Imagined Countries
by
Nick Papandreou
Athens Greece
As a bilingual hyphenated American writer now living in Greece, I am constantly comparing cultures. I fear I can see only with a double vision. What would they think of this back home, I hear myself saying half the time, when I encounter something extremely Greek. Prime time television Saturday night is mainly taken up with a dance-and-song fest. Singers, actors, politicians, and the emcee get together to drink, eat and dance in front of a live Greek band. On one of the shows, a boy who must be no older than fourteen serves the food, plays the bouzouki and occasionally dances.
My otherwise thoroughly modern Greek girlfriend insisted, when we were breaking up, on taking me to church in the poor area of Elefsina, south of Athens, to meet a special priest who uses the “alternative bible” to exorcise the evil eye that had been cast upon my person and so caused me to leave her. Four or five gypsies hesitated before getting on the brand-new escalator in the shiny new subway, built in time for the 2004 summer Olympics. I realized suddenly they were adults who’d never seen an escalator before. Worried that their feet might get caught in the metal teeth, they way I used to worry when I was a kid, they jumped onto it from a distance, then gathered strength to jump off at the end. Two of them took the stairs, sticking to tradition. None of this activity made the smallest impact on the non-hyphenated Greeks going up and down the escalator, the so-called Greek-Greeks who found nothing of value in the scene.
I am exposed to such Kulture Klashes every day. Let me offer a more literary example. Through Amazon dot com, my gateway to the States, I recently ordered a book by a relatively well-known author named Charles Baxter. When I received the cardboard box, book inside wrapped with inflated plastic, I considered his last name: “Baxter.” A solid sounding name with hints of a hardware-like background and hours spent with the boys swigging beer and watching Monday night football, the equivalent of Wednesday night soccer in Greece. The picture on the backsleeve shows him in the typical American writers’ pose: no suit and tie, no obvious effort to look neat. The picture itself appears as if it was taken by his wife with a cheap throw-away camera. And not surprisingly, when I strained to read the sidebar credit, I found the name Martha Baxter, probably the author’s wife or daughter. Something democratic and low-cost about the backsleeve production, another indication of causal class-free America. Greek books rarely include the author’s picture and when they do there is certainly no photographer’s accreditation.
Baxter’s sleeves are partly rolled up, a beard hides his chin, his hair is uncombed, and behind him, in the distance, you can make out a mountain range. Thoreau would be delighted. Already then, from the very book-cover itself, my generalized notions of America have been reinforced. The author as the loner, somewhere in a log cabin churning out his masterpiece. The Greek male author is more likely to be smoking in a dinky café in the heart of the city, speaking loudly to anyone willing to listen about the awful state of Greek literature and cultivates the raffish bohemian look, you know the one — the tortured artist who is always two days behind on his shave.
Baxter is in many ways a great writer. He is capable of depicting the strange silences and stiff gestures that are part of white American friendship. He has dialogue and inflection down so well that when I read his work I feel like I’ve been transported across the Atlantic. He captures the culture from within the culture, no mean feat, without reference to other cultures. That is why reading him in Greece is such a jolting experience. Though he lives in America, he also “imagines” America.
I read part of Baxter while on the old subway line that runs between Kifissia (the equivalent say of Great Neck, Long Island) and Omonia, (the equivalent of New York’s 42nd Street). My mental space was Baxter’s America; my physical space was as Greek as Greek could be. The old subway line is primarily made up of working class people. A young gypsy boy, no older than eight or nine, entered the car with an instrument called a baglama, which is like a miniature guitar. In a tremendously loud voice he sang that he didn’t have a “dime” for a “souvlaki” or a “joint.” A young man with his right arm missing had hung a sign from his neck saying he was Serbian, a sure drawing card in Greece, and that he’d been injured in the wars in Yugoslavia; a well-dressed woman in her fifties, looking like a high-school marm, sang a Bulgarian folk song. Refugee overload means their cups pretty much stay empty.
Between songs and plaints, I managed to complete a story called Reincarnation. The story ends when a man cries in front of another man at a dinner party among friends. The other man touches one cheek and so has the benefit of actually feeling the tears. Perhaps this is an image of communion or perhaps it is the ultimate act of male bonding. The cause of the crying is not abundantly clear, and for our purposes, not important. The point is not that the man is crying, it is that his friend is sensitive enough to appreciate his pain.
