Traveling With Pomegranates Read online

  I notice that several niches in the rock have been turned into improvised altars, holding offerings left by visitors. Standing on tiptoe, I examine a collection of dried flowers, snail shells, a pile of stones, bouquets of wheat, a small scroll of paper, and the peelings of a pomegranate.

  This will sound outlandish, considering my age, but I’ve never tasted a pomegranate. Not in my entire life. I have no idea why this is so. It has simply never entered my mind to eat one. Now, in the space of days, I am wearing them, begging them off waiters, dropping them in the street, consumed with their mythological meaning and engrossed in their symbolism.

  They are lavish symbols of fertility. When opened, they look for all the world like ovaries engorged with seeds, their insides bloodred. In some parts of Greece, a groom hands a pomegranate to the bride when they cross the threshold; in others, farmers break the fruit against their plows before planting. As I contemplate the fertility I hope for in my fifties and beyond—the regeneration of my creativity, the refinement of my spirituality, a new relationship with my body, the rediscovery of my daughter, indeed an inner culmination I cannot fully articulate to myself—I realize it cannot be plotted, orchestrated, controlled, and forced to bloom. It can only germinate naturally out of my experience . . . or not.

  I retrieve the pomegranate from my bag and slice it open with my knife.

  The pomegranate in the myth symbolizes both death and life. When Persephone ate the seeds Hades gave her in the underworld, she ensured her return to it, initiating what impresses me now as an astonishing process: dying and being reborn. The secret of fertility.

  Maybe it is a feminine thing, I don’t know—but whenever I’ve managed to find new consciousness and renewals of my work, my relationships, and myself, it has been by going down into what seemed like a holy dark. It has come through a deep metabolizing of my experience and moments of metaphoric dying. The old cycle: life, death, rebirth.

  “I’m going to eat some of the seeds,” I tell Ann. “Do you want some?”

  Of course, this is what I’ve had in mind all along, ever since I spotted the leather-skinned fruit on the breakfast buffet. The idea was more innocuous then, an interesting thing to do at a sacred site. Now, it is personal, serious, and makes my heart thump in my chest. I feel like Eve in the garden about to bite into an undreamed-of hazard. I will look up the word pomegranate when I get home and discover it comes from the Middle French pomme grenate, literally “seedy apple,” and I will wonder if maybe the fruit in Eden wasn’t a pomegranate all along.

  I pick out a handful of seeds and eat them one by one. I let the tart, acidic sweetness saturate my tongue. It becomes an initiation. A ceremony of consent. Traveling now with bones. Traveling with pomegranates.

  As we leave, a single sheaf of wheat lies on the ground, blown from the cleft in the rock. Demeter’s wheat.

  Ann picks it up and hands it to me. “Happy birthday,” she says.

  Ann

  Sanctuary of Demeter-Eleusis

  Walking Walking toward the Plutonian at Eleusis, I stop to take a picture of a column that lies on the ground like a fallen tree trunk, arranged evenly in seven pieces. If a column falls in a Greek ruin and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? This is the kind of thought I distract myself with.

  I love how remnants of the past overlie everything here. I am moved by the way history is folded right into the present, where it can remind people of who they are, where they come from, and how they were shaped. My feelings for Greece haven’t changed since I was here before, only the question of what I will do with them.

  I flip my journal open to the photo log I’ve created and write “Eleusis” at the top of the page, then list everything I’ve photographed so far: cypresses growing between power lines; a Greek flag hoisted on a clock tower; four smokestacks puffing behind the ruins of a temple dedicated to Artemis; the bust of a man who has lost his forehead but not the curl in his beard. Finally, I scrawl: marble column in seven slices.

  I left Mom beside a well, a journal in her lap and a pen behind her ear. Somehow I know she came here to sit by that well. What I don’t know is why, and I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with me. I don’t want it to have anything to do with me, seeing as how she’s at the spot where Demeter grieved for her daughter.

  “I’ll be in hell,” I told her, pointing toward the Plutonian with my site map. It was an obvious joke about the entrance to the underworld, and I manufactured a smile to conceal how much my joke had revealed.

