The Vengeances.

Choundas, George

PARIS STEALS HELEN. Pries her out of her husband's bed, seasons her lips with his own, spirits her to Troy. Of course that's how it starts. Love is the seed of every perfidy, every cataclysm. Even the chaste kind has its spawn. Paris's, hardly chaste, sires the world's longest feud.

(1) 1184 BC, GREEKS: The Greeks take first vengeance. They burn Troy to the ground. There is talk in Homer of babies thrown from walls. The Greeks probably shouldn't have done that.

(2) 753 BC, ITALIANS: Round two. Aeneas, the vaunted Trojan, escapes destruction. He flees to the Italian peninsula. His descendants found Rome. If the best revenge is living well, there is no defter comeuppance than founding an empire.

(3) 325 BC, GREEKS: Except founding an empire that nuzzles India. Alexander the Great makes both traditional conceptions of conquest and Romans look ridiculous. Point, Greeks.

(4) 27 BC-476 AD, ITALIANS: And in that, I confess, I take a little delight. Because--full disclosure--I am Greek. Half-Greek, actually. My Greek father ran a sandwich shop in an office park. I helped (notionally) with phone orders and food prep, sometimes cash register. I did not wear anything close to the smile my father insisted be presented to customers. Once, a manager from the medical supply outfit on the other side of the building ordered a meatball sub. While waiting he spied a titanic can of the Neptune brand tuna my father used. He knew my father was Greek.

"If Poseidon is god of the sea, who is Neptune?" he asked.

"Neptune," my father replied quietly, with the substrate conviction of one trafficking in axioms, "is Poseidon's helper."

For centuries after Alexander's corpse turns to livid soil, Rome burgeons and conquers and prospers. Neptune is decidedly not anyone's helper. Neptune leaves Poseidon polled and clipped and moaning in a watery corner. Never are tears more futile than when shed directly into ocean.

Point, Italians.

(5) 326-1000 AD, GREEKS: The Byzantine empire displaces the Roman. It also reigns as the world's mightiest religious institution. Empress Helena herself discovers the True Cross after being led by the scent of basil to the patch of ground where it lies buried. To honor the miracle, basil is thereafter revered by the Greeks. Many refuse to ingest it as food because of its spiritual significance. I once pressed my father as to why he did not eat basil. He is an avid churchgoer in the sense that the post-liturgy coffee hour is held in a church building.

"For the same reason you don't eat horse," he said.

"I don't eat horse because Kash 'n' Karry doesn't sell horse," I said.

He gave me the same look as when I wasn't smiling enough at customers.

(6) 1054 AD, ITALIANS: The Pope sends an obstreperous cleric to Constantinople. Cardinal Humbert's mission: to finally reconcile the Latin and Greek churches. The Cardinal instead antagonizes the Greek Patriarch. The two bicker about whether communion bread should be leavened.

Humbert has a fit and leaves. But not without a flourish. First he lays down a papal Bull on the altar of the Greek cathedral. The Greeks are excommunicated.

Later, the Pope repudiates Humbert's tantrum. He claims the Bull was never authorized. He does not, however, withdraw it. Nor does he explain the entrusting of diplomacy to a cantankerous sorehead. It is like sending a tarantella band to soothe a baby.

(7) 1182 AD, GREEKS: The new Byzantine Emperor sanctions a massacre of the Latins in Constantinople. He is deposed and murdered three years later. Some are sure his fate is repayment for wholesale murder in a holy city. They have no idea.

(8) 1204 AD, ITALIANS: The Venetians commandeer the Fourth Crusade. They forgo Muslim targets and sack Constantinople instead. This is repayment. Thousands are slaughtered. Masses of holy relics are looted. A fragment of the True Cross, stolen from the Emperor's private chapel, returns west with the victors.

All this transpires after Pope Innocent Ill's blessing of the crusade. He had hoped to install a Rome-friendly emperor. But the bloodbath must be disavowed. The Pope recycles an excuse from 1054: none of it was authorized. Thus he transubstantiates himself into a rebus--the "III" representing the lashes of a winking eye just after the word "innocent" is pronounced.

Occhio per occhio.

