THERE’S A PICTURE I keep in front of me. I cut it out of a magazine. It’s a photograph taken in a monastery on Mt. Athos, a peninsula in northern Greece. The monasteries at Mt. Athos were founded in Byzantine times and, as far as anyone knows, no woman has set foot on the peninsula since then. So if you’re male, you can apply for permission to visit the monks on Mt. Athos, who otherwise live utterly isolated amidst amazing treasures just as they have for centuries.
This photo was taken in a charnel house and the first thing you see is skulls, a pile of them. They’re stacked up neatly in rows, one on top of the other. Images of the Black Death come instantly to mind.
One skull is out of place—maybe someone was careless arranging the skulls or maybe the pile settled over the years, for one skull lies face up. Instead of eye-and nose-holes, you find yourself looking into the hole where the spine went in—a round “O”—and the two hollows under the cheekbones. It makes this face look exclamatory.
The skulls sit in ranks on a ledge against a rough whitewashed wall. Some of them are almost as white as the wall. Others are parchment-colored. The pile of skulls is so graphic, at first you don’t even notice the monk.
This monk—recedes into the background. He’s wearing black. The photographer’s flash casts the wall behind him into shadow. His black beard all but obscures a gaunt profile. He’s holding a big box full of bones.
The box is made of wood and has a hinged lid. There are two skulls and some arm or shin bones in the box. One of the skulls has letters written on it. Pieces of paper have been bound around a few of the bones with leather thongs—these aren’t just bones, they’re relics. The skulls on the ledge haven’t been labeled. They must have belonged to ordinary monks. I like to think those died peacefully of old age in their narrow beds.
The monk has turned his face away from the camera. Maybe he doesn’t want to have his picture taken. Maybe he even considers it a sacrilege. It makes you wonder what the photographer had to do to get this picture. Who gave him permission? Did he even ask? He must have known a great picture when he saw one. Did he pose the monk against the skulls? Did he shoot a whole roll? Once you’ve taken the first picture, I know, it’s easy to snap a second and a third. People will stand for it.
The monk has averted his face. Maybe, secretly, he is bloated with pride because he is the one who was chosen to display the bones, but I don’t know—it seems to be a gesture of humility. Blank as the wall, he seems to be saying, I’m blank as the wall, stock-stone-still like the stone ledge holding the pile of skulls, holding out this box with the bones in it as proof—someone was here.
But fleetingly, you think—because you don’t—maybe he just doesn’t want to look into the box. Maybe he finds the bones disgusting.
Maybe not. Maybe he reveres them so, he has to avert his face, because they’re so holy.
You glance back at the bones in the box. The skulls on the ledge are as clean as cattle skulls picked clean, sun-bleached in the desert. The bones in the box look mottled, rotted. Maybe not. Maybe they’ve been polished, varnished to a darker hue. One of the skulls has fallen forward and almost seems to be gnawing on the edge of the box.
Like the round “O” in the skull behind him, the black hole of the monk’s convoluted ear seems somehow articulate. His unseen eyes are eloquent. When I opened the magazine in a waiting room and saw this photo, I was sure this man was signaling, he could hardly bear to show us what was in the box.
But someone, I thought, has to tend to the bones. Someone has to arrange and rearrange the display. Someone has to take the box down off the shelf to show you. This is that man.