Next Of Kin

Next of Kin

Two Sisters

Beyond the cemetery wall the north-south road linking Paris and Spain strides like a stinking nude to both horizons. Commerce and contraband hurtle by; the drivers’ mindscape of tedium and banality rarely registering a nearby cottage. Two sisters had lived there until the liberation. So the moon, the blood coloured, pagan moon which threw my shadow over the tombstones was my only witness.

I married the elder sister, Simone, taking her back to New Jersey as a war bride. I had been a young G I, part of the armies that pushed Hilter’s forces from France in 1944. I have come here as an old man with a troubled mind for a final goodbye now that both are dead.

Marriage always separates siblings but not often so completely. Simone’s experience of the USA was akin to a haunting. She never perfected English (I should have done more) and her French slowly evaporated. She did delight in her vastly higher living standard but became prone to snobbery. American history, I mean the common stories so much part of our lives that they are absorbed in childhood, never penetrated her psyche. The French equivalents withered. She was a faithful wife but we had no children. She died without a fuss and few noticed.

Her sister, Morrisette, was the ugly duckling of the two and had been almost blind since childhood. Nevertheless she had the more real life.

The war which the villagers had waded through daily naturally left scars. At the beginning many men had been taken as forced labour and had never returned. Partisans and then collaborators had been shot at crossroads and in cellars. The survivors sized up the future. Some left the village to improve their life and many of the others found a use Morrisette. After one such use a son was born, a marriage arranged and an uninterrupted life of neglect began. For sixty years she never left the village.

Her uses included killing and skinning rabbits, feeding hens, growing and preserving vegetables and fruits by cart load, skivvying for various generations of her relatives, cleaning, cooking and laundering for local families as well as her ever-immature husband. And laying out the dead.

Over the years she had done the final honours for most of the richer families thus saving professional fees. She had been the first to tend to a hanged man not once but three times. As the village slowly shrank with the suicides and the mechanisation of farm work she was the ‘go to’ woman for the worst jobs, tending to the ‘respectable’ families, often for more than one generation. One by one they all ended up in the cemetery under the moon. About the time of her fiftieth birthday with the burial of another youth killed in a motorbike accident the balance had swung definitively in favour of the dead. The majority of the people she had known and therefore the majority of the population of the village were now housed in the cemetery.
I have lost some of the foolishness of my youth and I know now that the world can show few examples of a better existence than Morrisette’s. Wading waist deep through the immediate details of life she knew the names and the stories of every last one of the people now populating the cemetery. The older occupants only by repute or through the eyes of childhood, the newer graves contained those she had grown up with. Dust to Dust in the same few lanes and fields. Some of the gravestones spoke of the short lives of schoolmates of her son Max. Do you know who lies in your local graveyard?

Perhaps to compensate for the disdain of the villagers she decided on a grandiose enterprise which was to dominate her life - an enormous tomb. Whatever the reason for it the scrimping had been monumental too. A sous saved here a sous earned there year after year. But there it was for all to see close to the War Memorial, by a factor of two the biggest in the cemetery. Her chosen abode in death was garish, very unlike her modest earthly one. More garish even than the graves memorialising in tears of marbled guilt the young victims of motorbike accidents. I knew the edifice well as she took every opportunity to show it off. A year after her death I stood next to it in a state of shock. It was empty. I left the moon alone in the cemetery and went back to my hotel in Blois.

The hotel was a modern one just off the auto-route but really just part of it. I had been there before on infrequent family reunions. My restless night started with a simple feeling of unease - like a sin whittled to a shadow. I searched the cardinal points of my life to identify the cause. Truthfully, there was nothing but a feeling of homelessness, of dislocation. I thought, naturally of my departed wife.

My visitor appeared as a medieval leper with half a face. Speech was difficult for the ‘apparition’ but as I gaped, horrified, I realised that the face was Simone’s. Whether words were actually spoken or not I can’t be sure but I felt I was being cursed in the name of all lepers for having wrenched her flesh from her native soil and interring her far away in New Jersey. I saw her name written in blood on the moonlit tomb before mercifully awakening.

