Like Jumping over the Cemetery Fence
- How do you feel today?
- I feel like jumping over that fence, unhurried, with the river dozing and pink-brown below. And then again, and again.
At 7:40 pm, with the two of us breathless in front of the gate, he says indifferently "At 8 pm I lock the gate and leave, I don't wait for anyone. What section are you going to?" "70." "Oh, that's quite far, I don't know if you can make it." We say we will; we'll run, we'll spend just a couple of minutes at the grave, and then run back. "At 8 I'm locking and leaving," he shakes his head convinced we won't make it as he opens the gate a little wider for us to enter. We break into a run right away; by now we probably have only 19 minutes.
This is a huge, sprawling cemetery -- a necropolis, really. On top of a hill, with the massive presence of the Danube below, it commands a far-stretching view of the eastern districts of Belgrade, along with unexpected softly curved hillocks and pastures closer to the river. A favourite meeting place of the winds, it seems, the hills is also a popular haunt for the local jet-black and glossy crows, flapping their awkward wings lazily around the grave stones. The concrete paths -- which can be used by cars at certain hours during the day -- are broad, with each section of the cemetery clearly marked by a number on a small square of metal, stuck on a pole.
At the water-fountain (we check it in passing -- today it has water, which is not always the case), we make a sharp left turn, taking a shortcut towards section 70. We can't afford to stop but we look to our right, beyond the wild rose bush (from which I borrowed a rose or two on occasion) where Nana and Uncle Bata are buried together; she's been there since 1997, he since 2004. When we are not in a rush -- usually when I come with my father -- we light a cigarette, stick it on top of a toothpick, and let it sink into the fine gravel on top of the grave, then watch a thin wisp of smoke rise irregularly, as the cigarette eagerly shrinks in size. We bring flowers too, but if they are anywhere now, and if there's anything they want, it's certainly cigarettes. Especially Nana, who in her old age, when she was barely mobile and often hazy in the head from all the medication she took, smoked on the sly in the washroom, and we all pretended we didn't know.
The path climbs gently towards higher points of the hill and other avenues lined up with tombstones open up on the left. Further down one of them, under medium-sized linden trees, is where Aunt Ljilja, her mother Milja, and my cousin's baby are buried; they arrived there one by one, roughly in the period between 1985 and 2001, the last one being little Ana who, even though she had a name during her 6 months in this world, is always referred to as "the baby" and is the only one without a picture on the black stone. Aunt's death in 1989 marked the dawning of two troubling facts in my developing mind: even familiar things get pushed to a distance by the seriousness of death (when, for example, my parents talked about what we'll do with "the bird" while we were in Belgrade for the funeral, even though he was always our Pipo), and there is no such loneliness as the one that lingers, forever, after death (driving away after the funeral, my mother made a comment how we are all leaving now while Aunt had to stay there alone; I turned to look back through the rear window of the car, and for the first time really felt what that meant). Then, of course, these were the relatively new parts of the cemetery, but by now they are a little run-down; the fresh flowers are not a common sight here, and weather or time-induced damage to the tombstones is often left unattended for years -- as if the relatives of those who died in the late 80s had lost some of their cemetery-visiting stamina.
The newer additions to the cemetery crawled steadily up the hill over the years so that by 2006, when my mother died, they had reached one of the peaks. That's where we are headed, our hearts in our throats, with the minutes ticking away. Other known though less familiar people are around too: to the extreme left and down the slopes is my cousin's husband's mother (whose real name, Mileva, I only found out from the inscription on the tombstone; while she was alive, everybody called her Milena); and if you followed a zig-zagging trajectory to the right, not far from a small cypress tree, you'd find the neigbour's two daughters, both gone earlier this year within a month of each other. Their names, Mirjana and Vesna, are still on their wooden crosses since it hasn't been a year yet. The other day when my father and I were doing a larger loop we passed by them to see how the newly piled earth was settling down in and around the grave so we could then report it to neighbour Ljubisa, their father, who hadn't been able to come for a few days. Somewhere towards the middle parts of the cemetery are Uncle Panta and Aunt Marica who, childless, bequeathed their small apartment to us, which is where my father lives now - the second-last in the row of identical 4-storey apartment buildings visible from the top of the hill.
We are approaching our section. At the foot of the slope on the left is the Chapel, from which all the coffins leave on the solemn and slow journey to their grave site. I think of that June morning in 2006 and how humid it was as we were gathering there for the funeral; how my brother's best friend -- a giant with shovel-sized hands -- spread his arms wide as soon as he saw us, and folded us into his chest, one on each side wordlessly. It started to drizzle as the procession stirred into a slow march, following her double coffin: inside the wooden one was another, metal one -- some obscure regulation that had to be observed since she was transported from Banja Luka.