To end a story with a man crying in silence after a dinner party and then for another male to touch his tears, and to hold this up as the defining moment in the story – what literature professors sometimes call the epiphany – is all fine and well and quite moving, in a subtle understated way. But I immediately wonder at the cultural connotations. Would it work for a Greek reader? And more to the point, would it work in a Greek setting where men of all classes hug and kiss and cry during a political rally or a soccer games? Where you can’t say goodbye without kissing each shaveable cheek?
When I arrived at Omonia Square and walked into the sun, surrounded by dozens of Albanians come to buy their local newspapers, it struck me that it was truly strange to be riding the old subway while reading a modern American short-story from a Michigan writer. Reincarnation would be completely untranslatable, not because of the technical difficulties but because of the freight of culture embedded in the story. Unless you had some sense of America, you’d be in trouble. In the States, relationships and particularly the writing about them has been greatly influenced by both the women’s and so-called men’s movement. I think this fine-tuned awareness concerning the politics of relationships is not part of modern Greek consciousness yet, so the subtlety of Baxter’s “male bonding” epiphany would probably be lost on the modern Greek. And even in the States of twenty years ago the meaning of a story about how men reveal intimacy might have been lost. I mean it took us the better part of three decades to go from Midnight Cowboy to Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Cowboys and on one level the two movies are similar. However the first was a cult movie and you probably wouldn’t invite either of the characters into your living room, while the second made it into the heart of middle (and multiplex) America. That’s where the difference can be charted – American society has become far more mature and highly aware of all sorts of prejudice than ever before.
I walked up Panepistimiou Street and made my way to a Ministry where I had an appointment with a bright young lawyer on the fifth floor. Having just read Baxter, my American side had been properly alerted, which meant that I was embarrassingly polite, it meant I didn’t stare at the women, and that I said sorry and excuse me whenever I bumped into someone, and most of all, I let lots and lots of people get in front of me at the red light. This is a generalization but these are the characteristics that represent the countries of my imagination, these are the ideas that which I must work with or against when I construct my fictional worlds – American or Greek.
The Ministry building was new so because of its modernity, when I rode the elevator I was not jolted out of my Americanness. Then I reached Petros’ office. The “coffee-boy,” a short man in his fifties wearing a white short-sleeve shirt, was arguing about last night’s soccer match with Petros. I had barely entered the office when I was asked my opinion about the Olympiakos soccer team. I disappointed them by saying I had none. Not having grown up in Greece I possess none of the cultural markers, though my Greek is fluent even in its slang. I’m like the German spy who when arrested by the GIs can speak English perfectly but doesn’t know who Mickey Mantle is and thinks that the expression “Pleased as Punch” is the term for a satisfying drink. The coffee-boy took my order for a freshly squeezed orange juice and bowed out. Coffee-boy. I don’t think that word exists in English but I just automatically translated it from Greek. (There is something demeaning about it.) I don’t think in the States we have men in their fifties or sixties whose full-time job is to run up and down office floors taking chump orders. We have “delivery boys” who usually quit after a month.
Before getting down to business I knew we would have to spend at least fifteen minutes to half an hour on other topics. Petros informed me that he was the only male on the floor, except for another one who didn’t count because of his particular sexual proclivities. So, he said, the two of us had free reign.
Three of the women in the legal department, he informed me, were “available” but had not yet gone so far as to cheat on their husbands. It would take an outsider from the ministry, someone like me, he implied, for them to yield. A buxom dark-haired woman dressed in an elegant deep blue came in to drop off some papers. We were introduced. She was a lawyer working on human rights. She spoke very proper Greek and seemed to have gone to all the right schools.
As soon as she left the room, Petros went into excruciating detail about what he wanted to do to her sexually, going so far as to demonstrate a certain position on the desk, only partly reminiscent of what Jack Nicholson does to Jessica Lange in The Postman Only Rings Twice. Suddenly, in the middle of these theatrics, the woman returned, saw Petros in a prone position, turned beet red and hurried out of the office without a further word.
My mother’s feminist training kicked in. I was embarrassed. I wanted to apologize because though I was not the instigator, I had certainly not stopped Petros and this made me an accessory to the crime. I told Petros that in the States his behavior would have gotten him fired for overt sexual harassment. It’s not that some men don’t talk like that about women – it’s that in professional circles they’ve learned to be quite careful about it. I told him about the rather strict rules about teacher-student relations when I was a teaching assistant in the economics department at Princeton.
Petros raised his hands into the air like his team had just scored a goal and shouted, “He’s crazy, he’s crazy! Petros the bald is crazy!”
