A WOMAN, around forty years old, approaches the building from the left. She wears a backpack and in her right hand carries a black suitcase. She stands close to the door, opens the backpack, and pulls out a hurricane lantern. She lights it, pushes open the door to the barn, and enters. She peers around with the lantern and then sets it down on the ground, center stage, to the left of a large flat stone. She looks around.
WOMAN: Wherever you step here, you step on bones. (She sets down the backpack and suitcase in front of the stone. Offstage to the right, audible howling. The WOMAN turns in the direction of the sound, then looks in front of her.) Six years I’ve been away. This morning on the bus ride here, I read a book. A customer had ordered it but hadn’t yet picked it up. I flipped through and liked it, so I threw it in my bag. I’ll return it tomorrow when I’m back at work. In the book a musician is recounting his life; another musician—can’t be a coincidence. He writes that for years, until he turned forty, he spilled his heart out every night in stadiums and theaters, before thousands of strangers, but with his own people he was afraid to open up. He’d turn his secrets into songs and tell them to strangers, never to those the songs were about. That’s the way it goes; the one you love wears a Medusa face—looking at him turns you to stone. It’s easier to tell truth to a stranger, and easier still to someone who’s not there. And best of all if they’re dead. All of you, buried here in the old cemetery to the right of the creek. Under lilies and manure, in the mud of the bank. Even if I can’t see you, I know you’re gathered round listening. This summer evening, the night breeze and the nightingale, a year since Father died, I will tell you his story, which is my story too. Here, in this ruin he called his shrine, where I’ve entered now for the first time, I’ll commemorate him and you will be my congregation. (She opens the backpack, takes out a bottle of oil, a candlestick with a wick, a glass, and a bunch of beeswax candles wrapped in white kitchen paper. She sets everything on the ground to her right. She chooses a flat stone in front of her. She pulls out a Tupperware container of wheatberries sweetened with raisins and pomegranate and sets it on top. She takes a canteen out of the backpack, pours water into the glass, and puts the canteen back. She pours oil into the glass and with a match from her pocket lights the wick, setting it down beside the container.) Blessed be our God, always, now and forever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen. So, this is where Father would come. Where he’d come to play after he got out of prison. (She goes to the window. Stands on the left side and looks in front of her.) The candles in Aghios Antonis are lit. They never go out in the small chapel. (Pause.) This is where his story began. (She turns around.) How old was he—thirteen? As soon as he learned the clarinet, his grandfather took him around to play at weddings. That’s how he made his pocket money. Half the village is buried in Aghios Antonis. Come early March, after a rainstorm, the stream would flood and rush down as if it wanted to hurt the houses and the people. Above the bridge, a fallen oak blocked the flow. The water split in two: on the left it gushed into town, drowned animals, two old men; on the other side it ran through Aghios Antonis, demolished the church, swept away graves. The next day, when the waters pulled back, all you could see was mud spread everywhere. For three days, villagers collected bones from the creek bed. Until the village president, because mourning was too great to bear, asked for some music. His grandfather refused to play, like all the other musicians. Then my Father came forward and said: “I’ll play.” And he played for three days, mournfully and joyfully, while women and men bent down to gather the bones from the sludge, to wash them and wrap them in white handkerchiefs. Everyone looked at my Father with fear. He never stopped playing. For thirty years there wouldn’t be a feast day or wedding without him. Thirty years no bride left home without a procession headed by him. Until Yorgos was killed. (She leaves the window and goes to the flat stone in the center. She sits down on it. Looks around.) These stones, even the ones that fell on the ground, still have sharp edges. Of course that’s where he’d come to play. (She unwraps the bunch of candles and puts four in the ground in front of her.) When I was a child, I used to look at the map on the classroom wall and wonder: a whole country, so much weight, all supported by one small nail. The way my Father, the musician, supported the village. His grandfather was clever; he let his grandson take over. And my father, orphaned as he was, anger driving him like fuel, took up the challenge. He had talent, a dowry of deprivation, and a thirst for revenge. Weddings and feast days were his responsibility, here and in the surrounding villages, as far as the other side of the lake. He didn’t drink. He didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to speak poorly of him. He always kept a handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket. He played perfectly, but in his playing there was something