Dinner with Persephone (26 page)

The baby, who likes to slow dance, will not have a name until he is baptized, a year or maybe two years from now. For the moment, he is called Kourkoumbini, after a popular pastry dusted with powdered sugar. He will be called this exactly as if it were a given name, and I enjoy it so much that I would find it a wrench to give it up for a conventional Yiannis or Constantine. There are different rationales for this practice of the delayed name; in some parts of Greece, it was a safeguard against evil spirits, who might come and take the tender child if they had something as concrete as a name to go by. In Zakinthos, unbaptized babies were called Drakos, or Drakaina, Dragon, something far less appetizing than Kourkoumbini, in order to frighten off evil spirits who might be tempted to interfere. Kourkoumbini, like all Greek babies, lies between East and West even on his changing table. Nicknamed for a Turkish pastry, he sleeps on Mickey Mouse crib sheets, with Winnie the Pooh wallpaper overhead, while on his changing table, the Vaseline and Johnson’s baby powder share the surface with an icon of the Archangel Michael. My friends fiddle with their television set, which gives information in Russian, Greek, French, Czech, Italian, and Magyar. A game show is playing—when the male contestant calls out the right answer, the host shouts, “Triumph! Triumph!” and they kiss each other on both cheeks. My friends invite me to stay for supper and tell me there’s a
drakulariko
(after Dracula), a monster movie, on television, but I am nervous about Polytechnic night, and go home, where I amuse myself by reading an advice column in a women’s magazine. A sixteen-year-old wonders whether to sleep with her boyfriend. If they break up, and she is no longer a
parthena
, who will marry her? Another asks how to stop her boyfriend from making so much noise during sex—her neighbors come to their windows and call out, “Shame to you, we all have children at home.”
The adviser tells her, apparently following Greek convention, that men are usually more rowdy during sex than women. Another woman of thirty-two, who has had a series of bitter experiences in love, asks whether or not to accept a proposal that has come her way through a matchmaker, and to make the kind of marriage her grandmother did.

The morning news makes me glad I chose to stay in—Polytechnic night was full of violence. Some five hundred self-styled “anarchists” ran through the city center, smashing shop windows and throwing Molotov cocktails into the central post offices and various banks. They bombed shops, bus-ticket kiosks, and a New Democracy (conservative) Party office building. Twenty-six people have been arrested and riot police are posted outside the Polytechnic until further notice.

Newspapers here could offer a daily schedule of demonstrations, as they do television programs. The week’s protests go on—Greek farmers demonstrate against the government’s agricultural policies, blocking the Athens-Lamia highway, spilling milk in the streets of Thessaloniki, and blocking entrances to that city. Schoolteachers demonstrate outside the Ministry of Education, in a “severe confrontation” between them and the deputy minister of education. The medical school students demonstrate, ending in a fight between them and the riot police. According to one newspaper, a student leader called police officials to say that the police were obstructing a peaceful demonstration and threatening the students, and the officials replied, “Good,” giving the special squads implicit permission to start the beatings—women demonstrators said the police especially singled them out. I look in Artemidorus to see how beatings were imagined in the second century—the dreams of beating are favorable, he writes, if you strike only people you rule, with the exception of your wife. To dream of beating her is a sure sign that she is committing adultery.

I am going out for a drink with a neighbor’s relative, a computer programmer who lives a few streets over. He was born and raised in
this neighborhood, went to the local school, and has lived his entire adult life on the next street over, though he keeps his father’s house in a Peloponnesian village for weekends. I seize the opportunity to ask him about the names of some of the streets we are walking through to the café; it is profoundly disorienting to move through streets named for cities and historical events you know nothing about, as if space itself were full of conversation and references you can never grasp. But Christos doesn’t know what the streets commemorate either, or why the district is called Pangrati, or how to translate into Greek the café’s Italian name. They just are what they are. We stop to look at the headlines of the afternoon newspapers displayed on poles at the news kiosk—there is still a drama here in the changing headlines of the newspapers, an urgency expressed like the old-fashioned newsboys’ cries of “Extra, Extra!,” a sense that fates can alter absolutely between morning and afternoon. These are full of pictures of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who has been on a twenty-day trip to Greece, based on a yacht owned by the billionaire London-based shipping owner John Latsis. I have some letters to mail, so we stop outside the post office, where the domestic and international boxes are marked, to my permanent pleasure,
esoterico
and
exoterico.

