Dinner with Persephone Read Online Free

eyes.
    The
periptero
man waves me over. “You just move here?” he asks, framed by newspapers hanging over his head like national flags from wooden poles. There are the Everydays, the Afternoons, the Newses, the Free Presses, the Uprootings, as some of the dizzying range of Greek newspapers, journals usually openly affiliated with political parties, are called. There is
Estia
, named after the goddess of the hearth, which in the nineteenth century serialized many of the first modern Greek novelists, and is now one of the most vitriolic of right-wing papers, referring to Bosnia-Herzegovina as a “Turkish protectorate.” There are the magazines named as if they were philosophical categories:
Images, It Is, She, Woman, One
, and the Greek satirical paper
The Mouse.
    “Yes, I’m here for a year,” I answer, aware of the constantly shifting passage through Athens of diaspora Greeks, students, tourists, international scholars, and EEC employees. I choose a carton of strawberry juice from the kiosk refrigerator. Except for certain wines and cold mountain water, I have never drunk anything as perfect as Greek fruit juices, each as distinct in timbre and character as the instruments of an orchestra.
    “And you’re Greek?” the
peripteras
asks.
    “No,” I say.
    “But you speak Greek?”
    “Yes, but I still talk a lot of
ardzi, bourdzi
, and
loulas
,” I say, using a Greek phrase for nonsense that amuses people when they hear it, a phrase that plays with the idea of being fluent in nonsense.
    “So how much a week do you have to live on?” he asks.
    “Enough for
horta
, greens, at the
laiki
,” I say, and catch the light to cross.
    “Well, buy your newspapers here,” he calls after me, “and you can practice your Greek too. Here we speak Greek for absolutely nothing. Even though it is an expensive language to speak.”
    Just beyond, a shop window offers a new line of wedding and baptism invitations, all embossed with a gold Star of Vergina, the symbol marking some of the grave treasures of Philip of Macedonia, Alexander the Great’s father. The vegetable and fruit stalls of the
laiki
are hung with the most beautiful agriculture I’ve ever seen: olives in many colors, grapes so real they make fancy grocers’ bunches seem like Victorian wax ornaments, eggplants that are the royal porphyry that was the exclusive color of the Byzantine imperial family, branches of bay leaves that are called Daphne here, after the nymph who metamorphosed into the laurel tree to escape being raped by Apollo. “Wherever I go and wherever I stay,” wrote the novelist Kazantzakis, “I grasp between my teeth, like a bay laurel leaf, Greece.”
    The sellers shout for the shoppers’ attention. “
Aromata kai khromata
,” perfumes and colors, says one, scooping up handfuls of ruby-colored cherries. He gives me one to sample and enjoys my response. The fruit has something more than flavor; it evolves—it has drama. “It’s the sun,” he says. “We get more sun than any other country in Europe, and it concentrates all the sugars in the fruits and vegetables. And we pick them ripe, just before we sell them.” The only other place I find with fruits and vegetables to equal this brilliance, when I travel there at the end of my year here, is Turkey.
    I pass a stall with barrels of grains that are collectively called here
demetriaka
, after the Greek goddess Demeter, as we call them cereals, after the Roman goddess Ceres, a subtle reminder of complicated historical fissures and parallels. The Western world is called the Western world because it descends from the western Roman Empire, while Greece belonged to the eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium. The polarity of the relations between the two and the cultural dominance of one over the other are rarely as clear in their contrasts as they are often presented. These empires seemed not so much to face each other like black and white champions across a chessboard as to be enmeshed dynamically