Dinner with Persephone (52 page)

We spend the rest of the afternoon in Aïvali, in the central market of the town, a place of chaotic commerce. Kostas and I look in some of the secondhand storefronts to see if we can find any pages from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century calendars; I have been told that the calendars of the period in use here, and in cities like Smyrna and Constantinople, would often have the date and year printed according to the Muslim, Jewish, Eastern Christian, Julian, and Western Christian Gregorian calendars, a tribute to all these imperial religions’ ambition to control time itself. It feels strange and painful to amble past the corpses of the elegant neoclassical Greek houses, recognizable for the marble reliefs over their doors which carry Greek imagery, a baby Dionysus holding a cluster of grapes, a ship sailing confidently over marble waves, that give a glimpse of the voluptuous domesticity prosperous Ionia seems to have meant to so many Greeks. The market itself is a maze of abundance—a wagon full of olives, tableware, brightly colored fruit and vegetables, encyclopedic collections of spices, some to make you sleep, some to make your hair gleam, or to make you potent. Along
the crowded cobbled streets are motorcycles, donkeys, dwarfs, cripples, sellers of cherry syrup blended with water to quench your thirst, birds to slaughter at home or here. A horse drawing a wooden cart whose sides are painted with brilliant poppies and vines stops to piss on the street, its urine swirling through the interstices of the cobblestones, past the feet of a seated bread seller.

As there were no women entrepreneurs this morning, there are no male shoppers this afternoon. The women shopping wear their long overcoats and scarves; some are fully veiled in black, some in Turkish trousers in electric color combinations, topped with blouses in flaming colors covered with sequins, these last unveiled. Although most of the women in the market are lumpen with coverings, in many of the shop windows you see posters of belly dancers, marking a hopeless sexual polarity. On the one hand, there are the women in sequins and flames, jeweled bras and pubic coverings, the stuff of sexual fairy tale; on the other, women covered like people guilty of a great crime, or hideously disfigured, objects as much of fear and loathing as of desire. These women can have no reality on either side of the veil. And the veil posits in an ugly way that men’s sexual relations with women are fundamentally rapes, enactments of uncontrollable lust and violence; but the veil is itself a violation, a woman who wears it has already been raped. It occurs to me, too, as I watch the great amethyst eggplants and brilliant green beans changing hands, to be made into dishes like the ones I will eat tonight in Greece, that one indication of a country’s capacity for diplomacy, for compromise, negotiation, promise making and keeping, may be found in the relations of its men and women, which are the models and training grounds for making alliances, for the negotiation, discussion, and maintenance of common interests without the use of physical force, for the cultivation and sustaining of trust.

It also strikes me that this market could be Mitilini’s: the manners of the people, their gestures, with the same raised head and closed eyes to signify a “no,” the radio music which sounds familiar
except for its Turkish lyrics, the exclusively male
kafeneia
, the combination of mistrust and appetite for contact with the foreigners, the civic entertainment of the
corso
, the love of bright colors, all mirror the world across the water. When we walk through the streets, with their handsome dilapidated mansions like the ones in Mitilini town, to take the return ferry, I stop for a moment to look at the ornament on one door, hung with a bunch of garlic, a fork stabbed through one clove to pierce the evil eye. All the way back through the pine-forested hills of the island to the tiny village on the coast, Mitilini glows in the evening sun, caramel-colored, like the skin of the beautiful interracial child it is.

If you go to the Theophilos Museum, you will see—along with the strange, beautiful Theophilos paintings, which transmute everything they touch, heroes from history, battles, airplanes, prosperous Greek-Americans visiting for Easter, into fairy tale—a Tsarouchis portrait made from a photograph of about 1910 or so, of the itinerant painter himself, dressed as Alexander the Great, in an outfit drawn from the shadow puppet Alexanders who appear in some of the Karaghiozis plays. The squat little painter stands holding a tiny shield, his plump belly causing his cheap masquerader’s cuirass with its flaking gilt to hang unevenly over his dirty trousers, his hair and beard unkempt, his fat-cheeked, tired face utterly unlike the chiseled coinage of Alexander’s. His eyes have an expression that is both tragic and visionary, since he knows that he is not Alexander, and at the same time dreams he is, both Karaghiozis and Alexander, a man and a dream of himself. It is something Alexander himself must have felt at times, and I think it is one of the great portraits of the twentieth century. Kostas hums a fragment of one of his favorite Savopoulos songs: “The thing that destroys me and that saves me/ is that I dream like Karaghiozis …”

