A Room in Athens Read online

  Yesterday morning, walking up the steep street to the Casbah15 in the powerful morning sun, I felt a warm bond of sympathy for a small pregnant dog who walked with us, stopping midway to drink from a can of water in the gutter.

  I am now into my sixth lunar month. The baby pokes me from within, but it feels remote, faraway.

  At sea, on the Yugoslavian freighter Trebinje to Tangiers, en route to Greece, June 1964.

  MADRID

  July 1

  I bought the first clothes for the baby in a department store here. One little white undershirt and a pair of booties. It gave me a sense of the reality of the baby—or rather, made it seem real for the first time in a new way. I put the things at the bottom of the suitcase and every once in awhile I take them out, touching them, trying to grasp the idea of the baby inside. Because I have seen so much these two weeks, my vision turns outward, away from myself, my shaping womb.

  Spain. Easier to understand than Morocco, because it is Europe and we know its history, but still, consciousness is stretched each second with total attention. In the whirl of impressions, the strangeness, the newness, I have lost contact with my baby and hope to find it in a white shirt and booties.

  COPENHAGEN

  August 8

  We have been put up in the home of the conductor of the Royal Danish Radio Orchestra. Tonight, at midnight, his house is flooded with American jazz. Arno is restless these days. He seems about to write something, but whatever it is hasn’t emerged, and he lives around an unseen but felt iceberg lodged in his mind. He can’t sleep easily, dreams much, looks uncomfortable, and is distracted and moody, hard to be with. Until the idea emerges, shooting off images and phrases, he is like a bone in the jaws of a dog.

  The baby fluttering and lightly pounding almost constantly the past few days and, looking in the full-length mirror last night, I was surprised to see how large I’ve become. It is getting easy to imagine a baby curled up inside. Tonight, when I could feel such wild activity against my walls, I could imagine it born already and my holding the squirming little life. Holding it against me. Arno holding it. The marvel of its father. The wonder of having life to begin. Of learning warmth and goodness of food and speech. Poetry.

  A description (right-hand page) of the carousel at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen.

  Laughing aloud watching my belly move, slide, jiggle with the baby’s activity.

  Heavy as a freighted ship with pregnancy.

  Arno is home, writing. Saturday afternoon, alone in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens. I find myself in front of the carousel, enchanted and moved. La Ronde plays, Tournent, tournent, mes personnages. I sing along silently with the organ, then add the English words I know: “Love makes the world go round and round.”16 The carousel is crowded with very blond and blue-eyed children. A few adults accompany the smaller ones.

  A magnificent girl about twenty gets on with a bearded young man. Her chestnut hair falls to her waist and she wears tight-fitting green pants, a sky-blue sweater, and sky-blue knee-high boots of soft leather. She is eating cotton candy off a stick.

  She climbs up on a camel; her boyfriend takes the ornate blue-andpink carriage. As the music plays he begins to move from carriage to elephant to her side, and then off again. They are always looking for each other at every turn. She eats her candy, laughs, turns her lovely, full body from side to side, shakes her brown hair. The music stops and they get off. A new flood of blond children take over the fierce little lions and obliging, diminutive elephants. There are two enormous giraffes. One is taken by a serious-faced boy of nine, the other by an equally serious girl with bright round eyes and long yellow braids. These two are utterly solemn, like all the children who ride the giraffes, as though bearing the great weight of responsibility for such a beast.

  Whirling, whirling, the little white horses go up and down, flashing the tiny, diamond-shaped mirrors on their painted halters. The music plays on. I think that it won’t be long until I am standing with the smiling, nodding ring of parents at the side—or more likely, up there riding a camel, with you as an excuse beside me, squealing or solemn, pushing off my anxious hands in a great burst of independence, as I saw that little girl of two in the white dress do a moment ago.

  All my membranes are full to bursting. Touch my gums, they rush with blood. Touch me, and the tears start. I am ready to flood. I cannot tear myself away from the brilliant whirling carousel.

