ONE DAWN IN 1983, outside of the Prague train station, I stood off-balance on the descending conveyor belt that slid me into the subways with their ceramically ornamented walls. A man in a beret told me that because the subway was built by the Soviets, its cars were so massive that the paintings in the art museum used to fall off the walls whenever a subway train passed beneath it. If I missed the bus, he told me, I could kill time by visiting the large Jewish cemetery, with Kafka’s tomb, right opposite my subway exit. When I emerged from the underground—where the dead rather than the living could be commuting—I did miss the bus.
I rubbed my eyelids and tried to look to the cemetery through the pain with which the brilliant sun afflicted my eyes. When I walked through the gate, cool shade soothed my eyes. Large black marble tombstones, untailored evergreen trees, shocks of grass, dank soil. In many places the branches hung low, touching the tombs marked with Hebrew and German inscriptions. I walked through the shaggy graveyard alleys, back and forth, one by one, and then along a wall, more aware of the stickiness of my socks than of the wall that shielded the cemetery from the street and the street from the cemetery— the passersby from the dead and the dead from the passersby. The light brown-gray stones of the wall were dark in places, probably from coal smoke.
On my left remained the darkness of trees and tombs. Suddenly whiteness burst at me. I narrowed my eyes to be able to look at it. My eyelids refracted the light, which tremblingly showed me the letters from the stone, FRANZ KAFKA. The blackness of the trees and nearby stones grew green, the white tombstone pulsated with the blood of my eyes. The warmth of the sun and the light dizzied me and lightened me, but one thing was still needed to perfect the experience: I took off my shoes and my socks so nothing would separate my soles from the soil, and rubbed my bare toes against each other over dust and gravel; my skin rejoiced in the coldness of the ground, and I relished my dizziness as if it were a communication from the dead beneath the stone. Behind me, when I turned around, was the plaque of Max Brod, without whom Kafka would have remained unknown and free from the visits of the likes of me. And though I disliked any presence behind me, I felt as though a conspirator was there with me—a memory hunter.
Soon, with my socks and shoes back on, I walked to my bus stop, happy that I had been stunned by the tombstone, aware that the experience offered itself to easy embellishment and fabrication. I wished to have more experiences like that one.
And so, as some letter writers begin to collect stamps, I began to collect memories of graveyard visits; and as many philatelists specialize in stamps of certain regions and themes, I began to specialize in visits to the graves of the famous Continental writers, not heeding Bulatovich’s epigram— “There were many people at the cemetery, mostly grieving relatives and bad poets.”
In Leningrad, nevertheless, I wanted to visit the tomb of Dostoyevski, but my tour guide did not know where it was, and though I walked up and down Nevsky Prospect many times, I was not aware that at the end of the street reposed the writer in Tikhni Cemetery.
In 1988, in Weimar with a friend of mine, a mathematician awaiting his East German exit visa, I was determined to visit the Goethe mausoleum. On the way to the Stadtpark with the mausoleum, I hesitated, facing three men who humbly waited for me to step off the bus first. They wore blue worker’s suits. Their deeply creased skin was pale and transparently red, their eyes livid blue, pained and unmoved; they looked like a Dürer drawing, like engraved seals of an old nation, which, when you face them, imprint themselves on you, sealing a document of some sort through the used yellowness of your retina. I could hear the stamping of iron facing them.
Wow! I said to my friend Detlev, who replied, Berger. How do you say it in English?
Miners.
On the way, we had a sip of bitter coffee in Goethe Cafe, passed by a yellow Goethe museum and by an orange Goethe gymnasium. As we entered the Stadtpark with the Goethe mausoleum, I asked: How come this park is not called Goethe Park?
Because there is a bigger park, which is!
The ground was covered by green and red crumpled leaves, writhing and rustling in the wind.
The ceiling of the mausoleum dome was blue with a few gilded stars and long rays. In the middle of the gray marble stone a fence surrounded an opening; through a grating I saw two rectangular varnished wooden boxes. Faust’s Night lines, the only ones I could remember from the book, occurred to me. “I have studied philosophy, jurisprudence, and medicine, and alas, theology, with great zeal, and here, I stand once more, no wiser than before.”
And I stood, as bored as before: nothing special. But wait, I thought, it might come yet. We walked down the stairs.
How do you say, Gruft? asked Detlev.
Mausoleum, I told you!
No, Mao is in a mausoleum, Lenin too, there you can see the body.
Here we can see the coffin.
No, it cannot be a mausoleum!
I felt like telling him, Shut up, I want to have a concentrated experience of visiting a famous ghost, not quarrel over words.
