Dinner with Persephone (38 page)

As I pass through the orange-tiled stone houses on my way to the hill of Mystras, a white-haired lady with kind blue eyes and a naturally comic shrieking voice calls me over to her wall, and tells me to wait. She climbs a ladder to pick two oranges from her tree, and wishes me happy travels, reminding me of another idyllic moment of Greek generosity. In late January a friend and I were having lunch in Galaxidi, a lovely waterfront town near Delphi, an important port before the advent of steam-powered ships, replete with charming neoclassical houses and fine wrought-iron work, memories of its former prosperity. At one of the taverna tables a man was lunching by himself, and the waiter was just bringing him a plate of
delectable-looking olives to go with his noontime ouzo. At our table, the waiter didn’t mention olives among the
mezedes
, but our neighbor’s beautiful plate had given me an appetite for them. I asked him if we couldn’t also have a plate of olives, and he shook his head regretfully, explaining that those olives were the fruit of the customer’s own tree. We thanked him, settled on something else, and became absorbed in our conversation. The waiter brought our wine, our appetizer, and a small plate, with six olives on it. The gentleman had set aside a taste from his own plate. He nodded to us, and we raised our glasses to him. They were a breed apart, those olives, opulent and tender, like a kind of tree-growing equivalent of filet of beef.

After a substantial uphill walk, I reach the ruined city, a place of stone façades, hollowed-out buildings, and some functioning churches and convents. Moving between churches, I am struck by their determined avoidance of the column, at least externally, evaded through their amoeba-like bubbling domes, arches, tower-like chapels. The place has a feeling of tremendous precariousness, some of the monasteries seeming ready to slip off the side of their sharply angled positions on the hill. If there is an architecture of impending danger, it is here. In the monastery of the Perivleptos, the All-Seeing, a stony-faced Mary lies on rock with her head turned away from her shrouded newborn child, who lies in a sarcophagus-like crib beside her; it is the most infertile birth imaginable, as if being born to earthly life were death itself. In the fresco of Christ’s baptism, five or six figures with human bodies swim at his feet, barely distinguishable from the fishes in their cold insignificant nakedness. I turn to the familiar scene of the Dormition of the Virgin, strongly resembling in its elements scenes of Christ’s descent from the cross. Her recumbent figure is surrounded by the keening apostles, who by legend were translated to Jerusalem from wherever they were to attend her death, while behind her Christ holds her soul in his arms in the form of a newborn baby. In the foreground of this version, though, there are figures I do not recognize. Someone is
kneeling beside the Virgin’s bier with outstretched hands, while a winged angel with a drawn sword is cutting his hands off at the wrists. I shyly ask a nun who is keeping an eye on the visitors who these figures are, explaining that I haven’t seen them in other Dormitions. “The person kneeling,” she tells me, “is the Jew Iefonia, who wants to profane the body of the Virgin, and to overturn the bier, so the Archangel Michael cuts off his hands as they touch, her coverlet and stops him. It isn’t in every Dormition, though if you go to the Afendiko monastery here, you will see it there too.” I thank her, going outside again onto the green hill. I wish I knew at what period this image had begun to be incorporated into the Dormition scenes—was it somehow associated with the threat of the Turkish conquest, since the Turks were friendly to Jews, and eventually invited the expelled Jews of Spain to settle in Turkey, often in territory that had been largely Greek? I decide that when I get back to Athens, I will call Stamatis, whom I had met at the carnival party, to see if he knows its history.

I walk with no goal in mind until I find a waterfall hidden in the hills behind Mystras, its waters curling in marryings and divorcings like the destinies of lovers; some of its currents meet inevitably, others are inexorably divided, others separated and reunited, all with a common destiny awaiting them in the pool below.

Next morning we taxi to a village where there is access to an unused Roman road, a mule path. As we pass a field of sheep, the taxi driver honks the car horn at them in brotherly greeting. “
Yia sta provata
,” he calls out the window, health to the sheep.

As we climb, Paul points out an almost vertical ascent used by shepherds to reach flocks they shelter in a high cave, as Polyphemus, the man-eating Cyclops, that insult to shepherds everywhere, did in the
Odyssey.
The landscape of Greece is the purest remnant of the classical world, I think, its existence is the most independent element of that world we have often shaped and studied according to what we need to believe about it, resisting our enclosing fantasies. There is nothing of the golden world about this ascent; to take that
path every day would mean pure hardship, in rain, snow, heat, struggling footsteps up the steep paths by day, and at night, life by firelight in these damp, camouflaged caves. Paul says that the Taygetus has traditionally been a refuge for the persecuted, including the helots, Spartan slaves. The conversation turns to what surprises him most when he goes abroad—the ease of making arrangements. In Greece, to get a telephone can take five or ten years, not so much in Athens, where lines are established, but outside. To move a telephone from one house to another, he says, can cost eight hundred dollars. Checking accounts are expensive, and in any case, people prefer you to pay with cash, something I know from experience. He tells a joke whose punch line depends on the initials of the Greek telephone and electric companies, and the national tourist organization. DEH, the electric company, is code for “We don’t have electricity.” OTE, the telephone company, is code for “Neither do we have telephones.” But EOT, the tourist organization, stands for “Nevertheless, we have tourism.”

