Every Sound by Hand

The Voices, the Sounds and the Studio

*A radio play in twenty reels. It is meant to be heard, and it can be read. Every voice is named before it speaks. Every sound is written down before it is made.*

---

*The voices, in the order the microphone meets them.*

**ILINCA DUMITRU**, twenty-nine. A sound designer, born in the Danube delta, trained in Bucharest, home again since the spring of 2024. She narrates. When she is listening hard she closes one eye.

**RAISA FYODOROVNA LUNGU**, born Sokolova, seventy-nine. Born on the fourth of June 1946 in Belaya Pristan, a river town on the Volga, the daughter of a ferry captain. For thirteen years she was a voice on children's radio in Minsk: hares, wolves, grandmothers, the wind. For twenty-five more she made sounds by hand for the radio house in Chișinău. Widowed in 2018. Since 2019 she has lived with her daughter's family in the delta. Lately she loses the morning and keeps the year 1956 perfectly.

**RODICA DUMITRU**, born Lungu, fifty. Raisa's daughter, Ilinca's mother. Born in Minsk, raised in Chișinău, married into the delta. Runs a guesthouse of six rooms with a reed roof and a blue gate. Talks while she cooks and cooks while she talks.

**COSTEL DUMITRU**, fifty-seven. Rodica's husband. A fisherman, boat guide and winter reed cutter, born in the village and never tempted to leave it. Says little. Knows the name of every channel and most of the fish in them.

**FLORIN NEAGU**, sixty-six. A retired schoolteacher who runs Radio Delta Mică from a room above the village shop: one microphone, one mixing desk older than Ilinca, and a signal that reaches eleven villages on a clear night.

**DOINA LUNGU**, forty-nine. Ion Lungu's niece. An archivist in the sound archive of the radio house in Chișinău. Brisk, funny, allergic to dust, surrounded by it all day.

**SILVIA LUNGU**, seventy-four. Doina's mother, widow of Ion's younger brother Grigore. Lives in a stone house in Chișinău with a walnut tree that is older than the street.

**TUDOR LUNGU**, fifty-five. Raisa's son. Born in Minsk in 1970, raised in Chișinău from the age of nine, back in Minsk since he was eighteen. A piano tuner. Hears a quarter-tone wrong from across a room and pretends not to.

**TANYA LUNGU**, born Tatsiana Mikhalevich, fifty-three. Tudor's wife. A school music teacher who plays the tsymbaly, the Belarusian hammered dulcimer, in a folk ensemble that rehearses on Thursdays.

**ALES LUNGU**, twenty-seven. Tudor and Tanya's son. Drives a tram in Minsk. Has his grandmother Zoya's laugh and his grandmother Raisa's habit of narrating everything.

**ZOYA MIKHALEVICH**, eighty. Tanya's mother, and so Ales's other grandmother. For thirteen years she played the wolf to Raisa's hare on the same children's radio hour. Weaves figures out of straw.

**KONSTANTIN FYODOROVICH SOKOLOV, called KOSTYA**, eighty-three. Raisa's older brother. A retired river pilot who still mends outboard motors in a shed behind his house in Belaya Pristan. A widower since 2021. Keeps a dog called Bulka and a grudge he has not looked at closely in fifty-four years.

*Heard only in memory, and played in this production by members of the family:* **FYODOR SOKOLOV**, captain of the ferry *Volzhanka*, and **ANTONINA SOKOLOVA**, who sold hot pies from a kiosk at the pier. **RAISA** and **KOSTYA** as children and as young people. **ION LUNGU**, sound engineer and player of the nai, the Moldovan pan flute, who recorded everything and labeled most of it.

*Heard on tape:* the real voice of Ion Lungu, from boxes in Chișinău. And, once, the real voice of Raisa Lungu at twenty-five, from the night of Sunday the twenty-sixth of December 1971.

---

*The language.* The family speaks Russian, Romanian and Belarusian, often in the same sentence, and switches whenever someone new comes into the room. The play is written in English. A few single words are kept as the family keeps them.

*What they call her.* Rodica and Tudor call her Mama. Ilinca calls her Bunica. Ales calls her Babulya. Kostya calls her Raya, which nobody else alive is allowed to do.

---

*The sounds.* This production follows the rule Raisa Lungu learned in 1966 and never broke: every sound is made by hand, in the room, at the moment it is heard. No recordings from a library. No borrowed weather. Where a real sound from a real place is used, it was recorded by the family on the spot and the place is named. In the script, sounds are marked **SOUND**, music is marked **MUSIC**, and directions for the voices are written in brackets.

*The time.* February 2026, from Saturday the seventh to Sunday the first of March, when the red-and-white threads of spring are tied on, and a little after seven in the evening, a broadcast goes out across eleven villages and down one telephone line to Minsk.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel One: A Bowl of Water

**SOUND:** A tin bowl set down on a wooden table. Water poured into it from a jug, slowly, from a height. The jug set down. A hand enters the water and moves it in a slow circle.

**ILINCA (narrating):** That is the Volga. At least it is the Volga as my grandmother makes it, at our kitchen table in the Danube delta, two thousand kilometers from the real one. She has been making it for sixty years. She says the trick is not the water. The trick is the wrist.

**RAISA:** Slower. No, slower. A river is not a soup.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It is Saturday, the seventh of February. Outside it is four degrees, the reeds are gray and stiff, and the channel past our gate has a skin of ice on it that the ducks walk across with great dignity and then fall through. Inside, the stove is going. My mother is at the far end of the kitchen with a pot of fish soup. My father is mending a net by the window. And my grandmother has her sleeves pushed up and one hand in a bowl.

**SOUND:** The circling water. Then a second hand, smaller, tapping the rim of the bowl with a fingernail: a thin, high tick.

**RAISA:** That is the ice at the edge, in November. You hear it? It talks before it freezes. Now, listen. You are on the pier at Belaya Pristan. It is evening. My father's boat is coming across.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Yesterday my mother drove her to the clinic in Tulcea. A young doctor with very clean shoes asked her to remember three words, a pencil, a window and a horse, and to tell them back to him after ten minutes. She told him about a horse called Mushka that pulled the bread cart in Belaya Pristan in 1952. She did not remember the pencil or the window. The doctor wrote something down and said a phrase my mother repeated in the car four times, the way you press a bruise. Early memory loss. He said other things too. He said it was good to talk about the past, to tell the old stories out loud, to have people listen.

**RODICA (from the stove):** He said it like it was medicine. Tell stories twice a day after meals.

**RAISA:** I heard him. I am not deaf. I am forgetful. That is a different department.

**SOUND:** A spoon knocking twice on the rim of a pot. A lid. Steam.

**RODICA:** Soup in five minutes. Mama, take your hand out of the river, it's freezing.

**ILINCA (narrating):** So tonight, after the clinic, after the doctor, I asked her to tell me a story, and I asked if I could record it. She looked at my little recorder on the table, the red light, and something in her face woke up. My grandmother does not like cameras. She likes microphones. A camera, she says, steals your face. A microphone only asks for your voice, and you can give it as much or as little as you like.

**RAISA:** Which story?

**ILINCA:** You choose.

**RAISA:** Then I will tell you the only one I ever wrote down. A radio play. Forty minutes. It went out once, in Minsk, on a Sunday, the week after Christmas, in 1971. *The Ferryman's Daughter.*

**ILINCA (narrating):** I had heard of it the way you hear of a great-aunt who emigrated: a name, a date, a look on my mother's face. Nobody in the family had ever heard it. There was no copy. There was, my mother said, no script either; it had gone wherever paper goes.

**RAISA (her voice changing, lower and slower, a voice for a microphone):** On the Volga, at a town called Belaya Pristan, which means the white pier, there was a ferry called the *Volzhanka*. The ferryman was a big man with a small voice. His daughter was a small girl with a big voice. Every evening when the ferry came back across the river, the girl ran down the pier to ring the bell.

**SOUND:** The water slows. From somewhere in Raisa's lap, a tiny brass bell, the kind on a cat's collar, shaken once.

**RAISA:** No. Wrong. That is a cat. I need a bigger bell.

**COSTEL:** There's the boat bell in the shed.

**RAISA:** Later. For now we pretend. Imagine a bell.

**ILINCA (narrating):** She told it for eleven minutes. The ferry, the pier, a kiosk that sold pies with cabbage and egg, a brother who wanted the ferry and a sister who wanted the radio, a river that froze from the edges in. She did the voices. The ferryman, low and gentle. The mother, quick. The brother at fourteen, his voice cracking in the middle of a word. I sat there with my headphones on and the hair on my arms standing up, because I had grown up with her, and I had never once heard her work.

**RAISA (in the voice of the brother, cracking):** Papa, let me take the wheel. Just for the middle. Nobody will know.

**RAISA (as the ferryman, low):** The river will know.

**RAISA (as the narrator again):** And then came the night of the fog, the last crossing before the freeze, when the whole town stood on the pier and could not see the water, and the ferryman's daughter...

**SOUND:** Nothing. The water in the bowl has gone still. A long silence, and in it the stove ticking, Costel's net needle pausing, the clock over the door.

**RAISA:** The ferryman's daughter.

**SOUND:** The clock.

**RAISA (quietly, in her own voice):** I don't know.

**RODICA:** Mama.

**RAISA:** I know the fog. I know the bell. I know I stood on that pier. But I don't know what I wrote. I don't know the end. It was there yesterday.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It was not there yesterday. I think it had not been there for years and she had not needed it until now. But I did not say that. My mother put the soup on the table, and my father put down his net, and my grandmother took her hand out of the bowl and dried it on a towel, finger by finger, which is a thing she does when she is deciding something.

---

**SOUND:** Spoons on bowls. The thick, mild clink of a heavy soup: carp and catfish and pike, potatoes, a sour broth, a handful of green lovage at the end. Bread torn.

**RODICA:** It doesn't matter, the end. You told it beautifully.

**RAISA:** Of course it matters. A play without an end is a door without a floor behind it. You step through and you fall in the river.

**COSTEL:** Was there a tape?

**RAISA:** Your father-in-law recorded everything. He recorded me snoring. He recorded the refrigerator. He would have recorded it off the air at home, on his own machine. But where it went after that, after Minsk, after Chișinău, after Ion... I don't know. Boxes. There were so many boxes.

**ILINCA:** Then we find the boxes.

**RAISA:** And if we don't?

**ILINCA:** Then we make it again. You and me and everyone. Real voices. Real sounds. We record the whole play, the way it went out, and we find the end together.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I said it before I had thought about it. That is my grandmother's habit, not mine, and I have caught it from her like a cold. She looked at me over her soup. She has gray eyes, the gray of river water in a pail, and when she is about to bargain they go flat.

**RAISA:** My rules.

**ILINCA:** Your rules.

**RAISA:** One. Every sound by hand. No noises from your computer. If you need rain, you make rain. Two. Every voice is family. No actors. If we need a ferryman, we find a ferryman in the family. Three. Each house brings its own sound. Minsk brings Minsk. Chișinău brings Chișinău. The Volga brings the Volga.

**RODICA:** The Volga means Uncle Kostya.

**SOUND:** A spoon set down.

**RAISA:** Kostya is busy.

**RODICA:** Kostya is eighty-three and lives alone with a dog.

**RAISA:** He is busy with the dog.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My grandmother's brother lives on the Volga, in the town where they were born. He telephones on New Year's Eve and on her birthday, and the calls last four minutes, and at the end of them she always says he sounds well, and her mouth goes thin. Nobody has ever explained this to me. I have learned not to ask, the way you learn not to step on a certain board in an old house.

**RAISA:** And four. We put it on the air. A play is not a play in a drawer. It must go out.

**COSTEL:** Florin has the radio.

**RODICA:** Florin's radio plays wedding songs and the price of diesel.

**COSTEL:** Florin's radio reaches eleven villages.

**RAISA:** Eleven villages is more than most plays get.

**SOUND:** Raisa stands, a chair scraping back. She crosses to the sink. The tap, briefly. Then the bowl again, refilled. The hand back in the water, circling.

**RAISA:** Listen. This is the river again. Tomorrow I will forget I promised you. You will have to remind me. Don't be gentle about it. Be like a ferry bell.

**ILINCA (narrating):** That night, after she went to bed, I sat at the kitchen table with the recorder and the headphones and listened to all eleven minutes again. Then I sent the recording into the family's private space, the little shared corner where my mother keeps the photographs and my uncle Tudor posts the dates of everybody's name days, with one line under it. *Bunica's play. She has the beginning. Who has the rest?*

**SOUND:** A soft electronic chime from the phone, then another. Then a third.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Minsk was awake. Chișinău was awake. The Volga was not. I sat there until midnight with my hand in the cold bowl of water, trying to find the wrist.

**SOUND:** Water, circling, slower and slower. Then still.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Two: Eleven Villages

**SOUND:** Outdoors, early. A long, dry, rhythmic hiss: a hooked blade going through reeds at the base, then the rattle of the cut stems falling together. Breath in cold air. Boots on frozen mud that gives a little.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My father, Monday morning, the ninth of February, cutting reed on the bank behind the guesthouse. Every winter, when the stems are dry and the water is low and the ground is hard enough to stand on, the men of Gura Stufului go out with sickles and cut, and tie, and stack, and in the spring the bundles go up onto roofs from here to the sea. Our roof is reed. The school roof is reed. The bus shelter is reed. My father says that a reed roof, done right, lasts forty years and sounds like rain even when it isn't raining.

**COSTEL:** Is it on?

**ILINCA:** It's on.

**COSTEL:** Then I won't say anything.

**SOUND:** The sickle again. The rattle. A bundle lifted and thumped down on a pile.

**ILINCA:** Papa. Say something.

**COSTEL:** You said every sound by hand. This is by hand.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He is right. It is the first sound for the play that is not made at a kitchen table. The Volga ferry needs a shore, and my grandmother says a shore in winter sounds like dry grass and somebody working. So my father works, and I hold the microphone low, and the reeds go down around us with a noise like a long sentence being whispered.

**SOUND:** A heron, far off: one harsh croak. Then quiet.

**COSTEL:** She asked me this morning why you were up so early.

**ILINCA:** And?

**COSTEL:** I told her. The play. Florin. She said what play.

**SOUND:** The sickle stops.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Sunday she had forgotten. I knew she would. She told me she would. On Sunday morning I said, Bunica, the play, and she said, which play, and I said, The Ferryman's Daughter, and I watched it come back into her face the way the light comes up over the reeds, from the bottom first. She said, my rules. I said, your rules. She said, don't be gentle about it. Monday it was the same, my father says, except this time she laughed.

**COSTEL:** She said, I'll forget it every morning, so you'll have to sell it to me every morning. She said it's good practice for you. For your work.

**ILINCA:** What work?

**COSTEL:** Selling things to people who don't want them.

**SOUND:** The sickle again, and Costel's short laugh, which is mostly through his nose.

---

**SOUND:** Indoors. A small room. A door with a spring hinge that slaps shut. The hum of an old transmitter warming, a fan inside it ticking. A kettle on a hot plate. Below, muffled through the floor, the village shop: a bell over the door, a woman asking for cooking oil and two loaves.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Radio Delta Mică lives above the shop by the landing stage, up a staircase so steep that Florin Neagu keeps a rope on the wall to hold. There is one microphone on a metal arm, one mixing desk with half its knobs missing, a shelf of records, a shelf of cassettes, and a window that looks straight down the channel to where it meets the river. Florin taught me geography when I was eleven. He still calls me by my surname.

**FLORIN:** Dumitru. Sit. Tea?

**ILINCA:** Please.

**SOUND:** Tea poured. A spoon in a glass. Florin sitting heavily in a swivel chair that complains.

**FLORIN:** So. A radio play.

**ILINCA:** Forty minutes. Live. The whole family.

**FLORIN:** I have done a lot of things on this radio, Dumitru. Once I broadcast a whole goose auction. I have never done a radio play.

**ILINCA:** Neither have I.

**FLORIN:** Your grandmother has.

**ILINCA:** Two hundred and something. She stopped counting in Minsk.

**FLORIN:** Then she will tell us what to do, and we will do it, and if we get it wrong she will tell us that too. When?

**ILINCA (narrating):** I had thought about this all weekend. My grandmother's good hours are in the evening, after supper, after the light goes, when the day stops asking her questions. The family needed time to come from three countries. And there was one date in the calendar that every branch of us already keeps.

**ILINCA:** The first of March.

**FLORIN:** Ah.

**SOUND:** Florin's chair creaks forward.

**FLORIN:** Mărțișor. Sunday. Good. Everybody in eleven villages will be wearing the red and white thread already and feeling soft about spring. They'll listen to anything. Seven o'clock?

**ILINCA:** Seven o'clock.

**FLORIN:** I'll put it in the announcements. A radio play, live, by the Lungu and Dumitru family, from the house with the blue gate. People will come and stand outside your fence just to see what a radio play looks like.

**ILINCA:** It looks like people standing around a table making noises with bowls.

**FLORIN:** Then they'll be disappointed, and then they'll go home and listen, and they won't be. That's the radio.

**SOUND:** Florin flicks a switch. The transmitter hum lifts half a tone. A small click, and a red bulb above the door, in a cage of wire, comes on and buzzes faintly.

**FLORIN:** I wired that myself in 1998. When the light is on, nobody comes up the stairs. Not even the mayor. Not even my wife.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It is the reddest thing in the village in February. I stood and looked at it for a while and thought about my grandmother at twenty, in a studio in Minsk, under a lamp like it, with the whole country's children listening. I recorded the buzz. It goes in the play.

---

**SOUND:** The guesthouse kitchen, evening. A laptop's fan. Then a cascade of voices arriving on a group call, overlapping, each with its own room behind it: a television in Minsk, a kettle in Chișinău.

**DOINA:** Hello, Rodica. Hello, Aunt Raisa. Can you hear me? I can see Tudor's ceiling.

**RAISA:** It's a nice ceiling.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Four screens on one laptop on our kitchen table. My uncle Tudor and aunt Tanya in their apartment in Minsk, with the edge of a piano behind them. Doina in Chișinău, a scarf around her neck indoors, because the radiators in her building have opinions. Us, around the table, my grandmother in the middle, wearing her good cardigan because she had been told there would be company. A fifth square on the screen stayed dark, with a name under it.

**TUDOR:** Mama, I heard the recording. All of it. Twice. You did Uncle Kostya's voice. The cracking.

**RAISA:** He cracked for two years. A boy should crack.

**TANYA:** Mama Zoya listened too. She cried. Then she said you'd made the ferryman too gentle.

**RAISA:** Of course she did. She always wanted to play him. She thought every man in every play should sound like a wolf.

**DOINA:** About the tape.

**SOUND:** Everyone stops talking at once, which on a call sounds like four rooms holding their breath.

**DOINA:** When Uncle Ion died, Aunt Raisa, you remember, you gave his tapes to the archive. To us. Eleven boxes. I signed for them myself. Most of it is his work for the station, sessions, test tones, a lot of nai. But there were personal boxes. He labeled everything. If he recorded the play off the air in 1971, it will have a label.

**RAISA:** He labeled the refrigerator.

**DOINA:** Then we'll find the refrigerator, and next to it, the play. Come to Chișinău, Ilinca. I'll open the boxes. I'm not supposed to let you touch them, so you'll touch them while I'm looking the other way.

**ILINCA:** Wednesday?

**DOINA:** Wednesday. My mother will feed you. You'll have no choice.

**TUDOR:** And then Minsk. Mama, Zoya says she was in the studio that night. She says she remembers it.

**RAISA:** Zoya remembers everything that happened to Zoya.

**TANYA:** She says you changed the ending live. On the air.

**SOUND:** A pause. Raisa's chair creaks.

**RAISA:** Did I?

**TANYA:** She says.

**RAISA (quietly):** Then she was there and I wasn't. Isn't that funny.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Nobody on the call thought it was funny. My grandmother did. She laughed until she had to take her glasses off. And then she looked at the fifth square on the screen, the dark one with the name under it, *Konstantin Sokolov*, and stopped.

**RODICA:** I sent him the link, Mama. Twice.

**RAISA:** He doesn't use these things.

**TUDOR:** He uses the telephone.

**RAISA:** On New Year's Eve.

**ILINCA:** I'll go to him.

**SOUND:** All four rooms speaking at once: Rodica saying "in February?", Tudor saying "to the Volga?", Doina laughing, Tanya saying "take a hat". Then Raisa's voice over them, not loud, just level.

**RAISA:** You won't need to. He'll say no on the phone.

**ILINCA:** Then I'll go and let him say no in person.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Afterward, when the screens had gone dark one by one, my grandmother sat looking at the laptop as if it might come on again by itself. Then she reached into the pocket of her cardigan and took out a small notebook with a green cover, and a pencil, and in her large looping hand, slowly, she wrote three lines.