The coffins were not much to look at, so I began to look around into the darkness. All along the walls were black dusty boxes, crowded together like worthless materials in a factory outlet, and above them a tarnished plaque hung with the names of dukes of Weimar, duchesses, counts and countesses. It was the mausoleum of the dukes of Weimar, one of whom had invited Goethe to be buried alongside him if he so wished. Probably he hadn’t planned it the way it turned out: he, pushed against the wall in a dusty coffin, Goethe, elevated in the center in a polished one—a rude guest even in death! In life, Goethe probably wasn’t rude, but imposing; and that his name covered so many places in Germany is doubtless to be attributed to his political genius at least as much as to his literary genius. As a vice-councillor and a friend of many influential people, he had his fingers in all sorts of projects; for example, he supervised the rebuilding of the Weimar Palace though he was not an architect, and he designed the Weimar Park (now Goethe Park) though he was not an urban designer or landscaper, and though many who were competed for the projects. Goethe was rich. On the other hand, Schiller (I notice I have made the mistake I’m criticizing—of allotting all the space to Goethe, the attention magnet) died a pauper and was buried in a communal grave, so that it is not certain that the bones in the coffin with Schiller’s name are indeed Schiller’s.
Goethe willed that Schiller be buried with him, so some pauper’s bones, perhaps Schiller’s, were undug, cleaned, and placed into a coffin next to Goethe’s. And here they were, one soul in two bodies—that’s how Goethe had defined friendship, after some Ancient. Actually, one soil in two coffins, and two coffins in one grave, is what the friendship now amounted to. Fresh carnations, red and white, were in front of the coffins, as though the men had just been buried, although they had not been buried. It struck me as strange—somehow naked, mutilated— that the bones of the two men, elevated in coffins above the stone floor, were isolated from the soil below. Shouldn’t your bones be in the earth rather than above it once you died? Shouldn’t your stuff go back into the mother earth, rather than be cut away in a monstrous stone imitation of a womb?
On the way back, at the edge of Goethe Park, we visited airy Liszt’s house with creaking floors, examined the scratchy handwritings of Schumann and Brahms, gazed at the tranquility and dignity of Liszt’s Totenmask raised next to a sunny window, and shuddered at the sight of Beethoven’s Totenmask—the head shrunken, cheeks sunk, small upper teeth protruding from his thinned lips; terror, rage, disease. I wondered, What is Beethoven’s mask doing in Liszt’s house, on a lower shelf in a corner?
In a walk alongside a pine forest on our left, my brother and I admired the greenery of the descending slope on our right, the hazy dark gray-blue of the Zurich lake, and the hill beyond the lake that echoed the shape and size of the hill we stood on. To the tolling of distant sheep, he told me that in addition to the beauty of nature and culture, the area boasted Thomas Mann’s grave, whereupon I livened up from my dusky slumber and insisted that we see the grave without delay.
Since my brother didn’t know where exactly the grave was, we wandered and read the names in the cemetery. There were many Schweitzers, and no doubt many talented corpses, but I wanted only Mann’s. We couldn’t find the tomb, and, jumping over the cemetery fence to cut the distance, my brother promised when I visited again, he would have the grave ready for me. But he didn’t. Next month we went into the cemetery, and the search resumed. Ivan led me to the central plateau of the yard, with many flowers and white gravel. The first tombstone I laid my eyes upon read THOMAS MANN. We rushed to the stone as if there was danger of it vanishing. There were fresh flowers in two pots on the sides of the precisely yet roughly hewn large cubic stone. The name of Mann’s wife was beneath his. In front of the block of stone were smaller stones, laid down in the grass, with the names of their children. There was no cross, no symbol engraved on the stones.
On our way back, staring at a huge black clock with gilded Roman numbers and gilded limbs on the small cemetery chapel, I weighed the last experience, comparing it with the visit to Kafka’s grave, which was wonderful, and to Goethe’s and Schiller’s, which was not much during my visit, but which had grown in the meantime to the status of a striking experience; and I wondered whether the quiet impression of the cubic stone would grow in my memory. Had I become too promiscuous, each visit to the dead meaning less and less? As we climbed away from the cemetery through cow dung and grass, the clock beat time with rich brass echoes, and I feared I would remember the sound more than the sight of Mann’s grave.
But it was because of this fear that nothing remarkable would remain after seeing the graves of famous writers—and that I could not trust my memory to last—that I decided to write about visiting the graves.