We settle at a table inside the smoke-filled café, and order
mezedes
and a Cypriot red wine called Othello. Preparations are under way for a day of national demonstration about the issue of the name of Macedonia, and Christos is livid about the new republic’s declaration of its name. “They are robbers, they are thieves,” he says. “Suppose I just camped in your apartment and said it was my apartment.” “But,” I say, “that is not what they are doing, that is what you are worried that they will do.”

“We will go to war if they keep the name, we will fight them,” Christos says, hitting the table with his palm. “Do you really think a war would be more fruitful than a political solution?” I want to know. “The European Community does not support Greece’s absolutist stand on the name, and Greece is straining its relationship
with valuable allies. This doctrinal insistence on the name seems to me to be trying to practice politics as if the world were ideal, and not one of imperfect compromise. If their using the name Macedonia seems to you to constitute a territorial claim, then isn’t this the moment to get them to show their professed good will, to search together for a compromise name, and to firmly establish the borders with a treaty signed by all the European Community?”

“Pay attention, pay attention,” Christos hisses, jabbing his forefinger in the air. “Macedonia is Greek. Do you think Alexander the Great was a Slav? What good will a treaty do; everyone knows where the borders are, and borders won’t stop their aggression. They want Thessaloniki.”

“But if they do,” I say, “the name is not a piece of magic that will magically secure the borders. You will just keep yourselves shouting across the borders like children having tantrums, ‘Is not Macedonia.’ ‘Is too.’ ” But of course in this part of the world, I think to myself, names are treated as magic, personal names, place names. A person’s name is a territorial matter, makes a claim to patronage, or states a claim on some property, attribute, or ambition. The Ottoman Turks for a long period wouldn’t permit any Greeks but the wealthy, and often pro-Turkish, Phanariot Greeks to name their sons Alexander. Some Byzantine Greeks took it as an evil premonition that the imperial family had “run out of names” and that a Constantine’s coming to the throne again in 1449 was the signal of the fall of what a Constantine had founded. And of course, Greece has itself made territorial claims through names. Maps published at the turn of the century, when the Ottoman Empire was tottering, identified great swatches of Turkey as Greece. And there is the case of the Greek border with southern Albania, which, whatever you think about the crude resolution of the border dispute, is a case in which Greece makes its territorial claim through a name. “Do you think that Skopje is using the name Macedonia in the same way that right-wing Israelis call the West Bank ‘Judaea and Samaria’ and that Greece uses the name ‘northern Epirus’?” I ask with tactless curiosity.
“It is not the same at all,” he answers. “Macedonia is Greek. And so is northern Epirus. It has always been so, and will always be, whatever the usurpers of our history may claim.”

We find a way to change the subject, but Christos gives me another glimpse of the politics of the Greek
moyen homme.
He is talking about Polytechnic night, and offers his solution to the disorder. The reason these anarchists run wild through the streets on November 17, he says, is that the Greek public is not yet ready to face the real solution, which is to have the MAT (literally, unit for the “restoration of order”) riot police surround the Polytechnic and without interference, beat some of the perpetrators to death. It is a surprise to hear the tone of the junta in the voice of a young man, but the junta could not have been simply imposed from outside, but represented one genuine political impulse in a country which has an authoritarian tradition, at times paternalistic, and at others dictatorial.

“You must,” says Christos, walking back with me through the series of tiny squares that make little villages and definite sections of all Athens neighborhoods, where even now that the nights are chilly, people prefer to sit outside, “as a poet, scatter flowers on the paths of people’s difficult lives.” As he waxes lyrical, he is pushing me against the wall of an apartment building. “It would be hard for me to judge,” I say. “You’d probably have to read some of my poems.” “No,” he says, “I’m sure of it. We must all be grateful to the poets for the rose petals they leave on our rocky roads.” I am doing my best to convey disinterest, but he is much more interested in what he is doing than what I am doing.

A series of rather mercantile compliments is produced, like putting coins in a jukebox. He arrives at “You are beautiful.” “Especially,” he says, “I like your hair. It is the kind of hair I myself would have, if I were a woman.”