**SOUND:** A pencil on paper, deliberate, with pauses.

**RAISA:** *Ilinca. The play. Don't be gentle.*

**ILINCA (narrating):** She tore the page out and gave it to me. "Put that by my bed," she said. "For tomorrow." I did. It is still there now. She reads it every morning, and every morning she says, "Who wrote this?" and then, "Oh. Me."

**SOUND:** The reed roof, in the wind. It does sound like rain.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Three: The Ferryman's Daughter, Part One

**SOUND:** A reel-to-reel tape machine threading: a clatter, a click, the soft whir of the reels starting. Then a single long note on the nai, the Moldovan pan flute, breathy and low, which bends upward at the end like a question.

**ILINCA (narrating):** What follows is the first part of the play, as my grandmother told it on Monday night, the ninth of February, into my microphone. She tells it as the play. Then, every few minutes, she stops and tells it as her life, because the two have grown together over seventy years like the roots of two trees by a fence. I have left both in. The young voices are played by the family: my father the ferryman, my mother his wife, and I, until we can do better, my grandmother at ten.

**RAISA (as narrator, the microphone voice):** Belaya Pristan, on the Volga. The summer of 1956. A wooden pier painted white once and gray since. A kiosk at the end of the pier with a green shutter. And across the river, a mile and a little more, the low far bank with its willows and its one road, and a ferry coming over it like a slow white duck.

**SOUND:** Water against wooden piles, lapping. Gulls. The deep, slow churn of a small diesel engine, far off, coming closer. Children's voices, distant, shouting in a game.

**ANTONINA (played by Rodica):** Raya! The pies!

**YOUNG RAISA (played by Ilinca):** I'm going!

**SOUND:** A green shutter rattling up. A tray slid onto a counter. The kiosk: paper, a tin cash box, coins.

**ANTONINA:** Cabbage on the left, egg and onion on the right. Don't mix them up again. The man from the timber yard bit into a cabbage and nearly divorced me.

**YOUNG RAISA:** He's not married to you.

**ANTONINA:** That's how angry he was.

**RAISA (now, in her own voice):** My mother made sixty pies every morning in a kitchen the size of this table, and every one of them was different, because she pinched the edges with whatever was on her mind. If she was happy, little waves. If she was worried about money, tight, tight, like a purse. You could read the whole household in a tray of pies. I learned to read before I learned to read.

**ILINCA:** What were they that summer?

**RAISA (now):** That summer? Waves. My father had a new engine.

**SOUND:** The diesel close now, then throttling down, a long rumbling sigh. Water churning backward. A rope thrown, the thump of it landing on boards. A boy's voice shouting, breaking in the middle.

**YOUNG KOSTYA (played by Costel, gamely):** Got it! Papa! I've got it!

**RAISA (now):** That is Kostya. Fourteen. He had his hands on that rope as if it was the tail of a horse he was going to ride to Moscow.

**ILINCA:** Papa, you're not fourteen.

**COSTEL:** I'm doing my best.

**RAISA (now):** He's doing very well. Kostya sounded exactly like that, like a man who is also a door hinge.

**SOUND:** The ferry engine cut. Silence, except for water, gulls, and a creak of wood as the boat settles against the pier. Then heavy footsteps on a gangplank.

**FYODOR (played by Costel, now low and gentle):** Raya. Ring us in.

**YOUNG RAISA:** You're already in!

**FYODOR:** Ring us in anyway. So the far shore knows we've landed.

**SOUND:** A bell. Not the cat bell this time. Costel has brought the boat bell in from the shed, a brass ship's bell the size of a man's two fists, green at the lip, hung from a hook on the kitchen beam. Struck three times with a wooden spoon, it gives a bright, wide, slightly cracked note that fills the room and goes on going after the third stroke.

**RAISA (now, very softly):** Oh. That's close. That's very close.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It is the bell from my father's grandfather's fishing boat. It has never been to the Volga. But my grandmother sat with her eyes shut and listened to it fade until the very last of it was gone, and when she opened them they were wet.

---

**RAISA (as narrator):** The ferryman's name was Fyodor Sokolov. He had driven the *Volzhanka* since before the children were born. Twenty-two crossings a day in summer, eight in winter until the ice, none at all when the ice came. He said that a ferryman's whole job was to make two shores into one town. He said it so often the town painted it over the waiting room door.

**SOUND:** Inside a small wheelhouse. The engine, steady. Wind through a half-open window. The creak of a big wooden wheel turning a few degrees.

**YOUNG KOSTYA:** Papa, let me take the wheel. Just for the middle. Nobody will know.

**FYODOR:** The river will know.

**YOUNG KOSTYA:** The river doesn't know anything. It's water.

**FYODOR:** Then why does it keep moving the sandbar?

**SOUND:** The wheel creaks again. A long pause.

**FYODOR:** Hands here. And here. Feel that? That's the current pushing the bow downstream. Don't fight it. Lean on it. Like you'd lean on a friend at a wedding.

**YOUNG KOSTYA (thrilled, cracking):** I've got it. Papa. I've got it.

**FYODOR:** You've got it. Now tell me where the pier is.

**YOUNG KOSTYA:** There.

**FYODOR:** And where are you pointing?

**YOUNG KOSTYA:** There.

**FYODOR:** Point a little upstream of where you want to be. Always. The river takes its share.

**RAISA (now):** That's a thing my father said about everything. Money. Time. Love. Point a little upstream. The river takes its share.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My father, playing the ferryman, stopped, because he says the same thing about the delta, and he did not know he had got it from anyone. He looked at my grandmother. She shrugged. "Every river man says it," she said. "But my father said it first."

---

**RAISA (as narrator):** And where was the ferryman's daughter? She was in the kiosk, with the shutter up, and on the shelf behind the pies was a radio.

**SOUND:** A small valve radio switched on: a hum warming, a crackle, the sweep of a dial through static and fragments, a march, a man reading numbers, a woman's voice, then a children's program: a xylophone tune, and a warm, overacted voice telling a story about a hedgehog.

**RAISA (now):** Every afternoon at four. A woman in Moscow who was a hedgehog, and a squirrel, and the wind, and the hedgehog's grandmother. All her. All one woman. I stood behind the pies with my mouth open. I thought, she is not a woman. She is a whole forest in a box.

**YOUNG RAISA (to herself, copying the radio voice, high and puffing):** Oh dear, oh dear, the leaves are all blown into my burrow again.

**ANTONINA:** Raya, who are you talking to?

**YOUNG RAISA:** The hedgehog.

**ANTONINA:** The hedgehog can wait. The man from the timber yard is back.

**SOUND:** Heavy footsteps on boards. A man clearing his throat.

**RAISA (now):** I sold him egg and onion. On purpose. He never came back to complain. My mother said it was the first time in her life she saw a man too frightened of a ten-year-old to argue.

**ILINCA:** What did you do?

**RAISA (now):** I looked at him like the hedgehog's grandmother.

**SOUND:** The radio xylophone, finishing its tune. The diesel, starting up again, far off. The ferry pulling away from the pier.

**RAISA (as narrator, slowing):** And so it went, that summer and the next. The ferry going over and coming back, the boy learning the wheel, the girl learning every voice on the radio, and the mother pinching waves into the pies. And all that time the river was keeping a secret, the way rivers do, deep down under the brown water, about a night in November when it would try to keep them apart.

**SOUND:** The bell, struck once, softly. The nai, its low note bending up.

**RAISA (now, after a pause, in a different voice, ordinary and tired):** Is that enough for tonight?

**ILINCA:** That's enough.

**RAISA:** What's the name of this play again?

**ILINCA:** *The Ferryman's Daughter.*

**RAISA:** Yes. That's a good name. Who wrote it?

**ILINCA (narrating):** I told her. She nodded, as if I had told her the name of a neighbor's dog. Then she reached up, there in the kitchen, and touched the green lip of my great-grandfather's bell where it hung from the beam, and said: "That one stays. That's the one."

**SOUND:** The bell, touched by a finger only: the faintest hum.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Four: The Suitcase of Weather

**SOUND:** A suitcase, heavy, hauled out from under a bed, scraping on floorboards. Two brass catches snapping open, one stiff, one easy. The lid lifting on a leather hinge. Then a strange small orchestra of things shifting inside: a rattle, a crinkle, a soft clonk of wood on wood, a faint tinny shiver.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Tuesday, the tenth of February. My grandmother's suitcase. I had seen it all my life under her bed, the way you see a hill from a window, and never once been allowed to open it. Brown leather, a strap gone pale, a label from the radio house in Chișinău with her name typed on it and the word *Effects*. This morning she read the note by her bed, and said, oh, me, and then said, bring me the suitcase, before she had even had her tea.

**RAISA:** Everything in here is weather. Or animals. Or doors. A radio play is mostly weather, animals and doors. People think it's words. Words are the easy part.

**ILINCA:** What's this?

**SOUND:** A pair of leather gloves lifted out and flapped together, fast: a sudden flurry, a clap and a whirr, exactly the startle of a pigeon going up from a roof.

**RAISA:** Birds. Big ones, small ones. Clap them slow for a heron, fast for a sparrow, and if you want a goose you have to lose your temper a little.

**SOUND:** The gloves, angrier, uneven. A goose, offended, taking off from water.

**SOUND:** A small cloth bag squeezed in a fist, rhythmically: a dry squeak and crunch, the precise sound of boots in fresh snow.

**RAISA:** Potato starch. In a bag my mother sewed in 1966. Walk your fingers in it. Faster, you're running. Slower, you're old. Now stop. Now one more step. Hear that? That's someone deciding not to go home yet.

**ILINCA (narrating):** She went through the whole suitcase like that, one thing at a time. A roll of cellophane for fire, crushed slowly near the microphone, which crackles exactly like dry wood catching. A sheet of thin tin with a handle, shaken gently, for distant thunder, and then hard, for thunder in the next field. Two halves of a walnut shell, which she took from a cigarette tin and clopped on the table, first in a walk, then a trot.

**SOUND:** Walnut-shell hooves on wood, walking, trotting, then pulling up with a little skid.

**RAISA:** Horses. In Minsk we used coconut. In Chișinău, walnuts, because in Chișinău there are more walnut trees than there are people, and coconuts you had to write to Moscow for. Walnut horses are smaller. Ponies, really. But nobody ever complained.

**ILINCA:** And this?

**SOUND:** A wooden box with a door the size of a book set into its front, and a real handle, and a real latch. The handle turned. The latch clicks. The little door creaks open, wheedling, on a rusty hinge.

**RAISA:** The door. The most important thing in the suitcase. Ion built that for me in 1980. Every door in every play I did in Chișinău for twenty-four years was that door. Palace doors, cowshed doors, the door of a submarine. You change the speed, you change the building.

**SOUND:** The little door, fast and crisp: an office. Then slow and long: a barn at night. Then slammed: an argument.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I asked her where she had learned it. She looked at me as though I had asked where she had learned to breathe. Then she put the little door down on the table, and folded her hands on top of it, and told me.

---

**SOUND:** A tall stone stairwell, echoing. Many footsteps, going up and coming down. A distant typewriter. A man's voice reading the weather from behind a closed door, muffled. A woman somewhere laughing.

**RAISA (as narrator):** Minsk, the radio house. September 1966. The ferryman's daughter is twenty and has come six hundred kilometers on two trains with one suitcase, a different one, and a letter saying she may come and read for the children's hour on Tuesday at eleven.

**RAISA (now):** I was early. I was so early I was there on Monday.

**SOUND:** A door with a small window opened. A rehearsal room: a piano, slightly out of tune, someone running scales. Chairs.

**YOUNG RAISA (played by Ilinca):** Excuse me. I am here to read. For the hare.

**ZOYA (as a young woman, played by Rodica, very loud and very Minsk):** Everybody's here to read for the hare. Sit there. I'm reading for the wolf. Nobody wants the wolf. You'll get the hare.

**RAISA (now):** That was Zoya. Twenty-one. She had a voice like a tram coming round a corner. She was the only girl in the building who wanted to play the villain, and she was right, there was no competition at all. We were introduced by the wolf eating the hare in rehearsal.

**SOUND:** A gruff, dramatic growl, held far too long. Laughter from several people at once. A hand slapping a script.

**RAISA (now):** But I didn't learn the suitcase from Zoya. Zoya didn't believe in sounds. Zoya believed in Zoya. I learned the suitcase from a man in the basement.

**SOUND:** Down a flight of iron stairs. A big low room, cluttered: something being sawn, a bucket sloshing, a gramophone horn knocked and ringing, a cart creaking on one bad wheel.

**RAISA (as narrator):** Matvei Ilyich. Sixty-eight years old. Effects. He had made the sound of every storm, every train and every bear that had gone out of that building since before the girl was born. He had a coat with forty pockets and something different in every one.

**MATVEI (played by Costel, very gruff, a smoker's chuckle):** What do you want?

**YOUNG RAISA:** They sent me down. They said I should learn the effects. Because I'm small and I'm only the hare.

**MATVEI:** Who said only?

**YOUNG RAISA:** Everyone.

**MATVEI:** Then everyone is a fool, and you can tell them Matvei said so. Come here. Put your hand in that bucket.

**SOUND:** A hand going into water, startled.

**YOUNG RAISA:** It's cold.

**MATVEI:** It's a river. What did you think it would be? Now move it.

**SOUND:** The water, sloshing wildly.

**MATVEI:** No. That's a bath with a dog in it. Slower. From the wrist. A river isn't in a hurry. A river has been going there for ten thousand years and it knows the way.

**ILINCA (narrating, quietly):** So that's where it came from. The wrist. I had always thought it was hers.

**MATVEI:** Here is the only rule. Write it on your hand if you have to. Every sound by hand. Every one. You make it in the room, while the actors are talking, at the moment it happens. If the hare runs, you run. If the wolf knocks, you knock. A sound from a record is a photograph of a sound. It's dead. The children can hear it's dead. They don't know why. They just stop believing.

**YOUNG RAISA:** How do you know they stop believing?

**MATVEI:** Because I was a child.

**SOUND:** The gruff chuckle. Then something metallic handed over: a small handbell, shaken once.

**MATVEI:** There. That's yours. A hare needs a bell. Every time the hare escapes, you ring it. Every time. The children wait for it.

**RAISA (now):** I had that bell for thirteen years. I rang it, I think, four hundred times. It was the first thing I ever owned that was only mine. My father had a ferry bell. Now I had a hare bell. I wrote him a letter. Papa, I have a bell.

**ILINCA:** Did he write back?

**RAISA (now):** He wrote back one line. My mother wrote the rest. His line said: *Ring it so the far shore knows.*

---

**SOUND:** The kitchen again. The suitcase lid. The little wooden door being set inside, carefully.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I asked where the hare bell was now. She looked for a long time into the suitcase as if it might be under the starch bag. It wasn't. She said it had gone, along with the script and the tape and her father's ferry, into the place where things go. Then she shut the suitcase, both catches, the stiff one and the easy one, and said a thing I wrote down.

**RAISA:** You know what's strange? I can't tell you what I ate yesterday. Rodica tells me fish. I believe her. But I can tell you the smell of that basement. Wet sawdust and machine oil and Matvei's cigarettes, which were terrible, they were called something like Northern Lights. And the cold of the bucket. It's as if the old rooms have better locks.

**SOUND:** Rodica, at the stove. A pan, oil spitting. Onions.

**ILINCA (narrating):** That evening I made a list of every sound the play would need. A ferry engine. A rope. Gulls. Snow. Fog, which is harder, because fog does not make a sound, it takes them away. And a bell. Not my great-grandfather's bell from the delta, which is lovely and wrong. The bell. The *Volzhanka*'s bell. I added it to the bottom of the list, and then I looked at the name of the man who might know where it was, and I picked up the phone and rang the Volga.

**SOUND:** A long distance ring tone, foreign, slightly flatter than ours. Four rings. Five. Six. Then a click and an answering machine: a man's recorded voice, deep and abrupt, as if annoyed at having been made to speak to nobody.

**KOSTYA (recorded):** Sokolov. Leave it.

**SOUND:** The beep.

**ILINCA:** Uncle Kostya. Great-uncle Kostya. It's Ilinca. Rodica's daughter. Raisa's granddaughter. In the delta. I'm making a radio play, Bunica's play, *The Ferryman's Daughter*, for the first of March. I need the Volga. I need the bell. I'll call again. Please... Please call me back.

**SOUND:** The phone set down. The stove. The onions. The clock.

**RAISA (from the next room, not raising her voice):** He won't.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He didn't. But at a quarter past eleven, when the whole house was asleep but me, the phone lit up on the table with a message, the first I have ever had from him, seven words long, no greeting, no name.

**ILINCA (reading):** *The bell is in my shed. Why?*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Five: The Vinegar Room

**SOUND:** The inside of a minibus on a long road: the engine laboring in a low gear, a heater fan rattling, a radio up front playing a folk song through one working speaker. The indicator ticking. Someone's bag of oranges rolling under a seat and being chased.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Wednesday, the eleventh of February. Tulcea to Galați by minibus, an hour and three quarters along the river, past the long gray walls of reed and the cranes of the shipyards. Then a bus north and east, across the Prut at the customs post, where a woman in a green coat looked at my recorder for a long time and asked if I was a journalist. I said I was a granddaughter. She stamped my passport as if that explained everything. Then the hills of Moldova, low and brown, with rows of bare vines on them like handwriting.

**SOUND:** The phone, a short buzz.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Last night I had answered my great-uncle's seven words with the recording of my grandmother's eleven minutes. No message. Just the file, and her voice. All the way to Galați the phone said nothing. Somewhere after the border it buzzed.

**ILINCA (reading):** *She has the boat wrong. It was green, not white. Green with a white wheelhouse.*

**ILINCA (narrating):** Then, a minute later.

**ILINCA (reading):** *And I never sounded like a hinge.*

**SOUND:** Ilinca laughing, alone, on a bus, trying not to. The woman across the aisle peeling an orange and looking at her.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I typed back, *Then come and play yourself.* I looked at it for a long time. I sent it. The phone said nothing for the rest of the way.

---

**SOUND:** A city street in winter. Tires on wet stone. A trolleybus, its poles hissing and snapping against the overhead wires. Footsteps. A woman calling out from a doorway, offering roasted seeds, the paper cone rustling.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Chișinău in February is a city of stone and bare trees. The avenues are wide and lined with chestnuts and lindens, all of them gray now and waiting, and the houses in the old streets are low and made of a soft pale stone that goes gold in the late sun. My grandmother lived here for forty years. My mother grew up here. I spent every summer of my childhood here, in the stone house of Silvia and Grigore, under the walnut tree, eating things that had been pinched shut by hand. The city smells, in winter, of coal smoke and bread, and it hums with the trolleybus wires, which smell of nothing but sing all day.

**SOUND:** A heavy institutional door. A security desk, a man's radio playing football. An elevator that clanks. Then down a corridor, footsteps echoing, and a second door opening onto a different air: hushed, close, the hum of a dehumidifier and, underneath it, a faint sour tang that you can almost hear.

**DOINA:** Welcome to the vinegar room.

**ILINCA:** It really smells of vinegar.

**DOINA:** Old tape. The acetate breaks down and gives off acid, and the acid smells like a salad. It's the tapes complaining. I've worked here nineteen years. I can't eat salad anymore.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Doina Lungu is my mother's cousin, my grandfather's niece, and the only person in the family who has made a career out of keeping things. She is tall, with her hair in a knot held by a pencil, a wool scarf, and white cotton gloves, which she put on before she shook my hand, so that I was greeted by a glove.

**SOUND:** Long metal shelving on rollers, a wheel turned, a whole stack sliding sideways with a deep iron rumble. Another wheel. Another stack. An aisle opening.

**DOINA:** Four hundred thousand hours of sound. Every concert, every play, every interview since the station started. Some of it is turning to vinegar. Some of it is so sticky that if you play it, it sheds, and you have to bake it.

**ILINCA:** Bake it?

**DOINA:** In an oven. Very low, for a day. Like a meringue. Then you can play it once, and quickly, and copy it before it gets sticky again. I have a little oven in the back that I am not allowed to use for food, and I don't.

**SOUND:** Footsteps down the aisle, the dehumidifier fading. A smaller room. A trolley with a squeaking caster. Cardboard boxes set down one after another, eleven times, with soft thumps.

**DOINA:** Uncle Ion.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Eleven boxes. Brown cardboard gone soft at the corners, each one labeled on the end in thick marker in two alphabets, Romanian above and Russian below, in the same steady hand. *Studio sessions 1980 to 1986. Weddings, Orhei, nai. Tests. Tudor, piano, ages 6 to 9. Raisa, effects, the good ones. Refrigerator.*

**ILINCA:** He really did.

**DOINA:** I told you. Nineteen seventy-nine. He wanted to know if the hum from the new refrigerator would get on his recordings in the next room. It did. He wrote a complaint to the factory. They wrote back. The letter's in the box.

