Dinner with Persephone (20 page)

“ ‘Then you have found that man in me,’ said the traveler in the tunic. ‘Take me to your house and I will sponsor your son.’

“ ‘What is your name?’ asked the peasant.

“ ‘I am Saint Peter,’ said the man in the tunic.

“ ‘Then I cannot accept your kind offer,’ said the farmer. ‘Everyone knows you guard the gates of Paradise, and everyone knows you play favorites. You love sinners more than you love the good. The drunkards, the avaricious, the evil-hearted are the ones you sponsor, but the struggling decent folk you abandon. If a murderer builds you a church, the gates to Paradise are open. But if a good man can’t afford to light you a candle, to hell he goes. You are not
the right godfather for my child.’ The farmer walked on, leaving Saint Peter speechless in the road; that night he found a cave and slept in it. When morning came, and he emerged, he saw three beautiful women with baskets on their arms filling them with wild greens. ‘Where are you going, Christian?’ asked the most beautiful one. ‘I am going to look for a godparent for my child, someone perfectly just to give my son protection.’

“ ‘I will be the godparent and protectress,’ said the lady.

“ ‘And your name, sister?’ asked the farmer.

“ ‘I am the Virgin Mary,’ she replied.

“ ‘Then I must respectfully refuse,’ said the farmer. ‘You consented to give your child up to a dreadful death, as if his life was yours to give, without knowing whether this fate came from God or the Devil. You did not protect your child, sister, and besides, you are known to demand buildings and candles and jewelry. Your icon in my church is hung with gold and diamonds, sister, while people’s children go barefoot. I will look elsewhere for a godparent.’

“The farmer continued on his road, while salty breezes blew from the distant sea. He saw coming toward him another farmer, who had been doing the hard work of harvesting, since he was sweating and carrying a sickle. ‘Where are you going?’ the sweating farmer asked. ‘I have been traveling for three days now, looking for a godfather for my child. But I have not found him yet, because I am looking for a man of supreme justice.’

“ ‘It is lucky that you have met me, then,’ said the thresher. ‘I am a supremely just man, and I am willing to stand godfather to your child.’

“ ‘On the road so far,’ said the farmer, ‘I have met and refused God, Saint Peter, and the Virgin Mary. You call yourself more just than they are?’

“ ‘I am more just than God, more just than the rock on which He built His church, more just than the Queen of Heaven, who yields to persuasion.’

“ ‘And who are you?’ the farmer asked.

“ ‘I am Death,’ said the thresher.

“ ‘Then you are telling the truth. You favor neither the rich nor the poor, the ugly or the beautiful, the man or the woman. You take the child sucking the nipple and the blind woman limping with a cane. You are supremely just. Will you stand godfather to my son?’

“ ‘I will,’ said Death, and accompanied the farmer back to his home. Kharos himself held the infant over the font and smoothed the wriggling baby with the holy oil. Death himself handed sugared almonds to the guests, lifted his wineglass to the company at the baptismal feast, and led them in the Greek songs he knew so well, since himself is present in so many of them. At the end of the day, he thanked his host, and said, ‘It is not often I am invited to a feast, and have the chance to sing and dance with the living. It is an honor to be
nonos
to your boy, and I would like to honor you in return. I would like my godson to benefit from his
nonos
, so if you like, I will put you on the road to riches and a great reputation. From now on you will be a doctor, and you will become the most eminent doctor in the world.’

“ ‘How can that be, your excellency?’ asked the peasant nervously. ‘I am
agrammatos
, unlettered, I can barely read the initials of Christ on the holy bread in church.’

“Death shrugged. ‘The rich bey in the town is sick, but I know he will not die yet. Go to him, prescribe something, no matter what, and tell him he will recover. You will instantly become famous for your medical wisdom. And when you are called to diagnose other patients, look for me. If I am standing at the patient’s feet, prescribe whatever herb that comes to mind, the patient will survive. If I am standing at the patient’s head, you will say the case is hopeless, and you will never be wrong.’