(9) 1261 AD, GREEKS: The Greeks retake Constantinople. The Latins are expelled. The original relics, of course, cannot be restored. But exact duplicates begin to resurface in all the same places. These "reappearances" are explained as miracles. It is a net positive: relics no longer lost, a rich new body of devotional narrative into the bargain.

What the Greek does not have, he wills.

Odonta anti odontos.

(10) 1453 AD, ITALIANS: Of all the world's feuds, few rival that between Greek and Latin. One contender: the long-running debacle between Greek and Turk. Its wounds, especially among older generations, are startlingly fresh. At dinner in 1985, when I was a high school freshman, I informed my father that I'd signed up for Model United Nations. The meal ended with my father informing me--shaking his head in a way that carried some of the shoulders with it--that I was mistaken, that in fact I had signed up for nothing. He issued this pronouncement after asking me, not once but twice, to repeat the part about how the school's team would be representing Turkey.

The next day I told the MUN moderator that a piano recital had come up last-minute, the way piano recitals sometimes (never) do.

For centuries Byzantium staves off Islamic conquest. For centuries the Greeks shelter behind Constantinople's famous walls. Even on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, when 60,000 Ottomans and mercenaries mass outside the city, the walls hold. The Turks do not breach them. But, it turns out, they do not need to. A Genoese general fighting for the Greeks has demanded that a single gate be unlocked so that he can abscond to his ship.

The Turks find the gate. They pour in after Giovanni Giustiniani and his retreating contingent.

One Italian's desperation becomes every Greek's catastrophe. The Turks take the capital and the empire. For hundreds of years after 1453, the Greeks live in slavery, subjects of the Ottoman sultanate.

A few years ago I reminded my father about his forbidding me from representing Turkey at a school event. He is eighty-two years old now. I asked him if, looking back, he thought it was the right thing to do. He shrugged his shoulders, the same shoulders that in 1985 had loomed like a bulwark against the possibility of appeal, and said simply, "I don't know. But it was too much to ask."

Five and a half centuries after that fateful Tuesday, one and a half centuries after liberation, and still my father speaks in terms of insufferable burden.

(II) 1500S-1600S AD, GREEKS: Rome dominates the Christian faith, dispatches it to three new continents. Still, the Greeks persist in their differences. They continue to reject, for instance, the Catholic communion wafer. They cite historical fidelity and maintain that only leavened bread can stand in for Christ's body. This candidactism is in fact an act of mercy. The hungrier the communicant and the more freely salivating, the less likely the prim and stinting disk survives long enough to be chewed.

As a teenager I took comfort in this notion one Wednesday a month. That was when my Jesuit high school held mandatory mass. We had time during these services for quiet contemplation, the Jewish kids and I, when at Communion we perched in our pews and watched our schoolmates file out to the priests and their wafers and file back.

I had every opportunity then to mull the incongruences between Greek and Catholic worship. There existed a serious discrepancy, for example, regarding the provenance of the Holy Spirit. I'd been taught from the age of nine that it proceeded from the Father. Yet every Wednesday in St. Anthony's Chapel roughly 615 people disagreed, reciting a version of the Creed in which the Holy Spirit proceeded also from the Son.

At some point I learned something that cheered me. The Greeks had long ago spurned the Filioque as theologically unsound, as surplus-age bolted on by the Catholics nearly 800 years after Christ. I came to enjoy this moment in the Creed. Every Wednesday I reveled in silence while the rabble droned their tri-syllabic blasphemy: and the Son. It came at the end of a sentence and sounded like superfluous prattle. The anapestic rhythm, moreover, suggested a blunder--words absently blurted and later regretted.

(12) 1687 AD, ITALIANS: The Venetians attempt to dislodge the Turks from Greece. The Greeks, two centuries into Ottoman subjugation, let their hopes soar. But ultimately the Venetians fail. In the attempt, however, they do succeed in bombarding the Acropolis.

When the world looks at the Parthenon, it sees the temple that still stands: a monument to humanity's greatest achievements. When the Greeks look at the Parthenon, they see also the parts that have fallen away. The view is no less wondrous. Like every dashed hope, it is a sad and beautiful ruin.

