For some reason, this incident from my past has been skulking at the corners of my mind over the last week or so, although it’s hard to say what, precisely, dredged this memory up from wherever it had been hiding. It sometimes seems like these strange images of the past just appear, for no apparent reason and with no real lesson in mind. They’re just sort of there.

Living in Molybos, one sort of came to know everybody else, and therefore, most of the town showed up for major events like christenings, weddings, and funerals. Funerals were announced with a dolorous clanging of bells, and people would wind their way through the city to the church for an interminable service, and then dutifully follow the coffin to the graveyard and watch while it was interred.

Unlike in the United States, where funerals are a tasteful, refined, quiet affair for the most part, Greek funerals were as noisy and colourful as the rest of Greek life. Members of the procession would weep and wail whether or not they knew the deceased, with the female family members of the deceased weeping more than anyone else, rending their black clothing and smearing their faces with dirt and ash. Before the coffin was interred, women might throw themselves upon it to be pulled away by their family members, and after the burial, the women would return to the grave every day to tend it, keep the memorial candle burning, and talk to the dead.

On Saturdays especially, the graveyard filled with women in black who would sit and talk with one another while tidying the graves, and periodically there would be an exhumation, which would also be attended by most of the community, as we waited to see whether or not the bones had been stripped clean as they were laid out on the traditional white cloth before being bundled into an ossuary. Some superstitious Greeks believed that the condition of the bones after the three year wait for exhumation was an indicator of the character of the deceased; good people would obligingly decay away into neat skeletons, while the less virtuous would still have clumps of stringy hair and papery skin which would necessitate reburial.

For some reason, in this memory I have a strong feeling that the cemetery was on a hill, which would make sense, since there’s no good reason to locate a cemetery on land which could be farmed. I remember a forest of headstones and rocks and gnarled shrubs, and I remember threading our way along with the rest of the village to the yawning grave, presided over by the priest.

What makes this funeral more remarkable than the others is the identity of the chief mourner: the butcher. The butcher was a terrifyingly large man who could immobilize a thrashing cow with one muscular arm, and he had long been a subject of fascination for myself and my German friend, Anna. We would skulk around the corner to watch him at work, efficiently hacking up poultry and livestock, and we were fans of his gigantic pig, who would lazily wallow to the fence to accept kitchen scraps from us.

The butcher was a fairly taciturn sort of man with a coarse voice and a common accent, and it was not unusual for transactions to pass in almost total silence, in marked contrast to the normally voluble commerce of the Greeks. He was simply a man who knew his business, and wasn’t that interested in discussions.

At this funeral, I was not the only one astonished when the dirt began to clod onto the coffin and the butcher started to sing in an eerily high, ethereal sort of voice, a lament that pierced your heart, pinning it to the back of your spine as you stood frozen in awe. For a man who rarely spoke to suddenly burst out in any sort of song would have been remarkable, but it was all the more astonishing for its haunting beauty and purity, the sort of sound which you hear and realize that you will never hear again. Like most Greek mourning songs, it was a tune that was invented as the song was sung, and the words were spontaneous and without calculation, and it captured the depth of his bitter sadness and the spirit of the deceased. While he sang, the other mourners fell silent, and even the priest stood still, the incense censer idly twirling from his hand.

At the end of the song, he left, silently, while everyone else stood stunned at the edges of the grave. I cannot remember who it was that died, if I ever knew, but even now I marvel at the depth of feeling conveyed by the butcher on that bitter day.