Читать книгу Something Remains - Hassan Ghedi Santur - Страница 15

8 interpreter for the dead

“What were her favourite flowers?” the woman sitting in front of Gregory asks.

Gregory stares at her, unable to decipher the significance of the question.

“We try our best to make the ceremony a true reflection of the deceased,” the man next to the woman adds, their kind gazes trained on Gregory. They talk soothingly as though how gently they speak to the widower in front of them is a direct measure of their sympathy.

Do they teach these people how to talk like this in mortuary school? Gregory wonders. A narrow coffee table with a nicely arranged vase of hydrangea separates Gregory and the couple. Gregory sips from the glass of water they offered him when he arrived.

“Are you married?” he asks the couple, who glance at each other, then back at him as if they have never heard such a question.

“Yes,” the man says.

“Well, technically, no,” the woman corrects. “But we’ve been together for five years and we’re engaged.” She wiggles a finger to show off the diamond engagement ring.

“We’ve been so busy taking over the business for my parents when they retired that we never got around to setting a date,” the man says.

The couple is about the same height and weight, which strikes Gregory as odd. He can’t figure out why this should seem so strange. Perhaps because he was much taller and weighed a lot more than Ella, he expects the same of all couples.

“When did your parents retire?” Gregory asks the man, not really giving a damn about the answer.

“Last year,” the man replies. “Did you know my parents?”

“My wife came here when her father died four years ago. She was very happy with the service she got.”

“We can assure you, Mr. Christiansen, we’ll do our best to match the level of service your wife received.” The man glances at his partner, expecting her to concur. She does so with a smile.

“If you can’t remember your wife’s favourite flowers, which is of course completely understandable given your situation, we can make the floral arrangements,” the woman says.

Gregory remains quiet for a moment.

“You must still be in shock,” the man adds.

Gregory’s wife was seriously ill for two years. Part of him was prepared for the possibility of sitting across from people like this talking about his wife’s favourite flowers to make the funeral service “a true reflection of the deceased,” as they put it. So it wouldn’t be completely true to tell them he is still in shock. What he really feels, however, is rage — pure and undiluted.

Ever since running out of the hospital after the doctor told him his wife was dead, Gregory has experienced an array of emotions, more than he even knew existed, most of which cancelled one another out. Except rage. It remains without being transmuted into something else. It has been ubiquitous and unrelenting. What or who he is angry at hasn’t become clear with time. He is even enraged at this nice, colour-coordinated couple sitting before him, even though they appear to desire nothing more than to help him give a funeral service befitting his wife. So why is he so infuriated at them? All he can do is stare at them and silently curse the way they smile and finish each other’s sentences, how they nod appreciatively at each other’s suggestions. They have gotten under his skin, and he wants to smack them silly. To Gregory everything they do comes off as shameless gloating.

“Did your wife leave a will?” the man asks.

“Excuse me?”

“We only ask because sometimes people leave specific instructions for the sort of funeral they want. You know, the music they want played and such …”

Gregory almost asked his wife to tell him what he should do if the end came. It was on a hot August Friday afternoon after a particularly bad week when even the doctors had little hope. But since Ella never brought up the subject, he didn’t have the heart to ask her. It seemed to him as if his wife believed that any discussion of a will or funeral arrangements was a resignation, an acceptance of defeat. So he, Andrew, and Natalie rallied around her in a display of willful denial.

“No, she left me no specific instructions,” Gregory says.

“In that case, you’ll have to help us decide.” As she speaks, the woman turns to her partner for another supportive nod. “Since you knew her best, you’ll have to act as … an interpreter of sorts.”

Gregory thinks about what is being asked of him. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or both at the thought of being an interpreter for the dead. Suddenly, his anger shifts from the funeral home couple to his wife for putting him in this position. “Okay,” he says, accepting the task, face flushed with shame for being mad at his wife. She isn’t even buried yet and he has failed her already.

“For starters, have you thought about what kind of casket your wife would have wanted?” the woman asks.

“She wouldn’t have wanted one. If she had a choice, I’m sure she’d rather not be in one. Don’t you think?” Gregory watches the woman cringe with embarrassment. He feels the momentary thrill of victory, of making her feel guilty for her stupid question.

“I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to —”

“No, I’m sorry,” Gregory interrupts, his triumph shifting into sorrow for taking his anger out on this poor woman trying to do her job. If he believed in psychotherapy or ordered self-help books on Amazon.com, he would have the tools, the emotional lingo, to understand the source of his rage and know where to direct it at. Instead he is incensed at himself, at God, at the universe, at whomever is ultimately responsible for who dies and who lives. Somebody has to pay, and since he can’t see God, it might as well be this nice woman in the brown turtleneck sweater.

“We have an excellent collection of caskets to choose from,” the man says, attempting to rescue his partner.

The woman rises, picks up a huge binder from a table in the corner of the room, and hands it to Gregory. “You can leaf through it and select the one you like,” she tells him.

Does anyone actually like picking out a casket? Gregory wants to ask her, but he knows he has already been rude enough for one day. As a grieving widower, he is probably allotted a certain amount of impoliteness before people think he is an asshole. So he quietly flips through the binder’s pages, which display caskets and their prices.

The man clears his throat. “The prices range from $1,400 to over $18,000.”

Gregory glances up from the picture of the casket he is studying and frowns.

“We want you to pick the one you’re most comfortable with,” the man says.

