Brown - My Last Lament

CASSETTE 1 Side 1

N ow let me see, how do I turn this thing on? Oh. Maybe it is on. Theres a red light, anyway, a little fiery eye in this dark kitchen. I guess I speak into this bithello, hello in there. One-two-three-four. Im just going to rewind and play that back to make sure Im doing it right, seeing as how all machines are out to humiliate me. Technology means putting a cassette into a recorder and thats it for me, no comments, please. Okay, everythings okay, though I would never guess thats how I must sound to others, old and croaky, like a geriatric frog.

Well, then, where to begin? My names Aliki and Im the last professional lamenter in this village of ours in the northeast of Greece. Thats right, a composer of dirge-poems, called mirologia, chanted at wakes and such. Well, actually, I dont really compose them. I seem to fall into a kind of state and they really compose themselves and just pour through me like a long sigh. Maybe theyre not even poems, more like chants. Its an old village custom, one long practiced by crones like me, though, as I say, Im the last in these parts. And the dead I chant about, well, they seem to linger around me whether I like it or notyoull see what I mean. The dead never seem to finish with us, or is it we who never finish with them?

When someone from one of the old families dies around here, the relatives ask me to lament. Its not exactly grieving they want, just the marking of a life. The lament can be grand or small and not necessarily sad. The family wants to feel theyve honored the dead in the traditional way before they trundle the body off to the church with that new, young priest, Father Yerasimos. Of course the younger families skip me and go straight to him and I bear them no ill will. Im here for those who need me and in return they give me whatever they have on handa few eggs, olives, cheese, a day-old loaf of bread. Some are more generous than others, but I accept whats offered and dont complain. No one has much cash these days, thanks to the blunders and outright thievery of our governments these last years, not to mention those moralistic neighbors to the north. Well, I dont need much; time has made me small. Thats what the years doshrink you down by plucking away those you love one by one and eventually even your memories of them. In the end, theres a lot less of you.

I dress only in black, once the custom for widows and crones. Its still my custom. My head scarf too is black and when I go out, I draw the corner of it across my nose and mouth to hide my bad teeth. I look like a storybook witch. The girl I was on the day the Germans executed my father wouldnt recognize the crone Ive become.

Speaking of my father, I saw him again this morning standing in my back garden. He fished a cigarette out of the shirt pocket next to the blackened bullet holes in his chest and lit up. There wasnt much point in telling him that smoking is bad for him as hes been dead for more than fifty years. So there he was, saying again between puffs that things over there were not much different from here. Of course Im not sure I believe in an over there, but when the dead turn up, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

We stand around all the time talking politics, he said. Everyone speaks at once, interrupting and yelling, and nobody agrees on anything. Its just like life.

It was back in 43 that the Germans executed him along with two other village men. Made them stand next to the stone wall under the plane tree in the plateia and shot them down, just like that. Its still there, that wall; I think of him every time I pass it.

There isnt even a decent kafeneion here for a good cup of coffee. Were trying to circulate a petition about it, but no one can agree on the wording. And theres nobody to give it to. Doesnt seem to be anyone in charge.

But what about the saints, I always ask, or the Holy Family?

Weve never seen any of them. But theres probably a bureaucracy full of incompetents somewhere. He took another drag on his cigarette, leaned back and blew a perfect smoke ring. Also just like life.

That was no surprise. Who can believe in all those sour faces in church icons? When we were wasting away back in the forties, they hadnt helped us at all. So what were they for?

He paused and then said, Go back to sleep, my child.

But Im awake, standing here on the back steps watching you smoke your lungs out.

Oh, well, he said. Sleeping, wakingwhats the difference? Then he was gone.

There is this about the dead: theyre so light. They slip in and out of our world with no effort whatsoever. By contrast, we seem heavy, dragging our lives along behind us like an old sack of stones.

Oh, now wait, whats that clicking noise? Maybe if I push this button? Really, I hope were not going to be plagued with stops and starts. This recorder and these cassettes were left here by a Greek-American scholar who came to see me a few months ago. An earnest young woman from an American university, doing research on rural lament practices, or so she said.