**SOUND:** A box lid lifted. Tape boxes inside, small and square, slid out one at a time and set on a table, a soft clack of cardboard. Doina reading the spines under her breath.

**DOINA:** He had a good machine at home. Better than ours, at first. He built half of it. In Minsk he worked at the radio house, so he could record anything off the air on the kitchen set straight to tape. If he recorded your grandmother's play, it'll say Minsk, it'll say a date, and it'll say what it is. He couldn't help himself.

---

**SOUND:** An hour later. The same room. Paper being turned. A thermos poured, the plastic cup steaming. Somewhere a pipe knocking.

**ILINCA (narrating):** We went through four boxes before five o'clock. Doina read the labels, and I photographed each spine and put it into the family's shared space under a heading she chose, *Ion's Boxes*, with a pin on the little map at the radio house, so that Tudor in Minsk and my mother in the delta could look while we looked. Within ten minutes Tudor had written under one of them: *That's me on the piano. I was terrible. Don't play it.*

**DOINA:** He was terrible. I've heard it. Every lesson until 1979, then the move, then nothing, then Minsk. It's a portrait of a boy who wanted to be anywhere else.

**ILINCA:** He's a piano tuner now.

**DOINA:** That's what I mean. He found the one job where you're in the room with a piano and nobody asks you to play it.

**SOUND:** Ilinca laughing. A box lid. More spines.

**DOINA:** Minsk. Minsk. Minsk, sessions. Minsk, Zoya, the wolf, 1970. You'll want that. Minsk, New Year concert 1971. December. Here. No. That's the concert.

**ILINCA:** Keep going.

**DOINA:** I am going. You go. Your hands are faster.

**ILINCA (narrating):** She did not say it, but her eyes were red. Not from the vinegar. Doina was fourteen when my grandfather taught her to splice tape with a razor blade at Silvia's kitchen table, and she has been splicing for him, in a way, ever since. She told me once that he never threw a sound away, even a bad one, because a bad sound is still evidence that something happened.

**DOINA:** He used to say every tape is a letter to someone who isn't born yet.

**ILINCA:** He said that to me too.

**DOINA:** He said it to everyone. He thought it was very clever. It was very clever.

**SOUND:** The dehumidifier cycling off with a sigh. In the silence, the clock in the corridor.

**ILINCA (narrating):** At half past five Doina's mother called, wanting to know where we were and whether I had eaten, and Doina said, *Mama, we're at work, we're in the archive*, in the voice of a woman of forty-nine who has been asked whether she has eaten every day of her life. We put the lids back on four boxes. Seven were left. Doina slid them onto the trolley.

**DOINA:** Tomorrow. I'll come in at seven. Before the director. If he sees an outside person touching a donor box, he'll write a memo. He writes beautiful memos. I've kept them all.

**ILINCA:** Of course you have.

**DOINA:** They're evidence.

**SOUND:** Footsteps out. The heavy door. The iron rumble of the shelving sliding home. Then outside: the wet street, the trolleybus poles snapping blue on the wires, cold air.

**ILINCA (narrating):** The phone buzzed as we walked to the tram stop. I thought it would be my mother.

**ILINCA (reading):** *What play. I don't play.*

**ILINCA (narrating):** And then, a long time later, while Doina was buying a cone of hot seeds from a woman in a fur hat at the corner.

**ILINCA (reading):** *And she was never on that pier alone.*

**SOUND:** The paper cone rustling. Seeds cracked between teeth. A trolleybus coming, its wires singing.

**DOINA:** Who's that?

**ILINCA:** The Volga.

**DOINA:** What does it want?

**ILINCA (narrating):** I didn't know. I looked at the message for a long time on the tram. *She was never on that pier alone.* My grandmother had told me the ferryman's daughter ran down the pier to ring the bell. She had never said who ran with her.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Six: Test, Test, the Baby Is Asleep

**SOUND:** A reel-to-reel machine in a small cold room: the tape threaded by hand, the take-up reel turned twice with a finger, a switch. The reels begin. A hiss, the particular soft wide hiss of old tape, like breath through a closed mouth. Then a click on the tape itself, and a room fifty-six years away.

**ION (on tape, a young man's voice, soft, amused, with a Moldovan lilt under the Russian):** Test. Test. Ion Lungu, the kitchen, Minsk, the fourteenth of March 1970. Microphone two, the new one. It is ten at night. The baby is asleep. Raya is asleep. The refrigerator is not asleep. Can you hear it? That hum. That's the enemy.

**SOUND:** On the tape, very faint: a low electrical hum. And, very faint, a baby's sigh from another room.

**ION (on tape, whispering now):** And that's Tudor. Hello, Tudor. This is your papa. One day you'll hear this and you'll say, what was he doing at ten at night talking to a refrigerator? I'll tell you. I was making sure that one day you could hear yourself breathing.

**SOUND:** The tape hiss. Then the click of the machine being stopped, on the tape. Then just the room in Chișinău, the dehumidifier, and someone sniffing.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Thursday, the twelfth of February, ten past seven in the morning, in the back room of the vinegar room, before the director. Doina had come in early as promised, with a thermos, a paper bag of warm rolls from the bakery by the tram stop, and a second pair of cotton gloves, which she handed me without a word. That was the first tape we played. We sat with it. Then Doina blew her nose, loudly, into a handkerchief with an embroidered corner, and said: "Well. He was right about the refrigerator."

**SOUND:** Rolls torn. The thermos. Two plastic cups knocked together.

**DOINA:** I'm sending that to Tudor.

**ILINCA:** He's at work.

**DOINA:** He's always at work. He can cry on a piano. They're used to it.

**ILINCA (narrating):** She copied it, there and then, and put it in the family space, in the folder under Ion's name, next to his photograph. Under the photograph, after a few minutes, a little line of text appeared. *Tudor listened.* That was all. That is what the space says when someone has listened. It is the most intimate thing I have ever seen a screen do.

---

**SOUND:** A box lid. Tape boxes. Doina's gloved fingers on spines, a soft rhythmic flick.

**DOINA:** Minsk sessions. Minsk sessions. Minsk, the course, 1968.

**ILINCA:** The course?

**DOINA:** That's where they met. Didn't she tell you? He went to Minsk for a course. Six months, for sound engineers. Twenty-five years old. He'd never been further from home than Odessa, and that was for a wedding. He came back married.

**ILINCA:** She told me they met at the radio house.

**DOINA:** They did. But he heard her before he saw her. Put it on. This one he narrated. He used to play it at Christmas when everyone was full and couldn't escape.

**SOUND:** The machine: rewind, a squealing rush. A stop. A new reel threaded. The hiss.

**ION (on tape, older now, perhaps in his forties, a man telling a story he has told before and enjoys):** This is for the children. All of them. Even the ones who aren't born. This is how I met your mother, or your grandmother, or whatever she is to you by the time you hear this. Pay attention. There will be questions.

**ILINCA (narrating):** From here the play is his. My grandfather tells it on the tape, and we have built the scene around him, the way you build a house around a stove. Doina plays my grandmother at twenty-two. The sounds are mine.

**SOUND:** A control room in 1968. A big console humming, with heavy rotary knobs that click. The glass between the control room and the studio, a dead quiet panel. Through a talkback speaker, small and tinny, the studio: a children's play in rehearsal.

**ION (on tape, narrating):** September 1968. The radio house in Minsk. I am in the control room with the senior engineer, a man called Pyotr who smells of onions and is the best in the building, and I am supposed to be learning how to balance voices. Through the glass is the studio. In the studio there is a screen, a big wooden screen, because the actresses do not like to be watched while they make animal noises. And from behind the screen comes the voice of a hare.

**SOUND:** Through the tinny talkback: a hare's voice, quick and bright and frightened and funny all at once, played by Doina doing young Raisa doing a hare, which is three people in one throat.

**YOUNG RAISA (as the hare, through the speaker):** Oh, not the wolf, not today, I've only just washed my ears!

**SOUND:** Through the speaker, a handbell rung, twice, quick. The hare bell.

**ION (on tape):** And I said to Pyotr, who is that? And Pyotr said, that's the hare. And I said, yes, but who is the hare? And Pyotr said, she's from the Volga, she's twenty-two, she's the best voice in the building and she's terrifying, don't even look at her. And I said, I can't look at her, Pyotr, she's behind a screen.

**SOUND:** On the tape: someone in a room in Chișinău, sometime in the 1980s, laughing. A woman's laugh, warm and low. Raisa, in her forties, listening to him tell it.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Doina stopped the machine.

**DOINA:** That's her. That's your grandmother, laughing at him. That's Christmas 1986. I was ten. I was under the table.

**ILINCA:** Why were you under the table?

**DOINA:** Because that's where the walnuts were. Play.

**SOUND:** The machine. The hiss resumes.

**ION (on tape):** For three weeks I balanced the hare. I learned more about microphones balancing that hare than I learned in the rest of the course. She moved all the time. She never stood still behind the screen. The hare jumped, so she jumped. I had to follow her with the faders like a man following a cat with a lamp. And I never saw her face. Then on the last Friday of the month, I was in the corridor with my nai.

**SOUND:** A corridor, echoing. A nai played softly: a slow Moldovan doina tune, the lament kind, breath and wood, the notes sliding into each other.

**ION (on tape):** I used to play in the corridor at lunchtime. The stairwell had a wonderful echo. A girl came up the stairs with a bag of buns and stopped at the landing and listened to the whole thing. When I finished she said one sentence. I knew the voice. I knew it before she had finished the first word.

**YOUNG RAISA (played by Doina):** That's the saddest thing I ever heard. Play it again.

**ION (on tape):** And I said, I can't play it again, it's a lament, it's only sad once. And she said, then play me something else, and give me a bun, I mean, have a bun, they're mine. And she gave me a bun with cabbage in it, and the edges were pinched in little waves. And I knew, I don't know how, I knew those waves meant something. I married her in June.

**SOUND:** The nai, finishing. The tape, on Christmas 1986, the warm low laugh again. And a child's voice, a girl of ten, from very close to the microphone, from under a table: "That's not true, you married her in July." And Ion, on the tape: "Doina! Out from under there."

**DOINA (in the room, her voice wobbling):** It was July. I was right. I was ten and I was right.

---

**SOUND:** Later. Boxes being stacked. Doina's breathing as she lifts.

**ILINCA (narrating):** By nine o'clock, when the director's footsteps came down the corridor and went past the door without stopping, we were on the tenth box. Every reel in it was a session from the Chișinău years. *Effects, Raisa, rain on a tin roof, a good one. Effects, Raisa, a herd of goats, very good. Effects, Raisa, the sea at Odessa, she says it's wrong, it isn't.* Not one said *Ferryman*.

**DOINA:** One more.

**SOUND:** The eleventh box. The lid. Doina's fingers on the spines, slowing. Stopping.

**DOINA:** Here.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It was the size of all the others. Square, brown, the corners soft. On the spine, in two alphabets, in my grandfather's hand: *The Ferryman's Daughter. Raya. Minsk, off air, 26 December 1971.* Doina held it out to me in her two gloved hands like an egg. I took it. It weighed nothing. I knew, before I opened it, because a box with a reel in it has a weight, and this was cardboard and air.

**SOUND:** A small square box opened. Nothing inside rattles. A slip of paper unfolded.

**DOINA (reading):** *Given to K. Belaya Pristan. July 1979. For Fyodor's son, so he has his father's favorite.*

**ILINCA (narrating):** Fyodor Sokolov died in the summer of 1979, the year my grandparents left Minsk for Chișinău. My grandmother has told me that the whole family went to the Volga for the funeral, and that my uncle Tudor, nine, fell in the river off the end of the white pier and had to be pulled out by a man with a boat hook, and that it was the only thing anybody laughed about all week. She has never told me, I don't think she knows, that her husband gave her brother a tape.

**DOINA:** Did she know?

**ILINCA:** I don't think so.

**DOINA:** So it's on the Volga.

**ILINCA:** It's on the Volga.

**DOINA:** With the man who doesn't play.

**SOUND:** The empty box closed. Set on the table. The dehumidifier comes back on, humming. Ilinca's phone, a soft click: a photograph taken.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I photographed the slip and sent it to the Volga. Not the family space, just to him. No words. The phone said nothing all morning. At noon, while Doina was walking me to the tram, it buzzed once.

**ILINCA (reading):** *I know where it is.*

**ILINCA (narrating):** And then, ten minutes after, as if it had cost him something to add it:

**ILINCA (reading):** *I never listened to it.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Seven: Red Thread, White Thread

**SOUND:** A gate in a stone wall, iron, swinging on a hinge that sings two notes. Gravel. A small dog barking twice, then thinking better of it. A door opened before anyone can knock, and from inside a wave of warmth, a radio playing a waltz, and a woman's voice already talking.

**SILVIA:** Come in, come in, take off your boots, not there, there, and give me that bag, what's in it, nothing, good, you'll need room. Doina, you didn't feed her.

**DOINA:** I fed her rolls.

**SILVIA:** Rolls. Rolls are for birds.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Friday, the thirteenth of February. Silvia Lungu's house is in one of the old streets on the slope above the lake, low and pale and long, with a vine on a trellis over the yard that in summer makes a green room and in winter is a cat's cradle of gray rope. In the middle of the yard is the walnut tree. It is older than the street. It is older, Silvia says, than the city's patience. When I was small it held a swing and I believed it held up the sky.

**SOUND:** A kitchen. A wide pan on a gas ring, butter foaming. A wooden board, a knife. Something wrapped in a cloth unwrapped. Silvia's breath as she bends to the oven, and the oven door's iron complaint.

**SILVIA:** Sit. Here. No, here, where I can see you. Doina, plates. Ilinca, eat this while it's too hot.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Plăcinte. Two kinds, because there are always two kinds. Thin dough stretched over the whole kitchen table until you can read a newspaper through it, Silvia says, and then filled and folded and fried in butter, one batch with salty white cheese and dill, one with cabbage cooked down soft with a little tomato. The cheese ones crackle when you bite them. The cabbage ones sigh. I have recorded both. My grandmother wants them in the play; she says the radio house in Chișinău ran on Silvia's plăcinte for twenty years, and Matvei Ilyich would have moved to Moldova for one.

**SOUND:** A crisp bite, flaking pastry. Then a second, softer. Silvia's satisfaction, a small hum.

**SILVIA:** And after that, mămăligă. And sarmale. And the compote. You're too thin, you work with your ears, ears don't eat.

**DOINA:** Mama, she's not too thin.

**SILVIA:** Everyone is too thin. Your uncle Ion was too thin his whole life. He'd sit at that table and play the nai with his mouth full.

**ILINCA:** You can't play the nai with your mouth full.

**SILVIA:** He could. That was the kind of man he was.

---

**SOUND:** A heavy pot lifted off the flame. A wooden spoon dragged around the inside of it. Then the pot upended onto a wooden board with a single soft thump, and a length of thread drawn tight and pulled down through something yielding.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Mămăligă is cornmeal, cooked in water with salt, stirred with a wooden stick for half an hour until it comes away from the side of the pot in one golden piece. You turn it out onto a board. It holds the shape of the pot, round and steaming, like a small sun. Then you cut it with a thread, because a knife would stick. Silvia pulls the thread tight between her two hands and presses it down through the yellow dome and it falls open in two halves with the faintest sound, the sound of a page turned in a quiet room.

**ILINCA:** Tell me about them. The brothers.

**SOUND:** Silvia sitting down for the first time all evening. A chair. A long, comfortable breath out through the nose. Outside, a car going past slowly on the stones.

**SILVIA:** Ion was the older. Two years. Born in a village near Orhei, where the river goes round the cliffs. Their father kept bees and their mother made rugs, the old kind, with roses on black. Both boys came to Chișinău. Ion went into the radio, because he could hear things. Grigore drove a bus, because he could see things, the whole city, every street. He drove the number twenty-two for thirty-one years. Every morning Ion would stand at the stop under the chestnuts and Grigore would drive straight past him without stopping and wave.

**DOINA:** Every morning.

**SILVIA:** Every morning for years. And Ion would walk to work, and say it was good for his lungs, for the nai. They were like that. Two brothers who loved each other so much they had to pretend not to, all the time, at the top of their voices.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It was the first time I had thought about it. I had grown up with two great-grandparents I never met on the Volga, a great-uncle who answered the phone four minutes a year, and a grandmother who said he was busy. I had not known there was another way for brothers and sisters to be far apart. With a wave from a bus.

**SILVIA:** And your grandmother and her brother?

**ILINCA:** I don't know.

**SILVIA:** Has he answered you?

**ILINCA:** He sends me one line at a time.

**SILVIA:** What does he say?

**ILINCA:** He says, why. He says, I don't play. He says, she was never on that pier alone.

**SOUND:** Silvia's spoon against a glass of compote, stirring though there's nothing to stir. Plums and quince, the fruit knocking softly.

**SILVIA:** When a man of eighty says why, child, he means ask me again. When he says I don't, he means I used to. And the other thing...

**ILINCA:** What does the other thing mean?

**SILVIA:** That means he's been waiting fifty years for somebody to ask him a question.

---

**SOUND:** The table cleared. Dishes in a sink, water running. A drawer pulled out, wood on wood, and from it a cardboard shoebox set down on the oilcloth. The lid. A soft rustle of thread.

**ILINCA (narrating):** After supper Silvia took out the shoebox where she keeps her thread. It is the first of March in two weeks, and in this house the first of March is a serious matter. On that day everybody, from here to Bucharest, pins a little red-and-white twist of thread to their coat, a mărțișor, and gives them away to the people they love, and wears them until the first stork, or the first blossom, or until they forget. Silvia makes forty every year, by hand, for the whole street.

**SILVIA:** Two threads. Red and white. Hold the ends. Now twist. No, the other way. Twist it away from you, like you're winding up a clock. Now let it go.

**SOUND:** Thread twisting, a fine dry purr. Then, released, it winds itself back on itself into a cord with a tiny snap.

**SILVIA:** There. A cord. Now a little bow. Now a tassel for the bottom. Now you've made spring.

**ILINCA:** I made a mess.

**SILVIA:** Spring is a mess. Do another.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I made eleven. They got better. Silvia said I had my grandfather's hands and my grandmother's patience, which she said was a terrible combination, because his hands could do anything and her patience could not wait for them. Doina, at the end of the table, made a tiny one, no bigger than my fingernail, and put it in an envelope, and wrote on the envelope *For the Volga.*

**DOINA:** He won't wear it.

**SILVIA:** He'll put it in a drawer. Men put mărțișor in drawers. Then when they die, you find forty of them, one for every year somebody thought of them. That's how you know.

---

**SOUND:** The laptop on the oilcloth, its fan. A call connecting, and a room in the delta coming through: a kitchen, a stove, a reed roof in wind.

**RODICA:** Mama, it's Ilinca. And Silvia. Look.

**RAISA:** Silvia!

**SILVIA:** Raisa. You look well.

**RAISA:** I look old. You look the same. How is that possible?

**SILVIA:** Butter.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My grandmother and my great-aunt by marriage have known each other since 1979, when one of them arrived in Chișinău with two children and a suitcase of weather and the other was waiting with a plate. They talked for twenty minutes, about Ion and Grigore and the walnut tree, and my grandmother remembered the exact wrong green of a dress Silvia sewed for my mother in 1992, and the name of the shop that sold the fabric.

**RAISA:** And Ilinca, when are you coming to see me?

**ILINCA:** I saw you on Wednesday morning, Bunica. I'm in Chișinău. For the play.

**RAISA:** What play?

**SOUND:** Silence on the line. The stove in the delta. In Chișinău, the walnut tree's branches against a window.

**ILINCA:** *The Ferryman's Daughter.* We're going to put it on the radio. On the first of March. You told me the beginning on Saturday. And on Monday. Florin said yes.

**RAISA (slowly):** Florin. Florin with the red light.

**ILINCA:** Florin with the red light.

**RAISA (after a moment, laughing):** Oh. That one. Don't be gentle with me, I said. Did I say that?

**ILINCA:** You wrote it down.

**RAISA:** Then I meant it. Silvia, are you in this play?

**SILVIA:** I'm the food.

**RAISA:** Good. Every play should have a woman who is the food.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Before we hung up, Silvia leaned toward the screen and said, very quietly, the way you'd say something to someone across a bed in a hospital: "He gave Kostya the tape, Raya. Ion did. In 1979. Did you know?" And my grandmother looked at her for a long moment, and said she didn't, and then she said she thought perhaps she had, once, and lost it, and then she said she was tired. Rodica took the laptop away. The screen went dark.