(13) 1757 AND 1810 AD, GREEKS: The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is the holiest church in Christendom. Inside are the sites of Jesus's crucifixion and burial. Empress Helena oversaw its construction. It was during excavations for this building that she smelled basil and found the True Cross.

For centuries, six sets of Christians have struggled over control of the Church: Catholics, Greeks, Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians, and Syrians. They live side by side inside the building but in an anxious pique. Each obsessively preserves historical claims over particular rooms and walls and inches of floor. Each watches carefully for where the others make repairs, or leave their brooms, because even these might be the basis for future claims. A ladder propped alongside the top-right window over the main entrance has leaned there since 1854. No agreement has ever been reached on how, or even whether, it might be moved.

In 1757, the Ottomans, fearing a Russian invasion, award primacy of the Church to the Greeks. The Greeks get Christ's tomb; the Catholics get a scattering of lesser chapels. Czar Nicholas and his fellow Orthodox are placated. The Pope and his followers, on the other hand: not pleased.

In 1808 the building is devastated by fire. By 1810 it is restored. But now the Greek spaces are larger, the common areas smaller in exactly the same proportion. Also, many of the Latin markers and decorations are now Greek. It happens that the architect for the renovation was a man by the name of Nikolaos Komnenos. From Mytilene. A Greek.

(14) 1863 AD, ITALIANS: It takes the Italians over half a century to retaliate. Not until 1863 is the cookbook La Cuciniera Genovese published. Inside is the first written evidence of their cunning: pesto.

Here is the recipe. Take Greece's holy plant. Do not merely shred or dice it. Pound it into a paste. Adulterate this new substance with pig food: pine nuts. Add a malodorous cheese--Parmesan, Pecorino, Romano, it doesn't matter, because what's important is to corrupt Saint Helena's beloved scent. Finally, slick this mealy abomination with copious amounts of oil, so that you and your guests turn it as promptly as possible into shit.

Basil, when heated, blackens and goes bitter. The fourteenth vengeance, therefore, is best served cold.

(15) 4:00 AM, OCTOBER 28,1940 AD, GREEKS: The Italian ambassador thinks it a good idea to present the leader of Greece with an ultimatum. Surely Mussolini himself, chafing to found a new Roman empire, has commanded it. Surely Mussolini used his famous signature posture when giving the order--chin thrust forward and up.

The threat comes on October 28. Submit to Axis occupation, warns the Italian ambassador, or face war. Ioannis Metaxas reportedly answers with a single word: Ohi. No.

The Greeks still celebrate Ohi Day every October. Mainly they honor the laconic defiance in that single word. No stauncher proof of a readiness to fight than keeping talk to a minimum.

But anyone who has been to Greece, or Astoria, Queens, or Tarpon Springs, Florida, might guess the real reason for the day's immortality. If you've seen a Greek say no, you've seen him do it in the iconic Greek fashion. Whether or not the word itself is spoken, whether or not (as is often the case) the tongue is instead unglommed abruptly from the palate with a percussive "tch," always that negating Greek chin is thrust forward and up.

Ohi Day is not a mere remembrance. It is a living caricature of Italy's most notorious leader. It is a cue for derision on a national scale."It does not matter that once you hung him upside down," a whole country is saying; "we and our chins will mock him, right side up, in perpetuity." It is an evergreen humiliation.

(16) 5:30 A.M., OCTOBER 28, 1940 AD, ITALIANS: Mussolini attacks later the same morning. The assault lasts months.

(17) 1940-41 AD, GREEKS: There is one radio in my father's village of Kounoupitsa. It belongs to Ioannis Dedegikas. When Ioannis is in a good mood, he sets it on his balcony and turns up the volume. Neighbors gather underneath to hear news of the fight against the Italians. Some are drawn to the understated glamour of the BBC. Others prefer the strident tones of the Free Voice of Greece, the mouthpiece of Greece's government-in-exile in Egypt; its broadcasters manage to speak in a kind of perpetual call, sounding exactly as far away as across the sea.

