Picked-Up Pieces (11 page)

I discovered I had no opinion on oral love. I ventured that, all other things being equal, I was as much for it as not. In irritation the journalist tucked his notebook away and began to rail at the dead. Their pretensions to immortality enraged him. He rattled at the door of a grenadiers colonel interred in 1903 and invited me, where vandals had smashed a grating, to peer in and see how a burrowing creature, a rat or badger, had penetrated the coffin, adding sawdust to the rubble of bricks and powdered mortar. The pious mottoes—“From strength to strength in the everlasting,” “Love shines yet more brightly above”—abraded against my escort like supercilious assertions at a party where he was socially insecure. And indeed he came, with his cleverness, from a Midlands working-class family, and the tombs represented Victorian gentry. “The fools!” he shouted. “ ‘Honor perisheth never.’ Well, Mr. Nevil Cunninghame-Wright Esq., O.M., M.B.E., it bloody well has!” He kicked at the black drift of rustflakes and leafmold clogging the Cunninghame-Wright portal, and read the next motto. “ ‘Earth’s shadows testify to radiance eternal.’ Oh, my buggering God! Oh, my dear old Eustace Pickering, you poor old sodden mouse-nest of agglutinated bones, how do you like your radiance eternal now?”

He was most affronted by the immense mausoleum of a man called Julius Beer. Chinks in its cupola had admitted generations of pigeons; their excrement, feathers, and corpses covered the marble floor. The mosaic murals of pre-Raphaelite angels were clouded with lime. The journalist, when I had satisfied his desire that I look in, put his mouth
against the crusty grating and shouted, “
Hooh!
” Nothing happened. He bellowed louder, “HOOH!” Evidently, the pigeons were supposed to fly out. He squinted into the depths of the befouled and forgotten memorial. “Damn,” he said. “I think they’ve cleaned it up a bit.” He backed off, and his face brightened. “But can you catch that smell, that evil stench? It’s a pigeon Dachau. You ass, Julius, you absolutely silly puffed-up old capitalist ass, you were so full of yourself we don’t even know what you
did!
” It was true; no identification, not even dates, qualified the high carved name of Julius Beer, the emperor of doveshit.

The cemetery had been private and fashionable. An outward-spreading cypress, now obscured by deciduous trees that had grown up, was to have been the center of a symmetrical system of vault lanes and individual tombs. One tomb, of a “menagerist,” had a smiling lion carved upon it. Deep in the woods—elm and oak and ailanthus that had taken root, perhaps, at the outset of World War II—a stone angel lifted her weather-blurred face, vague as Anglican theology, toward green leaves. We were far from the urban compactness of Novodyevichi Cemetery. I was impressed by England’s tropical luxuriance; the force so decisively tamed in the parks was here, untended, shattering marble and swallowing crypts whole. Yet I felt that these genteel 19th-century dead, who to judge from the novels about them had loved a country wildness, were not as overthrown as my escort believed. They were merely immersed, much as the living are immersed. A wild sapling grafts onto the spirit no less snugly than a toy tank.

Both of my escorts—the State Department man tacitly, obliquely; the journalist boisterously, indignantly—disapproved of the dead, implying that they were still alive. A cemetery, which like a golf course bestows the gift of space, also touches us with the excitement, the generalized friction, of a party.

The Chemin du Puy steeply climbed the hill from Antibes and on the long gradual downslope, before the farmhouse with the sign
MÉCHANTS CHIENS
, passed a cemetery of bright plaster, where things twirled to discourage birds. Though lonesome, I never dared enter; the dead were speaking French.

In Mayrhofen, at Christmas, candles glowed and guttered in the snow, before strict upright stones of black marble. The faces of Tyrolean burghers
alternated with that of an anguished Jesus.
Hier ruhen in Gott
, the stones said.

And in Peredelkino, in the village graveyard where Pasternak is buried, scrolling iron crosses spoke of an Orthodox Russia where burial took place in springtime, and metal echoed the burgeoning shape of the flowers.

