Dinner with Persephone (44 page)

There were other splinterings in her affluent life. Although the Greek community had a grandiose sense of its power and importance, it also was tormented by a sense of inferiority in relation to the western Europeans in Alexandria. The Greeks felt self-conscious about their struggling, weak, and very new state, and both envied and mistrusted the French and English contingents in Alexandria. There was a glamour for them in the manners and lives of western Europeans, a sense of more secure and established traditions, and perhaps a half-acknowledged yearning for a less punitive family life than the tyrannical Greek family structure allowed. The
Benaki children grew up under the tutelage of various English and French governesses and teachers, and it was a source of shame later to Penelope that the Greek community of her day had a reputation as energetic capitalists whose passion for business left them indifferent to cultural affairs. She was embarrassed that the Greek community had no school of their own. Girls were not sent on to high school, but kept at home to learn housekeeping; boys were given higher education in Roman Catholic schools, where sometimes, as in her brother’s case, they were proselytized. The Greek schoolteachers sent by the state were of such a poor standard, Penelope said, that none of the parents would entrust their children to them. Penelope grew up speaking English, French, and scraps of Arabic, like the brothers and sisters in one of her most famous novels for children, whose governess admonishes them perpetually to “Speik Ingliss,” as the Greek children hear her command. The children’s Greek lessons were all Katharevousa, which made them dislike the Greek books they read and distanced them from the spoken language of their own countrymen. It was as if American children’s only instruction in English were in the language of the Tyndale Bible, all
doths
and
spakes
; and the result was that the Benaki children wolfed down their French and English books, but opened their Greek books only under orders. The stories Penelope describes herself as having a “mania” to write during her girlhood, with deaths and catastrophes on every page, were written in French. Penelope wrote her journals in French, too, until she was a grown-up married woman; and even as a prominent author, she anxiously pressed other Greek writers to assess her Greek, while many people say the Benaki children spoke Greek with foreign accents. This was not peculiar to Penelope’s family—she records that all the Greek children of her acquaintance spoke English and French among themselves and with their parents. In fact, speaking Greek, among the very people who considered themselves, as Greeks, the “foam of the cream” in Alexandria, was the mark of someone who had had no cosmopolitan education—“Greek letters were for those who didn’t
know foreign languages,” Penelope remarked, and domestic life reflected the doubleness of the Greeks’ image of themselves. The children’s clothes were marked with their initials in English, and when Penelope was asked as a bride how she wanted her silver wedding gifts monogrammed, she stunned her circle by asking that they be engraved with her initials in Greek.

There was an upstairs-downstairs atmosphere about being Greek. Above, the house was furnished with tables and chairs, linen, glassware, china, and silver imported from England, the library stocked with foreign literature. The cellar, Penelope remembers, seems to have belonged to Greece, with its great jars filled with olive oil, special earthenware urns filled with Chiote olives preserved in brine, flagons of
raki
from Chios, flower waters, rosewater, shelves full of Cretan soap (the olive oil–based soap that was once a staple of the Cretan economy), containers of figs and raisins from Smyrna, sweet wines, clay jars filled with Chiote mastic, and Penelope’s favorite, confections made from almond and sesame, stored among dry bay leaves for fragrance. Despite this abundance drawn from both the Greek and the western European worlds, Penelope felt scorned for her ethnicity. The feeling of inferiority, she wrote, was inflicted on them by foreign nurses and teachers, who expressed scorn for the Greeks’ general use of marriage as a purely financial transaction; it was compounded by teachers of “our own race,” foreign-educated children they knew, the boys’ Jesuit teachers. She was also wounded by a sense gleaned from the western European communities that Greece was not considered an influential, or even a politically mature, nation. She remembered with particular bitterness a cartoon of Greece she saw in an Italian paper, probably during the period in which Greece’s ambitions to win back the territories of the former Byzantine Empire, to become “Greece of the two continents and five seas,” had begun to be openly stated. The caricatures represented different countries in their military uniforms, and Greece was shown as a little foustanella-wearing child, crying with his mouth open and rubbing one eye with his fist. In front of him stood a bucket of water
in which the moon was mirrored. The grown-ups surrounding the child asked him, “What do you want now?” and the boy called out, “I want, I want the moon!”