With about 12 minutes left, we are finally close -- we can see the wild cherry tree just before section 70; in spring, the path underneath it gets all smeared from the fallen cherries, and the birds have a good time. Then there are the three birch trees with the rough whitish bark, and there it is, her slender gray tombstone, like an island in the ocean of mostly black-marble neighbours. The exceptions are a Gypsy by the name of Semsudin Bajrami, whose grave no one took upon himself to maintain (in fact, there is no tombstone on it but only the old wooden cross, half-eaten by all kinds of weather over the years, where the letters of his name are beginning to get loose), and a young girl whose mother made her a massive light-burgundy marble monument, always covered in roses.
There isn't time for much. We quickly bring water from the near-by fountain for the plants, wipe the picture with the inside of the hand (she's in her 40's in it, and is wearing a small brooch on the collar), and share a few moments of silence, the particles of Belgrade grime shimmering in the distance below, and the Danube getting pink in the setting sun on the other side. Then we must run all the way back. And we do, scrambling downhill, cutting corners and walking gingerly in the narrow spaces between graves, arms open for balance, finding shortcuts. At the fountain close to Nana and Uncle Bata, my brother stops to drink water; I continue, looking at my watch (the round-faced Doxa my mother gave me when I left home), which shows 7:58. I turn the last corner, and as soon as I look towards the gate, I know it's locked. Something about the desolateness of the porter's booth and the motionlessness of the metal gate says that he's gone and we're locked in.
I slow down. Once at the gate, I try to open it, and confirm my suspicion -- the porter has really gone and left us locked inside the cemetery. I turn around, and wait for my brother, who's a fast-moving speck in the distance. I gesticulate the situation to him, he slows down, throws up his arms in the air. Not much to be done. Meanwhile it's the lilac hour. The river is quiet and on fire below. Then my brother is here; he says we'll have to climb over the high grid-like fence. I look down at my skirt and summer sandals, and it's just funny. He goes first, easily heaves himself over and jumps to the ground on the other side. I throw my small bag to him, lift my skirt a little so I have more mobility and start climbing. "You know, mom would freak out if she knew we were late and had to jump the cemetery gate," I say as I'm striding over the top bar on the fence, and we laugh, long, because it is true; because she would laugh too in the end; because we weren't even late! Also because the sun and the river and the city are beautiful, and jumping a fence seems an awkwardly right thing to do at such a moment. He extends a hand and helps me down; then we run to the car, and are gone, in a whiff of comic elation.
And they stay -- but amused and chuckling, no doubt.
Photo by dzonihsv
- I feel like jumping over that fence, unhurried, with the river dozing and pink-brown below. And then again, and again.
At 7:40 pm, with the two of us breathless in front of the gate, he says indifferently "At 8 pm I lock the gate and leave, I don't wait for anyone. What section are you going to?" "70." "Oh, that's quite far, I don't know if you can make it." We say we will; we'll run, we'll spend just a couple of minutes at the grave, and then run back. "At 8 I'm locking and leaving," he shakes his head convinced we won't make it as he opens the gate a little wider for us to enter. We break into a run right away; by now we probably have only 19 minutes.
This is a huge, sprawling cemetery -- a necropolis, really. On top of a hill, with the massive presence of the Danube below, it commands a far-stretching view of the eastern districts of Belgrade, along with unexpected softly curved hillocks and pastures closer to the river. A favourite meeting place of the winds, it seems, the hills is also a popular haunt for the local jet-black and glossy crows, flapping their awkward wings lazily around the grave stones. The concrete paths -- which can be used by cars at certain hours during the day -- are broad, with each section of the cemetery clearly marked by a number on a small square of metal, stuck on a pole.
At the water-fountain (we check it in passing -- today it has water, which is not always the case), we make a sharp left turn, taking a shortcut towards section 70. We can't afford to stop but we look to our right, beyond the wild rose bush (from which I borrowed a rose or two on occasion) where Nana and Uncle Bata are buried together; she's been there since 1997, he since 2004. When we are not in a rush -- usually when I come with my father -- we light a cigarette, stick it on top of a toothpick, and let it sink into the fine gravel on top of the grave, then watch a thin wisp of smoke rise irregularly, as the cigarette eagerly shrinks in size. We bring flowers too, but if they are anywhere now, and if there's anything they want, it's certainly cigarettes. Especially Nana, who in her old age, when she was barely mobile and often hazy in the head from all the medication she took, smoked on the sly in the washroom, and we all pretended we didn't know.