else as well, some secrets of his own that shook the unknown that hides in each of us. People who heard him play would feel it. That’s why there wasn’t a feast day without him. That’s why—when he got mixed up with our mother and took her, a bride from across the lake—no one said a word. That’s why the house he built on the hillside, high above the village, had so many windows and so many people came and went every day, so many that we twins, my brother and I, called it “The Palace.” No, he was never absent for feast days or weddings, just for us. And mostly for my brother. (Pause.) And when we finished grade school and our mother was already sick and his sister was taking care of us, he gave himself even more intensely to his instrument. Weddings were further afield, feast days in Thessaly, months-long gigs as far away as Thebes, even if our mother needed him the two years her illness lasted. (She takes out a match and lights the first candle to the left in front of her.) And his playing matured, knitting in new unknowns, resolving enigmas, burying them, discovering them again. The people would listen mesmerized. If he were away, marriages were put off until he got back. It was his playing that married people, not the church. (From the right, audible howling and growling. The WOMAN stands and walks to the window on the left. She stares out.) Look at them digging. Three hundred years of graves. One morning, when I was still at school, I went for a walk and saw two puppies playing with a white ball on the bank. I went to pet them, bent down: it wasn’t a ball. (She turns around.) We were in the third year of high school. I remember the night, it was January, and the cold wind blew down from the mountain. Not a cloud, no moon, just crystal cold. It was Saturday. My brother, his friend Yorgos, and I had gone for a drink in the village square. Father had been back for three months already. At the last wedding, in October in Elassona, he coughed, he couldn’t make it till morning. The doctors found fluid in his lungs and recommended rest. He returned to the village and planted ten rows of cabbage in the yard. He planted potatoes. He tended the bees. And, of course, we could hear him playing in the cellar every so often. That Saturday night the three of us drank in the square till midnight. I went home before the others so I didn’t learn what happened till the morning. My brother and Yorgos had gotten drunk, and Yorgos was afraid to go home like that since he still cared what his father thought. At three o’clock they finally climbed up to our door and tried to get in, but I hadn’t left the keys in the lock. So the two of them snuck into the garage and wriggled in between my Father’s truck and the wall. It was loaded with hives to drop off at Aghios Elias in the morning. They covered themselves with a burlap bag. Father got up at dawn, played a few notes on the clarinet—I remember because it woke me up—got dressed, put on his boots and jacket, took the car keys and went down to the garage, still dark. As he turned on the engine and car lights, something caught his eye in the mirror. He got out and saw the kids lying behind the truck. He shouted, what are you doing here, I could have killed you. Furious, he picked them up and threw them out into the cold, their hands fighting back, flailing. He sat back at the wheel and turned on the truck again, and then Yorgos, with the wine still in his blood, grabbed a shovel from the flowerbed, standing two meters from my Father’s headlights he made as if he was going to hit him. Father said to get out of the way, but Yorgos, while my brother was still crouching in the corner, picked up the shovel and hit the hood of the truck. Then, out of some base instinct, surprising even himself, Father stepped on the gas and drove into him. (She goes to the candles and lights the second with the first one. Barking sounds. She turns to the window, looks out.) Their eyes are glistening from the reflection of the water. They drink to quench their thirst. Who knows what they have dug up. (She goes into her backpack, takes out the canteen. Takes a sip, puts it back in. Stays sitting on the stone.) Then Father had gone up to the living room and called the hospital, after that the police. He stayed in detention for two months. At the trial he did not plead extenuating circumstances. He had spent his whole life fighting against things, revenge fueling the fire. But as always happens, the time finally came when he realized that he was the one who was burning up. And when the life sentence was handed down, he didn’t respond. In Diavata, in his cell, he asked for his clarinet. But they wouldn’t give it to him. We didn’t leave our house in the village for a month. We agreed we’d finish school and then go, and that’s what we did. We sold everything, the house, the car, the fields. The only thing my Father wanted was his instrument. We took it to Thessaloniki with us, my aunt and me. We moved there to be near him. But not my brother. I took my final exams, while he joined the army, not only for the one-year mandatory service, but forever. If he didn’t listen to me before, he didn’t listen to me after either. He and my Father never spoke again. (Pause.) After high school I worked for a