  “You’ve been dying to say that, haven’t you?” she said. Her laugh sounded as put-on as my smile. I look back now to see Mom still by the well, and I lift the camera and take her picture. I label it: Demeter Sue.

  I can’t keep her in the dark much longer about what’s going on with me, and I don’t want to anymore—well, more or less. Once the words are out there, they start to live and breathe in unpredictable ways. Another person will know what I do, and that will make the whole thing somehow truer and irreversible. It will crush my mother to know how unhappy I am. Besides, this is her birthday trip, so why would I lay all this on her now?

  If a column falls in a Greek ruin and no one is there to hear it . . .

  I move along the path, consulting the map as I walk, tripping on clumps of grass which sprout from seams in the pavement, passing steps that once led to the threshold of a temple but now end in midair, a capital ornamented with winged lions and bulls, and the Agelastos Petra or Mirthless Stone, where Demeter supposedly took a rest, apparently without delight.

  I don’t need the map to tell me I’ve arrived at the Plutonian. A cave is hollowed into the rock, its entrance bulging with deep blue shadow. When I step into it, chill bumps break out across my arms. Several clefts and cavities are lined with flowers, stalks of wheat, pomegranates, buttons, and ribbons—little altars scooped in the rock. I photograph them from different angles.

  The holes seem to tunnel back endlessly, disappearing into darkness. I put the cap on the camera lens and force myself to sit down on a stone ledge inside the grotto and take in the fact that I’m at the mythical spot where Persephone returned. I should do something. Pray for answers. Make an offering. I lift the pomegranate charm on my necklace and roll it between my fingertips, thinking for a second that I’ll make a grand gesture and leave it at one of the altars. But gazing at it around my neck, I notice it gives off a tiny glow against the skin of my chest, just a smudge of rose light, and I decide I can’t part with it.

  What I do is sit here and think about last night in the restaurant—the dancer waiting for me to get out of my seat, the way his face dropped when I didn’t. I wonder if my dancing would have broken an impasse inside of me and made everything better. The fantasy du jour. Why had I sat there like that? Now the evening will haunt me until I can’t remember the details anymore—not the music, the dancer’s face, or how helpless I felt when I was up against my own resistance to living out there in the world.

  My mind bounces from one self-recrimination to another, settling finally on the rejection letter, the doorstep where I usually end up with my load of blame and self-loathing. Sometimes, in an attempt to sidestep reality, I binge on memories of how it was before that letter came, and on my daydreams about the life I’d envisioned—silly things like wearing jeans to teach my classes, carrying a brown leather briefcase, updating my passport, planning my next sabbatical in Athens, writing papers on Greece at an antique desk. When I think about those reveries now, though, they seem infused with romance. There is nothing in them about a fervent interest in students, grading stacks of papers, chiseling out lesson plans, or sitting through faculty meetings. I’m not enthused by these facets of the job—the nitty-gritty parts—and this sudden revelation both disconcerts and embarrasses me.

  I think about the weird moment in the restaurant when it crossed my mind that the evaporation of my career plan was not the real source of my depression. I do realize the letter has become far more than
a rejection letter. Somehow it has gotten attached to much deeper things, turning into a catchall for everything that seems wrong with me: “Ann: the Official Document.” Could my depression come from my belief that the document is true? These thoughts create a lump of anxiety in my stomach. I don’t want to venture any further into them.

  I sit on the stone ledge as depression floods in. I try to hold myself there, to not jump up and take more pictures, to not run away. I remember when I was around nine, playing rodeo in the ocean waves with my brother, straddling a raft, and how a large wave unexpectedly knocked me off and shoved me under. Before I could surface, another wave pushed me down, then another. But this is not a game. This is my life. The darkness tunneling back and back.

  I could lose myself to depression.

  Fear flushes through me and for a moment I border on panic.

