Dinner with Persephone (49 page)

After a day’s hard walking, we approach the even tinier village where we will spend tonight. On an arched bridge with an old stone foundation, now covered coarsely with a thick slab of concrete like a piece of processed cheese on good bread, we are met by a grinning boy named Christos, who leads us into a village that consists mostly of the houses of his family, plus a sprinkling of others, a community office, and their family general store, the buildings arranged together on the buildable land like shelves in a cramped
closet. It is as if you opened a battered old cupboard and found it inhabited by a tiny town. Christos’s mother, Pareskevi, killed a goat in the morning to make a special meal for us. We sit on what approximates the traditional village
plateia
here, the concrete terrace of the general store, facing its green-painted door, a sign of the family’s affiliation with Andreas Papandreou’s political party, PASOK. Pareskevi tells us that because of the family’s PASOK connections, they were forbidden to serve drinks and meals on this terrace by a district authority who was loyal to the opposition New Democracy Party, and that they had had to serve their beers, coffees, and
mezedes
from a house until they negotiated permission to reopen. Christos brings out a tray of beers, and heads off to feed the things,
ta pragmata
, as domestic animals are called here. He carries a bottle of milk for some motherless lambs. A neighbor, wearing a long impressive beard and old army fatigues, arrives at the terrace to drink his evening beer, and Pareskevi brings out for all of us new feta cheese, as different from salty preserved feta as spring is from winter. The village has a contingent of relatives who live in the United States, in New Jersey, and at the insistence of the American relatives who return each summer, the village acquired its one flush toilet, and put in electricity a few years ago. Until 1991, the houses were lit with kerosene lamps. There is still no washing machine, and at Pareskevi’s house no hot running water, and only an earth-floored outhouse. She does have a television, though, where she and her black-veiled mother can watch Greek detective shows and
I Dream of Jeannie
, in one of the rooms of the house that are stacked together like cardboard boxes, wherever there is a piece of earth flat enough to support them. In the living room, there is an engagement photograph of her, taken on a special trip to Karpenisi, with an elaborate upswept hairdo, kohl-rimmed eyes, and the Persian look many Greek faces have, with a distinctive lustrously dark coloring.

It is still light when we finish dinner, ending with fresh sheep’s yogurt, like a plate of sour cream. We sit on the edge of the terrace
to watch the sunset. An old woman is coming down the neighboring hill from a house at the top. She is wearing an ankle-length black dress, a black kerchief over her thick white hair, carrying a woven shepherd’s bag and two full sacks of
horta
, wild greens she has picked in the mountains to feed her rabbits. “My mother,” Pareskevi says, and tells us that she climbs the impressively sharp peak we are looking at every day to look after the sheep. Her house is on the highest of the village hills, like a fortress, with the first view of visitors entering the village. She carried much of the building material up the hill herself, in sacks on her back, and it is her house that has the flush toilet. Pareskevi says she had all nine of her children by herself, in her old house, alone on the mountain, without a doctor. Pareskevi goes to meet her. From up close, she looks to be in her late seventies, and she greets us with hard eyes that never warm or trust. The greeting and wish and hospitality she offers is abstract, not personal; the convention is warm, the woman is not. She offers sweets to us in as prescribed a way as medicine. She is supposed to offer them and we are supposed to eat them, and none of us can continue until we have enacted the ritual, for her a domestic eucharist to be shared even and perhaps especially if she does not like us. She has the coldness of someone whose authority has been achieved because she has endured so much that some essential piece of caring has left her; you feel that she would be capable of murder, that somehow she has become a force, a fate, not a person, dissolved into clan and land, and that some detachment from this center would have to be possible for her to conceive of a world where people beyond her family had an equal claim on her sense of justice. She makes me wonder if the notion of loving your neighbor as yourself isn’t flawed; turn over a sense of community conceived as an extension of yourself, and what is on the other side might be the blood feud, warfare against a group of people conceived only as extensions of your enemy. Maybe loving your neighbor not as yourself, but as profoundly other, might make a stronger commitment.