year in a bookstore, then my aunt died, and we were the only ones left. (She bends down and lights the third candle with the second one.) He had no one else, nor did I. In the visiting room at the jail, from one Sunday to the next, I could see Father’s screws coming loose. He grew old the way night falls: slowly at first, without anyone noticing, till all of a sudden night fell. What weighed on him? Was it the murder? Or was it maybe that whatever secretly kept him alive had no way to get out now? Because on the outside, sure, he looked paler, but on the inside, I could tell, he was as unflappable as ever. He stirred up the same fear in anyone who looked at him, the fear of that kid playing his clarinet in the mud of the creek bed. When, after fifteen years, they finally let him out, and we returned to the village because he insisted on living in my aunt’s hut beyond the stream, a little further down, they looked at him with the same fear. And with the same consensus they avoided him. Who wanted a murderer to play at a wedding? That’s when he started coming here to play to the walls. (She stands and takes two pieces of charcoal and some incense from the knapsack. She picks out two flat stones, positions them on her left and right, puts the bits of coal on each, lights them with a match, and throws the incense on top.) He was sixty-five years old, but prison late nights had broken him. Bent over and bleary-eyed, he was determined to paint our aunt’s house by himself, plant pansies in the yard by himself. We made it through that year with no work and no one wanting us there, but every afternoon he would come by himself to play in this ruin, this place where his grandfather had kept his goats. He always asked me to accompany him, because his legs couldn’t hold him up anymore, but he wouldn’t let me follow him in. I would sit outside and listen, as these stones listen to me now, as the stray dogs lick themselves over there and listen to me. All those years in jail he hadn’t once picked up the clarinet, but I’d never heard him play more beautifully than he played now. And when he came out, he would take hold of my arm and we’d walk down the hill back home. Of all the tunes, the one he played most often was the wedding song. Who knows, maybe he was thinking of our mother? Or maybe he played it because it’s not a joyful tune. It’s played when a bride is separated from her parents. (More barking. The WOMAN turns to the window.) Aren’t you going to hell one of these days? (She faces forward, bends down, picks up a stone, and throws it at them. The howling, the growling. The WOMAN grabs another one, throws it. The barking fades away until it dies out. She stares ahead.) They’ve crossed the bridge. (She turns around.) To the left of the creek stands the village; to the right, all of you and me. (Pause.) We didn’t have any money. In the street everyone pretended not to see us. We would have lasted a little longer, though, if I hadn’t seen them one morning, when I opened the kitchen shutters, on the dirt road in front of the door to the yard. In a muddy Jeep, the engine running like a dog growling before it attacks, Yorgos’s father and his younger brother, now grown, two meters tall, waiting silently in the gray frost. I knew they were angry we’d come back and were set on getting rid of us. As soon as they saw me, they released the handbrake and drove off. I took a coffee to my Father and told him it was time to go. We packed up and by the next day we were already at the crossroads for Larissa. His people were waiting for us in Tirnavos, some old musicians he knew. Then in Karditsa, Domokos, Atalanti, Livadia. We wandered here and there, sometimes staying with one or another of his acquaintances, sometimes in rooms they booked for us and sometimes whatever we found—hotels, pensions, once or twice in the summer in bamboo reeds, in wheat fields. At first, they accepted him. They knew what had happened. They knew where he had been, but they didn’t care. They gave him jobs, at fairs, feast days. But he wasn’t the same. Despite his appearance there was still something noble about him. He was still respectable, but like his body his playing was broken. People who wanted to learn how to play would come to hear him, but they expected one thing and got another. And he, who could hardly see any more, felt it, and was angry, and would take it out on me. It surprised me. Not his insolence—I was used to that—but his playing. Since I had heard him playing on his own. I had heard the hidden part inside thicken, rise and fall, dive down, dip here and there, searching, finding it, losing it, and finding it again, that secret something, spun out note by note in an arch, slowly at first, watching it almost surreptitiously, and then sharply, mercilessly, writing a curve like an arc in the air, iridescent, lifting above the foaming surface and then, graciously, or perhaps simply out of terror, falling into the black water. He knew the iridescence was worth more than gold—to him it came first, above all. He played for himself, not for others; they were not the point. He continued to despise them, perhaps that was why he hadn’t deigned to show them the depths he’d reached. But the more they didn’t find the shimmer they sought, the