Dinner with Persephone (53 page)

The pilgrimage I am most anxious to make, given that I have such a short time, and must give it to Greek sites, is the monastery church at Khora, in what is now a suburb of Istanbul, the creation of the brilliant Byzantine politician and scholar Metochites, who died in 1332, not long before the empire fell. I have to make my way there by myself, since my hostess’s child unexpectedly needs stitches. I have noticed, to my surprise, how many women here wear scarves and veils, and I dress carefully for the expedition, knowing from Greece that sexual etiquette toward foreign women differs in unpredictable ways. I put on a long dress, wear a scarf and no makeup. I look at myself in the mirror. I look like something out of
Little Women.
I look like hell. The taxi driver, nevertheless, goes wild, and when I arrive at the monastery after many unwelcome suggestions, he flails his arms, gesticulating toward the women in the houses around the monastery, who are all scarfed, and wearing those hideous overcoats that look like the overcoats clients of pornographic films wear into the movie houses. He shrieks, “Turkish madams no good, not sexy like you!” I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, bewildered by this response to the little puritan I see there. I pay, and hasten to church.

Theodore Metochites, under whose supervision this church was restored, was one of the most vital figures of the fourteenth century. He was born in Constantinople in 1270 to a father who supported the reunion of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and was, at one point in his career, the Byzantine emperor’s
ambassador to the pope. The family was banished to Asia Minor when an anti-union emperor came to power. It was his training in classical rhetoric that won Metochites a place in the service of the emperor Andronicus II, who heard a speech he had written in praise of the city of Nicaea and was impressed. Metochites acted as an ambassador of the emperor, and eventually became the most powerful minister in the empire, managing to marry a daughter into the imperial family. He also acquired enormous wealth by selling positions and titles and access to the emperor, and an ugly reputation as a man who was a parasite on the poor, and a brilliant reputation as a mathematician and astronomer. He seemed to struggle with his admiration of ancient philosophy, praising secular philosophy, but cautious so as not to be accused of heresy. Christians, he said, having received the Revelation, only needed to follow the scriptures, having escaped the theological problems of the ancient philosophers, although his training in classical rhetoric made for an odd mixture of images in moments of his work. He praised an abbot friend for his performance of the liturgy’s Bloodless Sacrifice with “holy Bacchic frenzy.” And he also seemed to struggle with a foreboding that the empire was doomed. “We are all caught in an enormous net,” he wrote, “and tossed about in it without hope of escape.” From about 1316 to 1321, he supervised the decoration of this church. A little after Easter of 1321, civil war broke out between the emperor and his grandson. Metochites dreamed of a thief stealing the key to his treasure room, and when Constantinople fell to the emperor’s grandson, Andronicus II, Metochites was exiled to a provincial town called Didimotikho in Thrace, whose bad wine he complained of bitterly. He was permitted to return to Constantinople after a period, and died at the monastery he had restored, as a monk who had taken the name Theoleptos.

The church is famous for the freshness and beauty of its mosaics, and also for some extraordinary frescoes, an almost sensual Jesus as Pantokrator, and an angel holding the scroll of the Last Judgment in the air, a celestial athlete lifting a weight as great as the world. What
also strikes me is an intenser concentration on the girlhood of the Virgin Mary than I have seen in a Byzantine church, not only images of the Virgin in relation to Christ, but a separate cycle of the events of her own childhood, the annunciation of her birth, her birth, the first seven steps she took as a toddler, being tenderly caressed by both her parents, as always in Byzantine art, deliberately sacrificing the rendering of space so that time too will disappear into eternity.

It is when I see the mosaics of the Virgin entrusted to Joseph, and of Joseph leading the little girl to his house, an image I have never seen, that I sense the pressure of autobiography, Metochites’s autobiography. Mary is presented in the mosaics as a child, a little girl. The bearded Joseph who leads her away is old enough to be her grandfather. “And the priest said unto Joseph: Unto thee it hath fallen to take the Virgin of the Lord and keep her thyself. And Joseph refused saying: I have sons, and I am an old man, she is but a girl …” runs the account in an apocryphal gospel. In the mosaic, Mary’s protector, the priest Zacharias, mediates between Joseph and the Virgin, holding and controlling the flowering rod that signals Joseph’s election, while his hand is placed tenderly and protectively on the doll-like little girl’s head. The image stirs the memory that it was Metochites who arranged the complicated marriage negotiations for his emperor Andronicus II’s daughter Simonis and the Serbian king Stephen Milutin. In those days in the Balkans, marriages were one of the primary means of negotiating national boundaries, and settling other political disputes. The work of crafting the marriage contract took Metochites to Serbia five times. The Serbian king Stephen Milutin had been already been married twice, and repudiated a third wife to marry Simonis. The engagement was celebrated and Simonis was sent to Serbia, to be trained and educated to be what Milutin wanted as a wife. Milutin was forty years old. Simonis was six. He raped his six-year-old bride, rendering her sterile. When Simonis later fled to a cloister to escape him, she was forced to put off her habit and return.

