A Room in Athens

by Frances Karlen Santamaria

  January 21

  Joshua is three months old. When he is six feet tall and taking on Jericho, I shall not be the one to tell him how he wept heartbroken tears yesterday because I put a spoonful of apricot in his mouth for the first time. The process of eating is certainly not “natural” at this age. They have to learn to swallow rather than use the tongue as in sucking, which tends to send the food back out.

  He “talked” to us all day today, as well as to his stripes and his toys.

  “When he is six feet tall and taking on Jericho …” In the baby I love, the man who will be. We love the projected man or woman almost as much as we love the real child. How do I know he won’t be four-foot-two and a coward? And if I knew he would be, could I love him the way I do? And here we are back home—once again in fantasy land. Rereading the section of the diary on how, seeing John Kennedy—who has entered the national fantasy as the lost prince—riding in an open car the night before his election, I instead had a vision of him riding on a white horse. In a way, as a mother, especially a new mother, I have to see my son, too, on a white horse.

  I wonder if women believe in their children and have confidence in them in proportion to their belief in the father? I think women are much more aware of breeding and stock than they know—or would let on—to themselves or anyone else.

  January 22

  Rereading this diary, found Mary’s description of Greek doctors as sadistic. The word sadistic keeps coming to mind. Costis told us that the social entertainment event of the year here is an annual concert or recital given by an old opera prima donna whose voice has long since failed, but who believes she can still sing. She herself gives the concert and Athenians come to sneer and to play tricks on her—lower cats onstage in the middle of her act, et cetera.

  The men will tell a woman on the street not only that she is beautiful, but, if she doesn’t please, that she is ugly and graceless. Then, there are the doctors who keep parents coming back with false diagnoses of children’s ills. The endless cheating at kiosks, in stores, in cabs—anywhere at all that money changes hands.

  I am reminded of Costis’ story about a waiter who took care of his table when he, blond and blue-eyed, was sitting with a group of Englishmen in a taverna. The waiter thought all were English and after their dinner, he gave them an enormously padded bill. Costis, who had been speaking English, suddenly collared the waiter and confronted him Greek to Greek.

  “Why?” asked Costis of the man. “The bill is preposterous! For what you charged us, we could buy the entire restaurant! So why did you do it?”

  The waiter shrugged. “I thought someone might pay,” he said.

  I am reminded of the story because of its simplicity. I don’t think the cruelties are done in a spirit of evil implied by the word “sadistic.” I think they come out of the same spirit that leads small children to mindlessly hurt animals. Simple and rather innocent. Sexual guilt may be strong here, but there are Western refinements of moral responsibility (which sometimes lead to courtesy based on empathy) that I think do not exist in this not-so-Western place.

  It is in true American fashion that I review the past year; came across, at the beginning of this diary, my naïve hope that here in Greece, we will find the secret spring in which, if we bathe long enough, we will learn how to make life yield up all its goodness (“after all, these people really know how to live”). What else was it all about—the shore and the grapes, the dancing and the octopus? In Athens, we find, instead, the sour men, the unclaimed women. (“Oh Athens is not the real Greece!” everyone protests, but I don’t believe them any more than I believe that the peasant men of Crete are jolly and tranquil. New Yorkers are Americans, Parisians are French.) In antique fashion—if I had to name it—I could almost call the past year’s journal The Death of Fantasy. And that’s okay too. I’m learning—I hope—that nobody can give that secret away, even if they want to, and no people have a corner on it.

  Dear to us ever is the banquet, and the harp, and the dance, and changes of raiment, and the warm bath, and love, and sleep,91

  says Homer, that most cultivated of men. “Natural Man is Mean.” The sentence jeers at me. If I believe both, and I do, then the answer is simple: to cultivate, one definition of which is to foster, or cherish.

  That Greece, where baths and changing clothes and sleep are sweet, and where, several thousand years ago, Homer’s hero cried out for light—if only to die by it92—is a state of the spirit only, to which plane fare can’t take you.

