Greek to Me

by Mary Norris

  So far, the only signs of war I had seen were a refugee camp outside Limassol and a lot of poured-concrete buildings under construction to house people relocating from the Turkish sector. An old man with his arm in a sling was hitchhiking in the opposite direction, and I turned around to give him a ride. I felt so rich here in Cyprus, in my little yellow Fiat with its tank full of gas, that I could not pass up an old man who needed a lift. As soon as he got in the car, the old man whipped off the sling—there was nothing wrong with his arm. Back in his village, where I had been tempted to stop anyway, he wanted to buy me a Coke. The kafeneíon was next to a coppersmith’s shop. Cyprus has been famous since antiquity as a source of copper. The coppersmith, surrounded by his family, tried to sell me a round thing with a lid on it. “What is it?” I asked. I couldn’t understand the Greek answer, so they translated: “Souvenir.” We all laughed. I wanted a souvenir, but if I was going to lug something all over the Mediterranean, it had to serve some practical purpose. This idyll of international trade was interrupted by the arrival of a Cypriot American man in a big flashy car, who silenced the coppersmith’s family and demanded to know, in English, how much I paid to rent the Fiat and, when I told him, announced that I had been cheated. I turned back to the copperware and chose a simple ladle with a shallow bowl, the edges of its long handle folded in on themselves. It is in my kitchen, turning green.

  BACK ON THE ROAD, eager to get to the Baths of Aphrodite, I followed the map to Polis (City) and turned west along the bay. The baths were supposed to be six miles away, but I had no odometer and could easily misjudge a distance of six miles. Signs started appearing along the road with ambiguous messages like “Access to Aphrodite’s Beach.” That might be the one I’d heard of, but the Greeks were full of tricks: a restaurant could call itself the Baths of Aphrodite, post a sign, and lure a tourist miles from the mythical Baths of Aphrodite to their commercial namesake. And I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. This beauty spot that my friend Andreas had never heard of—was it an inland pool fed by a waterfall and surrounded by ferns and moss? Or was it a cove along the coast? Which would Aphrodite prefer? She was married to Hephaestus, the lame smith god. Homer tells the story in the Odyssey of the time Hephaestus was informed that his wife was carrying on an affair with Ares and devised a net that trapped the lovers in bed together, humiliating them in front of the other gods. Afterward, as Robert Graves puts it in his compendium of Greek myths, Aphrodite had come to Paphos to “renew her virginity.” Now, there’s a gift. The goddess also had a magic girdle that made everyone fall in love with her. (“Girdle,” an ugly word that conjures for me Playtex, must refer to some more flattering garment—perhaps a belt or a sash.)

  I could no longer resist the invitations to the Beach of Aphrodite and turned off at one of the signs, which was in fact for a restaurant. It was sparsely populated, and the owner was occupied with a couple at a table. I bought two bottles of beer and escaped down to the beach by myself. There was a group of rocks offshore, some distance away, opposite a cove, and I headed in their direction. The beach was not sandy but sharp with small stones. I passed one couple and didn’t meet anyone else till I was almost at the cove of the rocks. A couple there saw me coming and departed—my invisible Gorgon shield on the job. I picked a place among the stones and thistles on the hillside and dumped my blanket and towel, stripped to my bathing suit, and waded into the water.

  The best-known image of the goddess of love is Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which shows her naked, on a half shell, arms and hair curving over her naughty bits, wafted ashore by a personified breeze. “Laughter-loving” Aphrodite was the original surfer girl. There was no danger of my being confused with her. I paddled out toward the rocks, which were farther away than they looked. This was not the place of ferns described in the guidebook. In fact, it was not in the guidebook. It was through the locals that I had heard of this beach and of the legend that if you swim among the rocks you will be beautiful forever. I was excited and had to calm myself down to swim the distance. This was not a race, after all, but a sensual exercise. What was the rush? I was used to being in a hurry, but I discovered that if I didn’t panic I wouldn’t run out of breath. The water was warm, the current gentle. No one was watching me. I tried out all my strokes: the dog paddle and the breaststroke and the sidestroke—first on one side, then on the other—and two backstrokes, the one with the frog kick and arms scooping water from underneath and the one with the flutter kick and arms arcing alternately over the head. I ran through the strokes in a series so that I could enjoy the view in every direction. This stroke, which I invented, is called the panoramic. It should be an Olympic event, with the gold medal going to the slowest, most voluptuous swimmer.

