this manufactured beverage in your dream, be on guard of superficial relationships. If you yourself are drinking it, your motives toward them may be suspect without your having realized it.”
I hear shutters beginning to open on the courtyard, sounds of televisions and radios. A woman emerges onto her balcony and signals to a neighbor across the way with a “
Pssst, psst
, Katerina,” exactly like Leporello in
Don Giovanni.
I had never thought about how brilliantly Mozart understood the community of balconies until now. My own telephone rings. “I knew you would come here,” says my friend Kostas. I had known Kostas in the United States, where he went to college, and has some family, and I had seen him struggling with the dilemma of where to settle. In the end, with no clear resolution, he returned to Thessaloniki, the northern city which is Greece’s “second capital,” where he practices law now. He jokes now that it should have been London, and not either Thessaloniki or Boston, because he can’t get a high enough dosage of Shakespeare ineither. Kostas loves Shakespeare probably more than anyone I know, with an almost sports-fan-like fanaticism, and his conversation is usually full of hidden Shakespeare, like those drawings in children’s books where you are supposed to find how many clocks or cats are hidden in the picture. I had thought about Antony and Cleopatra earlier this afternoon, and now, with impeccable Shakespearian telepathy, Kostas is on the phone.
“I knew you would come,” he repeats, “I knew it in the States.”
“How did you know that?” I ask, familiar with his bouts of both real and imaginary omniscience.
“I knew it because you love
A Winter’s Tale
most of all the Shakespeare plays,” he says cryptically, and we arrange to meet on his impending trip to Athens.
“Kosta,” I ask, “do you have an
oneirokritis
at home?”
“My sister does at her place.”
“Would she let me borrow it for a few weeks?”
“I think so, but you know Artemidorus, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I say, “I have his book with me, but there are dreams in it that nobody can dream anymore. I know what you dreamed of in the second century. But I want to find out what you’ve dreamed of since.”
“Well, I will see if I can wrest the book from Angeliki’s grip. And until I get there, keep in mind what Emmanuel Roidis, our great unread nineteenth-century novelist, said about my country: ‘Every nation has its cross to bear: In England, for example, it’s the weather. In Greece, it’s the Greeks.’ ”
I MMORTALITY
I tear off a slice of the flat bread I bought yesterday from a Lebanese bakery—it leaves floury traces on the cutting board. My electricity is “on vacation,” as they say here, because of sympathy strikes with the bus drivers. The hours that different neighborhoods will be without power are posted in the newspapers and announced on news bulletins during the day. Hospitals, merchants, schools, commuters, all suffer from the power cuts, but they are in an odd way an expression of a national ideal, that all experience should be communal, both in family and in political life.
I use my hours without electricity this morning to wander in my neighborhood, beginning to find my way around. The hills of Athens make it a labyrinth, easy to get lost in. You can be near a familiar main avenue and be utterly unaware of it, wandering in a cul-de-sac that seems to have no relation to your landmark. That is true of the language too, which is a language of enclaves. When you learn Greek, you aren’t learning one language, but two or three, and there are uncountable ranges of patois.
I discover a street that is like a miniature village, which has grapevines bearing grapes strung from house to house. In Athenswhat you tread on underfoot is most likely to be figs, or oranges or lemons that drop from the fruit-bearing trees onto the streets. On another corner, a man is changing a hubcap with
I hear shutters beginning to open on the courtyard, sounds of televisions and radios. A woman emerges onto her balcony and signals to a neighbor across the way with a “
Pssst, psst
, Katerina,” exactly like Leporello in
Don Giovanni.
I had never thought about how brilliantly Mozart understood the community of balconies until now. My own telephone rings. “I knew you would come here,” says my friend Kostas. I had known Kostas in the United States, where he went to college, and has some family, and I had seen him struggling with the dilemma of where to settle. In the end, with no clear resolution, he returned to Thessaloniki, the northern city which is Greece’s “second capital,” where he practices law now. He jokes now that it should have been London, and not either Thessaloniki or Boston, because he can’t get a high enough dosage of Shakespeare ineither. Kostas loves Shakespeare probably more than anyone I know, with an almost sports-fan-like fanaticism, and his conversation is usually full of hidden Shakespeare, like those drawings in children’s books where you are supposed to find how many clocks or cats are hidden in the picture. I had thought about Antony and Cleopatra earlier this afternoon, and now, with impeccable Shakespearian telepathy, Kostas is on the phone.
“I knew you would come,” he repeats, “I knew it in the States.”
“How did you know that?” I ask, familiar with his bouts of both real and imaginary omniscience.
“I knew it because you love
A Winter’s Tale
most of all the Shakespeare plays,” he says cryptically, and we arrange to meet on his impending trip to Athens.
“Kosta,” I ask, “do you have an
oneirokritis
at home?”
“My sister does at her place.”
“Would she let me borrow it for a few weeks?”
“I think so, but you know Artemidorus, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I say, “I have his book with me, but there are dreams in it that nobody can dream anymore. I know what you dreamed of in the second century. But I want to find out what you’ve dreamed of since.”
“Well, I will see if I can wrest the book from Angeliki’s grip. And until I get there, keep in mind what Emmanuel Roidis, our great unread nineteenth-century novelist, said about my country: ‘Every nation has its cross to bear: In England, for example, it’s the weather. In Greece, it’s the Greeks.’ ”
I MMORTALITY
I tear off a slice of the flat bread I bought yesterday from a Lebanese bakery—it leaves floury traces on the cutting board. My electricity is “on vacation,” as they say here, because of sympathy strikes with the bus drivers. The hours that different neighborhoods will be without power are posted in the newspapers and announced on news bulletins during the day. Hospitals, merchants, schools, commuters, all suffer from the power cuts, but they are in an odd way an expression of a national ideal, that all experience should be communal, both in family and in political life.
I use my hours without electricity this morning to wander in my neighborhood, beginning to find my way around. The hills of Athens make it a labyrinth, easy to get lost in. You can be near a familiar main avenue and be utterly unaware of it, wandering in a cul-de-sac that seems to have no relation to your landmark. That is true of the language too, which is a language of enclaves. When you learn Greek, you aren’t learning one language, but two or three, and there are uncountable ranges of patois.
I discover a street that is like a miniature village, which has grapevines bearing grapes strung from house to house. In Athenswhat you tread on underfoot is most likely to be figs, or oranges or lemons that drop from the fruit-bearing trees onto the streets. On another corner, a man is changing a hubcap with
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