  This is when I land on the ocean floor, and I don’t know how to surface, or if I will. Simply facing that truth, grim as it is, alleviates the alarm inside. I take a slow breath. I don’t know how many minutes pass, but gradually the crest of anxiety subsides.

  I rummage through my backpack for a guidebook and turn the pages till I find the myth of Demeter and Persephone that I’d scanned earlier in the taxi. This time I pore over it slowly, and it dawns on me that the myth tells my story.

  Persephone never saw Hades coming. She was jerked out of her nice, sweet life and plunged into a dark underworld. On one level, she was abducted into her own depths, forced into a deep and painful confrontation with herself. Yet the time she spent in the underworld is precisely what transforms her from a naive, untested girl into a mature and conscious young woman. I reread the part of the myth in which Persephone eats the pomegranate seeds. Is that the moment she accepts the complexity of her experience and really takes it in? I wonder: instead of retreating and hiding, instead of pining for the way it was, what if I accept the way it is? This strikes me as both the most obvious thing in the world and the most profound.

  It occurs to me then that Persephone came back. I could come back, even if at this moment I don’t understand how. There is an end to this.

  Seeing my experience mirrored in this mythical context reassures me. I take out my journal and write three words on a piece of paper, then scroll it up and place it on one of the altars inside the cave. I stare at it, wanting to memorize what it looks like sitting between a mound of pebbles and a sheaf of wheat.

  When I leave the Plutonian, Mom and I wander through the museum, where she surprises me, and I think herself, too, by opening up to me about a struggle she has long had between her writing ambitions and her desire to . . . how did she put it? To just dwell, to be. Her confession flabbergasts me. Growing up, I never saw this private tension of hers. What touches me most about the conversation is that Mom has revealed this to me at all, that she has let me see how human she is.

  When we leave the museum, we return to the Plutonian. She hasn’t been there yet. Standing beneath the overhang of rock, I watch as she inspects the altars. She gazes right at my piece of paper and has no idea.

  She pulls out the pomegranate she confiscated from the hotel, cuts it open, and offers me some of the seeds. The myth, I realize, is her story, too. It’s not hard to see that being here is full of meaning for her. It’s like she’s inwardly grieving. It could be because of her birthday. Turning fifty has clearly gotten her attention. But maybe, too, she feels she has lost me in some way. If I’m aware of how our relationship has changed, of the room divider that marks her world from mine, of the way I withhold, then she must be aware of it as well.

  I watch Mom eat several of the pomegranate seeds.

  I take a handful and swallow them.

  Back in Athens, Mom and I go shopping. We spend the whole time in one art gallery. Mom goes back and forth between two museum replicas—a white Cycladic statue and a black Minoan vase. She says it’s a gift for the new house she and Dad are building, a housewarming gift . . . for herself. She has been known to buy herself birthday presents and wrap them.

  As she studies the amphora, I wander through the gallery, trying not to think about Demetri. This is the night I’m supposed to meet him, and already I’m reluctant about the prospect. It feels like the same resistance that gripped me in the restaurant when the dancer held out his hand and I felt powerless to move, the same resistance I have to talking to my mother.

  While Mom debates about her purchase, I have a conversation with myself about how disappointed I’ll be if I don’t see him. I tell myself it’s probably the last chance I’ll get for the rest of my life. Dancing with him all those months ago drew me out of myself into a world where I felt like I belonged. We wrote letters, traded pictures, became close. How could I not go?

  “Which one, Ann?” Mom says, pointing at the two replicas.

  “I like them both.”

  “Good idea,” she says, and turns to the clerk. “I’ll take both of them.”

  I do not know how to have both things I want. To see him and to stay safely disengaged in my hotel room. I want to know how a person can be happy and isolate herself from most everyone on the planet.

  Maybe I hesitate because I don’t want to be reminded of who I was when I was with him—I’m so far from that person now.

  On the way back to the hotel, we watch the changing of the guard at Parliament House from across the street.

  “It’s been a long day,” Mom says. “Let’s eat dinner in the room.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, wait, I forgot. You’re meeting Demetri tonight.”

