Dinner with Persephone (24 page)

And poetry figures in this scene, not only because of Palamas, but because of the customary usefulness of poetry and song as coded free speech during periods of occupation—during the Ottoman period, Greece was a country that existed only in poetry and song lyrics; Greece itself was no more and perhaps no less than poetry. In this scene there is also the Greek mysticism toward the Greek language, which Greeks are taught to regard as sacred—in the Greek drama of revelation, the Hebrew father god abandons the stage to his Greek-speaking son, the Logos, the Greek word, Greek speech, the chosen expression of the Christian divinity. But perhaps the most tellingly Greek detail of all in this scene is that it is a funeral, like Easter, the signal Greek holiday, the trauma that acts as a trigger to the wild Greek appetite for and insistence on resurrection. Funerals hold a special place in both community and national ritual. They are moments of resolution, as in the many village stories of peace among feuding families accomplished over coffins, and moments of defiant calls for new life, like the funeral of George Papandreou during the junta years of military dictatorship (1967–74), when someone cried out, “Get up from your coffin, old man, and see what we have become,” and, in 1994, shortly after I left Greece, the funeral of Melina Mercouri, surely the largest public funeral of modern Greece, which received a full day’s television coverage, from the procession of the coffin through the streets of Athens, while rose petals rained down from balconies along the way, to the burial itself.

“You are reading more Greek literature than most Greek students I know,” Kyria Ioanna is saying. “And I think that is so partly because of the war. We who lived through the occupation and the
war have spoiled our children and grandchildren—we were so horrified at our own deprivations that we gave our children a dream of what we would have liked to have had ourselves. But some deprivation is no bad thing. Downstairs lives a widower and three children, all together in two rooms. The oldest boy is a lawyer, the girl is a teacher, the youngest boy just now in university. The older children help with the younger’s expenses. My son, on the other hand, lives with us, for which he pays nothing. His meals are free, he contributes nothing to buying the food or cooking it, his laundry is done, I clean his room, we pay his medical bills. He has a big car, we have a small car. He has a CD player, a VCR. He has no idea of what it would mean to have a household of his own. He will be shocked when he is married, unless he marries a wife like me. But at least we haven’t had the trouble with him that my sister-in-law Mimi has had with her Stavros. He insisted on going to university in London, but he doesn’t work hard there. Because he is alone and has no help. I told Mimi she would have to go to him if she wants good grades.”

“Go to him?” I ask, weighing the possibility she is joking, because of her speech on the values of adversity. “Yes,” she says. “Go to him, like I did with my Elias—she should find him a good place to live, not something so uncomfortable as a dormitory, and when he has exams, she should be there to clean house and do his laundry and cook for him, and sharpen the pencils, so he can study more. Yes, Mimi doesn’t do what she should for the boy, she should go to him.”

“T
he ruler of the planet,” Greeks call the American president, and I spent much of election night in the ballroom of a hotel off Syngrou Avenue in Athens, an avenue that runs from the temple of Olympian Zeus to the sea that was made famous by a George Seferis poem: “When you let your heart and thought become one/with the blackish river that stretches, stiffens and goes away;/Break Ariadne’s thread and look!/The blue body of the mermaid,” which, although Syngrou Avenue is now most famous as the marketplace for Athenian transvestites, is still a stirring description of how it feels to find the sea at the edge of tangled Athens.

The election night party is sponsored by the American embassy and the Hellenic-American chamber of commerce. In order to get into the ballroom, we must run a gauntlet of security checks, bags examined and bodies X-rayed as if we were boarding a plane. The crush is spectacular, some three thousand people are vying for breath here, since, the security man tells us, the two organizations failed to coordinate their RSVP lists. Inside, miniature Greek and American flags decorate the tables; the Republican table is watched over by a nearly life-sized poster of Dan Quayle; junior government ministers
are working the crowds surrounded by burly bodyguards. The active anarchist organization “November 17” targets not only politicians, but prominent businessmen, so this crowd is dense with possible victims. “Wise men say only fools rush in,” sings the middle-aged bandleader, in the accents of the island of Kefallonia, “but I can’t help falling in love with you.” Greece has followed this election with the special intensity of a country which has a large population of Greek-Americans, often employees of American companies, or retired people who have returned to their birthplaces, who live and cast their votes from here. Greece’s absorption of American culture has a distinctive cast because American culture comes to Greece, not so much from the outside, but transmitted through relatives. The returning émigré, the taverna singer who risks her soul for a record contract with an American company, the attempt to arrange a marriage with an affluent American relative, all are staples of Greek literature, songs, and movies. I recently saw a comedy in which a young American woman on a ship was slapped onto a bed by a Greek man (which, in the film, she enjoyed, having at last encountered a real man), while the hero said, “At last, Greece on top of America.”

