Gospel (60 page)

“He doesn't understand enough English to be offended by what I say,” Teddie explained.

Stavros sauntered from the room while Teddie talked on of America and what she knew about it and an exchange program she hoped to participate in. O'Hanrahan and Mrs. Matsoukis talked in Modern Greek, which had come back to O'Hanrahan like an old friend, and Lucy was thrown back on the resources of Teddie for entertainment. Teddie grabbed her handbag and suggested Lucy and she go out to cruise Kolonaki. Stavros happened to pass through the room.

“No, you're not going with us,” said Teddie.

On the way down the stairs, Teddie explained to Lucy that it was insupportable to be seen anywhere near her brother for there was a certain fourteen- and fifteen-year-old contingent that adored him and, worthless as he was, it was hard for a sister to watch.

Theodora: “You must think Athens is dreadful after Chicago.”

“Not at all, Teddie. It seems great fun.”

She made a dismissive noise.

Their first stop was a club called
1924.

“What is so special about 1924?” asked Lucy.

“There is a
1900
and a
1920
so this came next. Someone probably died in 1924, I don't know…”

Lucy took in the surroundings. It could be anywhere in Europe, postmodern lines and decor, postmodern people, track lighting illuminating raging punk art on the walls. The pale waitpeople were clad in black, the men with ponytails pulled back and the women with short cropped hair, both frozen in a seriousness, a bleakness in their indifferent fulfilling of orders. Lucy looked at the female customers, all dressed similarly in browns and blacks, giant hoop earrings like Teddie's, and all lighter-skinned than she thought Greek people normally were.

“So tell me about Chicago University,” asked Teddie, once the drinks were ordered. “Do you want some food?”

Lucy was starved. “I wouldn't mind a snack.”

Recognizing
taramosalata
on the menu, Lucy ordered it at a steep 2000 drachmae, $12 or so. “Chicago,” Lucy began. “Well, unfortunately the campus is in a slum, which is sometimes dangerous.”

“Slum?”

“Ghetto?” tried Lucy. Teddie knew what that meant. “I live in an apartment with another student and we share expenses.”

Teddie enthused for several minutes over the freedom of having one's own place. Until she got married, which she didn't intend to do since she hated Greek men, she would have to live at home with her parents and, until
he
got employed, which was inconceivable, with her brother Stavros as well. And what's more, all of Greece that was livable was in Athens. The rest was for the peasantry or for holiday-making. All the action was here, all the jobs, all the glamour, such Athenian glamour as there was anymore, all the connection to the new Europe. “If the EEC doesn't expel Greece,” Teddie considered.

“Why should it do that?”

“Because the government a few years ago bought Yugoslavian wheat and sold it to the EEC as Greek wheat, cheating the EEC. And it will never get better for Greece, because the politics do not get better.”

“Papandreou,” checked Lucy, “was the one with the sex scandal, right?”

“Sex, business, corruption,” she said, stirring her drink idly. “But scandal is better than elections. Because elections mean assassinations and worse. Even in this neighborhood, right on the street near our house a few years ago.”

Lucy didn't know whether to believe her. This perfectly up-to-date cosmopolitan city … assassinations over local elections?

Teddie casually put an open box of cigarettes between them, offering Lucy as many as she pleased. Teddie went on, “I would love to live in America, New York City, for a while, no?”

“Yes, normal people get assassinated there,” said Lucy.

The
taramosalata
arrived on a big black square plate, scooped into tiny fish-shapes atop that harsh, bitter red lettuce no one likes used by all trendy places worldwide. Discreet melba toast squares were stacked to the side. Not the dish of pink nirvana and the basket of pita bread Lucy would have preferred for 1000 drachmae less.

“It's not very good here,” whispered Teddie. “Nothing is.”

“Is there anything you like in Athens?” Lucy asked politely.

Teddie took a moment to think about it, and in that minute, Stavros and two good-looking buddies strode into the bistro, all with the same curly Greek-god hair, all with near-identical leather jackets with fake American army insignia or British air force patches.

“
Ohi ohi
…” wailed Teddie, spying her brother. “Look over there, that table near the … the…”

Lucy helped her: “The speakers.”

“‘Speakers?' They do not speak, they play music. But there, the girl in the brown leather jacket.”

Which one of ten? wondered Lucy.

“That is Jane, little sweet Jane, my brother's girlfriend.”

Teddie explained the fondness for foreign nicknames, often as an escape from old-fashioned mouthfuls like Klytemnestra, Kassiopeia, Kassandra.

“I would not name my poor daughter Theodora,” Teddie explained.

“But that's a lovely name—”

Teddie disgustedly exhaled her cigarette. “My father would call me his little Empress Theodora…” She rolled her eyes, then made a karate-chop gesture. “Named after a former prostitute who cut off men's penises for amusement.”

Could be apt, thought Lucy.

Following a recent Madonna hit was a local Greek pop song, and then Madonna was back again, unchallenged pop queen of the Mediterranean. Stavros was threading his way through the tables to insult his sister. Lucy tried to listen in but Classical Greek against the Modern Greek left too few traces. Some serious Jane-insulting was followed by Stavros heaping abuse on his sister.