It is suddenly a cold day, and the clouds on the mountain are thick, dark, smoky, as if the mountains had been lit with cold fire. The sharpest and least secure-looking of the peaks, covered with stained-looking late snow, is called the Nereidovouno, the nereids’ mountain. Paul tells us that on this peak, nymphs would dance naked in the moonlight, and young men would climb toward them; when they reached the top, the nymphs would kick them in the face until they fell into the gorge. We see the form of our own fears, desires, and needs in the landscape itself. I know so few Greek stories of trustworthy beauty, of sexual happiness.

We scramble, cling, climb, leap, and endure, and at last arrive at the small village, a village of mostly red-tiled older houses, built of stone, with wooden balconies overlooking the mountains; there are a few new houses with patios of smooth brick, monuments to a new Greek-Australian, American, Canadian legend of the suburb. Two boys are playing in a brick patio of the tiny dream suburb; they call out to us as we pass—
hello hello hello
follows us into the village like
mountain echoes. The small village square is flanked by two general stores, mirror images, with matching merchandise of wine, coffee, hardware, new bread, Coke. I note one is called “Scribe and Son”; one accommodates right-wing clients, one left-wing clients, I’m told. An old man falls into step beside me, and tells me that it will snow here until April, and that in winter, the snow will often be as high as my waist. The wind blows straight down the main street, the upper village connected to the lower village by high stone steps. The place has an air of furtive desperation, suggesting the great fear that motivates such camouflage from the outside world. One of the British boys tells a romantic story about surviving some days of being lost in the wilderness, saying that life is not worth anything until you risk it; but danger often has a different value for the privileged than it does for ordinary people—someone who had been a child in harsher circumstances might feel her life counted for less, precisely because, against her will, it had been risked so much. We walk along a river gorge, overlooking great curtains and swathes of rock and sheer drops that make you feel you have already died just to look down them. Two rough-looking shepherds pass, with dirty curly hair like sheeps’, and gray-green eyes, both carrying, instead of crooks, rolled-up raffish Bond Street—looking black umbrellas. We stop in a cave that must have been once used for polytheist worship, as caves almost invariably were; now it is a chapel to the Virgin of the gorge, stalactites dripping water that is sanctified and collected for healing. We find slim green stalks of wild asparagus and add them to our bread and cheese, eating and staring at the chain of peaks before us, gray and savage, through the intimate tender blossoms of cherry trees. The delicate wild shoots have a brilliantly concentrated flavor in comparison to the cultivated, like the difference between attar of roses and the memory of roses in cologne, like the difference between reality and memory. The wind up here has the sound of someone asking anguished questions, of breath sucked in and gasped out with effort. After we have eaten, Paul remembers that he needs to make a telephone call to rearrange a ride tomorrow.
He stops at a small house to ask if the family has a telephone he can use. A stocky man with a newspaper under his arm answers the door, and before he responds to Paul’s question, he turns slightly toward the interior of the house and snaps his fingers. A thickset woman in a housedress printed with infertile-looking dead-brown flowers, her curly hair in transition between brown and gray, comes to the door. With a furtive glance at us, she kneels down and, like a prehensile dog, she puts slippers on her husband’s right foot and left foot as he holds them out for her, without looking at her. When he is shod, he jerks his head, and she retreats silently to the interior.

