My mother was as chic as her cigarettes. This had happened in Italy too. She was a chameleon. She took on the prevailing look. In much of Greece, the prevailing look for women was a black shawl and premature age, but not in our neighborhood. Our seven-story apartment building on Kolonaki Square probably contained half the wealth in Athens. We constituted a large part of it. Our dollars made us millionaires. We had five bathrooms and six bedrooms and two kitchens, and crackled gilded mirrors built into the living room walls, and chandeliers that jingled in the breeze that blew in through the French doors open to the balcony in the mornings when Kula, the maid with a feathery touch of mustache, brought my father an orange carved into a lotus at the dining table that could seat twelve. On the street floor a café with a black-and-white-striped awning sold coffee and a sugared apricot dipped in honey and balanced on a spoon for ten times what it cost a few blocks away. Next door was a boutique so special you had to ring a bell to get in. Our first week in Greece, my mother rang the bell, went in, and bought a green suede jacket the color of an olive and a geometric-patterned, full-skirted linen dress in black and brown and a short, midriff-hugging sweater she called a shrug made of loosely knitted undyed silk yarn that she said would be perfect for an evening on a boat.
My mother at forty looked ten years younger than the other women her age who patronized that shop and whiled away their afternoons at the expensive café. Their hairdos were stiff and poufy, and their ankles were thick. They wore suits with tight, straight skirts and boxy jackets in horrid pastels, and extraordinary amounts of perfume and jewelry that clanked when they picked up their tiny cups of coffee. Here and there, though, strode her sole competition, or perhaps the look she was aiming for: a few slant-eyed beauties, Amazon-tall in their stiletto heels, often draped in a stifling, unnecessary fur wrap, wearing real pearls.
“You can tell,” my mother said, “when they’re real.”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t figure out anything that had to do with clothing and adorning. I didn’t think beyond loving my red sneakers or hating that middy blouse, and picking a T-shirt for my overalls-and-T-shirt ensemble. But the overalls didn’t fit well anymore.
This probably was because disconcerting lumps were growing on my chest. They seemed like breasts, but I pretended they weren’t anything. They were mushy and sometimes sore. Some days I had to admit that they might be breasts. Other days I’d wake and think: They’re gone! They were never gone. I couldn’t believe they were so persistent. I didn’t need them. They complicated clothing. I wanted to wear things that squashed them down and made them invisible, but anything tight enough to squash them did the opposite of making them invisible.
Before we left Cambridge my mother had got me five cotton sundresses with flower prints in Filene’s Basement. They were the kind of thing I hated. One of them was pink! There was a green one that was tolerable, but they all pulled under the arms, chafing, too tight for my new, mushy additions. To protect and disguise my breast-things, I hunched over, which made the underarm pulling and chafing worse. Also, then my mother would say, “Stand up straight.”
I sacrificed one of my two pairs of blue jeans to the scissors and created a more grownup version of my traditional costume: blue-jean Bermuda shorts. Then all I had to do was find a few shirts that weren’t too tight.
“You should tuck that in,” my mother said.
“It’s too hot,” I said. I hoped this excuse would work.
“It’s sloppy,” she said. “Tuck it in. You’ll look so much nicer.”
That was typical of her. She’d tell me I would look nicer, but what she meant was, I like it better when you tuck it in. She thought she could make me do what she wanted by appealing to my vanity. She didn’t understand that my vanity had been destroyed. It had been vanquished by what was happening to my body. If this was how I was going to look, I reasoned, I didn’t want anyone to look at me. Sloppy shirttails and frayed denim edges were perfect for deflecting interest.
In the old days, at the few moments when I thought about it, I’d liked the way I looked. I was small and could fit nicely into little spaces. I was bony and quick, and my skin was a nice brownish color, though in winter it was a rather yellowish color. But on the whole I was fine. Now I was turning into a kind of monster who had to be disguised. My mother was forever giving me tips. “If you wear a belt, it will distract from the top.” “The top” was her name for the eruptions on my chest. “Patterns are good,” she’d tell me. I knew this was part of her plot to get me to wear the sundresses. “You have such a tiny waist,” she’d say. “I wish my waist were still so small.” She could have my damned waist. All it did was accentuate the breast-things. I would have given her my waist in a second if I could have got my old self back in return.