  FRANKFURT

  August 14

  Tired. Could find no room last night, had to sleep in the car. We’re not comfortable in heavy-hearted Germany and want to leave the country ahead of our plan.

  I daydream about the child sometimes as we drive, between our studying Serbo-Croat and reading Rebecca West’s book on Yugoslavia17 in preparation for our month of research there for Arno’s article.18

  The feeling of pregnancy at its best is summed up in a glorious shout: “Mother—I’m to be Queen of the May!”

  Every woman hopes or thinks she is potentially Shakespeare’s mother—or some comparable power behind the throne. Einstein’s, Roosevelt’s. It may not matter to her what the child actually becomes as long as he is happy, but that urge to importance, power, and creativity lies in us all. (Indirect expression in women.)

  WALES

  August 20

  Tony West, the writer, lives here and we are visiting him for a week.19 He is the father of eleven children; looks like a cross between William Shakespeare and an aging elf. He cautions me in those eerie, green Welsh mountains, “Don’t eat potatoes or his head will bulge.” Talks about a child’s urge and need to be born. “Children get born when they want to come.” Then he speaks brilliantly on Welsh history, megaliths—those prehistoric stone monuments—American politics, and his own writing, surrounded by children of all sizes, a lame horse, and a spastic dog.20

  ITALY

  August 25

  American men will not give a pregnant woman a second look. A woman used to being whistled at is apt to wonder if pregnancy rendered her invisible in her third month. In Europe, no woman on her two legs is out of the running. Apparently, any woman in sight is fair game for street tag. The Roman middle-class dandies with jackets draped over their shoulders suck their teeth and look arrogant—but they do look. And I hate them for their arrogance—but it is nice to be watched as a woman again. Of course, there is always the mild anxiety—will I ever again be as I was before, or have I lost the slimness and the curves forever?

  A boy in Paris ran up behind me, threw his arm around me, as young men in Paris sometimes will do to a woman, noticed I was pregnant, and went on, laughing and with a slight bow. Surprisingly, I was offered the dubious company of six different men when I walked up the wrong side of the Seine late one night, despite the six-month belly.

  This brings up interesting questions. Is woman-as-Mother so sacred that to desire her is taboo in America? Is she not of sexual interest to American men in their passion for the very young woman? She is not considered a woman, and motherhood—instead of crowning her womanliness—seems to detract from it as soon as pregnancy becomes noticeable; and whereas, from a biologic point, it makes sense, why should men in other parts of the world respond differently?

  The effect of men’s attention during pregnancy is like a tonic, and it’s even made me give up the pregnant gait. I find I can walk as lightly and swiftly as I ever did.

  ENGLAND

  August 31

  In France, I was examined by an old French obstetrician at the American Hospital of Paris. The examination was carried out without the customary draperies, before an open window, outside of which a crew of construction men were busily at work. In Italy, I was assured by a Roman doctor who looked like Rex Morgan21 that the baby’s “chief and feets” were in the right position and that the heart was strong.

  But I can’t get out of my mind last week’s examination in London. The doctor, a short man with white hair and moustache, pulled out a stethoscope and listened, midway and slightly to the
left side of my belly. Then, without a word, he handed me the stethoscope. I put the earpieces in place and lay listening. At first, I heard nothing, and he told me to take my hands off the stethoscope. I did, and within seconds I could hear the faint but steady beating of the baby’s heart. I grinned and the doctor, who had been watching my face, smiled his little Chaplinesque smile under the white moustache and said, “There, I can always tell when they hear it!” And he took the instrument.

  I’m sorry now I couldn’t listen longer to that faraway, underwater sound. As we drive, I think of the heart and the diminutive chest it inhabits. I’m eager to claim the baby, to nurse it, but still, I have some fear at times, and another part of me is content to wait—it will all be soon enough.

  YUGOSLAVIA

  September 20

  For three days now we have been driving on a road that is nothing but an endless bed of jagged rock. Our tires have all been torn and patched and torn again, and we ride at a pace no more than ten or fifteen miles an hour, teetering on the unfenced mountain roads with their passing peasants and sheep.

