The parish priest, accompanied by two singers for the occasion,
absolved him of his sins, committed knowingly or unknowingly, waved his
thurible as if sowing seed, and then made a cross in the air above the head of
the deceased migrant, nodding to the gravediggers as a sign to start lowering
the coffin into the grave.
The soil suddenly seemed light and friable. It was hard to
imagine that it would swallow with the same greed anyone who was buried in it
Some of the congregation said that foreign soil received strangers with a
certain gentleness.
As they were hammering the nails in the coffin, one of the girls
rushed at the men with the hammers, and shouted:
“No,” she cried, “I’ve just remembered. One day when he
came back from fishing he had a serious talk with me, and said...”
“What?” asked an elderly migrant.
“He wanted to be cremated, Yes, and have his ashes
scattered at sea.”
“Which sea?” asked another in the congregation. “How do
you know that he meant this sea?”
“We just had no money to take him to any other.”
“At sea in general,” the girl insisted. “That was his last
wish.... Perhaps he wrote it down somewhere.”
The priest frowned. He was not allowed to bless a deceased
person who had expressed a wish to be cremated.
“You had better hold your own service,” he said. “I’ve
finished my duties.”
The coffin was loaded onto the bier again and carried towards
the crematorium. They had to hurry, because strangely, as has often been
noticed, in the few hours after death a body becomes five times heavier, and
almost impossible to lift. This found this to be true in this case when they
reached the crematorium entrance.
“He’s as heavy as lead,” said the attendant. ‘As if you’d
come here to melt lead.”
“We’re peace-loving people,” grinned one migrant. “We’re not the sort who melt lead for bullets.”
The crematorium director quoted a horrendous price for his
services. Everybody knew that this was because of their lack of language. If
you don’t know the local language, you get robbed left right and centre. In
this case, there was also what was called an Aliens Tax, levied by the crematorium
which assumed responsibility for the risks incurred in cremating foreign
bodies, such as the spread of unknown toxins, or gases of unknown origin and
with incalculable effects.
As they grieved and lit cigarettes in the desolate crematorium
yard they watched the wisps of smoke that were their one-time friend, and saw
in this smoke their own histories and desires, Cremation had been a good
solution. “Poor guy,” said the girl. “He could have lived longer.”
The eldest among the migrants curled his lip.
“Why?” he said. “To make blacker smoke?”
“He’s out of it now.” said a woman. “And you would have wanted
him to live longer. Were you in love with him perhaps?”
The girl did not answer immediately. She wiped away a hint of
tears and added:
“I don’t know. Perhaps. In fact, no. Not an ordinary kind of
love. He loved someone else. A girl in his own country.”
“But that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have loved him, does
it?”
“Well, it was possible. But in fact he was impossible to love,
not passionately anyway. You could see his heart was elsewhere.”
“And the poor soul doesn’t even know that he’s dead,” another
woman added.
“What poor soul?” asked the girl in bewilderment.
“The girl he loved, of course.”
“Ah yes... she’ll have to be told too. In case she’s waiting for
him to come back.”
The old man cast her a reproachful glance.
“Let her find out for herself,” he stammered. “We can’t
interfere with a woman waiting for a man she loves. Who knows, does she have
anything else in her life as precious as this waiting?”
“That’s right,” said one of the women. “Let her find out
herself. She’ll notice that letters aren’t arriving any more, no news, no phone
calls... She’ll understand herself, like we all did.”
“Nobody I have loved has ever died in a foreign country,” said
the girl.
“It’s never too late,” said the old man.
The wisps of smoke that were once their friend had dispersed.
The older man had had the time and inclination to count them.
They decided to take lots for who should scatter his ashes at
sea.
The lot fell to a woman, who had just finished her first month
abroad.
“This is a good omen for the start of your adventure.,”
the girl said to her.
“What adventure?” said the woman, taken aback.
“Your journey into hell,” said the older man.
They came from totally different countries, and understood each
other with difficulty in the language of the country that had brought them
together. They accepted each other’s blunders and inadequacies without even the
most covert of smiles.
One of the crematorium staff handed over the urn and laughed,
wishing them a long life. “God rest his soul.”
“God rest your mother,” the old man butted in angrily.
They walked to a small bay on the seacoast. This “guy the
bitches didn’t bark at” had had the habit of diving in each morning, after
work, to catch fish, or perhaps to soothe away monstrous visions of
homesickness.
The older man took on the task of scattering the ashes, He
deserved the role, because he more than anyone else had been the undeclared
leader of this group of exiles. He had coped with the bitter collapse of so
many dreams, without losing heart.
