پرده ی چهارم 8-4

ACT FOUR, SCENE FOUR

MINISTRY OF MAGIC, HARRY’S OFFICE

HARRY is hurriedly going through paperwork.

DUMBLEDORE: Good evening, Harry.

A beat. HARRY looks up at the portrait of DUMBLEDORE, his face passive.

HARRY: Professor Dumbledore, in my office, I’m honored. I must be where the action is tonight?

DUMBLEDORE: What are you doing?

HARRY: Going through papers, seeing if I’ve missed anything I shouldn’t have. Marshaling forces to fight in the limited way we can fight. Knowing that the battle is being raged far away from us.

What else can I do?

Pause. DUMBLEDORE says nothing.

Where have you been, Dumbledore?

DUMBLEDORE: I’m here now.

HARRY: Here just as the battle is lost. Or are you denying that Voldemort is going to return.

DUMBLEDORE: It is — possible.

HARRY: Go. Leave. I don’t want you here, I don’t need you. You were absent every time it really counted. I fought him three times without you. I’ll face him again, if needs be — alone.

DUMBLEDORE: Harry, don’t you think I wanted to fight him on your behalf? I would have spared you if I could —

HARRY: “Love blinds us”? Do you even know what that means? Do you even know how bad that advice was? My son is — my son is fighting battles for us just as I had to for you. And I have proved as bad a father to him as you were to me. Leaving him in places he felt unloved — growing in him resentments he’ll take years to understand —

DUMBLEDORE: If you’re referring to Privet Drive, then — HARRY: Years — years I spent there alone, without knowing what I was, or why I was there, without knowing that anybody cared!

DUMBLEDORE: I — did not wish to become attached to you — HARRY: Protecting yourself, even then!

DUMBLEDORE: No. I was protecting you. I did not want to hurt you . . . DUMBLEDORE attempts to reach out of the portrait — but he can’t. He begins to cry but tries to hide it.

But I had to meet you in the end . . . eleven years old, and you were so brave. So good. You walked uncomplainingly along the path that had been laid at your feet. Of course I loved you . . . and I knew that it would happen all over again . . . that where I loved, I would cause irreparable damage. I am no fit person to love . . . I have never loved without causing harm.

A beat.

HARRY: You would have hurt me less if you had told me this then.

DUMBLEDORE (openly weeping now): I was blind. That is what love does. I couldn’t see that you needed to hear that this closed-up, tricky, dangerous old man . . . loved you.

A pause. The two men are overcome with emotion.

HARRY: It isn’t true that I never complained.

DUMBLEDORE: Harry, there is never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe.

HARRY: You said that to me once before.

DUMBLEDORE: It is all I have to offer you tonight.

He begins to walk away.

HARRY: Don’t go!

DUMBLEDORE: Those that we love never truly leave us, Harry. There are things that death cannot touch.

Paint . . . and memory . . . and love.

HARRY: I loved you too, Dumbledore.

DUMBLEDORE: I know.

He is gone. And HARRY is alone. DRACO enters.

DRACO: Did you know that in this other reality — the reality Scorpius saw into — I was Head of Magical Law Enforcement? Maybe this room will be mine soon enough. Are you okay?

HARRY is consumed in his grief.

HARRY: Come in — I’ll give you the tour.

DRACO walks hesitantly inside the room. He looks around distastefully.

DRACO: The thing is, though — never really fancied being a Ministry man. Even as a child. My dad, it’s all he ever wanted — me, no.

HARRY: What did you want to do?

DRACO: Quidditch. But I wasn’t good enough. Mainly I wanted to be happy.

HARRY nods. DRACO looks at him a second more.

Sorry, I’m not very good at small talk, do you mind if we skip on to the serious business?

HARRY: Of course. What — serious — business?

Beat.

DRACO: Do you think Theodore Nott had the only Time-Turner?

HARRY: What?