  January 23

  We are getting ready to leave. It is only a few days. Outside in the large airshaft or courtyard, I hear the loud voices of Karneadou Street. It is hard to believe that nine hours of flight will leave us five thousand miles away from it all, and that Quasimodo will still be muttering and hunching out in the shaft, her hanging lip thrust out over her gold teeth and simian jaw; that the Singing Athenian Mop—the maid upstairs—will continue to bat out her tuneless braying lilt in a parody of song. Quasimodo’s husband, with his unfortunate pointed head and humble manner, will forever wind copper wire around one defunct fuse after another. In a different part of Athens, Vasilios will continue to lubricate a rich couple or ease a love-starved Dutch or English girl hungering for a bit of the passionate South. Madame Kladaki, Miss Elleadou, Costis and Gella, Liesel. We leave them all in one scoop of flight and a roar.

  Arno picked up the cape we had made for me. It is magnificent, “imposing,” he says, studying me. White, handwoven Cretan wool, trimmed in black braid. My only purchase here.

  I don’t believe it! We heard it—the song! Finally, just as we’re getting ready to pack our stuff for the flight back. Last night, we went to the movie theater at Kolonaki to see an American film, Topkapi. (Melina Mercouri, crooks, and a robbery set in Greece and Turkey.) Toward the end of the film, in a scene set in a Turkish carnival, we heard it: “Hopa nina nina nai.” We stared and banged each other on the back in silent, incredulous laughter. When we left the theater, we howled on the dark streets for nearly half an hour.

  “We’re ready to go. Now I know it. We finally hear the damn thing in an American movie!” I say.

  “Yeah,” Arno says, “let’s go home. So much for idylls by the sea.”

  Chapter VII

  Return

  January 26

  Tomorrow we leave Athens for America. Drying clothes festoon the apartment, and the errands are almost all done; the gifts of dolls, bookmarks, worry beads, and coins are packed. This afternoon, Liesel went with us to the Acropolis. It was a clean, clear, windy day, with occasional bursts of sunlight. The air up there on the hilltop was as sweet and astringent with pine and sea as it was the day we drove down through Greece from Yugoslavia. From the hill, we could see all of Athens, white, spilled sprawling among the harsh, purple hills. In the distance was the violet, calm Aegean.

  We had almost not gone. The Alhambra, the flamenco dancing in Spain, Carcassonne, the castles of Wales,93 had been essentially disappointing—not in themselves but because of my inflated American expectations, fed by years of daydreams and imaginings of EUROPE. I had not wanted to be disappointed at the Acropolis; I wanted to leave myself one last illusion. Still, it seemed the thing to do. And Liesel wanted us to go.

  I am glad we went. It was nearly deserted in the winter afternoon. We clambered over sharp, white rocks and splintered stone. The Acropolis had been built as a fortress, and it sits upon high walls; I found myself quite moved looking at the entrance. Huge, blackening blocks sit one atop another. The little maneless lions are melted, eroded with age, turning black, yet oddly still white in spots.

  Age overwhelms up here. Athena’s temple94 sits in massive ruin, here a row of columns missing, there the roof. On one column, the base-stone is wider than the others, as though there has been a miscalculation. And this alone, the human error, gives some sense of the breathing past. I had wondered how the little porch of the carytids95 would look after having read of the maidens and seen so many phot
ographs. It was indeed charming, lovely. The grace of the bent knees under the draperies, the girlishness of the figures, and their stance cut in the ancient stone is still fresh. The noses have suffered, most of the maidens are without theirs now, but otherwise intact. Below the Acropolis were glimpses of old, pre-war Athens—a woman washing dishes in a sink without plumbing or pipes; yellow-washed buildings with red-tile roofs, haphazard and warm-looking—the Plaka, where we had first met Vasilios.

  As we walked chatting among the columns and glistening shards, I scooped up a little chip of marble to bring home for Josh to keep. What would it mean to him to have been born in Athens? What magic or power would it have in his life? We went into the museum.96 Paint still on statues; the beautiful little horses with delicate legs and neat, stylized manes.

