A Room in Athens Read online

  There were also lovely young women with the light hair and blue eyes of Crete, marvelously groomed and outfitted. Boys in white aprons ran by, swinging tripodic, long-handled trays of coffee and ouzo26—messengers of the Greek carry-out. Occasionally, a cart rumbled by with a handsome young man standing up driving the horse, so like a charioteer I had to smile. Crowds poured into and out of the subway at Omonia.

  It didn’t take long to realize that these people were the most beautiful we had seen in Europe. So many pairs of fine eyes, good noses. You would see here the line of a cheek, there a brow, a nose, a mouth—it was inevitable to think of it—of the white-marbled beauty of the statues for which their ancestors were the models. The Greeks.

  How many hours of my American life, I speculated, had I dwelled on Greece? We barely took our first desks at school before they started telling us about the Greeks. My eyes would tear for the little boys of Sparta with their hard beds and winter morning dips.27 Later, it was for Socrates with his hemlock. In Social Studies, we analyzed the Greek city-state to utter tedium, and in World History, it was the Peloponnesian War—to the total exclusion, that year, of both World Wars I and II. College began and ended with Plato’s Dialogues.

  Then it was living in New York and going to hear Greek music at the Eighth Avenue clubs,28 and finally, reading Durrell, conjuring the little fantasy house by the sea and the swarm of happy peasants.

  My ancestors spoke many tongues: Hebrew, Lithuanian, French, Romanian, Yiddish. Now English is my language. But Greece is at the root. I had been taught that much of what I was came from this tough, rocky land. My very thoughts traveled the labyrinth of my brain in a reasonable, orderly fashion because the Greeks had taught me how to think. And so, I had carted my unborn child halfway around the world to be born at the crux, the omphalos.29

  Well, here I was, and a Greek man in a homemade suit was stepping on my heels. Nine months pregnant, twenty-seven years old, wearing American maternity clothes, my hair loose on my shoulders, I was striding alongside my husband at dusk on a warm Sunday evening in October. This night, we were not merely out for a stroll through the narrow streets and dense crowds; we were on our way to Bouboulinas Street to see if we could finally track down the elusive Madame Kladaki and her Psychoprophylactic Maternity Clinic.

  A friend, Alice,30 had a sister, Mary, whose baby was born here several years before, and I’d been looking for the “clinic run by a woman who practices natural childbirth—the only one in Greece,” since we’d arrived in Athens two weeks before. The telephone directory in the unfamiliar Greek alphabet was no help, and the half-dozen doctors I’d asked claimed they had never heard of such a woman. I had already engaged another doctor, but I disliked his smugness and I didn’t trust that he would cooperate in my desire for a natural birth.

  “Certainly,” he told me, “you may have a natural birth. You do what I say and I won’t give you anything for pain unless you ask. But tell me, why would you want such a thing?”

  It was only by a stroke of luck that we found the name and address of the clinic: I had nothing for the baby to wear except the shirt and booties I bought in Madrid. There were some children’s shops near the American Express office in Constitution Square, and leaving Arno writing one morning, I walked out, tightly holding a pamphlet I had carried from America—the U.S. Government book on pregnancy and postnatal care. In it was a page of crude drawings, circa 1925, of Minimal Infant Wardrobe.31

  In the shop, I looked around at the foreign-looking knitted suits and shoes. A young girl came to wait on me.

  “Nai?” she asked.

  “Uh. Um. Do you speak English?”

  She shook her head.

  “Français?”

  Another shake.

  I took a breath. “I need. J’ai besoin … uh … bébé! Clothes.” I pointed, touched my clothes.

  “Ah! Bébé!” she said and grinned.

  “Oui! Nai! Bébé!” I said with great relief.

  We were in total agreement. Nothing could be plainer. She looked at me intently. Helpfully.

  “Nai?” she asked.

  “Uh.” I said. “Um.” Remembering the pictures in the pamphlet, I put it on the counter and pointed, making sweeping gestures around the store that meant, I need everything. I pointed to the picture of an infant’s nightgown in the manual’s illustration of minimum wardrobe. She looked at it. Thought. Then broke into a grin.