But I couldn’t get that. I was on an inexorable march toward a new, unrecognizable me. Some nights I’d lie in bed and press them—the breasts—into my chest, hoping to push them back to wherever they’d come from. If I could get them to retreat, I’d wake up the way I’d been only a few months before, skinny and straight from top to bottom. But they had a will of their own. They wouldn’t back down.
My father was my refuge. He didn’t notice what was going on with me and my top because he was in a perpetual welter of enthusiasm. To the Agora! To lunch at the little taverna five blocks away to have kokoretsi! (I didn’t want any: livers and hearts of unknown animals on a spit.) Let’s go into this pottery store and see if there are any nice coffee cups. Then, turning to me: Is this a nice coffee cup? That meant, Would your mother like it? Neither of us was confident enough to risk her aesthetic disapproval, so we left the shop. Let’s explore the Plaka (mostly prostitutes in 1959). Let’s go to the top of Mount Lycabettus.
My mother declined all these explorations. Too hot, too much to do getting the apartment into a livable condition. The apartment was crowded with stuff in a Bigelovian manner, but the stuff wasn’t interesting or nice to look at. Every gilded side table had its bronze shepherdess, every marble mantelpiece its curly tinkly clock, every corner its half-size plaster replica of a statue whose eternal original lived ten minutes away at the National Archaeological Museum. Lurid little rugs were scattered throughout, waiting to trip you. As in Italy, there was a superfluity of furniture, but in Italy that had been cozy (and the furniture had been beautiful) and here it was bothersome. And, as my mother said every day when my father proposed a trip—Let’s go to Epidaurus—we were here for a year and she just couldn’t live with it the way it was.
She wanted my father and me out of the house so that she could enlist Kula the maid with her peasant strength to help move at least half the furniture into one of the several unused bedrooms. My sister trotted around with them, chattering in Greek, which she’d learned in two weeks from sitting in the kitchen while Kula made lotuses out of oranges and soup out of lemons and seven-egg omelettes and all the other peculiar things she had to offer us, about which my mother said, “I’ve got to get a handle on Kula’s menus, but that’s the project after this one.” In the mornings my father and I stood in the doorway, flanked by a miniature discus thrower on one side and a dwarfish Poseidon hurling an invisible spear on the other, and waited for our good-bye kisses, while the maddened female trio planned their attack for that day.
Our attacks on Athens were not so carefully planned. In an uncharacteristically relaxed decision, my father had declared the entire city—the entire country—to be a museum. Therefore, as long as he had his Guide Bleu to document our activities with, it didn’t matter if we were meandering, dead-ending, or, often, totally lost. Wherever we were there was Something. That’s the Church of the Haghii Assomati, not just a brown brick heap. Oh look! This confusing pile of rocks is the Pnyx. Usually we weren’t looking for the thing we ended up standing in front of. It didn’t matter. He would flutter the pages of the guide as I shifted from one hot foot to another, waiting to be instructed. His endurance was astonishing. He never needed to pee, he never needed to eat, he never
got tired of the brick heaps or the toppled columns strewn among the cafés and the fruit markets and the cheesy souvenir stands. If we headed out to the Panathenaic Stadium and instead ended up watching the evzones lift their red slippers toward their noses in Syntagma Square, he didn’t care.
Only one thing was stronger than my father: the heat.
We were both foolish. We thought we were tough because we were used to the intemperate Cambridge climate, which ranged from arctic to a swampy Floridian humidity, and we’d weathered a summer in Italy. Athens in July at midday was intolerable. All the metaphors people used about summer—my brains are fried, it’s an oven, it’s an inferno—turned out to be plain description. Our brains fried. It was an oven. It was an inferno. There wasn’t a Greek on the street between one and four. It was the kind of heat that could kill you. I could see why it had been personified as a golden chariot drawn by golden horses whipped on by a golden, molten god.