**SOUND:** The kitchen in Chișinău. The waltz on the radio, very low. Thread twisting. A tiny snap.

**SILVIA:** Make another one, child. For her.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Eight: The Ferryman's Daughter, Part Two

**SOUND:** A phone set face-up on a table, a recording beginning: a kitchen in the delta, late, the stove's tick, a chair pulled closer. The reed roof in wind. Then Rodica's voice, close and careful.

**RODICA (recorded):** It's Friday night, Ilinca. The thirteenth. After the call. She wanted to keep going. She says you'll need the middle. I'm just holding the phone. I don't know what I'm doing.

**RAISA (recorded):** You're doing what Ion did. You're holding the phone. Hold it closer.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I listened to this on Saturday morning, the fourteenth, in Doina's spare room in Chișinău, under a quilt with roses on black, which Silvia says was made by Ion's mother. My mother had sent it into the family space at midnight with a line under it: *She did the middle. She didn't want to wait for you.* I lay in the cold room with the headphones on and the quilt up to my chin and listened to my grandmother, three hundred kilometers away, the night before, do the middle.

**RAISA (recorded, the microphone voice):** Belaya Pristan, on the Volga. Six years later. The autumn of 1962. The ferryman's daughter is sixteen now, and she is no longer the girl who rings the bell. She's too old for that, she says. She has a radio of her own, a little one, in a leather case, and she listens to it under the pillow at night, and every night she whispers along with the actresses until her mother bangs on the wall.

**SOUND (made by Rodica, at Raisa's instruction, recorded):** A fist, softly, on a wooden wall, twice.

**RAISA (recorded, now):** Good. That's my mother. Harder. She banged like she was nailing up a shelf.

**SOUND:** Harder.

**RAISA (recorded, as narrator):** And the ferryman's son is twenty. He has finished the river school at the city downstream and come home with a certificate in a frame. He is the mate now. He takes the wheel for the middle every crossing, the whole middle, every day, and everyone on the pier knows that one day the *Volzhanka* will be his.

**RAISA (recorded, now):** He was so proud. He hung the certificate in the wheelhouse. My father said it was bad luck to hang paper on a boat. Kostya said it was worse luck not to. They argued about it for three summers. It's still there, I think. Somewhere. On a wall.

**RODICA (recorded):** Mama, the play.

**RAISA (recorded):** I'm doing the play. This is the play. The play is that they argued.

---

**RAISA (recorded, as narrator):** The ferryman's daughter wanted one thing. She wanted to go to Minsk, where there was a radio house that took girls who could do voices, and her father wanted one thing, which was that she would not.

**SOUND (recorded, made by Rodica and Raisa together):** A table being laid. Plates, heavily. A samovar's bubble imitated by Raisa, a soft repeating blup in her throat. Tea poured.

**FYODOR (played on this recording by Raisa herself, low):** Minsk is six hundred kilometers.

**YOUNG RAISA (played by Raisa herself, quicker, younger, almost a different woman):** Six hundred and forty.

**FYODOR:** Who will ring the bell?

**YOUNG RAISA:** Papa. I haven't rung the bell since I was twelve. Kostya rings it. The little Petrov girl rings it. Anybody can ring the bell.

**FYODOR:** Anybody can. But they don't ring it like you.

**RAISA (recorded, now, breaking off):** He never said that. I've put that in. He never said anything like that. He said, Minsk is six hundred kilometers, and then he drank his tea and went out to the boat and didn't speak to me for a week. That was my father. He used words the way my mother used salt: never more than he needed, and never twice.

**RODICA (recorded):** Then why put it in?

**RAISA (recorded):** Because it's a play. In a play, people say what they mean. That's the whole reason anyone listens.

---

**SOUND (recorded):** Raisa's hand in the bowl of water again, slow. Then, from her throat, a long low moan, rising and falling: the wind across a wide river at night.

**RAISA (recorded, as narrator, slower now):** And then came the night of the fog. Friday, the sixteenth of November, 1962. The last crossing of the year. The ice had been coming in from the edges for a week, white teeth along both banks, and the ferryman said one more, for the people from the far bank who'd come across to the market and had to get home before the freeze. Nine passengers, a cart, a goat. He went over in the afternoon in sunshine. And while he was on the far bank loading, the fog came down the river from upstream like a wall walking.

**SOUND (recorded):** The wind stops. The water stops. Nothing. Then Raisa's voice again, much quieter, as if it is coming from inside the fog.

**RAISA (recorded, as narrator):** You could not see the end of the pier. You could not see your own hand. The whole town came down to the waterfront, with lamps, and the lamps made the fog yellow, and made it worse. And somewhere out there, on a river with ice in it, the *Volzhanka* was trying to come home with nine people and a goat and no way to see the pier.

**RODICA (recorded, whispering):** And the girl.

**RAISA (recorded):** And the girl ran to the end of the pier where the bell was. The old bell. The ferry's spare, on a post. And she rang it. So the boat could steer by the sound.

**SOUND (recorded):** The delta bell, on the kitchen beam, struck once by Rodica with the wooden spoon. Then again. Then again. Slow, steady, every few seconds.

**RAISA (recorded, as narrator):** All night. Every few seconds. Her hands went numb, and her arms, and the rope froze to her mittens. And somewhere in the middle of the night, very far off in the fog, so faint you thought you'd imagined it, an engine.

**SOUND (recorded):** The bell, on. And, under it, Rodica's voice, imitating very softly, a low throbbing engine sound, barely there.

**RAISA (recorded, now):** That's right. That's how far. Further.

**RODICA (recorded, stopping the bell):** Mama. Was she alone?

**RAISA (recorded):** Who?

**RODICA (recorded):** The girl. On the pier. All night.

**SOUND (recorded):** A long silence. The stove. The wind in the reeds over the roof.

**RAISA (recorded):** Of course she was alone. Who else would be there? Everyone else was on the shore with the lamps. I remember the rope. I remember my hands. I remember the cold coming through my boots like water through a sieve.

**RODICA (recorded):** And Uncle Kostya?

**RAISA (recorded):** Kostya was on the boat. He was the mate.

**RODICA (recorded):** He was on the boat?

**RAISA (recorded, sharply, then less so):** He must have been. He was always on the boat. I don't... I don't know where Kostya was. Why are you asking me about Kostya? Ask the play.

**SOUND (recorded):** A chair. Raisa standing. The bowl of water knocked, a slosh, a hand steadying it.

**RAISA (recorded, tired):** Turn it off. That's enough of the middle.

**SOUND:** The recording clicks off. The spare room in Chișinău. A clock. Ilinca taking the headphones off; the faint tinny hiss from them on the quilt.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He was on the boat, she said. She must have been alone. *She was never on that pier alone*, he wrote. One of them was wrong. Or both were right, and there was a third version that neither of them had. I sat up in the cold room under Ion's mother's roses and played it again, and listened to my grandmother say *I don't know where Kostya was*, and to the long silence after it, and I understood, for the first time, that the play was not missing an ending. It was missing a person.

**SOUND:** The phone. A message typed: tap, tap, tap, a whoosh.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I sent the recording to the Volga. And under it, because Silvia had told me what *why* means, I wrote: *Where were you?*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Nine: The Long Bus North

**SOUND:** A coach at night on a long straight road. The engine a steady low drone. Tires on cold asphalt, a regular thump at every joint in the road like a slow heartbeat. Someone snoring three rows back, with conviction. A plastic bag of sunflower seeds being shared across the aisle in whispers.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Sunday, the fifteenth of February, into Monday. The coach from Chișinău to Minsk leaves at four in the afternoon and arrives at ten in the morning, eighteen hours, and Silvia packed me enough food for a family of six for a week. Plăcinte in a cloth. Hard-boiled eggs. A jar of compote wrapped in newspaper so it would not knock against anything and break, which it did anyway, gently, in the night, onto my boots. The coach smelled of plums until Minsk.

**SOUND:** The phone, buzzing in a coat pocket. Fabric, a zipper. The screen's glow is almost audible.

**ILINCA (narrating):** At one in the morning, somewhere in the dark between two countries, my great-uncle answered.

**ILINCA (reading, very quietly, so as not to wake the woman beside her):** *Come here and I will tell you. Not on the telephone. Bring a hat. A real one.*

**ILINCA (narrating):** I wrote back *Thursday*, and he wrote back *Thursday*, and that was the longest conversation we had ever had. I looked out of the coach window at nothing at all, at fields under snow and the occasional lit window of a farmhouse moving slowly backward, and for the first time since my grandmother had put her hand in the bowl, I thought: this is going to work.

---

**SOUND:** A big bus station in the morning. An announcer on a loudspeaker reading departures in a calm metallic voice. Hundreds of feet on wet tiles. A kiosk selling coffee, the hiss of a machine. And then a young man's voice, cutting across all of it, very loud, very cheerful.

**ALES:** Cousin! Cousin from the swamp!

**ILINCA:** It's a delta!

**ALES:** It's a swamp with good publicity!

**ILINCA (narrating):** My cousin Ales is two years younger than me and three inches taller and has my aunt Tanya's round face and my grandmother Zoya's laugh, which comes up from somewhere around his boots. He was in his uniform, a navy jacket with a little badge of a tram on the collar, because he had come straight from the end of a night shift on line seven. He took my bag and smelled it.

**ALES:** Why does your bag smell of plums?

**ILINCA:** Silvia.

**SOUND:** Outside. Cold, much colder than the delta, a dry cold that squeaks underfoot. Wide streets. Traffic moving slowly on packed snow.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Minsk is a city built very wide and very straight, as if somebody had planned it with a ruler and a great deal of optimism. The avenues are broad enough to land a plane, Ales says, and the buildings along them are big and pale and serious, with columns and tall windows, and in February they are all the same color as the sky. But behind them, in the courtyards, there are children on sleds and old women feeding sparrows, and the river, the Svislach, comes winding through the middle of everything with ice along both banks and black water running in the center, and steam coming off it in the mornings, as if the river were breathing.

---

**SOUND:** A flat on the sixth floor of a big building. An elevator door, folding. A corridor. A door opening, and from inside, before any voice, a single piano note, A, struck, held, struck again. And the slow whine of a tuning lever turning a pin, the note sliding up by a hair. Struck again.

**TUDOR (from inside, not stopping):** Is that her? Ilinca? Come in. Don't talk. I'm on the A.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My uncle Tudor tunes pianos. He is fifty-five and gray at the sides and he wears his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead where he loses them, and when he is tuning he does not speak, because he says a voice in the room puts the strings off, the way a person in a doorway puts off a cat. He was tuning his own piano, which he does every Monday whether it needs it or not.

**SOUND:** The A struck. Struck with the E above. A slow wavering between them, a wobble in the sound, slowing, slowing, then stopping. Pure.

**TUDOR:** There. Now you can talk. Hello. Come here. You smell of plums.

**SOUND:** A hug, a coat crushed. Tudor's laugh, which is shorter than his son's and somehow embarrassed.

**TUDOR:** Your mother says you went into Papa's boxes.

**ILINCA:** Doina did. I just held them.

**TUDOR:** I listened. The refrigerator. And me, breathing. I sat in front of a client's grand piano and couldn't touch it for twenty minutes. She thought I was assessing the soundboard. She tipped me.

---

**SOUND:** A kitchen. A grater, big and coarse, potatoes going across it fast. Then onion, the same. A bowl, a spoon. A pan of oil heating, the first spit. And a woman singing very softly under her breath, a folk song, a little tune going round and round.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My aunt Tanya is Belarusian, from Minsk, from a family of Minsk people going back as far as anyone has bothered to count, and she says that a Belarusian kitchen is a potato's idea of heaven. She teaches music in a school across the river: singing to the small ones, tsymbaly to the older ones, and the history of every folk song in the country to anyone who stands still long enough. She was making draniki.

**TANYA:** Potato, grated fine, squeeze the water out, onion, egg, a little flour, salt. That's all. People put things in. Garlic. Herbs. Cheese. They're wrong. Draniki should taste of a potato that has been told it's beautiful.

**SOUND:** Spoonfuls of the batter laid into hot oil, each one a sudden loud crackle that settles into a steady fizz. Five. Six. Seven.

**ILINCA:** Can I record that?

**TANYA:** You can record anything in this house. Everyone else does. Tudor records the piano. Ales records the tram. Mama records herself singing and then won't let anyone listen.

**ILINCA (narrating):** She flipped them with a fork, one by one, and they turned over golden and lacy at the edges, and she laid them on a plate with a cloth over it, and beside them she set a small pot of something dark and rich: pork and mushroom, cooked slowly in a gravy with onions, for dipping. And sour cream. And a jar of lingonberries. We ate in the kitchen with the snow coming down past the window very slowly, as if it was being lowered on strings.

**SOUND:** Draniki torn, dipped. Ales talking with his mouth full. A fork on a plate. The snow, which makes no sound at all, so Ilinca makes none for it.

**TANYA:** Mama is waiting for you tomorrow. She's been ready since Saturday. She's dusted. Mama never dusts. She says dust is how an apartment remembers you.

**TUDOR:** Ilinca, you should know: Zoya Mikhalevich is eighty years old, has two bad knees and one good hip, and is the loudest woman in Minsk. If she starts doing the wolf, there's no stopping her. Just let it run. Like weather.

**ILINCA (narrating):** After supper Tanya brought out her laptop and showed me what she had been doing all week. In the family space, under the part where our tree branches out, she had been scanning her mother's photographs from the radio house. Dozens of them. Young women in cardigans at microphones, a man in a coat with a great many pockets, a children's choir on a staircase. She had put a name under every face she could. Under a girl with a heavy fringe and a handbell, she had written *Raisa Sokolova, the hare, 1967.* And under a broad-shouldered girl with her mouth wide open in mid-growl: *Zoya. The wolf. Obviously.*

**TANYA:** Look at this one.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It was a corridor, a long tiled corridor, with a red lamp at the far end over a door. In front of the door stood my grandmother, young, laughing, holding a script. Beside her stood my grandfather, thin, in a sweater, with his nai sticking out of his pocket. And a little way behind them, half out of the frame, a tall young man in a heavy coat and a fur hat with the flaps up, not laughing, looking at the camera as if it had asked him a question he didn't want to answer.

**TANYA:** Mama wrote on the back. *Children's hour, December 1971. And her brother.*

**SOUND:** The laptop fan. The kitchen clock. A dranik, the last one, still faintly crackling on its plate under the cloth.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Kostya. In Minsk. On the night of the play. I put my finger on the screen over his face. He was twenty-nine. He looked exactly like my grandmother, which is to say exactly like the man who sends me one line at a time, and he was standing in a radio-house corridor in a fur hat, a long way from his river, not laughing.

**ALES (gently):** Grandmother Zoya will know.

**TANYA:** Mama knows everything that happened to Mama.

**ILINCA:** That's what Bunica says.

**TUDOR:** That's what they say about each other. They've been saying it for sixty years. Go to bed. Tomorrow you'll need all your ears.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Ten: The Wolf at Home

**SOUND:** An old stairwell, tall and stone and echoing, five floors of it. Footsteps going up. A pram parked on a landing. A radio behind a door playing an accordion. And from the top of the stairs, long before anyone reaches it, a voice coming down like a tram round a corner.

**ZOYA:** Is that the delta girl? Is that Raya's? Come up! Come up! I'm not coming down, I have the knees of a chair!

**ILINCA (narrating):** Tuesday, the seventeenth of February. Zoya Mikhalevich lives on the fifth floor of a building of yellow stucco four streets from the old radio house, in the apartment she moved into in 1969 and has never once considered leaving. There is no elevator. She says the stairs keep her young and her visitors honest. She was standing at the top in a purple cardigan with her arms open and her glasses on a chain, and before I had reached the last step she had hold of my face with both hands.

**ZOYA:** Let me look. Raya's chin. Ion's ears. Oh, the ears. He had ears like a fox. Come in, sit down, everything in here is straw, don't lean on anything.

**SOUND:** A door. A small warm room. A clock with a loud tick. And all around, a faint dry whisper, as if the room were full of grass in a light wind.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It is full of straw. Everywhere. Birds made of straw hanging from the ceiling on threads, turning slowly in the warm air from the radiator. Straw horses on the bookshelf. A straw woman with a straw basket on the windowsill. And in the center of the ceiling, over the table, a great golden many-sided thing like a lantern made of a hundred small diamonds, all of straw, every joint tied with red thread, turning very slowly on its string, throwing a soft shadow like lace.

**ZOYA:** That's a spider.

**ILINCA:** It doesn't look like a spider.

**ZOYA:** It's not supposed to look like a spider. It's supposed to catch things. Good things. My grandmother made them in her village for the winter, and her grandmother, and I make them here, and I give them away at New Year, and people hang them up, and then they come back to me in the summer to say thank you, which is the whole point. You can't catch anything good if nobody comes to tell you.

**SOUND:** Zoya's chair. A tin of cookies. A cup and saucer, rattled by a hand that shakes a little. Tea poured from a pot with a chipped spout.

**ZOYA:** Now. Tanya says you want me to talk about the radio house. I'll talk. I'll talk until you beg. But first we telephone your grandmother, because I haven't spoken to her since her birthday and she'll be furious if she hears I've had you to myself.

---

**SOUND:** A mobile phone set on the table, speaker on. A ringing, foreign, faint. A click. Then the delta kitchen, faintly: the stove, the reeds.

**RODICA (on the phone):** Hello?

**ZOYA (enormously):** Rodica, it's the wolf! Give me your mother!

**SOUND:** A pause. Then, down the line, from twelve hundred kilometers, a sound like a small animal being startled: a high, quick, breathless squeak. And then a voice, young, bright, scared and funny, which is the voice of a seventy-nine-year-old woman being, effortlessly, a hare.

**RAISA (on the phone, as the hare):** Oh, not the wolf! Not today! I've only just washed my ears!

**ZOYA (as the wolf, a growl that rattles the cups):** Little hare. Little hare. I can smell your clean ears from here.

**RAISA (as the hare):** You can't smell anything, you've had a cold since November!

**ZOYA (as the wolf):** Then I'll follow the sound of your heart going like a sewing machine!

**SOUND:** On the phone, very fast, a small handbell would be rung here, if anyone had one. Instead, from the delta, someone hits a glass with a spoon three times. Rodica, improvising.

**ILINCA (narrating):** They did eleven minutes. I timed it. A whole episode of the children's hour, from 1968 or 1970 or some year in between, about the hare and the wolf and a cabbage patch and a bridge that was too narrow for both of them. Neither of them had a script. Neither of them hesitated once. My grandmother, who on Friday had not remembered I'd seen her on Wednesday, did not miss a cue. Zoya, who had told me she had the knees of a chair, stood up halfway through to growl better and stamped her foot.

**ZOYA (as the wolf, defeated, grumbling):** Next time, little hare. Next time.

**RAISA (as the hare):** There's always a next time. That's what's wonderful about you.

**SOUND:** Silence. Then two old women on a phone line, laughing, helplessly, the way you laugh at the end of a long day in a basement full of buckets. It goes on and on.

**RAISA (on the phone, herself again, out of breath):** Zoya. Zoyechka. We were good.

**ZOYA:** We were wonderful. We were the best thing in that building.

**RAISA:** We were the only thing in that building.

**ZOYA:** Raya, the play. Your play. The ferry. Your granddaughter wants to know the end.

**SOUND:** The line. The stove in the delta.

**RAISA (on the phone, quietly):** I know. I don't have it, Zoya. I've lost it. You have it.

**ZOYA:** I don't have it either.

**RAISA:** You were there.

**ZOYA:** I was there. I'll tell her what I saw. You listen, and if I lie, ring the glass.

---

**SOUND:** The flat. The straw spider turning, a faint whisper. Zoya sitting back down slowly, a long creak of chair and knee.

**ZOYA:** Sunday, the twenty-sixth of December. Nineteen seventy-one. The children's hour went out at five, live, from studio three. I was the mother, the ferryman's wife, because Raya said I was the only one who could shout at a husband properly. Ion was at the desk. Pyotr was beside him, because he never let anyone do a live broadcast without him breathing on their neck. Matvei had retired by then, so Raya did all the effects herself, every one, with her hands, while she read. She had the bowl of water. She had a bell. She had a bag of starch for the snow. Forty minutes, and she was the narrator and the girl and the weather.

**ILINCA:** And her brother was there.

**ZOYA:** You've seen the photograph. Tanya told me. Yes. He came. He was in Minsk for some course, a winter course, river pilots, something with charts. He turned up at the radio house in the afternoon in that terrible hat. They talked in the corridor. Raya and him. By the window at the end, near the stairs.

**ILINCA:** What did they say?

**ZOYA:** I don't know. I was in the ladies' room fixing my hair. When I came out they had stopped talking and he was standing by the window and she was walking toward the studio with her face very white. And I said, Raya, what is it, and she said, nothing, it's nothing, my brother's here. And then she went in, and I went in, and the red lamp came on.

