Orpheus and Eurydice

Part One · The Singer of Thrace

In the mountain country of Thrace, where the rivers ran cold and the oak forests were considerably older than any recorded village, there lived a young man named Orpheus, whose mother was a Muse and whose inheritance was music. He carried a lyre strung with sinew, and whenever he touched it, the entire landscape seemed to incline itself in his direction, as though attention were a kind of gravity. Rivers slackened their currents so that they might hear the melody more completely, and wolves descended from the ridges to lie among the sheep without the slightest appetite. Shepherds insisted that the very oaks had uprooted themselves to follow him, settling wherever he paused. Yet Orpheus was a reserved and unassuming person, who regarded his extraordinary and mysterious talent less as a possession than as a species of weather, something that arrived without invitation, accomplished its mysterious work, and departed without explanation.

Then he met Eurydice, a woman of the valley who collected medicinal herbs at daybreak and discovered amusement in nearly everything, and his music acquired a purpose it had never previously possessed, and it had always been beautiful, but now it had a destination. He played for her beneath the plane trees, and she listened with her chin resting on her knees, as if she were witnessing the invention of sound itself. They were married in the spring, in a procession decorated with garlands of thyme, although the ceremonial torches burned with a thick and bitter smoke that made the guests cough and exchange uneasy and apprehensive glances. Orpheus noticed the smoke and declined to interpret it. Happiness, he discovered, makes a person remarkably skillful at overlooking omens, and for several weeks the newly married couple wandered the meadows with the serene and unexamined confidence of people who believe that nothing in creation could possibly interrupt them.

The interruption arrived on a magnificent afternoon, while Eurydice was traveling alone through the tall grass beside the river. A snake, concealed among the roots and startled by her unexpected footstep, struck once at her ankle and disappeared. She did not even cry out; she simply sat down in the grass, thoroughly bewildered, and within the hour the color had abandoned her face and the light had gone from her eyes. When Orpheus eventually reached her, he found nothing except stillness and a scattering of crushed wildflowers. For many days he declined to play at all, and the lyre hung silent against the wall, while the rivers, long accustomed to his songs, waited in a perplexed hush. Then one morning he wrapped the instrument in a cloak and walked toward a cavern in the southern hills, which the shepherds carefully and respectfully avoided, because they believed it was a doorway, and that anyone who entered it could never return.

Part Two · The Black River

The passage beyond the cavern descended in long, deliberate, gradual spirals, and the daylight thinned behind him until it became nothing more substantial or permanent than a memory pressed against his shoulders. At last he reached a black river, slow and immense, where the dead congregated in murmuring crowds and where an ancient ferryman named Charon leaned upon his pole. The ferryman refused him without even acknowledging his visitor, explaining that the living were forbidden to cross. Orpheus presented no argument. He unwrapped the lyre, sat upon a flat, weathered stone, and commenced to play, and the song was neither clever nor triumphant, but simply the most authentic thing he knew: a melody about a woman in tall grass, a morning that should have continued, and the unbearable emptiness of a house with only one person inside it. The crowds fell silent, and the ferryman lowered his pole, and for the first time in a thousand years he forgot to count the coins.

On the farther shore, a formidable and thoroughly unwelcoming three-headed dog named Cerberus rose out of the shadows, guarding the gates of that kingdom against everyone who attempted to leave it. Orpheus advanced directly toward the animal, still playing, and the music reached all three heads simultaneously, with extraordinary gentleness. One after another they lowered themselves to the ground, the immense jaws yawning in three different keys, the burning eyes growing heavy, until the creature slept like an enormous puppy beside the road, with one head snoring and two others sulking about it. Inside the gates, the sorrows of that colorless and melancholy country appeared to pause in their routines. The condemned prisoners were, for a while, no longer being punished. A man who had spent ages rolling a boulder uphill sat down upon it, and a woman sentenced to carry water in a leaking jar set the jar aside and wept without embarrassment or apology, although an enormous vulture, who had spent several centuries professionally disapproving of everyone, was observed to sniffle. The song passed among them like a warm current through a cold building, and wherever it touched, the ancient suffering loosened its grip, if only for the length of a single trembling verse.

Part Three · The Long Road

At the end of the road stood two thrones of polished obsidian, and upon them sat Hades, lord of the dead, and Persephone, his queen. Hades was neither cruel nor cheerful but exact, a sovereign who governed an incalculable population by never granting exceptions. Orpheus knelt before him and addressed him plainly, because he possessed no talent for flattery. He said that he had not come to steal anything or to challenge any law, but only because a single snakebite had ended a happiness that had scarcely begun, and because every creature in the upper world would eventually arrive in this kingdom regardless. Surely, he argued, a brief delay could cost the king nothing. Then he played again, more softly this time, the way a person speaks to someone who is already listening. When the final note faded, Persephone was weeping with her hand pressed against her mouth, for she understood better than anyone what it meant to be taken from the sunlight and kept below.

