Lambda is for Laothalassa
Nick Papandreou
When we first moved to Greece, my father’s mother, who lived with us, took on the task of improving our Greek. To grow into who we were, my grandmother said, meant learning Greek. She gave us Greek books to read but above all she insisted we learn to write Greek “beautifully.” She was determined, on this at least, not to let her grandchildren get away with the sloppy American writing habits acquired in the California public school system. “An elegant writing style,” she said in her precise formal Greek “is a necessity in today’s world.”
So began the calligraphy lessons. Once a week I sat at her small ebony-colored desk — she always made sure my shoulders were upright and that when I leaned forward I did so without bending my back — and then she would place in front of me some fresh, creamy-smelling sheets of paper, an inkwell, and a stylus with removable nibs. For these occasions she wore not her ornate ruffled blouse and stylish chapeau but some loose equivalent of an older woman’s workclothes: a long gray woolen skirt that reached her ankles with two enormous sets of buttons running its length and a simple white blouse.
We began with the Greek alphabet. She showed me how to ornament each letter with its own particular curlicue and wisp, adding tails, lengthening stalks, thickening stems and thinning curves by twisting and turning the nib of the stylus. I learned to taper downstrokes and add flourishes to upward strokes — descenders and ascenders she called them; she made me concentrate on initial and terminal letters so that I could lend them “grace and freedom,” and she showed me how to connect two letters with a smooth ligature. She corrected me if I didn’t hold the pen properly because it wasn’t enough that the letters look beautiful but that I look good while engaged in the act of writing. If someone should come in while I was writing they should notice the elegant way I held the pen, angled back like a reed bending in the wind, not sticking crassly up in the air like the mast of a ship. She showed me how to dip the nib into ink and turn it slightly so it wouldn’t drip on the creamy white sheet, to check for the watermark on the paper and to imagine a horizontal line running through each word. While she taught me the art of calligraphy she also taught me about each letter’s “soul,” as she put it, its psyche.
I learned that each letter has its own personality. The letter lambda ( λ ) has two legs which dangle beneath the word. A properly drawn lambda is a wonderful thing, a lovely trigonometer; think of lambda like a little man leaning back so that you draw the first leg slightly shorter than the second. Lambda’s embarrassed to be such a beautiful letter which is why we draw its head slightly bowed and why it keeps its hands in its pockets. If you lift lambda by its head and shake it like a bell the sound drops out of it — ul ul ul. I could see myself as a lambda, hands in pockets, head down.
The letter beta (β) was pregnant twelve months of the year; pie (π) was a square block of a letter shaped like a house; only something as solid as that could shelter the equation for the area of the circle, a shape which so intrigued the ancient Greeks. Psi (ψ) was like Poseidon’s trident, clearly a masculine letter, one that could be used to spear fish. Open your mouth for capital omega (Ω) feel it, the large drawn out ooh sound versus its taut breathless brother o-micron that looked like your mouth when you pronounced it. There was the delicate delta (ä) and the cantankerous eta (η). The small gamma (γ) was a scissors while its capitalized version resembled a hangman’s post (Λ). Epsilon (ε) was a very vulnerable letter, a letter to feel sorry for because of its open half-circles but a great addition that any word would be proud to have in its repertoire because epsilon looked so beautiful. Words with too many epsilon’s I felt sorry for because they seemed steeped in vulnerability, like the word eleos which meant mercy. N was a sophisticated letter, naturally written tall, linear and elegant; it stands strong while joining what can never meet — two parallels. Capital theta (Θ) you had nothing to worry about, a self-sufficient letter, a closed circle with a dash in the middle, never lonely. Words with theta’s seemed as independent as a military garrison.
Once I had learned the individual letters I practiced writing sentences by copying selected passages from the Bible. My notebook was soon filled with quotes like “Judgments are prepared for scorners and stripes for the back of fools,” or “A foolish son is the calamity of his father.” She corrected me with admonitions in French. “Ce n’est pas comme ça,” or “Mais non!” After a few weeks of biblical instruction she opened a book of poetry by Cavafy. My task was to copy the poems. While I followed Cavafy’s stanzas she would pause to tell me how polite he had been to her when they had met in Alexandria, a true gentleman who worked in an office of the Bureau of Irrigation Works by day and wrote poetry by night. As I wrote she recited the poem as if in front an audience and when she was done there would be a satisfied stillness in the room that my imagination filled with applause. “They don’t make poets like him anymore,” she would say and shut the book.
