Athens

Athens my Grandmother

My birth certificate says I was born in Thessaloniki, but don't put much stock in birth certificates. I'm an Athenian. From the 5,000 or so inhabitants which Athens had in 1827, one was the father of my maternal great-grandfather; in other words, the grandfather of my grandmother on Mama's side. That good man had a number of vegetable farms-later owned by the cousins of my grandmother when I was a boy-down there, near Saint John's at Rendi, just six kilometers from the Acropolis.

"One day," my grandmother said, recalling for my benefit those vegetable farms, "Grandpa, God forgive him, brought a head of cabbage up to the house for us. He set it down on the kitchen table, gave my tresses a teasing yank, then went away. Later that day Mama put me to peeling the potatoes. While I was peeling away, I saw the head of a snake slithering up out of that cabbage. At first I went numb, then I let out this scream: 'Mama! Mama! A snake!' Now, not all snakes bite, some are even good and bring you luck. In the old days every house had its snake, and you had better never kill it! I remember a certain husband of a friend of mine who killed theirs, and since that day their luck went downhill. But back then when I was just a little girl and didn't know about such things..."

My great-grandfather turned his back on his father's vegetable business and opened a coffeehouse at the intersection of Kolokynthous and Piraeus streets, across from the Foundling Home. His wife was from Andros, but all their children-the eldest being my grandmother-were born in Athens, which in the meantime had grown, boasting several majestic neo-classical buildings and some 80,000 inhabitants. Whenever their children wished to play away from home, which was also located on a side street off Kolokynthous, they would go over to Kerameikos, the ancient cemetery.

"I was the eldest," my grandmother said, "I practically weaned all my brothers and sisters. Every time the boys vanished, Mama, God bless her soul, would send me over to Kerameikos to see if by chance they were playing there. To tell you the truth, back then I didn't know that it was an old boneyard, but even if I had known, why should I have been scared? What can the dead do to you? God protect you from the living..."

I can't really see my grandmother as a little girl of 11 or 12, out searching for her brothers and sisters, whom I never knew anyway. But I can imagine her as she is in her oldest photograph, still a little girl, picking wildflowers on a spring day near the stele of Heghisso, with whom she shared an astonishing facial resemblance. She told me once how after her wedding she had thought that by changing neighborhoods she would be free from her mother's tyrannical control. So she managed to move into a house about 500 meters further up, in the Thiseion district.

"Do you see that house there? That's where I lived after I married your grandfather. I have often been tempted when passing by to knock on the door, go inside, and take a look around, but what's the use? Hm! And that's where your precious mother was born. When we left, let's see, she must have been either seven or eight years old..."

"When we left" meant "when we moved" to Thessaloniki, where some 10 years later I was born. But this exiling of ourselves didn't last very long. In the early thirties what was left of the family moved back to Athens-whose population was now approaching one million-having in the meantime purged through deaths and divorce those "foreign bodies," who in my grandmother's view, were my Siatista grandfather and my Salonika father.

The first house into which we moved was naturally in one of my grandmother's old haunts, at the corner of Kolokynthous and Leonidas Streets, near where most of her cousins, nephews, and nieces still lived. So before moving out and into another, better neighborhood-Kolokynthous having in the meantime become a red-light district-I lived for a time in the atmosphere of the family mythology. It's true that I never played in the Kerameikos, which since those days had been walled off anyway. But it was in its vicinity that I first began to stray away, bumming around, hopping the Botanical Gardens tram, which passed in front of my school on Alexander the Great Street, and then getting off at the Hatzikostas Orphanage, just a skip and a jump from the Kerameikos district. Often, my grandmother and I would visit those vegetable farms from which my family sprouted. It was there that I first tried atzouria, those acrid little cucumbers that have since disappeared.

