Dinner with Persephone Read Online Free PDF

entering. It is an odd fact that except for details regarding particular saints, you know from outside the pattern of decoration in an Orthodox church; in my New York neighborhood, there are Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and Jewish temples, but I couldn’t guess at their interiors without peering in.
    I have a copy of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
on my lap, which I brought with me, along with Artemidorus’s
Oneirokritika
, Boswell’s
Life of Samuel Johnson
, a cookbook of Claudia Roden’s, and a few others. But the barrage of new sights from the window makes it hard for me to concentrate on anything else.
Huckleberry Finn
is suddenly lifted out of my hands and examined by a stout middle-aged lady wearing brown support hose and an arsenal of jewelry. She puts it back into my hands with neither prelude nor farewell, and communicates her finding to her seat partner. “
Galliki glossa
,” she says firmly, “French,” gesturing toward me. “A French girl.”

T HE B LUE G LASS E YE
    M y chore is to open a bank account and then join my friends Leda and Theo for lunch in Plaka, the lovely, crowded old quarter of Athens, at a restaurant owned by a man who calls himself simply the Mustache, or for specificity, the Mustache from Olympia.
    The bank is affiliated with my bank in the States, and I explain to the raven-haired representative with the dramatic makeup that I will be here for a year and a bit and would like to open an account. I hand her letters of recommendation from the American bank officer and my employer, and she takes them off to her supervisor. When she returns, she says, “We open accounts in dollars under the following conditions: You must deposit at least fifty thousand dollars in the account. Or you must be of Greek descent.” I am puzzled, since this appears to be a branch of an American bank, and ask the reason for these unexpected conditions. She says certainly, she will ask her supervisor, and after a conference with him, she returns. “There is no reason,” she says.
    “Okay, thanks, I just wanted to be sure,” I say and gather up my letters.
    “But try the National Bank of Greece,” she says, “I know for a fact that they have the kind of accounts you want. Many Greeks from America and Australia use them.”
    I find my way to the National Bank of Greece with obedient confidence and am told there that only the bank I have just come from offers the service I want. “Many Greeks from Australia and America use them.” The bank representative then offers to translate any of my magazine articles into Greek, assuring me that he has the “competence of the University of Michigan.” It is a puzzle I can’t work out; there seems to be no uniform law, and no common reservoir of information about it, not even a sense that information is being deliberately withheld in order to increase some unknowable advantage. I try a third bank, and after a substantial wait, sit down with the bank officer, in shirtsleeves, as most Greek businessmen are during the hot summers, and turn-of-the-century-style mutton-chop whiskers. I hand him my letters of recommendation and my passport and wait for the verdict. “Why do you want to open an account here in Greece?” I direct him to the letter from my employer, which verifies that I will not be taking a salary from any Greek source, and tell him I have business here.
    “You? You have business here? What kind of business can you have here?” He bursts out laughing theatrically, shuddering with stagy hilarity.
    “What makes you laugh?” I ask him, and he picks up my passport, opens it, and begins kissing my passport picture, making sure I can see that he is using his tongue. I do have business here, though, and I am engaged in it at this very moment—my business is to remember you, I think. I give up for the day on my bank account, and walk to Plaka, cooling my temper. The bankman’s arrogance and the coarse insult interest me less than his presumption—the