  When we reached home, Josh was wailing hungrily in Francisca’s arms. Arno and I were very tired; we had been up early for the past few days and had much to do. Liesel sat with us for awhile. She began to tell us things about herself she had held back before—how she had defied her father, had studied chemical engineering in Greece and then Germany, won a scholarship at Texas University and had had to turn it down. How she loved America. But it was a doomed rebellion.

  “Even now,” she said, “I must obey my father.” As we talked, I felt sadness on leaving her behind in Greece to the narrowness of life in Athens.

  We kissed good-bye and she went home. We continued last-minute affairs. Later that night the bell rang, and for the third time that day Liesel appeared. “I brought you these,” she said, laying some records on the table. “I know how much you love the Greek music, and I want you to remember.” She stayed awhile again. It was as though she was reluctant to let us go. I was moved and sad, and yet I felt we would see her again. After she left, we started to dismantle the apartment. We had left America almost nine months before, had unpacked and repacked so often. Now we packed the scuffed canvas bags for the last time.

  January 28

  The next morning, Josh awoke at five-thirty and the big day began. I sat on the striped sofa and nursed him there in the dark for the final time. The last odds and ends in suitcases, the blue plastic bathtub fixed up as a bed for Joshua. The mattress was made of all his clothes and diapers, and the novel was stuck underneath for safekeeping. Liesel’s crib was dismantled and it and the carriage were picked up by a workman. Half an hour before we were to leave, we got a telegram saying we couldn’t be met in New York.

  I was nervous at the prospect of traveling with the baby, afraid he’d cry through the trip and I wouldn’t be able to do anything. For weeks I had been haunted by fears of crashing into the Atlantic—husband, me, baby, novel—all swallowed up in the icy waves in an agony of unkept promises, wasted potential, and blasted youth.

  Shortly before we left, there was a knock on the door and Quasimodo and her husband stood with a hugely padded bill in their hands for our utilities. There was a long, loud argument during which Arno kept saying in French, “Impossible! Impossible!” Then he said, “Poliza! Poliza!”97and crumpling the bill, he threw it in the man’s face. When they heard the word police and saw how angry we were, they slunk away without another word. When we left the building with tub, baby, and suitcases a few minutes later, Quasimodo held the door open for me smiling and saying “Au revoir, Madame, au revoir.”

  At the airport, the trouble began when Arno went to weigh our baggage and was told we wouldn’t know till noon if we had seats on the plane. Noon was three hours away and the scheduled takeoff time. We were stunned. Our ticket—sold to us by our “friend” Dinos, had cost nearly six hundred dollars, all we had, and there had been no hint that our seats weren’t assured on this chartered flight. Now we stood, our apartment given up, the baby lying in the middle of the airport on top of the novel, and all our baggage around us. Broke.

  Not knowing what else to do, we began to argue as loudly as possible. Three hours of shouting and threats of jail uncovered Dino’s attempted swindle and produced a phony passenger list on which our names had been hastily typed in a back office. By the time we boarded the plane we were thoroughly exhausted and disgusted.

  The plane was an Israeli jet carrying some Greeks, but mostly Greek-Americans, back to the States.

  The baby was in my arms as the rush of air through the huge jet began. The Greeks all crossed themselves several times as the roar grew louder and the plane moved with terrific speed down the runway until, in a second, we rose straight off the ground and at that moment of leave-taking and breathless flight, under my sweater Joshua clamped his tiny mouth onto my breast and fed with eagerness and appetite.

  Arno sat beside me and we settled comfortably together, in the habit of long, daily intimacy of the past months of travel and isolation. As we laughed and talked and ate figs from my bag, Joshua nursed himself to sleep and we placed him at our feet in the tub. We flew over the white mountains of northern Italy. It was still hard to believe it was over, past, done.

