Dinner with Persephone (3 page)

I have some basic household staples to buy and a bank account to set up before I meet some friends in central Athens for lunch. It takes deep breaths and resolution to get myself down the three flights of stairs onto the neighborhood streets. The first month in a new country is an exhausting one; every object, every face, every incident comes at you the size of faces on a giant screen. You are exhausted from paying attention, and even sleep is sleepless, because the magnified days, the fifty-foot words, the towering new conventions insist their way into your dreams, too.

It seems almost impolite, somehow tactless, to notice how unlike any other neighborhood streets in any other country these are. I pass two or three icon stores in the space of six or eight blocks, hung with rows of sullen female saints, dead-eyed male saints, looking as if they are at the last moment of control before an explosion of anger. The more expensive images have ornate frames or silvered-over clothes. Women buy them and women tend them, lighting oil flames in front of them, burning incense, and misting
them with holy water as if they were sacred house plants. I never actually saw a man buy one, not during the year I spent in Greece; and I often remembered, as I walked by these stores, that during the two periods of fierce Byzantine iconoclasm, both times the revival of icon worship was sponsored by women, the empresses Theodora and Irene. There is something disturbing about all those blank pent-up-looking faces that demands propitiation, like a child’s desperate attempts to please a remote, miserable parent. And there is something poignant, too, as if they are only so alike because they need to be rescued into individuality, they need the mercy of tending, one reason little girls play with dolls. I used to spend pocket money for small toys when I was little, not nearly so much because I wanted the toys for myself as because I wanted to release them. I remember buying a palm-sized monkey and the saleslady wanting me to exchange him because he didn’t have the right tag. “They’re all alike,” she said, and threw him into the bin overflowing with the toy monkeys. “No, they’re not all alike,” I said, fishing him out. “Not anymore.” Outside the shop, safe in my hand, he stopped being a movie tie-in.

I walk past yet another icon shop, past those bitter faces imprisoned in their silver cells. I look for a moment past the street of Phryne, beyond a small green square, to the street of Agios Fanourios, the revealer, patron saint of illumination, who finds lost objects and gives glimpses of the future. He is also famous for having had such a monstrous mother that on his name day, one formulaic prayer runs: “God pardon the mother of Agios Fanourios.”

At my intersection, Phryne, the prostitute, was a courtesan in the fourth century
B.C.
, the lover of the sculptor Praxiteles, and the model for what seems to have been the first monumental statue of a female nude. She was also the only woman in antiquity to have won a lawsuit with only her own eloquent breasts. When she was about to be condemned by the Athenian court for immoral conduct, she pulled her dress from her shoulders down to her waist in front of the judges, who, transfixed, ruled in her favor. In a world
where speech and thought were neither the rights nor the privileges of women, Phryne found a way to pose philosophical questions with her body. “Are you immoral?” she asked the judges. “Is desire immoral? What is immorality?”

This story may or may not be true. And all we know of the looks of this standard of female beauty in the Greek and Roman worlds is our dream of them. We only know the lost Aphrodite of Knidos from Roman copies and images on coins, made by artists who probably never saw the original statue, and certainly never saw the woman. In any case, the statue was rejected by the islanders of Kos, who had commissioned it; they considered its nakedness immoral.

Running parallel to the street of Phryne, forming a rough cross with it, flecked with small shops, is the street of Fanourios, a saint, who was satisfied that as a Christian he had found the answer to Phryne’s questions. Following the consequences of his logic, he submitted himself to the sacred suicide of virginity and martyrdom, instead of the profane suicide of sexuality. Greek polytheists were not “pagan,” in the licentious interpretation of the word given by their religious rivals. The old Greek word for pagan is
ethnikos
, which is synonymous with “national,” as in the national flag. I didn’t know you were
ethnikos
, says a Christian to a polytheist in one of Cavafy’s poems.