**RAISA (on the phone, very quietly):** I don't remember that.

**ZOYA:** I know, my love.

**RAISA (on the phone):** I don't remember him there at all.

**ZOYA:** He was there. He stood in the corridor by the loudspeaker. There was a loudspeaker on the wall outside every studio, for the people waiting. He stood under it in his coat. I could see him through the little window in the door, every time I looked up from my page.

**ILINCA:** The whole time?

**SOUND:** The clock. The straw. Zoya thinking. Her breath, slow.

**ZOYA:** No. Not the whole time. Near the end, in the fog part, when Raya was ringing the bell and saying it was all night and her hands were frozen, I looked up and he was gone. I saw his back. Going down the stairs. Fast, with the hat in his hand. Before the lamp went off.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I wrote that down. I wrote it down twice.

**ZOYA:** And then the last page.

**ILINCA:** What about the last page?

**ZOYA:** Raya turned to it. I saw her. She was standing at the microphone with the script on the stand, and she turned the page, the very last one, and she looked at it. And then she took it off the stand and put it face down on the table. And she looked at the door. And she started talking, without it. Not reading. Talking. The way she talks to you, or to me now on the telephone. Two minutes. Maybe three. Ion, at the desk, behind the glass, took his hands off the faders. Pyotr was waving at him, the way you wave at someone who's driving too fast, and Ion just sat there with his hands in his lap and let her.

**ILINCA:** What did she say?

**ZOYA:** I don't know.

**ILINCA:** You don't...

**ZOYA (sharp, then soft):** I don't know, child, because I was crying. The wolf. Crying. In thirteen years I never once cried in that studio, not at the death of the old horse, not at the little lost bear, nobody could make me. And I stood there at my microphone with my mouth shut and the tears coming down into my collar. And there was a bell at the end. And she said something about a song. And it was finished. And the lamp went off. And Pyotr said, well, that's not what's in the script. And Ion said, no. It's better.

**SOUND:** On the phone, from the delta, faintly, very carefully, a glass touched once with a spoon. A single small note.

**ZOYA:** Raya? Did I lie?

**RAISA (on the phone, almost a whisper):** No. I just wanted to hear the bell.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Eleven: The Ferryman's Daughter, Part Three

**SOUND:** The tape hiss, but made by mouth: Ales, very close to the microphone, breathing out through his teeth, a long soft *hhhhh* that is uncannily like old tape. Then a click, made with a tongue.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Tuesday night, the same day, Zoya's apartment. Tudor, Tanya and Ales came up the five flights after work, and for three hours, while my grandmother listened on the phone from the delta, we built the night of the twenty-sixth of December 1971 out of everything Zoya remembered and everything she didn't. Zoya plays herself. Tanya plays Pyotr, the senior engineer, because she has always wanted to play a man who smells of onions. Ales plays my great-uncle at twenty-nine, who has no lines. My uncle Tudor plays his own father. He did not want to. He did it anyway.

**SOUND:** A long tiled corridor, made of Zoya's kitchen floor and a pair of hard shoes: footsteps, ringing. A window at the end, rattled in its frame by wind. A loudspeaker on a wall, made by a small radio turned low, playing a dance band from somewhere.

**ILINCA (narrating):** The corridor outside studio three, half past four in the afternoon. It is already dark in Minsk. Snow against the window at the end. A man in a heavy coat and a fur hat with the flaps up is standing there, looking out. A young woman comes along the corridor from the stairs with a script under her arm and stops when she sees him.

**SOUND:** Footsteps stop. Wind. The dance band, far off, under everything.

**ILINCA (narrating):** And here, we have a silence. Nobody alive knows what they said. Zoya was fixing her hair. Ion was at the desk. My grandmother does not remember being there at all, and my great-uncle, who does, has only said he will tell me in person. So in our play, at this moment, there is only the wind against the window for thirty seconds, which is a very long time on the radio. Zoya says it is the right length. She says that is about how long a brother and sister take to say a thing that lasts for fifty years.

**SOUND:** Wind against glass. Thirty seconds of it. The snow ticking. Somewhere, a door. Then quick footsteps, a woman's, going away along the corridor, and another door opening onto a different, deader air.

---

**SOUND:** A studio. Heavily padded, close. A big ribbon microphone on a stand with a faint electrical hum. A table covered in a thick cloth with objects on it, which clink softly as someone checks them. A bowl of water. A bag. A bell.

**ZOYA (playing herself, at fifty-five years' distance, low):** Raya. What is it?

**YOUNG RAISA (played by Tanya, because the others insisted, in a voice nothing like her own, careful and small):** Nothing. It's nothing. My brother's here.

**ZOYA:** Here? In Minsk?

**YOUNG RAISA:** He's on a course. Charts. He came to hear it.

**ZOYA:** Well, that's lovely.

**YOUNG RAISA:** Yes. It's lovely. Where's my starch?

**SOUND:** The bag of starch, squeezed: a crunch. The bowl of water: a hand dipped, a small circle. The bell, lifted and set down without ringing, its clapper knocking once against the inside.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Behind the glass, in the control room, my grandfather sits at the desk. He is twenty-eight. He has a pencil behind his ear and the nai in his inside pocket, because he will play the theme himself, live, from the control room, at the start and the end. Beside him the senior engineer, Pyotr, is eating an onion sandwich and looking at the clock.

**PYOTR (played by Tanya, now in a deep, comfortable growl):** Two minutes. Tell her two minutes.

**ION (played by Tudor, quietly, into a talkback):** Raya. Two minutes.

**SOUND:** Through the talkback, a small click. In the studio, a cough. A page turned. Then the red lamp, in this production the very same buzz Ilinca recorded under Florin's ceiling in the delta, switching on.

**PYOTR:** We're on.

**SOUND:** From the control room, live, the nai: Ion's theme, which Tudor has learned from the box tapes, played here by Tanya on the tsymbaly instead because nobody in the family can play the nai anymore, the little hammers on the strings giving the same sliding, rising tune in a brighter, rippling voice. Then it fades.

**YOUNG RAISA (the microphone voice, steady now):** On the Volga, at a town called Belaya Pristan, which means the white pier, there was a ferry called the *Volzhanka*...

---

**ILINCA (narrating):** And so it went, for thirty-seven minutes, the play we have already heard, the pies and the wheel and the radio behind the counter, the brother at the wheel and the girl who wanted Minsk. The children of the whole country listening, at five o'clock on the Sunday after Christmas, in kitchens with the stove going. And in the corridor, under the loudspeaker on the wall, a man in a fur hat, standing still.

**SOUND:** The corridor. The loudspeaker on the wall, very small and tinny, carrying the play: Young Raisa's voice describing the fog. And, close to it, the faint creak of a heavy coat as somebody shifts his weight.

**YOUNG RAISA (through the loudspeaker, tiny, far):** ...and the girl ran to the end of the pier where the bell was, and she rang it, all night, alone, every few seconds, until her hands went numb...

**SOUND:** The coat. A breath through the nose, hard. The fur hat taken off: a soft thump against a sleeve. Then footsteps, quick and heavy, going away down the corridor, and down a stone stairwell, round and round, fading, and a door far below opening on a gust of wind and swinging shut.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Ales, playing Kostya, walked out of Zoya's kitchen and down all five flights of her stairs and out into the street, and stood there in the snow for a minute, so the sound of the door would be right. When he came back up he did not say anything. He sat on the floor by the radiator with his coat still on and his hands under his arms.

**ALES (quietly, later):** I didn't know why I was doing it. I just felt it was right. That he'd go fast.

---

**SOUND:** The studio again. The bell now, ringing, slow, steady, every few seconds, rung by Tanya as young Raisa. The bowl of water. The wind, made by Zoya in her throat, long and low.

**YOUNG RAISA (the microphone voice):** ...and very far off in the fog, so faint you thought you'd imagined it, an engine...

**SOUND:** The bell stops. A page turned, with a dry rasp. Then a second sound, quieter: the page lifted off the music stand, paper sliding on metal, and laid face down on the cloth-covered table. A long breath taken in.

**ILINCA (narrating):** And here, the tape we did not have would have gone on. Two minutes. Maybe three. The ferryman's daughter talking without a script, looking at a door with a little window in it, at an empty corridor. Ion with his hands in his lap. Zoya crying into her collar. A bell at the end, she says, and something about a song.

**SOUND:** Nothing. The studio. The faint hum of the microphone. Thirty seconds. A minute.

**ILINCA (narrating):** We did not try to fill it. We stood in Zoya's kitchen under the straw spider, five of us, and let the silence run for a minute and a half while my grandmother breathed down the phone from the delta. Then, at the end of it, Tudor, playing his father, leaned toward the talkback and said the only line from that night that anyone remembers word for word.

**PYOTR (playing his part, gruffly):** Well. That's not what's in the script.

**ION (played by Tudor, after a pause, his voice not quite steady):** No. It's better.

**SOUND:** The red lamp switching off: the buzz cut, and a tiny ping of the cooling filament. The studio air. Someone sniffing.

---

**SOUND:** Zoya's flat. Chairs scraped back. The straw spider turning. Tanya putting the bell down on the table with a small, final clunk.

**RAISA (on the phone, from the delta, after a long time):** Tudor.

**TUDOR:** Mama.

**RAISA (on the phone):** You sounded just like him.

**TUDOR:** I was trying.

**RAISA (on the phone):** No. You weren't. That's why.

**ILINCA (narrating):** After they had gone, I sat on in Zoya's kitchen with her while she wrapped a straw bird in tissue paper for my grandmother. She tied the parcel with red thread and wrote on it, in large wobbly capitals, *THE WOLF SAYS NEXT TIME*. Then she put her hand on my wrist.

**ZOYA:** Your great-uncle. When you see him. Ask him why he left before the end.

**ILINCA:** Do you think he knows?

**ZOYA:** I think he thinks he knows. That's worse. A man who doesn't know asks. A man who thinks he knows sits in a shed on the Volga for fifty years.

**SOUND:** The parcel set on the table. Tissue paper. The clock. The straw.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Twelve: Line Seven

**SOUND:** A tram depot before dawn. Huge doors rolling open on iron wheels. The deep electrical thrum of a tram waking up, a compressor chugging, then a hiss of air brakes released. Overhead, the pantograph rising to meet the wire with a crackle and a single blue snap.

**ALES:** You hear that? The snap? Every morning. It's like the tram is clearing its throat.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Wednesday, the eighteenth of February, ten to six in the morning. My cousin had got permission, by means he declined to describe, for me to ride the first run of line seven from the depot to the far end and back, sitting on the folding seat just behind his cab with my recorder on my knee. I had to wear a high-visibility vest. Ales said it suited me and that I looked like a very small road works.

**SOUND:** The tram moving off: the rising whine of the motors, the wheels on rails, the rhythmic double knock at every joint. A curve, and the long metallic squeal of steel flange against steel rail.

**ALES:** That's the curve at the bakery. Everyone who lives on this street hates that noise. I love it. It's the only time the tram complains. The rest of the time it just does its work.

**ILINCA:** Like Papa.

**ALES:** Like your papa. I met him twice. He said nine words to me both times. They were good words.

**SOUND:** A bell: the tram's own bell, two quick dings from a foot pedal, bright and old-fashioned.

**ILINCA (narrating):** The tram bell. I asked him to ring it again. And again. He rang it for every cyclist and every dog. By the third stop the first passengers were climbing on in the blue dark: two nurses at the end of a night shift, a schoolboy with a trombone case taller than himself, a woman with a string bag of beets, an old man with a little brown dog in his coat.

**ALES (into the cab microphone, in a calm, pleasant, unhurried voice that is not his own):** Next stop, the Market. The Market is next. Please mind the gap and the gentleman with the dog.

**SOUND:** Laughter, small, from the passengers. The nurses. The old man.

**ILINCA:** Who's that?

**ALES:** The lady who announces the metro. Same voice since before I was born. Babulya did her at my seventh birthday, and then a mole who was in love with her, and I laughed until I was sick on Grandmother Zoya's shoes. That's Babulya doing the metro lady. I do Babulya doing her. It's a family tradition. My supervisor says I can't do it. Then he rides with me and says nothing.

---

**SOUND:** The far end of the line. The tram stopped, motors idling, a soft electric hum. Outside, a wide white field at the edge of the city, and in the distance a row of tall apartment blocks coming up pink in the first light. Ales opening a thermos, the screw lid squeaking.

**ILINCA (narrating):** At the end of the line, before he turned it back, we had eleven minutes. We drank Tanya's tea from the thermos lid, sweet and black with a slice of lemon in it, and looked at the field.

**ALES:** Can I tell you something strange?

**ILINCA:** Always.

**ALES:** I have two grandmothers who have known each other since they were twenty. They were in the same building every day for thirteen years. They were the hare and the wolf. And their children married each other. And I never once, growing up, heard them say they loved each other. They say, *Zoya remembers everything that happened to Zoya.* They say, *Raya always got the good parts.* At my graduation they had an argument about whether a bear could fit in a cabbage patch.

**ILINCA:** And?

**ALES:** And when Babulya said on the phone yesterday, *we were good*, Grandmother Zoya went into the bathroom for twenty minutes after you'd gone. Mama says she came out with her face washed and said the tap was dripping.

**SOUND:** The thermos lid. Wind against the tram windows.

**ALES:** I grew up in Minsk. You grew up in the delta. We met every second summer at Silvia's in Chișinău and fought about who got the swing. I don't speak your Romanian. You speak my Russian like it's been in a drawer. But we have the same grandmother. She did a mole for me and a fish for you. That's the whole family, I think. People in different countries who got the same animals.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I recorded him saying it. I asked if I could put it in the play. He said no, absolutely not, and then, when we were halfway back to the depot, with the city waking up on both sides and the trams going the other way ringing at us, he said yes.

---

**SOUND:** A school. A long corridor with a polished floor, a smell of floor wax that is almost audible. Children's voices behind doors, a recorder squeaking a scale, a teacher clapping a rhythm. A door, and inside it, a room full of a bright, rippling, shimmering sound: six tsymbaly being played at once, by six twelve-year-olds, some of them nearly together.

**TANYA (over it, cheerful, firm):** Stop. Stop. Lovely. Stop. Arina, you're a bar ahead. Pasha, you're a bar behind. Between the two of you, we're perfect.

**ILINCA (narrating):** In the afternoon I went to Tanya's school across the river. The tsymbaly is a box of strings, wide and flat like a tray, laid on a stand or across the knees, and you play it with two small wooden hammers, one in each hand, wrapped at the tip in cotton or felt. A good player's hands go so fast they blur. The sound is like water running over pebbles, if the pebbles were made of silver. Tanya has played it since she was eight.

**SOUND:** Tanya alone now, playing slowly: Ion's nai theme, the sliding, rising melody from the box tape, translated to hammered strings. She plays it once plainly, then again with a tremolo on the long notes, the hammers trembling on one string until the note seems to hang in the air.

**TANYA:** Ion's tune. I took it off the tape Doina sent. I've been playing it every evening this week. On the nai it bends. On the tsymbaly it can't bend, so it shivers instead. That's the best I can do.

**ILINCA:** It's beautiful.

**TANYA:** It's a translation. All music in this family is a translation. Moldovan into Belarusian. Belarusian into Russian. Russian into whatever your grandmother is now. Delta.

**SOUND:** In the corner, a piano lid lifted. A tuning hammer set on a pin. A single note struck, over and over, sliding by a hair.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My uncle Tudor was in the corner of the music room tuning the school's upright, an old black one with brass candleholders on the front and a cigarette burn on the lid from some long-gone teacher. He tunes it for nothing every February. He says it's his rent for marrying the music teacher.

**TUDOR (not looking up):** Ilinca. Come here. I want to ask you something.

**SOUND:** The note, and its neighbor. The slow beat between them, slowing.

**TUDOR:** Papa's boxes. Did Doina go through all of them?

**ILINCA:** All eleven.

**TUDOR:** And the tapes from Minsk. From when I was little. Did you play them all?

**ILINCA:** Not all. Some. Why?

**SOUND:** The beat between the two notes stopping. Pure. Tudor sets the hammer down on top of the piano.

**TUDOR:** When I was seven. 1977. In the apartment in Minsk. Papa had the machine on the kitchen table, his good machine, the one he built half of. He'd gone out to the shop. Mama was at work. And I knew how to work it, because I'd watched him a thousand times. Red button and black button together, that's record. And I wanted to hear what I sounded like singing. We'd learned a song at kindergarten. About a little goat that went into the forest to find the end of the river.

**ILINCA:** And you recorded it.

**TUDOR:** On whatever was on the machine. A reel. I don't know which. I didn't look. I sang the whole thing, all nine verses, and then I heard his key in the door and I panicked and pressed stop and rewound it and ran to my room. And I waited all week for him to say something. He never did. Not once. Not in forty-one years.

**ILINCA:** Maybe he never played that one again.

**TUDOR:** Maybe. Or maybe he did, and he heard me singing about a goat over something he'd kept, and decided not to tell me. That would be like him. That would be exactly like him.

**SOUND:** Tudor striking a chord, softly, the whole piano in tune now, a warm, full, rounded sound.

**TUDOR:** I've felt bad about it for forty-nine years. About a tape. I don't even know what was on it. Isn't that stupid?

**ILINCA (narrating):** I said it wasn't stupid. I said Doina would say a bad sound is still evidence that something happened. He laughed, and closed the lid over the keys, and we went out into the corridor where six twelve-year-olds were waiting to be told they were wonderful, and Tanya told them.

---

**SOUND:** A railway station at night. A train standing at a platform, its heating ticking. Doors. A conductor calling. Ales, Tanya and Tudor on the platform, their voices overlapping in farewell.

**TUDOR:** Tell him... Tell Uncle Kostya... I don't know. Tell him I still can't swim.

**ILINCA (narrating):** At nine o'clock on Wednesday night, I left Minsk on the train east. Two trains and a bus, twenty hours. Zoya's straw bird was in my bag in its tissue paper, for my grandmother. Doina's tiny mărțișor was in my coat pocket in its envelope, *For the Volga.* And Tudor's goat was in my head, going into the forest, nine verses long, looking for the end of the river.

**SOUND:** The train moving off. The platform sliding away. Three voices waving, getting smaller. Then the wheels, steady, on and on.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Thirteen: The White Pier

**SOUND:** A country bus pulling away on snow, its chains clinking, its engine fading into a great wide quiet. Then, in the quiet, a dog. Not barking. Breathing, close, interested, and a tail thumping against a man's boot.

**KOSTYA:** Bulka. Sit. Bulka. She's not a sausage.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Thursday, the nineteenth of February, a little before five in the afternoon. Belaya Pristan, on the upper Volga. Snow on everything, deep and old and blue in the dusk, and the bus shelter where I stood with my bag had a roof of corrugated iron with a fringe of icicles as long as my arm. My great-uncle was waiting for me in a sheepskin coat that came to his knees, with a dog the size and shape of a small sofa sitting on his boots. He did not hug me. He looked at me for a long time, from under the flaps of a hat that I recognized, with a jolt, from a photograph of a corridor in 1971. Then he looked at my hat.

**KOSTYA:** That's not a hat.

**ILINCA:** It's wool.

**KOSTYA:** It's a sock with ambitions. Here.

**SOUND:** A second fur hat, pulled from a coat pocket, held out. Ilinca taking it. The soft flump of fur over her ears.

**KOSTYA:** It was Nadya's. My wife's. It's been in the drawer for five years waiting for a head. Come on. It's minus fourteen and the dog wants her supper.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He is eighty-three. He is a head taller than my grandmother and has the same gray eyes, the river-in-a-pail gray, and the same way of pressing his lips together before he says something difficult. His face has been outdoors on the water for sixty years and looks it, lined like a map of a delta.

---

**SOUND:** A street of wooden houses. Boots on packed snow, a dry squeak at every step. A chimney somewhere breathing smoke. A gate, wooden, its latch iced, knocked free with a fist. A path. A porch, three steps, each one creaking a different note. A door.

**ILINCA (narrating):** His house is wooden, old, painted green a long time ago, with carved frames around every window, white wooden lace, flowers and suns and little birds, and the shutters painted blue. Every house on the street has them, he says, and every one is different, and when he was a boy you could tell who had made which by the shape of the birds. His father carved these. The birds are swallows. You can see where the paint has been touched up and touched up again, by a careful hand, many times.

**SOUND:** Inside. A big tiled stove in the corner of the main room, ticking with heat. An electric samovar, coming to the boil with a low grumbling roar. A clock on the wall with weights on chains. Bulka collapsing onto a rug with a groan of enormous satisfaction.