In Prague, the tombstones of the Jewish cemetery were squeezed together like cards, conjuring up a jumble of bodies underneath. Visitors left pebbles on them instead of flowers. Was it an ancient custom, or something forced upon the Jews by Hitler? A kind of chapel here had walls gray with the names, six hundred thousand of them, of Jews whose death-dates were 1943, 1944, 1945. Years whose smoke permanently stained the ceiling of Heaven.

And the mass graves of the Siege dead near Leningrad, acres of hummocks, like giant bulb beds in winter, marked with stone tablets 1941, 1942, 1943.

And the Pyramids, and the gaily painted corridors leading into the robbed chambers of Ramses, and the even gayer cells of the nobles, into which light is shuttled by a set of mirrors held by silent brown guides. In Cairo, the necropolis is inhabited by children and beggars, and is a slum.

The Long Island necropolis seen from an airplane: a pegboard that abruptly yields to the equally regular avenues of the living, each gray rooftop companioned by a green backyard pool, like a wide-awake eye.

Also from the air, descending I think into Cleveland, I saw a little triangular family cemetery, precious soil spared from the corner of a field, like the book page whose corner I had turned down to mark my place.

And the stingy clusters of markers, too many of them children, in rocky abandoned places once farmed, like Star Island off Portsmouth, or the mountainsides of Vermont north of Montpelier.

In Marigot, on St. Martin’s, one noon, my wife and I walked a mile to a restaurant that was closed, along the shimmering white road, and came back along the beach to cool our feet, and came to a cemetery that was being nibbled away by the sea. There were no signs of an attempt to halt the gentle erosion; one tombstone was teetering, another had fallen upside down, and fragments of a third were being washed and ground into sand. We went up into the cemetery, and there, amid the French
colons
and the tessellated patterns suggestive of voodoo and the conch-shell borders and the paper flowers and the real flowers that looked like paper,
my wife, starved and weary, sat on a crypt and dried her feet with her bandana and put on her shoes. I took her picture; I have the slide.

Years before, when we were at college, a girl whose major was biology and whose hobby was fungi used to make me bicycle with her to ancient burying-grounds in Cambridge and Concord. There, on the tipping old Puritan slate tombstones half sunk in the earth and sometimes wearing artfully shaped weatherproof hats of lead, she would show me lichen, in a surprising variety of colors, each round specimen, scarcely thicker than a stain, somehow an individual creature or, rather, two creatures—a fungus living symbiotically with an alga. Whitish, brownish, bluish, the lichens enforced their circles upon the incised, uniquely graceful Puritan lettering and the winged skulls which, as the 17th century softened into the 19th, became mere angels, with human faces. She was, perhaps because she majored in biology, wonderful at sex—talk of oral love!—and the lichen, the winged skulls, the sweaty ache in my calves from bicycling, and her plump cleavage as she bent low for a determined inspection and scraping all merged in a confused lazy anticipation of our return and my reward, her round mouth. Cemeteries, where women make themselves at home, are in one sense dormitories, rows of beds.

“But the
view
is so lovely,” my mother said to me. We were standing on the family burial plot, in Pennsylvania. Around us, and sloping down the hill, were the red sandstone markers of planted farmers, named and dated in the innocent rectangular lettering that used to be on patent-medicine labels. My grandfather’s stone, rough-hewn granite with the family name carved in the form of bent branches, did not seem very much like him. My grandmother’s Christian name, cut below his, was longer and, characteristically, dominated while taking the subservient position. Elsewhere on the plot were his parents, and great-aunts and uncles I had met only at spicy-smelling funerals in my remotest childhood. My mother paced off two yards, saying, “Here’s Daddy and me. See how much room is left?”

