Dinner with Persephone (17 page)

I clamber onto the airport bus marked “Kavalla” and head off into the northern Greek night, feeling oddly between worlds, since the lonely freedom of a bus on a highway is for me a quintessentially American feeling. A song called “I’m a Man” is playing, which I recognize because I have it on this same tape, an anthology called
Classical Popular Songs.
We pass a village whose lights are glowing with an
almost desperate-seeming brilliance in the first fullness of night. Each house or taverna we pass is glowingly illuminated, as if it were emitting its own inner self. There is a
kafeneio
on the main street where shadowy old men with intent faces are drinking and playing cards, and then an
ouzeri
where the glasses of the drinking men glitter in the strangely isolating glare, as if they are being filmed in close-up. This sharpness of gesture is not just in my personal vision, but is a consequence of being born into the world of TV and movies, with a secret, ever-present expectation that the camera will be there, that this is all being filmed, that in a moment the star will make an entrance. Here it would have to be a pop icon, an old rock star, so out of his element he was back in it. I look out onto the blank darkness of the highway, now that we have left the village, dreaming one of the most common twentieth-century dreams, one Artemidorus’s people couldn’t have had—I am dreaming up the credits of a movie. Little Richard would be good for the old rock star. He and a band with instruments would be on a bus marked “Drama,” going to give a concert near where I am going tomorrow, to Philippi, where Cassius and Brutus killed themselves. The cleverly designed titles appear floating over the backdrop of the mountainous landscape, and you hear a pop song expertly setting the mood.

We are pulling into Kavalla, a city set on a curved harbor, built up into the hills behind it. At night it looks like a reclining lamb hung with the white flowers of lights. A fortress and church are floodlit on the heights, and the town is walking its
corso
, its evening promenade,
pano-kato, kato-pano
, on the waterfront. I check into the grim but functional little hotel facing the harbor, and prepare to carry my suitcase to the elevator, but a man in a baseball cap steps forward and offers to help. “You’re not from Athens, Greece, are you?” he says in a strong Texas accent, grinning a chipped-tooth grin. “No,” I say. “You’re not from Athens, Texas, are you?” “No,” he says delightedly, “Beaumont, not Athens. They have us out here working on offshore rigs, and if you don’t mind, I would love to talk
to somebody I can understand for an hour.” I put my suitcase in my ugly room, which has an icon of Jesus over the bed, and a fine view of the harbor where the ferry from Thasos is coming in, festively ablaze with lights, and meet the homesick Texan downstairs to walk the
corso
, which runs along the harbor, from a group of fish restaurants on the left to a disco and small-scale amusement park on the right. One wrinkled old man is grilling corn over a brazier, and another presides over a kind of counter on wheels which has partitions for chickpeas, pumpkin seeds, pistachios, the fiddly snacks the Greeks love, the edible equivalents of worry beads. A teenage boy in front of us is eating a whole rosary of pumpkin seeds, counting and fingering and clutching, without which care and exercise of the hands he threatens to go wild. It is a hot September night, but regardless of the iced lemonades they are drinking, the conventional farewell to any kind of meeting at this time of year is “
Kalo himona
,” Have a good winter.

Since the night is young, parents and children populate the miniature carnival, so small that you can see all its components from the wooden benches that form its boundaries and provide a place for the parents to sit while their offspring go up in rockets, ride beribboned mechanical ponies, drive toy motorboats. Each section is neatly partitioned according to age—tots in the area of rainbow-colored vehicles that bob gently up and down—here the emphasis is on gentle prettiness and maximum choice. Even the rocket ship is anthropomorphized, and would not look unnatural with a pair of eyelashes—and no pony or buggy is repeated, so any imminent tears about wanting what someone else has are cleverly forestalled. In the older children’s section, there are the bumper cars. Here imagery matters less than skill and daring, as the children guide their cars to total destruction, and all miraculously survive. In the teenagers’ section, the theme is controlled aggression, with a portable boxing machine, and a booth for hitting targets with rifles. And for parents and children together, a tilting car ride, with the cars set in the hoopskirt of a dancing lady, whose swiveling hips
determine the speed and direction of the passengers. In Greece, you are never far away from an outbreak of dance. I was walking past my local elementary school on the way back from paying bills at the post office, just this morning, when I saw a heavyset ten-year-old leap up onto the stone ledge that runs around the front of the building, raise his arms like torches, and begin to dance the
zembekiko
without music. Passersby stopped to watch him, smiling with admiration, and his audience drew a style from him, the schoolboy’s dance gained a dignity.