The Greek polytheists regarded the body with their own kind of mystical puritanism, believing that each sexual act diminished in some degree the vital force of the partners, and even shortened their lives. Their ideal was a highly stylized and controlled kind of sexual contact, in which the “passive” partner was always to some degree humiliated, and which looks from the scenes on vase paintings to have been really very dull. Perhaps it is no accident that the body of myths assembled, invented, reinvented, and anthologized from a variety of sources by the ancient Greeks is one of the least erotic of the world’s mythologies, rivaled perhaps only by the mythology of the ancient Israelites. The source of sexual tension in ancient Greek myth is not so much the drive to the ecstasy of consummation,
but uncertainty as to whether either or both partners will survive the sexual act. This thread runs through all the stories of the young men and women who are killed after lovemaking with each other or the gods; through all the stories of rape, a sexual act in which there is always an implicit threat of murder; and on a global scale, through the
Iliad
, in which generations and nations die because Helen and Paris lay down together.

I realize now how much being on the courtyard side of the building shields me from the noise of the streets. Athens streets are substantially noisier to my ear than New York’s, because of the ubiquitous motorcycles and from the incessant gear-shifting here, where nobody drives automatic.

I am on my way to the
laiki agora
, the farmers’ market, held on different days of the week in different neighborhoods throughout the city.

The traffic is anarchic, and walking here requires acute scouting attention. Cars simply drive over curbs; motorcycles wanting to pass weave through the pedestrians on the sidewalks; and often cars are parked directly on the sidewalks, further narrowing the slim margin of safety separating pedestrians from the onslaught. Traffic is worse today because there is a bus strike—the conservative Mitsotakis government and the bus drivers’ union are struggling over the government’s attempt to privatize the buses. There are hints that the trolleys and taxis will soon strike in sympathy. Walking everywhere doesn’t trouble me, since I am used to some five miles a day, but I wonder what it will do to elderly people like Kyria Maro if they have heavy groceries or errands downtown. A red light halts me at the
periptero
, one of the kiosks for newspapers, aspirin, batteries, and the cold drinks that are crucial in the southern Greek summer, when thirst is felt more violently than hunger. I am caught in a crossfire of stares: a motorcyclist has turned his face away from the lights toward me and is staring with dedicated attention, while the
periptero
man has me covered from the other side. It is very hard to get used to, but there is no social prohibition against frank, assessing, concentrated
staring, and my first pervasive sensation in Greece is of those eyes—the stares of the coffee-drinking shopkeepers, the gazing icons, the tin and glass eyes dangling from key chains and rearview mirrors and hung over doors as protection against harm from living eyes.

The
periptero
man waves me over. “You just move here?” he asks, framed by newspapers hanging over his head like national flags from wooden poles. There are the Everydays, the Afternoons, the Newses, the Free Presses, the Uprootings, as some of the dizzying range of Greek newspapers, journals usually openly affiliated with political parties, are called. There is
Estia
, named after the goddess of the hearth, which in the nineteenth century serialized many of the first modern Greek novelists, and is now one of the most vitriolic of right-wing papers, referring to Bosnia-Herzegovina as a “Turkish protectorate.” There are the magazines named as if they were philosophical categories:
Images, It Is, She, Woman, One
, and the Greek satirical paper
The Mouse.

“Yes, I’m here for a year,” I answer, aware of the constantly shifting passage through Athens of diaspora Greeks, students, tourists, international scholars, and EEC employees. I choose a carton of strawberry juice from the kiosk refrigerator. Except for certain wines and cold mountain water, I have never drunk anything as perfect as Greek fruit juices, each as distinct in timbre and character as the instruments of an orchestra.

“And you’re Greek?” the
peripteras
asks.

“No,” I say.

“But you speak Greek?”

“Yes, but I still talk a lot of
ardzi, bourdzi
, and
loulas
,” I say, using a Greek phrase for nonsense that amuses people when they hear it, a phrase that plays with the idea of being fluent in nonsense.

“So how much a week do you have to live on?” he asks.

“Enough for
horta
, greens, at the
laiki
,” I say, and catch the light to cross.

“Well, buy your newspapers here,” he calls after me, “and you can practice your Greek too. Here we speak Greek for absolutely nothing. Even though it is an expensive language to speak.”