I stared at him. “Why don’t you go tell the woman you’re sorry.”
“Sorry? About what?”
“About.. you know.”
“Aw, c’mon. They like it!”
“Right.”
“Okay,” he said finally, “let’s go together.”
When we entered the woman’s office, Petros said,
“Have we offended you?”
“What?”
“My friend here thinks I’ve offended you.”
“Oh,” she said, turning slightly red.
“Hasn’t he?” I said.
“No,” she said, finally acknowledging what she had seen. “That’s just the way Petros is. Everybody knows it.”
“You see,” Petros said triumphantly. “This is Greece!” I threw up my hands.
My stereotypes had once again been confirmed.
Returning to another Baxter story on my way back up to Kifissia, (the Greek subway serves to carry us forward in this essay) I found relief in the absence of such Petros-like directness in Baxter’s work. What at first had seemed as castrated dialogue between the men and women of Baxter’s universe now struck me as the apogee of civilized discourse.
I discussed the issue of sexual harassment with a friend of mine who, like me, returned recently to Greece. He used to work in a prestigious D.C. law firm. He e-mailed me the following comment: “Let me assure you that the bantering that went on in my law office in D.C. and the discussions male lawyers had among themselves in the privacy of their offices could get much rowdier than the Greek example of Petros that you gave.” But the point is that the male lawyers in my friend’s law firm dared speak rowdily only in private. My dear Petros, however, had no fear about letting the women in on his doings. There was no fear of reprisal. In today’s corporate America you’d probably face a goodly number of sexual harassment lawsuits and the men have become far more careful. In Greece, the first successful sexual harassment lawsuit was won only three years ago by a woman working in a super-market in the port city of Patras. Things are still way behind in that department, I’m afraid.
Put a Greek in an American setting and you get trouble. Louis, A Greek friend of mine who was teaching “poli sci” at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and who had grown up on one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Aegean (he would boast about how many tourists he had bedded per summer starting from the age of fourteen), was taken to court by one of his students on the charge of sexual harassment. (He was so out of sync with the moral police that when I visited to teach one of his classes he entered the classroom holding hands with two of his students…) He had only kissed her on both cheeks, he argued, because it had been her birthday. “That’s what we do in Greece.” She claimed he had ejaculated in his pants when he kissed her and that this implied an attempt at rape. His main line of defense was not one to go over well with the female judge – he had been with many women and she was not attractive enough to merit harassment, certainly not stunning enough to cause such an ejaculation. “Who does she think she is,” he told the female judge, “Marilyn Monroe?” Since there was no Monica-like proof of such exertions on either his pants or hers, the judge sent the case for internal review to the University itself where he was summarily fired. A few months later, the student became his girlfriend. Greek lover loses job, runs the headline, but gets the girl. One more stereotype confirmed – and more grist for my fictional mill.
But lets return to our trip on the old subway. Being early afternoon, the train car, built in Rumania, was relatively empty. (I will leave it up to you to imagine the trip, especially the overground part with the olive trees and old shacks along the way, the sun blazing on the windows, a shepherd grazing sheep next to the new Olympic Stadium). A young boy with black glasses had his face stuck in a book. He got off at my stop. He seemed rather uncoordinated. His books kept slipping from his grip and seemed ready to crash to the ground. I liked him. For one thing, he was actually carrying books. For another he was exceedingly clumsy, and who can resist that? In America we would have called him a “nerd.”
It has often struck me that a further crucial difference between Greece and America is the existence in America of that bearer of maximum awkwardness, the “nerd.” In Greece the nerd is a rather rare species. In any American gathering, especially academia, you can find varying degrees of awkwardness – ranging from full-blown nerd to semi-nerd to total cool to Cary Grant – a man who increased his sophistication by adopting that strange Brahmin-British accent of his. Only in a European gathering of course, will you find a perfect ten: someone, say, like Sean Connery.
(I can’t prove any of the above statistically, of course. Nor is any of what I’m saying footnoted. Not by accident did Montaigne call his pieces of writing “essays” meaning “attempts.”)
