Dinner with Persephone (32 page)

The wedding date is set for October 28, “
Okhi
” Day—“No” Day—a serpentine irony, since the day unreservedly commemorates one of the most ambiguous figures of modern Greek history, the dictator General Metaxas. Kostas presses the pause signal on the remote to make sure I know the story of Metaxas, a Nazi sympathizer who tried to make a miniature Germany of Greece, down to the youth organizations for Greek Christian boys only, but when the Fascist Italian allies asked for free passage through Greece to Africa, replied with the famous and fictitious “
Okhi
,” no. “So you see,” he says, “there are helices of irony here, the ultimate irony being that this is a holiday that in a sense, by heroizing Metaxas, denies the existence of irony, adopts a deliberate national amnesia, says no to everything but myth. In fact, Melina’s own father, Stamatis, protested against the Metaxas dictatorship, and was involved in a coup to overthrow Metaxas.”

He starts the tape again; the groom’s mother, a dumpy little colonel of a woman, calls on Stella, protesting that Stella should have come to her to kiss her hand, and announcing that Stella is too beautiful for her son. She tells Stella bluntly, and with the calm smug schadenfreude of a camp guard addressing an internee, what marriage means—that her job singing is finished, that she will move from her familiar beloved neighborhood to a respectable middle-class house that Miltos has already decided on, that she is no longer Stella, but the wife of Miltos. Stella is horrified by the message
and the messenger—she sees her future in the figure of Miltos’s mother, who seems to have been destroyed as a woman by marriage—she is monstrously neutered, only her costume of dress and hat, but nothing in her features or bearing, expresses a distinctive femininity. Stella realizes that marrying according to this conception will destroy her love and her humanity—that, ironically, the sanctified convention is immoral—although she wants Miltos so much that the only way she can not marry him is by not going to the church, losing herself in the Okhi Day parades, and dancing until dawn for the last time, since she knows that Miltos will come hunting soon to kill her. As she reaches her own street at dawn, she sees him coming toward her with a knife, and stands her ground. “Run away, Stella,” he says to her, “I’m holding a knife,” but she walks freely toward him, in a magnificent piece of acting, struggling with her fear and her knowledge that she is about to be murdered. He warns her again to run away, but she continues to walk toward him; at this moment, she is “the man, the hero” he is not, the gallant
pallikari
, proceeding in the full consciousness of what lies ahead, while he, despite his muscled strength and the honed knife he drives into her, is helpless, compulsive, too weak not to kill her.

“Some people say it’s the Greek
Carmen
,” Kostas says, rewinding the tape. “But it’s not like Carmen at all,” I say. “In the last scene when she walks toward him, she is pitting love against murder, she is offering him a choice of life and love in all its complexity. And he says, ‘
Okhi.
’ This is not the Greek
Carmen
, it’s the Greek
Psycho
, as if Miltos and his mother, fused together, kill Stella. Except in Hitchcock, it was treated as a psychological aberration, and in
Stella
, as a social norm.”

A few days later, I stopped at the
laiki
in Melina’s neighborhood to buy some potatoes—Greek shops open and close in different time patterns according to the day of the week, and the shops in my neighborhood would be closed by the time I got back there. Melina suddenly appeared, in full coiffure and handsome heavy gold jewelry, trailing an entourage of cameras, while the
laiki
merchants
called affectionate greetings to her. As she passed by a booth selling tableware and kitchen utensils, the gold-toothed, gray-haired proprietor grinned with delight, seized a knife from one of the boxes, and waved it in her direction. “Run away, Stella,” he shouted to her joyfully, “I’m holding a knife.”

M
agic water in great vats is set up in the forecourts of the churches in my neighborhood for the January 6 feast of Theofania, a feast with many themes, the baptism of Christ, whose divine presence purifies the waters, and who is always shown in icons of this scene with “the personification” of the river Jordan crouched at his feet in a corner, a river deity miniaturized by the power of the divine mortal. The celebration of the return of light is continued in this feast also known as Ta Fota, The Lights, here allegorized as the light of Christ coming into the world. It is also the day of the blessing of the waters, a day when drops of the water blessed in church are flung in spots where the
kalikantzari
demons lurk, in corners of the house, on the fields and vineyards, in wells. Icons are taken outside to be washed in the sea or in blessed rivers and fountains, reminiscent, as many friends have pointed out to me, of the annual sacred cleansing of Athene’s cult statue of Athena in the sea.

