Mnemosyne
May Steinberg
Olive trees are the most assertive flora I’ve ever encountered. The peppery smell logged itself into my memory, rendering the different scents of trees I had experienced in my lifetime into an indistinct odious blob of pollen. My nose hairs back stroked through a sea of olive oil as the scent wafted through the cracked car window and activated the deepest synapses of my brain. I eyed the grove of twisted trees flush with delicate, muted green leaves and expected the hand of Zeus, clutching a heel of bread, to drop out of the sky and dab into the grove we are whooshing past.
I settled into the soft leather seat, taking it in, despite my distaste for olives. The scent of the trees, tapped into something deeper, which made my chromosomes quiver. I look to my left at Mnemosyne. She was in the car when Agiris, our distant cousin and driver, picked us up for our lengthy day trip to Koupia, my Yia Yia’s village in southern Greece, a modern version of my mother’s own journey 40 years ago which she always brushed with a wistful glaze in her descriptions of unpaved roads, donkey rides, and connecting with relatives.
I knew who Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, was when I saw her. The folds in her drapey tea-stained dress contained our collective memories, generations of births, deaths, victories, defeats. She gazed at me with irises coated in honey syrup emphasized by chestnut-colored arched eyebrows that matched her coils pinned into a hellenic chingon. Her slight smile screamed, “Remember me?”
I excitedly slipped into the backseat next to her, thinking about how as a child I pored through Greek mythology, yearning for a spiritual connection through culture since the distance of Christianity never quite resonated. In church I learned that God was in heaven, and you are on Earth, and you can talk to him any time you like but, chances are, he won’t address you directly. I wasn’t into being ghosted through prayer. In mythology, gods like Mnemosyne would often come directly to humans, like me, setting them on great tasks, adventures, or fucking them while disguised into animals. I didn’t spy any particularly amorous animals on the way to Koupia, so I assumed my labour would be limited to lunch.
As we drove, Agiris explained to Mom and I the deep ties the Peleponisian peninsula has to agriculture. He told us that Greece used to produce rice, right in the area where we were driving. Mnemosyne telepathically put the picture of vast paddies, wedged in between the rolling, rocky mountains, pockmarked with green shrubs into my mind. “The mosquitoes became a health problem, so they drained the fields and planted oranges,” he explained. On the opposite side of the road, wisps of citrus playfully tweaked my nose, attempting to establish dominance over the strong scent of the olive trees. Mnemosyne massaged my temples, imprinting these scents for me to reflect on, to connect this information with my own family’s past, their local origins, and their bizarre return.
My great-grandfather, Nikos Scarmoutsos had emigrated to the United States in the late 19th Century. A story seemingly so common you can picture an old newsreel of a mass of people stuck in colorless staccato, shuffling off the boat. By 1920 he had a wife, five girls, and his own business, a goody shop in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. However, when Yoanna, my Yia Yia, was six or seven years old, he became ill and relatives urged him to go back to Greece. “The air will be good for you,” they said, “You can come back when you’re well.” So, the whole family boarded a ship, endured a tumultuous journey home, and upon arrival to the motherland, Nikos promptly passed within 40 days of arriving, leaving my great-grandmother stranded in the old country with five girls among in-laws who had their eyes on her money. And here Mom and I were, almost one hundred years later, barreling through olive and orange groves toward the village where Yia Yia grew up; the place that disrupted their American dream.
The fragrant trees disappeared as our elevation increased on the road to Koupia. We passed sheep lazing in fields and bee hive boxes sitting undisturbed on the edge of the steep cliffs. I asked Agiris to stop the car when the town unfurled itself before us, a quaint jumble of white and neutral colored homes clustered together on the side of the mountain. I had never realized that I was mountain folk.
Agiris’s mother had lunch waiting for us. Eleni was saturated in an aura that glowed with Greek hospitality. We met Vicky and George, also cousins, who had retired in a nearby town, and we were ushered inside Eleni’s taverna for a feast that I had been eagerly anticipating. The taverna looked like it should have been on an inspiration board for “rustic”. The stone fireplace was decorated with unfamiliar photos of distant relatives and people who knew my grandmother in a town whose main road couldn’t have been more than a mile long. Charmingly mismatched wooden chairs huddled around dining tables of different sizes massaged by the daylight streaming in. We sat at a long table nestled under the front window with a bench littered with cushy shabby-chic pillows and a white tablecloth with place settings waiting expectantly to be piled with food. “We’re here to serve YOU!” the dishes squealed, at least I assumed that’s what they said. My Greek isn’t great.