DRACO: The Time-Turner the Ministry seized was a prototype. Made of inexpensive metal. It does the job — sure. But only being able to go back in time for five minutes — that’s a serious flaw — it isn’t something you’d sell to true collectors of Dark Magic.

HARRY realizes what DRACO is saying.

HARRY: He was working for you?

DRACO: No. My father. He liked owning things that no one else had. The Ministry’s Time-Turners — thanks to Croaker — were always a little vanilla for him. He wanted the ability to go back further than an hour, he wanted the ability to travel back years. He’d never have used it. Secretly I think he preferred a world without Voldemort. But yes, the Time-Turner was built for him.

HARRY: And did you keep it?

DRACO reveals the Time-Turner.

DRACO: No five-minute problem, and it gleams like gold, just the way the Malfoys like it. You’re smiling.

HARRY: Hermione Granger. It was the reason she kept the first, the fear that there might be a second.

Hanging on to this, you could have been sent to Azkaban.

DRACO: Consider the alternative — consider if people had known that I had the ability to travel in time.

Consider the rumor that would have been given increased — credence.

HARRY looks at DRACO, understanding him perfectly.

HARRY: Scorpius.

DRACO: We were capable of having children but Astoria was frail. A blood malediction, a serious one.

An ancestor was cursed . . . it showed up in her. You know how these things can resurface after generations . . .

HARRY: I’m sorry, Draco.

DRACO: I didn’t want to risk her health, I said it didn’t matter whether the Malfoy line died with me — whatever my father said. But Astoria — she didn’t want a baby for the Malfoy name, for pureblood or glory, but for us. Our child, Scorpius, was born . . . it was the best day of both our lives, although it weakened Astoria considerably. We hid ourselves away, the three of us. I wanted to conserve her strength . . . and so the rumors started.

HARRY: I can’t imagine what that was like.

DRACO: Astoria always knew that she was not destined for old age. She wanted me to have somebody when she left, because . . . it is exceptionally lonely, being Draco Malfoy. I will always be suspected. There is no escaping the past. I never realized, though, that by hiding him away from this gossiping, judgmental world, I ensured that my son would emerge shrouded in worse suspicion than I ever endured.

HARRY: Love blinds. We have both tried to give our sons, not what they needed, but what we needed.

We’ve been so busy trying to rewrite our own pasts, we’ve blighted their present.

DRACO: Which is why you need this. I have been holding on to it, barely resisting using it, even though I would sell my soul for another minute with Astoria.

HARRY: Oh, Draco . . . we can’t. We can’t use it.

DRACO looks up at HARRY, and for the first time — at the bottom of this dreadful pit — they look at each other as friends.

DRACO: We have to find them — if it takes centuries, we must find our sons — HARRY: We have no idea where they are or when they are. Searching in time when you’ve no idea where in time to search, that’s a fool’s errand. No, love won’t do it and nor will a Time-Turner, I’m afraid. It’s up to our sons now — they’re the only ones who can save us.

ACT FOUR, SCENE FIVE

GODRIC’S HOLLOW, OUTSIDE JAMES AND LILY POTTER’S HOUSE, 1981 ALBUS: We tell my granddad and grandma?

SCORPIUS: That they’ll never get to see their son grow up?

ALBUS: She’s strong enough — I know she is — you saw her.

SCORPIUS: She looked wonderful, Albus. And if I were you I’d be desperate to talk to her. But she needs to be able to beg Voldemort for Harry’s life, she needs to think he might die, and you’re the worst spoiler in the world that didn’t turn out to be true . . . ALBUS: Dumbledore. Dumbledore’s alive. We get Dumbledore involved. We do what you did with Snape —

SCORPIUS: Can we risk him knowing your dad survives? That he has kids?

ALBUS: He’s Dumbledore! He can cope with anything!

SCORPIUS: Albus, there have been about a hundred books written on what Dumbledore knew, how he knew it or why he did what he did. But what’s undoubtedly true — what he did — he needs to do — and I’m not going to risk messing with it. I was able to ask for help because I was in an alternate reality. We aren’t. We’re in the past. We can’t fix time only to create more problems — if our adventures have taught us anything, they’ve taught us that. The dangers of talking to anyone — infecting time — are too great.