**KOSTYA:** Sit. Tea. You'll eat.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He fed me pelmeni, small dumplings of meat in thin dough, which he takes from a cloth bag that lives on the frozen balcony at the back of the house, hundreds of them, frozen hard as pebbles. He dropped them by the handful into boiling water and they rattled like gravel against the pot and then went quiet and rose. With butter and sour cream and black pepper. Then tea from the samovar, very strong, cut with hot water from the tap on the side, in glasses in metal holders, with raspberry jam from a jar to stir in, and a string of sushki, small hard rings of bread, which you crack in your fist.

**SOUND:** A sushka cracked in a fist: a sharp, satisfying snap. Then another. Tea stirred with jam, a spoon tinkling against glass.

**KOSTYA:** Raya used to do that sound. The sushka. For a branch breaking. In the children's plays.

**ILINCA:** You listened?

**SOUND:** The spoon stops.

**KOSTYA:** Our mother listened. Every Tuesday at four, in the kiosk, when Raya was in Minsk. She'd put up the shutter and turn the radio up so loud the whole pier had to listen to the hare. Fishermen. Timber men. The boys from the boatyard. She'd sell them pies and make them be quiet. I listened because I was there.

**ILINCA:** Did you like it?

**KOSTYA:** It was a hare.

**ILINCA (narrating):** And that was all, for a while. I did what Silvia had told me to. I didn't ask again. I drank my tea, and cracked another sushka, and waited, and the clock with the weights ticked, and the stove ticked, and the dog sighed, and my great-uncle looked at his glass. And then, instead of telling me anything, he started asking.

**KOSTYA:** How is she?

**ILINCA:** She forgets the morning.

**KOSTYA:** And the old things?

**ILINCA:** She remembers the old things better than I remember yesterday.

**KOSTYA:** What does she remember?

**ILINCA (narrating):** So I told him. For an hour. I told him about the bowl of water and the wrist, about the suitcase of weather, about walnut horses and the little wooden door. About Zoya doing the wolf on the phone and my grandmother not missing a single cue. About the note by her bed, and how she reads it every morning and says, who wrote this, and then, oh, me. He listened the whole time without moving. When I got to the note, he put his hand over his eyes, just for a moment, and took it away.

**KOSTYA:** Our mother was the same at the end. The morning went first. Then the week. Then she'd ask for our father, and I'd tell her he was on the boat. She liked that. On the boat was a good place for him to be.

**ILINCA:** Was he?

**KOSTYA:** He'd been dead fifteen years. But he was always on the boat, for her. You understand? You don't take a man off his boat.

**SOUND:** The samovar, cooling, ticking. Snow sliding off the roof outside in a long soft rush and a thump.

---

**ILINCA (narrating):** At nine o'clock he put on his coat again, and took a flashlight from a nail, and said, *Come.* We went out of the back door, past the frozen balcony with its sack of pelmeni, across a yard trodden into paths, to a long low shed with a tin roof. He unlocked a padlock the size of a fist. He went in first and found the switch.

**SOUND:** A fluorescent tube flickering, buzzing, catching. A cold room full of machine smell: oil, gasoline, iron. Something dripping slowly into a tin. Outboard motors on stands, one with its cover off. A vice. Tools on a pegboard, each one hung inside its own painted outline.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He mends outboard motors. Everyone's, from up and down this stretch of the river. There were nine of them in the shed, waiting. And on the wall above the workbench, in a frame, the glass cracked across one corner, a certificate from the river school downstream, dated 1962, with a name on it in ink.

**ILINCA:** You kept it.

**KOSTYA:** Papa said bad luck to hang paper on a boat. So when they took the boat, I brought the paper home.

**ILINCA:** When did they take the boat?

**KOSTYA:** Nineteen eighty-four. They built the bridge upstream, eight kilometers, and nobody needed a ferry anymore. They cut the *Volzhanka* up for scrap at the yard downstream. I didn't go. I was piloting the big boats by then, the cargo boats, all the way down to the sea. I was in Astrakhan the day they did it. I came home and the mooring was empty.

**SOUND:** The drip into the tin. The fluorescent buzz.

**KOSTYA:** But I'd taken two things off her before, the winter before, in case. The certificate. And this.

**SOUND:** A heavy canvas tarpaulin dragged aside, stiff with cold, crackling. Beneath it, something on a wooden frame. A hand on brass. A knuckle tapping it, once, very softly: a low, wide, golden hum, much deeper than the delta bell, and with no crack in it at all.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It is bigger than I expected. Twice the size of my great-grandfather's fishing bell. It hangs from a frame of oak he must have built himself, and the brass is dark, almost brown, and polished on one side only, the side that faces the bench, where a hand would rest on it while its owner worked. On the lip, in letters punched by hand, half worn away: *VOLZHANKA.* Under it a date I could not read.

**KOSTYA:** That's the bell.

**ILINCA:** The one on the pier?

**KOSTYA:** No. The one on the pier was the spare. This is the ship's bell. Papa's. It rang on that boat every crossing for thirty years. On the pier was the old one, cracked, on a post. That one's gone.

**ILINCA:** And the tape?

**SOUND:** A drawer in the workbench, pulled out: wood swollen with damp, sticking, then giving.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He took out a square cardboard box, small, the corners soft. It was the twin of the empty box in the vinegar room in Chișinău. On the spine, in two alphabets, in my grandfather's handwriting: *The Ferryman's Daughter. For Kostya, from Ion. 1979.* He held it in his big cracked hand the way Doina had held the empty one. As if it were an egg. As if it might be alive.

**KOSTYA:** Ion gave it to me at the funeral. On the white pier, after. He said, *this is your father's favorite thing. Every New Year's Eve I played it to him down the telephone, the whole forty minutes, and he never once let me hang up before the end. He'd want you to have it.* I said thank you. I put it in this drawer. It's been in this drawer for forty-seven years.

**ILINCA:** You never played it.

**KOSTYA:** I don't have a machine.

**ILINCA:** You could have found a machine.

**SOUND:** The drawer pushed shut, slowly. The box held. The fluorescent tube buzzing.

**KOSTYA:** I didn't need a machine. I'd heard it.

**ILINCA:** All of it?

**KOSTYA (after a long time):** Enough.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I wanted to ask him then. Why he left before the end. What they said in the corridor by the window. Where he was on the night of the fog. I had all three questions lined up behind my teeth like passengers waiting at a gangplank. I didn't ask any of them. Silvia had said a man who says *why* means *ask me again*. She had not said *tonight*.

**KOSTYA:** Tomorrow I'm going out on the ice. Early. Six o'clock. There's a place below the old landing where the perch come in February. You'll come.

**ILINCA:** I'll come.

**KOSTYA:** Wear the hat. And bring your machine. You'll want it.

**ILINCA:** Why?

**KOSTYA:** Because some things are easier to say to a hole in the ice than to a person.

**SOUND:** The light switched off. The buzz dying with a tick. The padlock. Boots squeaking back across the yard. And behind them, in the dark shed, a bell that someone has brushed with a sleeve on the way out, humming very faintly to itself.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Fourteen: A Hole in the Ice

**SOUND:** A vast flat silence, outdoors, before dawn. Boots crunching on snow over ice, two pairs, and four paws. Then a sound like a huge string plucked somewhere very far off under everything: a long, descending, whooping *pyoo-oo-oong*, eerie, electric, that travels away across the river and fades.

**ILINCA:** What was that?

**KOSTYA:** The ice. Talking. It's cold, so it's shrinking, and when it shrinks it cracks, and the crack runs for a kilometer, and that's the noise. Like a whale. It's nothing. It's the river turning over in bed.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Friday, the twentieth of February, six in the morning. The Volga at Belaya Pristan is a kilometer and a half wide and frozen from bank to bank, and in the dark it is a great gray plain going away to a line of black trees on the far shore. Across it, here and there, little lights: other men, already out, with lanterns, sitting on boxes over holes. We walked out from the white pier, which still stands, though nothing has landed at it since 1984, past the stumps of the old mooring posts sticking up through the snow, to a place he chose by some calculation he did not explain.

**SOUND:** A hand auger: the blade bitten into the ice, then the long rhythmic grinding of a man turning a crank, the ice chips spraying, a deep chewing sound going down and down. Then a sudden gulp as the blade breaks through, and water welling up into the hole with a slosh.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He drilled two holes and set a wooden box with a sheepskin on it beside each. He gave me a rod no longer than my forearm, with a line as thin as a hair and a tiny bright lure, and showed me how to jig it near the bottom. Bulka lay down on the snow between the two holes and went to sleep with her nose on her paws.

**SOUND:** A thermos opened. Tea poured. Steam that you can almost hear. Then the jigging: a faint rhythmic tick of the little rod against a mitten.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It was very quiet for a long time. The light came up gray, then pink along the far bank. Other men's voices carried across the ice, small and clear, as if they were in the next room: someone laughing, someone swearing at a lure. And then my great-uncle, without looking at me, still jigging, began.

---

**KOSTYA:** I wasn't on the boat.

**SOUND:** The jigging, steady.

**KOSTYA:** The sixteenth of November, 1962. A Friday. I had a fever. Thirty-nine, Mama said. She wouldn't let me out of bed. Papa took old Semyonich as mate, who was seventy and deaf as that post. I lay in bed all afternoon. I heard the engine go out across the river. I heard it stop on the far side. And then the window went white.

**ILINCA:** The fog.

**KOSTYA:** The fog. Like somebody had pressed a pillow on the house. I got up. Mama was already gone, down to the pier, with everyone. I put my coat on over my pajamas and went down. I could hardly see my boots. And I could hear the bell.

**SOUND:** Far away across the ice, someone's sled scraping. The ice: another long whooping crack, nearer.

**KOSTYA:** She'd been ringing it for two hours. Sixteen years old. On the end of the pier at the old post. And when I got to her, her mittens were frozen to the rope. Frozen to it. She couldn't open her hands. She was crying, but she didn't stop. She was ringing it and crying. And I took the rope from her. I had to break the ice off her mittens with my thumbs.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He stopped jigging. He sat on his box with the little rod across his knees and looked down into the black water in the hole.

**KOSTYA:** And I rang it. All night. Every few seconds, the way Papa taught us, slow, so the sound doesn't run together and the boat can tell where it comes from. And she sat beside me on the boards with her back against the post, wrapped in my coat over hers, and she sang. To keep us awake. All the songs from the radio. The hedgehog song. The one about the little steamboat. All of them. When she ran out she started again. When her voice went, she hummed. Mama brought soup at midnight in a can and fed it to her with a spoon because her hands still wouldn't work.

**ILINCA:** And the boat?

**KOSTYA:** Six in the morning. Like now. The light came up and the fog came off the river like a blanket being pulled, and there she was. The *Volzhanka*. Two hundred meters out, a bit downstream, nose pointing a little upstream, the way he said. He'd been feeling his way across all night by the bell. Nine passengers and a cart and a goat. The goat was furious. And Papa came up the pier and picked Raya up off the boards, she'd fallen asleep against the post by then, and carried her home, and the whole town said, Raya's bell, Raya's bell brought him in.

**SOUND:** The jigging resumes, slowly. Then, sharply, a tug: the tiny rod bending, line hissing up through the hole, and a flip of water and a small slapping on the ice.

**KOSTYA:** Perch. Small. Put him back. He's the size of my thumb.

**SOUND:** A fish, slipping back into a hole with a tiny plop.

---

**ILINCA (narrating):** I didn't say anything. I had my recorder in my lap, under my coat to keep the batteries warm, and the red light was on, and I let him go on. Silvia said wait. Zoya said ask him why. I thought, if I ask him anything now, he'll put the lid back on the hole.

**KOSTYA:** I didn't mind. You understand? I didn't mind that they said Raya's bell. She was sixteen and she'd stood there two hours alone before I came. I'd have said it too. And then she went to Minsk. And I stayed. And Papa got old, and Mama got old, and I stayed. I did the boat, and the house, and the doctors, and the funerals. And she sent postcards. With hares on them.

**ILINCA:** And the play.

**KOSTYA:** And the play. The winter of 1971 I was in Minsk for three weeks on a course, charts for the new channel. And I thought, I'll go and hear it. My sister's play. About our father's boat. I thought... I don't know what I thought. I bought a new hat.

**SOUND:** The thermos lid unscrewed. Tea. A long drink.

**KOSTYA:** In the corridor before, I asked her. I said, Raya, is it the fog night? And she said yes. And I said, am I in it? And she said, you're in the beginning, you're at the wheel, you crack. And I said, and at the bell? And she said... she said, Kostya, it's a play. A play needs one girl and one bell. Two is a crowd on the radio, the children can't follow it.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He did her voice. Not well. But he did it, quick and a little impatient, and it was so exactly how she still talks when she's frightened of something that my eyes stung.

**KOSTYA:** So I stood under the loudspeaker. And it was beautiful. I'll say that. The pies, the wheel. Papa. Her voice doing Papa. And then the fog. And she said, *the girl rang it all night. Alone.* Alone. On the radio. To the whole country. And I put my hat on and went down the stairs and out into the snow and walked back to the hostel. Four kilometers. I didn't feel my feet.

**ILINCA:** You didn't hear the end.

**KOSTYA:** I knew the end. The boat comes in. The girl's a hero. The town says Raya's bell. I didn't need to hear it.

**SOUND:** The ice. A long, slow, groaning crack, very near, that seems to pass right under them and away. Bulka lifts her head, then puts it down.

**KOSTYA:** Fifty-four years. Over one word. That's what you came to hear. Now you've heard it. An old man in a shed being angry about one word.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I wanted to tell him then. That she had put the last page face down. That she had looked at the door. That Zoya had cried for the first time in thirteen years, and Ion had taken his hands off the faders, and Pyotr had said, that's not what's in the script. But I didn't know what she had said. Nobody did. And it seemed to me that if I told him, and I was wrong, I would be doing to him exactly what had been done to him once already: telling him how his own story went.

**ILINCA:** You weren't angry about one word.

**KOSTYA:** No?

**ILINCA:** You were angry because you stayed. And nobody put that on the radio.

**SOUND:** The jigging stops. A long silence. The far men's voices across the ice. The fizz of the thermos, cooling.

**KOSTYA (very low):** Your grandmother used to do that. Say the thing back to you, but the true one. It's very annoying.

**ILINCA:** It runs in the family.

**KOSTYA:** It does not run in my family. In my family we say nothing and fix motors.

**SOUND:** A tug on his line. A flash of a fish, larger this time, pulled up through the hole, flapping on the ice. Kostya's grunt of approval.

**KOSTYA:** That's supper. Put your machine away. Your fingers will fall off.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I put it away. But I had it. Forty-one minutes, on a box on the Volga, with the ice singing under us like a whale. And when we walked back across the river at nine, with two perch in a bag and the dog running circles, he stopped at the end of the white pier, by the stump of a post that stuck out of the snow beside the gangplank's old iron rings, and put his mitten on it.

**KOSTYA:** Here. This was it. The old bell. Right here.

**SOUND:** A mitten on frozen wood. Wind. And, from very far across the frozen river, from the far bank, a dog barking, so clear in the cold it might have been next to them.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Fifteen: Steam and Brass

**SOUND:** A wooden bathhouse. The heavy door on a spring. Inside, a hot dim room: water thrown onto stones in a stove, a sudden explosive hiss and roar of steam. Men's voices, deep and slow, groaning with pleasure. And a rhythmic leafy slapping: bundles of birch twigs, soaked, being beaten gently across someone's back.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Saturday, the twenty-first of February. In Belaya Pristan, on Saturdays, the men go to the banya, the bathhouse by the creek, and have done every Saturday since there was a creek. I was not allowed into the men's side, obviously, so I sat in the front room with the woman who runs it, Lyubov Andreyevna, who is eighty-eight and has seen everything, drinking cranberry juice from a jug and holding my microphone against the wooden wall. The wall is thin. The men are not quiet.

**SOUND:** Through the wall: the steam, the slapping, a man shouting cheerfully that he is being boiled like a crayfish, another telling him that's the point.

**LYUBOV:** Konstantin Fyodorovich hasn't missed a Saturday in sixty years. Not even when Nadya was ill. He'd come for one hour and go back to her. He says the steam is where he thinks.

**ILINCA:** What does he think about?

**LYUBOV:** Motors, mostly.

**SOUND:** Through the wall, the steam again, and Kostya's voice, deep, slow, carrying through the boards.

**KOSTYA (through the wall):** Gena. Do you remember the fog? Sixty-two?

**GENA (through the wall, an old man's wheeze):** The fog. Everybody remembers the fog. Raya's bell.

**KOSTYA:** I was there too.

**GENA:** Of course you were there. You rang it till morning. Everyone knows that. My mother said you couldn't lift your arms for a week.

**SOUND:** A pause through the wall. Water thrown. Hiss.

**KOSTYA:** Everyone knows that?

**GENA:** Kostya. It's a small town. Everybody knows everything. We just don't say it, because you'd hit us.

**SOUND:** Laughter through the wall, several men, a deep shaking chorus. Then birch twigs, slapping. Then Kostya, laughing too, which I had not heard before: low and rusty and surprised, a hinge that has not been opened in a long time.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Lyubov Andreyevna poured me another glass of cranberry juice and said, with great satisfaction, that she had been waiting forty years for someone to say that to him in a room he couldn't walk out of.

---

**SOUND:** Outside. Afternoon. A sledge being dragged across the yard, its runners hissing on packed snow. A heavy thing on it, tied with rope, swaying. A man breathing hard. A dog panting alongside.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He came out of the banya red as a beet and steaming in the cold like a horse, and walked home, and went straight into the shed without a word. When he came out he was pulling the little sled from the ice, and on it, tied down with rope, was the oak frame and the bell.

**KOSTYA:** Help me. Down to the pier. Before the light goes.

**SOUND:** The sled down the street. Neighbors' gates opening. Voices: a woman asking what on earth Kostya is doing, a child running alongside asking if it's a school bell, Kostya saying it is a boat bell and to mind his feet.

**ILINCA (narrating):** By the time we reached the white pier there were eleven people following us, and two dogs, and a boy on a bicycle with chains on its tires. Kostya set the frame up at the end of the pier beside the stump of the old post, and kicked the snow away from its feet, and stood back. The sun was going down across the river, enormous and orange, behind the black trees on the far bank, and the whole frozen Volga was pink and gold and blue in long stripes, and the ice was singing again, now and then, far off.

**KOSTYA:** Your machine.

**ILINCA:** It's on.

**KOSTYA:** Then listen. This is the sound. Not your delta bell. This.

**SOUND:** A wooden mallet, wrapped in leather, on brass. One stroke. And the *Volzhanka*'s bell speaks for the first time in forty-two years: a great round warm golden tone, not bright, deep, wider than the pier, that rolls out across the ice in a long wave and keeps going, and going, and comes back a second and a half later, softer, from the trees on the far bank, so that for a moment there are two bells, one here and one there, answering each other across the frozen river.

**ILINCA (narrating):** The echo. From the far shore. I had not known it would do that. He had. He stood there with the mallet hanging from his hand and listened to it come back to him, and the eleven people from the street stood behind us without moving, and when the last of it was gone, Lyubov Andreyevna, who had followed us all the way from the banya in her felt boots, said: "That's Fyodor's bell. I'd know it anywhere. I crossed to my own wedding under that bell."

**SOUND:** A second stroke. A third. Slow, every few seconds, the way their father taught them. Each one rolling out and coming back. Under it, the ice singing.

**KOSTYA (quietly, between strokes):** So the far shore knows.

---

**SOUND:** The house. The stove. The samovar ticking as it cools. A cell phone on a table, speaker on, ringing out, foreign, faint.

**ILINCA (narrating):** That night, after the perch, which he fried in butter with nothing but salt, I asked if I could call her. He said nothing. He didn't say no. I dialed the delta and put the phone on the oilcloth between us, next to the jam, and my mother answered, and I said, *give her to me,* and then I slid the phone across the table to him and went and stood by the stove.

**SOUND:** The phone. The delta kitchen, faint. A rustle. Then:

**RAISA (on the phone):** Ilinca? Where are you?

**SOUND:** Silence. The clock with the weights. Bulka's tail on the rug. Kostya clearing his throat, twice, the way a man starts an old engine.

**KOSTYA:** Raya.

**SOUND:** Nothing. Then, from very far, a small sound on the line, like a breath caught.

**RAISA (on the phone):** Kostya?

**KOSTYA:** It's me.

**RAISA (on the phone):** It's not New Year.

**KOSTYA:** No.

**RAISA (on the phone):** It's not my birthday.

**KOSTYA:** No. It's February. It's minus fourteen. Your granddaughter is standing by my stove wearing Nadya's hat and pretending she isn't listening.

**RAISA (on the phone, a little laugh, astonished):** Is she?

**KOSTYA:** She is. She's got your ears. Ion's ears. She listens like a fox.

**ILINCA (narrating):** And they talked. Twenty-six minutes. I timed it, because I could not help it, standing by the stove with my back to them. About our mother's pies. About Semyonich, who was deaf as a post. About the hedgehog song. Then she asked him something, and his face changed.

