The cemetery looked the way cemeteries do in winter. The tall trees, which surely cast a friendly, calming green shimmer over the graves in springtime, were now bare and thus looked like shit. I’ve never been one for bare trees. Whether capped with snow or not, in sun or fog: I think they just look dead.
The wide pathways through the cemetery were muddy, and there were lanterns on many of the graves with those awful candles in their little plastic cups burning inside. In the dark they always make the cemetery look haunted with all those little lights flickering everywhere.
I was familiar with this cemetery because my grandmother was buried here, and my parents used to come visit at least twice a year, on Gran’s birthday and on some other sad day in November. They would light one of those little flickering lights and pretend to pray for a while before going back home and shoveling cake into their mouths. I had to go along until I was twelve, and then my father stopped going, too. I have no idea how long my mother kept up the tradition. Starting tomorrow, though, she could visit two graves at once. My birthday happens to be in November, so maybe she can cover the November visits at the same time, too. More practical.
Martin found his way to the cemetery chapel without getting lost, although as far as I was concerned the paths all looked the same. I never knew if I should take the third or fourth crosscut, but Martin knew. He was just being precise—as always.
There was a sign in front of the chapel with my name and the time of the burial on it. My name. That queasy feeling started getting stronger. Pretty soon it would be serious.
Martin swallowed, too, even though he hadn’t known me at all when I was alive. And he knew that I wasn’t dead now, too. Funny thing. Should you be sadder that the body is dead, or happier that the spirit is alive? But is a life like mine, where I’ve got only a very restricted radius of action, really any comfort? I could feel Martin struggling with these thoughts, and I couldn’t help him answer his questions. Plus, I myself didn’t know what the alternative was. Would “dead” mean that my spirit just ceased to exist, as well? Or would it exist somewhere else, where other spirits were flitting around? Would we be able to talk to each other, make fun of each other, tell jokes? Keep following events on earth? Make bets? With what kind of money? I’d never given any thought to things like this when I was alive, but now, in view of my special situation, they were cropping up naturally, like a cold sore after a wet kiss.
OK, that was enough. I had to create some spiritual distance. I had to think about something nice or just about the harshness of reality, instead of drowning here in religious, philosophical, or other sentimentalities. This funeral wasn’t changing anything about my current situation. What the hell difference should it make if my body was lying in a refrigerated morgue drawer or inside a box underground?
Martin entered the dim light of the chapel and sat in the second-to-last row. I stayed with him for a moment, but of course I couldn’t recognize the attendees just from the back like that. Stupid. So I set out, passing along the wall nice and discreetly toward the front. My parents were sitting in the front row, and behind them a couple of aunts and uncles I hadn’t seen for an eternity. The women who lived on either side of my parents’ house, who apparently didn’t have anything better to do, or just wanted to wear their black coats out again. And my elementary school teacher. Wow! I hadn’t thought about her for ages. Back in the day I had idolized her. She was the coolest teacher at schooclass="underline" bleach-blond, single, smoker. All the boys in my class wanted to marry her. In those days I thought she was very young and good-looking, and that was a just decade and a half ago. Now I thought she looked old and frumpy. Still blond, still a smoker, as suggested by her yellow, nicotine-stained fingers, but I couldn’t tell if she was married or not. Didn’t matter now anyway. She was here, in any case, and I thought that was pretty strange. Did she feel something for me in those days, too? But if so, then she must have been pretty seriously disturbed. After all, I was ten years old and had only about seven teeth in my mouth, as I mentioned before.
My mother had hardly changed in the four years since I’d seen her last. Why should she? She’s been wearing her hair that way since the nineteen seventies, and this is exactly how she looked then, too. Her corpulence was still keeping the skin of her face relatively taut—that’s the benefit of extra fat pads: they keep wrinkles from forming. Her legs were stuffed into thick, black pantyhose that better hid the waning juvenescence around her ankles than did the flesh-colored ones she normally wore, but hers were still the ugliest legs I’d ever seen in my life. A disaster for a woman who never wore pants. I used to be pretty embarrassed about my mother’s legs when I still needed them to lean on. My mother looked like a country-butcher’s wife, and basically that’s what she was, too. Her father had been a butcher, her husband was one—at least, he was until he became a wurst manufacturer who earned money by stuffing chopped offal into artificial casings and selling them to people who believed the ham sausage actually had ham in it. Have I already mentioned that for a few years I refused to eat anything but recognizably coherent meat? That is, schnitzel and steak. But that’s when I was still living at home; only the best was served at our dinner table. Later on due to lack of money I transitioned back to ground meat products. Whether a burger between two pieces of cardboard passing for bun, or currywurst, it ultimately didn’t matter.
Compared to his butcher’s wife, my butcher father cut a finer figure, on the outside. Tanned, only ever so slightly overweight, with stylishly short hair, rimless glasses, and a fashionably tailored black jacket. People would never have thought him capable of the less-than-fashionable blows to the head he inflicted whenever his brat of a son wasn’t minding.
The brief glances my father was exchanging with my elementary school teacher also explained her attendance. Pretty ballsy bringing your mistress to the funeral of your only son—but then class (ha!) was something he’d never really had. And the assertiveness to stand up to him was something my mother had never really had, either. She knew about his affairs but played along as though nothing were going on. In front of me, the neighbors, and my mother’s family. To my father she kowtowed. He gave her a housekeeping allowance, he determined what was served at the dinner table, and he selected the vacation destinations. Often enough they were places teeming with willing women. Mom pretended she didn’t notice anything and wrote postcards about gorgeous beaches and nice people. The only thing she had to hold onto was me, and unfortunately that was too much for me to deal with. They were both too much to deal with: her love, and his expectations. They had both crushed me, and here and now before my coffin both of them seemed to have conveniently forgotten all that. If I had a sentimental bent I would drivel on right now about how there was more being buried at this funeral than just a body.
I’ll spare you and me the description of the other guests and bulimic priest, who was leading the devotion. The clergyman was pretending he had known and liked me, but that’s probably his job. Coming out of his mouth my life also sounded way more ordinary, successful, and conformist than I’d ever thought it was, but maybe the mistake was mine.
Now, you may have noticed that so far I’ve been talking a lot of shit about other people to dodge the actual topic. My coffin. It was grandiose. Black. Shiny black. Like a concert grand piano you might see in the symphony halls of this world. With red roses on top. The color of love. Or of a Ferrari. Or of Pamela Anderson’s bikini. It looked fucking sweet.
The priest finally finished the devotion, droning, “…eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord…” Martin winced as tinny organ music pealed out of a ghetto blaster. A couple of men came forward, grabbed hold of the cart with the casket on it, rolled it out of the chapel, and all the mourners trundled along behind. My father supported my mother, who was sobbing uncontrollably. Everyone else looked awkward or bored; only the elementary school teacher had a poker face on. And Martin looked sad. Really sad. I steered clear of his gloomy thoughts.