“Ehhh,” Teddie concluded, motioning for him to go away. “You are a peacock—my friend Lucy does not want to know you.”

“What ees peacock?” Stavros asked Lucy, suspecting something horrid.

“Pagóni,”
his sister said, before adding to Lucy, “except a peacock has a bigger
poutsos.
”

Stavros arched his eyebrows in distaste, looking precipitously down from his high cheekbones. Yes, thought Lucy, one of the two or three best-looking, best-constructed men I have ever seen in my life. His stupidity is what would save a woman in a relationship with him. God help us all if he had genuine charm. She watched Stavros and his tight jeans saunter back to Jane the bimbo.

“Why don't we go?” suggested Teddie, leaving a 1000-drachmae note on the plate beside the bill. “This place is ruined now.”

The evening outside was cool and the air still bad from the daily Athenian jam of diesel and leaded fuel–spewing vehicles. Lucy and Teddie walked along clean, prosperous streets and appraised women's fashions in store windows, Teddie deferring to Lucy's American, contemporary sense of what was in fashion and what was not: “What could we know here, after all? Athens probably gets the clothes no other country will buy…”

“Do you work?” Lucy asked.

“No,” said Teddie, surprised at the question. Why should she work as parents regularly provided for their children on the slopes of Kolonaki?

A café or two more, all blaring American pop hits and atrocities from Northern European countries recorded in English trying to pass as American pop hits. Around midnight it was time to go home, Lucy yawning more than talking.

It was decided that Lucy should have Theodora's room.

“The couch is fine for me,” Lucy pleaded, rather liking the look of the plush living-room sofa.

No, Lucy would get Teddie's bed and Teddie would bunk on the couch; Dr. O'Hanrahan was in the guestroom. He and Eleni were staying up late with a bottle of ouzo and intended to move to the balcony; Mr. Matsoukis, having nodded asleep several times, finally excused himself to the bedroom.

Teddie fluffed the pillows beside the sofa, all the while teaching Lucy how to deflate Greek leches. “They hate to be called
malakismeno.
”

Her mother Eleni interrupted her conservation with O'Hanrahan. “Theodora, please … Why should you teach her that word?”

“Because we walked on the street and the
malakismena
made a comment. And if she goes to the islands she will need to know what to say.”

Eleni warmly turned to Lucy. “Ignore them, Lucy. That is best.”

Teddie was smiling and forcing a bit of laughter.

“What is so funny?” asked her mother.

“Lucy,” Theodora explained. “Coming back from the café, the boys made fun of us and Lucy insulted them…” Here Teddie put her head back uttering what could almost be called a laugh.

“Whadya hit 'em with, Luce?” asked O'Hanrahan.

Lucy was persuaded to confess.

Dr. O'Hanrahan reeled, and Eleni put her hand to her heart laughing silently. “Brilliant!” she cried.

“You told them in Classical Greek to put a radish up their behind?” asked the professor.

“Aristophanes,
The Clouds,
” she said quietly.

“A common punishment for adultery in those days, you know,” said O'Hanrahan, who knew all. “A peeled radish would be quite a sensation, hm?”

“Call them
malakismena,
” Teddie reminded, fluffing the pillow.

Teddie was to explain when things were more private that it was calling a man a masturbator, as opposed to a man with an actual sex life. It was worse than suggesting he was gay, though that was good too—Greek men suspect all foreigners have that impression, given Plato and the boys, et al., but then again, according to Teddie, so many Greek men
were
bisexual, whether they admitted it to women or not. Then Teddie launched into a recommendation as to which islands were one big orgy—Ios, for example—and which had to be seen to be believed, like Mykonos: “There are human creatures there that might be girls, might be boys, I cannot tell. I know they are beautiful
hermaphroditoi
…”

“Hermaphrodites,” said Lucy. “We have your word in English.”

“Of course you would have
that
kind of word from Greece,” Teddie scowled.

Lucy bade her good night around one
A.M.
, withdrew to Teddie's room and closed the door behind her. She sank into the cool sheets and kept the reading light on briefly, looking over some of Teddie's schoolbooks, the lovely Greek script gesturing balletically across the page. What a shame the Romans didn't abandon their blocky alphabet and adopt the Greek one, since they slavishly copied everything else Greek, littering their own capital with copies of Greek temples, copies of Greek statues. Perhaps no language has ever been such a simple, direct assault upon the complex; in what other language can so much emotion be uttered with such restraint? The model for a classicism, for a linguistic purity still sought after today.

Latin, Lucy had long ago decided, was authoritative, a language fit for Roman conquerors, precise to the point of small-mindedness. It never seemed to flow or sing like Greek. In
Genesis
1:3, the Bible God creates light in Greek with

Ka
e
pen
ho Theus ‘gen
ē
th
ḗ
t
ō
ph
ō
s.'

Let there be light. But in Latin, it sounds like a proper order, barked by a centurion following Caesar's will:

Fiat lux.

Latin renders the
Gospel of John
well enough; even the nonspeaker can appreciate the square, forthright rules-and-regulation Vulgate feel to John's opening, the
In the beginning was the Word
bit:

In principio erat Verbum

et Verbum apud Deum,