Dinner with Persephone (41 page)

In the evening, in the narrow streets beyond the church, roosters pick their way over their familiar territory, even though this is the
neighborhood of the Ionian University, and of a number of Corfu’s hotels. I climb up to the women’s gallery, full of heavyset matrons in wool pullovers and three black-clad old women who dominate the front of the gallery, looking exactly like the three fates, with their black scarves, gnarled faces, and ruthless eyes. I hear Kassiani’s lament and also the “Bridegroom Hymn,” in which Jesus, the man about to die, is celebrated as a bridegroom—if there is any single dream that has held a continuity of interpretation from the second century to this morning in the Greek world, it is the dream of a wedding, which is invariably interpreted as a premonition of death, as dreams of death are often interpreted as a premonition of marriage. The imagery of the one and the other converge, for, as Artemidorus says, “the same things befall a groom and a dead man, as, for example, a procession of friends, both male and female, wreaths, spices, unguents, and written records of their possessions.” On the other hand, dreaming of a memorial monument often foretells marriage, “since a tomb, like a wife, has room for entire bodies.” The same interpretations, unchanged, are in every generation of dream book that I have looked at, and this deep unconscious substitution of one condition for another is being enacted in this very liturgy. A pudgy ten-year-old boy comes upstairs for a visit—there is a great deal of chatter and movement during many Orthodox services—and his gray-haired mother immediately stands and offers him her seat.

Thursday morning is lyrically beautiful, and I take a bus, jammed with Greeks on Easter holidays from other parts of the country, to Corfu’s most famous building, the palace the Hapsburg empress Elizabeth of Austria had built here and called the Achilleion. On the way I read an Eastertime interview with a metropolitan who looks out from his photograph with grim eyes, a set mouth, and an air of implacable spiritual condescension. Holy Scripture, he remarks, confirms the Greekness of Macedonia in seventy-seven passages. Asked his opinion of women, he replies, taking a privilege of omniscience usually associated with God, “Very very many of today’s women will not enter Paradise.”

The Achilleion is an ugly, vulgar, and foolish palace in one of the most beautiful settings in the world, overlooking a blue bay from so many exquisite prospects that the bay seems to be painting its own portrait. But the palace itself is a dissertation on a fascistic, ruthlessly perfectionist strain in classical art that was one element of Nazi physical and racial idealism, and an underpinning of Nazi art. The tremendous drive for power in using sacred architecture for domestic housing is apparent here, as it often is in the Greek Revival architecture of the American South, where white people often chose to house themselves like gods in temples, as incongruous as it would be if farm owners in the Midwest modeled their farmhouses on the plan of Gothic cathedrals. The empress Elizabeth had grown up in the Bavaria that idealized ancient Greece, and it was her uncle, King Ludwig, who collected classical Greek works and ambitiously renovated Munich to make it the “Athens of the North.” It was her relative, Otto, who went to rule over what her mother called the “bandit-subjects” of the new state of Greece. She herself developed a mania for Greek, and hired a Greek tutor named Christomanos in 1891, who later wrote a romantic, overwrought, but revealing account of his acquaintance with her in Austria and on Corfu. For her, Greek seemed to provide another outlet for her persistent imagining of herself as a goddess, an imagining she seemed to encourage in her retinue. Christomanos, meeting her for the first time in an Austrian reception room whose walls were covered with blood-red silk, full of opulent gold furniture, mirrors, and crystal chandeliers, said she reminded him of Persephone, the queen of the underworld. And she herself, in planning her Corfu refuge, some years after her son Rudolf’s suicide at Mayerling, decorated the palace to evoke the immortal Thetis and her mortal son Achilles, choosing dolphins, sacred to Thetis, as symbols on all the tableware and glassware, and ordering a monumental painting of the Triumph of Achilles by Franz Matsch.