The reasons for relative “nerdlessness” in Greece are clear: rarely is anyone left alone long enough to enter his private nerd-like space and lose himself in total dorkiness. That ubiquitous social apparition, “the Group” to which so many teenagers attach themselves provides both solace and serious training in social skills. Teenagers do everything in large groups. In Greece you don’t date, you rarely have to go up to a girl and ask her out, as I had to do when I was sixteen, after planning my opening lines for a month. (In the end I winged it because her obsessively jealous father showed up just as I was retrieving my tickets to a King Crimson concert). This process, painful yet maturing, is taken care of in Greece by the girl’s friends who let your male friends know that she is interested in you, and then you end up sitting next to each other, along with twenty others, in a public space. From then on in, it’s god’s will, mixed with hormones. The group acts as a psychological support cushion for the rest of your life, right up until the final moments, the equivalent of our twelve step programs or one on one therapy. I often think the reason that the suicide rate is so low in Greece is because the potential suicidee is not left alone long enough to write his note… The door bangs in his room – it’s his mom visiting, it’s his friend wondering, it’s his neighbor asking, it’s the “group” demanding… It is inconceivable that two sixteen year olds could live in their own world for half a year a lá Columbine, without speaking to another person except themselves, staring at their Heavy Metal posters all day and dressing up like Satanists before blowing away eleven students in the cafeteria. The extended family, the omnipresent group would notice the signs before they’d painted the first circles around their eyes, before wearing their Clint Eastwood overcoats to school each day. It might be worth mentioning that in Greek there is no word for “privacy.” The closest to privacy in Greek is the word “idiot” which in ancient Greek did not have the modern connotations of dumbness but applied to the citizen who did not actively participate in the City’s affairs. One benefit of privacy is the ability to concentrate for long periods of time and thus to be more creative. I often think that that’s why Greece has two Nobel prize winners in Poetry, Elytis and Seferis, since poems require short periods of isolation and no Nobel prize novelists, since a novel requires longer periods. America on the other hand is full of inventors and writers who can nerd-out as long as they wish. Think of those writing programs where you can hole up in your room and have the food left at your door. The socially-trained Greek wouldn’t last a day and would liken his lot to the imprisoned Count of Monte Cristo. The American craves that pain and turns it into something productive.
I am exaggerating the differences between the two cultures, yes. I am pontificating. I am drawing dangerous caricatures of two separate cultures, yes. The Greece of my imagination, my fictional Greece is low on nerd population and high on socially adept people who tend to be full of life and exude Zorba-like wisdom; the America of my imagination is full of achievers and creative individuals to be sure, but also more important to my literary agenda, awkward moments, embarrassing situations, knotty discussions with members of the socially challenged who are at the top of their class in everything but discussion.
***
Awkwardness seems to characterize America, the America I’m talking about at least. The Americans that inhabit Baxter’s stories are awkward; I myself feel awkward almost as soon as I land back in the States and drift through customs at Kennedy Airport, reduced to more sorries and excuse me’s than you’ll find in granny’s book on manners.
The last piece in the Baxter collection is called Believers. Here, just at the end, Baxter pulls a no-no. In Believers, a naive mid-western couple visits pre-war Germany and become enthusiastic about the Nazis and embraces the Third Reich. Heartland America and Nazi Germany are suddenly compared.
Why, I asked myself, did an author as good as Baxter need to get away from the accurate portrayal of America that had carried us along so well in his previous stories and take us into the imagined heart of pre-war Germany? (Why did Ron Hansen, another good American writer, feel the urge to write something called Hitler’s niece?)
I think I know why.
I think you know why. Relevance. The pressure of Europe’s tragedies on the American imagination. A need to take on matters beyond a small insular galaxy. A need to contend with historical events that have shaped our world. A need to bring separate worlds together.
But the story fails. It doesn’t convince. It’s a version of the evil-in-the-American-heartland story. Perhaps you need to read it to believe me but let me give an example. Baxter’s piece has as its crowning point a scene where the American heroine, a certain Mrs Jordan, is in Berlin with her husband. She is so overwhelmed by the men in their uniforms that she jumps onto the sideboard of Goebbel’s convertible. Is that possible? The sick head of Hitler’s propaganda machine being accosted by a naïve American? What about all those black-leathered Storm Troopers running along side? Nonetheless she talks to him. The conversation of this fictitious encounter is not recorded. Perhaps Baxter wrote the conversation in one of his drafts and decided to scrap it later on. (I can imagine: “Oh, Mister Goebbels, what an honor. Lots of Germans in Michigan, you know? Maybe we could invite you to the Rotary? What? Drinks? Can I bring my husband? Mahvelous, just mahvelous.”)
So here we have it. The shrewd Baxter mind, the one capable of concocting great stories, illuminating the subtle dealings of men, women and even children, fails to convince. His double vision becomes singular.