In Hollywood, people drive around to stare at the villas of living movie stars, but in Paris, the dead make for the best stargazing scene. At the entrance to the Père Lachaise Cimetière, people stood in line to buy stargazing maps. At Balzac’s grave there were fresh yellow carnations, and above the stone, there was no cross, but Balzac’s head. So, here he is, dead at fifty, after more than fifty novels, fifteen cups of coffee a day, perpetual schemes to run away from creditors, with no reliable address. Now, a hundred years later, the address could not be more reliable. On the side of the grave were the letters of Comtesse Rzewuska, his Polish mistress/wife. Nobody was visiting the grave during my five-minute stay. Next to his grave was a tomb with a little chapel, grave of a painter who died at twenty-five. Through the blue-stained glass, sunshine streaked and hit red and brown leaves, which floated by in a hush.
On the way to Chopin’s grave, I passed by the central chapel, where a service was taking place, with a dirge played out slowly. Black cabs stood parked outside, and the drivers smoked cigarettes impatiently. Wreaths of flowers with purple ribbons covered the steps, and inside, people walked around the coffin. A woman walked out and wept, and leaned against the chapel walls.
From the chapel I walked down, and in a narrow alley found Chopin’s grave, with many wreaths, flowers, and ribbons. The largest ribbon bore the inscription, Polish Embassy. There was a Polish flag here. A couple in black came by and whispered and crossed themselves and laid down white roses.
Not far from this one, I saw a crowd. I guessed it must be Jim Morrison’s grave, and when I came close enough, I could read James… Morrison. (There was a middle name too, but James already sounded odd.) The grave was in a back row, several yards away from the alleys. A front row grave plot costs about eight thousand dollars, a back row plot around four thousand. It’s always possible to buy a slot here because the cemeteries destroy the graves that are no longer visited. Supposedly, if a grave has not had flowers on it for more than a year, and nobody calls to claim it, the management removes the stone and sells the plot to a new customer. So, although the cemetery bore the names of close to a hundred thousand people, more than a million lay here underfoot. The Morrison estate certainly could have afforded the front row, but perhaps the French government did not want him to have it because even in the back rows, his presence was rowdy enough. About two dozen youngsters smoked pot, wept, shouted, and attempted to write graffiti on adjacent stones, but a guard who stood nearby warned them not to do it. The comparison between the number of visits to Morrison’s grave and Balzac’s could sufficiently attest that the serious novel may be dead or in a critical condition, but rock is alive. And Balzac’s grave was no anomaly. Nobody was at Proust’s grave. I stood at his black marble stone, two graves removed from an alley; the stone was smooth, shiny, low to the ground, looking as new as if it had been planted the day before.
At the avenue walked a young sorrowful woman with a bodice lower than her skirt. She exchanged glances with me and walked on to the crematorium, slowly, with a sensuous amble, appropriate near Proust’s grave. A thought crossed my mind that the cemetery could be a meat market of Paris, although I was sure that the thought was unfair to the young woman. Still, I recalled a story by Maupassant, “Graveyard Sisterhood,” in which a prostitute picks up customers at Montmartre cemetery. “Was it a profession—a graveyard sisterhood who walked the cemeteries …? Or had she alone hit upon that admirable idea, that profoundly philosophical notion, of exploiting the amorous regrets awakened in those mournful places?”
And it was Maupassant’s grave I wanted to see next, but for this I had to visit the Montparnasse cemetery. For my essay it would have been better if he had been buried at the Montmartre cemetery, which he had described at length in “Graveyard Sisterhood,” lyrically and thoughtfully, yet he ended up in the flat-walled cemetery of Montparnasse, far from the cemetery avenues. It took me a while to locate his grave, close to a cedar and next to a Legion of Honor soldier. It was a high stone, resembling the frame of a gate. On the soil there were flowers, I did not pay attention to their kind. After two years of syphilitic dementia, he ended up here. His grave was visited. A large family, seeing me there, rushed to the grave—it insulted me that they took me for a tourist rather than for a mourner, although I was not in the least in a mournful mood—and they spoke in excited Polish. Did Maupassant’s influence spread eastward better than westward? Isaac Babel wrote a great story, “My Maupassant,” and Russians used to hold Maupassant, as the short story master, in higher regard than Chekhov.
From here I walked on to the other section of the graveyard, over Rue Emile Richard. Workers were smashing a gravestone and throwing the stones into a dump truck. Clearly, nobody had mourned on that grave in a while, and the space was precious. I found Beckett’s grave, and wondered what would be the appropriate cynical response, in the spirit of his work, whether to take a leak or sit bored, but when I noticed that his wife too lay buried there, out of respect for her I did not opt for the former. She died soon after him, perhaps of grief. Could it be that the cynic had a happy marriage? Somebody had glued several yellow willow leaves on the stone. I walked over to another happy couple, Sartre and S. de Beauvoir. They too had plenty of flowers, yellow for some reason, and no cross, of course, unlike Baudelaire, around the corner and alone. There was a sea of flowers here. Were they a pun of sorts, les fleurs du mal? The cold rain and a whipping wind forced me to reconsider the worth of my visit—wouldn’t it be morbid to become gravely ill at a cemetery? I was contributing nothing to the guys in the ground, and to be with them, I decided I should better leave the dank winds and stay home and read—have the thoughts of the dead relived in me. No, this was not a conversion—I hoped to visit more continental, transcontinental, as well as incontinent corpses of writers, but for now, the cumulative effect of my spending two half-days among the graves was a malaise and a sense of alienation, a feeling—nothing literary—that comes upon me after being in any cemetery for too long.