My mind took some time to connect with ‘reality’; fleetingly I conjectured that I was the nameless occupant of the tomb. But no, I was the nameless occupant of a bare, anonymous hotel room in an eddy off the auto-route and my death still some time in the future. As I lay there I felt fearful waves of sorrow engulf me, the sorrow of uprooted vagrant souls denied burial in native soil, like millions of Americans immigrants, landless peasants from half the globe.

People often say that you are born alone and die alone but that seems to under-estimate the role of the mother. You do die alone though. Male bumble bees mate and then drop immediately to the ground to die. I have trodden on them at this stage to shorten their misery but who is to say that it was not some kind of ecstasy that I ended? To die as part of your life, with cultural and homely things both physical and spiritual at hand, may be some kind of apotheosis. To die confused amongst strange customs, foreign voices and recognising nothing must be Hell itself. The leper’s curse had drawn its power from this.

I drove back to the village to find out why the tomb, so laboured over, had not been used. With the feeling of acting in an unsettling play I pulled up a few minutes later by the ‘For Sale’ sign on the old cottage. I was half expecting some signs of recent witchcraft but it had never looked as ordinary. My curiosity about the tomb would soon be satisfied but that question was not the cause of my unease. Rather I felt the weight of my sin, of having arrogantly, as next of kin, torn her from the ground of her real being. My spirit was heavier than my body as I crossed the road to a neighbour’s house. I walked round the back as is the custom there and knocked. The family here had parked children and then grandchildren on Morrisette when they needed impromptu child-minding without ever becoming friendly. I had been treated with respect there as an American or perhaps just as an unknown quality. No immediate answer to my knocking came and, standing alone in the silence, my unsettled night settled on me like a shroud. I shivered.

Thankfully the neighbour soon welcomed me into her kitchen where a small, wiry-muscled man rose from the table offering me his hand with a smile. He was wearing shorts and a casual shirt which contrasted with my rather military attire. Every time I had met this man I had been taken aback by so much body hair. My shirt was deformed from the shape intended by a little extra fat, Max’s was held an impossible distance from his skin by what appeared to be a doormat. His aunt, my wife, referred to him as the god Apollo but I think she meant Bacchus. To me no man could look less like a poet but what do I know? That we should both have called on the neighbour at the same time was fortuitous, my questions about the tomb would be answered by her only son, Max.

I wondered how I should broach the subject. Had Max failed in his duty, as I was increasingly feeling I had, to bury family in meaningful ground? At length he suggested that we visit his mother’s resting place. Once outside he unexpectedly opened the passenger door of his car for me and we drove off even though the cemetery was only yards away. He took the road out of the village.
As he drove neither of us spoke for half an hour. There were a few turns around small drainage canals but otherwise the road went straight through the expanses of ripe crops. I had passed along this road before but on that day it seemed uniquely featureless. Every now and again we would appear to be approaching a farmhouse but the road always deviated slightly. With the old farms derelict or used as barns all life was gone. This modern countryside was as devoid of interest as the auto-route.

He stopped where I had guessed he was headed, a tiny cemetery now a long way from any habitation. The cemetery was triangular and was well shaded by plane trees which enclosed it. Our footsteps on the gravel surface were the only sound after the metal gate clanged shut. First Max paused at his grandmother’s grave and then indicated one a few steps away, unnecessarily as it was the only other one with floral tributes, the grave of Morrisette.

“Did I do ‘the right thing’ as you say in English?’’ Max asked. It was a genuine question.

“The marble tomb…?” I uttered fearfully.

“Oh, that hideous thing. I sold it when she took ill. He half shrugged his shoulders, then, indicating a field or perhaps a water tower beyond the cemetery with a vague wave of his arm continued, “Over there, she told me, is where I was conceived.”

We formed an odd couple, a short man who had for decades been a successful poet and myself, head and shoulders taller, a man of military appearance who had slowly built up a business importing fine wines. That does describe us both but every word in that sentence is immaterial, as is much in this life. What matters is often a momentary insight. I knew what I had to do.

Having no need to speak I patted him on the back and we left. He had answered my question by his actions. We have no closer kin to embrace our bodies than our native soil.