ALBUS: So we need to — talk to the future. We need to send Dad a message.

SCORPIUS: But we don’t have an owl that can fly through time. And he doesn’t have a Time-Turner.

ALBUS: We get a message to Dad, he’ll find a way to get back here. Even if he has to build a TimeTurner himself.

SCORPIUS: We send a memory — like a Pensieve — stand over him and send a message, hope he reaches for the memory at exactly the right moment. I mean, it’s unlikely, but . . . Stand over the baby — and just repeatedly shout HELP. HELP. HELP. I mean, it might traumatize the baby slightly.

ALBUS: Only slightly.

SCORPIUS: A bit of trauma now is nothing compared to what’s happening . . . and maybe when he then thinks — later — he might remember the faces of us as we — shouted — ALBUS: Help.

SCORPIUS looks at ALBUS.

SCORPIUS: You’re right. It’s a terrible idea.

ALBUS: It’s one of your worst ideas ever.

SCORPIUS: Got it! We deliver it ourselves — we wait forty years — we deliver it — ALBUS: Not a chance — once Delphi has set time the way she wants she’ll send armies to try and find us — kill us —

SCORPIUS: So we hide in a hole?

ALBUS: As pleasurable as it will be to hide in a hole with you for the next forty years . . . they’ll find us.

And we’ll die and time will be stuck in the wrong position. No. We need something we can control, something we know he’ll get at exactly the right time. We need a — SCORPIUS: There’s nothing. Still, if I had to choose a companion to be at the return of eternal darkness with, I’d choose you.

ALBUS: No offense, but I’d choose someone massive and really good at magic.

LILY exits the house with BABY HARRY in a pram, she carefully puts a blanket on him.

His blanket. She’s wrapping him in his blanket.

SCORPIUS: Well, it is a moderately cold day.

ALBUS: He always said — it’s the only thing he had from her. Look at the love with which she’s put it on him — I think he’d like to know about that — I wish I could tell him.

SCORPIUS: And I wish I could tell my dad — well, I’m not sure what. I think I’d like to tell him that I’m occasionally capable of more bravery than he might think I am.

ALBUS has a thought.

ALBUS: Scorpius — my dad still has that blanket.

SCORPIUS: That won’t work. If we write a message on it now, even really small, he’ll read it too soon.

Time will be spoilt.

ALBUS: What do you know about love potions? What’s the ingredient they all contain?

SCORPIUS: Amongst other things, pearl dust.

ALBUS: Pearl dust is a relatively rare ingredient, isn’t it?

SCORPIUS: Mainly because it’s pretty expensive. What’s this about, Albus?

ALBUS: Dad and I had a fight on the day before I went to school.

SCORPIUS: This I am aware of. I believe it kind of got us into this mess.

ALBUS: I threw the blanket across the room. It collided with the love potion that Uncle Ron gave me as a joke.

SCORPIUS: He’s a funny guy.

ALBUS: The potion spilt and the blanket was covered in it and I happen to know for a fact Mum hasn’t let Dad touch that room since I left it.

SCORPIUS: So?

ALBUS: So it’s coming up to Hallows’ Eve in their time as well as ours — and he told me he always finds that blanket, he needs to be with it on Hallows’ Eve — it was the last thing his mum gave him — so he will look for it and when he finds it . . .

SCORPIUS: No. Still not getting you.

ALBUS: What reacts with pearl dust?

SCORPIUS: Well, it is said that if tincture of Demiguise and pearl dust meet . . . they burn.

ALBUS: And is tincture of (he’s unsure how to say the word) Demiguise visible to the naked eye?

SCORPIUS: No.

ALBUS: So if we were to get that blanket and write on it in tincture of Demiguise, then . . . SCORPIUS (eureka): Nothing would react to it until it came into contact with the love potion. In your room. In the present. By Dumbledore, I love it.