The strong ties of the Greek and Greek-American communities, not to mention the presence of George Stephanopoulos at Clinton’s side, ensures that the major Greek television channels will provide all-night coverage and commentary. A panel of experts, including one of the Papandreou sons, who has just returned from a month at the Harvard School of International Affairs, is emphasizing the importance of the African-American vote. A usually impassive news anchor cannot conceal a small ironic smile when he translates Little Rock—Mikros Lithos—into Greek. “Who will be the new
planetarkhis
?” someone murmurs, helplessly changing vantage points in the throng, while cameramen and Greek TV reporters trample militantly over us. I am struck by the faces in the crowd, the difference between the appearance of the Americans and their Greek guests. The Greeks have a national face, features recur, there is a striking current of physical relationship alive between these faces and these
bodies. The Americans have some common expressions, but rarely common features. When you see them in contrast to an ethnically related people, you realize how synthetic this nation is; under the coarse overhead lights, the group of people sitting behind the long Democratic Party table remind me of an Edward Hopper painting, with their patchwork of features and lack of physical resemblance, the wakeful look of people who must find ways and reasons to be together by choice.

In the morning, the front-page photographs of Clinton in the papers share space with shots of Stephanopoulos, who will, if anything, dominate the news of the new administration for a time, as Greece reverts to a village in relation to him. His aunt from Evia is photographed leaving for America, with the hopeful text “Maybe she will bring us news”; and in the national style of Greece, his mother gives interviews to the glossy magazines to discuss her George. An editorial cartoon this morning shows a man in a foustanella holding a newspaper marked “Clinton’s promises” and warning his wife, who wears a classical tunic, with a Greek proverb, “When you hear about many cherries, bring just a small basket.” The wife replies, “I’m holding only a thimble.”

“T
i oraia mera
, what a beautiful day,” echoes around me on this brilliantly sunny early November morning, on the island of Aegina, the feast of Saint Nektarios, which is the last truly out-of-doors feast until spring, and unofficially marks that we are now to perceive ourselves as entering fall and winter, even though I did swim just a day ago. The ceremonies for Nektarios go on all night, from about 5:00
P.M.
the previous day, all-night vigils being a mark of spiritual merit here. People have already gotten up at dawn to kiss the saint’s tomb, and the bus on the way to the church has standing room only. I wedge in, just behind the driver. The passengers cross themselves, elaborating the cross three times as they pass the town cemetery. The men wear sprigs of basil in their buttonholes, a common sight on Greek Orthodox feast days. The monastery is built on one of those hills whose overhang makes the roads of island Greece so narrow. A small homely taverna faces it—the site asks for a building that will live within the folds of this land that looks like dough kneaded by a god, while the walls should be of some earth color that will not argue with the lion-colored landscape. Instead, the furious and distinctively retroactive Greek ambition came into
play, and the architect apparently attempted to copy Istanbul’s Saint Sofia; Agios Nektarios is still unfinished, but the driver tells me that it is nevertheless the largest church in Greece. The walls are a garish orangey-yellow, windows outlined in red, and the building sits bulbously on its site like a raw onion someone tossed on the ground realizing it had a bad center. The taverna across the way is filled with people drinking beers on the outdoor veranda, having completed their obligations to the saint. “
Khronia polla
, many years to you,” says the policeman directing traffic, greeting us with the standard Greek festival wish. A golden crozier rests on the ledge under one car’s rear windshield. People are thronging the parking lot and the path spiraling up to the monastery entrance, dressed in various styles. One woman is wearing a sequin-covered jacket and brocade skirt, as if she had just come from a nightclub. And there are clusters of either widows or pious women wearing black dresses, scarves, and stockings. There are no little black dresses in Greece; it is not the same color as in Paris or New York, where its purpose is to give a sculptural line to the body. In the Byzantine world these women’s ideas of clothes descend from, rich colors were the privileges of the royal and the wealthy—black, which did not show stains or dirt, was the cloth of those without status, the abased, likely to do dirty work, and unable to pay for the service of maintaining stain-free clothes, which must have been a mighty labor, as you can see from catching occasional glimpses in the countryside of women doing laundry in rivers. That white should have been the baptismal color is not evidence of universal abstract symbolism, but of recognition of the sheer physical difficulty of keeping it clean.