She taught me that Greek words might be funny. Fallen leaves make a sousouro, she said, when the wind rushes through them. Politicians who are full of themselves are pompodis. A car that’s falling apart is a saravalaki. Tzitziki is the Greek word for cicada, a word that sounds like the insect’s call. Some words were invented to sound like things. The word laothalassa literally meant a sea of people, an orgiastic multitude. The open alpha’s were like the crash of waves against the shore; in lao the mouth went from the open alpha to the rounded omicron and pronouncing it required disciplined effort, the energy of a crowd itself.
On her dresser, next to the fans which she used on hot days, my grandmother kept three icons of saints and behind that, a crucifix with Christ’s nearly nude body arched in that peculiar pose of pain and deliverance. Pictures of her Polish father hung from the wall, a man with a fierce beard, a monocle and an erect bearing. She told me he fought the Russians in Lithuania, was exiled to Siberia, escaped and joined some old communards in Paris, trained in the Garibaldi school for rebels in Italy before joining the Greeks liberate Ioannina from the Turks in 1871. There was also a large picture of my grandfather and my grandmother when they were young. It was only after weeks had gone by and I had stared at the pictures countless times that I suddenly realized that my grandfather and she had once lived under the same roof, inhabited the same bed and eaten their breakfast together.
“Why don’t you live with Pappou any more?” I asked her one day while copying out “The God Abandons Anthony.”
“We’re divorced,” she replied and then pointed to the next stanza so I couldn’t ask any more. Divorced since 1927 my mother told me, a period which belonged to the paleolithic age for me, a remote world of model T-Fords and women with veils and people who walked too fast — like in the silent movies of that era. So it was with some excitement that I told her that Pappou would be visiting us for lunch one day.
When she heard the news she opened her anthology of poems. Yet rather than start reciting she deposited the book on her lap and from the window of her bedroom stared at slices of bark which hung from the trunks of the birch trees like empty shirt sleeves. After a long silence she began the lesson but for the duration of the hour, hunched over her small desk, she barely paid attention to my writing and didn’t guide me. Free of her vocal correctives and that solid grip over my fingers — though over seventy she sometimes squeezed my fingers so hard against the ink pen that when she lifted her hand the place where my finger touched the pen was red, with a small depression — my writing degenerated into child-like scribbles, losing all traces of the adult-like beauty I thought was mine. My alpha’s were so small the open hole was filled with ink and my gamma’s barely crossed below the line. At some point she lifted her hand and scrutinized my sloppy oeuvre. I expected to hear her cries of “Mais non!” but instead she patted my head absent-mindedly and said it was too hot a day for such hard work. We would continue tomorrow, she said, and stood to gather up the utensils.
The following day when I showed up for my lesson she was sitting on her bed reading a letter. Hanging from the closet handle was a dark blue dress and beneath that were three pairs of shoes. Her open jewelry box held a mass of necklaces, thin and tiny, tangled up with each other. Her hearing aid sat on the writing table so and because she had her back to me, she couldn’t know I had entered the room. When I stood close I saw from over her shoulder the date at the top right corner of the letter. December 6, 1910. The words were larger than hers and swerved sideways, as if written in a rush, but nonetheless preserved the calligraphic principals she had taught me. This was a man’s writing. Though I was tempted to read on I was also embarrassed to cheat. When we played cards I knew it was ridiculously easy to cheat on her, but precisely for that reason I didn’t. I walked in front of her and stood there. When she saw me she immediately brought the letter close to her chest then returned it to a wooden box which held similar letters of super thin onion skin paper. She told me she didn’t remember that we’d put off yesterday’s session for today but soon enough we were bending over her desk. She held my hand with her coarse fingers. Her attention to my efforts was so slight that soon I was drawing alpha’s big as a cat’s head.
“What’s this?” she said, pointing to a cat’s head.
“But you’re leading me,” I replied, “it’s not my fault.” She said nothing. “Yiayia, we can do our lessons afterward.”
“Afterward?”
“After Pappou.”