ALBUS: We just need to work out where to find some . . . Demiguises.

SCORPIUS: You know, rumor has it Bathilda Bagshot never saw the point in witches and wizards locking their doors.

The door swings open.

Rumor was right. Time to steal some wands and get potioning.

ACT FOUR, SCENE SIX

HARRY AND GINNY POTTER’S HOUSE, ALBUS’S ROOM

HARRY is sitting on ALBUS’s bed. GINNY enters. She looks at him.

GINNY: Surprised to find you here.

HARRY: Don’t worry, I haven’t touched anything. Your shrine is preserved. (He winces.) Sorry. Bad choice of words.

GINNY says nothing, HARRY looks up at her.

You know I’ve had some pretty terrible Hallows’ Eves — but this is undoubtedly at least the — second worst.

GINNY: I was wrong — to blame you. I always accuse you of jumping to things and it was me who — Albus went missing and I assumed it was your fault. I’m sorry I did that.

HARRY: You don’t think this is my fault?

GINNY: Harry, he was kidnapped by a powerful Dark witch, how can that be your fault?

HARRY: I chased him away. I chased him to her.

GINNY: Can we not treat this as if the battle is already lost?

GINNY nods. HARRY starts to cry.

HARRY: I’m sorry, Gin . . .

GINNY: Are you not listening to me? I’m sorry too.

HARRY: I shouldn’t have survived — it was my destiny to die — even Dumbledore thought so — and yet I lived. I beat Voldemort. All these people — all these people — my parents, Fred, the Fallen Fifty — and it’s me that gets to live? How is that? All this damage — and it’s my fault.

GINNY: They were killed by Voldemort.

HARRY: But if I’d stopped him sooner? All that blood on my hands. And now our son has been taken too —

GINNY: He’s not dead. Do you hear me, Harry? He’s not dead.

She takes HARRY in her arms. There is a big pause filled with pure unhappiness.

HARRY: The Boy Who Lived. How many people have to die for the Boy Who Lived?

HARRY sways a moment, unsure. Then he notices the blanket. He walks towards it.

This blanket is all I have, you know . . . of that Hallows’ Eve. This is all I have to remember them. And whilst —

He picks up the blanket. He discovers it has holes in it. He looks at it, dismayed.

This has got holes in it. Ron’s idiotic love potion has burnt through it, right through it. Look at this. It’s ruined. Ruined.

He opens up the blanket. He sees writing burnt through it. He’s surprised.

What?

GINNY: Harry, it has — something — written —

On another part of the stage, ALBUS and SCORPIUS appear.

ALBUS: “Dad . . .”

SCORPIUS: We’re starting with “Dad”?

ALBUS: So he’ll know it’s from me.

SCORPIUS: Harry is his name. We should start with “Harry.” ALBUS (firm): We’re starting with “Dad.”

HARRY: “Dad,” does it say, “Dad”? It’s not that distinct . . . SCORPIUS: “Dad, HELP.”

GINNY: “Hello”? Does that say “Hello”? And then . . . “Good.” HARRY: “Dad Hello Good Hello”? No. This is . . . a strange joke.

ALBUS: “Dad. Help. Godric’s Hollow.”

GINNY: Give me that. My eyesight is better than yours. Yes. “Dad Hello Good” — that’s not “Hello” again — that’s “Hallow” or “Hollow”? And then some numbers — these are clearer — “3 — 1 — 1 — 0 — 8 — 1.” Is this one of those Muggle telephone numbers? Or a grid reference or a . . . HARRY looks up, several thoughts smashing through his brain at once.

HARRY: No. It’s a date. 31st October, 1981. The date my parents were killed.

GINNY looks at HARRY, and then back at the blanket.

GINNY: That doesn’t say “Hello.” It says “Help.” HARRY: “Dad. Help. Godric’s Hollow. 31/10/81.” It’s a message. Clever boy left me a message.