“But she”—I didn’t have to name my wife—“has never
lived
here.” I was again a child at one of those dreaded family gatherings on dark holiday afternoons—awkward and stuffed and suffocating under the constant need for tact. Only in Pennsylvania, among my kin, am I pressured into such difficult dance-steps of evasion and placation. Every buried coffin was a potential hurt feeling. I tried a perky sideways jig, hopefully
humorous, and added, “And the children would feel crowded and keep everybody awake.”

She turned her face and gazed downward at the view—a lush valley, a whitewashed farmhouse, a straggling orchard, and curved sections of the highway leading to the city whose glistening tip, a television relay, could just be glimpsed five ridges in the distance. She had expected my evasion—she could hardly have expected me to pace off my six feet greedily and plant stakes—but had needed to bring me to it, to breast my refusal and the consequence that, upon receiving her and my father, the plot would be closed, would cease to be a working piece of land. Why is it that nothing that happens to me is as real as these dramas that my mother arranges around herself, like Titania calling Peaseblossom and Mustardseed from the air? Why is it that everyone else lacks the sanguine, corporeal, anguished reality of these farmers, these people of red sandstone? When was Pennsylvania an ocean, to lay down all this gritty rock, that stains your palms pink when you lift it?

Placatory, I agreed, “The view
is
lovely.”

“Think of poor Daddy,” she said, turning away, Mustardseed dismissed. “He has no sense of landscape. He says he wants to be buried under a sidewalk.”

The cemetery of the town where I live, like many, has climbed a hill, and the newest graves are on the top, arranged along ample smooth roadways of asphalt. Some friends of ours have buried children here. But I had stayed away until it was time to teach my son to ride a bicycle. It is safe; on weekdays few cars visit the fresh graves, with their plastic-potted morning glories and exotic metal badges from veterans’ organizations. The stones are marble, modernly glossy and simple, though I suppose that time will eventually reveal them as another fashion, dated and quaint. Now, the sod is still raw, the sutures of turf are unhealed, the earth still humped, the wreaths scarcely withered. Sometimes we see, my son and I, the strained murmurous breakup of a ceremony, or a woman in mourning emerge from an automobile and kneel, or stand nonplussed, as in a social gap. I remember my grandfather’s funeral, the hurried cross of sand the minister drew on the coffin lid, the whine of the lowering straps, the lengthening, cleanly cut sides of clay, the thought of air, the lack of air forever in the close dark space lined with pink satin, the foreverness,
the towering foreverness—it does not bear thinking about, it is too heavy, like my son’s body as he wobbles away from me on his bicycle. “Keep moving,” I shout, the words turning chalky in my mouth, as they tend to do when I seek to give instruction—“the essence of the process is to keep moving!”

LETTER FROM ANGUILLA

February 1968

U
NTIL ITS REVOLUTION
last summer, Anguilla was one of the most obscure islands in the Caribbean. A long, low coral formation of thirty-four square miles, it seems from the air a cloud shadow, or a shadow image of St. Martin, which lies twelve miles to the south and whose green mountains loom dramatically in the view from Anguilla. Whereas from St. Martin, Anguilla, at its highest elevation scarcely two hundred feet above sea level, can easily be overlooked. It is even obscure who named it “Eel”—the Spaniards, who may have cruised close enough under Columbus to call it
Anguila
, or the French, who, under Captain René Laudonnière in 1564, definitely called there, en route to Florida from Dominica, and may have bestowed the appellation
L’Anguille
. Both nations left this modest island to the British to colonize. In 1609, a Captain Harcourt, after touching at Nevis, “disembogued” on the north side of Anguilla, where “I think never Englishmen disembogued before us.” Southey’s history of the West Indies records under the year 1650, “The
island of Anguilla, so called from its snake-like form, is said to have been discovered and colonized by the English this year; it was filled with alligators and other noxious animals, but the soil was good for raising tobacco and corn, and the cattle imported multiplied very fast. It was not colonized under any public encouragement; each planter laboured for himself, and the island was frequently plundered by marauders.”