De Greek
The gravedigger was crying. Through my streaming tears I could see that he was unsuccessfully trying to hold back his own.
I had never seen a gravedigger cry before and, out of surprised curiosity, I stopped crying myself and transferred my gaze on him, away from the coffin holding the remains of what used to be my father.
The scene of the crying gravedigger was a real shock to me. Ours was a small town with everybody knowing everybody else and attending funerals was an obligation imposed on all of us. During such festivities, I had never managed to come to terms with the casual indifference, to the point of heartlessness, with which the priest and the two grave diggers managed to plant their clients. The three of them, always true to the Kipling poem about keeping their heads while everyone around them was loosing theirs, went through the motions with a coldness which was shocking yet admirable in some odd fashion. Perhaps it was because no one was blaming them for the event.
Conceivably the gravedigger was influenced by the eulogy read out at the church, which he had attended in his capacity of fellow citizen a short time previously. The eulogy was somewhat unusual, in that it was written by my father himself, prior to his death of course. Admittedly, it had that little ‘something’ in it, but more towards creating a smile rather than tears. I had been required to read it myself, an act that made keeping a straight face doubly difficult.
It was headed:
"A EULOGY BY THE DECEASEDAnd so the gravedigger wiped his drippy nose and some drool that was coming out of the corner of his mouth on the work shirt he had changed into, trying to hide the unmanly weakness.
As the honoured person here today, I feel that it is appropriate to say a few words. It is surprising that even a dead person finds a captive audience irresistible.
First of all, I should like to thank you all for coming. Both of you. Those of you who do not understand this joke, may stay behind after the funeral and my son who should be reading this will explain it to you.
I also want to take this excellent opportunity to do a bit of advertising. Please note the splendid coffin, which is one of our own productions. Since we are in the joinery business and have all the necessary machinery we thought of adding coffins as a new product to supplement our income. Just in time as it turned out. Have you seen the prices of these things recently? Those of you who were generous enough to sent flowers, will have presumably attached cards to them, so we shall shortly send you more information on this very useful and very attractive product. (Naturally, when I say “we”, I use the term loosely). A special discount shall be made to the names on all the cards, in acknowledgement and reciprocity of friendship, but no credit facilities apply.
Incidentally, should there be a large “D” in evidence anywhere near the coffin, please ignore it. It would be the result of excessive zeal by our employees, who sometimes go a little overboard in implementing ISO requirements. “D” stands for DEAD. Just in case some of you are absent minded and haven’t noticed the corpse.
No doubt the spectacle of a friend or relative being made ready for planting must create a feeling of finality which can never be an agreeable one. For consolation, though, think of the pleasure this event will give to at least one person, my ex-wife, who has for years been waiting to dance on my grave.
A word of advice to those of my aging friends who might feel obligated to give a helping hand in carrying the coffin to the hearse: DON’T! - I seem to have added a few kilos of late to an already impressive figure and the effort may be such as to create a rush of business for our worthy funeral director, which may overwhelm the poor man’s ability to cope. Please resist the temptation and let the younger men do the job. It will give them something to do and might even prevent them from yawning.
Now that the introduction is suitably out of the way, I believe that it is customary to say a few words about the departed, ideally complementary. Well, I can tell you that through most of my adult life I have studiously avoided being fired, through the simple expedient of becoming the President of various companies. Since it was somewhat unlikely that I would fire myself, I became quite adept at holding down those jobs. The occasional clanger I made, I faced with humane understanding and leniency. Only the unsporting and unreasonable point of view of the Department of Income Tax occasionally put a spanner in the works.
Without wishing to bore, I feel the need to pass on a few words of wisdom to those of you who are still listening. Wisdom acquired as a businessman and as a father. The Lords Tennyson and Byron might have found a different way of dispersing these pearls of wisdom, but the advantage of being dead is that one may risk a touch of eccentricity.
As a businessman, I have had personal experiences which led me to the conclusion that ‘someone may look at a gift horse in the mouth out of habit. But if the gift horse is the odds-on favourite to win the next Darby, then that someone can’t afford the stable fees’. Think about this for a while.
As a father I have at last learned that ‘the result of punishment on men and animals is the increase of fear, the promotion of cunning and the control of desires. Punishment tames a man, but does not make him better’. This is not one of my own gems, but belongs to a fellow philosopher by the name of Nietzsche.
