The day echoes like laughter

And one day it finally happens. Although I had postponed the plan for so long and so many times. Every morning when I got up and had in mind to follow my idea, something came up and stood in the way. The car would not start, a friend needed my help, I got the flu, a story had to be written off, a pandemic broke out.

But now I'm here. Fate was apparently sleeping today. No accidents on the road, no natural disasters, no angry farmers blocking the highroads with their tractors. It is a quiet day in February. The light is friendly, inviting. Aluminum gray clouds are stuck to the sky. But it is not raining. A thin wind blows against the lonely trees.

The cemetery is located outside the village. Wherever I look, there is only grassland to be seen. The meadows are occasionally interrupted by small farms, narrow ditches, silent horses. This is not a country that welcomes visitors. This is a country that at best tolerates its residents. Like a strict teacher endures docile students.

The two tombstones are standing skewed but indifferent in the wet ground. I read the familiar names on the weathered stone. My grandparents. I have never known them. They had already passed away when I gained some sense of reality. But now, standing here in the solemn shadow of the old gable roof church, I feel their presence. The stiff blood, the rough flesh, the tough words. How long did my ancestors live on this unruly sandy soil? Hundreds of years? Thousands perhaps? Farmers, clog makers, skippers. All their toil, all their dreams, all their hardship. I am made of it too.

For too long I thought I did not belong to them. That the history of my ancestors was not my history. That their sorrows, their joys, their disappointment, were not mine. But what person can do without roots, what creature can do without a past? It is an illusion to imagine that I can ever break free from this toilsome clay ground. I'm stuck in these grasslands for life. Like the crooked willows along the abandoned ditches, like the lapwings in the desolate sky.

“You're from the village?” A man wearing a tweed flat cap is standing next to me. I did not see him coming. He smokes a pipe. I smell the spicy, vanilla scents. I explain to him why I am here. As the man trudges on, I follow him. Is he the gardener? A volunteer who maintains the graves, the tombstones, the beech hedges?

We stop at a dilapidated shed. There are two white summer chairs. We sit down and watch how a line of cars are moving slowly toward the cemetery. A little later a coffin is carried from the front car. Six men dressed in black, drag the colossal case into the church. Stately and miserable, the rest of the procession follows. When the sexton closes the doors, it is quiet again. No creaking of fancy shoes on the shell paths, no rustling of vintage style skirts.

I confide to the man with tweed flat cap. How hard I tried to start over. Other countries, other languages, other cultures, other people. So many choices, so many directions. But still, I always end coming back to it. My past, my origins. Should a person just experience that? That his life remains as it is. That he always carries his provenance, his history with him? Like a millstone?

“Maybe we do,” the pipe smoker mutters. “Undeniably we are stuck. But do you know what the idea of dying is? Besides the fact that there is so much sadness, so much pain involved? The relatives can move on. They are allowed to continue. And we have to move on. That is what I believe. A person is not meant to be a copy, an imitator. Every person has a voice, a will, a opinion. And although we sometimes find that terrifying, it makes who we are. Without death there is no progress, no new voice, no new ideas.”

It all sounds so banal, so vulgar, so cliché. But as we sit there in the grumpy afternoon light, I realize what he wants to say. The past, can also be an excuse. An excuse not to move on, not to fight.

And while the funeral goers return from the church, I see a child break away from the procession. She runs to the pipe smoker. Do they know each other? The old man picks up the girl and throws her into a pile of dry leaves. The girls screams with joy.