will take your ship in her hands and take you herself where you want to go, swiftly and safely; she will still the waves, and teach you the music of the sea. Which is why our songwriters when they introduce a new song say ‘I learned it from the Gorgona.’

“But if you tell her that Alexander is dead, then she will go into a rage, and pound your ship with her huge fist down onto the floor
of the sea. Or she will be grief-stricken, and begin to cry and chant mourning songs,
mirologhia
, the speech of fate, as we call them. And no one will survive, because when the mermaid mourns, everyone drowns. The mermaid’s
mirologhia
become powerful typhoons, and she tears out strands of her shining hair, which become bolts of lightning, and her sobs make the huge swells that wash over ships during storms. And speaking of liquid, we need another carafe, don’t we?” Marina’s father gets up out of his chair to marshal the waiter, and watching his movements, it occurs to me that we don’t observe fully if all we see in an aged body is weakness. He moves with a special vigor and force belonging to age, which is not an energy drawn from the shreds of youth, but of accomplished will, a strength coming from an expert judgment of the relation between him and his object, a calibration of just how much force it will take to get something or someone to do as he wills them to do. His aged body is a kind of physical philosopher, the components of motion are wordlessly analyzed as knowledge and practice come to play a role in his getting out of a chair.

The waiter brings us more wine, and when everyone’s glasses are filled, Kostas lifts his glass to Aura and says, “Well told. You are doing a great service for our guest by teaching her this story. Because the story teaches that if you are Greek you have to learn to lie in order to live. Because we all know that Alexander is in fact dead, but we are doomed to keep saying he is not in order to survive. And the only Greek who doesn’t know he is dead is the Gorgona, and she is mad. That is in another part of the story, the part you haven’t told, Aura, about how it happens that Alexander the Great’s sister is a mermaid.

“After Alexander the Great had conquered all the countries he knew of in the world and taken all their treasures, he called together the magicians and astrologers and interpreters of dreams who advised him, because as Patricia knows, Alexander never went on a campaign without a dream interpreter, and said to them: ‘Where can I find the library where the Fates store the scrolls of all
the destinies of all living beings? I have conquered every kingdom on earth, but I have not yet conquered the Empire of Time, and only with that conquest will I live to enjoy what I have achieved.’ And a great dream interpreter said to him, ‘Your Majesty, you are the most powerful mortal on earth, but what the Fates, those great poets, write cannot be unwritten, only a little edited, its grammar corrected, a phrase polished. There is only one thing I know of that you can do to be sure that you will live to rejoice in your kingdom and your glory—if you want to live as long a life as the mountains have lived, you must become immortal. And that is a difficult thing to do, very very difficult.’ Alexander the conqueror said to the dream interpreter, ‘I didn’t ask you if it would be difficult, I asked you if it would be possible.’ His adviser replied, ‘Well, then, Your Majesty, within the borders of Greece, your own kingdom, exists the immortal water, and whoever drinks it need fear death no longer. But you must risk your life in order to obtain it. You must pass between two mountains that clash together and pulverize whoever tries to escape. Many athletes and aristocrats have been crushed there in their quest for the immortal water. And if you clear the passage between the mountains, you must descend under the world of Greece itself, where you will find a sleepless dragon who guards the immortal water day and night. You must kill the dragon and take the water and pass again through the grinding mountains.’

“Immediately Alexander mounted his horse Bucephalus, the horse who could fly although he did not have wings. Together they overcame the trials and Alexander took the glass carafe with the immortal water and brought it back to his palace in Macedonia. But the great hero forgot that having the immortal water was one thing, and guarding it was another. He gave the carafe to his sister while he rested from his arduous feats, and she tripped as she was taking it inside the palace and spilled the immortal water. By chance some drops fell on a hill full of wild onions, and that is why onions have such great keeping powers, and can be kept all winter without rotting.

“After Alexander had rested, he called for his sister to bring him the immortal water to drink. She, having thought the carafe held ordinary water, told him that she had tripped and spilled it, but would bring him a fresh carafe. The great Alexander went nearly mad with rage, and he cursed his sister for depriving him of immortal life. He cursed her to live forever a half life, half woman, half fish, able to live fully neither on the earth nor in the sea. God heard him and changed her into a mermaid that people on ships see swimming through the waves. And she is so crazed with guilt because she caused the death of her brother that she compulsively stops ships to ask them if Alexander is living and will destroy anyone who says he is not.

“So now you know, Patricia, that in Greece when you hear a story, you must expect to hear its shadow, the simultaneous counterstory. Because as you said, Marina, we have eaten the six pomegranate seeds here, and all our stories come in two versions, and the story that is told in hell will sound different from the same story as they tell it in heaven. And you know that in Greece you must never use the past tense when you are speaking of Alexander the Great, although you also know that he is dead. We are telling different stories at the same time. So if you see the mad mermaid, what will you say?”

“He lives and reigns.” We overhear the strains of another familiar song starting at a table, one of the loveliest and most elegiac of modern Greek songs, set to a poem of Seferis’s called “Denial,” everyone here knows because the Theodorakis melody is so treasured. “We were thirsty at noon, but the water was brackish …” Once begun, this song is irresistibly taken up. Sophisticated Marina and her white-haired father are singing it with their heads close together, as if in intimate conversation: “With what heart and spirit/ what desire and passion/we lived our life …” There are ghosts in this haunted language, there is a ghost in this song, in the form of the word for desire,
pothos.
The ghost is the ghost of Alexander, whose association with the word
pothos
, irresistible longing, is
so strong that classical scholars have written monographs about it. Alexander’s urge to cross the Danube, and his urge to make the pilgrimage to the oracle of Zeus-Ammon in Egypt to be formally proclaimed a son of Zeus, are both described with the word
pothos.
It is Alexander’s word, the logos of Alexander. The song is ending: “With what heart and spirit/what desire and passion/we lived our life. A mistake!/So we changed our life.”