The tiled floor rumbled as the platters rolled in from the kitchen like a gastronomical stampede. Eleni commanded the charge with heaps of Koupia’s specialties. For the first time I tried gonges, flour-based boiled dumplings soft like clouds fit for Raphaelite cherubs greased up in a dry crumbly cheese. We sampled bulging discs of fried artichoke hearts encased in a chunk of slightly sweet batter. Mom and I had our first, of what would be many, REAL Greek salads chock full of the ripest red tomatoes and crispy cucumbers that act as a vessel for bricks of fresh feta cheese with craters full of olive oil, nary a lettuce leaf in sight. The bacteria in the yogurt, the base of the tzatziki sauce, magically configured itself into the perfect tang to bring out the best of the expertly grilled lamb and potatoes. The lamb was so fresh, we probably passed its cousins on the way up the mountain.
But, my heart stopped when Eleni put down the spanakopita. When my mom said “Koupia specialties” I hoped it would be on the menu. Spanakopita was Yia Yia’s signature dish, and I haven’t been able to find a spinach pie like it since she stopped making it. Mnemosyne slid into the chair next to me, staring intently at the spanakopita like I was. She put a smooth, spindly hand on my shoulder and I was back at Yia Yia’s kitchen table.
Yia Yia’s table was pea soup green with peppery flakes of black dotting the matte surface, the color of a cartoon character about to puke.The long oval shape allowed for many chairs to be squeezed around it for impromptu gatherings with family and friends. The “impromptu” factor particularly applied to my mom’s cousin Nick, who would call his aunt from Michigan when a craving for her spanakopita hit his belly, “Thea Ana, I’m coming over.”
“Ok Niko,” she’d reply nonchalantly. By the time he and his friends had driven the 7-8 hours from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Canandaigua, New York, the spanakopita would be piping hot and glorious. The filling, a perfect meld of impressionistic green and white pixels created a stark juxtaposition to the disgusting colored table. While they ate, they would play a few rounds of cards with my Papou, and then they would leave within a matter of hours, spending less time at Yia Yia’s house then they would have on the road.
As a kid, I would pop my head into the kitchen to see what Yia Yia was making. If I was lucky, I’d catch her making filo dough, the MVP of my favorite treat. She’d stand, slightly hunched, at the table as she rolled it out with an unremarkable wooden dowel. Flour dusted the apron that protected a casual top and creased slacks. Her brown eyes, neatly accented by liver spots sprinkled over her light olive skin, stayed focused at the task in her aging hands. Her thinning, golden-dyed hair caught the light streaming in from the kitchen window, meeting her wherever she moved around the table in hipster-cool orthopedic shoes, as she stretched and worked the dough to a delicate thickness, like an edible glass bottom boat, was thin enough to give you a glimpse of the green table underneath.
Spanakopita is also known in English, particularly on Greek diner menus, as spinach pie. Each crunchy, crackly sheet is piled one on top of the other, fortifying itself into a sturdy crust to hold in the spinach, leek, and feta cheese mixture on the inside. Supplemented by slick layers of olive oil, the top bakes to a nice golden brown and you’ll hear a crunch louder than the foreboding grunt of a Minotaur.
When I was young, I refused to eat spinach in any other form, despite the persuasive argument that my parents made about how strong it made Popeye. It was salty without drying your mouth out and moist on the inside. My tiny baby teeth effortlessly chomped through the wafer thin layers of filo. The corner pieces are my favorite to this day, because it’s the thickest, crispiest part, like the corner piece atop the pile of spanakopita at Eleni’s.
I looked to my right and I stared straight at Mnemosyne. All the relatives were chattering around me, going through photos Mom brought with her of my aunts, uncles and cousins in America, which included both former residents and descendants of Koupia. People who were mysteries to the mostly empty buildings that were left behind in the village as weekend houses when Greece began to modernize and jobs funneled its residents to cities or tourist centers.
This is where Yia Yia learned to make filo, unwittingly one of the last generations to do so in Koupia. Mnemosyne gently takes my short, stubby hand in her elegant fingers and transports me to see Yia Yia as a young woman, diligently making filo dough in the largest house in town, on the same piece of land as the small church, where her grandfather was the priest. The specter of Orthodoxy shrouding their home didn’t stop the older ladies of the village from lining up outside of Yia Yia’s door nearly every morning with a drained coffee cup in their hands, waiting to have their futures told in the grounds by their local diviner. Reading coffee grounds is an art, one that Yia Yia excelled at, and was never able to teach me.
Yia Yia and her family eventually paid for the privilege of a large house mostly full of women when the Nazis goose stepped into Greece and their home. The oldest Scarmoutsos girl, Matina, had been sent back to the United States to live with relatives by the time the war started, and according to letters that my aunt received, the local men, including many family members, retreated into the mountains to form militias. The women and children at home hosted their unwanted houseguests to maintain their own safety.