She stared at me is she hadn’t understood. Then she nodded her head. “Yes, yes. After Pappou.”
*
Saturday morning, the day of my grandfather’s arrival, the house was on the move. Elvira had prepared a large meal of rice, chicken and bechamel sauce. My mother had promised us a double allowance if we cleaned up our rooms by twelve noon. My grandmother’s door was shut all morning and except for the sound of water rushing through the faucet of the washroom, there was nothing to indicate that she had even woken up for the morning. She never took breakfast anyway, but today no one had seen her.
Yet when we heard the rumble of cars outside our home and the small cavalcade of cop cars and motorcycles, her door opened and she stepped outside. She was dressed like she was going to a soiree. A dark veil hid her face and her sleek blue skirt reached down to her ankles. With those fingers whose strength I had come to know well she clutched a small silver purse from which hung beads. She asked me to help her down the stairs and she followed me, placing one hand on my shoulder. I took each step like a kid, with care, joining one foot to the other before venturing down the next step.
When I reached the main floor I saw my grandfather in the hallway. His maroon tie was decorated with white palm fronds that looked sort of like the skeleton of a fish. When he saw me he opened his arms to receive me but then his hands dropped to his sides. A cloud crossed his face, the smile vanished, and he turned instead to greet Lydia, Jason and Hector. My grandmother squeezed my shoulder hard, involuntarily I think, then released me and I heard her steps fading behind me. I ran to my grandfather and let him lift me into the air. When he put me down I raced toward the kitchen but she wasn’t there. I knocked on the bathroom door, once twice, turned the handle but it was locked. She didn’t join us for lunch and nobody said anything when Elvira took her plate away. That brief meeting in the hallway was the last time my grandparents ever saw each other.
*
Our next lesson she asked me to read to her from something called “The Secrets of the Swamp,” by Penelope Delta. Six hundred and forty pages of action-packed story about the exploits of a boy living on the border of Greece and Bulgaria during the war of 1905. Turning to page one I read this:
The sun, setting, reddened the snow-covered peaks of Olympus, goldened the waterholes left by yesterday’s rain in muddy plains which stretched forever, ashen, ugly, deserted.
“Ah yes,” my grandmother said, nodding her head. “Northern Greece.” She wore a woolen vest and was knitting something. While I read I could hear the needles click against each other. Her glasses were perched on her nose so she could look up at me and down at her progress without a problem. She looked more grandmotherly than ever, nothing like the stylish lady she had dressed into for my grandfather. The only thing missing was a rocking chair. I read a few more paragraphs.
“Penelope wanted to write a book in simple Greek,” my grandmother began, “and she did it. We were friends of hers, your grandfather and I.” It seemed hard to believe that anybody could know someone whose name was on the cover of our school book but I didn’t doubt my grandmother in anything. Whatever she said was the truth. “Your grandfather wanted Greek to be understood by all people. He knew the language well, that one did.”
“Like in the letters?”
“Which letters?”
“The ones in your black box.”
“I know you saw me reading them,” she said. I nodded my head guiltily. “Come early tomorrow,” she said.
Next day I found her sitting on her bed, a mass of crinkled onion skin pages around her. Some were folded in half, some were small like from a notepad, others big as two sheets together. Rather than gather them up and stuff them into the box like last time, she asked me to sit on the chair.
“One day,” she said, “you will learn to cherish the shape of words. One day you will write love letters and you will win any woman’s heart with the sheer neatness and power of your writing style.”
She handed me the letter. “The first time I saw your grandfather,” she said, “he was being held by gendarmes, who were taking him to jail. Years later, on one of our anniversaries, he wrote me this.”
Just like today, my Lydia, in 1907, remember, I was being taken in for the inquiry for the student troubles and I saw you on the steps of the Law School, with your white chapeau. We hadn’t yet confessed. I blushed, you blushed, and these bright blushes lit my prison cell. And ever since then I have waited for you, just as I waited — how could I not? — for your letter in jail; what absolute relief to have received even one letter from you. Were you real? Were you false? Inside the prison I asked this question many times without being able to answer it.
The writing was like hers; imaginary horizontal lines that appeared between each neat sentence; the smooth rightward tilt of letters, the curlicues for capitals, the upturned deltas and long tails that dipped beneath the imaginary horizontals.