“So the farmer went to the bey and cured him, and became famous throughout the country for the perfect accuracy of his diagnoses. He became one of the richest men in the country, doctor to the government officials, the diplomats, the judges, the shipowners, the sultan himself, and his son was brought up in luxury and sent to fine schools. Every day, the former peasant blessed Death, his
koumbaros
,
for his largesse. He prospered and grew old. One day he was smoking his narghile under a leafy plane tree in his garden, and he saw a stranger coming toward him.

“ ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

“ ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ said the stranger.

“ ‘My eyesight is not what it used to be,’ the doctor said apologetically.

“ ‘But you can still recognize me when we are at a sickbed,’ said the visitor.

“ ‘Oh, my apologies,
koumbare
,’ said the doctor. ‘I feel so lightheaded this afternoon, and everything looks hazy. What can I do for you?’

“ ‘You can come with me to die,’ said Kharos. ‘It is your time, now.’

“The doctor trembled and threw himself at the feet of Death. ‘Have mercy,
koumbare
, give me a little time more for the sake of your godson. I beg you to let me stay until he is married, until I see his own son born.’

“ ‘I cannot wait for you, kinsman,’ Death answered. ‘We have lakes and seas and mountains and plains to cross, and you must come with me.’ So they traveled together, over islands and mountains and water, over Greece, through Greece, under Greece, until they came to a great palace hidden in a cave, a palace as huge as the sky, with as many windows as there are stars in all the galaxies. Some of the windows were brilliantly lit, some softly lit, some altogether dark. ‘We have come to the end of our journey,’ said Death. Kharos led the way into one of the lighted rooms, where many banks of candles were burning, some strongly, some weakly, and one an inch away from going out. Death stood the doctor in front of that candle and told him, ‘This is the candle of your life. Do you see how the flame is going out?’

“ ‘But here is a whole supply of fresh candles, burning strongly,’ said the doctor. ‘Let me replace mine with one of these.’

“ ‘They are the lives of your kin,’ said Death.

“ ‘What about this one, it has a steady flame,’ the doctor pointed to a tall candle.

“ ‘It is the life of your son, my godson,’ said Death.

“ ‘What does that matter?’ said the desperate doctor.

“ ‘I am the just godfather,’ said Death, and blew out the flickering flame of the doctor’s candle. The doctor fell dead at the feet of Kharos, who is at the center of the most intricate network of relationships, but who cannot be influenced.”

It is the most skeptical fairy tale I have ever heard, and I tell Kimon so. He laughs, and says, “Naturally. We are profoundly skeptical, like all truly superstitious peoples. Privately, I think this is why we are so disturbed by infidels, by the beliefs of other peoples. Because we are afraid what they believe gives them some advantage we are being cheated of. Because we don’t believe anything we say ourselves. Because as the story tells, we wouldn’t take even God’s word at face value. You are aware of course, that we have two verbs meaning ‘to love’? Now the standard explanation for this is to say that one has the nuance of to love with the heart, to give love, the other is to desire with the body, to want love. But I think we have two because when we fail at one, we can always claim we meant the other. Shall we walk back down slowly and have an ice cream?”

We stop at a patisserie whose menu features full-colored eight-by-ten glossy photographs of possible sundaes, each one with a name out of mythology: the Aphrodite, the Danae, the Adonis, names from the old gods. Kimon leafs through the booklet and comments that it is perhaps a mark of the change in religious sensibility that these voluptuous temptations could not be called after Saints Cecelia and Catherine and Stephen, despite the fact that Danae and Adonis had similar violent deaths.

“I hope you don’t mind ancient goddesses and so forth with your ice cream, Patricia,” he says and winks at me. I smile back. It seems to me they’ve instinctively got it right, that eating ice cream, the sweetness that disappears even as you pursue it, is about as close as you can come to the classical idea of pleasure.

I order the Persephone, a scoop of ice cream decorated with pomegranate seeds. Kimon orders the Leda, two scoops of vanilla covered with rosettes of whipped cream and studded with tiny paper Greek flags that is set before him in a swan-shaped dish. Persephone and Leda melt quickly in the late-afternoon sun, vanishing into milky pools before we have a chance to finish our immortal ice creams.

