“The bull that’s led to the cow probably thinks he’s in love too,” said Sylvie, and laughed. She said she’d better go, and went into the bedroom to get dressed.
“Write to her,” she said, as she said good-bye.
Andreas had decided to write to Fabienne, but he kept putting it off and putting it off, until he finally forgot all about it. There was some trouble at school, a couple of pupils started a fight during recess. One of them was in Andreas’s class, and there were meetings with the headmistress and the parents and a social worker. Then a letter came from Walter. Andreas was very surprised to hear from Walter. They talked on the phone every other month or so, and never had very much to say to each other. Sometimes Walter would send him a postcard from his vacation, which they would all sign, and at Christmas there was a round-robin letter containing all the news of the past year; apart from that, they never wrote to each other. The letter was accompanied by a form. Clearing of a grave, Andreas read. Under that heading were the names of his parents, handwritten, and under the heading, Client, was Walter’s name and his own.
The undersigned client is prepared to meet the expenses of the cemetery gardener in the removal of the grave. The leveling and refurbishment of the grave space will be paid for by the community.
Walter had signed the form. Normal practice was for graves to be given up after twenty years, he wrote in his accompanying letter, but the grave counted as that of their mother only. When their father was cremated, they had signed a disclaimer of burial rights, perhaps Andreas remembered. He was sorry to bother him over something like this, but he hadn’t wanted to make the decision on his own. He had thought Andreas might want to visit the grave once more. It wouldn’t be cleared until fall at the earliest. If he did decide to come to Switzerland, he would of course be welcome to stay with them. They would be pleased to see him again. Walter had signed the letter as “Your Brother,” which struck Andreas as being in poor taste.
He remembered his father’s funeral. It was a hot day. At that time, Walter and his family had still lived in an apartment, and Andreas had refused their offer of spending the night there. He had booked a room in the hotel on the market square. Walter had asked whether he wanted to be picked up in the morning, but Andreas said he didn’t want to put him to any trouble.
During that whole stay, he had had the feeling of being in a kind of trance. The simplest decisions had been incredibly difficult for him, and he was only able to think about absolutely insignificant things. But his physical awareness had been strangely heightened. Everything seemed to him unbearably loud and intense. Colors, sounds, even smells were more vivid than usual. When he crossed the road to the cemetery, a car braked, and the driver lowered his window and yelled at him. Andreas walked on, not turning around. He felt a trickle of sweat break out on his brow and down his back.
There were a couple of cars in the cemetery parking lot, but no one to be seen. The heavy wrought-iron gate lay in the shadow of heavy conifers. Andreas had his suitcase with him; he intended to leave right after the funeral. Now he didn’t know what to do with his suitcase. He thought briefly of shoving it in some bushes near the entrance to the cemetery, but rejected the idea immediately. He took off his jacket and lit a cigarette. His shirt was sodden with sweat. A breeze cooled the wet cotton on his back and under his arms.
The funeral party was standing in little groups outside the chapel, engaged in quiet conversation. There were a lot of his old school friends there. They nodded to him as he walked by, one or another of them muttered something, asked him how he was doing, and what his plans were. Andreas looked around for Walter, but couldn’t see him anywhere.
With a surprisingly loud clang, the church bells started to ring on the other side of the road, and the funeral party moved with slow, reverent steps to the entrance of the chapel. The situation struck Andreas as grotesque, the grave expressions, the whispering, the embarrassment. His father had been old, he had lived a retired sort of life, and Andreas was sure most of the people here had barely known him.
He stopped outside the chapel. When the bells ceased, and the sexton emerged from the chapel door to look around for any latecomers, Walter and his wife came out of one of the lying-in rooms, which were all housed in a low, long annex. Walter looked more surprised than grieving. He looked nervously at his watch. Bettina’s face was tear-stained.
They hadn’t seen Andreas. He followed them into the chapel. He was still holding his cigarette butt in his hand. It occurred to him to drop it in the holy water basin by the entrance. He stood his suitcase on the floor and leaned against the back wall.
Walter and Bettina walked down the nave. They took their places in the front row, where Bettina’s parents were already sitting, and the children. The children were all dressed in colors. Presumably that was Bettina’s idea. When Walter sat down, he half-turned his head, and the movement became a sort of bow, as though he wanted to greet the mourners. He smiled sheepishly. At that moment, Andreas felt sorry for him, and he would have liked to go up to him and give him a hug.
Walter lowered his head. The children slithered about, bored. Then the organ began, the mourners relaxed, and settled into their pews.
Only then did Andreas see Fabienne and Manuel. They were sitting in a row near the back, not far from him. As Fabienne leaned over to Manuel to whisper something in his ear, Andreas could see her profile. She had hardly changed at all. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress. Andreas wished he could touch her shoulders and her neck. Manuel was wearing a dark suit. He had lost a lot of hair, and had gotten rather chubby. As a young man he had been good-looking in a not particularly interesting sort of way; now he looked old to Andreas, though they were the same age.
The vicar seemed to be suffering from the heat. He was pale, and rattled through his sermon and a fairly interchangeable vita of the deceased, that was all work and births of children and memberships of clubs. Some of it Andreas had never heard of — or forgotten it. The little he did know he had heard from his mother.
The lady organist played a couple of wrong notes. Andreas was glad there wasn’t any singing. For the prayers he put his hands together without folding them. He dropped the cigarette butt quietly on the floor. He didn’t close his eyes, and as he looked at the swaying figures of those praying, he didn’t know who was more ridiculous — the others in their adherence to a meaningless ritual or himself in his pose of rebellion.
During the service, the coffin had been brought out into the churchyard. It now stood there, but no one seemed to be paying it any attention. Andreas couldn’t imagine that the dead man had anything to do with him. His father had been a quiet and reserved man. If he had still been alive, he would probably have stood on the periphery somewhere, in the shade of one of the pines, and observed the gathering with a nervous and at the same time amused eye. Andreas felt no grief at the time. Grief came later, when he was back in Paris, in his customary surroundings, and with a violence that had taken him aback.
Walter went up to Andreas, shook hands, and took him to his family. Bettina’s face had a somehow complicated look on it; she resembled an old woman. They said hello, and then the vicar came up to them and said something comforting, and the mourners got in line to offer their condolences. All of them looked bashful and did their best to make their grief appear genuine. Walter’s face had the startled expression it had had before, and sometimes, when he was shaking hands with someone, a forced cheerfulness.