A couple of weeks later, Ivo and I went to Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich, near the zoo, to see Joyce’s grave. It was a rainy Sunday, and the blue tram #5 took us to the cemetery at its last stop. It was a relatively new cemetery, from the end of the last century, a bay of grass cutting into an evergreen hill. The intense rain created a haze and a low pressure, so that in tranquility we yawned. If there had been a dry piece of ground with pine needles I could have sprawled over it and fallen asleep right there. The graves in the center section were spacious, with single files of large cobbles making paths aside from the main path. Most graves had candle flames in red glass containers with a hole on the side for oxygen, so that the rain could not extinguish the fire. Now we took a look at the cemetery map. There were less than a dozen entries here— for the mass grave, the chapel, and James Joyce. Joyce was the only individual named. No need for a map here. Arrows pointed the way to him. He had become a tourist trap. Up at the highest point of the cemetery, behind hedges, stood his grave, or rather, sat Joyce, that is, his sculpture. I had seen the sculpture in many textbooks, and I had not known that that was the gravestone. There was no cross here, Joyce’s God must be Joyce, or one of our gods was Joyce. He sat in bronze, his legs crossed, left ankle over the right knee, and at his right side leaned a walking stick. (My brother commented that I should take a photo of the grave, so I could describe it accurately. That’s true, I said, the descriptions would be better, but I’d probably carry on too long, and anyway, the photo arts are the enemy of the literary arts. One picture equals a thousand words, so why bother with words?) Joyce’s feet were amazingly narrow—either Giacometti’s influence, or, if this was a realistic presentation of Joyce’s feet, it probably had to do with Italian shoes. He lived in Italy long enough to have his feet squeezed by the Italian shoe industry. Mine, from living in a neighboring country, certainly were—even now my left foot hurt because I’d walked most of my adolescence in narrow Italian shoes. On James’s head (it feels odd to call him by his first name, and would be odder to say Jim Joyce, but why not?) was some white stuff, at first I thought a present from the pigeons, but it turned out to be cold candle wax, in a circle. Somebody must have burned a candle atop his head. Water drops burst on his skull, and water dripped down his glasses, and his lips, onto his lap. The plaque on his grave was covered by yellow cedar needles, and to read it, I removed them with my fingertips. Gebornen in Dublin… Gestorben in Zurich. Why was he buried in German? Next to his grave was a small willow, perhaps a bonsai, but a little too large for a bonsai, and a little too small for a real willow. The bumpy tree squatted and bent its branches. Joyce looked thoughtful, and his gaze fell—and stayed fallen—upon a fresh grave, with orange flowers, not cut, but growing from the ground in a multitude. The grave bore a thin varnished orange cross. Elias Canetti. He had died in August 1994, and this was November, no time for a stone yet. Canetti liked to write about death and cemeteries, as did Joyce.
At any rate, in the haze of rain and mist I had no epiphany, although I remembered the last snowy lines of The Dead: “It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Could you substitute rain for snow, and have the same effect? Why does snow seem to be so much more expressive than rain? Maybe I should visit here when it snows, although there could be no crooked cross in this tidy Swiss cemetery, unless Joyce’s body could be taken for one. At any rate, to form my impression, I would have to make do with the cold hushing rain, and that did not cheer me, as my shoes soaked up the cold. My eyeballs grew cold in the vapors. The vapors drifted upon the softened face of the earth, collected the last breaths left in the soil, lifted them, and took them into the pine woods, sifting them through the needles.
On the way home, Ivo and I visited the Zurich Public Library and its reading room. The walls were lined with journal shelves. I found several dozen literary journals from the States, including the Joyce Quarterly and other Joyce journals, as well as several magazines with my stories in them. It was clear that people were not rushing to the shelves. In fact, I’d never seen anybody in a library pick up a small literary journal. The journals stood here, like thin urns, ashes of reticence. And if I wrote about the grave visits, the scriptoral aftermath of the visits would—at best—end up along the walls, unread, unmoved, silent, buried at a few libraries. That would be fine and appropriate.