On Sundays I would go to the same church to which my grandmother went as a little girl-the Foundling Home church. And now and again I played where my mother had played, in the garden of the Thiseion. At that house on Leonidas Street I received, when they found out from my teacher that I had been riding the tram, the most memorable beating of my life. I also took walks with my grandmother at the foot of the Acropolis, although we never did go, true Athenians that we were, to the top. In '35 I saw my first Lent Costume Carnival in the Psyrri Quarter, while from Philopappus Hill I flew my first kite-but its string got tangled with another boy's, and although his kite eventually flew out of the tangle and continued soaring proudly, mine plunged to the ground in shreds.

Later we moved, as I said, into a better neighborhood along the foot of Lycabettus Hill, the part starting on the less fashionable side of Hippocratous Street. Whenever I played hooky from school-and I played hooky often, especially when the night before I hadn't been able to solve my math problems-I would go over to the Lycabettus quarries and play soccer. There, inside those small caves, I hid my first innocent, and shortly thereafter not-so-innocent, loves. Below and around Lycabettus I spent my tortured teenage years, which, alas, also coincided with the four years of the war and the German Occupation. Finally, between those two big rocks, the Acropolis and Lycabettus Hill, I grew into manhood, if indeed I dare to make such a claim myself. True, later I left. For some 10 years I wandered over half the world; I encountered my own Cyclopses and Lotus-Eaters; and I did return to live, not in one of those new quarters bereft of tradition of history in today's megalopolis of two, and now three, million, but rather once again below that big rock, the Hill of Lycabettus. This time, on the fashionable Dexameni side, where I also had lived briefly as a child and as a teenager.

So you shouldn't put much stock in birth certificates, you see. I'm an Athenian, a fifth generation one at that. Over the past 40 years I have seen many, yes, many changes-for the worse. Now it's one thing to gain knowledge from books-"perhaps right where we're walking now Socrates once sat down with Phaedrus"-but it's something else again if you have learned firsthand, if you can say: "Do you see that bustling avenue over there, choked with cars and exhaust fumes? Well, back when I was a kid it was a riverbed-strewn with litter, granted; but it really was a gentle waterway that nourished the remaining plane trees..."

What I'm trying to say is that I see Athens through the prism of vast time, from prolonged years, as no newcomer from the provinces or foreign tourist can ever see. And from these same prolonged years I am able to see myself. When I take a walk, let's say on Philopappus Hill, especially in springtime, and my eye falls on one of those things that the English call "French letters" and the French "English hoods," I am apt to feel a certain melancholy, where someone else might be shocked or disgusted. "Good God!" I say to myself, "How life has changed me, just as it has Athens! Who would ever think that there was a time when I really believed this hill existed for no other reason but for children to fly their kites from!" So, as the years go by I have come to feel that I am not simply an Athenian but indeed a piece of Athens herself, something like a microscopic, moveable, archaeological monument. Sometimes when I go out on my terrace in the evening to water the plants-geraniums, jasmine, basil, hibiscuses-and look up at the provincial visitors and tourists crowded around the belfry of Saint George to gaze out over Athens, I have the strange and perhaps arrogant feeling that I am-it doesn't matter that they don't know it-just one of those postcards which they buy and send back home.

I have lived in many cities. Some of them-Sydney, New York-I truly loved and would gladly visit again, if only once every five years. But in the time I have left in this life, it is here in Athens, above all, that I desire to live, and here, when my time comes, to end my days. Unless, of course, something terrible and unexpected happens, and it may well come about that way, at a time when her population will have reached five million, five and a half at the height of the tourist season. At that point, I sometimes think to myself, nearly nothing will be left of my Athens, the Athens that I loved. She may end her days before me. But then something inside me tells me I am wrong. For unless some great cosmic change takes place, the hills of Lycabettus and Philopappus will remain standing for a long time, I hope forever. Of course by then they will have been 'developed' by some municipal or federal branch of government in shocking bad taste, and fenced off with barbed wire. But children and lovers will always find a way to open up a secret passage, just so big an opening as it takes to crawl in and have fun.