“G
uide them into the harbor of salvation,” I read while on the ferry to Naxos, in the prayer against storm winds and tempests at sea. A couple who have no language in common are communicating solely through kissing. They pause to grip each other’s thighs, stare out to sea, and kiss again. In the prayers of a people are their longings and their fears—at least those they are allowed to voice publicly. The prayers for special occasions in the Greek Orthodox prayer book are also atoms of social, political, and economic history, at least until the Second World War—it is one of the ironic results of the bitter Greek experience of four hundred years of Ottoman occupation that it seems to have preserved well into the 1970s a sense of continuity with the medieval world that the Renaissance ended in the West, but here has only recently begun to be disturbed. It is an even more dazzling piece of historic irony that an element of the Greek sense of eternity, of world without end, may be drawn from the economic and social immobility of the Ottoman years, as well as from the unchanging agricultural challenges of this region. And of course, from the Christian translation of Platonism, so poignant in these prayers which see this world as a
damaged version of a perfect prototype. “Would the ancient Greeks be proud of us and our Athens today?” is a question often posed to schoolchildren, and according to Kostas, has become a standard filler human-interest story that appears at least once a year in some newspaper or magazine. He sent me a sample when I was on Thasos, with a newsprint photograph of cherubic children visiting the Parthenon with their teacher, measuring their modern distance from the perfect Greeks, the ancient ones.

What do they pray for, what did they need, what were they afraid of? They pray that new-dug wells be blessed, that their water be pure and drinkable, here in this part of the world where water is a precious commodity still, and later this year will be so strictly rationed that exceeding your limit carries threats of fines and even imprisonment. They pray against harm that might come to vineyards, fields, and gardens. They pray to bless fruit, wine, olives, seeds, at planting and harvest, and vintage time when the grapes are pressed. They pray to exorcise evil spirits from the things they are trying to grow, and they pray with tragic regularity against each other, against ruin that might come from human malice. They pray against their old gods who threaten them as demons that need to be exorcised from the streams, trees, and rivers over which they used to preside, and need to be driven out of the human bodies they can still possess. They pray against deadly illnesses of cattle, swine, horses, goats, sheep, mules, and donkeys and bees. There is a prayer over silk making, which was once an important Greek craft—the Peloponnesus is sometimes called the Morea, in memory of the abundant mulberry trees that grew there. They pray that the little silkworm will survive unharmed and will grow and multiply in the name of the god who promised to father Abraham that his seed would multiply as the stars of heaven and as the sands on the seashore. The prayers over food are reminders of the constant hunger of this world; as one historian, Peter Brown, has written, “Food was the most precious commodity in the ancient Mediterranean.” A traditional fillip of the Karaghiozis shadow puppet
plays the Greeks adapted from the Turks was Karaghiozis’s merry promise that “tonight we’ll eat, we’ll drink, and again we’ll go to bed hungry!” During the German occupation of 1941–44, when the Germans requisitioned Greek produce to send to Germany, so that more Greek citizens died than in any other occupied country, one famous Karaghiozis master cut plays that referred to food from his repertoire, because he would not torture the audience. There are prayers over cheese, and God, the true nourishment, is asked to bless meat, and salt, that preservative cornerstone of the stored foods that meant survival. There are prayers against the rotting and spoilage of flour, honey, olive oil, wine. They pray with poignant specificity, at all contacts with water, the building of all kinds of ships, the moment of voyage, the completion of fishing nets. They pray over the foundation of a house, so important that dowry houses were often the critical factors in whether or not a girl could marry, and they pray over the moment when the members of a family enter a new house. They pray to welcome someone who has worshipped as a Roman Catholic back to Orthodoxy. I remember that I have yet to see a church dedicated to Saint Peter, and will not see one during my time here, although they may exist. But Peter seems primarily identified as the putative progenitor of the Roman church—and of course, Western churches dedicated to Constantine, the founder of the Eastern church, are also rare.

They pray, having lost Constantinople, first to the European Christian crusaders, and later to the Turks, and having seen the swastika flying from the Parthenon, against invasion by “other races of people”; they pray against civil war, still so traumatized by the last one ending in the early fifties that most people cannot bring themselves to speak of it; they pray against plague, starvation, fire, sword—they pray not to experience what they have experienced, their prayers pit them against the very world they live in.