Women crowd around the vat after the liturgy, carrying pitchers, teapots, and plain drinking glasses to get supplies of the holy water, “the holiest of the year,” one says to me. A man and a boy ladle the water into the containers, busy as short-order cooks. The sea is
also being blessed today; a neighbor of mine tells me that the ceremony of diving into the water to retrieve the cross helps bring the beginning of calm weather, and hurries the process of breaking up the ice. All over the country, men who have made special vows are performing the feat of diving into the waters to bring to the surface the cross their bishop or priest has thrown. In northern Greece, where the rivers and lakes are full of ice, the feat is especially painful, and the evening papers are full of pictures of shivering men with hard-won smiles of pride. The main Athens ceremony, the friend who is taking me to lunch claims, is held at a heated swimming pool—the bishop, she says, has the cross on a kind of leash, so it doesn’t sink to the bottom. I can’t tell if she is teasing.

We head for Glyfada, a seaside suburb of Athens, for lunch, parking her car once to run down the beach to dip our hands in the cold, steely sea for luck. The restaurant, a well-known seaside dive, has moved, and is now, it turns out, on the highway. Inside, we eat mussels stuffed with rice and currants at a table facing a huge poster showing a quadrant of views of the Swiss Alps and Swiss villages. A mirror over the bar is inscribed in bright blue paint with the Greek word for tradition, in Roman letters. A bearded priest in a long black cassock, with his hair in the Orthodox ponytail, reels his way to the bar, carrying a carafe he wants refilled. “They are all traitors,” he shouts over the noise of the crowd. “All traitors. They have all betrayed us.” He looks around the room, as if he expects a challenge, and finding none, lurches unevenly toward the door, pausing to support himself at intervals with the backs of strangers’ chairs.

Next morning, I am on my way to Thessaloniki, planning to go to a curious yearly celebration in a Macedonian village called the Yinaikokratia, the Rule of Women. Thessaloniki is hemmed in with fog, as it often is, I am told, in winter, so I wait for hours in the airport while a businessman who has just come in from Russia tells me about his wheat trade, and entertains me with his racy version of Mrs. Papandreou’s sexual biography. “Her breasts,” he says, “are phenomenal, they are like engineering feats. Have you been to
Istanbul?” No, I say, I haven’t. “Well, Dimitra’s breasts, they are like the dome of Agia Sofia.”

Yiannis, a friend who is a brilliant painter, drives with me through the dove-colored gray and brown winter countryside to the small, pleasant, nondescript village of Monoklissia, where the festival is held. The usual archaeological layers of myth have settled over this holiday, which some say came here from eastern Thrace, as a vague festival celebrating a female god: some call it Saint Domna’s Day, a Christian festival honoring midwives and female fertility, which of course is a dead giveaway of its pre-Christian origins, because of the Christian idealization of celibacy and condemnation of sexuality; some say it was brought here by Greek refugees from Turkey after the 1923 population exchange. I was told by a Macedonian specialist that there was a similar holiday celebrated by the Bulgarians of Macedonia when the region had a mixed ethnic population, a January holiday called “Matron’s Day,” with festivities very like this one. And although everyone has told me, in odd tones of reassurance, that this holiday, like the January holidays, and like carnival approaching, is dedicated to fertility magic, it is clear from the moment we reach the village that, like the other holidays, this one carries strong social messages—a huge banner is arched over the entrance to the village, reading “Yinaikokratia,” and an orchestra of men wearing long skirts greets us as we enter the town. I can pass freely through the entrance, but Yiannis is restricted, and must be given a kind of permission to enter by the women controlling the visitors. The transvestism here is a social, even a political transvestism—the men are not just dressing like women, but being treated like women by women mocking men’s behavior. A woman comes forward carrying a bowl of water and a sprig of basil, and with gleeful malice splashes Yiannis with the drops clinging to her plant, in a deadpan parody of a typical Orthodox priest’s blessing and assumption of moral authority. “Why do you splash me?” Yiannis asks, a shade of hurt in his expression. “Because you are a man,
vre
, polluted,” she says, “and you must be purified to enter.” She winks at me, having a high time mocking the theology which defines women as physically and morally imperfect, and evoking
in particular the prohibition against women entering a church during their menstrual periods, a routine prohibition for a woman of her generation. As a girl baby, she would not have been baptized close to the sanctuary as a boy baby could be. When Yiannis has met the standards of the ruling women, he is allowed to follow me past the houses where men wearing long aprons and holding brooms are shut up for the day. He accompanies me to the edge of the village square, but he is not allowed to set foot in it, a community transvestism, since a village
plateia
is usually a male preserve. Someone points out the mayor to me, standing theatrically at a window in the
dimarkheio
, the mayoralty overlooking the square, peering mournfully out, like a harem woman. Women and girls are dancing round dances on the square, many of the older women swigging from open bottles of wine and ouzo. A lone television reporter and cameraman follow the leader, a magnificent
yiayia
with long gray braids, who must be at least eighty, and is leading the dances, holding a bottle of brandy in one hand and a carved wooden cane in the other. She takes a superbly stagy gulp of brandy, composes her face into a hilarious caricature of a manly leer of authority, and issues her edict: “None of us will be going home tonight,
vre
!”