No matter how polluted the air becomes, the honey-colored Athens autumn won't ever change very much, nor the mild Athens winter with its halcyon days, nor the intoxicating spring, nor the narcotic summer with its occasional evening breezes. No matter how dirty the Saronic Gulf becomes, there will always remain somewhere, I hope, a relatively clean beach. In the meantime, men may be traveling on business to the moon, but the magic of the moon as it creeps over the crest of Mount Hymettos will always be the same. And that unique light of the Attic sky, that too will be difficult to alter. And within the hell which they say Athens will have become in a few years will always exist that tiny paradise, the Kessariani Monastery, just 10 minutes from the center of the city. Although not one will remain of those small old houses that we knew, those houses with so much human worth. Still, in the gaudy apartment buildings going up in their place will dwell for many years to come people who speak more or less the same Greek as I do, even if frayed and threatening to expire as a language-will it have been its first attempt at dying? There will be people here who think and feel more or less as I do, young men and women who, as long as books exist (it can't be otherwise, surely, even if few in number), will read what I have written.

Some claim that Athens is already a hell. They complain bitterly about the endless rattling of the jackhammers and the thundering of the concrete mixers, about the constant tearing of the sidewalks, about the dust that makes even more excruciating the aridity of the nearly treeless cityscape, about Athenian housewives and their awful habit of shaking rugs out over their balconies, about the quarry devouring Mount Hymettos like gangrene, about the impunity strangely accorded those who burn up forests in order to clear construction sites, about the inadmissible traffic problems and the tickets given to people parking illegally outside their own homes, and about so many other things. The old Athenians blame it all on those who moved here from the provinces, who have swooped down on Athens like locusts, and the two groups together blame the tourists-another, and even worse scourge.

But anyone can find a means to explain all that away-rationalizing is an art that Greeks have perfected to an incredible degree, otherwise they would never have survived. A Greek would say: "What's all this uproar? Better the dust of Attica than nuclear fallout, better an unjust parking ticket than a charge of committing a lewd and unnatural act, better tourism than Nazism-so long as they don't co-exist, of course..." As for myself, I don't say a thing. I just sit perched up on my terrace like Athena's owl and watch people and the years-I almost said centuries-go by. Sometimes, to take my mind off things, I fly to the top of Mount Hymettos. From that distance Athens still looks like she used to.... Moreover, I transform myself endlessly-the spirit of the place compels you-into a satyr or a nymph. I walk to the top of Philopappus Hill and listen, smiling, to the mawkish yet poignant and sweet talk of lovers. Perhaps that young man, I think to myself, is the son of the boy who downed my kite while his continued to soar. Or, leaving the Plaka to its tourists, I stroll through the narrow, dim little streets of Psyrri with their heartrending names-Hebe Street, Kalaischron Street-and relive, in my own way, the Lent Costume Carnivals of my childhood years.

Once or twice, recently, late at night, I have let my car drive me where it willed: out to Saint John's at Rendi. There, amidst the factories spewing out polluted fumes and the working-class apartment buildings, a few vegetable patches still exist. I didn't get out of my car, though. Not because I was afraid I would see a snake slithering through the cabbage heads. I'm not afraid of snakes. What can snakes do to you? God protect you from these humans....

The road back into the city passes alongside the cemetery of the Kerameikos, and once-I just couldn't resist the temptation. I parked my car outside that recent ugly Christian church and walked over to the fence, my eyes intently riveted to the spot at which I knew the stele of Heghisso had been, when suddenly I swear I saw my blessed grandmother, big as life, looking at me with tender serenity and saying: "Ah well! You could've turned out worse, I suppose..." And then, just like that, she vanished. Thanks to her-and let those birth certificates say what they will-I'm Athenian. Thanks to her I love Athens. Some people say, nowadays the state she's in, this city is the ugliest capital in the whole world. I don't know about that, nor do I really care. Beautiful or ugly, she's unique. She's the city in which my grandmother was born, where she lived and died. I should naturally tell you that from my point of view-unlike Athens herself-she was a monster, often wreaking havoc on me when I was a child and a teenager. But what can I do? In the whole of my life she was the only woman I ever loved.

by Costas Tahtsis