I think that I had better terminate this discourse now, or I may risk being frivolous. Enjoy the rest of the proceedings."
I considered this to be just one more of the oddities governing my life at that time. During that period I had a horse which was allergic to hay, a housemaid who was allergic to dust (so I had to employ her a housemaid to do her work for her) and a Great Dane dog which was terrified of cats, the worst allergy of all. My heart bled for him every time I saw him cowering at the sight of a cat. The oddities or allergies of life.
The allergy that was a crying gravedigger moved forward and took hold of the two ropes on his side of the grave and with another wipe on the long suffering shirtsleeve he nodded to his partner. They both lifted the coffin over the grave opening and began lowering it into the finality of life.
I looked around at the sea of faces that had materialized out of nowhere in order to pay their last respects. The church had been packed but there seemed to be even more mourners here. Faces I knew well and others I had never seen before.
It was a beautiful warm May morning, with the smell of flowers pungently sweet in the air. My Godfather and my secretary standing next to each other, looking after the overseas visitors, appeared efficient and tired. They had taken over the role of informing everyone they knew, as well as those they didn’t but had found listed in my personal phone book and seemed to have excelled themselves. I had been in Manila when the heart attack finally felled the oak that was my father and in order to accommodate me and the overseas friends who wanted to attend the funeral, the body had been kept in the morgue for four days.
There was Ilan Raviv and Oded Giveon, who flew over in a private jet from Tel Aviv. Next to them stood a short unimpressive man towered over on either side by two men in black suits one size too small for them, looking like wrestler twins and seemingly without any neck to speak of. I was told that he had flown over from the States with his companions. All wore sunglasses to hide their eyes.
There was Rachel, the Romanian prostitute, whose story had inspired my father to finance her, a woman he had never actually met, into becoming a very prosperous madam, an act of generosity which she never seemed able to forget.
My father learned of her through me. Mine was the first foreign company to open an office in Romania immediately after the Revolution which ousted communism and Ceausescu from that long suffering country. When I first went there for the purpose, there was no infrastructure for business and no possibility of renting an office, so I rented four rooms at the Continental Hotel in the port of Constanta. I employed twelve people, including two body guards who eventually proved very useful, and proceeded to train the staff in my line of work which was ship owning and ship management. I wanted to employ Romanian seamen on board my ships.
Every day I used to take the staff for lunch and dinner at the hotel restaurant, to reward them for the hard work and the long hours they put into the effort. Downstairs there was a large lobby extending into a huge restaurant and bar, which happened to be the nesting place of most of the local prostitutes catering to the needs of the visiting seamen. And every day, there was pretty young Rachel making eyes at me. And every day I would turn my back on her and studiously ignore her.
The time came when the training was completed and the staff at last went home to their families for dinner and I went downstairs to have my own lonely supper. I sat at a free table and ordered my food. I felt someone standing next to me and looking up I saw the perpetually smiling Rachel.
“Buy me a drink?” she asked. Most eyes in the restaurant were on the rich foreigner and the whore.
“No” I said as rudely as I could.
“Shall I sit with you?”
“No” again, with annoyed force and rudeness.
“Shall I come to your room tonight?”
This conversation took place in very broken English which I cannot quite reconstruct, so I am translating the gist. By this time I was really annoyed, so in order to be as harshly rude as possible, I said
“How much will you pay me?”
She thought for a very long minute and then asked with childish curiosity
“Me, pay you?”
“Yes” again harshly.
She again thought for a long time. Then to my surprise she said in an interested manner
“How much?”
This threw me a bit, I must confess, but I maintained my composure. I knew from seamen from one of our ships which had made a call at Constanta during my stay that the local tariff was a measly $20.
“One hundred dollars” I said.
She looked at me curiously for some seconds and then
“OK …. But you fuck me all night!”
Guffaw is the only word which can describe the laughter that was wrenched from me. I laughed so loudly that every head in the restaurant turned. Unable to resist unexpected witticism of this magnitude from a whore, I asked her to sit down and bought her dinner. She turned out to be a very clever and witty person, as a lot of Romanians are, good company for the one hour I spend at dinner. A silent agreement was reached that night that she would never solicit me again and I would not ignore her.
