This is a guest editorial by Elizabeth Herring
It isn’t the first time I’ve been asked to expound upon the subject – I am, after all, one of the ticking group to which my foreign friend refers. (Nor is it the first time I’ve felt, Herr Freud notwithstanding, that the unexamined life must be the only one worth living.)
For how is it possible to describe the Athenians? What does make us tick? What are we like? (And have you got several years for even the abbreviated beginning of an answer?)
Perhaps one can generalize about the Parisians, and John Russell does so in his recent book, Paris.
He can get away with “Parisians take nothing for granted,” or “Parisians watch people the way birders watch birds, and they are never deceived,” for example. He can go on and on with such succinct observations and, having lived amongst Parisians – albeit briefly; I couldn’t wait to get back to Athenians -I tend to agree with him: Russell’s pronouncements on the Parisians hold wa-ter, or wine…
But generalize about the Athenians?
Whenever I begin to describe us, I find myself compiling a catalogue of minute, specific, contradictory bits of observation about individuals and their individually quirky behaviors – each bit at odds with every other bit, like tesserae at war in a sort of biochemical mosaic.
And the picture I come up with would only incite further exasperation (and admiration?) from the foreigner unwittingly dropped into our schizophrenic midst. What makes us tick? Everything. Who are we? Everyone. If one makes some generalizations about us, does one err? Every time.
For, you will find…
Athenians are blue-eyed Macedonian bakers with ginger moustaches and big ruddy knuckles driving vans purchased in Frankfurt full of croissants; Italian-speaking, Rhodian goldsmiths with ex-opthalmic eyes the color of dark pansies, and two sons at Oxford; Sicilian-Constantinople refugees, swallowing our lamdas and practicing medicine on Mykonos; and members of every other foreign Greek-community-come-home, from New Zealand and Zimbabwe, to Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan – bringing with us Greek dialects and cultural idiosyncrasies born of the mix of Greek and African, Greek and Arab, Greek and American cultures – hatched in all those one-of-a-kind and never-again nurseries of the diaspora, but now come home to roost in the cradle of democracy.
We may reside in a three-story penthouse on the slopes of Lykabettos with a live-in Filipina maid who speaks no Greek and only her own brand of English, but who, nevertheless, has been taught to make moussaka, for twenty.
Yet we may also scrub floors for our neighbors’ money in the morning, collect their children from school at midday, and go home to drink ourselves silly in the afternoon, left alone by grown children with only a cross eyed cat for company.
Or, we may be an unmarried couple living with the child of his former marriage in Ghizi, commuting “home” to some western island for the olive harvest, and never feeling really at ease in the big city.
We are dues-paying members of Weight Watchers, who repair to the plateia in the cool of the evening for a Black Venus torte, or Peach Melba, with our equally portly companions. But we are up early the next morning for tennis lessons in Halandri or several hours of buffeting by those strangely ineffectual machines at the slimming studio.
Too, we are svelte and tall and post New Wave, outfitted in knock-offs of Paris’ latest – billowy, multi-pocketed trousers to the knee, black flats (a marriage of Uniroyal Tire and the Roman Legion,) a midi-blouse with padded shoulders but everything else quite visible to all through khaki-colored net.
We are short-tempered and shrill, and everyone gets quite a piece ofour mind if we get out of bed on the wrong side. The Laiki man weighing cherries in his rigged scale, for example, the taxi driver who goes a block out of our way, and the waiter who overcharges us ten drachmas are all told, in no uncertain terms, what to do with “their Virgins.”
We are also the world’s most generous and selfless and modest friends, picking up a taverna bill for six and using our rent and electric bill money to pay, cooking chicken soup or Briam for a sick friend every morning before going off to work, and delivering it to his door, taking in relatives, tourists and others in need, and never demanding any consideration in return. In some ways, we Athenians still operate by the village laws of hospitality, and see Athens as just the largest of our country’s villages.
We are in awe, still, of anything made abroad – the word megla (Made In England) still in use – but we also make fun of ourselves and exhort one and all to “buy Greek.” When we do, we are often pleasantly surprised by the quality.
We queue-barge without batting an eye, and then lambast those who cut in on us. Yet, too, after a sweltering two-hour wait at the polls, we are still quite willing to let yet another pregnant woman or mother trailing her (borrowed?) brood go in to vote before we do.
Athenians will unhesitatingly steal taxis out from under one another’s noses, cut one another off ruthlessly in traffic, and give pedestrians no quarter whatsoever. (“God gave them two eyes, didn’t He?”)
For “one little second, only” we abandon our vehicles in mid-street while we collect our drycleaning or drop a daughter at her ballet, or French, or piano, or drawing lesson, and we invent unbelievable but creative excuses for the traffic piled up and honking behind us when we return.
As new drivers, we hang a giant “N” in our car’s rear window: A skull and cross-bones would be more indicative of our driving skills.
We Athenians are more politically involved than anyone else in the world – yes, there is one generalization that holds ouzo – and we debate the merits and demerits of our myriad parties and their spokesmen from dawn till dusk. Athenians may be easily distinguished as belonging to one party or another by what newspaper they choose to hammer home their arguments on the cafe table.
When evening comes, however, PASOK, ND and KKE troop off together for an evening of wine and song at a local kentro, where newspapers and tempers are checked at the door.
In the summer, we still ship our wives off to the islands while we stay in town and work like demons all day so we can spend the evenings with our newfound foreign companions. Or, more modern, we may bundle our husbands off to make room for that delightful younger man.
(We are resourceful, if a bit Victorian, in our mores.)
We may also be scrupulously moral in a neo-European sense, eschew marriage, live together, share expenses, and do the dishes every other day. We take the baby to the park in the stroller while our wives go to the cinema, and we even find we enjoy it.
We are excellent, if curious, neighbors, and rarely confront one another if there is a less direct face-saving method of achieving peace. We don’t even bother about yelling or banging our shutters when the youth downstairs plays disco music at 3 a.m. Poor dear, he’s going into the army next month.
We are rotten, meddling mothers-in-law and, remembering our rotten, meddling mothers-in-law, we are tender, tactful mothers-in-law.
We are scrupulously clean housekeepers, and we leave our trash bags on street corners for the cats to get into: Then we heave stones at the cats.
We marry for money. We marry for love. We marry the girl from Neo Iraklion that Aunt Cassiani sent out to Africa for us to marry.
We speak four languages fluently, but cannot, for the life of us, give adequate directions to the train station.
We will guard the tourist’s purse, left by accident on the park bench, with our lives.
We will also do you out of twenty thousand in a business deal if we can get away with it.
We will bail a friend of a friend of Niko’s out of jail if we hear of his need.
We will never ever steal a friend’s girlfriend.
We call a projectionist who mangles the film reel a “butcher,” the youth who dances divinely a palikari, or “brave young man. “In moments of rage, we can call our wives anything under the sun. In moments of love, they are “our dolls,” “our spirits,” “our eyes,” “our lives.”
We are vain and humble, sensual and distant, demanding and patient to a fault; we are hard of hearing when we watch T.V., attentive to friends’ unspoken needs and stingy with all but our immediate families, always late for everything but doctors’ appointments (yes, there’s generalization No.2;) we are proud and slavish, aggressive and fearful, assertive and insecure, loving and indifferent…
…and I doubt John Russell will ever come to Athens to write a book about us, because he’d never be able to fit us into one of those nice neat little molds that will do for the Parisians, but not for the Athenians, not ever.