  “Nai. Nai. Nai.”

  Crossing the store, she returned with a pink flannel gown the perfect size for a chunky ten-year-old. I shook my head, and she looked crushed.

  Next, we tried minimum-wear undershirts. More success. She showed me some bulky wraparounds with strings that looked like nothing I’d ever seen, but they would work. Now for the diapers. I pointed to the picture of a diaper, a rectangular piece of cloth. I will need a few dozen. Why was she frowning at the picture? Nothing could be simpler than the idea that a baby needs diapers. She stooped and brought up a stack of cloths which she unfolded. They were large and square, like small sheets.32 She pushed a dozen toward me with a deft, certain gesture.

  “But they are not diapers,” I said in exasperation.

  “Nai?” she asked, puzzled.

  “Diapers! What are these?”

  She shrugged. Another girl came over to stand behind the counter, stare at the drawings in the book, and push the cloths at me, as though saying, “Of course you need these.”

  “But I don’t want them! I want diapers!”

  I was breaking into a sweat, and they had begun to titter at me with my strange requests and admittedly absurd book. I had a child coming. My belly tightened, growing taut with the Braxton Hicks contractions33 of late pregnancy. No clothes to dress the baby in. It must be a very basic need. I had traveled through a dozen countries, ridden for days on beds of rock instead of roads, slept in the car and in the houses of peasants without a qualm or regret. Now I was thrown into near panic over a bunch of diapers, a nightie I couldn’t find, and some snickering girls. Through my confusion I heard the American tones.

  “Since he’s not trained yet, why don’t you get this potty instead?”

  “Yeah—okay,” came the answer. “It’ll do fine.”

  To my ears it had the beauty and balance of a Shakespeare sonnet read by Olivier.34

  “Oh, thank God,” I said, and turned. The two women were carefully examining a plastic seat.

  We exchanged introductions. One of the women was a businessman’s wife from Michigan who had come along to Athens with her husband; the other woman, who introduced herself as Liesel something-very-long, was playing hostess to her while their husbands did business. Liesel was without makeup and casually dressed. There was something very likable about her. She had lived in America, she said, explaining her almost perfect American accent. “My firstborn daughter was born in the States.”

  “Who is your doctor going to be?” she asked.

  “I have someone, but I’m not satisfied. I have been looking for a woman who runs a natural childbirth clinic but none of the men doctors I’ve spoken to know of her.”

  She raised her eyebrows in a look of weary exasperation. “I’ll bet they don’t know! I have a cousin who is an obstetrician. Let me call him and find out. I will let you know this afternoon. Give me your telephone number.”

  We exchanged names and numbers on scraps of paper, and they paid for the plastic seat and left.

  The girls were waiting for me with the stack of cloths and the undershirts. They had pulled out some triangular pieces of cloth with patches of toweling sewn into them, and I realized they must be diapers. I took a dozen, knowing it was not enough but not wanting to load up on these strange-looking things. I was sorry I didn’t ask the woman, Liesel, to help me, but in my excitement, I forgot.

  A half-hour passed, and by the time I had paid for my sub-minimal purchases we were all irritated and upset. I had only a few of the odd, bulky shirts, a dozen towel-lined triangles, a few small, sheet-like clo
ths. No rubber pants, no cozy terrycloth one-piece suits, no pretty soft nighties in pale greens and yellows and blues, no downy receiving blankets—in short, nothing in the familiar Easter-hues, nothing that I associated with a baby’s life and needs. I felt a profound sense of failure as I walked out the door. I heard the girls exclaiming and laughing, and I broke for the security of an American Express washroom in a cold, sick sweat.

  By the time I walked back to the apartment, the tightness of the contractions were nonstop and so strong I feared my labor had begun. However, the wardrobe, laid out on the bed, didn’t look quite so minimal, and Arno cheered me with his matter-of-fact masculine assurances that the baby would survive whether his shirts fastened with Greek strings or American snaps.

  Liesel telephoned that afternoon to give us her cousin’s address and that of the clinic I had been searching for. “Feel under no obligation about my cousin, but here is his number if you want it. The woman you asked about is Madame Kladaki at 26 Bouboulinas Street. For some reason I don’t understand, my cousin was reluctant to give it even to me. Call me. Let me know how you are. Good luck.”