The place has an atmosphere of suppressed violence, of egotism combined with self-hatred. Statues of Zeus and Hera flank the marble
entrance stairway, while Elizabeth’s dressing room features a head of Medusa, and the sitting room is decorated with demonically grinning plaster cherubs, whose faces and bodies are so poorly crafted that art seems to have spun chaotically out of the control of the artisans. And the friezes of hunting animals—dogs, rabbits, piggish boars—are unnerving in the context of her son Rudolf’s obsession with guns and shooting; he was famous for his recklessness with guns, and had a sequence of accidents that almost seemed to be experiments leading to his death, at one time shooting himself in the hand, at another narrowly missing his father, Franz Joseph, instead wounding the emperor’s loader, and finally murdering Marie Vetsera, one of his girlfriends, and himself. In the gardens, the Ping-Pong paddle-shaped leaves are scarred with Greek graffiti cut into them with pocket knives, and five men are posing together in front of the enormous statue of Achilles placed here by Kaiser Wilhelm, who bought the villa from the Austrian royal family after Elizabeth tired of it. There is a reclining statue of the dying Achilles that makes death look like a rapturous moment of the most supreme self-love. I go close to the bombastic Matsch painting, which shows a victorious Achilles in a scene of battle pornography, a kind of precursor to the action movie, dragging Hector’s dead body behind his chariot, while doll-like crowd figures react. And yet there is a chillingly prophetic detail in this vacuous painting—over the stone entrance to the Trojan city, Matsch has painted a small swastika.

This evening’s service commemorates the Crucifixion, with readings of the Passion story from all the Gospels. In the women’s gallery, we follow the readings by candlelight. I hear Peter deny acquaintance with Christ. In the Bible, a cock crows, and Peter rushes off crying bitterly, in a sentence of such simplicity in Greek that you can feel a childlike sense of shame and failure in his outburst. Suddenly all the lights are doused in the church, and the priest emerges from behind the iconostasis, carrying an enormous cross with a detachable figure of Jesus laid on it. The priest nails Jesus’s hands and feet to the cross, and candles are lit at his head and hands, while the
yiayias
in the balcony sob and groan. Then the
priest carries the crucifix around the church three times, and I am again stunned by what seems to be an allusion to wedding ritual, reminded of the three circles called the Dance of Isaiah that an Orthodox bride and groom walk around the altar.

At the hotel later, I read Artemidorus on crucifixion, an image that as something the dreamer might suffer has disappeared from the modern books. But crucifixion was such a common punishment in Artemidorus’s world, such a common element of conscious life, that it was also a common dream, with none of the uniqueness it has in our imaginations. It was Constantine who ended crucifixion as a Roman punishment, although he instituted other penalties, like the well-known statute which decrees that boiling lead shall be poured down the throat of anyone who assists her mistress in making a love tryst. Surprisingly, a dream of crucifixion is generally very favorable in Artemidorus. It is good for seafarers, since a cross resembles a ship’s mast, and like a ship, is made of nails and wood. It is good for poor men, since a crucified man has been placed in a high position; it signifies wealth since the crucified man provides food for many birds of prey, which gives an idea of what a contemporary of Artemidorus’s might have seen if he took a walk near a military prison. For a bachelor crucifixion means marriage, although the bond will not be easy. Oddly, in the modern dream book, there is no crucifixion, only the more removed symbol of the crucifix, a sign of a troubled sexual relationship, one in which any joy will be accompanied by conflict and sorrow. On an impulse, I look up the dream of resurrection in my books—the modern book moralizes, warning that such a dream is often a sign of egotism or conceit. But for Artemidorus it signifies chaos, as an offense against the social order and against logic. “For one must hypothetically imagine the kind of confusion that would result if the dead were to come back to life again. They would naturally demand their possessions back, which would bring about losses.”