Penelope’s novel
Trelantonis
(something like “Crazy Anthony,” “Wild Anthony,” or “Irrepressible Anthony”) gives an idea of the scale of the Greece of her childhood. It is based on the summer of 1881, which the Benaki children spent with relatives in Piraeus, which then had a quarter that was valued as a summer refuge for its sea breezes and the access it gave to the sea for health-giving daily swims. There the children lived in the third of seven houses built by Ernst Ziller—a German architect who had also designed a house in central Athens known as the “Palace of Troy” for the philhellene archaeologist Schliemann, in 1878, where Schliemann and his wife Sofia brought up their two children, Agamemnon and Cassandra. In the largest of the row of Ziller houses in Piraeus, as Penelope’s novel recorded, lived the king of Greece, who himself spoke Greek with a foreign accent. This was George I, a member of the Danish royal family, and founder of the Glucksberg dynasty, which never truly successfully rooted itself in Greece. No Glucksberg king ever had a hereditary connection to the Greek people. George had been a seventeen-year-old Danish naval cadet when the great powers of Europe selected him for the Greek throne. His accession to the throne had been revealed to him by a fish sandwich: he had left his house in Copenhagen carrying his lunch, consisting of sardine sandwiches which were carefully wrapped in newspaper so as not to leak oil. He happened to scan the paper as he unwrapped his lunch, and “read to my delighted amazement that I was King of the Hellenes.” Just before the Greek delegation formally offered him the throne, he was promoted from naval cadet to captain.

In the Belle Epoque world of
Trelantonis
, the children’s treats are
loukoumi
, what we call Turkish delight, prepared with mastic, and
vissinada
, a cherry syrup to flavor drinks beloved both in Turkey and in Greece, whose preparation by the daughters is described in one chapter. The boys’ toy soldiers go to war divided into Greeks and
Turks, and when the children suffer at the hands of an English governess who tipples and scorns them as Greeks, it is the queen of Greece who, sitting in her garden, sees that the governess is drunk and informs the children’s aunt, while in another adventure, the hero, Antonis, is bitten by the Greek king’s dog, Don.

To an outsider, though, this children’s novel, with its conscious domestic realism, reads like a fantasy of another world. The children in the illustrations look like perfect specimens of European Edwardian childhood, with their sailor suits and straw hats; but at the same time there is a strong undercurrent of hostility between Greece and Europe, expressed by the struggles between the mischievous children and the malicious English governess, Miss Rice. When Miss Rice unfairly brings down a punishment on the children from their aunt, Antonis, the hero, says, “These are the kinds of things these foreigners do, the kinds of lies they tell … and they always do these things!” These handsomely turned out children are also frequently slapped, spanked, and beaten by nearly all the adults, foreign and Greek, and there is something nauseating in the relentless contempt expressed for girl characters by the boy-hero of a novel written by a woman. The girls are drawn as weaklings, prudes, physical and moral inferiors; the one who is most distinguishable from the others is the one who praises Antonis in the end for his incorrigibility, calling him a “little cockerel,” with almost erotic undertones: “I like you,” she says, “because you are unruly and you are a
pallikari
, a brave, daring boy. You are always making mischief, but you aren’t afraid of any punishment!” Antonis, for his part, orates with depressing frequency about the inferiority of his sisters and of all women, and in a fight with his sisters over which one will keep a beloved Greek servant when they are grown up, says with doctrinal certainty that he will have the privilege because he is a boy, and has first privileges in everything. When Antonis for the first and only time admires a girl, he says, “You are a daring boy yourself, you are a man!” The girl then invokes the names of gallant fighting women of the Greek revolution, and asks Antonis if they too aren’t
pallikaria.
She poses him a
surreal question about the heroines—the sentence reads literally: “And these women weren’t gallant men?”