**RAISA (on the phone):** Kostya. Ilinca says we... she says there was something. Between us. For a long time. That we were angry.

**KOSTYA:** Yes.

**RAISA (on the phone, slowly, troubled):** I don't know what it was. I've been trying. I lie in bed and I try. And it's gone. Isn't that terrible? I've lost what we were angry about. What was it?

**SOUND:** The clock. The stove. A very long silence on the line.

**ILINCA (narrating):** And my great-uncle, who had carried it for fifty-four years, from the corridor of a radio house in Minsk to a shed on the Volga, who had walked four kilometers through snow in a new hat without feeling his feet, sat at his kitchen table and began to laugh. Not loudly. His shoulders went first. Then his hand over his eyes. Then a sound came out of him that was a laugh and was not only a laugh, and he could not stop it, and I did not turn around.

**KOSTYA (when he can):** It was a hat, Raya. I didn't like your hat.

**RAISA (on the phone, laughing too now, without knowing why):** I never had a good hat. Mama always said.

**KOSTYA:** Mama was right.

**RAISA (on the phone):** Will you come? To the play? Ilinca says it's on the first. On the radio. Will you come and be in it?

**KOSTYA:** I have a passport. Nadya made me get one, in 2017, to see the warm sea. It's in the drawer with the hat.

**RAISA (on the phone):** Is that yes?

**KOSTYA:** It's a passport.

**RAISA (on the phone):** Bring the bell.

**SOUND:** Kostya lifting his head. Looking at Ilinca by the stove. Ilinca shaking her head: she did not tell her.

**KOSTYA:** How do you know I have the bell?

**RAISA (on the phone, simply):** Because you're you. You keep things. I lose them. That's always how it was.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Sixteen: The Goat Who Went to Find the End of the River

**SOUND:** The little room above the village shop. The spring-hinged door slapping. Florin's swivel chair. And something heavy being lifted onto a desk with a grunt: a big gray reel-to-reel tape deck, its lid hinged back, its metal bones creaking.

**FLORIN:** The school language lab. Nineteen eighty-two. Forty children repeating *the cat is on the table* in English. I saved it from the trash when they modernized. My wife, Mirela, said nobody would ever need it. I'm going to phone her afterward.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Tuesday, the twenty-fourth of February. I had come home on Monday night, two days on trains and buses with my great-uncle's tape box in my coat against my chest the whole way. My grandmother did not remember that I had been gone. She remembered Kostya's phone call, though. She told me about it at breakfast as if it were news, with her eyes shining, and said he was coming, and that he'd been angry about a hat.

**SOUND:** The deck switched on: a deep electrical thunk, a hum, a little green lamp glowing. Florin blowing dust off the heads.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Doina had made me promise, on the phone on Sunday, not to play it more than once before she arrived to copy it properly. Old tape, she said, is like an old person. It will do one big thing for you a day. Then it needs to rest. And she told me one more thing, from box four, a letter my grandfather wrote to himself in 1975 and filed with the refrigerator complaint: *Home machine. Erase head weak. Leaves ghosts. Must fix.* He never fixed it.

**SOUND:** The tape threaded by Ilinca, carefully, through the guides and past the heads, onto the empty take-up reel. A finger turning it twice. The room settling: Florin, Rodica, Costel, and Raisa, in the best chair, with a blanket on her knees and her hands folded on top of the little wooden door from her suitcase, which she had insisted on bringing.

**RAISA:** Why have I got the door?

**RODICA:** You wanted it, Mama.

**RAISA:** Then I'll keep it. Something might need to come in.

**FLORIN:** Red light?

**ILINCA:** Red light.

**SOUND:** The bulb over the door, in its wire cage, buzzing on. Then the switch on the deck. The reels beginning to turn. The hiss.

---

**SOUND:** On the tape, fifty-four years ago, a kitchen radio in Minsk, its speaker small and warm. Static clearing. A man's voice announcing the children's hour. Then, from a control room in 1971, live, the nai: Ion's theme, the sliding, rising tune, breathy and real, the actual breath of a man of twenty-eight.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My grandmother made a small sound. It was the only sound she made for thirty-seven minutes.

**YOUNG RAISA (on tape, twenty-five, the microphone voice):** On the Volga, at a town called Belaya Pristan, which means the white pier, there was a ferry called the *Volzhanka*...

**ILINCA (narrating):** It is the play we have heard, almost word for word: she had kept it nearly whole for fifty-four years and lost only the end. Zoya as the mother, shouting at the timber man. My grandmother's hand in a bowl of water in Minsk, making the Volga with her wrist. The boy at the wheel cracking in the middle of a word: she did it on the tape exactly as she did it at our kitchen table three weeks ago. And then the fog.

**YOUNG RAISA (on tape):** ...and the girl ran to the end of the pier where the bell was, and she rang it, all night, alone, every few seconds, until her hands went numb...

**ILINCA (narrating):** That word. Kostya's word. I looked at my grandmother. She was sitting very still with her eyes closed and her hands flat on the little door.

**YOUNG RAISA (on tape):** ...and very far off in the fog, so faint you thought you'd imagined it, an engine...

**SOUND:** On the tape, very faint, a page turning. Then the tiny scrape of paper lifted off a metal stand. Then a breath, taken in, by a young woman at a microphone looking at a door.

**YOUNG RAISA (on tape):** But listen...

**SOUND:** A sudden harsh click on the tape. A jump in the room tone. And then, very loud, very close to a microphone, a small boy's voice, breathless with importance, starting to sing. He is flat. He is wonderfully, confidently flat.

**YOUNG TUDOR (on tape, seven, singing):** *Oh, the little gray goat went into the forest, went into the forest to find the end of the river...*

**SOUND:** Florin, unable to stop himself, a snort. Costel's laugh through his nose. Rodica saying "oh no, oh no." The child singing on and on.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Nine verses. The little gray goat asks a fox, and a hedgehog, and a bear, and an old woman with a bucket, where the river ends. They all send him further. He walks for days. In the last verse he comes to the sea, and he stands on the shore and he says, so this is where it ends, and the sea says, no, little goat, this is where it begins. My uncle Tudor sang all of it, at seven years old, in 1977, in a kitchen in Minsk, over the last three minutes of his mother's only play.

**SOUND:** The goat song finishing. A child's loud satisfied breath. A pause. A key, faintly, in a door. The child's gasp. A thump, a click, and then nothing: the tape running on, empty, hiss, hiss, hiss.

**SOUND:** Florin stopping the deck. The reels slowing. The red lamp still buzzing.

---

**ILINCA (narrating):** Nobody said anything. Then my grandmother opened her eyes, and looked at all of us, and said, in a perfectly ordinary voice:

**RAISA:** That's Tudor. He always sang flat.

**SOUND:** A moment of silence. Then Rodica laughing, helplessly, the laugh that is half crying. Costel, too. Florin wiping his eyes with the end of his scarf. And Raisa laughing with them, though she isn't certain why, and stroking the little wooden door on her knees.

**RAISA:** Oh. Oh, wait.

**ILINCA:** What?

**RAISA (slowly, finding it):** Papa. On the telephone. A New Year. Ion was playing it to him down the line, the way he did every year, and at the end Papa laughed and laughed. Ion held the phone out so I could hear. Papa said, *Raya, there's a goat in your play now.* And Ion put his finger to his lips and looked at Tudor's door. And I never asked. I never asked what he meant.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It had come up from the bottom, the way she says, like the light over the reeds. Not the ending. A New Year's Eve in 1977, a laughing ferryman on a crackling telephone line, and my grandfather putting his finger to his lips. She was so pleased to have found it that she asked Florin for a pencil and wrote it in her green notebook. *Papa. The goat. Ion knew.*

**SOUND:** Rodica's phone, dialing. Ringing. Minsk.

**TUDOR (on the phone, wary):** Rodica? Is everything all right?

**RODICA:** We found your goat.

**SOUND:** Silence from Minsk.

**TUDOR (on the phone, very small):** No.

**RAISA (leaning toward the phone, delighted):** Tudor! You were flat!

**TUDOR (on the phone):** Mama, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know it was yours. I didn't...

**RAISA:** Papa knew. Ion knew. Nobody minded. It's a good song. The goat finds the sea.

**TUDOR (on the phone, after a long time):** He knew?

**RAISA:** He knew, and he gave it to Kostya anyway, with you on the end. That's the kind of man he was. He'd rather have your goat than my ending. And so would I. Now come on Thursday and bring Tanya and the strings.

---

**SOUND:** Later. The room above the shop, emptier. Florin downstairs, the shop bell. Ilinca alone with the deck, headphones on. The tape rewound a short way: a squeal, a stop. Played again, very quietly. The goat song, faint. And Ilinca's breathing, close.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I promised Doina I would play it only once. I broke the promise for eleven seconds. Between the third and the fourth verses of the goat, my uncle at seven stopped to breathe, a big gulping breath, and in that breath, under it, so faint I thought at first it was the blood in my own ears, there was something else. Not a word. The shape of a word. A voice, very far off, as if from the far side of a frozen river. A ghost, left by a weak erase head that a careful man never got round to fixing.

**SOUND:** Ilinca stopping the tape. Sitting back. The chair creaking. The red lamp buzzing over the door.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I didn't tell anyone. Not my mother, not Florin, not my grandmother, who had gone home to sleep with the wooden door in her arms. I sent one message, to Chișinău. *There's someone under the goat. Bring your gloves.*

**SOUND:** The phone. Almost at once, a reply chime.

**ILINCA (reading):** *Of course there is. He never fixed anything. Thursday. Don't touch it.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Seventeen: Eleven at the Table

**SOUND:** A small car on a rutted frozen track, its suspension clanking. Reeds hissing along both sides. The car stopping. A door. A second door, opening more slowly, and an old man's boots finding the ground with care. A dog is not here; Bulka has stayed with a neighbor on the Volga. Instead, the guesthouse gate: blue, wooden, its latch lifted.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Thursday, the twenty-sixth of February, two in the afternoon. My great-uncle had come from the Volga in two days of trains to Chișinău, been fed eleven plăcinte in one evening at Silvia's, and been driven down to the delta this morning by Doina in her small green car, with Silvia in the back seat holding a covered dish on her knees for four hours. And in the trunk, wrapped in two blankets and a sheepskin, the *Volzhanka*'s bell.

**SOUND:** Footsteps on the path. The gate's latch. Then another door: the house door, opening. And a pair of slippers on the porch, stopping.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My grandmother had been told every hour since breakfast that her brother was coming. Every hour she had been surprised and glad. At two o'clock she was standing on the porch in her good cardigan, holding on to the post with one hand. He came up the path with his stick, in the sheepskin coat and the fur hat with the flaps, and stopped at the bottom of the three steps and looked up at her.

**SOUND:** The reeds. A gull, far off. Nothing else.

**RAISA:** You're old.

**KOSTYA:** You're older.

**RAISA:** I'm younger. By four years. I've always been younger.

**KOSTYA:** Not today.

**ILINCA (narrating):** They had not been in the same place since 1994, at their mother's funeral, on the Volga. Thirty-two years. He climbed the three steps, slowly, and she let go of the post, and they stood on the porch and held on to each other's elbows, the way you hold on to someone on ice, and neither of them said anything at all, and then she took his hat off his head, and looked at it, and put it back on him crooked.

**RAISA:** That's a terrible hat.

**KOSTYA:** It's the same one.

**RAISA:** I know. I remember it.

---

**SOUND:** Evening. The guesthouse kitchen, full. Every chair in the house brought in, and the bench from the porch. Pots on every ring of the stove. A dozen conversations at once in three languages. The Minsk family arrived an hour ago off the bus from Tulcea, cold and loud: Tanya's tsymbaly case being set down carefully in a corner, Ales asking where the swing is, Tudor saying this is a delta, there is no swing.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Eleven of us at one table. My mother and father. My grandmother at the head of it, and her brother at her right hand. Tudor, Tanya and Ales. Doina, Silvia. Florin, who came for one glass of tea and stayed for the fish. And me. On the laptop, propped against the bread basket, Zoya in Minsk, in her purple cardigan under her straw spider, eating draniki at the same time as us so she wouldn't feel left out.

**SOUND:** A great tureen set down. The ladle. Fish soup, my father's: the sour broth, the carp, the pike, lovage. Silvia's plăcinte unwrapped from their cloth, still faintly warm from four hours on her knees. Tanya's lingonberries. Bread. Kostya sniffing the soup.

**KOSTYA:** What's in it?

**COSTEL:** Fish.

**KOSTYA:** What fish?

**COSTEL:** All of them.

**KOSTYA:** Good.

**ILINCA (narrating):** That was the whole of the first conversation between my father and my great-uncle, and it was enough. By the second bowl they were discussing outboard motors with their hands.

---

**SOUND:** Later. Bowls pushed aside. Glasses of tea. The reed roof, in the wind. Ilinca tapping a spoon on a glass, three times.

**ILINCA:** We have a play with no ending.

**DOINA:** We have a play with a goat for an ending.

**TUDOR:** Please.

**ILINCA:** On Sunday at seven we go on the air. The beginning is Bunica's. The middle is Bunica's. And the end... Bunica doesn't have it. The tape doesn't have it. So we have to make it. Tonight. Together.

**ILINCA (narrating):** And they all started talking at once. Doina said we should be honest and tell the listeners the ending was lost, that it was more interesting that way, that an archive is not ashamed of its gaps. Tanya said music, the ending should be music, Ion's tune on the strings and nothing else. Ales said a twist, the goat should turn out to be the ferryman in disguise. Florin said the listeners in eleven villages would want the boat to come home, at minimum, or they'd ring him all week. Silvia said there should be food. Zoya, from the laptop, said the wolf should come back. My mother said she'd do whatever Mama wanted. My father said nothing, and ate a plăcinta.

**SOUND:** The voices overlapping, louder, cheerful, arguing. Then, under them, a single spoon on a glass: slow, steady, every few seconds. Kostya, ringing for quiet the way a ferryman would ring for fog.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It took nine strokes. By the ninth even Zoya had stopped.

**KOSTYA:** May I say how it was?

**ILINCA:** Please.

**KOSTYA:** Not how it should be in the play. How it was. Then you can do what you like.

**ILINCA (narrating):** And he told it, at our kitchen table, to all of us, exactly as he had told it to a hole in the ice: the fever, the window going white, the mittens frozen to the rope, the whole night at the bell with her singing beside him in his coat, the soup at midnight, the furious goat, and their father carrying her home asleep.

**SOUND:** Only his voice, and the stove, and the reed roof. Nobody eats. Nobody drinks.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My grandmother listened to all of it with her chin on her hand. She did not interrupt once. She did not correct him. When he had finished she sat for a long time looking at him, and then she said a thing I had not heard her say about anything in the three weeks since the doctor in Tulcea.

**RAISA:** Thank you.

**KOSTYA:** For what?

**RAISA:** I remember the rope. I remember my hands. And then I remember waking up in my bed with Mama putting goose fat on my fingers. And in between there was nothing. For sixty years there's been nothing, a hole, like a hole in the ice. And now there's a brother in it. Singing. No, I was singing. You were ringing. There's a brother in it. Thank you for putting him back.

**SOUND:** Kostya's chair. He doesn't answer. He takes his glass of tea and holds it with both hands.

---

**TANYA (gently, after a while):** Then that's the ending.

**DOINA:** Two at the bell.

**FLORIN:** And the boat comes home. For the eleven villages.

**SILVIA:** And soup. At midnight. In a can.

**ALES:** And the goat is furious.

**TUDOR (quietly):** And then the other goat.

**ILINCA:** What?

**TUDOR:** My goat. The song. The goat walks all the way down the river to find where it ends, and he gets to the sea, and the sea says, this is where it begins. Look where we are. This house. This is where the Volga's daughter came. Where the river meets the sea. Papa left my song on the end of her play for fifty years. Maybe he knew something.

**SOUND:** Silence. The reeds. Then, very softly, Tanya opening the tsymbaly case in the corner, and a single string touched with a hammer: one silver note.

**RAISA (slowly):** The ferryman's daughter grows old by the sea. And her brother brings the bell. And the children sing the goat.

**KOSTYA:** In tune.

**RAISA:** In tune, if possible.

**ILINCA (narrating):** We wrote it that night, all eleven of us, and Zoya, on the backs of my mother's guesthouse menus, because they were the only paper in the house. Doina wrote it out fair at the end in her archive hand. And I sat with my pencil and did not tell any of them that in Florin's room above the shop, at that moment, in a tin box with a lamp and a thermometer, Doina's traveling oven was very gently warming fifty-four-year-old tape, and that by Saturday, if it held, we might hear who was under the goat.

**SOUND:** Pencils on paper. Tea poured. And far away across the delta, the faint hum of the transmitter above the shop, where a red lamp is not yet on.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Eighteen: Ghosts

**SOUND:** A flat-bottomed wooden boat on a narrow channel, an outboard motor puttering low. At the bow, a thin skin of ice breaking as the boat noses through it: a long crisp tinkling crackle, like a sheet of glass being folded. Reeds, taller than a man, hissing past on both sides.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Friday, the twenty-seventh of February, nine in the morning. My father took my grandmother and her brother out into the delta in his boat, and I went in the bow with the microphone. My grandmother in the middle seat in two coats and a blanket, with a hot water bottle in her lap. My great-uncle in the stern, beside my father, watching his hands on the tiller with the expression of a man who has been asked to sit still in someone else's kitchen.

**SOUND:** The motor's note changing as Costel throttles back. Water chuckling along the hull. And, from somewhere ahead, a heavy splashing run and a great creaking of wings: swans taking off from a lagoon, six of them, honking.

**KOSTYA:** Your motor's running rich.

**COSTEL:** I know.

**KOSTYA:** You could lean it a quarter turn.

**COSTEL:** It likes it rich. In the cold.

**SOUND:** A pause. The motor. Then Kostya's short grunt, which Ilinca has learned is agreement.

**ILINCA (narrating):** The delta in February is all gray and gold and silver. The reeds have been cut along some channels and stand in sheaves on the banks, tied, waiting for spring and the roofers. In others they still stand, dry and pale, rattling. The lagoons between are wide and flat and the color of pewter, with cormorants standing on posts holding their wings out to dry like old coats on a line, and in the distance, everywhere, the low line of willows and the enormous sky. There is no sound in it bigger than a bird.

**RAISA:** Kostya. Look. It's all water and no shore.

**KOSTYA:** There's shore. You just can't see it. It's under the reeds.

**RAISA:** That's what Papa would say.

**KOSTYA:** That's what any pilot would say. But yes.

**SOUND:** The boat drifting, motor cut. Water lapping. A cormorant somewhere, a hoarse croak. The reeds.

**ILINCA (narrating):** My father let the boat drift into the middle of a lagoon and stopped there, and we sat in the cold for a long time doing nothing. Then my grandmother put her hand over the side, and into the water, and moved it in a slow circle, from the wrist.

**RAISA:** Listen. It's the same.

**KOSTYA:** It's not the Volga.

**RAISA:** It is. It's the end of it. Or the beginning. Tudor's goat says.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It isn't, of course. The Volga goes to a different sea. But my great-uncle, who has piloted boats down every kilometer of it, opened his mouth to say so, and looked at his sister's hand in the water, and closed it again. Then he reached over the side himself, with his big cracked hand, and did the same.

**SOUND:** Two hands in the water, circling. Two wrists, one slow, one slower.

---

**SOUND:** The kitchen. Afternoon. A rehearsal, chaotic. The suitcase of weather open on the table and its contents being handed round. Ales trying the gloves for birds and producing a sound like a wet umbrella. The starch bag. Tanya tuning a string. Rodica reading her lines under her breath.

**RAISA (from the head of the table, a director now, sharp and delighted):** Ales, you're a heron, not an umbrella. Slower. Lose your temper only a little. Rodica, my mother never whispered in her life. Kostya, you're the ferryman.

**KOSTYA:** I'm not an actor.

**RAISA:** You're not acting. You're Papa. You have his voice. You've had it since you were forty. Say the line.

**KOSTYA (stiffly):** Raya. Ring us in.

**RAISA:** No. He didn't say it like an order. He said it like a favor. Again.

**KOSTYA (after a moment, lower, and gentler, and so much like the voice my father had found three weeks ago that my mother looked up from her script):** Raya. Ring us in.

**RAISA (very quietly):** Yes. That's him.

**ILINCA (narrating):** We cast it in an hour. My grandmother narrates, as she did in 1971. My great-uncle plays his father. Ales plays my great-uncle at fourteen and at twenty, and cracks beautifully, because he says he never stopped. I play my grandmother as a girl. My mother plays her grandmother, the pie woman. Tudor plays his father at the desk; Tanya plays the theme. Doina does the fog, Silvia the soup at midnight, my father the engine, and Florin the red lamp.

