But it does seem to me too bad that you’re spending your youth on such a project, listening to an old woman with what is probably my last lament for another time, for the lives of Stelios and Takis. There was so much I didn’t know then, such as how days get used up and are irreplaceable. Like lives. Sometimes when I watch the village children playing, I think that they’re like messengers into a time to come. And I wonder if I should send a message with them. But what one? Love one another? Something like that? But they’ll probably learn enough of that sort of thing, learn it and forget it on the way to war.
A while back I saw on that television in Stamatis’s shop that the Land of Big Radios had sent some kind of device out there among the planets and stars. Not a satellite exactly, the newsperson said, but a kind of voyager that might sail on through the blackness forever, if such a thing is possible. Inside it is, well, I don’t know, a sort of phonograph record with information about us earthlings in all our languages. Can you imagine? Everything about what we eat and wear, the music we listen to, the gods we worship and I don’t know what all. Maybe all our stories from the Trojan War to the Germans here in Greece and, who knows, maybe even Karagiozis—why not? Ah, humans, I thought. We can be such barbarians and then turn around and act like children hoping that among the stars, someone or something might care about our yearnings, our stories. Hope, that’s all we’ve got, isn’t it, our most important word?
There’s a word for Takis’s illness now and maybe that’s on the record too. I’ve heard it but can’t at the moment remember it. He could probably get medication these days and not remain a person as divided as this country. But his shadow puppet self lives on, as do Stelios’s and mine.
I know because just after Aphrodite died, a puppet master touring the provinces came to our village and set up his shadow theater under the plane tree where my father was executed. Working at night with battery-operated lamps to make the shadows, he performed the comedies at first on successive nights. I could hear the children screaming with laughter all the way to my house. When I heard that he was to perform The Hero Katsondonis, I waited until the play was well under way then stood at the back of the crowd.
It was the scene where Katsondonis was dying. But I was shocked to see that at one side of the screen stood Stelios’s old Takis puppet reworked as a shepherd, and the Stelios and Aliki puppets, dressed as the priest and the wife of Katsondonis, weeping and lamenting for the dying hero. Oh, no, I thought, the puppeteer, could he possibly be Takis, who’d survived in spite of everything? When the performance was over and the puppet master came from behind the screen to take his bow, I saw he was a tiny old man hardly bigger than a child. His white hair was so curly he looked as if he’d been electrocuted. I waited until he was packing everything up to ask how he’d come by the set of puppets. He’d bought them, he told me, at a sale of the contents of an old school in Peristeri. It was closing down and anything left there by former students had been for sale. Most of the puppets were too old and damaged to be of any use and he’d thrown them out.
“But these handmade ones,” the puppeteer said, holding up the ones of Stelios, Takis and me, “they’re so beautifully done.”
“I knew the man who made them.”
“Really? Was he a puppeteer too?”
“Oh, yes, a good one.”
“Ah, there aren’t many of us left. Television and computers, they’ve stolen our audience. And our stories.”
But we were still characters in a larger story, as Stelios had said we were, like extras in a movie—people at the edge of a scene that you barely notice, though important enough to share the stage with the hero, all our shadows on the screen. I imagine them now when my last hour has come, Karagiozis and the others dancing around, tearing their make-believe hair. They lift glasses of raki and drink to me. The goose that escaped returns and volunteers itself for my funeral feast. Katsondonis speaks.
I say good-bye to you, tall hills, and to you, rocks on high.
You are my witnesses . . .
And I think of that night before Stelios’s funeral when I was sitting by myself in the schoolhouse and felt as if someone had come in the door. There was a sheen of light across my eyes that blurred the room. I knew at once that it was Stelios, his spirit. I reached for his hand and saw us walk together along a street in Athens then up the hill behind Chrysoula’s house outside my village. And we were in other places I didn’t recognize. We grew up. We had a son and a daughter. We became middle-aged and our children had children too. We were on a ship and then on a plane and then we were coming home again. We argued and drank too much and got fat and fell down stairs and made money and lost it. We grew old together. He became bald and nearsighted and crabby. Then all over the room his light dimmed and began to fade. Good-bye, he called over his shoulder. Good-bye.
Oh, but there’s the knock at the door. I gather myself and glance out the window to see you, still with that eggbeater hair. Theo mou! I stand up to open the door and as I do, I press the button to turn off this little red light, my life.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The period covered by Aliki’s story is still a polarizing one for both those who survived it and those who’ve had to live with its repercussions, which have helped shape the present. This narrative is in no way meant to be a definitive account or explanation of those awful years but rather an imagined story in turbulent times. In order to suit the larger purposes of the narrative, the actual years of civil fighting have been telescoped to a more condensed time frame. For anyone wishing for more information on the period, the craft of shadow theater or the art and practice of lamenting, I suggest the following books, to which I’m indebted.