  That had been Friday, now—Sunday night—we walked to Bouboulinas Street. My time was very close, and this night’s search was the last hope I had of fulfilling the long-time desire: the glory of a conscious delivery, a first baby I had long awaited. It was at least five miles from our apartment to the narrow street in back of the great, darkened Archeology Museum, and I was panting a little from the long walk.

  We checked the numbers on apartment houses. Then, on a wall, we made out a brass plaque: KΛAΔKH.35 Arno lit a match and we painfully traced the unfamiliar Greek letters with our fingers. Entering, we went up a flight of stairs in semi-darkness. A pleasant, fresh face appeared at a door, and a young girl wearing a nurse’s uniform and sandals took a quick look at me and showed us in.

  “Nai?” she asked in the now familiar nasal, questioning tone.

  We had been trying to teach ourselves Greek, but so far we only knew the alphabet, yes and no, and the words for yogurt and milk. French had often gotten us through; we tried it on the girl but she shook her head with a grin. She spoke to us in Greek, and it was our turn to grin and shake our heads. Finally, we said “Madame Kladaki.”

  “Oh!” she said, “Nai, nai, nai.”

  She led us through the still, dark rooms of the clinic and opened French doors. Madame Kladaki36 rose to meet us. From that moment on, no matter how strange or alone or uneasy I was to feel in this unknown city, when this woman smiled I would feel I was in safe port. I relaxed, sensing that we had come to the right place, and I knew Arno felt it too.

  She was short and heavy-breasted in her white doctor’s coat; her dark hair was bobbed and you imagined sparks of crackling, angry electricity from her black eyes. And then that smile appeared with its dazzling warmth. She was excitement, command, a quick, hot temper—and at the center, utter calm and radiance. We spoke in French, mine stumbling, Arno’s quite good, Madame’s careful, clear, and deliberate. Half an hour later, when we walked downstairs, I was enrolled in her clinic.

  Twice a day for a week we were to receive instruction, for I had at least five months of lessons to make up in one week. Our classes began the next day.

  When we returned in the morning we were introduced to Miss Elleadou, an ample, gray-haired woman with a pleasant smile, big buck teeth, brisk manners, and a large nose. She had a rather bouncy, athletic air. In another life, say as an American, she might have become a high school gym teacher. Later, she came to remind me more of those spinster teachers who were always chosen to teach sex in hygiene class.

  Like Madame Kladaki, she wore a white medical coat. She showed us into a stifling room off the waiting lounge and shut the double doors. She had, she told us, studied English for two years and had given lessons in English several years ago to another American woman. Between our French and Miss Elleadou’s English we would have to make do.

  She picked up a battered slate and placed it in her lap. The first lesson, she announced, was about “the structoor of the brain,” which she proceeded to draw in yellow chalk. For an hour she drew. There were round protuberances with appendages like trunks; there were curlicues; and then something shaped like a skull, but which may have been a uterus. Throughout the hour-and-a-half of the first lecture, all of which made sense from one word to another but seemed to dissolve to nothing when one looked back over the whole span—there was a recurring theme: the “stimoolous absolute of feeding.”

  Left: Charis Kladaki early in her career. Right: Kladaki one year before her death, at age seventy-eight, in 1990.

  26 Bouboulinas Street, Athens, site of Madame Kladaki’s Psychoprophylactic Maternity Clinic.

  At the end of the morning, she stood up and wished us good day. She would see us later. We had had, she said, the most important lecture of all, and this afternoon we would discuss “reproduction.” With that promise, she gathered her slate, rag, and chalk, and left.

  When afternoon begins in Athens—at five o’clock—we were once again admitted to 26 Bouboulinas Street; again it was stifling. Again Miss Elleadou entered the double doors, slid them shut, picked up the slate, and sat down. We had been listening hungrily to someone in an upstairs apartment playing a familiar Mozart sonata in the dusk. It had been months since we had heard such music, but Miss Elleadou got up and closed the window in a businesslike way. “Madame Kladaki’s daughter is studying music,” she said noncommittally.

