The Burial

Breathing so hard was very painful. Sweat was pouring from his pores, overworked not so much because of the searing spring heat, but rather from having to clamber up mountains. It was trickling slowly through his short, thick body-hair; in the silent world that enveloped him, it managed to sound like the ripple of a tiny stream flowing through a canyon. Nothing but silence, the lethal trickle of sweat, a blocked road, utter exhaustion, and a woman who was still unburied even though she had been dead for two days.

S. stopped climbing, panting even harder than before; he was totally exhausted. Being forced to use another route than the one that was blocked made for very tiring work. For two whole days now he had been climbing up and down other trails . . . but no matter how exhausted he felt, he could not stop or take a break. Back down there, his wife still lay inside the house like a bag of wet hay. By now her corpse may well have begun to smell bad; perhaps worms had started sprouting from her toes in search of exits to the world of light. The cemetery was still a long way away. The blocked road had made it even further.

One evening, exactly a week ago, while S. and his now-dead wife were having dinner, they heard a violent crashing sound and a loud rumble, which totally obliterated the combined noise of thunder and pounding rain. They had never heard such a sound before. The next day they discovered that part of the mountain had collapsed in a landslide, because the floods had eroded part of the ground. The road was now blocked. There it all stood, stubbornly defiant. From that evening on, S.’s house was totally cut off from the world, from the village and its shops two miles away.

S. was totally exhausted as he tried to get there. To get around the landslide, he had had to resort to his hands and knees—in fact, his entire body. Once he had reached the top of the landslide, he’d jumped down to a lower point, then back onto the blocked road.

When his wife had died, he’d thought about wrapping up her body, tying her to his back, and making his way over the landslide. However, he realized that that would be totally undignified for a dead person. In any case, he might not make it, and that would make him feel very sad. For two days now, he had been trying to come up with some other way of getting his dead wife to the cemetery, but the road was still blocked. It was the only road, and the cemetery was very far away. He would need to go around the mountain and get to the place where the shops and cemetery were located. Feeling desperate, he thought of taking an ax and burying his wife somewhere close to his house, but everything he tried was utterly futile. The ground was as hard as steel; digging just a few cubic inches took many hours. He had tried in other places too, only to confront the same firmness, obstinacy, and rejection from the ground.

But now he had found a solution. In the afternoon two men were going to meet him and help him carry the corpse. They would walk with him down the circular road to the bottom where the village, cemetery, and shops were located.

When S. reached the house, he paused for a moment. Utterly exhausted, he collapsed on the ground; even though it was actually cold and hard, it now felt warmer and more sympathetic. He stared off into the distance, relentlessly observing the curved line that separated earth and sky. A doleful tableau took shape before him: white houses, plowed land, shapeless, colorless trees, and far away a curved line separating earth and sky. From that scene he looked back at his own surroundings and focused on the lower part of the door. Still feeling stunned and ill at ease, he realized that behind that half-opened door lay the shrouded body of his wife. By now it might well be, indeed probably was, turning blue and covered with a layer of worms. In his mind he gathered together all the foulest smells he could imagine; it was the most repulsive ones that seemed to stick in his mind. A strange image occurred to him: what if wolves had sneaked in through the door while he was out and savaged the corpse? He imagined his wife, whom he had often hugged and embraced, being instantly torn to pieces. In his mind he tried to put the pieces back together and restore to his dead wife the tender body that had become so diseased in her final days.

Like a defective machine, he stood up slowly, placed his hands on his knees that were sagging under the weight of so much grief and bitterness, and rushed like a madman toward the house, chasing away the image of carnivorous wolves as he did so. No one deserved such a death, he told himself, especially someone who, during her lifetime, had been one of the most beautiful, kind, and tender of creatures. Divine care always attends such benevolent souls, protecting them from evil.

He scratched the nape of his neck; it was the sweat that was making his hair coarse and damp, not the rain. When he opened the door, his eyes fell on a serenely shrouded body, covered with a clean and plain cloth that his wife had kept locked away in a chest for such a day as this. It was painful for S. to find himself alone and isolated, facing the world unaided (but then death spares no one).

His wife had passed away one morning while she was chatting to him in her usual amiable way. She never worried about death or imagined it would surprise her, but now it had! Even if she hadn’t been aware of the imminence of death, her life-partner certainly was, now that she had died. . . . Her husband was now fully aware of the fact that death can surprise you wherever and whenever.

S. could not bear to stare so helplessly at the serene corpse, so he shifted his gaze elsewhere to focus on things that reminded him of his dead wife’s image. Slowly closing the door, he left the house and sat on a rock fixed firmly in the ground. Once again he could see the white spots on the horizon, the plowed land, and the curved line separating the kingdom of heaven from that of earth. He stayed there sitting on the rock till he heard the sound of voices floating on the air, which was as oppressive as a stagnant lake.

The two men arrived and followed S. into the house. They looked sad. Even though they themselves hadn’t lost anyone so far, they were aware that they were supposed to look sad and mournful.

After awhile, S. tried to close the door. By now, he was even more upset, but somehow his exhausted frame managed to find some fresh, nervous energy. More than ever, he now realized that he would have to face the world on his own, without any help. While the three of them stumbled their way over the rocks on the road, a movie image passed rapidly across S.’s vision. In it, the circular road was not long, and he imagined it as having been asphalted, even though it was actually rocky, hard, and impassable. In any case, it led to the valley where the white houses, shops, and cemetery were. Far away, a curved line still separated heaven from earth.

He was feeling bitter and exhausted. Even so, he sensed an unusual burst of energy which he had never felt before. . . . At this point, his wife only seemed to weigh a few ounces (for sure, by now her soul would be flying toward that distant unknown place along with many others). . . . A tear fell from S.’s eye. The rough, twisting road seemed to grow shorter.