  I prayed that I was in the right place: O Aphrodite (breaststroke), if I have ever neglected to bathe myself and manicure and perfume myself and bedeck myself (sidestroke left), if I have scorned to wear the girdle (backstroke), I ask you to overlook my flaws and accept this sign of my devotion (sidestroke right), honoring air and water (breaststroke), sweetness and light (dolphin dive). The water was warm and embracing, and the swimming took no effort at all. I sipped at the surface, tasting the salt. I could look back at the beach, with its low mounds of green beyond the shore, and up at the sky, which was cloudy over the mountains (Andreas’s warning that it was raining in the Troodos) but clear at the zenith, then out over the glimmer-gray sea to the horizon and ahead to the white rocks. They were a peeled white, like skin treated at a spa, and, close up, they were very suggestive. In the biggest one, I made out the figure of a woman with rounded limbs and full breasts bending over the water. When I reached her, I realized that the best part of her was submerged, a mossy shelf pricked all over with tiny mollusks. I hauled myself onto her lap for a rest. I could not believe it: I had reached the Rocks of Aphrodite, and it was as if all Cyprus belonged to me.

  As long as no one was looking, I was tempted to take off my bathing suit. I had skinny-dipped only once before, in a pond in New Jersey, and it felt so daring: my heart had pounded as I got in deep enough to lose foot contact and begin to tread water; I had expected any second to hear a bullhorn and have the police roar into the water in an amphibious squad car and fish me out and book me for indecent exposure. To be naked in the elements—it can only be bad if someone disapproves, as when Yahweh (I-am-who-am) spotted Adam and Eve after the apple in the Garden of Eden. But I was strongly tempted. If a swim around the Rocks of Aphrodite was supposed to make me beautiful, the water had to touch all of me. I wouldn’t want to make the mistake of silver-footed Thetis, who held her son Achilles by the heel as she dipped him in the immortal waters of Lethe, leaving that one part of him vulnerable.

  Reader, I stripped there on the rock and lowered myself back into the sea. Every nerve fiber was alive as I hovered in the water; there was no layer of Lycra between the sea and me. I clamped the suit between my teeth by its straps and paddled around the rocks like a retriever. I felt as if I had shed a woolen overcoat. The current pushed me gently back to shore and I washed up onto mounds of bleached seaweed, as cushiony as confetti. I felt reborn.

  I ate my lunch on the beach—a cheese sandwich left over from breakfast, dried figs, a few cookies, prolonged by the beer, from which I poured generous libations to Aphrodite. I wished now that there were a man with me—someone to enjoy this with—but I had no regrets. Like the island of Cyprus itself, I wanted self-determination. My two wishes might conflict—it seemed impossible to have both love and independence at the same time—but it was liberating to admit I wanted them. And if I had been traveling with someone else I would never have ended up in this place.

  I walked back to the car, saturated with beauty. Many tiny burrs stuck to my Cretan blanket. There was a dirt road winding along the hillside, so I could avoid hobbling over those sharp stones. For once, I let myself do something the easy way. I don’t know if anyone would say I was changed, but everything I saw was transformed. It was as if I were drugged. Color
s of rocks, flowers, pebbles, grass, thistles, sea, cypresses and cedars—all were heightened in beauty and somehow graspable, more palpably there. After being in the sea, I was returning to my own element, to land, and I saw it all anew. I was a long way from home, where I had stood in front of the bathroom mirror with the Ajax and muttered, “Hideouser and hideouser.” When I got back to the car, I did something I hadn’t done in years: turned the rearview mirror toward me and rearranged my hair.

  CHAPTER 7

  ACROPOLIS NOW

  IT MUST BE said that I was not raised with the highest standard of beauty. Lake Erie was not beautiful. It was the first body of water I was ever sat down by, and I remember that the shore was covered with green slime. I loved the fireworks over Edgewater Beach one Fourth of July when I was small enough to ride on my father’s shoulders: tiny golden fish clustered into the shape of one giant fish, a school of fish shaped like a fish flashing in the night sky. I have never seen fireworks to match. I did not live in a beautiful place until I moved to Vermont and had a view of the Adirondacks and a lush green drive to work. New York always looks beautiful to me when I am leaving it. Maybe that’s the way of it: things are at their most beautiful when you think you’re seeing them for the last time.

