Chapter 61
After war, after any act of inconceivable violence, the world is neatly divided between those who are dead and those who remain. Troy was no different. When that ten-year siege was done—the walls of the glittering city razed, pillaged, burned—when the Greeks set off from the shores, when the old Trojan king was murdered along with his sons and the baby Astyanax hurled from a parapet, his tiny skull smashed—past and future leveled in an instant—afterward, who remains?
The mothers, the daughters, the wives. And sometimes, that’s when the play begins.
I am someone who did not die when I should have died.
Hecuba said that. The Trojan king’s widow. She’d watched her husband, sons, and daughters killed. She was destined to be exiled, enslaved.
Yes, I remember thinking when I read those words, I do know that feeling.
One day took a world away.
Yes, that too.
But the dream of the story continues. In some gorgeous zone of the imagination, told and retold, as if some new incarnation might shape a keener sense of meaning out of what was broken, burned, slain.