Alexiou, Margaret. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
Andrews, Kevin. Greece in the Dark (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1980) and The Flight of Ikaros (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959).
Beevor, Antony. Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (London: John Murray, 1991).
Carabott, Philip, and Thanasis D. Sfikas. The Greek Civil War: Essays on a Conflict of Exceptionalism and Silences (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).
Cockburn, Patrick, and Henry Cockburn. Henry’s Demons: Living with Schizophrenia: A Father and Son’s Story (New York: Scribner, 2011).
Danforth, Loring M. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).
Danforth, Loring M., and Riki van Boeschoten. Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Herodotus. The Histories, translated by Aubrey De Sélincourt (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, translated by M. L. West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Holst, Gail. Road to Rembetika (Athens: Anglo-Hellenic Publishing, 1975).
Homer. The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1990); Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997); and Stephen Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 2011).
Janes, Colin. The Eagles of Crete: An Untold Story of Civil War (n.p.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2013).
Matthews, Kenneth. Memories of a Mountain War: Greece 1944–1949 (London: Longman, 1972).
Mazower, Mark. After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
Myrsiades, Linda S., and Kostas Myrsiades. Karagiozis: Culture and Comedy in Greek Puppet Theater (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1992) and, as translators, Karagiozis: Three Classic Plays (New York: Pella Publishing, 1999).
Oswald, Alice. Memorial: An Excavation of The Iliad (London: Faber and Faber, 2011).
Psychoundakis, George. The Cretan Runner: His Story of the German Occupation, translated by Patrick Leigh Fermor (London: Penguin Books, 2009).
Seremetakis, C. Nadia. The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Spatharis, Sotiris. Behind the White Screen (New York: Red Dust, 1976).
Voglis, Polymeris. Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002).
Woodhouse, C. M. Modern Greece: A Short History (London: Faber and Faber, 1991).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m grateful to the Boston Athenæum for its solitude and grace: much of this work was written and revised there. I also want to thank Tom Jenks of Narrative magazine for his close reading of and suggestions on an early draft of the manuscript. On later drafts, Thomas H. McNeely of GrubStreet made countless invaluable and perceptive comments. I also thank my agent, Susan Golomb of Writers House, for her belief in the story and my editor, Claire Zion, and her staff at Berkley for their enthusiasm and careful work at all levels. I’m forever indebted to my wife, Jane McLachlan, my first and most tireless reader, for her belief from beginning to end.
Readers Guide for
MY LAST LAMENT
James William Brown
Questions for Discussion
Who do you think Aliki loved more, Stelios or Takis? Do you think the nature of her love for them was different? How? Do you think Takis had a romantic love for her, or something else?
Did you think Takis told the Germans about Stelios and his mother, and set off the massacre of the village? Did you change your mind later? Why? Do you think Takis was mentally unbalanced before then or that the massacre led to his mental instability?
Why do you think Aliki took Takis with her for so long? Do you think she was right to cut ties with him finally?
Why do you think Aliki never married after the death of Stelios? Why do you think she became a lamenter?
What is the relationship between laments and shadow theater performances? What do each of them tell us about our lives?
What is a lament? How has your understanding of it changed by reading the novel?
Does it surprise you that, as an old woman, Aliki has such an irreverent voice? What does that say to you about Greek culture?
Near the end of the novel, Aliki says, “A record of a life nearly complete could also be said to be a lament for that life, couldn’t it?” Do you agree with her? Why or why not?
Do you think it’s intrinsic to the Greek character to believe that each of our lives is a story being told? Or do you think that’s part of a wider literary tradition?
Do you think the old women who go with Aliki to funerals and other gatherings are meant to function like the chorus in a classic Greek play? In what ways do they do that? In what ways are they different?
Many details of Greek life in a small village come out in this novel—the food, the idea of living off the land, the village songs, the pragmatic attitude and stubborn humor with which villagers face their lives. Did you see these attributes as typical of Greeks and Greek culture? Or did this representation change your understanding of what Greece is like?
Do you think what happened to Greece after World War II is related to its current economic standing in the eurozone? How do you think the struggle between communism and fascism has affected Greece today? Some critics blame a culture of government corruption for being behind Greece’s fiscal problems. Do you think that’s true, and does it have roots in what happened after the war?
How is the world of modern Greece as presented in this novel different from the world of ancient Greece as presented in works such as The Odyssey, The Iliad and others? What are the similarities?
James William Brown, author of the critically acclaimed Blood Dance, is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford and has been a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has also directed the editorial departments of textbook publishers in New York, Boston and Athens, Greece. Previously he lived and taught in Greece for ten years, but he now lives with his wife in Massachusetts.
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My Last Lament Page 35