  So how did I ever develop a taste for Greece?

  Nothing was quite what I expected. The light, the famous light, was not brighter than light anywhere else but softer, more delicate, like cream instead of milk, or real maple syrup tasted for the first time. There were no sharp edges but, rather, bands of color along the horizon, shades of distance, whitewashed walls, blue domes, the soft terra-cotta red of roof tiles. The landscape was the setting for the temples: the man-made enhanced the natural and nature set off the man-made. It was the perfect assemblage of elements.

  Wherever I went, I heard parents calling to children, “Έλα! Έλα εδώ!” “Come! Come here!” Imagine being a child in Greece, growing up in that landscape, being plopped down on a beach in your ancestral land, learning the word for the sea: θάλασσα (thálassa), with the stress on the first syllable, like a wave that breaks and then retreats, hissing, and is overtaken by the next wave, and the next. Once, walking down a hillside to the sea, admiring a terraced garden among small pines, I watched as a man removed a block of wood in an ingenious network of irrigation channels, sending the water in a new direction. “Έξυπνος,” I said. Ex + hypnos—“out from sleep”—is the Greek for smart, intelligent, alert, woke. He smiled. He hadn’t invented the system. His ancestors had figured it out millennia ago.

  Ed Stringham had spoken appreciatively of Vouliagmeni, a beach outside Athens, but when he traveled, it was for the cities, for the art and culture. “You must go to the Benaki,” Ed had said. With its rank upon rank of icons and its collections of sculpture, pottery, jewelry, silver—from the archaic to the modern—the Benaki is a world-class museum. Ed impressed on me the importance of the Byzantine in Greek history: the country had missed the Renaissance, he said—it was under the Ottoman Empire while its own ancient glories were being rediscovered in Italy, and it was largely the Orthodox Church that kept Greek culture alive. Although Ed had stressed that Greece looked east, to Asia, rather than west, to the rest of Europe, it was the Parthenon, the symbol of Western civilization, that he spoke about most rhapsodically. He had climbed the Acropolis one night with a poet to view the Parthenon under the full moon. The memory of it made him swoon: the glow of the marble, the shape of the columns against the sky, the poignancy of ruins that were both tragic and triumphant. Seeing the Parthenon had clearly been a highlight of Ed’s youth, his “bloom,” as the ancients called that epoch of young manhood when a boy is at his most godly. Although it was the landscape and language of Greece that first drew me, Ed’s praise made me long to see the Parthenon. Surely it was something that nobody could ever feel jaded about.

  So in 1983, on my first day in Athens, right after breakfast, at which I had asked a street vendor for a donkey (yáidaros) instead of a yogurt (yiaoúrti)—not even close—I went straight to the Acropolis. I was sitting on a big rock by the stairs to the Parthenon when a man who looked Greek addressed me in German, inviting me to join him and his friends. The German threw me off—I didn’t come to Greece to speak German. I declined, and he said, in Greek, “You don’t want to?” He was Greek after all. Only later did I realize that he had addressed me in German because he thought I was German—that was the default nationality of fair-skinned women traveling in Greece. Americans were rarer, and even rarer was the fair-skinned American who didn’t get it when a Greek was trying to pick her up.

  “Acropolis” means “the upper fortified part or citadel of a Greek city,” “a place of refuge.” In ancient times, people protected themselves by gathering together on a height where they could see enemies approaching and roll rocks down on them. Whoever is up high has an advantage. “Refuge” as a definition has developed from the function of the place, but its literal meaning—from akro, edge, and polis, city—is the Upper City, the Heights. Although the English word acrophobia (akro + phobia) is a fear of heights, akro can also mean edge. An acrophobic may not mind being in a high place as long as he doesn’t have to look over the edge. Athens is a hilly city—not an easy place to ride a bicycle—but, compared with the mountains in the east and north, it slopes like a plain to the sea in the west and south. The Acropolis is a mountain peak that somehow got separated from its range and now stands flat-topped in the middle of the city that grew up around it, inspired by it, depending on it for refuge.