On the morning of Great Friday (all the days of this week are called “Great”), a black and white lamb suddenly appears, tethered on a strip of grass on a small square in front of the hotel. During
breakfast, the music piped in is no longer the cheerfully inane pop music of yesterday, but church chanting. Today is the descent from the cross, and later this evening, Christ’s funeral, and on the streets the Greek flag, its blue and white adopted from the Bavarian colors of its postrevolution Bavarian king Otto, flies at half-mast. The candles always available for churchgoers to dedicate are brown and are said to be charged with special powers. I climb up to my now familiar spot in the women’s balcony—for this service the church is crowded as I have not seen it before, and the women sitting trade places at intervals, to give those standing a place to rest, an extraordinary sight, since anyone who has been on a Greek bus, trolley, or ferry has seen seats and benches defended to the point of violence. The door of the iconostasis is flung open, and the priest, dressed in a magnificent gold and purple robe, moves to the front of the black-draped altar, takes the detachable figure of Christ from its cross, and wraps it in a white cloth. The priest is playing the role of Joseph of Arimathea, who took Christ’s body to its grave, and as he carries the white-wrapped figure around the church, showers of flower petals are thrown at it, exactly as at a wedding. The ancient involvement of drama and resurrection is renewed: drama is, after all, the art in which people outlive their own deaths—after Heracles dies in agony in his shirt of flame, he comes around the curtain unscathed to receive his applause. In literature, all tragedies have happy endings, the sufferings of their characters removed from history, and from us, so that their pain ends. A death in literature is always a resurrection. And we make their misery fertile, using the intimacy and detachment of literature to survive it and redeem it, to see by the light of their grief, using our own minds too like candles in the dark. We have not learned that art with the tragedies of history. The Greeks and Bulgarians of the Balkan Wars, the Byzantines and Turks of the Ottoman Empire, the West and East, the Greeks and Turks of the Asia Minor catastrophe, and of Cyprus, have not repaired what they destroyed for each other; these are the tragedies that have not ended. In today’s service, worship is itself a
form of drama, in which the congregants and priest themselves are actors, not audience, and through them, Christ dies and is resurrected, borrowing their flesh for incarnation, borrowing their lives for the story to inhabit. I remember that in Artemidorus, the dream of being a god is especially propitious for actors, because actors so often impersonate gods in plays—in fact there was a particular part of theater architecture called a
theologion
, the place above the stage where the actors dressed as gods appeared. You can see the niches in the theater of Herodes Atticus in Athens; the
theologion
, I imagine, must be the ancestor of the iconostasis.

Engaging the congregation as actors shifts the gravity of faith; if they believe in their own lives, at this moment, they believe in God’s. The body of Christ is brought to the bier, which is a real bed with a pillow, framed in white carnations, the flower associated with Christ’s passion, with an emperor’s crown of red carnations at the top. Again I am struck by its eerie resemblance to a wedding bed. Children dressed in scouts’ uniforms, carrying wooden staves that represent rifles, present arms and stand to attention. The figure of Christ is covered with a magnificent woven
epitafios
, the grave cloth, covered with scattered carnations, and laid on the bier, as the children move forward to guard the bier, as at a presidential funeral, and the older women sob and light their brown candles. The priest delivers a hectoring sermon, denouncing foreign manners and customs, and threatens those who follow
xenoi tropoi
with the loss of heaven.

Outside, when the service is over, the world has come to life again. Booths are doing brisk business in shards of crockery and cheap clayware to throw out the window on Saturday morning, both to celebrate the shattering of death, and as a heckling of Judas. The street where the butcher shops are concentrated is lined with rows of dead lambs hanging by their heels, their eyes blank and their teeth set in grimaces. At the bus stop, a cluster of people are waiting in a thin silvery rain, holding flowers and wrapped lamb parts to put in their
mayeritsa
, the soup that breaks the Lenten fast after the
Saturday night service. A man heaves the whole dead body of a lamb into the trunk of his car, lined with paper to catch the blood. Other booths are selling candles, and I choose one for the Saturday night service, the most beautiful candle I have ever seen, in the shape of a calla lily with green leaves. The church bells toll ceaselessly today. I buy a paper, and find my way to a square centered around a Venetian well that gives me an amnesiac feeling of being in Italy and not where I am at all. I order
pastitsada
, pasta not boiled in water, but cooked in its sauce—the cooking of Corfu is Italianate, too, rather than Middle Eastern, although there is a comical remnant of the British governors, in the form of ginger beer. There is a report in the paper of an arrest for a particularly cold-blooded murder. The account makes me think again, as I often have here, how specific murders, except possibly self-defense murders, are to a culture. Murder is charged not just with personal but cultural symbolism, as the sight of the crucified body of Christ constantly reminds me this week. There are hidden messages in murders, to people or to people who represent institutions which are felt to have previously attempted to harm or even to have actually murdered the killer. But in order to make the murder the consummate violation the murderer desires, murder has to violate cultural convention as well as the victim. Murder is, in a way, the least individual of acts.