The man lived there for almost a year. At night, when the moon was out, he did a little of the maintenance work in the churchyard. What did he do during the day? Perhaps he read, and apparently he also wrote something about his own life, but nothing of that survived. Then winter set in and things became more difficult. It was cold inside the mortuary, and outside there was snow, so the farmer left tracks when he went out. Both the priest and the sexton tried to persuade him to hide in their homes, but he
hesitated, perhaps because he didn't want to put them in any danger. In those days everything was treated as high treason or subversion and sabotage. One morning they found him dead inside the mortuary. He was given a quick, but Christian, burial, and they decided to destroy everything he left behind. It was too bad about the notebooks. In such isolation, a person may catch a glimpse of things we are not even aware of.
As I walked among the graves, it occurred to me that our obsession with measuring, counting, drawing and inventing comes not just from trying to expel mystery from the world, but also from the need to hold life itself at a distance, since otherwise it would terrify us by its brevity and its transience. In a digitalized world, not only does life vanish, death disappears as well. What remains, at the most, are citizens, populations, property and land registries.
One day, at another cemetery, I saw, bent over a grave, an oddly familiar angular head with prominent ears. For a moment I couldn't remember where I'd seen that head before, until the old man looked around and asked, 'Looking for someone's grave, comrade?' The word 'comrade' took me back to the corridor in the château that first day of my career as a surveyor's assistant. I answered as I had then: 'No, I'm not.'
'I have to come here once in a while,' he told me, as though apologizing, 'to look after my late wife's grave, to keep it from going to seed.'
The grave looked more neglected than the rest. The date on the stone indicated that his wife had passed away five years before. The grave had no cross and there were no flowers around it, only some desiccated heather.
'No one's even bothered to lay so much as a dry stick at
her grave,' he complained, 'and it's so close. And when she was alive they all greeted her, and whenever they needed something they came to her, even in the night.'
'Was your wife in the health service?' I asked, guessing.
'My wife made it further in life than I did. She was working for the district office,' he said proudly. 'And back in 1970, when we had to purge the party and society of anti-socialist elements, she was chairman of the screening committee — higher than me again.'
I understood that I was standing face to face with the older brother of K., the director, the addressee of my letters.
'Why, she could still be with us,' the old man complained. 'She wasn't yet sixty.' His voice quavered. He pulled a large wallet from his breast pocket and fished around in it for something. As he did so, several photographs spilled out to the ground. I bent down to pick them up. I'd have done the same for K., the director, if he were so despondent, so surrounded by emptiness. In one of the photographs I saw a young man with an obviously angular head, in another a girl with thick long hair. I handed back the photographs and he quickly stuck them into his pocket. 'There she is,' he said, having found the snapshot he was looking for. 'Who would have thought it?'
The face of the older sister of that family of which Mr K., the director, was also a member, revealed nothing. The thin, tight, unsmiling lips perhaps spoke of rigidity or intolerance.
'And now I'm in the home,' he sobbed suddenly. And do you think anyone will talk to me there? I hear them talking to each other, but whenever I approach them, they stand up as though they were just going.'
'Were these your children in the snapshots?'
'Don't talk to me about them! I feel closer to children who aren't my own. The girl stayed in Austria, and I arranged for her to go on that trip myself. She didn't even come back for her mother's funeral. What did she want that she couldn't have had here? And I don't talk to the boy either. You know what he did?' He waved his hands as though trying to drive away a terrible vision. 'He joined up with the Adventists. He even tried to convert me. "Dad," he says, "the end of the world is coming. Repent while there's still time." So I said to him: "Repent yourself. I haven't betrayed my ideals, I don't need to repent!" And I told him not to even bother writing to me. Life, comrade, has taught me how to be tough.' And the cheeks of this wretched man burned with flames of rage.
The surveyor came through the gate, walking beside a priest. The man saw them as well, and suddenly became alert and guarded: 'Who are you anyway? What are you doing here?'
'We're surveying.'
'Surveying? What?'
The earth.'
'Have you got a permit?'
For surveying, yes, but for simply walking upon the earth, we don't have the proper stamp. I walked away.
It is possible that this anxious stewardship of the cemeteries that sets them aside from the decay and neglect around them can be explained by something more than simple respect for past values. We avoid thinking about death, but death is all around us and impinges on us everywhere except here. In the cemetery lies lose their meaning, and without lies all the artificial world falls away.
And so this is where we, the living, retreat. We embellish the graves, adorn our asylum, build invisible but impenetrable walls to keep out the flags and banners, the slogans, the loudspeakers, the parades, the television screens.
The surveyor nodded to me. The priest was inviting us to climb the church tower to view the countryside.
I had a last look around. K.'s older brother was standing there alone, as though he himself had emerged from the grave. What was his past, and what lay ahead of him? What can a man who has lived in the grave have to look forward to? What could he be thinking about in his rigid isolation?
And suddenly, in a flash, it occurred to me: he was wondering whom he should report us to.
The Moon
IF WE MANAGED to finish everything in time here, the surveyor wanted me to go with him to Moravia, which was not far from his home. When he'd been there on a surveying trip earlier in the year, he'd needed to measure two points by the North Star, but the nights had not been clear enough for him to do so.
Sometimes, when we would come back from work after dark, Kos Would point to stars in the Little Dipper where the light of Polaris twinkled, and complain that all summer long the nights had never been this clear. Wouldn't this be a perfect time to survey?
If he felt like it, I would suggest, we could go first thing tomorrow. The weather looked stable.
'Do you think so?' I felt he was giving it serious thought, but next morning we would drive off to a field in the neighbourhood and, dripping with perspiration in the glaring sun, dig out a stone that had shifted position.
But as the autumn advanced and the number of underlined circles on the surveyor's map increased, the end of the work was in sight.
'Tomorrow, then,' he decided, 'if you agree, we could go.'
In fact it was a good idea to leave the night-time surveying until the end. Night makes every enterprise special and our work too, it seemed to me, ought to be concluded in a special way, at least. Besides that, I wanted to do something for my young boss when the work was over. I didn't know why, but I thought I might be more likely to find an opportunity on this trip.
There was no need to worry about accommodation, he added. He'd already told his wife I'd be staying over with them.
I was curious about his wife, but I said nothing, I only went to pack the best clothes I had with me.