  The city of Akron in northeastern Ohio, famous for rubber, tires, and the Goodyear blimp, takes its name from the Greek akro. I went there once in high school, and by Ohio standards it did feel rather elevated. Akron sits on a western plateau of the Alleghenies, 1,004 feet above sea level; the Acropolis in Athens is 490 feet above sea level, but it is not part of a plateau. It’s a high, sharp rock that juts up out of the chaotic city like a huge shard.

  On that trip, my view of the Parthenon, the temple to Athena the Virgin that crowns the Acropolis, was compromised by scaffolding and rusty-looking machinery. It was like going to Venice when the Campanile is under renovation or the Alhambra when the fountain in the Court of the Lions is being replumbed. It was disappointing. All I could do was try to get a grip on the history of the Parthenon. A less grand version begun by the Athenians after the Battle of Marathon, in 490 BC, was destroyed by the Persians and then reconstructed, more grandly, under Pericles in 447 BC. Construction took nine years, and it stood until 1687, when it was blown up by the Venetians, who shot mortars at it when they learned (from the Greeks) that the Ottomans were using it as a weapons depot. By 1983, the Parthenon had been a ruin for three hundred years—ten generations. What was the likelihood that it would be restored during my lifetime?

  I wandered around with my Blue Guide, but it was hard to match what I was supposed to be seeing with what was actually there. I didn’t know the archaeological terms—metopes, naos, propylaea. There was a pocket museum right there on the Acropolis, and I saw the damage the pollution had done to the sculptures, eating away the marble. Personally, I was not sensitive to the bad air—the Cloud, as the Athenians called the smog created by traffic emissions. Cleveland is a steel town, and New Jersey has a petrochemical refinery or two. To me the air of Athens smelled piney, like retsina. But the decay of the stone was tragic.

  The next time I climbed the Acropolis was in 1985. I arrived in Athens via London, where I visited the British Museum to see the Elgin Marbles. I bought postcards and books and learned to recognize Herakles by his lion skin and Hermes by his floppy hat and winged sandals. There was a lot of fighting going on in the friezes: battles of Centaurs, Lapiths, Amazons. Centaurs, of course, had the bodies of horses and the heads and torsos of men. Lapiths were mythological beings from Thessaly, who mostly fought with Centaurs. The Amazons were a mythical tribe of warrior women who scheduled conjugal visits with the opposite sex once a year, strictly for procreation.
They excelled at archery, and legend has it that a girl’s right breast was cauterized so that she would grow up better equipped to shoot arrows. (The name Amazon is supposedly from a-mazos, without a breast.) In our time the word Amazon is more likely to be associated with the empire of Jeff Bezos and online shopping for books and for bows and arrows—and for bras and prostheses, for that matter. The behemoth company was named for the Amazon River, which was named for the Amazons.

  There were a lot of animals in the sculptures—a wide-eyed ox being led to sacrifice, horses whinnying—and young girls in the Panathenaic procession carrying pomegranates and gifts for the goddess. The most beautiful sculptures from the Acropolis, to me, were the Caryatids: strong, graceful female figures supporting the porch roof of the small temple called the Erechtheion. (I am always embarrassed to pronounce the word, but I’m told it’s carr-y-a-tids.) Lord Elgin’s men took one of them to London, sawing her off the porch and stacking rubble in her place. Lord Byron, a contemporary, deplored his countryman’s rape of the Acropolis. The British say that Lord Elgin’s action, which took place while he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (1799–1803), saved the precious marbles from certain destruction—they would have been neglected under the Ottomans and eroded by pollution in modern times—and make the point that in the British Museum you get to see the figures from the friezes and the pediments up close. The original sculptures were very high on the temple, and even the ancients couldn’t have been able to see them very well. But the six Caryatids were rhythmic in their poses, and breaking them up was a sacrilege.

  In Athens I climbed the Acropolis again and tried to reassemble it all mentally, but the Parthenon was in fragments and the fragments were scattered all over Europe. Its fragmentation was part of its history now. Even if I lived to be a hundred and fifty and could still scramble up to the heights of the city or command a sedan chair, it was unlikely that I would ever see the Parthenon free of scaffolding, with Doric columns intact and monumental marble gods on the pediments. I would never be able to enter the temple that once housed a colossal statue of Athena and feel the proportions of the place and crane my neck to look at the friezes. The Parthenon of the present was a forlorn reminder of the Parthenon of the past.