The reason is awkwardness. The awkwardness of comparing two completely different worlds and two completely different sensibilities. The awkwardness an American feels in the face of European history, the awkwardness when confronted with individuals whose sense of history defines them as much as its absence defines the American.
It’s not that America does not have its own history; god knows, more history being made by the minute in New York or El Paso than most other places in a decade. But to make a sweeping generalization, it is that Americans in general seem to lack a sense of history or wish to ignore it, perhaps in a ‘we’re still young’ spirit of things. That is not a criticism. In fact, perhaps it is artistic endeavour’s good fortune to always start with a clean slate. I can imagine what would have happened if Walt Disney had been born in Greece and not in Chicago, back in 1901, where his mother, sister and brother encouraged him to keep selling his art, let alone the quality of the McKinley High School. His imaginary Greek parents would discourage him from wasting his time with silly drawings of cats and ducks and remind him that they had starved in World War Two and that he has to grow up and get serious about his life if he wanted to survive…
Yet it is hard not to agree about the lack of a sense of history. The sixties has been trivialized as a drugged free-love sexfest, while many people at that period of time lived urgently. In Greece the urgent times are rarely forgotten (for better and for worse) because they are still close. I am guessing that if you haven’t lived in what we call “urgent” times and sensed that urgency in your veins, if political and historical events haven’t crowded out your individual needs, if, in short, you have grown up in a society where the collective unconscious does not include the sweep of larger all-encompassing events, meaning not only the pressure of current affairs but the images and stories and myths that are handed down from grandparents and parents to children and grandchildren, I don’t think you can imagine a world where, to use a cliché phrase, history is in the making. That’s my contention. Because you can’t acquire a historical consciousness through libraries. That’s why Baxter fails to convince. And I’m not sure Pearl Harbor or the Anthrax scare or the pain of nine eleven will invest future story tellers with a deeper sense of American history.
I have the feeling that such efforts are blocked by a very McCarthyite self censorship, a fear of bringing politics into literature, but that is something else again. Americans fear politics in their literature. It is my sense that every American has been affected by certain unspecifiable effects of McCarthyism. The writer’s subconscious mitigates against placing ideas and those who believe them at the center of a novel. There is something “communistic” about it. Even E.L. Doctorow, who might be considered our top political novelist, seems to trivialize the emphasis on belief and action. In one scene in his acclaimed novel, Ragtime, one of his characters jerks off behind a closet, while secretly watching Emma Goldman, the anarchist who nearly brought down Germany in the early nineteen hundreds, make love with her partner. The focus is on the young man’s “jism” and how it floats in the air. Yet Emma Goldman is the one ultimately killed for her beliefs. White jism versus a bleak “ism.” Tongue-in-cheek yes; American bravado, yes. Convincing no.
The weight of history, past and present, is something the Greek has no way of escaping. It is ever present. It’s no accident that the partisans, those bands of hungry, lice-infested men who lived in the mountains fighting Germans with rags for shoes and the fever of battle and combat in their eyes, chose for their aliases names like Aristotle, Pericles, Agamemnon, Achilleas, and Ulysses. Because of the partisans, these ancient names are now vested with multiple identities and resonate from generation to generation.
This very morning, even as I revise this piece, a radio program interviewed the author of a new book. He had just published his detailed diary about being holed up in a cellar in Athens with his two brothers during the German occupation. Nothing as dramatic as Anne Frank, but powerful nonetheless. The main overriding theme? Hunger, the starvation of children, Biafra, poverty, survival. The essential themes. After hearing that program, it seemed much harder to return to the fictional world of my next book, populated as it is by largely middle-class white Americans who don’t need to worry much about where their next meal will come from.
For the imagination, the weight of history can be oppressive.
Greece’s main military threat today is Turkey. And the stories about Turkey and the Turks have been around for more than five hundred years. This certainly colors the modern Greek consciousness and by extension, the way we imagine Greece when we are in the States.
Last year I visited the Monastery of Saint Loukas in the mountains of Thebes. (The streets unfortunately have names like Oedipus and Sophocles.) A monk at the monastery showed me an emerald-studded crown of deep blue velvet, soft to the touch, worn by a bishop who fought in the liberation war against the Turks. When they caught him, the monk explained to me, they sat him on a sharp stick. For the next two or three days, the executioner “gentled” the stick deeper and deeper. With a simple touch to the man’s arm like this, the monk said and touched my arm lightly, or like this, he said and pushed my head just a little to the right, gravity was given a helping hand. The stick pierced through stomach, intestines, kidneys, very slowly, until penetrating the heart itself.