  “Now,” she began, “in order to have baby, we most reproduce ourself. When a man and woman are married they have intercourse sexuelle. The man, he has a spermatozoan. How you say? Right?” My husband nods and I don’t dare look at his intent, too-serious face.

  “The spermatazoan then, he got a tayl (she picked up her chalk and drew) and with this tayl”—she made an abrupt motion—“he gotta be quick! Here,” she said, “is our organ genital. Right? Yes?”

  At the end of the long session she walked us to the door, chatting. “You see, if we know soch thing about ourself, we would not stop having intercourse as so many times happens to Greek couples. Madame Kladaki and I we are trying to teach our girls. Goodnight.”

  The next morning, we deferred our lesson for awhile. “Tell us about Madame Kladaki,” I asked. Miss Elleadou looked pleased.

  “Madame’s first daughter was born fourteen years ago and when she was in childbirth she had so much pain, such suffering, that Madame decided women should not so much suffer. She went to Paris to study. I, too, studied in Paris. Psychoprophylaxis.37 The clinic has had many successes, and the doctors of Athens try to pretend there is no Madame Kladaki and no clinic.”

  “No wonder we couldn’t find the clinic.”

  She became indignant. “The doctors, the men, they say you cannot to have birth without greatest pain. They will not hear us, or the girls who have come, and say unto them they did not so much suffer. But a Greek girl, she cannot to argue with a man, and of course not an older man. But girls come anyway and we teach them their bodies—how they are working.

  “Our women they eat too much when they are pregnant,” she continued, a little red in the face with effort and indignation. “They get very fat and have babies too big to be born right. That is why we say unto you not to eat butter nor eggs nor pastry. And then girls are afraid to go out of their home when they are pregnant, and we try to teach them different. But they must listen to their mama and father, their grandmother, and even their grandmother’s mother! So we do not to have so much success. Here is not like America. The married couples they live with their families—and they cannot to disobey.

  “In Greece one cannot to go against the customs. For example, I was in America, in New York, for one only day. I wore a coat and with him white shoes. But nobody laughed at me or made fun of me because my shoes were white. Nobody said to go home and change my shoes or that I would be cold in such a light coat. In Greece it is different. I would have been”—she sought a word—”humili
ated.”

  “But now it is time for the lesson.” She propped up her slate and began to draw what I now recognized as a uterus and two tubes. She pointed to a tube. “This that I’m drawing: this is our trompe. In English how do you say?” We looked at each other. Trompe? In French that is trunk—an elephant has a trompe. We hold a fast conference.

  “Fallopian tube, perhaps?” I offer. “Yes, fallopian tube.”

  Miss Elleadou looked at us with a small smile and a shake of her head. She still can’t believe that we understand and know anatomy. “Our trompe,” she insists.

  “I don’t care,” said Arno on the way home, “I still think it was our fallopian tube.”

  The next morning, Miss Elleadou asked me to stay to watch the other girls be tested on their breathing exercises. The comfortable little waiting room with its pictures of babies, plastic flowers, and old magazines, was full of women. Many I had seen before as I came for lessons. The girls were very young, mothers-to-be for the first time. There were about a dozen who gathered this morning, as they did every Wednesday, for a physical, and so Madame Kladaki could see if they were learning the natural childbirth breathing exercises properly.

  The girls were, without exception, handsome. They and their mamas, who accompanied them, were finely dressed, although the girls wore makeshift maternity clothes—mostly wraparounds or street clothes let out at the seams. They were definitely the solid middle- or upper-middle class of Athens. There was a lot of babble and laughter. It broke off sharply, however, when one fat, pretty girl with a smooth, round face and eight-month belly, came in and threw herself down in a chair weeping uncontrollably. She interrupted herself periodically to speak grievances in a plaintive tone.

  “It is the effort,” one of the girls told me. “She had some trouble getting here, she says.”

  No sooner was she quieted by Miss Elleadou and Marina, the young nurse who had let us in the first night, than another of the girls puffed up the stairs and sat down sourly, wailing “water, water.” She fanned herself with a limp hand.