Just beyond, a shop window offers a new line of wedding and baptism invitations, all embossed with a gold Star of Vergina, the symbol marking some of the grave treasures of Philip of Macedonia, Alexander the Great’s father. The vegetable and fruit stalls of the
laiki
are hung with the most beautiful agriculture I’ve ever seen: olives in many colors, grapes so real they make fancy grocers’ bunches seem like Victorian wax ornaments, eggplants that are the royal porphyry that was the exclusive color of the Byzantine imperial family, branches of bay leaves that are called Daphne here, after the nymph who metamorphosed into the laurel tree to escape being raped by Apollo. “Wherever I go and wherever I stay,” wrote the novelist Kazantzakis, “I grasp between my teeth, like a bay laurel leaf, Greece.”

The sellers shout for the shoppers’ attention. “
Aromata kai khromata
,” perfumes and colors, says one, scooping up handfuls of ruby-colored cherries. He gives me one to sample and enjoys my response. The fruit has something more than flavor; it evolves—it has drama. “It’s the sun,” he says. “We get more sun than any other country in Europe, and it concentrates all the sugars in the fruits and vegetables. And we pick them ripe, just before we sell them.” The only other place I find with fruits and vegetables to equal this brilliance, when I travel there at the end of my year here, is Turkey.

I pass a stall with barrels of grains that are collectively called here
demetriaka
, after the Greek goddess Demeter, as we call them cereals, after the Roman goddess Ceres, a subtle reminder of complicated historical fissures and parallels. The Western world is called the Western world because it descends from the western Roman Empire, while Greece belonged to the eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium. The polarity of the relations between the two and the cultural dominance of one over the other are rarely as clear in their contrasts as they are often presented. These empires seemed not so much to face each other like black and white champions across a chessboard as to be enmeshed dynamically together, more a spiral than a chessboard, in a cultural struggle that could never be fully resolved or completely clarified, because each side was so marked
by the characteristics of the other it had taken on. Each side at times confronted the other in opposition, but at others adopted the more insidious method of incorporating its rival, like two actors competing for the same role. It was even a common dream in the second century for Romans and Greeks to have dreams of each other’s alphabets. The interpreter who recorded these dreams remarks, “If a Roman learns the Greek alphabet or a Greek learns the Roman alphabet, the former will take to Greek pursuits, the latter to Roman. Many Romans, moreover, have married Greek wives, and many Greeks, Roman wives, after having this dream.” Elite Roman children had Greek nurses, and Greek literature and decorative arts had something like the prestige and elegance of French for nineteenth-century Russians or Persian for the Ottoman Turks. I remember having dinner with a teacher who worked at one of the most prestigious Greek prep schools, who told me her high school class had flatly refused to read Virgil’s
Aeneid.
Greek high school students have a reputation for being ungovernable; I heard teachers’ stories of classes who, en masse, refused exams, and of idle weeks passing while students went on strike, attending school but doing no schoolwork, in the service of various causes. These particular students held it as dogma that the
Aeneid
was a cheap imitation of Homer, with a popular Platonism, present in both the ancient Greek preoccupation with sculpture and the modern Greek preoccupation with icons, that insisted there was one ideal original, and the rest of the genre increasingly false and bloodless. “It’s as if they accused Chopin of being a cheap imitation of Beethoven, without of course having heard him,” the teacher said frustratedly to me. They were unable to see Virgil’s poem as a radical reinterpretation of the epic and the epic hero. It was an ironic thing to hear, since the borders of influence were so permeable—the Byzantine Empire, which evolved into an empire dominated by Greeks, was founded by a Latin-speaking Roman, now one of the important saints of the Greek church, and the language of this empire, later to become Greek, was originally Latin, and remained Latin for an ample number
of centuries. Besides, the Greeks had called themselves, well into the twentieth century, Romans, and their word for quintessential Greekness had been Romiosyni, Romanness. This historical vertigo had been brought home to me by the title of a modern short story, which described a quintessential Greek Orthodox Easter. The title of the story was “Romaic Easter.” Through the strange spiral of this history, the Greeks evolved into their conquerors.