I translated.
41
Von dem Dome,
Schwer und bang,
Tönt die Glocke
Grabgesang.
AUNT TERESA, ALREADY SEATED IN THE CARRIAGE, waited for Berthe and Uncle Emmanuel to join her; but Berthe, with that quick intuition for succour, divined where her help was most needed and said she must walk by the side of Aunt Molly, who insisted on walking behind the coffin.
‘Emmanuel!’ exclaimed Aunt Teresa, ‘you will sit with me in the carriage.’ But, strange as it may seem, my uncle this time took a firm stand, though, as always, his answer was tender. ‘Ah,’ said he, beholding my uniform, ‘it behoves nous autres militaires to march behind the coffin. It would not look well if I sat with you in the carriage, my angel.’
‘But, Emmanuel! I can’t be sitting here all alone!’ remonstrated Aunt Teresa in tones of acute anguish. ‘I feel very faint and ill! I must have somebody at my side.’
And to comfort her, Natàsha was put into the carriage.
At last the procession moved on. Uncle Emmanuel had donned his uniform for the occasion and had a broad black band stitched round his sleeve. I had fished out ‘le sabre de mon père’—a long clumsy thing in a leather scabbard. I had bought it cheap in a second-hand shop in Charing Cross Road; it was an obsolete cavalry sword of pre-Waterloo pattern, being much too long even when you sat on the top of a horse, and therefore long since discarded. I carried it well forward, walking side by side with Uncle Emmanuel, on the heels of Aunt Molly and Berthe, at the slow funeral pace set by the General’s brass band. And it seemed to me that Uncle Emmanuel was glad that now he could keep step with me, without effort, that his strides were as measured and dignified as my own. Alas, it was a funeral march. My spurs softly jingled; involuntarily I looked down at my feet, conscious of the superiority of my cavalry boots which Pickup had polished up to the last pitch, so that they shone like the veneer of a dark-brown piano. My uncle’s ill-fitting boots and incongruously light leggings were detestable. Only an officer of the Latin race could put up with the indignity of such a uniform. As the hearse moved through the streets, peasants took off their caps and crossed themselves. An American captain saluted that sunshade salute, and seemed glad of the opportunity. He was smart, but his boots, though good, were much too low. I daresay he thought mine too high. Poor Uncle Lucy! he did not suspect the homage accorded him on all sides. What futile waste of gesture: if the dead can really see the living one may assume that they are above such vanities. Yet this was a farewell from a stray brother who lingered behind to a brother who had set out on a journey. A Chink whipped his horse up a steep hill. Two little girls, looking on, said: ‘What a cruel man!’ And Uncle Emmanuel upon my having translated, said: ‘The little hearts are compassionate.’ A very old man in charge of three cows and a bull found that the bull had galloped off at the cross-roads in the opposite direction to that of the cows, and he could not make up his mind which way to go. He was too old to run after the bull, and the cows meanwhile had also walked off, and so he stood still, reflecting in anguish, while the street urchins laughed at him, teasing him: ‘Beaver! Beaver!’ And Uncle Emmanuel said: ‘They are cruel and heartless, the little ones!’—This was life. And how was death?
We went by a long winding road into the country, between two rows of trees. Aunt Molly looked hot in her long astrakhan coat and warm felt goloshes slopping in the mud. Soon, too, Pickup’s labour was wasted: my boots were covered with dirt. The road before us seemed endless. I had a feeling that I’d like to mount a steed and ride away from these mourners, this dead, from their red weeping eyes and the deadly boredom of living, gallop on without looking back, on and on, on and on.
At length we had reached the lonely Lutheran cemetery in that far-away lonely suburb, and the hearse and the carriages halted. We followed the bier through the great silent gate that bore the message: I know that my Redeemer liveth. It was the 14th of April; two days ago it had been bitterly cold and snow had fallen in heaps and covered everything at a distance. But that morning turned out hot, even stifling, and now as we entered the lych gate, the awakening verdure exuded upon us so strong and pungent a scent that we felt as though we had entered a hothouse. The procession turned to the left, the wheels leaving deep furrows in the muddy snow. But the sun played on a thousand well-kept tombstones and sepulchres: evidently in this forgotten, far-away nook of the world people had been dying, people who are cared for, who are not forgotten. The trees were stripped of verdure, but green was just sprouting. Behind the open grave which swilled in water there were birches — dear, modest birches! — and at the side, as if guarding the grave, a young weeping willow with the leaves golden in the spring sun. They had been trying to pump out the water, but the pump — or the people — proved unable to cope with the floods of the melting snow, and when the coffin was lowered there was an unpleasant sound of its splashing, as if it had been dropped into a well. How strange, I thought: Uncle Lucy, who was born in Manchester, and spent his life in Krasnoyarsk, was put to bed with a shovel in a Lutheran graveyard on the soil of a Russian concession on the Chinese Eastern Railway. When the coffin was being lowered into the swilling grave, Uncle Emmanuel and I, who stood a little forward, stretched ourselves up to the salute. The Lutheran pastor — for want of an Anglican minister — read the service in sonorous German. We precipitated to the edge of the grave. Aunt Teresa and Natàsha dropped flowers on the floating coffin; then Aunt Molly dropped two China roses. We followed her with handfuls of sand which fell on the hollow-sounding lid. I stood to the salute, and Uncle Emmanuel quickly put on his cap and emulated my example; the pastor said a few last words. And the men vigorously handled their spades.
There was no other sound than the chirruping of birds; the sun beating upon us, on the sprouting young green beneath the thawing snow, spoke of the passing of winter, of the awakening of life into spring, then into summer. The eternal cycle. And suddenly — for no reason — the thought of the gold bridge in Uncle Lucy’s mouth swam into my mind. It would outlast the ages! In these decades his teeth, his mouth, his body would be gradually decaying in the swilling grave, but the solid gold would be immune from change, and then, one day, there would be a moment when nothing whatsoever remained of his once active body, and the solid golden bridge would fall upon dry dust. The sky was kindly, the morning friendly and tranquil. I thought of this terrible death penalty that hangs over us all — when we shall fall asleep and not waken. No: waken, but far beyond this. In my soul I keep captive the soul of the world as hostage for my immortality. I have released it now: and we are one: and I am dead. To die could not be stranger than to come to life. He died — and was disillusioned in death. ‘Where was death?’ And there was no death. And perhaps he longed to explain, to tell us that there was no death, that death once dead, there was no dying then. Passion, in the nature of the satisfaction it seeks, is not a craving for acquisition, but rather for the release of the forces oppressing us. In the same way, death may be the release of those forces that had ‘licked us into shape’, and kept us in the mould of our particular individuality too long — a satisfaction akin to the physical, but lasting longer, perhaps very long, perhaps into eternity. Death, I thought, is the merging of a particular vision in the sea of bleak generalities, the ending of all limiting and exclusive perspectives, the grandest of all disillusionments.