Dinner with Persephone (48 page)

Penelope’s homecoming to Greekness, though, was also a homecoming to the doubled moral and social world that seems so much a part of being Greek. Her writings reflect her painfully divided feelings toward women and girls, and a gross idealization of boys and
men, almost jingoistic, which conflicts with their humane liberalism, as does a strain of at times almost murderous nationalism. The humaneness of Penelope’s vision is movingly present in an episode of
Trelantonis
, in which the children torment a little Jewish neighbor with sanctimonious anti-Semitism, taunting her with the accusation that Jews killed Christ, and showing her a cross to see if she will die, since the devil in every Jew is supposed to burst at the sight of a cross. After the incident their uncle calmly explains to them, in a speech astonishing for its period—the book was first published in 1932—why Jews could not be held responsible for Christ’s death and should not be treated with theological fanaticism, but as people who share Christian values; he wishes that all Christians might be such good people as their Jewish neighbors, and defends the principle of religious freedom. In
Mangas
, on the other hand, the adventures of the dog narrator are interspersed with lessons in modern Greek history. The children, who live in Alexandria, make a hero of their Macedonian gardener, who delivers deadly sermons about the Bulgarians, the chief opponents of the Greeks over Macedonia. The gardener, a former guerrilla fighter with Dragoumis’s brother-in-law, Pavlos Melas, “straight like a cypress, eyes illuminated like the sun, and the profile of an ancient Greek,” declares that the Bulgarians are worse than the Turks, that they want Macedonia, which is Greek, for themselves, as they wanted Eastern Rumelia, which is Greek. “Macedonia is Greek,” he declares. “We will take it for ourselves.” When one of the boys tells him that his French governess mocks his patriotism, the gardener replies, “Let her mock. They have no business in our parts, the Europeans, nor do they know what our dreams are,” and tells them that the struggles of ’21 are not finished, that Greece remains a slave with Constantinople under Turkish jurisdiction. The gardener has a fight with a Bulgarian milkman in revenge for Bulgarian terrorists having killed his family. The milkman is a symbol of Bulgarians; “All the Bulgarians are one,” the gardener says, “wild beasts.” The milkman is dismissed, although the family’s grandmother says he has served them well and never tried to
cheat them, but since he is Bulgarian, he must be expelled. Even the dog narrator comments, “Dogs hate cats, as the Greek hates the Bulgarian”; they are, he concludes, “ancestral enemies.” In the end, the oldest boy of the family goes off to join the Macedonian struggle. By presenting the Bulgarians as hereditary enemies of the Greeks, Delta paints the whole people as a negative icon; she sacralizes political hatred in the way other people sacralize religious hatred. Deadly political dogma surprisingly crops up at moments in her books, offered to children along with her warmth and charm, and the delicious adventures of the protagonists.

Delta lived out her life writing her books, raising her children, and serving Greece on a grand scale, devoting her fortune to her country’s service, even playing a role in creating Athens College, the famous Greek preparatory school. When the Germans invaded Greece in 1941, the suicide that had haunted Delta from childhood became possible. The German invasion was a violation of the one love left her, the love of her
patrida
, her fatherland. She took poison, succeeding in her calculation of a mortal dose. She was buried in her garden in Kifissia, requesting neither priest nor funeral. Her gravestone carries one word: Silence.

As for Dragoumis, after his affair with Penelope, he became the lifelong lover of the great actress Marika Kotopouli, who had starred as Electra in the presentation of the
Oresteia
during his year in Alexandria. He wrote and served in parliament as a member of the opposition to Venizelos. Sent into political exile under Venizelos’s authority, he was murdered shortly after his return to Athens, in 1920, under the supervision of a former bodyguard of Venizelos’s, the afternoon after an assassination attempt had been made on Venizelos in Paris. Penelope’s father, Emmanuel Benaki, Venizelos’s economic minister, told her he warned the leader of the band of renegade soldiers not to mishandle him, but the soldiers formed a firing squad and shot the great love of Penelope’s life. Later on, the former bodyguard whose men had seized Dragoumis declared that the order for execution was given by Penelope’s father. The
Benakis, including Penelope, were indignant over the accusation, which was never substantiated, although it does seem remarkable that a powerful Venizelist like Benaki apparently made no move to intervene or use his authority to order the party of soldiers, Venizelists all, to instantly set free a man whom they had no right to seize, much less execute.