The rest of Kounoupitsa gets their war news from the church bell. A slow tolling means a Greek defeat. A fast pealing means a victory. Who knows who rings the bell--the priest himself? His wife? Not his son. His son has gone to war.

The villagers hear more peals than tolls. So many peals, in fact, that it's hard to believe. One imagines the villagers starting to suspect the accuracy of the ringing. One imagines them joking that the priest's wife is purposely botching the job so that her son will have to return from the front to take over.

But no. The peals are accurate. The Greeks are prevailing. They do not simply resist. They repel. They counterattack and chase the Italians into Albania. It is a rout.

Hitler asks the Italians to withdraw from Greece altogether. Like children bold with sugar and capering in a driveway, they are urged to get out of harm's way. The Panzers will take it from here.

(18) 1941 AD, ITALIANS: TWO men from Kounoupitsa die at the lines. One is a seventeen-year-old named Nikos Javelas.The other is the priest's son.

The bodies are never brought back from the front.

The priest and his wife carry on. Nikos's mother does not. For the rest of her life, she wanders the village, moaning the same words over and over. Niko mou, se afisane sto krio. My Niko, they left you in the cold.

The Germans occupy key locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Crete. The Italians get the leftovers. In the Italian zone there is looting. Worse, too. Depredations mount with desperation. Generally, their egregiousness is in inverse proportion to their distance from the cities. Kounoupitsa sits in the hilltops of Methana, a peninsular bit of volcanic land that points like Diogenes's lantern from the Peloponnesus toward Athens. My father remembers mostly chicken theft.

(19) 1947 AD, GREEKS: The war dust settles. Greece reclaims the islands of the Dodecanese. This ends a thirty-five-year Italian occupation. There is only one downside. Arguably this vindicates the Italians. They had always insisted on describing their takeover as "temporary."

(20) 1954 AD, ITALIANS: Before he owns a sandwich shop, before he comes to the United States, my father is a ship captain. He starts his merchant marine career as a naftis--a deckhand. His first ship is the Maria. It has only one route: Piraeus, Greece, to Trieste, Italy, and back again. The Maria is a cargo shuttle. From Greece to Italy, it carries alefopetra, a lightweight stone used in construction materials. From Italy to Greece, it carries hay.

My father remembers lots of things about the Maria--how the captain and the owner both discovered he knew English (at the time a mark of some distinction), how the captain thereafter replaced all his duties with just one (paperwork), how the owner thereafter invited him to lunch after lunch to discuss his marriageable niece (my father, wily as Odysseus, implying just enough interest to keep the lunches coming).

But most of all my father remembers gelato.

Every night in Trieste, he and the rest of the crew eat gelato. Every night the Greeks place their orders, and the Italians behind the counter ask "E?" The Greeks, oblivious that the custom is to request two flavors served side by side, smile as if remembering picnics with their favorite aunts. The Italians give up. Apparently convinced all Greeks love lemons, they give them all a second serving of lemon.

The crew stroll about as they enjoy their gelato. They admire the clean streets. They envy the city's easy vigor, its liveliness without traffic or crowds. They watch the passing women, fully appreciating the impossibility of looking manly while eating gelato. They manage anyway.

Having brought with them stones lighter than stone, and eaten ice cream lighter than ice cream, the Greeks head home aboard the Maria. Amid the affable huff of aging diesel engines they feel lighter, more hopeful, than when they arrived.

This was Italy's vengeance: It bewitched my father. His first taste of the ships had the flavor of promise, of perfection. By golden association, the happenstance of gorgeous Trieste, of wonderful gelato, of counterwomen who smiled back like they were the favorite aunts, ensnared my father into a long merchant marine career, nearly derailing his larger dream of coming to America.

It is a small vengeance, though. Really my father's stories of Trieste are less about rivalry than about sweet commiseration. Whenever my father tells them, I see two countries, one as war-broken and impoverished as the other, trading rocks and grass between them. Each offers the other what it can: parts of itself.

(21) AUGUST 2, 1968 AD, GREEKS: The Katingo lies in port at Genoa, Italy. It is a 16,000-ton oil tanker. My father is captain.

Onto the ship struts a man my father has never met. My father knows only two things about this stranger: he arrives fresh from a honeymoon on a lake in Austria, and he is taking over command of the Katingo.