Bullshit, Gregory thinks. You want me to choose the one that’s going to add the most to your bank account. He continues to browse the binder until he comes across a beautiful black casket. The price is $8,911. How absurd to spend so much money on a box only to bury or burn it.

Gregory once read that Muslims inter their dead wrapped in a simple white cotton sheet. At the time he thought it was disrespectful to the dead; now it makes perfect sense. “This one,” he says as he hands the binder to the woman and indicates the black casket.

“An excellent choice,” she says.

“Indeed,” the man concurs. “One of our most popular.”

Gregory has to get out of the stuffy room. One more minute with this couple and their friendly toothpaste commercial smiles and soft, consoling voices and he will scream. He might even grab the pretty vase of hydrangea on the coffee table and hurl it at them. That ought to wipe the sympathy smiles off their faces, Gregory thinks. However, two assault charges in one week would be pushing luck even for a bereaved widower.

“You said your wife wanted to be cremated, correct?” the man asks.

Is this ever going to end? Gregory wants to scream.“Well, I don’t know about always,” he says instead in a pleasant tone, surprising even himself. “But she did express an interest in cremation once.” For the first time in ages, he remembers when his wife actually talked about her death and what kind of burial she would like. Strange that it was two days into their honeymoon rather than when she got sick and was on the cusp of the hereafter. She didn’t tell him what she wanted when it really counted, when death was no longer a hypothetical, way-in-the-future abyss.

———

Gregory and Ella were really keen on going somewhere fancier — Rome, Cairo, or even reliable old London — but in the end the Grand Canyon won. As small as the wedding was, it was still expensive, and the down payment they put on their first home, a fixer-upper off Bathurst Street near Eglinton Avenue, had pretty much depleted their collective savings. Europe could wait, they agreed, so they rented a car and set out on a road trip. Three days on the highway, three days camping at Grand Canyon, and three more days driving back. It was exhausting, sometimes boring, and often plain rough. But one morning at the edge of the canyon when they managed to awaken as the sun came up over the cliffs made all the trouble worth it.

As Ella and Gregory stood side by side near the metal railing that separated them from the great chasm, they stared straight ahead, the sun casting its first rays on the mind-boggling void and rendering them speechless. That wasn’t much of an accomplishment for Gregory, since silence was the state in which he spent much of his days, but it was a shocking new experience for Ella. For close to ten minutes she gazed ahead as if stunned by the vista.

Almost frightened by her reaction, Gregory put his arm around her shoulder. “You okay there?” he asked with a slight but benevolent smile.

Tears welled in Ella’s large black eyes, which were almost as dark as her hair. There were no tears in her eyes on the first night they had made love in his small, sparsely furnished apartment three weeks after they met. Nor were there any tears when he proposed to her a year later, and most surprisingly, even on their wedding day. Gregory used to think all women cried at weddings, especially their own, but Ella proved that theory wrong. It took a geological freak of nature to bring tears to his wife’s eyes.

“This is it,” Ella said finally. “This is where I want to be buried.”

“Honey, I don’t think that’s legal.”

“I don’t mean literally,” she said, giving him a slight, scolding push with her shoulder against his rib cage. “God, sometimes you can be so damn literal. I meant my ashes, my remains.”

Remains? Gregory repeated to himself. He hated that word. It sounded like something a serial killer left behind. Gregory turned away from the scenic wonder and peered into Ella’s watery eyes, so open and already familiar to him as though he had known them all his life. “That’s a pretty morbid request on your honeymoon, isn’t it?”

“It feels like home,” she said as undramatically as if she were talking about her favourite sweater. “Puts it all into perspective, doesn’t it?”

“How so?” he asked, instantly regretting the question. He often felt like a complete ignoramus around her. She was always thinking five steps ahead of him.

“Oh, I don’t know — life, death, divorce, bankruptcy, a bad case of syphilis, a flooded basement, all of it. This —”she pointed with her chin “— dwarfs everything else. What’s a single life’s ups and downs in the face of billion-year-old rocks?”

After that they sank back into their respective reveries as the sun slowly revealed more and more of the red cliffs and pits of the canyon.

“It’s amazing isn’t it, God’s patience?” she said without looking at him.

Ever the scientist, Gregory wanted to say, “What’s God got to do with it?” But he remained silent as they held hands and stared ahead.

———

“She wanted to be cremated and scattered over Grand Canyon,” Gregory says to the undertaker couple. Then he grins devilishly. “Me, I want to be buried, mud, dirt, and all. Why deny the crawly suckers their feast? That’s my philosophy.”

A quick peal of laughter escapes the woman and stops immediately as though she remembered that merriment in the presence of a grieving widower goes against everything they taught her at mortuary school.

Finally, after saying goodbye to the couple, Gregory steps out of the funeral home and into the blinding September sun, feeling relieved. It is mid-afternoon, and Danforth Avenue is alive with people going about their business. A young mother with a pierced eyebrow pushes a double stroller. A willowy black teenager, possibly Haitian, almost bumps into Gregory. He notices the teen is reading a tattered copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. An old Greek woman in a black skirt, a black sweater, and a black head scarf sits on a bench, hands folded, gazing intently at something unseen as though trying to figure out how she got there.

Gregory takes a couple of deep breaths as he walks toward his car, which he parked in a lot a block away. He is so happy to be out at last and into the sunlight. What sweet lark it is, he thinks, to find one’s self plunged deep in the midst of life. A sudden pang of guilt hits him. How heartless, he thinks, to revel in life, to breathe it so shamelessly, so joyously.