The old woman asks to see the American who is visiting, because she wants me to see an album of wedding pictures from a visit to
New Jersey. Even Christos went, and told me with an expression of rapturous remembrance that he had loved most of all the tunnel the cars took under the water from New Jersey to New York. I am taken through the album, from white limousine to banquet hall in a New Jersey wedding palace, all burlesque chandeliers and engraved matchbooks and weirdly sculpted pink napkins rising out of glasses. It was the wedding of twenty-three-year-old Elias, who had arrived last year for his summer visit and was told by
yiayia
that there would be no return ticket for him unless he married a local girl before he went back. Within two weeks, he was engaged to a girl from a neighboring village. “We didn’t want him to marry an American girl,” she said. “They leave men they don’t like.”

O
n my way to Ouranopolis, Heaven City, the last outpost on the Athos peninsula where women are permitted, I stop in Thessaloniki, the city I love best in Greece, for its civic sensuality, its hill neighborhoods, its views of the Thermaic Gulf, its hospitality to pedestrians, its small sweet parks where white-haired men and women sit on benches on summer nights singing old love songs, the rare old
rembetika
records you can hear being played in flea markets, its unabashed eccentrics and fine Ottoman cooking. I have a letter of introduction to a publisher based here, and on my way to meet him at his office, I stop in the church of Agios Dimitri, the patron saint of Thessaloniki, with its marvelous wavy patterns of bricks and some sort of healing moisture the saint causes to exude. On my way out, the clerk in charge of books and postcards hands me an English language booklet by the bishop of Konitsa, a town on the border of Albania, about northern Epirus, also known as southern Albania. I riffle through it on the way to my meeting—“History shows …,” it says, “that the Albanians never cared about their own freedom … Although they never admit it, they preferred to be slaves … The Albanians have no excuse to get nervous and angry
whenever they hear the just demand of the northern Epirotes and of their Greek brothers for the union of northern Epirus with Greece. We are not asking anything more than what the Albanians are asking regarding the Kosovo area in Yugoslavia …”

The publisher turns out to be a small wiry man from Kefallonia, with a book-crammed office. I walk around the shelves to get an idea of what he has published, when suddenly there is a helping hand on my hair, then one on my shoulder, then one on my breast. I dodge away, having been trained in Anglo-Saxon–style martial arts, of which the basic underlying principle is to deny that anything has happened. So I crowd the room with remarks, telling him I am fascinated by children’s literature, and trying to interest him in how little most of us really know about Scandinavian literature. I keep leaping out of his reach into intellectual frontiers, past a huge pictorial history of Salonika, and a solemn-looking Koran in Greek, as he bears down on me, his face sour with determination, only slightly unbalanced by clutching a camera, and shouting, to the consternation of a few people on a sofa in the waiting room, “Kiss me, kiss me on the mouth!”
Molon lave
, I think drily, “Come and get it,” reverting to the legendary phrase of Leonidas to the Persians before the battle at Thermopylae, so beloved of all my Greek teachers. I am thinking, of course, of the practical problems the conference tables and desks and bookshelves present me in not getting kissed, but I am also thinking how this confirms an intuition about how kissing and not kissing are not only physical but metaphysical problems. This confrontation concerns something perhaps even more fundamental than the liturgy of sexual flight and pursuit. We are enacting an ancient argument, I realize, about the nature of reality, as the Kefallonian stumbles around his own obstacles of tables heaped with books, clutching his camera, his automatic flash making miniature explosions as he attempts to capture me in poses that could look convincingly welcoming. He is arguing that I am an image, as he chases me from corner to corner, and that his camera can prove it. I unfortunately, frustratedly, am sure that I am real—the proof that I am not
an image is that I cannot disappear from this situation, however much I want to. In this crisis, my life does not pass before my eyes—his does. Because it is clear too that I am not even, in these circumstances, a feminine image. For this wiry old Kefallonian, I am an image of himself—he looks into the pool of me and sees his own face, thirty or forty years ago, sees his own trim torso, his own incontestable vigor—if he could touch me, he would have that lost young body of his back. By the magic which turns an image into a seer, I see that he is trying to turn me, at any price, into a young island boy—himself, once upon a time. But too many people are now sitting beyond the smoked glass doors of the reception room for him to continue his pursuit without public embarrassment, and I run down the stairs into the sunlit street, having witnessed again that historically cultivated Greek passion for the icon, one key to understanding not only Greek daily life, but Greek politics.