HARRY kisses GINNY hard.

GINNY: Albus wrote this?

HARRY: And he’s told me where they are and when they are and now we know where she is, we know where we can fight her.

He kisses her hard again.

GINNY: We haven’t got them back again yet.

HARRY: I’ll send an owl to Hermione. You send one to Draco. Tell them to meet us at Godric’s with the Time-Turner.

GINNY: And it is “us,” okay? Don’t even think about going back without me, Harry.

HARRY: Of course you’re coming. We have a chance, Ginny, and by Dumbledore — that’s all that we need — a chance.

ACT FOUR, SCENE SEVEN

GODRIC’S HOLLOW

RON, HERMIONE, DRACO, HARRY, and GINNY walk through a present-day Godric’s Hollow. A busy market town (it’s expanded over the years).

HERMIONE: Godric’s Hollow. It must be twenty years . . . GINNY: Is it just me or are there more Muggles about . . . HERMIONE: It’s become quite popular as a weekend break.

DRACO: I can see why — look at the thatched roofs. And is that a farmers’ market?

HERMIONE approaches HARRY — who is looking around himself, overwhelmed by all that he’s seeing.

HERMIONE: You remember when we were last here? This feels just like old times.

RON: Old times with a few unwelcome ponytails added to the mix.

DRACO knows a barb when he hears one.

DRACO: Can I just say —

RON: Malfoy, you may be all chummy chummy with Harry, and you may have produced a relatively nice child, but you’ve said some very unfair things to and about my wife . . . HERMIONE: And your wife doesn’t need you fighting her battles for her.

HERMIONE looks witheringly at RON. RON takes the hit.

RON: Fine. But if you say one thing about her or me . . . DRACO: You’ll do what, Weasley?

HERMIONE: He’ll hug you. Because we’re all on the same team, aren’t we, Ron?

RON (hesitating in the face of her unwavering gaze): Fine. I, um, I think you’ve got really nice hair.

Draco.

HERMIONE: Thank you, husband. Now this seems a good spot. Let’s do this.

DRACO takes out the Time-Turner — it begins spinning wildly as the others take their places around it.

And there is a giant whoosh of light. A smash of noise.

And time stops. And then it turns over, thinks a bit, and begins spooling backwards, slow at first . . .

And then it speeds up.

They look around themselves.

RON: So? Has it worked?

ACT FOUR, SCENE EIGHT

GODRIC’S HOLLOW, A SHED, 1981

ALBUS looks up, amazed to see GINNY and then HARRY, and then he takes in the rest of the happy band (RON, DRACO, and HERMIONE).

ALBUS: MUM?

HARRY: Albus Severus Potter. Are we pleased to see you.

ALBUS runs and throws himself into GINNY’s arms. GINNY receives him, delighted.

ALBUS: You got our note . . . ?

GINNY: We got your note.

SCORPIUS trots up to his dad.

DRACO: We can hug too if you like . . .

SCORPIUS looks at his dad, unsure for a moment. And then they sort of half hug in a very awkward way. DRACO smiles.

RON: Now, where’s this Delphi?

SCORPIUS: You know about Delphi?

ALBUS: She’s here — she’s trying to kill you, we think. Before Voldemort curses himself she’s going to kill you and so break the prophecy and . . .

HERMIONE: Yes, we thought that might be it too. Do you know where specifically she is now?

SCORPIUS: She’s disappeared. How did you — how did you, without the Time-Turner — HARRY (interrupting): That’s a long and complicated story, Scorpius. And we don’t have time for it.

DRACO smiles at HARRY gratefully.

HERMIONE: Harry’s right. Time is of the essence. We need to get people into position. Now, Godric’s Hollow is not a large place but she could be coming from any direction. So we need somewhere that gives us good views of the town — that allows for multiple and clear observation points — and that will, most importantly, keep us hidden, because we cannot risk being seen.

They all frown, thinking.

I’d say St. Jerome’s Church ticks all those boxes, wouldn’t you?