The world of
Trelantonis
is fascinating and disorienting, because of the strange encounter it records between Europe and the Orient; here a sailor-suited boy’s idea of a prank is to smoke his uncle’s narghile. The only narghile-smoking character I can conjure up in Western children’s books is Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar;
Trelantonis
, in Greek children’s literature a work of realism, reads to us more like
Through the Looking Glass.

The genre portrait of a Belle Epoque summer in Piraeus does not include another dissonance that disturbed Penelope in her childhood: the resentment of the indigenous Greeks for the
omoyeneis
, the expatriates of “the same race” who lived and made money outside Greece, who endowed the country with civic institutions, but always lived at a higher standard than the people they were benefitting could afford to do. In the Athens of Penelope’s childhood, there were fields in the city’s center, where the Hotel Grande-Bretagne now stands, and while the “outside” Greeks wore overcoats, the Athenians still wrapped themselves in oriental shawls. “Athenian” has been as malleable a word throughout its history as “Hellene”; in conversations overheard at the family dinner table, “Athenian” and “Plakiotis,” man of Plaka (now the most romanticized, “old quarter” section of the city), conjured up covetous, jealous, hard-luck cases, ill-fated and cursed, whereas
omoyeneis
, expatriate, had nuances of cultured, patrician, polite. As a married woman living in an Athens utterly, unrecognizably different from the Athens of her occasional childhood visits, she remembered a bitter dialogue between an Athenian woman and a street flower seller, in which the woman coarsely drove the peddler away, seeming to almost hate the roses offered, for the pain their beauty and perfume gave her. At the Benaki dinner table, she winced hearing relatives saying they loved the Greek landscape but not the Greeks, and later, she recorded a remark of her grown brother’s, “If I weren’t a Greek, I would be a Greek-hater,” a feeling she strove to repress in herself and in others. She puzzled over the
causes of the split Greek character, wondering why the same people could be both heroes and deserters, as she put it.

But for all the ambiguity of the expatriate Greeks’ relations with their own countrymen, with other foreign colonials, and with the local populations of the places where they did business, the most unstable, ambiguous, and dangerous environment Penelope ever knew was her parents’ home, where public dignity, power, honor, and lavish philanthropy coexisted with intimate cruelty and despotism. Penelope characterized child rearing in her day as strict, merciless, without developmental education, caresses, love, an upbringing based on terror and reverence, whose key phrase was
etsi prepei
, this is how things must be. She described her household not as a dual monarchy but a dual tyranny: her mother beautiful and unapproachable, her father “straight as a column,” with thick frowning brows, “two deities.” It was a household in which disobedience, complaint, and even terror itself were not tolerated.

Penelope was afraid of the grotesque shadows the lamplight threw on the bedroom wall at night, but she never permitted herself to call out, or even confessed the fear, because she was afraid her father would hear about it, and find some way to express his contempt for her, or punish her. Her father seemed to her the archetype of the
pallikari
: “Fearless, inflexible, implacable, untameable, big, muscular, proud, handsome, he represented for us all the beauty of virility. Whatever my father wanted, that was what happened. It never entered the head of anyone to resist him or speak back to him.” Penelope remembered how once at the lunch table her father berated her for biting her nails and called her to him, brandishing the carving knife and threatening to cut her finger off. She was so terrified that she couldn’t move when he told her to sit down again. She did not remember him whipping her with a horsewhip for the same habit, but her mother described it to her when she was older. When he entered the house, silence fell, and the main meal was served on his arrival at any hour. The children had to wait, no matter how hungry they were, or leave their lessons, no matter how preoccupied
they were—her father himself suggested to her mother that the children eat dinner with her earlier, but she insisted that they eat with the head of the house, the source of their food. When a European governess, frustrated by the disruptions the moveable dinner hour caused, criticized the arrangement, Penelope was partly grateful for the sympathy she craved for her hunger headaches, but also disapproving of what she felt to be presumption, even a quality of blasphemy in the criticism. Her father, she wrote, was something like a cult, a religion for her … “I cried horribly on his account. I cried all my life. He dominated me always and tyrannized over me, knowingly and unknowingly … and nevertheless he remained,” she said, the great overarching love of her life.