But like the sun itself my father pursued his daily rounds, dragging me, his satellite, along. He consented to an hour’s break for lunch, but then it was back to the blaring pavement, the glittering ruins, the relief when we turned in to a shady street. The shade was as palpable as the sun, a musty, dry, stuccoed shade where I could almost manage a shiver.
And so passed our first several weeks, carless in Athens.
My father had postponed until some auspicious moment the conquest of the Acropolis.
One morning my mother said, “I’ve got to conclude the so-called redecoration by the end of tomorrow or I will go nuts.”
“So will I,” said my father.
The next day, the last day of my mother’s frenzy, was the day he chose to go to the Parthenon. It was like all the other days. The delicate, rosy sun came up above the yellow city and by mid-morning had built heights of heat that you thought could not be surpassed, and which were surpassed every twenty minutes. We ate our oranges and toast with honey and were on our way by nine-thirty. In consideration of our adventure’s scope, my father stopped in a café at the foot of the Acropolis, where he ordered me a fortifying baklava and lemonade. He had coffee—the tiny super-sweet Greek coffee that is half dregs and that leaves a thick residue in the cup and on the throat. Then we started up the long, already hot footpath.
There were the remnants of marble stairs, but mostly underfoot was rubble and dirt. Stunted, dry vegetation had attracted some dusty goats. We passed an antique man with a box camera on a wooden tripod, napping on his stool. In the clear, dry air we could hear snatches of German floating down from above us.
“Why are there always Germans?” I asked.
“Germans are mad for Greece,” my father said. “Just like the English. But right now, the Germans can afford to come and the English can’t.”
It was too hot to ask why the Germans but not the English could afford to come.
We kept trudging upward.
It’s in the nature of a steep-sided outcropping that the top isn’t visible from the approaches, and for much of the climb I was too hot to look around or to look forward to where we were going. My father was a few steps ahead. His shirt was soaked, stretched wet across his back. A sudden gray-green lizard froze near my foot, looking up at me. We exchanged glances, then he vanished into a rock.
We reached the top.
A moment when the world unfolds: few of those, in life. Everything peeled back. I could hear it rolling away. This was the skeleton of humanity I was seeing, this colonnaded marble spine. And after the hiss of the shivering unrolling there was silence. It was an uncanny silence, indifferent and detached. Thousands of years of quiet floated in the hot, bright air.
We stood in the shadow of the Parthenon’s broken pediment, between the columns where the sun had not yet heated the stone. My father raised his arm and pointed west.
“The plain of Attica,” he said.
So this is reality, I thought. It’s hot and bare and permanent, it’s broken and chipped and huge, it will last forever, even in ruins, it will make you speechless.
We stood there for a while, until the sun invaded our recessed shade. Thick, black shimmering shadows made a Parthenon on the floor. We walked around the rim of the temple through these shadows and the light in between them. The difference in temperature was as sharp as a sound, as if we were walking on the black and white keys of a vast piano made of marble and daylight.
My father stopped again to point to a small building below.
“That’s the Erechtheion,” he said. “Look, look at the pillars.”
“They’re girls!” It was a relief to see something on a human scale, with a human face. Six girls standing on the edge of a temple, just as we were.
“Let’s go down there,” my father said.
It was a scramble. The way was littered with chunks and bits, sometimes fallen so I could see that this had been a column. Now it was a horizontal, dismantled column. Mostly, though, there were hunks and blocks of stone lying around in disarray.
“How come it’s such a mess up here?” I asked. “It looks like it got blown up.”
“It did,” he said. “The Turks were using the Parthenon to store their ammunition in, and the Venetians attacked it. So the whole thing blew up.”
“When was that?”