  The way back would be as bad as the road ahead, so we keep going, cursing the map that shows a splendid highway. Is it projected for some future utopian day? Or is it a direct attempt to deceive? I’m grateful our families have no idea where we are at this moment. I sit with my legs drawn under me, hoping they will absorb the shock, keeping it from the baby who is at the end of the eighth month. I remember with a half-hysterical laugh how my sister-in-law wouldn’t take a day’s drive on the Pennsylvania turnpike to come to my wedding in her seventh month, and how another friend refused a forty-minute train ride into downtown Philly. At the back of my mind is the knowledge that the baby could come at any time. And that I carry with me Grantly Dick-Read’s chapter on self-delivery.22 But for the most part, we are too busy involved in research for the article on Yugoslavia and too fascinated by the country to spend much time on such thoughts.

  The baby has barely moved in the past few days and I have the feeling that he is sleeping through this rough ride, perhaps even lulled by the motion. I miss his activity, and worry a little. Occasionally, as we drive, I remember the incident of the wrong drug, and even though the doctor reassured me, I am filled with fear.

  I try to keep my diet balanced. Goat cheese, sheep cheese, and yogurt where there is no milk. Yellow and orange cheeses have more calcium than white cheeses. Schnitzel in the Yugoslav restaurants to get eggs used in breading.

  We have had warm water for bathing twice in a month and have been purifying the water we drink, especially in the mountains of Montenegro. We fear tuberculosis, dysentery here. Conditions incredibly unsanitary (I have gotten a warm glow of nostalgia and gratitude for the simple American signs “Employees must wash hands …”—not only unheard of here, but impossible, as well). My pregnancy makes me more nervous and more cautious than I would otherwise be.

  The sheer inconvenience and discomfort are irritating, and after four solid months of moving through a dozen countries and forty hotels, we are desperately travel weary. Our work is almost finished.

  Next week, Athens.

  Chapter I

  Arrival

  FOR A YEAR WE HAD READ LAWRENCE DURRELL AND DREAMED OF THIS TIME IN Greece. We had not planned my pregnancy, but we fit it into our picture: I would leisurely take care of our newborn child, advise the maid, and wash grapes in the calm sea. Between chapters of a new book I was sure he would write, Arno was to catch octopus and walk barefoot on the Aegean shore. At night, we would folk dance with the island peasants. (We had both gone to Antioch College,23 and although I had no degree, I had had lots of folk dancing.)

  Before we’d left America, my doctor had warned us to be settled no later than three weeks before the baby was due. Cautiously, we gave ourselves a full month to locate an apartment, get settled, find a doctor, prepare for natural childbirth, learn the city and, of course, some Greek. We planned to stay in Athens long enough to have the baby and see it through the first couple of months. Then we would find our island. Hydra, perhaps, or Crete.

  In our joint fantasy, we had not considered Vasilios. We met him our second day in Athens in a small shop that catered to English-speaking tourists. Baskets, blankets, pottery, jewelry. Amid them sat Vasilios—tall, dark, elegant. Charming. A rather plain Dutch girl sat at his feet staring at him in stupefied adoration. He seemed likable and helpful, so we asked.

  No, he did not know where there was an apartment. Yes, he would look in the newspaper for us. No, there was nothing. Long, long pause. Wait. There is a place. A friend of a friend of a friend. We followed his tall frame down one alley to another in a very old section of town. He didn’t know much about it, but it might be empty. Here. No. There. Up the stairs? He wasn’t sure. He fumbled from one doorway to another. Finally, he led us up a delicate spiral stairway three flights up on a yellow stucco house. He took us on the little porch. Look. There is the Acropolis. We were dazzled, enchanted. We went inside the apartment. It was bare and clean. We wanted it badly, and there was no question that we needed it urgently. It would do beautifully until we could get to the shore with the octopus after the baby came.