She showed me a picture of the two of them together. In her eyes there is a sadness as if she knows one day she will be in a bedroom, alone, showing this picture to her grandson.
But she didn’t let me see any more letters. “You’re too young,” was her excuse. A few months later she told me that my calligraphy was passable and that I could practice on my own. We were both sad that I wouldn’t be joining her afternoons. The following year she took my youngest brother under her tutelage and taught him some of the surprises of the Greek alphabet. But once, when we compared notes, I asked him about the sturdy lambdas and the vulnerable epsilons. He thought I was crazy. My grandmother didn’t teach him that part.
*
On a cold day in the suburb of King City, north of Toronto, while kids sharpened their skates and slapped hockey sticks against pucks and snowmobiles roared in the distance, we sat in front of the television and changed channels in the hope of finding news of my grandfather’s funeral. We didn’t know if they were going to show anything. My grandmother had been crossing herself ever since we learned of his death. Her face looked worn but in her eyes rather than sadness I saw a small bright light.
Then, on the six o’clock news, for a full minute, we saw footage of the crowd surrounding the coffin. A close-up showed my mother in a black scarf and sunglasses, my older brother and my sister — they had been given special permission to enter the country — who were being pushed by the crowd practically onto the hearse. Behind the Canadian commentator’s words we could hear a roar and the slogan, “Old Man of Democracy, Rise Up and See Us! Rise Up Old Man!” An aerial shot showed hundreds of thousands walking slowly behind the funeral car. The crowds flooded into the First Cemetery of Athens and were backed up past Hadrian’s Arch, reaching as far as the Greek Parliament. Then the news flash was over and we sat there in silence.
My grandmother spoke first. Even in his last moments, she said, he managed to gather a real laothalassa. Her voice sounded harsh. It was the first hint I got of the real reason behind their separation. Politics. Not that I should have been surprised. She was the one who had told me that politics was the death of the family.
Once he was gone she seemed eager to talk about him. She started to sing songs that he had sung to woo her, usually German songs, but some in French. She told us about Leipzig and Berlin before the first World War and about the first time they held hands behind his father’s church in Patras and how he stole from her a breathless kiss inside the belfry. She told us how my grandfather had carried her through the streets of Chios one night, searching for a doctor, knocking on every door, shouting in the streets, until finally a mid-wife appeared to help with the baby and how my father was born in the middle of a garden, under a fig tree. Every year that went by, she said, every year that she grew older brought her that much closer to her husband.
*
We buried her in the same cemetery as my grandfather, though at quite a distance from each other. Her letters she left to us. For years I couldn’t look at them. But one day as I read them, I recalled that brief moment in our home when their gaze met each other, the day she dressed in case he had changed his mind and wanted to speak to her.
January, 1909
I want to be the wind in your hair, the teardrop of your eye, the breath of your mouth, the smile of your lips, the tip of your tongue. I love you, I will love you, I have loved you.
March, 1910
So what if it was insane to meet on Tuesday next to the church; we quenched our thirst. My hungry lips, my burning heart, cooled. Joy doesn’t walk streets, you must chase after it, beneath the table, before the theater, in the drop of sunlight on your cheek.
When she taught me how to write, when I blew on the creamy sheet to dry the ink and pressed down hard with the blotter she saw my grandfather in his military uniform drying one the words he’d written for her over half a century ago:
August, 1924
From the moment of our parting in the trolley your eyes live inside me, follow me everywhere. I left, my heart is wax, I return to you, my Lydia. I open the window to my office and let in a whirlwind of pain. Let’s close the windows, the door, the voices of the world, let’s be alone, alone. You and I.
Receive my soul.
In one letter, when they are no longer living together, he asks her for a divorce. It’s not that he doesn’t love her, he wrote, it’s that their marriage holds him back. Unlike the earlier ones, this one is free of his lazy rightward tilt; instead the words are upright and run across the page at neat right angles, perfectly horizontal, perhaps his most exquisite calligraphic effort. He wrote that his life required exhaustion in battle, whether in victory or in defeat. He was born when a crowd gathered in a square and died when it died. This passion, he said, he could share with nobody. He told her nothing of the famous theater actress who, along with four trunks of clothes and two poodles, would move in with him days after the divorce.