Two nights a week after dinner, I sequester myself in my 2nd floor office, spread out text book, work book, and dictionary and begin Greek lessons. I start up my engine by listening to Ellenika Tora, my favorite language program, hoping to bring to life my Greek through the dialogues and adventures of Yiannis, Alliki, Eleni, Spiros, and Sofia—the whole gang whose daily lives unfold from chapter 1 through 24. They go to the taverna. At home Sofia takes a brow-beating from Mama. Alliki makes inquiries about an apartment for rent; they all buy cigarettes and soda and phone cards at the local periptero (kiosk).
I listen and follow along, hoping to first jump-start my pronunciation. But my lazy English-speaking tongue seems to deaden the Greek language. Wake up, lips, I say. Face muscles—vacation is over! By paragraph’s end, my lips are pulling back, my mouth pursing, my tongue doing gymnastics—yes, I’m beginning to sound like an “ellinida,” a native Greek speaker.
Next, I open my workbook, on chapter 7 now, and begin writing in exercises that test my verb conjugation skills, and declension of nouns and pronouns, masculine, feminine, and neuter. The grammar is pretty tightly woven into my memory like language “scales” (from early years of Latin drill at St. Mary’s Academy, perhaps) and I persist, feeling a certain satisfaction knowing present to future perfect tense for many 1st through 4th conjugation verbs.
Something else happens as I begin speaking the language. I feel, I mean really feel what it is to be Greek. I understand the precision of their language and the order—it is a very rational language. Like Greek folk dances that count on a group to move as one, the language too honors the group and all its rules rather than the individual. Rules point to a common goal. You cannot say the letter delta, the equivalent to the roman “d” as just a flat d sound. No, the tongue must come forward and for one second get stuck beneath your front teeth as your lips pull back into a smile. Just d, like duh, will not do.
During the summer months, I speak with local Greek people, and they correct me with ease. Of course I want to learn to speak Greek better and they, with all their crushing desire to be hospitable, will help me reach my goal. The Greek word, philoxenia, after all, means friendship for the foreigner. How flattered they are, how proud, that you love this bear of a language so difficult to learn that you will risk sounding like a fool just to order a kilo of lamb chops from the butcher.
One day, some years back, while out shooting in the tiny village of Ana Pedina in Epirus, I took a break in the village square in the shadow of a platanos tree. An elderly woman in headscarf leading a goat on a tether passed by, a few chickens clucking behind her. I bade her good morning, we chatted in Greek through a background check of where I came from and where I was going. “It is a beautiful language,” she said finally with pride. And then she added, “Why, you sound like an ellinida,” She may not have known it but she had bestowed on me the academy award of language speaking. My accent and pronunciation, good as a native Greek woman. I beamed with pride.
I love too the unique character of the culture that emerges when Greek people speak. I delight in chatting in Greek with my neighbor, Katerina, because she, like many Greeks, is so typically demonstrative. She pulls her head back and frowns emphatically as she speaks to show disagreement or disbelief. Let’s out an bold “Ach” and pulls herself up an inch taller when something displeases her. It is easy to see that Greece is just across the Adriatic from Italy. In both countries language is accompanied by a great flourish of the hands, shrugs of the shoulders, and in Greece, the characteristic Greek nod in which the head bows slightly then the chin only takes an abrupt left turn. It is an elegant acknowledgment leaving the receiver with a feeling somewhere between acceptance and a magnanimous blessing. And always the most soft-spoken Greek talks so loudly you think they are picking a fight with you. My neighbor Soula’s house sits an acre away from us, but often, come around late morning when she’s out picking plums with her grandson, I can hear every shouted word: Dimitri pou pas—ela etho tora! Dimitri where are you? Come now!
Why do I keep pressing on, 15 years after my first lesson and I am still not truly fluent. Perhaps because I am infatuated with how the language sounds on my tongue. I absolutely adore how difficult it is to make those sounds of the Greek alphabet and I’m elated when I succeed. When in Greece, I practice whenever an opportunity presents itself. I confess to being a shameless eavesdropper when I travel alone, listening to conversations of people behind me in the bus, sitting nearby at the kafeneon, everywhere, I listen, I learn and I delight in hearing the language like a fly on the wall, knowing that no one is awaiting a response from me.
I have a dream to one day sit in the taverna with Greek friends and laugh and joke and tease and explore philosophical notions—all in Greek, mind you, all night long. My dream is framed in one magical night in July 2011. I remember driving into the darkness over serpentine roads in east Zagori, Epirus after a photo shoot that afternoon. My friends from Kato Pedina could not come out to play that night and so I was heading back to my room in Aristi. I pulled my car over on the way for a p-stop at St. Vassilis, an eglisaki, a tiny church by the roadside. As I walked down the path I saw 3 or 4 cars parked. And, further ahead, a large bonfire crackled and burned and I heard voices. Photo opportunity? I listened a minute more and considered.They could not see me nor I them but I could hear their peals of laughter and see the flames dancing. A male voice spun a tale then a woman joined in and like sparks round the fire, the mirth exploded, first one woman, then another.
When Greek woman laugh, mind you, it is a strong robust laugh; nothing timid or reserved about it. It is Mediterranean, full and direct as the midday sun. There is a cadence as it ripples along with the storyline then crashes like a wave over the punch line carrying everything and everyone with it. Perhaps this sonorous continuity comes from a culture at ease with storytelling. Greek conversation is full of stories that unfold but also full of ribaldry, teasing, poking fun. It is not just an exchange of comments. A sense of theater is always there because Greeks as the creators of tragedy and comedy are never far from their roots.
This I heard and this I was hungry for. But I hesitated. The Greek they spoke moved at a break-neck pace and much too much I could not understand. Did it matter? The moment was full of friendship but I was new and a xeni, a foreigner. And so I listened, felt some vicarious joy but walked back to my car and drove away. And so it became a dream, the dream of communion in a taverna or around a campfire.
The next campfire perhaps I would take my own advice and Make Myself BIG the title of a favorite story in my book, Daily Bread: Stories from Rural Greece. What if I stopped my car, walked over through the darkness and joined them. Would they say “no”? I think not. Mastering a language requires “stepping out” when opportunity presents itself. Either way, language is about communicating and any way you do it, be a smile, a gesture to illustrate or just the first words that jump into your mind as an answer. Present tense? Past? It does not matter.