Go Down by the River

After rubbing gently off a tram on a crazy Belgrade intersection on Thursday, Jelica and I finally went to the theater after several years. What a shame!!! We saw the Hanoh Levin's piece Requiem based on three short stories by Chekhov. The actors were fantastic with beautiful minimalistic staging and music with pretty much nothing on the stage but a bench (a bit of a Chekhov cliche) and a moon that watches over everything.

There are several topics that touched me and that I would like to single out.

At the end of his wife's life (and close to the end of his own life), the old man realizes the terrible loneliness of their common life. Time has just passed in the little poor hut in the little village on the way between Paris and Shanghai without they even kind of noticed each other lost in survival cares and petty-mindedness. As the man said with regret - we didn't even go the beautiful river that is in our village, we just didn't dare and stayed in the hut watching the world through the window. We could have gone there, caught some fish, we could have opened a restaurant and served people with a smile instead of making coffins and hoping that more people would die to make a bigger profit. These are two separate topics and could call them *so close and so faraway* and *fear of life, fear of breaking free*.

While taking his wife to the doctor in the nearby village, they traveled with two local prostitutes lamenting the lack of style of local men, their stinginess and poverty. Things are so different in Paris.....While they were travelling the horseman kept asking them to be a bit quieter and respectful as his son died the week before. Obviously no one cared and at one point the saddened man collapsed and confided his grief to his horse who understood him the best. This reminds me another post of mine on the loneliness of man in his noble ambitions - a Splash Quite Unnoticed. This was the topic of the *loneliness of man in his grief*.

There was also the issue of stinginess. After having to make his wife's coffin for free, the hero concluded that life is associated with losses and only death is linked with profits. Life-losses, death-profits.