Dinner with Persephone (28 page)

Out in the country, I am in a world of rock, houses and walls and bridges made of rock piled high, the building blocks of children turned into fortresses and farms. Boulders sit on the soil like saddles on a horse’s back, and rear up into thick tall square medieval structures that have something like the atmosphere of missile silos. Their ground floors were one huge room, with an enormous fireplace, called a
tzaki
, from the Turkish word
ocak
—a common phrase
still in use to express an aristocratic origin is that someone “comes from a hearth.” Walking around one of these stone towers is to walk around a building that is constructed out of the fullest possible imagination of danger, the architecture of vendetta. There are no doors or windows—you could enter by a removable ladder—only indentations at the top for pouring boiling oil or water on invaders, and slits in the stone made later for firing rifles. Indoors were spaces devoted to food storage, and subterranean passages for possible escapes or for bringing in more ammunition. Noticing the empty space over the main door where the marble relief escutcheon would have been placed with the family symbol or coat of arms, I am face-to-face with a notion of the family as a hostile, bloody enclave, the source of some privilege, but also of conflict and enemies, and of a future obligation to kill, incurred just as a result of being born into a particular clan. There is a drastic unbridgeable abyss between this and the ideal of the family as the seed of community, or of the holy family held up as a model to the inhabitants of these towers. This tower is well on its way to ruin, but the idea of family it demonstrates is still alive, in the vendetta traditions of Crete and Mani, and in the Sicilian Mafia. The interplay in this landscape is between raw, naked rock and rock broken into structure, but it is hard to say which is really more habitable.

I drive up to Menites, a village caught in a green grotto like light in an emerald, where inexhaustible spring waters rush into a central fountain from a marble lion’s head, a village like a resurrection after a sojourn in the underworld. It occurs to me poignantly that when Persephone made her bargain with Hades to spend her six months each year away from the underworld, it was not Olympus she chose to return to, not heaven, but earth. Lambros, the icon painter to whom Marina is introducing me, is expecting me for lunch, but first we drink a coffee under the trees. He is a good-looking man, with a full lower lip like a wave coming to crest, and a glance known here as the
satiriko vlemma
, the satyr’s tragicomic gaze, a glance which is insatiable, but which can change registers, becoming a gaze not of
insatiability but of tragic and unsatisfiable longing. I understand now why Athens is littered with his former wives and their children.

“It’s good you find me here,” Lambros says, “the life of an iconographer is a nomadic one. Few churches can afford one of us to paint them all at once, so I must do piecework from place to place. And I must also take commissions to live—I did a chapel on a ship last month—while the official church committee approves the sketches I submit, and makes sure that the hierarchical order of the saints in the proposed design is correct. Because our pictures, the pictures in the Byzantine tradition, are
dogmatismena
, they are incarnations of theology, they are God’s fingerprints. And they are the legacy of the greatest empire the world has known, the Byzantine Empire, which fixed its ambition on the supernatural and the eternal. As I do when I paint, I decorporealize, I dematerialize the saint; the painting becomes prayer, the saint’s body not an earthly body but a heavenly one. Byzantine art fulfills the meditation on the body begun in classical Greece. Christ, you see, brought a new eroticism into the world. The classical Greeks expressed perfect earthly beauty, and we complete them by expressing perfect divine beauty. For the classical Greeks, the perfect body was the athlete’s body, but for Christians, the perfect body is the angel’s spirit—we call angels ‘the bodiless ones.’ Not like your vulgar Western painting, with its gross fat Christs, and magi dressed in gold clothes, and Panagias in designer dresses, which as a great modern Orthodox artist called Kondoglou wrote, is nothing more than painted opera, and has no relation to either the letter or the spirit of the gospel, the gospel which is so simple that it confounds the labyrinths of the philosophers. Even our holy city is bodiless—your Pope is the Pope of Rome, a secular city. But our leader, the first among equals, is the patriarch of Constantinople. And you will say, but there is no Constantinople; this patriarch lives in Istanbul. But our Constantinople, like an angel, is a bodiless city, the leading city of a bodiless angelic empire.