Yia Yia kept these memories tightly bound as she returned to the United States, married my grandfather and had two children while running a restaurant that only closed twice a year. She did this while simultaneously balancing the demands of wife and mother. She baked all-American pies during the day, and spinach pies at home, rolling out fresh filo dough to satisfy visiting family and friends, to whom she was widely considered the life of the party, the conductor of a symphony of laughter, dancing, and food.
By the time I came along, she and Papou had long ago sold the restaurant. I was the only grandchild for seven years. So, I was spoiled at home and doted upon when I visited. Yia Yia would only get salty if I interrupted her afternoon soap operas. The rotating lighthouse of As the World Turns served as a warning that she was not to be disturbed, and I, like a ship in the night, managed to avoid danger and elected to play in another room of the house.
I remember her bragging, regularly, about her former athletic prowess. The idea of Yia Yia ever being my age baffled me as a child with no clear understanding of how time worked. She regularly claimed that she could jump, “Higher than Michael Jordan,” in her heavy Greek accent, to which I would unconsciously mimic her competitive streak by leaping to my tiny bare feet and challenging her to prove it. Not to be out-done by anyone, much less her kin, she would test the durability of her 70-year-old knees by jumping up and down with me on the brown shaggy carpet of the TV room.
When I was eight or nine years old, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Her memory became flaky and broke as easily as a crisp sheet of filo dough, making it difficult to remember to turn the stove off, find her way home in the town that she lived in for nearly 50 years, or, eventually, remember any of her family members. My mother had no choice but to put her in a nursing home since Yia Yia required full-time care. Mom made it a point to take her to church once a week, and out to lunch after. When Yia Yia lost her grasp on the use of her legs, my mom couldn’t handle transporting Yia Yia to church. So, we visited her afterwards, every Sunday, often around lunch time.
The tables at her nursing home were round with a heavy white table cloth slipped under muted colored plates that served equally muted colored food. The generic “turkey dinners” and paper weights of meatloaf were elevated versions of what I ate in the cafeteria at school. It had the same salty sourness of industrial food. If the table was full in the dining room, the staff would let us take her to a private alcove with a chunky birch table and high-backed, squeaky upholstered hospital chairs to help her eat.
Mom would sit next to her, and I across the table, peering at them over whatever young adult novel I was digesting. Yia Yia gazed out at the space in front of her with the blankness of an unused projection screen, disengaged with time and space. Mom chattered about family, friends and her own life at Yia Yia in Greek while crafting a perfect bite of food from her lunch to feed her. Yia Yia was unmoved by these updates about the people who she loved and fed over the years. Their avatars were abducted from her own narrative one by one. Along with forgetting specific people, she lost her grasp on English, so she and I weren’t able to communicate. I relied on Mom to tell her who I was, “Aftí eínai i engoní sou,” Mom would nod in my direction.
Yia Yia looked at me, expressionless. I stared back hoping to telepathically bore recognition into her brain. I beamed the memory of my first bee sting which she rubbed olive oil on, the trips we made to McDonalds in a gray granny Cadilac blasting Greek music, or how she gaily snapped her fingers as she danced. Despite my best efforts, she never received anything that I sent her, and, eventually, I detached too.
Yia Yia was abandoned by Mnemosyne, in the onset of her Alzheirmers. When Mnemosyne leaves, she leaves you with nothing, no identity, no loved ones, no capacity to survive on your own. I dread the thought of ever getting diagnosed with it. Memories are the foundations of our stories, our traumas, our motivations. Mnemosyne is with me whenever Mom and I drive through her hometown to visit Yia Yia’s friends, when I see a revolving lighthouse, whenever I eat a piece of spanakopita.
Mnemosyne was perched on the edge of the table, hovering next to the plate of spanakopita whispering my own stories about Yia Yia to me in a soft, steady alto. My stomach and my synapses began to rumble. I grabbed my corner piece and brought it to my mouth. I chomped down. The impact of the crisp dough threatened to break the skins of my ear drums. I let the filling seep into my taste buds as they frantically sent messages to my temporal lobe. The manilla folders of my memory burst out of its cabinets and found Yia Yia and me at that awful green table. It was the first time I had spanakopita like that in at least 24 years, and the thought that it may be my last nearly had me in tears. I didn’t want to lose her again. My brain continued to hum as I chewed on the sadness of her passing, resentment that she left so soon, and gratitude for her lessons on how food satisfies needs greater than hunger. I’ll never forget my formative years with Yia Yia, even though she ended up forgetting me.
© 2020 May Steinberg
About the Author
May Steinberg is a writer, reproductive rights activist, and a Cancer sun/Cancer rising. You can typically find her eating, cooking, baking, or guilting her friends and family into having seconds. She has previously been published in The Opal Club. You can find her on Twitter at @maaayyy or on Instagram at @maymeimaemaye.