  Well, Vasilios admitted, it had no heat (winter was coming). No, it didn’t have hot water either, but maybe the landlord would install it. How much was it? Vasilios said, “Wait. I have to check with my friend’s friend.” He went downstairs. Out came a young woman, a middle-aged woman, and a handsome, white-haired man in his pajamas, who—lo and behold—happened to be Vasilios’ very own sister, mother, and father. He introduced them as his dear family, and coming down to business with only the barest trace of charm, gave us a price higher by far than what we’d been paying in Manhattan.

  Good-byes were warm, and Vasilios hoped he could help us again. “Always,” he said, we should come to him first—“for service.” We walked back to our Citroën and drove back to the hotel. There followed a futile week trying to find an apartment. Supers were never around, or if they were, they had nothing, even though the red signs outside clearly said “for rent” (in Greek). Finally, in desperation, we put ourselves into the hands of a sharp young agent, paid him a fat price, and thus came to live in the most fashionable section of Athens—Kolonaki, a neighborhood of well-to-do Greeks, embassies, and foreigners.24 And there we stayed. Once settled in our meager apartment, we walked endlessly, trying to absorb the town. Athens was unlike any city we had seen—a white city, it appeared, deceptively, to be a middle-class city, with its five-story new white apartments stretching for miles in every direction. There was always the sound of building in the air—inevitably, another of the almost identical structures. Every day our shoes collected the dust of construction; two or three men could always be seen wiping it off cars with red or pink feather dusters. If we had been looking for antiquity in the streets—as it is in Rome—we had come to the wrong place. But we were not seeking antiquity, history, or myth; it was, for me at least, a search for the source of the spring that bubbled over so exuberantly in the Greek folk and popular music; some sense of goodness, of life, which fed the appetites for music, for food, for simple joyousness. With delight we walked the city for hours, stopping periodically when my contractions became strong. (These were a kind of muscle-tightening that I experienced almost from the beginning—usually when exerting myself too much; it was a strange, taut sensation, like finding myself in someone else’s girdle.)

  Postcard of Athens, c.1960. Gallias Edition (private collection).

  We quickly learned that Athens polarized around its two great squares. At the center of the city was the unmistakable glamor and dignity of Syntagma, or Constitution Square (Prostitution Square was the local joke), with its expensive hotels, bright neon signs, good Diners Club restaurants,25 many tourists, and elegant shops. We had to come here every day to American Express, as we were once again out of money and expecting a check from our dwindling account in the States.

  A half-hour walk from Syntagma was Omonia Square—a distr
ict with the excitement, mob, and sleaziness of New York’s Times Square, and which seemed to reflect the spirit of workaday Athens. In the narrow streets branching off Omonia, whole lambs were roasted on outdoor spits in front of shops, men cooked ears of tough corn over braziers on the street corners, and there was a smell of roasting chestnuts heavy in the air. For a few drachmas we would buy a souvlaki—meat, tomato, and onion, peppered and rolled in dough like a tortilla—or strudel-like spinach pie, to eat as we walked. There was a carnival air at Omonia, in sharp contrast to Constitution Square’s great spaces and elegance. But anywhere in Athens—except during the long siesta—there were always the crowds; the city seemed choked with endless masses of people who jammed the streets, pushing one another off the sidewalks.

  At twilight, the sky above Athens turns orange and the light in the streets takes on the purple tone of the bare mountains that semicircle the town. Men sat drinking in cafés where women never went. The city had awakened from its long afternoon nap and Athenians were out in their numbers, going back to work, shopping, strolling. Soldiers—with custom-made uniforms hugging their bodies—passed by in the twos and threes of soldiers everywhere; there were many of the righteous priests in their black robes, their hair braided in a knot in the back like a matador’s. They had, without exception, the air of smug landowners. There were many men, especially around Omonia, carrying briefcases and wearing bulky, homemade suits. Not long out of the peasantry, they were dressed to make the scramble into the small middle class. Interspersed in the crowd were old peasant women, dressed in black shabby skirts and shawls, toothless and often bright-eyed with the private jokes of country cousins in the city. There were young shop girls with soft dark eyes and sometimes delicate moustaches, and a few dandies in Italian-style suits.