---

**SOUND:** The room above the shop. Saturday, the twenty-eighth. Morning. The deck, warm, humming. Doina's breath behind a paper mask. The tape, baked for a day and a half in her makeshift oven, a tin box with a lamp in it and a thermometer taped to the side, being threaded with gloved fingers, slowly, through the guides.

**DOINA:** One pass. One. If it starts shedding, I stop, and that's it, whatever's under there stays under there. Agreed?

**ILINCA:** Agreed.

**DOINA:** I'm copying it to the computer as it plays. Then we can look at the ghosts all day without touching the tape again. Ready?

**SOUND:** The switch. The reels. The hiss. The goat song from 1977, faint in Ilinca's headphones, and the scratching of Doina's pencil on a pad, noting times.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It held. Thirty-nine minutes and forty seconds, all of it, the play and the goat and the empty hiss at the end, onto Doina's laptop, and then she stopped the deck and took the tape off and put it in its box and put the box in a bag and put the bag in her coat, and only then did she sit down and breathe.

**DOINA:** Now. Show me your ghost.

**SOUND:** A laptop. Keys. Then the goat song, played back from the computer, enormously loud and then quiet as Doina adjusts. Then, slowed, filtered, the little boy's voice pushed down and down until it is a far mumble, and under it the room tone of a kitchen in 1977, and under that, in the gaps where the boy breathed, something else.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Doina is very good at this. I am good. She is better. She took every place where my uncle stopped singing, nine breaths, two giggles and one long pause where he forgot the bear's verse, and cut them out and laid them side by side, and lifted what was underneath, the faint residue of my grandmother's voice that a weak erase head had left behind like a pencil drawing someone tried to rub out. It took four hours. Silvia came up the stairs twice with food and was sent away twice and came a third time and was not.

**SOUND:** A fragment, played, almost nothing: a breath, a woman's voice far away saying half a word. Another fragment. Another. Doina's pencil. Doina whispering, "again." Then all of them together, laid end to end, and a voice, faint as the far bank, saying something.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I am not going to write down here what she said. It was not much. Two sentences, broken in three places, the gaps filled with hiss. But it was the ending, or the heart of it. And I knew, when I heard it, that it did not belong to me, or to Doina, or even to the family. It belonged to one person, who had heard everything else on that tape in a corridor in 1971, and had walked down a stone staircase before the end.

**DOINA (quietly, taking off her mask):** Well.

**ILINCA:** Well.

**DOINA:** Do we tell them?

**ILINCA:** We tell them tomorrow. At seven. On the air.

**DOINA:** Your grandmother will be furious. She hates surprises.

**ILINCA:** She'll have forgotten by Monday.

**DOINA:** That's a terrible thing to say.

**ILINCA:** She'd say it.

**DOINA (after a moment, laughing, wiping her eyes with a gloved finger):** She would. She'd say it first.

**SOUND:** Florin coming up the steep stairs by the rope, puffing. The door slapping. The red lamp's switch, tested: on, buzzing; off.

**FLORIN:** Well? Anything?

**DOINA:** A goat.

**FLORIN:** I know about the goat. The whole village knows about the goat. Mirela told the woman at the bakery. People are already asking if the goat is in the broadcast.

**ILINCA:** The goat is in the broadcast.

**FLORIN:** Thank goodness. I've promised it to eleven villages.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Nineteen: The First of March

**SOUND:** Early morning in the delta. Birds, more of them than in February: something small and quarrelsome in the reeds, a lapwing's thin cry, and high overhead, very faint, a skein of geese going north. A door. Slippers on a porch.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Sunday, the first of March. Spring, by the calendar, though nobody had told the channel, which still had its skin of ice in the morning. By seven the whole house was awake, which in a house with eleven people and one bathroom is less a decision than a siege. I went in to my grandmother with her tea.

**SOUND:** A bedroom. A cup set on a bedside table, beside a folded paper. A curtain drawn back. The paper unfolded.

**RAISA (reading, slow, sleepy):** *Ilinca. The play. Don't be gentle.* Who wrote this?

**ILINCA:** You did.

**RAISA:** Oh. Me. What play?

**ILINCA (narrating):** And so I told her again, for the twenty-second time, sitting on the end of her bed. *The Ferryman's Daughter.* Florin and the red lamp. Kostya, here, in the next room, snoring like an outboard motor running rich. Tonight, at seven. Every morning she has looked at me with the same face while I told her, polite and puzzled, the face of someone being told an interesting thing about a stranger. And every morning, at some point, it has come up into her eyes from the bottom. This morning it came at *Kostya*.

**RAISA:** He's here?

**ILINCA:** Since Thursday.

**RAISA:** In this house?

**ILINCA:** In the blue room. With the bell.

**SOUND:** The bedclothes thrown back. Raisa's feet finding her slippers. Her voice changing, quick and pleased.

**RAISA:** Then why am I in bed? Get my good cardigan. No, the other one. The one with the buttons that look like sweets.

---

**SOUND:** The kitchen. A shoebox lid. Thread. Silvia's voice, brisk, commanding, and a line of people being processed through it like customers through a market stall.

**SILVIA:** Arm. Other arm. Hold still. There. Next.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Silvia's mărțișor, all forty, and my eleven, and Doina's tiny one. On the first of March you give them to people you love, and pin them on their coats, over the heart, and they wear them until they see the first stork, or the first tree in blossom, and then they hang them on a branch. Silvia gave them out at the kitchen door to everyone who passed. Ales pinned his to his tram badge. Zoya got one in an envelope, mailed to Minsk, which she won't receive until Thursday, and was told about on the laptop, and pretended to be pinned.

**SOUND:** On the laptop, from Minsk, Zoya's enormous voice: "It's beautiful! I'll wear it to the bathhouse!"

**ILINCA (narrating):** And then Doina took out her envelope, *For the Volga*, and went and stood in front of my great-uncle where he sat at the table with his tea.

**DOINA:** This is yours.

**KOSTYA:** What is it?

**DOINA:** Spring. You pin it here.

**KOSTYA:** I'm too old for spring.

**DOINA:** Nobody is too old for spring. That's the whole point of it. Hold still.

**SOUND:** A tiny pin through heavy wool, with some effort. Kostya's breath through his nose. Then, after a moment, a drawer opening, in his own pocket: a hand fumbling in a coat.

**KOSTYA (gruffly):** Here. Since we're... Here.

**ILINCA (narrating):** He held out his hand to my grandmother. In the palm was something small and gray and tarnished, a little handbell, the size of a thimble's grandfather, with a wooden handle worn pale. My grandmother looked at it. She did not take it. She put her hand over her mouth.

**RAISA:** That's the hare.

**KOSTYA:** You left it at the house in 1979. After the funeral. On the windowsill in your old room. I thought you'd come back for it. Then I thought you'd write. Then I put it in a drawer in the house.

**RAISA:** Matvei's bell.

**KOSTYA:** I don't know who Matvei is. It's a bell. It's been in a drawer for forty-seven years waiting for a hand.

**SOUND:** The little bell lifted. A tiny, bright, quick ring, twice: the hare escaping. And around the table, eleven people who had all, at one time or another in the last three weeks, heard about this bell, and none of whom had ever expected to hear it.

**RAISA (in the hare's voice, very small):** Oh, not the wolf. Not today.

**ZOYA (from the laptop, instantly, a growl):** Little hare. Little hare.

---

**SOUND:** Afternoon. The house getting quieter in the particular way of a house before something. A pot of potatoes on the stove for later. Rehearsal pages being shuffled. The reed roof. The channel outside, the ice gone now, water moving.

**ILINCA (narrating):** At four o'clock my grandmother went to lie down for an hour, as she does, and I went in at five to wake her, and she was not asleep. She was lying on top of the covers in the good cardigan with the hare bell in one hand and the green notebook in the other, and she had been crying, and she was not sad.

**RAISA:** I've lost it again.

**ILINCA:** What?

**RAISA:** The play. I had it at lunch. I know it's tonight. I know Kostya's here. I know the bell. But I lay here and I tried to say the beginning and it isn't there. On the Volga. At a town. A town called... and then nothing. Like the fog. What if it's like that tonight? What if I'm in front of the red lamp and everyone in eleven villages is listening and Zoya is listening and it just goes? What if I stand there with my mouth open?

**SOUND:** The bedsprings as Ilinca sits. The clock in the hall.

**ILINCA (narrating):** I could have told her it would be all right. I didn't know that. I could have told her not to worry. That is the thing people say when they want you to stop telling them about it. Instead I did what Silvia taught me, and Kostya taught me without meaning to, and what she taught me herself, a long time ago, at a kitchen table, with a bowl of water. I said it back to her. The true one.

**ILINCA:** You're afraid you'll lose it in front of everyone. And they'll see.

**RAISA:** Yes.

**ILINCA:** And that's never happened before. In two hundred plays.

**RAISA:** Never. Not once. Matvei said a good actor can be dying and still hit her cue.

**ILINCA:** But Bunica. Who's in the room tonight?

**SOUND:** Raisa not answering. Then the faintest ring of the little bell as her hand moves.

**ILINCA:** Kostya's in the room. He's at the bell. Rodica's the mother. I'm you. Ales is him. Tudor's at the desk. Tanya's got the tune. Doina's got the fog, and the whole script in her archive hand, and she's never lost a page in her life. If you go into the fog, we'll ring. That's the play. That's the whole play. Nobody on that pier is alone.

**ILINCA (narrating):** She looked at me for a long time with her river-water eyes. Then she sat up, and put the green notebook in her cardigan pocket and the hare bell in the other one, and swung her feet down, and said a thing she had said to me on the night of the seventh of February, which she did not remember saying, and which I did.

**RAISA:** My rules. Every sound by hand.

**ILINCA:** Every voice is family.

**RAISA:** Each house brings its own sound.

**ILINCA:** And we put it on the air.

**SOUND:** Raisa standing. Slippers on the floor. The bedroom door. Then, from the kitchen, faint, the whole family's voices, and the clock striking half past five.

**RAISA:** Get my coat. The one that looks like a ferry.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Reel Twenty: On the Air

**SOUND:** A steep wooden staircase, and a great many feet on it, slowly. A rope on a wall, creaking as hands pull on it. Breathing. Someone saying *mind the bell, mind the bell.* Outside, below, the murmur of a crowd in the cold: forty or fifty people in the street by the landing stage, stamping their feet, transistor radios in their pockets, a child asking if it has started yet.

**ILINCA (narrating):** Sunday, the first of March, six fifty-two in the evening. Radio Delta Mică, the room above the shop, built for one man and a microphone, now holding eleven people, a tsymbaly on a stand, a suitcase of weather open on a stool, a laptop with a telephone line patched into the desk so that Zoya in Minsk can hear and be heard, and a bowl of water. The *Volzhanka*'s bell would not fit through the door. It stands on its oak frame on the landing at the top of the stairs, with my great-uncle beside it on a kitchen chair, the leather mallet across his knees, where he can see my grandmother through the open door and she can see him.

**FLORIN (low):** Three minutes. Quiet now. Mirela, I can hear you downstairs.

**MIRELA (from the street, unrepentant):** Good!

**ILINCA (narrating):** My grandmother sat at the microphone in her coat that looks like a ferry, a dark green wool with white piping at the collar, and the hare bell in her lap, and the green notebook, and Doina's fair copy of the script on the stand in front of her. Her hand was on the edge of the bowl. She did not look at the script. She looked at the bulb over the door in its wire cage.

**FLORIN:** One minute.

**ZOYA (on the line from Minsk, enormous even at a whisper):** Break a leg, Raya.

**RAISA:** You first.

**SOUND:** Florin's switch. The transmitter's hum lifting half a tone. And the red lamp buzzing on, the same buzz that has been under this whole production from the start, now over a door that eleven people are standing behind.

---

**FLORIN (into the microphone, in his school voice, warm and formal):** Good evening, eleven villages. It is seven o'clock on the first of March, and you are listening to Radio Delta Mică. Tonight, for the first time on this station and the second time anywhere, a radio play, live, by the family of the house with the blue gate. Written by Raisa Fyodorovna Lungu, of Belaya Pristan, Minsk, Chișinău and Gura Stufului. *The Ferryman's Daughter.*

**MUSIC:** The tsymbaly. Ion's tune, the sliding rising melody, shivering on the long notes under Tanya's hammers, bright and silver in the tiny room. It rises and turns and fades.

**SOUND:** A hand enters a bowl of water and moves it in a slow circle, from the wrist.

**RAISA (the microphone voice, low and sure, as it was at twenty-five):** On the Volga, at a town called Belaya Pristan, which means the white pier...

**ILINCA (narrating):** And she was there. For thirty-one minutes she was entirely there. The kiosk shutter went up under my mother's hands. My father made the engine in his throat and Ales threw the rope, a real rope, onto the floorboards, and cracked in the middle of *Papa*. My great-uncle on the landing said *the river will know* in his father's voice, and down in the street somebody said *ah* out loud. Silvia, by the window, fed a ten-year-old girl a pie and was heard eating it. The man from the timber yard got egg and onion. The fog came down the river in Doina's breath, long and white, and the room went still.

**RAISA:** ...and then came the night of the fog, Friday, the sixteenth of November, 1962, the last crossing of the year, and the whole town on the pier with lamps, and the girl ran to the end where the bell was...

**SOUND:** The bowl of water. Raisa's hand stops in it.

**RAISA:** ...and the girl...

**SOUND:** Nothing. The transmitter hum. The red lamp buzzing. A breath taken, and not used.

**RAISA (very quietly, her own voice, not the microphone one):** The girl.

**ILINCA (narrating):** It went. I watched it go. Exactly as she had said it would on her bed at five o'clock: out like a lamp. She sat with her mouth a little open and her hand in the still water, and looked at the script as if it were written in a language she had never learned. Five seconds. Seven. On the radio, seven seconds is a very long time. In the street below, someone's transistor crackled, and somebody shushed it.

**SOUND:** From the landing, a leather mallet on brass. One stroke. The *Volzhanka*'s bell, huge and golden in the stairwell, rolling down the steep stairs and out of the door into the street and across the channel, and coming back, a second and a half later, softer, from the willows on the far side of the water.

**ANTONINA (Rodica, at once, sharp and loving, a mother calling across a pier):** Raya! The bell!

**YOUNG RAISA (Ilinca, quick, sixteen, frightened):** I'm going, Mama! I'm ringing it!

**SOUND:** The bell again. And again, slow, steady, every few seconds, the way their father taught them.

**ILINCA (narrating):** And she came back. I saw it. It came up from the bottom, the way the light comes over the reeds. On the third stroke of the bell she lifted her chin. On the fourth she took her hand out of the water. On the fifth she was the narrator again, as if she had never stopped.

**RAISA (the microphone voice):** ...and the girl rang it, every few seconds, until her mittens froze to the rope. Two hours. Alone. Until her brother came.

**SOUND:** Feet on boards, running: Ales, in Kostya's old coat, on the floor of the tiny room. A boy of twenty with a fever, breathing hard.

**YOUNG KOSTYA (Ales):** Raya. Raya, give it to me.

**YOUNG RAISA (Ilinca):** I can't. I can't open my hands.

**SOUND:** Thumbs on frozen wool: Ilinca's own mittens, which Doina has soaked in water and left on the windowsill since five, cracking in Ales's fingers.

**YOUNG KOSTYA:** There. There. Sit down. Here. Put my coat on. I've got it.

**SOUND:** The bell, now in his rhythm, steady, unhurried. And a girl's voice beside it, thin and cracked with cold, singing: the hedgehog song from the children's hour, in English, a little tune that goes round and round about leaves in a burrow. It goes round three times.

**RAISA (the microphone voice, under the singing):** All night. He rang, and she sang. Their mother came at midnight with soup in a can.

**SOUND:** Silvia, at the window, a spoon in a can. Eleven villages, hearing a woman of seventy-four feed soup to a girl of sixteen across sixty-four years.

**RAISA (the microphone voice):** And at six in the morning the fog came off the river like a blanket pulled from a bed, and there she was. The *Volzhanka*. Nose a little upstream. Nine passengers, and a cart, and a goat, and the goat was furious.

**SOUND:** Costel, a diesel engine, close and rumbling and throttling down. A rope on boards. And a goat, made by Ales, in fury. In the street, laughter, a great warm gust of it.

**FYODOR (Kostya, from the landing, low and gentle, not an order, a favor):** Raya. Ring us in.

**SOUND:** In the room, a tiny bright handbell, the hare's, rung twice in Raisa's lap. And on the landing, at the same moment, the ship's bell, once. The two of them together, small and great, and the echo coming back from the far shore of the channel, for a moment, as if there were four.

---

**RAISA (the microphone voice, slowing):** The ferryman's daughter went away to the city to be a voice. Her brother stayed and kept the boat. She did a hundred hares and a thousand rivers with her wrist, and he piloted the big boats all the way to the sea and back. And when she was old, she came to live where a river meets the sea, in a house with a reed roof. And one winter her brother came down the whole length of the river, with the bell.

**ILINCA (narrating):** That was the ending we wrote on the backs of my mother's menus. Tudor stood up at the desk. Tanya lifted her hammers. And all of us, the grandchildren, Ales and Doina and me, with my mother and Tudor, who had been told he could join in if he stayed in tune, sang the last verse of the goat.

**MUSIC:** Voices, not good, all together, and in tune, nearly, over the tsymbaly: the little gray goat comes to the sea at last and says *so this is where it ends*, and the sea says *no, little goat, this is where it begins.*

**SOUND:** The last note. Tanya's tremolo, hanging. Fading.

**ILINCA (narrating):** By the script, that was the end. Florin's hand was on the switch for the lamp. I put my hand over his. And I leaned to the microphone and said one thing, in my own voice, the only line in the whole play that I wrote alone.

**ILINCA (on the air):** One more sound. From Minsk, on the twenty-sixth of December 1971. Recorded off the air in a kitchen by Ion Lungu. Found this week underneath a goat.

**SOUND:** Doina, at the laptop, touching one key. A hiss, wide and soft and fifty-four years deep, filling the little room and going out across the delta. And in it, very faint, broken by gaps, as if from the far bank of a frozen river, a young woman's voice. Twenty-five. Looking at a door.

**YOUNG RAISA (on tape, 1971, broken):** But listen... she was not alone... her brother came down the pier... took the rope out of her hands... and he rang until morning, and she... Somebody always comes... Ring it, children... so the far shore knows.

**SOUND:** The hiss. Then a soft click, the end of the fragment. Then the room. The transmitter. Nothing.

**ILINCA (narrating):** On the landing, my great-uncle had stood up. He was holding the mallet in one hand and the oak frame of the bell with the other, and he was looking through the door at his sister. In 1971 he walked down the stairs before that, with his hat in his hand. In 2026 he stood at the top of a different staircase and heard it.

**KOSTYA (not on the microphone, but the microphone hears him):** She said it.

**RAISA (turning in her chair, to him, simply, on the air):** Did I? Good. I'm glad I said it. I'd say it again.

**KOSTYA:** You just did.

**SOUND:** One stroke of the bell, soft, from a man whose eyes are full. Its echo from the far shore.

**ILINCA (narrating):** And Florin, with his hand still under mine on the switch, said into the microphone the line Zoya had given us, which I had told him over tea that week and which he had clearly been saving.

**FLORIN (on the air, gruffly):** Well. That's not what's in the script.

**ZOYA (down the line from Minsk, through tears, at the top of her voice):** No! It's better!

**SOUND:** The red lamp switching off: the buzz cut, and the tiny ping of the cooling filament. Then, from the street below, through the open window, something none of them had made by hand: forty or fifty people in the cold, clapping, and stamping, and somebody's dog joining in, and down in the shop the telephone beginning to ring, and ring, and ring.

---

**ILINCA (narrating):** That was the first of March. My grandmother does not remember it now. She remembers that Kostya came, and that he still has a terrible hat. She keeps the hare bell in her cardigan pocket and rings it when she wants tea. Every morning she reads the note by her bed, and every morning I tell her about the play, and on good days it comes up from the bottom before I have finished. The recording is in the family's private space, under her name and his, with the photograph from the corridor in 1971 beside it, and a pin on the map at the white pier, and another where the river meets the sea. Under it, one morning in March, a little line of text appeared that I had been waiting a long time to see. *Konstantin Sokolov listened.*

**SOUND:** A bowl of water, set on a wooden table. A hand going into it, a young hand this time, moving it in a slow circle, from the wrist.

**ILINCA (narrating):** She gave me the suitcase. Every sound by hand. I am practicing the river.

**SOUND:** Water, circling. Slower. Slower. And far off, faint and golden, from the far shore, a bell.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.