“About three hundred years ago,” my father said. “Until then, it looked the same way it had when it was built.”
“That’s crazy! Why would the Turks put their ammunition in there?”
My father shook his head. “Well, it was big, and nobody was doing anything else with it.” Then he said, “They didn’t think much of the Greeks.”
“And the Greeks let them do that?”
“They didn’t have any choice. The Turks owned Greece. It was part of their empire. And the Venetians were at war with the Turks. That’s how it happened.” He walked on a little bit. “Let’s not think about it right now. All of that is sad.”
My father rarely used the word sad.
From where we were, below it, the Parthenon was anything but sad. It was splendid. There was nothing to say about it, that’s how wonderful it was to stand and look at it. As we picked our way over to the stone girls on their parapet, I wondered about what my father thought was so sad.
He must have meant the wrecking of the temple: For two thousand years it had been fine and then, boom, it was shattered. But it wasn’t completely gone, and it looked correct anyhow. It looked just right to me. Whoever built it had planned it so well that it didn’t matter if half of it got blown up, because it was perfect and so whatever was left was perfect too.
“Now these are the caryatids,” my father said to me. “These girls.” He seemed halfhearted about giving instruction, which was fine with me. He hadn’t opened the guidebook since we’d started our walk up the Acropolis.
“I know that,” I said. And I did know that, though I hadn’t quite put it together that these statues were those caryatids. Seeing them in a picture was one thing; being with them was something so different as to have made me forget that I knew them already, sort of.
We looked up at them. They looked out over our heads, the way they’d been looking out for thousands of years. A couple of them had a tiny bit of a smile, more the idea of a smile than the real thing.
The day was getting hotter and there wasn’t any shelter out in the rubble. Even though it didn’t have a roof, the Parthenon had been better—all those long shadows to duck into. Also, the girls, in the end, were as disengaged and impassive as everything else. I’d been misled by their faces, by the fact that they had faces. I thought that would make them comforting because they would be like me in some way. They weren’t. They weren’t like anything except themselves. Nothing on the Acropolis was like anything anywhere else. That was what made all of it stark and immobile and unyielding and unbearable.
That’s what it was: unbearable.
“It’s getting a bit hot,” my father said.
It must have been over 100 degrees.
“
Let’s go to the museum,” he said. “They put a lot of the Parthenon sculptures in there to preserve them.”
“In case somebody else tries to blow them up?” I asked.
He didn’t laugh. “Things were eroding from pollution and weather. And people stole a lot of them. Like Lord Elgin. Do you remember the Elgin Marbles in London?”
I didn’t.
“We saw them,” he persisted. “Magnificent horses. You don’t remember them?”
“I don’t see how you could steal things this big,” I said. “Even the broken things are huge.”
“You get a crane and a crew. It takes a lot of organization.”
“But why didn’t the Greeks stop them? Why did they let people come here and steal stuff and blow it up? Could we just come here with a crane and take away a caryatid?”
“Not anymore,” my father said. “But when you could, people did. It’s because the Greeks were always part of some bigger empire, so they weren’t strong enough to look out for their own interests. But, you know, this isn’t the only country that got looted by empire builders. Napoleon took half of Egypt back to Paris. The Romans started it. They’d take obelisks and whatnot from cities they’d conquered and set them up around Rome.”
“Bragging,” I said.
“Exactly. And the early archaeologists, in the nineteenth century, took just as much as the Romans ever had. Nobody had the idea that an ancient site ought to be left intact, that it was more meaningful that way. Everything was a trophy.”
“Where’s the museum?” I asked. I was feeling woozy from the heat, and I wanted to interrupt my father’s archaeology lecture.
“Of course,” he went on, “it is wonderful to be able to go to the British Museum and see that winged lion from Nimrud—”
“Daddy,” I said, “where is this museum up here?”
“Oh.” He stopped and looked around. “It’s over this way,” he said. He didn’t sound convinced, but he strode off, looking purposeful.