“You should read Kondoglou, he wrote many books, and while he was perhaps not a great artist, he was a great sage of Greekness,
Romiosyni. If you read him, you will understand that you westerners make only tableaux, but we make sacraments. Ours is true Christian art, yours is nothing but decorated egotism. Like your repulsive Gothic churches, which are the essence of your entrapment in the material world. They are like rockets, in which man spares no expense to search for God, insists on Him. But Byzantine architecture is on a human scale, with the exception of Agia Sofia, God surrounds man, God sees man, whether he wills it or not. Unfortunately, now that we have sold our souls for the EEC to pave our roads and air-condition our museums, this animal Western influence is polluting the Greek soul. And that is a tragedy, because if you know us and study our history, you will realize that we are not a local culture but a universal one, the acts of our holy people are the acts of the fourteenth apostle of Christ.”

“Who was the thirteenth?” I ask.

“Constantine, of course. Our people have followed the path that Alexander laid down for them in the pre-Christian world and Constantine in the fulfilled world—of becoming gods. This is a part of our Orthodox theology, not like your ‘salvation,’ which puts a piece of virtue in a bank and gets back divine grace as interest. To understand us, you must understand the concept of theosis. Our church teaches that the goal of each Christian is deification—Saint Athanasius wrote that Christ says to us, ‘In my kingdom, I shall be God with you as gods.’ ”

Lambros steers me up the path to his house. “And not by moralizing, something we imported from the West, whose moral rules are a form of spiritual capitalism. No. I was never a good man, I am not a good man, I will never be a good man. Marina probably told you I have my appetites, I have had some wives, I abandoned a wife and child in Germany, I have had many love affairs, very intense. We don’t have this Western thing you have, these relationships, this bargaining. We don’t have good relationships, we have great loves.” Eleni, his wife, comes out to greet us, followed by a toddling boy of sixteen months. She has blue-green eyes, and a nose and mouth cut
like jewels. “She looks like a virgin, don’t you think? Like what we mean by a virgin, which is not a woman who has never known a man, but a woman of fresh inexhaustible beauty that renews itself timelessly.” As we pass through the living room, the little boy suddenly catches sight of an icon of the Virgin, veiled in gold leaf, propped on an easel in a corner of the room, and he sets up a clamor. Eleni brings the picture down for a moment, and holds it to his lips. “Kiss Mommy,” she says, and after he does, she takes us outside to a table set for lunch in their garden. She brings us a plump loaf of bread, “like the baby Christ in His swaddling clothes,” Lambros says, cutting me a slice, and she sets down a plate of
froutalia
, a potato and sausage omelet that Andros is known for, but she does not eat with us, or talk to us as she moves back and forth between the house and the garden, bringing us fried potatoes and a bottle of wine, and a salad. I watch her, her eyelids lowered and her lips closed in almost stern repose, as she sets down plates and glasses without looking at us, or the little boy who intermittently clings to her leg, and I think, she is an icon. Lambros has made an icon and married it.

“To our health,” he says, and shows me the bottle—it is
agioritiko
, wine from the vineyards of the holy mountain, Mount Athos, the peninsula of Greece closed to women, the prohibition extending to female animals. “The vineyards of the holy mountain produce wonderful wines, because so few vehicles are allowed there that air pollution is unknown. It was a pilgrimage there that made me embrace Orthodoxy, and made me understand something of God’s plan for my life. Of course, you can’t really understand unless you go there and feel it for yourself. And you will never go. No woman will ever go there.” He smiles a smile I have seen, even on the faces of friends who have just come from Athos pilgrimages, a smug smile not unlike the bureaucrat’s smile I saw recently on the face of a civil servant, who was gratuitously causing a visa problem, though all my papers, proof of employment, and bank account were in order. There was the same petty thrill of exclusion, the same emotional
masquerade which justifies a dubious claim of privilege by feeling it as a mark of virtue.

“A man who truly gives himself to God must give up all relation to earthly love. But if you saw this landscape you would see a Dionysian world, it is a landscape made for ecstasy, to be in love with Christ. So when I went there on this pilgrimage, I was leaving behind a love affair. I simply walked and meditated and prayed and stayed in a monastery. And one night I had a dream that I was standing on the shore and out of the foam of the waves beating against the rocks, a bodiless angel formed itself and stood upright on the water. And this angel looked at me, and began to weep tears of gold, which rolled very slowly off its face. And when the tears fell onto the sea, they became women, that is, women were enclosed like beautiful prisoners in these golden tears, and I saw that they were my wives and my lovers. And when I woke up I understood that these women were a gift of tears that God was granting me, that He had planned that all my relationships would be lacking, all would be failures so I would give myself utterly to Him, see through the tears to perfect love.” Eleni’s clean laundry is drying on a line stretched between two trees beyond the table. A butterfly settles on a towel printed with bright multicolored flowers, which ripple as a breeze stirs the clothesline. The butterfly opens and closes its wings, thinking it has settled in a garden.