Pothos
, Alexander’s word, has a special nuance, almost as if desire and ambition were fused together, as if a lover had an ambition as well as a desire for his object, a nuance which makes sense in a world in which the very ambitious, like Alexander’s mother, declared that their children had been conceived in lovemaking with gods. I imagine I can feel Alexander trying to escape his word, like a firefly in a glass jar. But the dead are in such different conditions than we are that the boundaries of a word are enough to contain them. It was a coincidence hearing this word sung after the dinner-table stories, and a coincidence that I, through accidents of reading and childhood accidents of experience that began this journey, am here tonight to recognize it. I have a mental glimpse of the kind of connect-the-dot drawings that show you the shape of a constellation in books that teach you how to recognize them. The Greeks made their constellations out of myths and immortalities, but I am not Greek, so I trace my own out of history and mortality. I draw my imaginary line between two fireflies who have traveled an immense distance, a firefly conqueror audible for a moment in a word it was in his character to speak, and a temporary firefly consciousness who recognizes it. Mine is a constellation of fireflies.

O
ff Constitution Square downtown, the police are beating demonstrators who are protesting against the privatization of the buses. It is impossible to judge from the footage on the morning news how the beatings began, but the scene of at least fifteen policemen attacking one demonstrator and beating him to his knees with nightsticks, the tear gas masks on policemen’s faces, the threatening of the television reporter and chasing of the cameraman following him were unambiguous images, whatever their origins.

One of the worst fires recorded in Attica, which started last Saturday, so fierce that it had a twenty-kilometer blazing front, closing down the highways between Athens and northern Greece, seems to have been set deliberately. A government spokesman and several local government and environmental officials blame the fire on an organized plan by arsonists who work for land developers and real estate speculators. The mayor of a town called Kalamos turned in an arson device with a full gas cylinder found near a gas station to the local fire squad.

Arson is one of the ugliest traditions of modern Greece—nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts almost uniformly record
the Greek use of arson to settle property claims, to clear land for farming, and the indifferent, almost contemptuous Greek attitude toward trees, produced in part by the scarcity of fertile farmland, and by the centrality of cultivatable land to the marriage dowry. Even William Miller, a profoundly philhellenic historian and resident of Greece at the turn of the century, wrote exasperatedly that the expatriate Greek millionaires ought to turn their attention to reforesting Greece and reeducating the Greeks about forests rather than building the grand urban monuments they often favored. In the Greece of the 1980s and ’90s, the protection of forest land is still regarded ambivalently—over forty percent of forest land in Attica is involved in contested claims, and the state’s own commitment to protect the land is as ambivalent as the citizens’. Sometimes the ambivalence extends even to the people hired to protect the forests. I was told about one part-time forest fighter who set fire to a forest in Akhaia; he explained to the judge that he was afraid the new government plans for forest management would eliminate his job.

Forest ranger posts are understaffed and fire roads are often neglected, while the government rarely defies the builders and developers who seem to start construction on sites almost as soon as fires have died down. Whole towns have risen up on land acquired by arson. And the claims on protected land, which because they are rarely based on solid documentation can be neither effectively refuted nor proved, are an unexpected demonstration of the enormous force of myth as a political weapon. Perhaps the most familiar and the first full account of the power of the imagination over political action in the matter of appropriating land is in the Old Testament, in which the Hebrew people destroy communities and attack the gods of other peoples living on land which they believe belongs to them, according to a story God has told them, a story into whose maw bodies continue to be thrown. In fact, following a tangled skein of irony, one of the classics of Zionism, Yehuda Alkalai’s
The Third Redemption
, published in 1843, which helped inspire
the resettlement of modern Israel by the Jews, itself drew inspiration and practical ideas from the Greek Revolution of 1821, an effect the Greek revolutionary leaders, Christian nationalists who had uneasy relations with the Ottoman Jews and who often spoke disparagingly of them, can hardly have intended. And the Jews, whose Hanukkah is, among other things, a feast celebrating the rejection of Greek culture, in opposition to a royal successor of one of Alexander’s generals, Antiochus IV Epiphanes (“Greeks gathered against me,” runs one line in the Hanukkah prayers), seem to have formed their modern nation, at least in part, on a modern Greek example, in an ironic convergence of Zionism and Hellenism. Stories that seem perfect strangers to each other often intersect unexpectedly, like those couples whose chance encounters destine them to marry. And it may be that we should approach stories with more caution; many of them live longer than we do. I have read that in some areas of Greece, the claims on forest land by people who assert it is situated on ancestral property amount to more acreage than actually exists. “We also have ancestral claims on the many mansions in heaven,” Kostas told me during one dinner in Athens. “Where the standard language is the koine Greek of the New Testament. Just think what the consequences would be if Christ had spoken Latin.”

I watch another news story as I am getting dressed to run errands before I catch the afternoon plane to Kavalla. There are shots of foreign dignitaries being greeted in front of the presidential palace. My eye is jarred when I am faced with this world in which the images of authority are so different, and would only become recognizable by living here. The building that here evokes jeers, or affection, or anxiety, is delicately scaled, to my American eye, looking like a substantial Mediterranean summer vacation villa. I walk past it at least twice a week, and it shocks me to pass so close to it, close enough to see in full detail the faces of the heads of state as they shake hands for the camera. There are always TV camera vans and cars parked across the street from the palace,
their doors open as the reporters and cameramen lounge with one foot on the sidewalk, radios playing, cigarettes lit.