This is one of the very few cemeteries to be found inside walled cities, or so the Guide says.
Most are outside, says the Guide, most were forced outside, had been granted outside: begrudged to them nearby sites of execution, adjacent to carrion pits.
Everyone with me?
Here’s where you wash your hands clean, called the lavabo; don’t worry, we’ll be passing another.
Here’s where you purify, where you ritually guard the body, the corpse, keep watch over and yadda.
Here’s the shed for the funeral coach, the caravanserai’s the term, if you will.
Here the bier, here the common coffin for transport, because…
There, the loom of the shrouds; they’re woven from eyelash, you know…the Guide points with her umbrella, she’s poking.
Here the Sexton’s quarters, the Shammes’, the Cemetery Caretaker’s there. Across the street, the Guide umbrellas — the mason and wheelwright over there then the smithy, turn around, marked on the maps they hold in their hands with their respective guild seals, interpret…here, she says, it’s another lavabo, and so someone finally stops, riffles through his clothing for a camera not yet confiscated (how even the few survivals have been carefully planned for effect), takes a photograph of this relic in silver tarnished, smoky, handled in ivory, austerely no frills, half sunken in ivy, grass, and miscellaneous weed. Suddenly, that blackishbird swoops down out of the sky to fly away with the camera that anyway wasn’t loaded, that didn’t have any film, which’d been confiscated back at the aeroport.
There’s a nest of lenses, somewhere, it’s said.
Here, the Guide says again, the gate for the Priests, opposite the Gate where we’ve entered.
In the beginning, there were slab tombstones, stele, then the tombs with lids like sarcophagieyes, Egypt, if you remember it, then the desert, which’d been tented in rock like a mountain; then a period of double tombstones over a single plot, like another pair of peeled stones keeping watch: husband and wife sharing one earth. Menschs laid to rest under their names, the symbols of their family, their labor, occupations, as they once lived under the signs of their houses: the Cohens, the priests, they were buried in their own section under the relief of their hands, splayed and winged, then a fish, for the Levites, a jug, a dish, a crown and a book, a tailor’s scissors, a doctor’s scalpel, a lawyer’s scales, lions and deer; more birds swooping down to perch atop tombs, crows turned to rock, ravenrock. Dark. Pinch me, the icemensch’s pincette. They approach the inscriptions, wearied, weathereffaced, and they kneel, go to make rubbings with provided materials. One year later, their Guide says, not that they’d live — it’s the consecration of the burial, the unveiling, that’s when the tombstone’s set, placed: at least, that’s the tradition, they’re told, they believe. There, the rabbi’s section of the Cemetery. Here, husbands and wives had been buried separately…over yonder the sections reserved for the suicides, for the murderers further, and then that reserved for the bastards, no more illegitimate than anyone else nowadays. They lay little stones upon all the graves except these, as their Guide suggests, then instructs against their compliance, then for it, resistance, then none, stones, pebbles, gravel obtained from vessels in locations wellmarked, well in advance of their arrival, thousands of years; stones atop stones, they’re burying rock, consecrating memory itself, to itself.
Embrace what you’ve forsaken, the Guide guides, and they’re guided: this is just fascinating…
A trainful of them disembarks outside the Cemetery, about onehundred strong if weakened families with little ones mostly, only a few unattached, singlestoured, apprehensively lonely, unsure whom to beg for their comfort. Among them is Kaye, pale, darkhaired slickly struck down, tall, thin, and alert, impatient to visit the grave here of a fellow insurance mensch, a hero of his from the days of his very first policy. A brother worker in the service of adjustment, assessing liability, a companion in the divine office of limiting risk. Weather’s coming blown so regularly harsh it feels almost manufactured, machined, whips across his face, he squints, slowly makes his way across the street from the trainstop, toward the Gate. A pilgrimage. All those days of scrimping and saving were worth it, he thinks, have to be, he’s convincing, and now that I’m here, I’d better enjoy while it lasts. He heads up his laggard trainload in their march, keeps pace with their Guide who — with an order to them to wait at the gate for their Guide to the cemetery, because here, everything’s specialized — leaves them with a flourish of her umbrella to attend to yet another Group now doing the shuls, which are the synagogues, the houses in which these people once prayed. Hoping silently that nothing should disturb his Grave audience, Kaye’s intending to appeal for an exception, maybe a divine intervention, perhaps his merit for my predicament — even a few sales tips while we’re at it, useful if he would survive, if he could, advice regarding indemnity as if that were a theological issue, a coupla policy pointers. In his pocket, a scrap of paper folded thrice, company letterhead lined with strict, anxious handwriting that resembles the remains of insects swatted, squashed: a message for the mensch in the Grave, it’s a last will & testament, too, in addition to not a few other things; once inside, if inside, Kaye might use it for a yarmulke, a backup, just in case — he’s not in insurance for nothing.
Through the fence streaming its wall from both sides of the gate, through the inkdark smears and smudges of bars, everything muddled falls into focus: a lavabo to the left, a lavabo’s for the washing of hands…then, a vessel filled with tiny rocks ground down to pebbles positioned to the right, those are for placing atop the stones, the stele, the tombs; he’s prepared. Kaye tries the handle to the door set into the gate, tries again, grimaces wrinkles to an appearance older than he’ll ever live, to grow into his face to hide whether a blush or a blanch, turns to his trainload to ask for assistance, meekly, open of palm. Out of nowhere, there’s a mensch. His is the uniform of two wars ago or so that were never reported (who ever knew, the question every Group asks itself), a medal of uncertain insignia weighs as heavily as a head itself, decapitated, scalped to hang its shine from a scrap of ribbon a filmreel strangling a neck that’s scrawny, and mutual; that old sharp beak peeking from a bifurcate beard, one for you, one for him; onelegged, too, he feels deserving, and so he’s demanding an admission fee, supplementary, wordless, with his hands out, a sum additional to that of their entrance, which’d supposedly been allinclusive, extracted from each of them previously. Kaye shows the mensch his armband, reaches an arm through the bars, then, retracting to roll up the other sleeve, his tattoo, glossy with ointment lately applied, and then from his pockets, his documents disappeared of ink, everything he can think of, anything even remotely indicative of officialdom, of payment in full, but the mensch won’t understand, he couldn’t…he scratches his head, hops around in irrritation on the spring of his stump.