The women had begun to weep. They wept briefly for the youth of
“the guy the bitches didn’t bark at.” They thought, in these long ashen days
and nights and in their half-waking dreams of returning or not returning to
their home countries, that they would all one day be poured through the mouths
of urns like these.
The older man took care to scatter the ash on the water and not
let the wind blow the ash back onto the shore.
“How terrible to be caught on a hook,” the eldest among
the women broke the silence. “To be a fish... Imagine, no hands, no way of
saving yourself... Caught by the throat with a hook, in the stomach, or the
lungs...”
“We aren’t here to scatter the ashes of a fish,” the old
man gritted his teeth. “Better remember what it means to be a mother or a
father. When some unknown foreigner, at the ends of the earth, scatters the
ashes of your son.”
The older man had been the first to notice the absence of the
young man and had informed the camp director and the divers. He had dived into
the water with them, searching randomly among the rocks, algae, and hungry
crabs, until they had found him eighteen metres below the surface. However,
understanding that he had no chance of returning to life, they were struck less
by the extraordinary colour of his body, or the almost living, enheartening
expression of his eyes, than by the appearance of the fish. It was a giant
fish, the size of a boat. The young man had caught it on his hook and in order
not to let it escape had tied the line round his waist. And the fish, perhaps
likewise in order not to let his captor escape. had plunged deeper and deeper
into the water and remained there until the man had yielded up the the ghost.
The old man was familiar with this kind of fish. In the Balkans,
and beyond, in the Caspian Sea, they called it a “koran.” It was a carnivorous
fish, and whenever it chanced to be caught on a hook, it died, thrashing with
rage. The colour of its scales then changed completely, and you might imagine a
totally different fish on your hook. But this fish had not wanted to die and
had retained the colours of its birth. With its back turned towards the man’s
body, it had waited until the migrant’s blood burst from his ears, mouth, and
nose, and its captor’s writhings had ceased. When the old man and the divers
arrived below, they stared dumbfounded as the fish snorted, and dived even
deeper. The hook came loose from its chest together with a chunk of innards the
colour of a persimmon. Only then did the tardy rescuers turn to the man, and
were amazed a second time. He was naked, the colour of wax, luminous, and
surrounded by a halo of sanctity The fish and other sea creatures had eaten his
underwear and leather bracelet. He looked as if newly born from his mother’s
womb, a man born without a childhood, at the age he was when he died, about
thirty, the son of a mother who might have been life, or death, itself.
The urn was quickly emptied.
The ashes mingled with the salt water and turned to mud.
“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.” the priest had sung so
many times.
Only when the urn was emptied of slightest trace of unburned
bone and was emptied too of its dust and ashes of dreams, they began to ask
each other what it was that had distracted the guy the bitches didn’t bark at.
He must have had some kind of premonition. It was as if he couldn’t live
without diving into the water of this bay every morning after he returned from
work. He went to carnival in a fish’s costume. But he never ate fish. The fish
he caught, he kept for a couple of hours in a large aquarium in his room before
releasing them. He was as delighted as a child when he saw that the fish had
not forgotten how to swim. Had he not known that fish and drowning men, even if
they have forgotten how to swim, learn very quickly from the motion of the
waves? Or had he been trying to do destiny a favour, in the hope that the
latter, having caught him on her hook, would merely keep him a while and
release him?
They returned from the bay at about three o’clock in the
afternoon. They were not hungry. The canteen was empty, but even if they had
asked, nobody would have given them anything to eat at that time.
The old man smoked a roll-up.
The bitches emerged from their stinking lairs but made no sound.
Perhaps because they didn’t know who not to bark at. The man whom they had
never barked at had known the old saying, that it was easier to extract a fart
from the dead than a dollar from a migrant. He had settled his accounts with the
world above water, before he had caught that fish as big as a boat. Under the
aquarium in his room, he had left a sum of money in an envelope. He had written
on the envelope, “for subsequent expenses.” When the old man counted the money,
it turned out that the guy had paid for everything except the scattering of the
ashes, something which they had all carried out for free, as a mark of respect
for him and for themselves. Now they would have to endure the desperate howls
of the dogs, like the wails of souls of the dead cast from that sandbank into
the air and salt water, and they would wait to see at whom this barking would
sometimes cease.
They never swam again in that beloved bay, and when they chanced to pass that way, especially early in the morning, listening to the barking of the dogs, and so exhausted that they would not care if the world came to an end, they would shake their head, each in the manner of their own country, and say you shouldn’t catch larger fish than was proper, except when the barking becomes impossible to endure.
Translated by John Hodgson
© 2011
Goethe Institut