My father is resigning his captaincy. In just over a month, he will take a train from Piraeus, board a Luxair jet to New York, and emerge from JFK International Airport's arrivals hall into a new life. The stranger coming aboard is the Katingo's new captain.

For a man with larger concerns, my father spends an inordinate amount of time considering his successor. Specifically, he believes he will be a disaster. A captain who honeymoons on a lake in Austria does not know how to speak to a lostromos (bosun) whose family's only asset was a mule. A captain who honeymoons on a lake in Austria does not know how to say enough is enough when a seller's representative insists that tank number four be washed a fifth time, or how to manipulate this representative with a particular cocktail of geniality and menace into feeling shrill and fatuous and unreasonable, or how to finally appear to give in and provide the requested signature--but with the sneaky and nullifying words "subject to owner's approval" underneath--when the representative demands defensively that the ship at least assume the risk of contamination from tank number four's uncleanable muck.

It is important that Italy was both my father's first destination as a seaman and his last. It made the contrast all the sharper. In his first port, the air itself smelled of sweet destiny. In his last, the grinning and obsequious ship chandler brought aboard a local introduced only as "Dominick," who proposed that my father sail loads of cigarettes after sunset to boats waiting just inside international waters. In Trieste, there were smiling passers-by. In Genoa, there were grim-faced insurance inspectors who insisted on seeing the lifeboats lowered and raised and lowered again. In Trieste, the world waited at happy heel. In Genoa, the groveling chandler listened as my father, in one of his last acts as captain, ordered two cases of Coca-Cola and then promptly ignored the request because a soon-to-be-former captain is the same as nothing.

Life for everyone, to some degree, is a trip from Trieste to Genoa. Life hardens under the press of responsibility and striving, shrinks to fit the strictures of routine and betrayed expectations, wears from the constant scanning for threats and mustering of wherewithal. The blush of promise turns--even as we mourn its loss, even as we protest it needn't be this way--into the uncleanable muck of necessity and mediocrity and compromise.

We all collect our wounds and retreat to Genoa.

Forty-seven years later, my father will drive his Ford Econoline E-150 cargo van on a bi-monthly basis from his Tampa home to a shop on Florida Avenue. The shop sits directly across the street from ABC Auto Sales and alongside Fried Rice King. There he gets his hair cut for twelve dollars by a Vietnamese woman named Kim. Often she will ask him--half in jest, half in deference to profit--if he's sure he won't try a manicure. Each time my father, without willing it, thinks of the captain fresh from his honeymoon on a lake in Austria. One pristine hand grips a deck rail. The other tightens with clear-coat nails the line around a seaman's waist before sending him across a storm-tossed deck to secure a pair of loose steel pipes.

The honeymooner keeps silent. A good captain says, This will keep you safe. Because everyone knows it's really so that a mother will have something to bury, so that she'll not haunt a village with wails and wandering.

(22) SEPTEMBER 2002 AD, ITALIANS: I marry an Irish-American from Ossining, New York. She is Roman Catholic. The wedding is in her childhood parish. My mother makes me swear that after the honeymoon we'll have a Greek Orthodox ceremony at my own childhood parish in Tampa. It will be a brief ceremony, a kind of blessing. My mother makes this request not because she cares, but because my father otherwise would pretend not to.

I accede for the same reason a Trieste counterwoman could simply dispense a double serving of a single flavor but would never dream of it. Tradition is important.

For the honeymoon my wife chooses Italy. In Venice we stay at the Danielli because we cannot afford it, and that goes far in making it a honeymoon.

A few hours after check-in, Cathy drops her wedding ring into the bathroom sink. She peers down the drain and sees nothing. I peer down the drain and see the gently graying, soigne salesman at David S. Diamonds standing behind the vitrines with a replacement ring in one hand and my 18.99 percent APR MasterCard in the other, pinching the latter between thumb and index because, shriveled, it now resembles the torn corner of a page from a very sorry ledger.

The front desk sends a maintenance man, who dismantles the under-sink assembly. In moments he finds the ring and hands it over. He receives a tip worth one one-thousandth of the ring's value.