We buy ears of corn, smoky and salty, and sit for a while watching a two-year-old in a lace dress galloping on a white-maned pony with an expression poised between pleasure and anxiety. She keeps looking at her parents, to calculate from them the degree to which she ought to be afraid. If they had showed the slightest alarm, she would have burst into tears.

We eat at one of the harborside fish tavernas, which in classic taverna geography nearly adjoin the daily fish market, and drink a bottle of Saint Panteleimon wine—Agios Panteleimon is the patron saint of bakers, so it is good to know that he has wine to go with his bread. The nearest table is occupied by a group of high school couples, just old enough so that eating out on Friday night without their parents is a heady pleasure. Everyone is dressed up, and the table looks like the ideal Greek taverna table which is a standard tableau in movies—a table littered with plates and bottles is an archetypal scene of largesse and enjoyment. The boys smoke, rocking back in their chairs with their hands in their pockets, à la
mangas
, a key noun in the Greek poetry of masculinity—it can have negative connotations, but it always implies being unconquerable, and a largesse that expresses daring and power, a kind of macho equivalent of the quality of charity more often associated with women; but the largesse of the
mangas
is less freely given than conferred. The
mangas
character is most vividly associated with the experience of the Asia Minor catastrophe, and is a measure of the event’s impact on Greece, as well as a masculine archetype. The
mangas
was often a displaced Asia
Minor Greek who had lost his property and supported himself by day labor and robbery, though he may once have been wealthy. He fell between classes, neither peasant nor middle-class, and so made his own laws: the Greek masculine ideal. Certain postures and facial expressions were associated with the
mangas
—swagger, threat, dangerous sexuality, cigarette dangling from one corner of the mouth, readiness to dance or kill—the original
mangas
was supposed to wear a black mourning band around his hat, in memory of the people he had killed in fights, a generosity based on the power of being the survivor.

The
mangas
is an essential figure of modern Greek mythology, and I tell Jerry from Beaumont what I know about it. Myth extends a modern figure or characteristic backward, in the direction of infinity, so that a historical figure is made to exemplify timelessness, and in the body of modern Greek myth, becomes a proof of the all-important continuity between ancient and modern Greece. It is a sleight-of-hand that comes to seem quintessentially Hellenic, the magic illusion of eternity. And myth must work to seem true while destroying as much history as possible, which is why it is the kind of story that tells the lives of gods, and why truly concrete historical information about gods must be unavailable—if we saw a god as a truly historical figure, it would be difficult to see the god as immortal. It is, in a way, a contradiction in terms to speak of ancient myth, since myth does its work by eroding the sense of the past in favor of an eternal present.

“So can you guess the archetypal
mangas
?” I ask him, but he prefers to be told. “It’s Alexander the Great.” I take out my notebook and read him a quote Aura copied for me: “No one was such a
mangas
as to accomplish what he did then. To conquer all the East and to behave as he behaved!
E
, this was the essence of being a
mangas.
”

Jerry takes what I can see is a speculative Texan slug of the saint’s wine. “One thing about being here—you sure as hell hear a lot about Mr. Great and his Macedonians.”