On the way back to the city, we pass a sign showing the route to a city named Fiorina. This city is ruled, Yiannis tells me, by an old archbishop named Augustinos, who has been a power here since the sixties, the junta days. In Fiorina, he says, dead people remain unburied if the records show them as having had a civil marriage ceremony instead of a church one. A well-known movie director named Angelopoulos has been threatened by locals while on location in Fiorina and his movies cannot be shown here because the bishop has anathematized him. The archbishop is nostalgic for the sixties, when he issued a directive that women must remain standing throughout church services, while men were permitted to use pews and chairs, if they felt tired. He also forbade celebrations of the pre-Lenten carnival, because, I am told, he feared the festivities would bring about a religious revival of the twelve Olympian gods.

T
he half-hearted Valentine’s displays, since Saint Valentine belongs to Rome, and this is a thoroughly imported holiday, are overshadowed by the glittering masks and costumes that mark the overlapping three weeks of carnival. On the way downtown, the few Valentine’s offerings I see have neither hearts nor flowers. Instead, there is a gigantic baby’s rattle with the legend “You’re my baby,” and a thick green felt cucumber, inscribed “I’m very juicy, do you want some?” In a window a few blocks down, I do see hearts decorating a pair of red and white boxing gloves tied together with a red ribbon. One glove reads, “If you don’t love me …,” and the other continues, “I will make you eat wood,” the idiom for “beat you up.”

In Cathedral Square, between the Little Cathedral and the Great Cathedral, I wait for Kostas to take me to see the famous Zographos paintings commemorating the Greek revolution that were commissioned by General Makriyiannis himself. The alternative cathedrals themselves are witnesses to the meandering patterns of Greek history. The Little Cathedral, also known as “The Virgin Who Grants Requests Quickly,” of uncertain date, but probably twelfth or thirteenth century, was the cathedral of Athens under Turkish rule in
the eighteenth century; its size, smaller than a one-room frontier school, tells something about the status of the city itself during the Tourkokratia, and during the Byzantine era too, when Athens was considered a backwater, a memory of a great city. What is riveting about the Little Metropolis is that its builders made use of ancient marble reliefs that were to hand, just as the Christian emperor Constantine’s statue in Byzantium was constructed of his massive head set onto the decapitated body of a statue of the sun god. Some of the marbles are carved with signs of the zodiac, and personified festivals of the classical year, including the Panathenaic ship which carried the newly made garment used to dress Athena every year, and whose procession figures in the Parthenon marbles, as they are called here, never the Elgin marbles. In Byzantine days, when the countryside was covered with Greek and Roman antiquities, marbles were often thought to harbor demons, and a Christian folklore grew up about the old gods, whom Christ had revealed to be demons, some of whom, like Artemis, were said to roam the land with demonic followers. Scholars say that so many carved marble sarcophagi survived intact because people often left them untouched, afraid of the demons they harbored, although other, pragmatic, villagers put them to use as troughs or fountain basins. The builders who made use of these might have thought they were neutralizing the demonic powers that permeated them—now these marbles are infused with a different dream, a different kind of magic. I have come to this church many times, or passed it with different companions, who pointed it out to me as a perfect example of a magical unbroken continuity of Greek culture, a belief as strong here now as the belief in demons was in the twelfth century.