Penelope died with her dreams unfulfilled. But Dragoumis, two years before his murder, had a dream that came true. He recorded that he had woken up drenched in sweat, having dreamed that some people in Kifissia surrounded him and tore at him from all sides, as if they meant to do him harm.

G
reece, with its some twenty-five hundred islands, is, like the human body, made up mostly of water, and like the body of someone you love, is finite, but inexhaustible. Now that my time here is getting short, I realize that the literal size of this country is deceptive, that I will leave here having never seen much that I dreamed of seeing. I cannot resist another brief but strenuous mountain trip to a region called Agrapha, partly because I am drawn by the meaning of its name, the unwritten, although it does not fit the intricate, if hidden, logic of my other routes. Agrapha borders Thessaly, and is famous guerrilla country, the site of savage medieval battles between the Byzantines and the Bulgarians, the boyhood training ground of one of the most famous strategists and soldiers of the War of Independence, Yiorgos Karaiskakis, the home of the national leader and soldier Nikolas Plastiras, whose role in the Asia Minor disaster saved many refugee lives after the war was lost, and a center for the Greek resistance during the Second World War. The region is called “the unwritten,” according to most of the explanations I’m given, because the Turks never controlled the region, and so didn’t include it in their tax books, as opposed to
grammena
, or
“written,” regions. It is, many say, still the least developed part of the country.

On the bus into the mountains, the radio station of the driver’s choice repeatedly plays a soothing song for all the Greek students who are preparing to take their university entrance exams in June, an excruciating ordeal which, by all accounts I’ve heard, involves almost photographic memorization of the textbooks used to teach the subjects, and each year drives some children to suicide. The woman singing soothingly promises again and again in her refrain that everything will come out all right, a kind of national musical tranquilizer. I open my newspaper, which Paul says is the last I will see until I am back in Athens. A proverb forms one headline—“Beating comes from paradise.” A teacher who beat a boy on the face with an unspecified blunt instrument was found innocent of wrongdoing by a court. The twelve-year-old boy had apparently refused to applaud a rival team when it won against his own, and the teacher had beaten the boy, with what I guess was a belt buckle, saying, “Such people are useless to society.” The court found that the rights of teachers to correct children derive from society itself, and the special relation of submission to authority between student and teacher justified the teacher’s actions.

Near the town of Karpenisi, where in 1823 one of the most disheartening moments of the Greek War for Independence occurred, when Markos Botsaris, one of the most respected of all the Greek revolutionaries, was killed in a skirmish with the Turks, the bus stops for a young woman with shining brown hair. She is about eighteen years old, carrying a baby and guiding a toddler; the ticket taker, who obviously knows her, approaches her in a familial way, and when she smiles at him, she shows a great-grandmother’s mouth, with her front teeth missing. Paul tells me that this is common in these mountains, where people outside Karpenisi are cared for by a doctor who circulates in a Land Rover.