  Soon the stewardess brought lunch—a large, kosher meal that began with gefülte fish and ended with creamless coffee. We watched the Israeli crew with great interest. The men were tall and well-built with sandy hair and either blue or brown eyes. The stewardesses were attractive in a more interesting way than we are used to on American planes. They looked like alive and tough men and women. They spoke to each other in rapid Hebrew that sounded comforting to our ears after four months of hearing only Greek. They were brisk and efficient and seemed to have a certain indefinable camaraderie when speaking with one another. “These are not Yiddela,” said Arno. “They are a new breed.”98

  In London, an hour wait. The air was cold, voices muted. We had our first Coke in almost a year. Stopped-up plumbing with so-called disposable diaper. Fled ladies’ room. Since we had arrived at the Athens airport in the morning, Joshua’s eyes were popping with excitement. We boarded again for the long hop across the Atlantic. As we flew over England and Ireland, we could see snow on the brownish land below. We beamed at it, at each other, and Josh laughed and grinned and cooed as I had never seen him do before. It was as if he had caught our easing and our exhilaration; he seemed beside himself with happiness.

  We were flying at 39,000 feet and there was no glimpse of the Atlantic, only clouds. Banks of purple clouds, or clouds like snow fields, and blue sky. We flew over Nova Scotia, then saw the lights of Boston. As we flew over American land, twilight fell, and when we got to New York, it was dark. My fear of the crash returned. Could it really end perfectly? If it was going to happen, it would be soon. But it was mild fear and wove in and out of my excitement.

  We saw the lights of the New York airport twinkling, glimmering, reds and greens stretching out for miles.

  “America, Joshua!” I said. And each time I said “America,” he laughed, catching the elation in my voice. The plane was coming down. As it descended through clouds, in a moment of utter blindness, Arno and I held hands. I breathed out with relief when the wheels touched the runway with the anticipated bump.

  We bundled the baby up. It was nine degrees in New York. When I got him out of the plane, the bitter wind tore at his blankets and stung our hands and faces. I was struck by the friendliness of the airport employees, struck by the variety and types of Americans, their politeness to each other, and easy speech and humor. The variety of their dress.

  At Philadelphia, the family fell on the baby and on us. We stood and grinned with pride, numb with tiredness.

  Chapter VIII

  The Briss

  February 6

  Plans for the briss,99 the Jewish circumcision ceremony, began immediately, as Joshua was still uncircumcised. (The Greeks do not circumcise.)

  It took place the next Thursday afternoon, about a week after our return in my in-law’s living room, where we had been married five years before. The relatives started to come. My father and brother had flown in from Cleveland, although my father was weak from pneumonia (later, I found out it was terminal cancer).

 
; I was nervous, fearing the baby would have pain. We were not prepared for the sight of the moyl,100 who arrived at three o’clock. At the circumcisions of nephews and cousins there had always been a ubiquitous little old man in a black coat and hat with a wrinkled, efficient wife to whom he spoke in Yiddish as he performed the little operation in the privacy of the bedroom. (“They say he sucks the blood,” someone would inevitably whisper.) The mother, always wearing a brand-new blue nylon bathrobe, kept out of sight of the proceedings until the ceremony was over and the party had begun.

  Our moyl, a Mr. Shoulson, turned out to be a radiant young man with fresh skin that seemed unearthly smooth and white, and a handsome goatee. (He was a weekend folksinger, we found out later, and a frustrated, would-be medical student.) His suit was fashionable and his head with the white yarmulka was strong and beautiful. He worked with surgical equipment at a card table in the dining room, making preparations while the baby lay happily upstairs kicking in the crib, with Thel, his godmother, bending over him. He was dressed up for the occasion (sacrifice, I kept thinking) in a blue shirt and striped blue-and-white shorts and white booties with pom-poms she had brought that day. He was the size and weight of a six-month baby and he laughed delightedly and unsuspectingly in his deep, husky voice.

  Nervous, I had a drink. When our moyl was ready, the godfather proudly carried Joshua downstairs. Joshua looked around at the crowd of great-uncles and aunts and grandparents with sweetness and open-eyed curiosity. Shoulson smiled and talked to him, commenting he’d never performed the operation on any but an eight-day-old child.

  The baby was passed from the arms of his godfather to his father while prayers were said in Hebrew and English. Then he was placed on the crossed arms of both his grandfathers while the moyl prayed. Finally, he was put on the little board on the table. His arms were tied up over his head in a receiving blanket. His sturdy legs were put into wide leather bands on the board. Arno seemed excited but felt, I think, calmer than I.