That evening, we go to the thirteenth-century cathedral on the hill of Mystras to hear the
khairetismi
, the hailings, perhaps the most famous Byzantine hymn chanted to the Virgin on the five Fridays of Lent. The hymn is meant to be listened to standing, which is why it is popularly known as the
akathistos
“standing” hymn, and in its full version of twenty-four verses, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet, with repeated refrains, it is an arduous but extraordinary experience. I last heard it in a recorded version interspersed with canons in which Mary was hailed as the “seashell that dyed the Divine crimson robe for the King of the Heavenly Powers” and as the dripping “dew that extinguished the flame of polytheism.” But I have never heard it in a setting like this. Cars and buses of people from neighboring towns are coming to hear tonight’s
khairetismi
, and a policeman directs the traffic into a parking lot lit with candles. A flaming torch lights the entranceway to the cathedral, giving the stone arch the absolute detail of a piece of sculpture, and the church itself is lit only by candles; their moving shadows add an otherworldly life to the faces painted in the frescoes on the walls, and the chant begins, the words swaying and trembling on their breath-supported scale like fruit on a vine. At intervals, the congregation join in to sing a seventh-century addition to the hymn, an encomium to the mother of God praising her for saving Constantinople from the attacking Persian fleet, which was terrorized by the gigantic glowing figure of a woman walking on the city’s
defensive walls: “Unto you … Invincible Commander, your city, in thanksgiving, ascribes the victory … and having your might unassailable, free me from all dangers …” After thirty minutes, many people in the crowded church simply sink down to the stone floor and listen from there. I look down and recognize the white-haired lady who gave me oranges from her tree. Oddly, the poem in English that most reminds me of the structure of this hymn is Christopher Smart’s eighteenth song of praise, “For I will consider my cat Geoffrey,” with its mass of increasingly wild and magnificent epithets, each surpassing the previous one. But the charged subterranean power of the Greek rhetoric is in its evocation of other goddesses, in language drawn directly from earlier hymns: like Persephone, Mary is a divine bride, like the Demeter of the Orphic hymns, she is the
kourotrofos
, the divine nursing mother, a vine, a field, the source of milk and honey, a laden table. Like Hecate, Athena, and Tyche, she is the defender of a city. She is described as a heavenly ladder, a door, a gate, but she is the gateway in this hymn that opens both forward to Christ, and backward to her divine mothers and sisters. And then in an extraordinary whiplash turn, the hymn contemptuously attacks its own sources, the root and foundation of its own eloquence: “O Theotokos [God Bearer], we see the most eloquent orators mute as fish before you; for they are at a loss to explain … Hail! O vessel of God’s wisdom … Hail! to you who prove the wise to be unwise. Hail! to you, who prove the sophists as foolish. Hail! that the dreaded debaters were rendered fools. Hail! that the inventors of myths have waned. Hail! to you, who broke the word-webs of the Athenians …” A woman next to me blows out a candle that has burned down too close to her fingers, eaten by its own flame.

A
  strange light seems to emanate upward from the valleys of Arcadia, as if the mountains were somehow lit from below, and daisies drift up from the green banks of the road like bubbles in a champagne bottle. It is another utterly different countryside, with softly moulded hills and neat terraced farms descending them, like carefully corrected exercises in a copybook. The bus back to Athens stops suddenly when a group of people standing by the side of the road flag it down. Someone boards the bus to ask if any passenger is a doctor; a man with heart trouble has collapsed outside, and the bus driver radios to the nearest town for an ambulance. While we are waiting for it to arrive, two thirds of the passengers pour outside, chattering to the sick man, encouraging him with jokes, and surrounding him with a cloud of smoke from the cigarettes they immediately light.

In the city now, the shop windows are full of unlit candles, pent-up fire, waiting to be lit at midnight on Easter Saturday. The obligation to be joyful at the beloved holiday, and the poignant misery it brings to those whose suffering exiles them from its rejoicing, make it much more like our Christmas than our Easter. The magazines
bring out special Easter numbers, Sunday newspaper supplements print selections of poems on the theme of Easter and reproductions of icons known as the Anastasis, which represent Christ in hell, dragging Adam and sometimes Eve out of their tombs, cracking hell open like an egg. Human interest stories report the plights of people who cannot afford to serve lamb this year or buy gifts for children named Anastasia and Anastasios, whose name day falls at Easter. Jewelers’ windows fill with gold and enamel pendants in the shape of eggs marked with the year, as at Christmastime in the West you see the worlds of commerce and popular journalism shaping and marking the holiday. A dizzying synthesis of rebirths is being celebrated: natural, national, cultural, divine; familial in bringing to mind the resurrection of the dead, personal as in an ascent and liberation from any personal hell. Like all successful festivals, it is a sea of history and symbolism, infinitely malleable, changing shape and meaning at each approach. One of the magazine covers fuses a mass of popular symbolism showing a child standing next to a grown-up, both holding candles. The adult is partly concealed, only a hand holding a candle, so that you can see that the light has been passed to the child, who is almost the same thing as her candle, something newly lit. Her face blooms in the perfecting and mysterious light of the candle, emerging from the darkness; here is rebirth, spring, Hellenism, religious salvation, the passing of the light from one generation to another. For Greeks, this is the Eorti Eorton, the Festival of Festivals, the parallel Resurrection of the Lord and the Easter of the Greeks,
i Anastasi tou Kyriou
and
to Paska ton Ellinon
, a treasured national possession which their Turkish overlords were barred from sharing. In folk songs with a rainbow of variations, wealthy Turks offer to adopt or marry Greeks if they will only change religions, while the Greek speaker conventionally replies, “It would be better for you to become Greek, to rejoice in glittering Easter.”