I look again at the images of the little girl Virgin, looking up trustingly at Joseph, who looks down at her, utterly safe in the
divinely ordained procession of these mosaics, not to be raped by this bearded man, not to be sterile, but to be the mother of a divine child. And I think there is a lesson here in Balkan politics, in the utter separation of this sacred dream of the world from the real events Metochites presided over, in this divorce of history and art, of the imagination and time. For when legend extinguishes history, when the imagination is not allowed to play over the world in time, the events on earth that might have no consequences in legend destroy and entrap generations of human life. In legend, when time does not pass, the marriage of a child is a miracle, and death is not death. In history, when time does not pass, there is blood vendetta, the feud that never ends, that begins again in the next generation the feud that never ends. As Mary can never be truly harmed, Simonis can never stop being raped. If we value the great poem of Christianity, we cannot reject one meaning of Christ’s incarnation, that while God’s relationship to humans may not change, humans’ relationship to God must, as Christ’s did, even on the cross, ranging from the certainty with which he promises the thieves on their crosses that they will see paradise together, to the mournful cry to God in the question “Why have you forsaken me?”, experiencing in death both despair and hope.

O
n my last night in Athens, I go to roughly five parties and two nightclubs. All week too, there have been last meals, and visits from neighbors carrying sweets, while at each visit, I promise myself I won’t cry, but do. Tonight I am saying goodbye the way Athenians do, that is, by staying up all night and trying to stop time. At the third party, the host and hostess declare that I am not allowed to leave Greece without ever having seen a Greek pornographic film, so all during the wine and the chatter, films with names like
Hot Nights
and
Sensual Days in the Aegean
unwind on their VCR. People have sex in village costumes, with much visual joking about foustanellas; people have sex in fishing boats; one woman has sex with a coffin that has an erection, while she moans that this is what the angels do in paradise, that this is resurrection. I make my way on to the next party and the next, and then to a nightclub. The Greeks have made going to nightclubs a national art, a form of collective lovemaking, and one of the signals of enjoyment in their movies is the nightclub scene, with singing and dancing, and a table littered with bottles, glasses, fruit, and dancers. You go in search of
kefi
, of joyous abandonment. Tonight, a woman is moved by the first act
to leap from table to table to join the opening singer on the stage. Women circulate with baskets of carnations to buy to throw at the singers you appreciate—passionate enjoyment is demonstrated by buying the whole basket, and having it overturned on the singer, who continues the song through a rain of flowers. People in parties at tables leap up onto the tables and dance the
tsifteteli
, the belly dance that is both Turkish and Greek. Tonight, teenagers in Versace jeans climb onto the tables and sway to one of the hits of the season, “You remind me of my mother/That’s why I love you …” The show goes on for hours, but we leave as three baskets of carnations are poured over another singer, whose last line I catch as we are getting our coats, “Because it doesn’t exist, immortality …” At the
rembetika
club where we wind up, there is a sort of raised wooden platform for people who are inspired to dance to get on, the tables are too small. So, like people who in church get the spirit and come forward to testify, dancers come forward to the platform when a song moves them. An old man dances a
zembekiko
like a dying eagle’s flight, a middle-aged husband kneels at the feet of his wife and claps as she dances around him in an intricate circle. I see the most beautiful
tsifteteli
I will probably ever see, performed by two girls of completely different physical types, one heavy and voluptuous, the other reedy, both wearing ordinary jeans and T-shirts, but moving so liquidly that you would swear they could cross the borders between the great river of dreams and the earth of reality. Like a great river whose changing course alters the boundaries of the earth that contains it, the changing boundaries of dream and reality can never be permanently fixed, as they destroy and create and recreate each other. Like those fertile rivers that sustain settlements and cities, dreams make life possible, bring it into reality; we ourselves are bred in dreams. And like great rivers, dreams can destroy us if we do not patiently, delicately observe their barely perceptible changes in breadth and depth, the new tributaries and branches they sculpt. Watching the dance makes me think of this, and of the traditional phrase that ends a Greek fairy tale: “And they lived happily, but we
live better.” But like dreams, “they” are in our lives, and “we” are in their story. They lived happily, but we live better. Who are they, then, and who are we?

I get home a little after dawn. The streets are already full of the sound of people going to early morning jobs on motorcycles. I spend the little of the morning I have left doing last-minute packing, and waiting for my farewell call from Kostas. “I knew you wouldn’t stay,” he says sadly. “Why is that?” I ask. “Because your favorite of all the Shakespeare plays is
A Winter’s Tale.
” “Kostaki,” I say, “I have been up all night being very happy and very very sad. Don’t torment me with your tarot of Shakespeare. How did you know I wouldn’t stay?” “All right,” he says. “In
A Winter’s Tale
, a girl whose past has been severed from her is restored to her own history when she sees a statue move. When the statue moves, the play ends. You saw the statue move.”

I made myself look out the window as the plane took off, leaping over the cliffs and the Aegean Sea like a champion horse clearing a jump, as we moved away from the adamantine glitter of the sun on the white buildings and the Saronic Gulf to skies of a more diaphanous blue, the plane ascending delicately, securely, as if on a current of breath, a breath calibrated with precisely enough force to blow a candle out.