The crowd is of all ages, although teenagers are the least represented, and the elderly dominate. But there are parents with young children in their arms, some young couples, some mothers with ten- and eleven-year-olds. There are also the political pilgrims, high-ranking military officials, well-dressed women and men in suits, whose hairstyles and publicly graceful carriage show them used to leading processions and being photographed as they are led
into the monastery through a separate entrance from the crowds that the police herd through the narrow main entrance. Streamers striped in Greek blue and white and Greek flags flutter in the breeze, and booths are set up at the foot of the huge monastery. One sells dolls hanging from their curly blond hair off ropes crisscrossing the booth, pacifiers in their mouths. Other booths hawk radios and cameras, coarse cut-glass vases, round trays of halva and baklava scored into individual pieces. You can hear the amplified singing of the liturgy all the way down in the parking lot. On the path up to the monastery, people are sitting on the ground, their crutches beside them, while pilgrims who are obviously mentally troubled are led up the paths by brothers, sisters, or parents. This practice is a living demonstration of a Greek idiom for madness, dating at least from the Byzantine era, “He is for the
panegyri
,” when the mentally ill were brought to medieval fairs probably very much like this one, in hopes of a magical cure. A man who is bearded and dirty, with a heroically stony hermit’s face, sits on a portable stool—I overhear him telling a schoolteacher who has paused to talk with him that he spends his life going from
panegyri
to
panegyri
; as the teacher descends the path, the old man calls out, “Many years to you, Mr. Teacher, Mr. Teacher and Catechumen.” Just before the monastery entrance a woman is camped, selling candles, incense, and evil-eye charms.

The line to go into the church, the special goal being to kiss Nektarios’s tomb, is enormous, at least an hour and a half’s wait. I catch phrases from the Sermon on the Mount, powerfully loud, but violently garbled by the audio system. In the liturgy, people hunger and thirst, people are meek. In this least selfless of crowds, however, I am the closest thing available to someone meek. With an instinct for creating suffering where none needs to exist, and then exalting it, the crowd pushes, shoves, stamps on, and makes all its members as uncomfortable and claustrophobic as possible. Old ladies aggressively push each other back and forth, and every time there is a tiny movement ahead, there is a violent surge in the
crowd, nearly knocking people off their feet. When I reach the entrance to the monastery church itself, decorated with palm fronds, bouquets of carnations wrapped in foil, and a plastic Greek flag, I am nearly pushed down the stairs, falling apologetically onto a woman in front of me. She is holding a foil-wrapped bottle of olive oil as an offering to the saint, who needs an ample supply for the hundreds of gilt lamps that drop tears of light from the ceilings of his church. If anyone fell or felt sick, he would be trampled, and any accident under these circumstances would produce an enormous death toll. Once we are inside, the crowd becomes even more frantic, obdurately trampling on each other in order to snatch lustfully at the holy bread a priest is handing out, to lay flowers and money on Nektarios’s tomb, and to kiss the tomb as passionately as if it were a husband. I smell that off-key smell of singed cloth, and put out the beginnings of a fire lit by a pilgrim’s candle on the elbow of my sweater. I walk off, picking hot wax off the wool. Auto-da-fé,
actus de fides
, an act done from faith.