  “I can still eat with you,” I tell her, but I know what I’m doing. I’m steeping myself in an alternate plan. An escape plan. One about a picnic in the room.

  At a small grocery, we buy cheese pie, a spinach calzone, two bottles of Coke, and a chocolate pastry. When we get to the room, I fall across the bed with my feet dangling off the side. All I can think about is the phone.

  It rings while I’m washing my face at the sink.

  Mom calls into the bathroom, “That must be Demetri. Do you want me to get it?”

  The depression comes, one black wave after another. I look at myself in the mirror. “Let it ring,” I say.

  I close the bathroom door. He will not understand. He will think he means nothing to me.

  I sit on the side of the tub and wait for the phone to stop ringing. When he finally hangs up, I sob into the washcloth.

  Right now, I wish I were someone else. I will have to come out of the bathroom and explain to Mom why I didn’t answer Demetri’s call. I have no idea what I’ll tell her. I want to go out there and sit beside her on the bed and quietly lay my head in her lap. That’s all. I’m twenty-two and that is what I want.

  I open the door. I tell myself not to think about anything except the three words I wrote down on the scroll of paper I left in the cave: I will return.

  Sue

  Mary’s House-Ephesus, Turkey

  In the Turkish bazaar at Kuşadasi, Ann and I meander through a bright maze of rugs, evil-eye bracelets, coffee grinders, hookahs, silver jewelry, leather purses, and old pots. To see her now, you would not know she’s depressed. I watch her photograph trays of golden and magenta spices—sumak, kekik, kimyon—and marvel at how her melancholy comes and goes. Back in Athens, her sobs landed like soft, muffled explosions against the closed door of the hotel bathroom, while I sat on the bed feeling their detonations inside my chest, and now she circles objects with her camera, engrossed in pleasure, cracking up at the dark-eyed toddler who pretends to smoke a hookah and his mother who puts on a show of scolding him but keeps lapsing into laughter.

  We left Athens two days ago, desperate for air temperature less than ninety-nine degrees. Boarding a ship at Piraeus for an excursion to several Greek islands and the coast of Turkey, we sailed into the cool blue colors of the Aegean, clinging to the rail of the deck like wind socks, filling up with fat, glorious breezes. Yesterday, as we hiked around Mykonos, the island was brimming with w
ind-mills and zephyrs, and when the sun slumped toward the horizon, we floated back to the ship in small boats, shivering in the tinted light.

  “Oh great, now we need sweaters!” I told Ann.

  I behave as if she’s fine, as if I did not hear her grief spilled out in the bathroom, but I no longer doubt her depression. When I wake—at all hours of the night—that is what first breaks the surface of my thoughts. Then the sinkhole of fear opens. I know I should talk to her, intervene, do something . . . but it’s so easy to go on acting as we are, giggling at goose bumps on our arms.

  A particular memory has come to me twice since we boarded the ship. I am a new mother for the first time, barely twenty-four years old, and it is the day my own mother returns to her home, leaving me alone with my six-pound newborn son. I look over his crib and a paroxysm of fear grips me. Maybe I will be terrible at this; I will do something horribly wrong—sleep through his hungry crying until he grows emaciated or overfeed him until he spits up and aspirates . There are a thousand ways to screw it up, and I feel ripe for all of them. Alone, terrified, swimming in postpartum, hormonal soup, I sink straight down onto the floor and cry.

  Sometimes memory has the purposefulness of dreams. The second time I recollect that long-ago day, I realize it’s because I’ve arrived at the moment again—the scared new mother, not of a newborn, but of a grown, floundering daughter—feeling alone, afraid, the hormonal soup turned menopausal. There are a thousand ways to screw it up.

  Inside the coils of the bazaar, we wander into a small shop where sitar music whines from a tape player on the counter. I stare at a wall of shelves lined with identical ceramic statues of Artemis, as if she has been cheaply cloned at the goddess factory. I pick one up. Once Artemis flourished here. Her temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is just up the road in Ephesus. Her symbol, I notice, is a bee. It is engraved all over her dress.