Stories like these give the Greeks pause. Turkey in particular gives modern Greeks pause: life is not all one big consumer society. Life might end. Turkey lends Greeks a sense of urgency. However, this very urgency affects my imaginings of Greece, I would say, just as its absence – at least until the Muslim fanatics penetrated our world and our consciousness, liberates the way in which I imagine America.
***
My lawyer-friend wonders why I rarely write about the Greece that is modern, the one populated by bright economists, top-notch doctors, stock marketeers, bankers, art auctioneers, computer scientists, biologists, archaeologists, and sophisticated businessmen. In short, the Greece that I sometimes hang out with. He has a point. Why don’t I? Why am I more attracted to writing about the Greek village and to exploring the possibilities of a Greek version of magical realism.
I know why. If I’m going to do a computer programmer, he’s going to work in Seattle or Silicon Valley, not in Athens Greece. The Greece my lawyer-friend is talking about very much resembles the America I knew and abandoned. But even modern Greece is not so modern, or rather it is full of examples that reinforce my stereotypes. I search for stories and anecdotes that fire my imagination and this imagination is not excited by the professional classes – the Greek doctor at the Onassis Hospital performing a delicate operation or the Greek computer scientist working for Microsoft who cleans a program from viruses and bugs.
Ultimately, I suppose I search for elements in this society that seem to reinforce my imaginary Greece, not the one I live in (the newest Starbucks is next to the Byzantine church at the foot of the Acropolis while you can find a MacDonalds near ancient Corinth) but the one just beyond the corner, hiding behind the Cypress trees, the one that is populated by heroes, brigands, shepherds, fishermen and village women who go against the grain, the Greece that is still superstitious and wondrous, closer to its rural roots than America, a Greece where logic is so often upbraided by emotion.
In an old village square on the island of Astipalaia, a local builder built a memorial during the dictatorship (1967-1974). But there are no names and there is no war memorialized. The builder simply used the memorial as an excuse to get government funds. In a country that reveres history, it was not hard to trick the government. There are no dead, there are no names, there was no war. Over thirty years have passed. The local administration is keeping the memorial intact. At some point, the mayor told me, there will be a reason to use it and they will add the names.
A memorial waiting for a memory. Would that happen in America? Somehow, I think not. A mini-mall, a condo, a villa, a parking lot, a pay per view vista of the Aegean – all would be viable cash-producing substitutes.
Since I no longer have the subway to carry the essay along, (we got off with the “nerd”) I will finish on the back of a more traditional beast, the lowly mule.
Fifteen mules were captured by Greek border police a few years ago. The beasts, unaccompanied, carried two thousand kilos of hashish and dozens of machine-guns that the war in Yugoslavia has made so conveniently available all over the Balkans. Smugglers set them loose on the Albanian side and presumably, once the beasts made their way into Greece, they would re-join the family of man and rapidly be relieved of their valuable burden.
Now that the hashish and guns had been confiscated, the problem was what to do with the mules. They were fed, housed, and scraped down – some of the policemen had mules themselves back home and knew how to care for them – but the police station was in no position to run a full-time stable. Brigitte Bardot, former actress turned into animal activist, made a stink about the plight of the donkeys. They were instantly released. (Louis of Amherst told me that when the French made stamps with Bardot’s image on them, the Frenchmen didn’t know which side to lick…)
This small story, completely true, seems so ordinary and yet so Greek. I can hear my friend shouting at me for reinforcing the stereotypes. So be it.
And so also, our short and jumbled ride ends. I have thrown at you what I consider a number of issues which hover in my mind most of the day and night. Memory, history, imagination, awkwardness. How to render fictitious worlds real.
As a writer, I must end with the mules. I can’t leave them. I imagine them on their own. At first they are at a loss and munch on whatever mules munch on. But then one of the policemen gives a strong whack to the first mule and suddenly the whole pack lurches forward.
Like the translation of cultures, the mules move back and forth between borders; sometimes they carry a dangerous load, other times they are completely free of any such freight. At that moment, almost anything goes.
They jog briskly up the jagged mountain range, inhale the fresh air, smell the cypress and pine trees, and then cross the border and return to Albania. A good jog is perhaps the American way of getting your imagination to work; but don’t forget, the mules follow those ancient and trustworthy paths.