The bus’s route to Heaven City runs through the cinnamon-colored Macedonian countryside, thick with sunflowers. I would have liked very much to be in this countryside for Anastenaria fire-walking, held every May, when women and men who have been possessed by the spirit of the emperor Constantine, who appears to them in dreams, often dressed as a policeman, army officer, or doctor, dance and walk across hot coals.

Domed beehives along the road look very much like the doll-house-sized Orthodox shrines scattered on small lanes and busy highways here, often commemorating traffic accidents—these look like small churches full of God’s honey, and remind me of the story every Greek schoolchild knows about the bee and Agia Sofia. No architect brought the emperor Justinian a plan for the Church of Holy Wisdom that he liked. One day after mass, the patriarch handed the emperor the
antidoro
, a piece of blessed but not consecrated bread given after services in the Orthodox Church, which fell from the emperor’s hand. He bent down to pick it up, but could not find it. Suddenly he saw a bee with the
antidoro
in its mouth fly out the window. He issued an order that whoever had a beehive was
to lure into it the bee with the holy bread. It happened that an architect had a beehive, and it was there the bee took refuge. But when the architect looked inside, he saw not a hive, but a great domed church, with a holy altar inside on which lay the
antidoro
, completely modeled by the bee through the grace of the
antidoro
it had held in its mouth. It was the plan of the church of the beehive that was submitted to Justinian and became the great church of Byzantium, Agia Sofia.

A number of the villages on the way to Heaven City have religious names, like Saint John the Baptist and Great Panagia. Heaven City itself is a small town with a medieval tower, beautiful beaches, and a large transient population of monks—we pass a pickup truck full of produce driven by a pony-tailed, black-hatted monk. Other monks board the men-only ferry for Athos itself, where no women or female animals are allowed, with the exception of some female cats that make kittens to control the children of the ungovernable female mice. Athos is supposed to be the garden of the Virgin Mary, who doesn’t want to share her property with other women. The story goes that the Virgin Mary made a sailing trip to Cyprus, accompanied by Saint John. She had been eager to see Lazarus, who after his resurrection lived on the island. But a storm broke and the tempest carried her to Athos. One monastery commemorates the exact spot where her ship touched the shore, where there was at the time a temple of Apollo. At the moment her ship anchored, the statue of Apollo that stood in the temple called out ordering all men down to the harbor to do homage to the mother of the great god Christ. This kind of prohibition of women surely has pagan roots—the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, in his hymn to Zeus, writes of a temple on the spot where the goddess Rhea gave birth to Zeus, where “no fourfooted creature that needs the help of the patron goddess of childbirth,” or any woman, approaches the holy place, a hill called Rhea’s childbearing bed. I would have liked to have been able to see some of the monasteries, the one of which the Virgin Mary is the abbot, her icon hanging on the back of the abbot’s
throne, and the fresco showing the ship of the church battling the attacks of Muhammad, and the pope, who tries to use his pontifical cross as a grappling hook to draw the ship to him, and the final panel, in which Christ commands Saint Paul to cast anchor, and Orthodox priests draw the ship to shore. I have never seen it reproduced, and wonder if it is only a fable. I would have liked to have seen the icon of “the terrifying Protectress” that turned back an invasion of Turkish soldiers. But all that I can see on the little excursion boat that makes a semicircle around the holy mountain are occasional trucks, and paranoid-looking fortresslike monasteries. It reminds me of the gated and barbed-wire communities of South Africa.

I go to a tiny island later for a swim, what an island would be if it were a cottage. There I swim in a cove so calm you can swim laps, the waters clear as thought should be. An excited cry goes up from some children snorkeling farther out, “Octopus, octopus!” On the beach, there is a family group of a young couple and new baby, returning Greek-Americans from their accents, and some older Greek relatives, surely parents, and possibly some aunts and uncles. The baby is being given serial nurturing by all the female relatives, who fight gently over the changing of the diaper. But when it comes off, two of the women cry out in shock. The baby, apparently, is circumcised. The woman in a bathing suit relentlessly printed with purple flowers wrings her hands, and cannot stop herself from repeating, “Why did you ruin him? How could you ruin him?”