Hades remained thoughtfully silent for a long while, and the shades pressed forward in the obscurity to hear his decision. At last he lifted one hand, and Eurydice was summoned into the assembly. She emerged slowly from among the crowd, limping slightly from the old wound, pale as a candle but unmistakably herself, and she looked at Orpheus with such astonished and uncomplicated tenderness that he nearly dropped the lyre. The king, however, attached a single condition, and he delivered it without ceremony or drama. Eurydice would follow her husband up the long road toward the living world, but Orpheus must walk ahead of her the entire distance, and he must not turn his head to look at her until both of them had stepped into the open daylight. If he glanced back even once before the sun touched them, she would return to the shadows and remain there permanently and irrevocably. Orpheus agreed immediately and unreservedly, because the demand seemed so small, and because he believed that devotion, by itself, was a sufficient and reliable guarantee.

They began the ascent together, although only one of them could hear the other. Orpheus walked first, the lyre silent in his hands, listening for the faint, intermittent sound of footsteps behind him on the stony path. At first he heard them clearly, soft and regular, and his heart rose with every step. But the road was long and the darkness was complete, and after an hour the footsteps seemed to grow fainter, or perhaps he only imagined that they did. He reasoned with himself that a shade weighs nothing and therefore makes very little noise, and that the king had no conceivable justification to deceive him. Still, the silence behind him widened like a pond into which a stone has been dropped, and every ripple carried a question. Was she really there, or had the gods simply been entertaining themselves at his expense? He gripped the lyre more tightly, fixed his eyes upon the narrow, treacherous path ahead, and compelled himself, with enormous effort, to continue climbing, one painful step after another.

Halfway up, the darkness began to speak, and the voices that seeped out of the walls were as thin as dry leaves and exactly the tone of his own most secret thoughts. She is not there, they murmured, with a terrible and persuasive tenderness; she never followed you; only look, and you will see that you have been entirely alone for an hour. One of them even borrowed Eurydice's laugh, and the imitation was so perfect that Orpheus's knees nearly gave way beneath him. Something cold brushed his sleeve, and he heard a sound behind him like a sandal sliding across stone, and then, for a hundred steps, nothing whatsoever, which was incomparably worse than any noise. He recited the king's condition under his breath, over and over, as a drowning man clings to a plank, while the voices grew louder, then softer, then cruelly kind. Orpheus pressed his teeth against the inside of his cheek until he tasted salt, and he compelled himself to keep climbing.

Part Four · The Last Look

At last a pale smudge of gray appeared far above them, the mouth of the cavern, and then the gray warmed into the unmistakable color of morning. Orpheus quickened his pace, and the air grew more fragrant with every stride, carrying the fragrance and temperature of wet grass and distant woodsmoke. The light widened until it filled the entire tunnel, and he stepped across the threshold of the cavern into the open, trembling with relief and anticipation, with joy, and with a sudden, irrational, and overwhelming need for certainty. He had crossed the boundary, he reasoned, and therefore the condition had been satisfied, and surely she was only a heartbeat behind him, close enough to touch, and no god could possibly object to a single glance of gratitude and affection. He turned. In the doorway of the cavern, still half within the shadow, Eurydice stood with her hands outstretched toward him, because she had not yet crossed the line, and the daylight had not yet reached her.

For one moment they looked directly at each other, and nothing needed to be explained, and she did not reproach him. She whispered a solitary word of farewell, so quietly that the wind nearly carried it away, and then she drifted backward into the darkness like a breath leaving cold glass. Orpheus lunged after her, but the passage was empty, and the stones were cold and unremarkable beneath his fingers. He descended again into the darkness and begged the ferryman for a second crossing, but Charon, who had forgotten his coins once, would not forget them twice. For seven days Orpheus sat on the bank of the black river without eating, having nothing to offer except his grief and bewilderment, while the dead watched him from a distance, perhaps feeling compassion, perhaps only remembering what it had been like to be loved by someone who refused to look away. Then, at last, he gathered up the lyre and climbed back toward the light.

He lived for many years afterward, wandering the remote, mountainous country of Thrace with the lyre on his back, and his songs grew more elementary and more mysterious and more beautiful. Those who heard them said that each melody seemed to contain an unoccupied space, the way a room preserves the shape of a person who has recently stepped outside. He never married again, and he never explained or defended what had happened in the cavern. When children asked him why his music made them feel both happy and sad, he answered that the two feelings had never really been separate, and that anyone who attempted to keep only the first would eventually lose them both. The old shepherds maintained that the rivers still slowed when he passed, that the wolves still came down to listen, and that on certain evenings, when the wind turned and the light grew long, a second set of footsteps could be heard walking quietly and patiently behind him.