Local relationships are played out in miniature on the bus—the ticket taker is a hale, sociable man, who greets the boarding passengers,
calling out bits of gossip and joking, teasing a woman who shouts to him when she wants the bus to stop, “It’s not my job to let you off at your front gate.” The bus lets us off some miles away from the village where our party will spend the night, at its last stop, a place that has an alpine feel, with its green meadows and dairy cows; we immediately acquire a small troop of children, who walk us to the local general store, where we wait to sort out our sleeping arrangements. Their warmth and curiosity make me think about what Greece must have been like before tourism reached its full intensity here, and make me wonder what its mixed blessings will bring to this region. Still, in a world that offers few unmixed blessings, it seems to me a civilized and hopeful way to make a living. As we walk through the village, a place that is all dust and watchful eyes, the bravest of the children asks me if I like Greece. I say yes, and ask her if she does. She hesitates and then says yes, with a hint that she might like to live in a larger town. Athens and Thessaloniki seem very far away here. Her parents’ general store offers shelves of detergent, rice, and batteries; it is like a frontier store, except for the large color TV in one corner, tuned to a bodybuilding contest with bathing-suited men flexing their dramatic biceps and turning their finely muscled rears to the camera. Paul tells me that newspapers simply don’t reach this countryside, so the approach to the outer world is virtually all through images. But when computers come here in full force, with their more literate technology, that may change. The twelve-year-old takes our orders for coffee with fierce concentration, skillfully matching us to our combinations of sugars and milks, showing her village proudly competent to meet the needs of
xenoi.
The littler children, in their shorts and plastic sandals, sit on benches near the door, whispering and giggling at us, entertained as if we were live toys. I ask the older girl if the village we are going to is pleasant, and she wrinkles her nose, saying, “It’s smaller than this.”

We set out for it in a truck, hanging on to slats on the side, a sight I associate with convoys of Greek soldiers, here where military
service is obligatory and even boys of Greek descent who are citizens of other countries are encouraged to do service in the Greek army. When we thank the teenaged driver, I see that someone has lettered a plastic label for him to put over his glove compartment. It reads, “The hour always good and the holy Virgin always with Leonidas, the good and unforgettable guy.” The village is a velvety refuge hidden in the rough mountains, looking uncannily Swiss, and we half expect to be greeted with a supply of chocolate and cheese, instead of fresh-killed chicken, the ubiquitous french fries, and beer. There is one shower in one of the houses in town, with only cold water, and we are distributed among the village houses; exactly as in a medieval inn, the sleeping arrangements put strangers of the same sex into a shared bed. The villagers are puzzled when some of the visitors hesitate, but I am well past the initial shock this medieval pattern of housekeeping used to provide—on overnight ferries, too, it is common for people to sleep in cabins with strangers. The village is gathered at the one taverna in town, drinking beer outdoors in the summer twilight, and the appealing, dignified proprietress chats to us every now and then between kitchen and customer. Her eight- and ten-year-old daughters board during the week with a family in the largest nearby town, so they can attend school, coming back on weekends. She says it is a hardship for all of them, but that she is determined for her girls to have the means to live independent lives—and to leave here if they want. She is a prodigy among the Greek mothers I have met, who often seem to be competing with each other in possessiveness, as if permanently dependent children were a glory of motherhood—in a world where women’s personhood was determined only by the politics of motherhood, it is evident that surrendering children to adulthood meant a tremendous loss of social status, as well as being an emotional turning point. This village woman has more than one kind of courage.

Late that night, I wake up to the sound of someone shouting a catalogue of drunken curses. “He fucks the village,” he says, “he
fucks their mothers,” and most loudly of all, “he fucks the Virgin Mary.”

The mountains utterly change character from region to region of Greece. In Epirus, the region bordering on Albania, Lord Byron’s haunt, where I spent a few days after Easter, the countryside is crystalline, the trees full of language in the form of murmuring bees, rock formations that look like the patterned seals stamped into the dough of the traditional Greek church bread,
prosfora.
There even the wooden interiors of the houses, designed and carved by the great itinerant craftsman of the region, who traveled the Balkans building houses for clients from Vienna to Constantinople, comment on the outer world, with their lacy carving, built-in beds, niches, and wooden grottoes, looking like versions of the pools and grottoes cut into these mountains by the clear rivers that run through them. The landscape there is startlingly erotic, and made sense for me of some modern popular paintings I had seen on wood of nymphs metamorphosing out of the mountain rivers, the waters streaming behind their heads like transparent veils. I watched a blue and white river coursing through a curved channel that seemed to have taken on the shape of a woman’s body, the water spurting like a man’s seed over the woman lying underneath. Here, in a neighboring region, in mountains that are part of the same chain, we are in another country. These mountains seem the creation of stress, with their battered rocky folds, and camouflaged villages, flocks of sheep crammed together on plateaus, guarded by sheep dogs who hate everyone but their owners.