A
Greek friend of mine who is taking Turkish lessons lent me a book he had bought recently called
Turkish Culture for Americans
the week before I went for my brief visit to Istanbul. Put together by a Turkish team of authors, it consisted of scenarios illustrating Turkish manners and customs, and explanations of them for Americans. In one, an American couple having dinner with a Turkish couple become too engaged in a discussion of education with the Turkish schoolteacher wife. Her husband falls silent, indicating displeasure. The explanation follows: “Ayse had behaved like a submissive Turkish wife until the conversation turned to her profession. Her husband’s withdrawal from the conversation signaled Ayse that she had overstepped her role.” In another scenario, an American Fulbright scholar visiting Atatürk’s mausoleum is accosted by a screaming guard for keeping his hands in his pockets and continuing to approach the tomb during the playing of a martial tune—the book explains that he was perceived as not displaying adequate reverence to the memory of Atatürk, or the national anthem. There is a tale of a man who is insulted by receiving a gift from his Western employee of a framed picture of two village women in traditional
dress. The breach here is that the gift is thought to denigrate by showing Turkey represented by peasant women rather than modern achievements—“Turks are sensitive to how their country is perceived. They want to be seen as European …,” write the authors. It is a glimpse of a
filotimo
, a readiness to be insulted, a preoccupation with public image, that mirrors Greek
filotimo.
Finally, there is the visiting professor who leaves the room during a calculus quiz and is upset by being handed exams in which answers have been copied from paper to paper. The writers explain, “Turkish students may often … help each other with their homework. This may extend to the test situation as well. It is not seen as cheating, but rather as helping a friend. This is an important cultural point …” It is little more than a utilitarian book, but I have to admire its authors’ rigorous and public candor, facing a culture which, like Greece’s, turns on a gyre of humiliation and pride, and can seem more preoccupied with public perception than with private behavior, a culture which takes everything personally and, like Greece’s, is a culture of doppelgangers, whose capital, once Constantinople, the chief city of the eastern Roman Empire, became after years of decaying relations between two of the most diplomatically inept empires in history, the great city Istanbul, the queen city of the Muslim world. It seems now to be, above all, Atatürkopolis, judging from the relentless presence of his image, which appears, it seems to me, on every denomination of Turkish currency, not to mention walls, sculptures, books, schools. And Atatürk was another man in whom East and West strained against each other, the bisexual from Thessaloniki who longed for Turkey to become a Western nation, and imposed the reforms to make that goal possible in the style of an Eastern potentate, in a means that may have made some of those reforms only a veneer, an exhibition to please a feared and beloved father, Kemal Atatürk, the perfect father of the Turks, which was the meaning of the name that Mustafa assembled during his career.

In modern Greek folklore, Constantinople is the city of the marble king, the last Byzantine emperor, who will one day become
incarnate again, and drive the Turks back to the “Red Apple Tree,” their mythical birthplace. It is another irony of the shadow play of history here that the conquering Turkish Mehmet II may very well have had as much if not more Greek blood than Constantine Paleologus, whose mother was Serbian and father half-Italian. Mehmet also had Serbian kin through his father, but the identity of his mother is intriguingly unknown. What is known is that she was not born a Muslim, and she may very well have been Greek.

The last emperor of Byzantium, according to legend, was supposed to be named Constantine like the first one, and if the popular songs of 1922 are any indication, there was a mystical excitement about the King Constantine under whose rule the Asia Minor campaign was undertaken, the campaign which definitively ended Greek and Turkish coexistence on the same soil. In these songs, the Glucksberg Constantine is often identified with the marble king. But as is often the case with oracle and prophecy, the marble king did not take the form he was expected to, and 1922 remains a bitter influence on Greek and Turkish relations—in Greece, the prime minister Venizelos, who mercilessly badgered the European allies for cooperation in his plan to occupy Smyrna, with an eye on the rest of the Asia Minor coast, and on Istanbul, is called the
ethnarkhis
, the national leader. In Turkey, you hear him called Venizelos the murderer. Venizelos’s mother had had a dream, I was told when I visited his memorial outside of Khania in Crete. She had dreamed that he would be a great liberator of the Greek people, and because of this dream, she had chosen the name Eleftherios, from the Greek word for freedom, for her son. But the Turks dream too, and those dreams flow too, as dreams do, in the veins of their lives. Atatürk’s mother had also had a dream, I was told in Istanbul, a dream that had changed the future of the Turkish people. She had wanted him first to become a teacher of the Koran, and when he proved recalcitrant, she changed her ambition, wanting him to become the rich merchant his father should have been. But Atatürk fought with her, wanting a military career above all. He had passed the entrance to
military school, but needed her permission for acceptance, which she refused to give. One night, she had a dream in which she saw her son hovering in a golden tray on top of a minaret. A bodiless voice spoke to her, saying that a military career would give her son this height, but another choice would cast him down. So she agreed, a decision in which the military victories that won nationhood for modern Turkey now seem implicit. And I was told of another dream that ominously helped lead to the viciously unresolved and dangerous situation on Cyprus now, a dream of Atatürk which Denktas, the leader of Turkish Cyprus, had in 1974, a dream in which Atatürk’s response to his pleas for help seemed to him to prophesy the coming Turkish invasion of the island. Like a dysfunctional family, the Turks and Greeks have lived the same events, but have no common memories of them, few common interpretations of those events.