more the playing showed his weakness, and the years. Business thinned out. This bothered him and made him behave worse. Till, in the fifth year of our wandering life, exactly last year on a day like this, we found ourselves high up along the Venetiko river, late in August, the ninth day of the Annunciation feast. The weather had changed. It was drizzling, fog sliding in from Mt. Smolika. He’d gotten so thin his old jacket covered him completely, but he was cold. When I brought him up on the bandstand to play and then half an hour later brought him down again, he had coughed the whole time on my shoulder. In the room afterwards, when he lay down covered by his overcoat, I noticed the speckles of blood on my sleeve. He coughed late into the night, crumpled in a pile on the bed, falling asleep without reaching out to touch his clarinet, as he usually did, while outside the instruments kept on playing. In the morning, thunder woke me. I went to the windowsill: it was raining. I left his cup of coffee on the bedside table. After taking a sip, he looked at me and said: “Let’s go up to the ravine.” So I got him dressed, then dressed myself, found a plastic tablecloth in a drawer, and, wrapping it around us, we climbed the path towards the cliffs, half an hour above the village, where the river narrows and wind scatters dirt and beech tree leaves in pools of water. Since I didn’t know where we were going, I let him lead me. He told me he knew the place, he’d come here when he was younger before he got married, with Grandfather and the band when they would play the same gig on this same feast day. He walked without fear along the path beside the cliff, over the misty river, and in wind and rain we climbed the rocks, coming to a great boulder, three by four meters tall, with a hole at its far edge as dark as a cave. He stood there and beckoned to me to turn the other way. I searched his blind eyes and I knew I must obey. I turned and waited, till—in a flash—he was gone, and without thinking I cried out, “Baba!” I turned around but could see no one. I bent over the river to see if he had fallen in, if the water had carried him away, but he was nowhere to be seen. I hadn’t heard a splash. Again, I cried out, “Baba!” and my voice ricocheted off the rocks with no answer. Lowering my head, I wrapped myself in the tablecloth and stepped back onto the path. (She reaches for the candles, lights the fourth one, and sits on the stone.) Since my brother’s enlistment, I’d spoken to him three, at most four times: when he got married, when his daughter was born, and when he was sent to Kos. The last time was a year ago, after Father died. He always had the same response: Why bother? Why follow him around year after year? Once he told me: “He’s in prison for doing evil, but you’re in prison for doing good.” Another time: “Better if blood was water, so you’d drink it and quench this thirst.” If my brother could have gone farther away than Kos, he would have. But the earth is round: you think you’re getting away, but you keep coming back. (She bends down and brings the rectangular suitcase near her. She opens it. Inside is a clarinet. She takes out a cloth, cleans the pieces, pushes them together, and puts the clarinet on her lap.) I never thought about whether or not I should take care of Father—not when he was in prison, not during the time we lived here in the village, not while we were moving from place to place. I didn’t do it because I was his daughter, or out of pity. No: it was just the way I felt since I was little. Then one night in Falani, in a field in the middle of the plains, I understood why. It was July, moon waning, stars countless, and the galaxy like sprinkled dust. Father had played well and was smiling, and though we were given a room, the night was so warm and the breeze so sweet he said we should sleep outside by the haystacks. I laid his jacket down and threw a sheet over him, and he, his clarinet by his side, like a child clasping a doll at bedtime, fell asleep peacefully. Laying down beside him, my hands interlaced behind my head, listening to the owl in the grapevines, I turned and looked at him. He was just like a child, defenseless—if I blew on him, he would scatter in the brambles. Then it occurred to me that, deep down, this is what he always was: the child his grandfather and grandmother had cared for from the age of two, always trying to run away, but he couldn’t. We said the earth was round. What he struggled to express in his art all his life was that child’s cry. I realized that everyone who came to hear that cry all these years was equally inconsolable, each in their own way. As I looked back and forth from the Pleiades in the sky to my Father breathing lightly under the sheet, I said to myself: I take this child to cherish and care for. I accept this responsibility because I too am that child. That child is all of us. (Howling stage right. The WOMAN holding the clarinet stands and walks to the window. She looks, then turns to face the audience.) After he disappeared, they took me to Grevena, to the police station. They held me there as a suspect. They searched for his body in the river; they said the water must have washed him away, wild boars must have found his scent – locals came