Especially here in a part of the world so ambivalent about its identity as Macedonia. Just a glimpse at a small selection of pamphlets and books about the “Macedonia question” at the turn of the century and preceding the Balkan Wars makes me understand better the seemingly hysterical sense of threat the Greeks display over Macedonia now. The region had been home to Greeks, Bulgars, Albanians, Jews, Serbs, Vlachs, and Turks, and there are books arguing the justice of each country’s actions there in nearly all Balkan languages. So kaleidoscopic were the claims and counterclaims put forward by all parties that you find one of the most philhellene writers of the period, who wrote a worshipful book about the Greek politician Venizelos, stating that he was forced to conclude that the majority population of Macedonia was Bulgarian. The Greek view of him would probably be that on this issue he had succumbed to Bulgarian propaganda, with the inordinate Balkan faith in the political efficacy of mythmaking. Other anecdotes are told of people declaring unshakeable loyalty to their homeland, Greece, in Albanian and Slav dialects. The status of Kavalla itself was uncertain enough that Venizelos, the politician who led Greece through the 1912 and 1913 struggles over Macedonia, held it as a possible bargaining chip to be handed over to Bulgaria in exchange for other concessions during all the early-twentieth-century negotiations of Greece’s borders. The complicated motives and resolutions of the imperfect claims of all the interested parties to this territory make up one of the most disheartening episodes in human history, thick with the murdered bodies of people who always seem to lose their lives when eternity is invoked, and territorial claims sacralized beyond compromise.

Melons and the rich September grapes of Greece are brought to the teenagers’ table. They begin to sing a recent hit, swaying to its joyful assertive rhythm—“I have accepted both life and death, and I have nothing more to fear …”

In the morning, I go to the modest childhood house of Mehmet Ali, the nineteenth-century viceroy of Egypt, responsible for planting
cotton in the Nile valley, sending Queen Victoria the present of the obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle, and executing a political mass murder on a scale unmatched even by Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, by slaughtering in 1811 some five hundred of the ruling Mameluke faction of Egypt, his guests at a feast in honor of his son. The house, despite its small scale, preserves the radioactive eastern division between men and women, with special secured rooms for the women, and a dumbwaiter for the women to send along the food they prepared for the men, while remaining invisible. It is perhaps some measure of the Ottoman presence in Macedonia that both Mehmet Ali and Atatürk himself were born here.

I get on the bus marked “Drama” to go to the site of Philippi, where the Roman Republic was struck its deathblow by the forces of the future Augustus Caesar. Walking away from Philippi’s Acropolis overlooking the desolate-seeming Macedonian plains, toward the baptistery of Lydia, which celebrates the conversion of the first European woman to Christianity, through Saint Paul’s missionary work here, I think how unlikely that so many world-altering events will ever be concentrated again in one region. There are people who claim that this density of history is due to some inexplicable magnetism of place and sensibility, and it may be true, but the unavoidable fact is that Brutus and Cassius and Saint Paul couldn’t travel very far. Their theater of action was confined to the space that bad roads, limited funds, unpredictable seas, and primitive modes of transportation would allow them, and the intense philosophical ferment of this world was also in part a result of how geographically cramped it was. What a different sense it must have given even to the idea of coincidence—which must have had more the force of overlay and repetition than it does in our world, where it has, appropriate to the way we travel, more the drama of things coming together from vast distances to meet. Without airplanes and hydrofoils and ferries and gasoline-powered buses and paved roads and highway signs, I think, I would not be walking into the bapistery of Saint Lydia this morning, and admiring the rich purple-red color of
the garment she is always represented as wearing, since she was a well-off seller of dyes, one of the wealthy widows who gave an economic base to the early church. The lady who runs the gift shop closes it for a moment to come into the church with me. Ten or eleven children, she tells me, are baptized here every Sunday, and it is an enormously popular site for the baptisms of people being received into the Orthodox Church. “You are Orthodox,” the lady says, and when I shake my head she says, “But you must be, since you speak Greek.” Again I say no, and she seems sincerely disappointed. “Well, at least you behave well. So many people come here who are not Orthodox and they behave in such ugly ways.” She tells me I must see the river where Lydia was baptized, a fast shining river fringed with thick greenery and two splendid trees on the opposite bank. The modern speed I was thinking of leaves me more than enough time to see more of Kavalla before I catch the ferry to Thasos. I have a dish of late tomatoes stuffed with rice and mint for lunch, and stop in the small archaeological museum. In a case with treasures from a tomb excavated near by, a third-century-
B.C.
silver mirror is ingeniously displayed so I can look at it from both sides. I look at my reflection. My face in the old silver wavers like a faraway dream, like something either dissolving or forming. It is like meeting my own future, or my own ghost.