T
oday is the great demonstration on the Pedion Areos, the old military parade grounds that are called the Field of Mars, held in hope of influencing the EEC to adhere to Greece’s position that the name Macedonia is inadmissible for the new republic, until recently a part of Yugoslavia. There is continuous coverage on the news of the parallel demonstrations in Thessaloniki, even more fervent, since Thessaloniki is a symbol of Greek Macedonia, acquired in the Balkan Wars by a hair’s breadth, when the Greek army marched in and occupied the town just ahead of the Bulgarians. The demonstration is also more fervent in Thessaloniki because documents from ultranationalist organizations of the new Republic of Macedonia have turned up printed with images of Thessaloniki’s White Tower, making the possession of this important port seem an implicit ambition of the new state. Accusations against Bulgaria, traditionally Greece’s chief European rival for possession of this area, are murmured from many corners—many Greeks believe Bulgaria wants to challenge the boundaries settled by the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, and is using the Macedonia issue as the first act of its campaign. Others worry that the new republic intends to stir up
the Slav-speaking minority population of Greek Macedonia, kindling an ambition to forge a state with an independent “Macedonian” identity, and others speak apprehensively of what the Turks might have to gain in disputes over Balkan borders. School is canceled throughout Greece today so that teachers and students can attend their regional demonstrations; Greek schools have demonstration days instead of snow days.

The Pedion Areos is crammed with people waving flags bearing the Star of Vergina. From the temporary raised wooden platform that has been constructed, someone is speaking: “& The sun of Vergina is the light of Greek consciousness …” The speeches are punctuated by Greek Macedonian folk songs and dances; some of the male dancers are wearing the foustanella of the Makedonomakhi, the guerrilla warriors who defended Greek villages in the region and tried to drive out the Bulgarians and the Turks, in the period before the Balkan Wars. The crowd chants, “Macedonia is unique, always and forever Greek,” and someone galvanizes a cluster of people near me, shouting that Greece has been betrayed by Europe for the last time. A historian takes the microphone and talks about Alexander the Great, and the unmistakable Hellenic character of Macedonia in antiquity. “Macedonia is Greek! Read History!” a cry goes up from a few other knots of people.

But the more I look at the old men dancing in their fathers’ Balkan war uniforms, and the more prayerfully the quasi-mythical Alexander is invoked, the more powerfully I realize that the appeals to sacred and inarguable antiquity are masking the real concerns of the Greeks over the status of this region, the real ambiguity through which Macedonia was won for Greece, and the Greek anxiety that the settlement of these territorial issues was satisfactory to no one but the Greeks, and perhaps the Serbs. The claims to Macedonia were not settled with references to Alexander, but by guerrilla warfare and terrorism on the part of all the nations involved, and frantic building of nationalistic schools and reinforcing of ethnic enclaves by all interested parties. In fact, if you read history as history
rather than as creed, you recognize that this rhetoric has everything to do with the period before the Balkan Wars leading up to the Greek annexation of Thessaloniki and neighboring territory, and very little to do with Alexander, whose identity in any case was elastic and strategic—Greek, Macedonian, or Olympian, the son of Philip or the son of Zeus, as advantage required. The response on the Pedion Areos today has much more contemporary roots, in the Megali Idea, the “Great Idea,” formulated in the new Greek state almost immediately after its birth, the dream of replacing the Ottoman Empire with a new Byzantium, the Greece “of two continents,” as it was called, a Greek empire that would include Epiros, Macedonia, Thrace, Crete, and the Aegean islands, then collectively referred to as enslaved Greece, all under a reborn capital city in Constantinople. Macedonia was a crucial element of the Panhellenic ambition. The Serbs too had ambitions in Macedonia, but it was the Bulgarians, backed by the Russian Empire, who were Greece’s chief challenger in the region, with some parties staking ethnic claims to the territory and others favoring an autonomous Macedonia, with Thessaloniki as its capital.