Surprised alike by the formality of what the rite required and the Dalísque actuality of the horses, and yet way past both surprise and actuality, the twins had met with the others at the main entrance to the Smolensky cemetery. They had now been walking five minutes and already it was absolutely unendurable and absolutely had to be endured.
Gabriel had desolately (and happily) concluded that everything that ever happened was far, far beyond his control. Likewise, he had long since abandoned any attempt to apprehend the narrower significance and implication of what losing a parent actually meant. Each moment manufactures itself into a vast and hideous writhing universe-wide reality regardless, he thought; what business could it be of his? Nobody had the slightest idea what was actually going on. The horses were sweating steadily and the smell came and went on the gusts of the wind. His mother had always hated animals. We have enough excrement in our cities. Meanwhile the cart bumped and banged and the coffin shifted an inch here, back a few centimeters there, and he worried that perhaps it might slide right off and dive nose-first onto the gravel, splintering the wood, two dead legs shooting out the end, buckling, body following, crumpling, snapping, folding under its own weight. What was the flexibility of lifeless human sinew? What was the elasticity of death? At any moment he expected his mother to sit up and harangue them for such uneven treatment.
If anything, Isabella was even further away from reality, her thoughts droning around and around like a maddened bee trapped in an empty jar—amazed, upset by, resigned to, and yet bitterly angry with the numbness of her own head as she smacked it repeatedly against the invisible borders of her new circumstances. Give me something in here to sting and I will gladly give up my life to sting it. Only this has to stop. (Besides that, her feet were starting to hurt.) Her only real feeling, she felt, was that she could not feel. The best she could manage was the strange sensation of imagining that she was an old woman, older than her mother, sitting somewhere on a retirement home couch watching events as if they were footage of her thirty-two-year-old self in Petersburg—footage that had somehow become part of a documentary film about the legacy of defection. Or estrangement. Or the working life of animals. They were passing under trees, and another cloud had obscured the sun, and the semidarkness was as mad as the intense light that had caused her to squint only a second ago. The horses had become even more reluctant, so that the pace slowed even further… They might as well have crawled to the grave on their hands and knees. Would have been quicker. She wanted it over. She wanted it done.
But perhaps it was not the horses, nor the threadbare livery of the driver, nor the uneasy trees that most prevented the two from finding a way to access whatever feelings they had both imagined the funeral of their mother would evoke. Perhaps instead it was the old women… For waiting ahead at the main cemetery crossroads were five such, swathed in heaviest black. And without acknowledgment or query, these old women now filed slowly into step on either side of the coffin, flanking bewildered Gabriel and furious Isabella. Who they were and where they came from, nobody appeared to know. Neither did anyone wish to take responsibility for asking, or for telling them to go back there. (Part of the arrangements? Part of the package? Normal? Not normal?) And for the next ten minutes, these five walked beside the cart as well—now sighing, now incanting, now silent, continually crossing themselves. Some final delegation dispatched from the twilight fringes of the living to murmur Maria Glover to her judgment.
And for all anyone cared, Isabella thought, they could indeed be her mother’s sisters. Because the fact was, they knew next to nothing about their own mother’s family. They had never met a single living soul who shared their mother’s blood. (How much farther? How much farther?) Just an austere photograph of a severe woman: Russian Granny, Oksana. That a life could end like this. That this is what it all came down to. Who was this woman they were burying today? Who were all these people already buried? It was all too hasty; there was no time even to attempt to find her mother’s family, no time to do anything; the whole business felt mad mad mad and Isabella wondered if Gabriel was right to insist on having it all done here and so quickly. But then, what did it matter? And where else could her mother be buried? And what family? And what friends? At least they knew for sure now that their father could not show up. Not unless he was planning a surprise at the open grave.
And for all anyone knew, Gabriel thought, these old women might simply be actresses sent in as part of the day’s skillful conspiracy to subvert its own crazed reality—a conspiracy of which he was well aware but could do nothing. (The October wind was fresh, though, and took away the smell of the horses, and that was good. They must be nearly there. How much longer? How much longer?) And it was amazing how swiftly life could come at you when it felt like it. You thought you were moving fast—seasons passing unmarked, anniversaries barely celebrated, numbers careering forward on all the checks you had to write—but then these sort of things happened and you realized that Time hadn’t even got out of first gear. You realized that when Time really opened up and hit the gas, there was no telling how fast it might go—famine and floods crammed into the working week, entire lives passing away and forgotten in five short days, the heavens and the earth fashioned in six. Jesus, the incredible speed of it all—a routine Sunday night in Tufnell Park, the telephone, Monday in the visa queue, Tuesday hop on a plane, and by Friday this. And when time was racing, everything became impossible to understand or process or deal with. Of course it did. And, dear God, the utter intolerableness but utter necessity of what he had been required to talk about, consider, decide upon these last days—and mostly through Yana’s honest and well-meaning translations: “Do you like that we see your mother’s face for our praying, or do you like she keeps a special mask, like a wail, for the dead faces—so we can see but Masha is still little bit covered, like a wedding… a wedding material from the brides… It’s a wail, yes? You understand?”
They came around a shallow kink in the path and out from beneath the trees again. The way ahead, the last few hundred yards, was smoother underfoot, or so it seemed—marked out by manicured roses and thorns and fourteen crooked white headstones. If he did die up there on Calvary, then the last thing he would have wanted was resurrection. Not this, Father, not this shit again.
There was an awkward delay before they were allowed to enter the chapel. (Lid back on one coffin and haul it out the back; lid off a new one and haul it in the front.) So for a while they were all required to stand around outside, at a loss, as the sun kept on coming and going, coming and going, and the swaying trees appeared taller than ever. Nobody knew the name of the black birds that wheeled against the sky. But something like a robin settled on an iron cross close to where the twins now stood a little apart.
Isabella spoke first, her voice low but clear, as if she did not really care who heard: “Why can’t we just bury her? What’s going to happen in here? How long is it going to be? I want it to be over.”
Gabriel was cold in his shirt now they’d stopped walking. “I think they have to… I think it’s part of the service or whatever. Avery said you choose a rite and you have to go along with the whole procedure if you want a site here. Maybe the church people insist. Or the owners. God knows.”