with bloodhounds, their torches sweeping the alders on the bank. This went on for three days, until they remembered the cave in the rock. They found him at the bottom, five meters deep, face down in a hollow in the stone, drowned in a handful of muddy water. They kept me for two more days, questioning me. Then they told me they had examined the body and decided it was an accident—or he’d done himself in. The next day he was buried and they let me go. Around noon, or two. I walked out the door with nowhere to go. I paced up and down streets, then over to the river—dry, like cement, a duck wetting its beak in the scant water. In the afternoon I called the bookstore in Thessaloniki. I asked a passerby where the station was, and by eight o’clock I was in Vardari. The bookstore owner took me in, gave me a job. Her sister rented me a room in Evosmos, thirty square meters, but that was plenty enough: I was on my own now. (Pause.) Today at noon, getting off the bus, I didn’t take the main road; I went up to my aunt’s house through the back alleys, I went out into the fields. Tractors passed me, I saw people staring. The house had been closed for six years since we left. I opened it up, aired it out, shook things, cleaned up. I then pulled up a chair and sat down to rest in the yard, against the wall in the shade. Soon I heard a car come around the bend. I went inside and closed the windows. From behind the curtain I saw Yorgos’s brother pull up to the front door in the pickup. In the back of the truck a boy of twelve or thirteen was leaning against the railing. The boy blew at the lock of hair that fell across his forehead and, seeing his expression so impudent and yet so innocent, I winced—I thought it was Yorgos as a kid, as I remembered him then. Yorgos’s brother came into the yard with a plastic bag in his hand. I stayed crouched in the house. He knocked three times, waited, then turned, got into the car and drove off. I let a little time go by, and when I came out, I saw he’d hung the bag on the doorknob. I opened it: inside, chicken and homemade noodles, a bottle of water. (Pause. She looks out of the window. She turns to face out.) After the flood, after the mud was cleared away and they had collected all the bones they could find, they dug a pit in the churchyard, in front of the ruin, where the tombs used to be; they threw in the bones and sealed it up. Since then, everyone has been buried in Aghios Dimitrios, the church cemetery on the other side of town, a kilometer from where the houses end. The town keeps growing, moving further out. No end to that kind of work. And you, the dead, are left to sleep here in the meadows along the shore. Primrose and daffodil, geranium and saffron fertilized by your marrow, and in the spring the land blooms and smells fragrant thanks to you. Your sleep is disturbed only by the tiller and plough that every now and again bring you to the surface, strewing dirt on the farmers’ feet, along with the dogs that tease you with their horrible teeth and long claws. Over at Aghios Dimitrios: only cats chasing among the graves, lying carelessly on the marble, rubbing their backs against the crosses. On this side of the creek: the wild stray dogs that cross the bridge day and night, digging incessantly and then quenching their thirst in the stream. But sometimes I wonder, I wonder if even caught in the teeth of the dogs, whitening under the mint leaves, you, old bones, are not glad the sun caresses you again. It’s been thirty years since the small chapel was built over the remains of the church, and the village makes sure, in your memory, that the candles never go out. (Pause.) Well, this is where Father would come, after he got out of prison, to play the wedding song. That’s what I’ll play for his memorial service tonight. Sometimes, when I dust off the books on the shelf, when I take the clothes out of the washing machine that haven’t gotten clean, that won’t get clean no matter how much I wash them, I feel the way I did the day I called my brother to tell him that Father had died. He was silent for a moment and then laughed and said: “You didn’t lose a Father, you lost a husband.” (She brings the clarinet to her lips, plays the first few bars of the tune then puts it down.) Thy sleeping servant, rest. Forgive him his trespasses, forgive him all sins committed in word, deed or understanding, as a good and benevolent God, forgive him. And remember those whom every man according to his want remembers, and all and sundry. Amen. (She brings the clarinet to her lips and plays. After a minute the sound of howling starts again. The WOMAN stops, approaches the window.) Hey you! Here! Come over here! (She whistles. The growling grows louder. Clarinet in hand, she goes over to the stone where she has left the plastic container, picks it up, and empties the contents out the window. Howling.) Here, eat this. (Growling, the sound of dogs eating.) Down dogs, down, I said. (The WOMAN plays a few more measures.) Down. Down, I said. (The WOMAN plays a few more. The howling dies down and stops.) That’s it. That’s right, you old dogs. (The WOMAN turns to face forward and picks up the melody again. She plays another minute. The lights dim. The song continues until they fade completely.)
