Ιφιγένια

Intrepid Iphigenia and I needed to go out to buy some fruit and veg.  We had just arrived in Tbilisi a couple of days before.  Tense and touchy, we start arguing about where to buy the said goods.

Iphigenia spots a stand in which she says the produce looks agreeable.  But I’ve been to that one before during a previous stay in town and I say, “No, let’s go to another.”

She doesn’t understand why, of course, and I have to explain, but I don’t have time to expound on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s brilliant theory of the way in which locals perceive outsiders.*

Instead I tell her that the lady is a bit nosy and she wants to marry her daughter off to me, probably because I know how to string together a few sentences in Georgian.  Iphigenia replies with a Don’t be silly, but I am adamant.  I am cold, cranky and, as such, determined to avoid niceties, conversation, explanations — hell, all human contact, for that matter. 

Iphigenia shortly lets me have my spoiled, nonsensical way, and she storms off.  It’s rainy and muddy; the steps she is climbing are slippery. 

She falls and soils her elegant long coat. 

Instead of rushing to see if she’s all right, I become angry, as if she had meant to fall or as if I myself had fallen.  My tone of voice is reproachful.  This infuriates her, which then makes me further furious.  We yell a few words we will later regret and then stop talking altogether.  The chill and drizzle and anger in that grey square squeeze the life out of me. 

She never wanted to come here, but was kind enough to indulge me.  So how could I have so thoughtlessly ruined even one hour in our lives together?

Are Ferekeekos too proud to apologize?      

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*On being foreign, Fermor writes that the locals in the Greek cities and towns he visited tended to solve “the conundrum of a solitary foreign traveller, by regarding him as (a) an omniscient sage, (b) a millionaire, (c) a lunatic, (d) a spy.  Sometimes all four simultaneously” (Roumeli, Ch. 3, no. 18 on the list of the differences between Greeks who style themselves Hellenes and those who relate more closely to the Romiós [sc. Byzantines]).  NB that all four choices are way off in my case, well, except (c) perhaps. . .

*  *  * 

Select enlightenment:

P. L. Fermor, Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (London: John Murray, 1966).

N. Mahfouz, Miramar (The American Univ. in Cairo Press, Eng.  trans., 1978 [1967]).