But Turkey is veined with Greece as Greece is veined with Turkey. The keenness and beauty that is also a part of the dialogue between the Greeks and the Turks makes their mutual hatreds tragic not only for themselves, but for the world. I have never seen a city more dazzlingly situated than Istanbul, nor one with a keener sense of what domestic pleasure might be. The wooden villas along the Bosphorus construct a relation between sea and garden that makes Venice seem myopic; their combination of the ingenious, the playful, and the comfortable is a vision of domestic beauty. They often have the
krokalia
pebble mosaic decoration that Greek villas do, and the beautifully detailed woodwork that I have seen in the houses in Greece in Epirus; I learn from my hostess that the finest carpenter in Istanbul at the end of the nineteenth century was a Greek named Antonis Politis. And these waterfront houses are themselves called
yialis
, from the Greek word for waterfront. The Turks had their own version of the Katharevousa and demoticist quarrel—in 1932, it was estimated that thirty-five percent of Turkish vocabulary was of Turkish origin, a percentage which changed drastically after the linguistic reforms decreed by Atatürk. I wonder sadly how much of the
repressed vocabulary was Greek, feeling how much the Greek incorporation of Turkish vocabulary adds to the Greek language and sensibility, and thinking that the presence of its Greek vocabulary must be as valuable for Turkish.

On the way back to my hotel, I see several boys of five or six, dressed in satin and sequin costumes with plumed gendarmes’ hats on their heads, carrying sequined and plumed sceptres. The costumes have an odd look of theatrical and class pastiche, like the disguised counts’ costumes in Viennese operettas. “Is it a children’s party?” I ask. The driver—as in the countryside, I never saw a woman driving in Istanbul—answers, “Today they go to cut the peepee.” My hostess explains to me, “The costumes show that they celebrate their circumcision, which takes place today. They used to have marvelous carved wooden beds on which the operation took place, very prized today. I know antique dealers who hoard them.”

At my hotel, which is more luxurious than the finest hotel I have stayed in in Greece, with impeccable room service, sheets such as I have never slept on, like flower petals, there is a fridge stocked with Turkish
raki
, wines, and champagne. A prayer mat has been set down for use during the taped calls to prayer audible from the minarets of the neighborhood. I drink a glass of white wine before dinner, and open the memoirs of Halide Edib, the only woman member of Atatürk’s circle, whose Greek-infused memories of her childhood in Istanbul fascinate me. Her first lessons were from a Greek kindergarten teacher, and she remembers visiting her in her house, with its typical Turkish furnishings of divans, and its typical Greek corner for icons, before which an oil flame burned. The child would mimic the Greek funerals she saw passing in the neighborhood, in a favorite game, in which she would march up and down her room carrying a pet, and solemnly chant “Kyrie Eleison.” Even the proverbs she quotes as childhood touchstones seem interchangeable with Greek ones. Her older sister scolds her one day, telling her “No child can learn without being beaten. Beating has come out of heaven.” And the legendary tales she tells of the Paul
Bunyan-esque Turkish warrior Battal Gazi remind me of the Greek Byzantine legends of Diyenis Akritas; but for Akritas defending the borders of Byzantium, and Battal Gazi attacking them, happy endings have different meanings. Battal’s magical war whoop dispatches twenty Christian infidels to hell when he sounds it; the Byzantine Caesar builds a tower in the middle of the Bosphorus to hide the most beautiful Greek princess. But Battal Gazi outwits him, kidnaps the princess, and marries her. It is like the Zeus and Europa story; but this princess is not Phoenician, she is Greek.