“N
aive English-speaking girl wanted for lessons,” says one leaflet in the current new crop on the telephone pole that stands on one edge of the little squares that make
quartiers
of Athens neighborhoods. Leaflets are everywhere, ingeniously pasted on bank building pillars and on street lamps, advertising the openings of new clubs, benefits to save the Greek foxes, phone sex—“Choose from these story options: ‘The Mermaid’s Secret,’ ‘Naked Crete,’ ‘Sensual Days on Mykonos.’ ” There are black-bordered leaflets announcing funerals or memorial services for the dead: “Our much-loved and adored husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle, lawyer, MP of Akhaia, and minister. We are burying him tomorrow at the Holy Church of the Sleep of the Virgin. Wife: Alexandra. The children. The grandchildren. Sister. The nephews and nieces. The rest of the relatives.”

The dead are remembered nine days, then forty days after their deaths, then in cyclical ceremonies, all for the rest of the departed soul, whom Greeks seem to expect to be restless—the dead legitimately return to earth during the forty-day period between Easter and Pentecost, and unlawfully and unpredictably as vampires. There
is a whole range of vampire lore, anecdotes, remedies, curses. One of the most feared curses used to be “May the earth not eat you.” Vampires seem to function as a kind of underworld, criminal class of the resurrected—a body that hasn’t decomposed could be a sign of sainthood, but also that the deceased has become a vampire. They also seem to be an underbelly version of the much idealized Greek family, since their principal victims in the stories I’ve been told are family members, and since they often seem to be people who died with unresolved family quarrels. Vampirism here is a brilliantly simple metaphor for the tragic side of the blood tie.

While I am reading the new crop of leaflets, I feel myself being handled from the waist. I look down and to the left and see a charming middle-class lady running the fabric of my knit sweater between her hands. “Marvelous sweater,” she says, turning me to an angle more convenient for her, “is it made in China?” “No,” I say, as she outlines the design. “Flowers,” she says, “a panel of flowers. It looks easy to clean. How much did you pay for it?”

“Not much,” I say. “And where did you buy it?” “New York,” I say. “Well, I like it. Simple. And sexy. Have a good week,” she says, strolling off with one of the many variations of Greek benedictions on time, which are made for days, weeks, months, and seasons.

I skid on something underfoot as I reach the corner—a late fig that had fallen onto the pavement from the tree above. A new building is going up on this street, next to a pretty neoclassical with a substantial courtyard, which is being punished for its refusal to be part of a big apartment block by having one built loudly next door, the right-hand balconies leaning menacingly over its defiant little roof. The streets are in a constant process of repair even when buildings are not going up—soil and stony rubble, exactly as on the edges of cleared fields, obstruct your passage on your block. You need to be nimble to live in Athens, compact and nimble. The city is always aspiring to be a village again, always veined with ruins, ancient and modern. On the sidewalks of the small streets, grandmothers are having friendly chats, wearing bathrobes and slippers.
At a
kafeneio
, the men are wearing pullovers now as they drink their coffee and read the papers. A radio is playing, and I hear as I pass a broadcast of the elderly novelist Dido Sotiriou, reading from her popular memorial novel about the Greek community in Turkey during the Asia Minor conflict,
Blood-soaked Earth.
Many people whose taste I respect have told me that they dislike the book, for its florid style and the simple-minded political analysis undertaken by the narrator. But for an outsider, it records not only an event but a popular way of remembering the event—and the popular way of remembering an event, the style in which imagination acts on remembered events, is part of the structure of political policy. Sotiriou’s way of remembering is like looking through one of those overwrought turn-of-the-century photograph albums, covered with velvet, marked with living dead scent of dried lavender, too sumptuous, but containing real images. And she reads in the same innocently florid style, as if her words were a kind of mourning jewelry, onyx brooches a little gross in their deliberate elegy, but containing real strands of the lost beloved’s hair. Outside our local police station stand the usual covey of officers on guard duty, holding machine guns. I take a shortcut through the small park in front of the Evangelismos, Annunciation, Hospital. A man is sleeping on a bench, one hairy muscular arm dangling to the ground, the other flung across his eyes to shield them from the light. He is wearing a dress printed with yellow roses and a pair of high heels.