The path climbs gently towards higher points of the hill and other avenues lined up with tombstones open up on the left. Further down one of them, under medium-sized linden trees, is where Aunt Ljilja, her mother Milja, and my cousin's baby are buried; they arrived there one by one, roughly in the period between 1985 and 2001, the last one being little Ana who, even though she had a name during her 6 months in this world, is always referred to as "the baby" and is the only one without a picture on the black stone. Aunt's death in 1989 marked the dawning of two troubling facts in my developing mind: even familiar things get pushed to a distance by the seriousness of death (when, for example, my parents talked about what we'll do with "the bird" while we were in Belgrade for the funeral, even though he was always our Pipo), and there is no such loneliness as the one that lingers, forever, after death (driving away after the funeral, my mother made a comment how we are all leaving now while Aunt had to stay there alone; I turned to look back through the rear window of the car, and for the first time really felt what that meant). Then, of course, these were the relatively new parts of the cemetery, but by now they are a little run-down; the fresh flowers are not a common sight here, and weather or time-induced damage to the tombstones is often left unattended for years -- as if the relatives of those who died in the late 80s had lost some of their cemetery-visiting stamina.
The newer additions to the cemetery crawled steadily up the hill over the years so that by 2006, when my mother died, they had reached one of the peaks. That's where we are headed, our hearts in our throats, with the minutes ticking away. Other known though less familiar people are around too: to the extreme left and down the slopes is my cousin's husband's mother (whose real name, Mileva, I only found out from the inscription on the tombstone; while she was alive, everybody called her Milena); and if you followed a zig-zagging trajectory to the right, not far from a small cypress tree, you'd find the neigbour's two daughters, both gone earlier this year within a month of each other. Their names, Mirjana and Vesna, are still on their wooden crosses since it hasn't been a year yet. The other day when my father and I were doing a larger loop we passed by them to see how the newly piled earth was settling down in and around the grave so we could then report it to neighbour Ljubisa, their father, who hadn't been able to come for a few days. Somewhere towards the middle parts of the cemetery are Uncle Panta and Aunt Marica who, childless, bequeathed their small apartment to us, which is where my father lives now - the second-last in the row of identical 4-storey apartment buildings visible from the top of the hill.
We are approaching our section. At the foot of the slope on the left is the Chapel, from which all the coffins leave on the solemn and slow journey to their grave site. I think of that June morning in 2006 and how humid it was as we were gathering there for the funeral; how my brother's best friend -- a giant with shovel-sized hands -- spread his arms wide as soon as he saw us, and folded us into his chest, one on each side wordlessly. It started to drizzle as the procession stirred into a slow march, following her double coffin: inside the wooden one was another, metal one -- some obscure regulation that had to be observed since she was transported from Banja Luka.
With about 12 minutes left, we are finally close -- we can see the wild cherry tree just before section 70; in spring, the path underneath it gets all smeared from the fallen cherries, and the birds have a good time. Then there are the three birch trees with the rough whitish bark, and there it is, her slender gray tombstone, like an island in the ocean of mostly black-marble neighbours. The exceptions are a Gypsy by the name of Semsudin Bajrami, whose grave no one took upon himself to maintain (in fact, there is no tombstone on it but only the old wooden cross, half-eaten by all kinds of weather over the years, where the letters of his name are beginning to get loose), and a young girl whose mother made her a massive light-burgundy marble monument, always covered in roses.
There isn't time for much. We quickly bring water from the near-by fountain for the plants, wipe the picture with the inside of the hand (she's in her 40's in it, and is wearing a small brooch on the collar), and share a few moments of silence, the particles of Belgrade grime shimmering in the distance below, and the Danube getting pink in the setting sun on the other side. Then we must run all the way back. And we do, scrambling downhill, cutting corners and walking gingerly in the narrow spaces between graves, arms open for balance, finding shortcuts. At the fountain close to Nana and Uncle Bata, my brother stops to drink water; I continue, looking at my watch (the round-faced Doxa my mother gave me when I left home), which shows 7:58. I turn the last corner, and as soon as I look towards the gate, I know it's locked. Something about the desolateness of the porter's booth and the motionlessness of the metal gate says that he's gone and we're locked in.
I slow down. Once at the gate, I try to open it, and confirm my suspicion -- the porter has really gone and left us locked inside the cemetery. I turn around, and wait for my brother, who's a fast-moving speck in the distance. I gesticulate the situation to him, he slows down, throws up his arms in the air. Not much to be done. Meanwhile it's the lilac hour. The river is quiet and on fire below. Then my brother is here; he says we'll have to climb over the high grid-like fence. I look down at my skirt and summer sandals, and it's just funny. He goes first, easily heaves himself over and jumps to the ground on the other side. I throw my small bag to him, lift my skirt a little so I have more mobility and start climbing. "You know, mom would freak out if she knew we were late and had to jump the cemetery gate," I say as I'm striding over the top bar on the fence, and we laugh, long, because it is true; because she would laugh too in the end; because we weren't even late! Also because the sun and the river and the city are beautiful, and jumping a fence seems an awkwardly right thing to do at such a moment. He extends a hand and helps me down; then we run to the car, and are gone, in a whiff of comic elation.
And they stay -- but amused and chuckling, no doubt.
posted by Tijana | 12:03 AM
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