Twelve years later I will learn that during a festival every spring, in a millennium-old tradition, the mayor of Venice (and before him the doge) drops a wedding ring into the sea. This is how Venice celebrates its marriage to the ocean.

At check-out I review the bill. The bottom line is an injury, the comma between numbers a dagger. The top is insult: staring out at me from the letterhead are the four famous bronze horses of St. Mark's Basilica, looted by the Venetians from Constantinople in 1204.

(23) NOVEMBER 2002 AD, GREEKS: The parking lot at St. John's Greek Orthodox is not huge. When we arrive one Saturday morning, therefore, it is easy to see the priest is not there. In fact he arrives fifteen minutes late. (Promptness for a Greek is disrespect for tradition. We are five minutes late ourselves.) While family and friends fill the pews with chatter, the priest pulls my wife and me into an office, briefs us hastily on the ceremony and answers "Yes, yes" to a question from my wife that begins "Where." This persuades us against the utility of further questions.

When the ceremony begins, we know to face the priest. We know that much. What we don't know--because no one has told us--is that we're in for a full-blown wedding, complete with wedding crowns and three processions around the altar.

What we also don't know: to take off our wedding rings. After speaking a few lines to launch the ceremony, the priest regards the two of us warmly, leans in, and asks, "Do you have the rings?" My wife and I have the same reaction; we cram our ringed hands against our stomachs while using our other hands to torque the rings off, careful to smother our elbows against the sides of our bodies because, unaccountably but passionately, we both believe that this will somehow ensure invisibility. It is a caricature of surreptitious movement. It is a caricature performed in tandem, moreover, and on the equivalent of a stage, making it that much more ridiculous. When the priest sees those rings, he freezes, his mouth hardens--the warmth is gone--and he looks up at us and stares, and we realize our error.

These details do not concern my father. He sits in a pew quite satisfied. He once sailed a Pacific route where, during a nighttime transit through the Panama Canal, the crew was so exhausted they humiliated themselves by trying repeatedly and failing to heave a half-inch line to a waiting tugboat; where he stranded himself and six ailing crew members in Tokyo after navigating them to a pre-arranged clinic visit but missing the rendezvous with the ship; where the ship encountered a typhoon so violent, and swamping seas so massive, that continuing ahead seemed like sure disaster, and turning seemed like certain catastrophe, and the ship--equally sensitive to this predicament--took forty-five seconds, engines full ahead and rudder hard starboard, to decide finally to turn.

For my father, the challenges of the journey are irrelevant. He has reached the appointed harbor.

The second wedding reception is at Maggiano's Little Italy. The Greek priest is invited but does not come. I do not know whether these facts are related.

In sum: I am Greek. But I have never lived in Greece. I do not speak Greek. My identity and provenance are a patchwork of remnants: family vacations in Athens and Methana; weekly duty as altar boy; Sunday school with Fifi Russell, a sweet-tempered woman with enormous spectacles who taught that anyone we encountered could be Jesus in disguise; Greek dance practice; an esteem for basil; unrepentant tardiness. For me, these totems are a large part of my Greekness. For my father they are fusty and faintly ridiculous, like the inside of a favorite aunt's purse. Fie lived Greece; he has no need for tropes. In the end, his avoidance of basil is a habit and not much more.

My son is named after my father, in the Greek tradition. But my son's name is "Peter," what my father called himself after arriving in this country. It is not Panagiotis, my father's birth name. Even names are an approximation.

One wonders what happens to the Greek identity after a generation or two. One wonders whether the identity proceeds from the father and the son, or just the father. I am, after all, a man who honeymooned on a lagoon in Venice.

My bride is Roman Catholic. The Italian sea stole her during our honeymoon and married her in the U-bend of an enameled drain trap. Both my children are baptized Roman Catholic. We live in Westchester County, in fact a collection of Italian neighborhood restaurants with just enough homes to supply a clientele and just enough trees and grass to dilute the scent of adulterated basil.

Of course that's how it ends.

Love is the fruit of every perfidy, of every cataclysm.

Match, Italians?

Ohi. A Greek never capitulates. Not ever.