When my ex-wife called me that evening I told her the story, still amused by the incident, and she passed it on to my father. “That boy will come back with serious money” he had famously smiled and then proceeded to make arrangements to reward her wit with a sum which allowed her to set up in business for herself.
I looked now at my ex-wife amongst the sea of faces. Another whore, but this one without a sense of humour to speak of. Just a highly developed animal cunning, which is rare to come across.
Even the soon-to-be-grave-dancing widow, my mother, was delicately wiping a tear with a tiny handkerchief, but I think it was because it was fashionably expected of her by her accompanying cronies. I never liked that woman, especially since she knifed me, aged 10. But to give credit where credit is due, I always admired her knife throwing abilities. If you have never been knifed, by your mother, or anyone else for that matter, I strongly discourage you from trying it.
It was at the end of my daily argument with my elder sister and having made a ten year old’s cutting remark about nothing, I turned towards the field where my friends were preparing the soccer match of the day, when the point of the butcher knife hit me in the back from ten paces away. She had picked up the first available object to hand, which happened to be the butcher knife and threw it at me, with remarkable accuracy. An excellent shot.
Both the shock of the blow and the point of the knife entering the tender flesh caused me to exhale and I could not breathe. I walked a few steps and fell. A friendly doctor was found to saw up the wound without the police getting involved.
A sudden collective gasp from the crowd brought me back to the present and I looked down just in time to see the coffin overturn, the rope having slipped from the hands of the sensitive gravedigger. My father rolled over and landed on his back at the bottom of the grave, with the “splendid” coffin on top of him.
My godfather rushed forward as if to protect his dead friend and ended up in close conference with the priest. He finally came over to me and told me that it was the priest’s professional opinion that God preferred a burial without a coffin and that coffins were the invention of modern man. Not the best advertising material this. Was the idiot priest trying to put the last nail in my father’s new coffin business? I quickly agreed for the burial to proceed as God preferred and could not help thinking that a coffin saved was a coffin worth £3,400. My great-great grandfather was an atheist Greek Jew who indifferently converted to Christianity in order to be allowed to marry the woman he loved and it was a family joke how amazing it was that Jewish blood will always tell.
I stepped forward to the edge and dropped my pagan gifts into my father’s grave. Thousands of years of civilization and Christianity evaporating in my primitive need to ease his passing into the next world, the same primitive powerless need that motivated the ancients, be they Egyptians, Greeks, Britons and so many other archaic races of the past. I slowly and ritualistically dropped a bottle of his favourite 12 year old whisky into the grave and then a carton of his favourite cigarettes, which had probably contributed most to his early demise.
He had this strange need for me to remember him on each of my innumerable trips abroad, by always bringing him a bottle of whisky and a carton of cigarettes when I returned. He always gave most of them away so that I would have to bring him more, proving to him each time that I remembered him and that I loved him. He rarely drank, but he smoked a lot. Come to think of it, through my gifts I have probably killed my father…. What a horrible thought.
I looked down at the huge man in his ‘Church suit’ as he had called it. He was six feet two, 250 lbs, black hair with very little grey, still combed in place strangely enough, as if he did not suffer the fall. His hands were still across the chest. Looking serious … yes, that was the difference, looking serious, no smile.
I dropped a fistful of earth at his feet and watched as others dropped their own handfuls, only not so carefully as I. I saw earth at my father’s mouth and I wanted to jump in to stop it, to clear it away from his mouth, because I knew the taste of earth, thanks to “Molon Lave”.
“Molon Lave” is what the Spartans told the Persian tourists when the latter politely asked for the Spartan’s weapons in order to avoid unpleasantness. It means “Come and Get Them” in ancient Greek.
"Molon Lave" was also the name of my horse. The horse with the hay allergy. 18 hands, if he was an inch. A beautiful, strong animal, a retired 8 year old thoroughbred racehorse, with many victories to his name. The first time I rode him he was very excited and skittish, always ready to take off. It took me a while to calm him down. In the end he appeared to get used to me and I walked him around the grounds of the sporting complex were I was stabling him at a cost equivalent to an Indonesian Prince's ransom. At some stage, I thought that it was time to trot him, show him who was master and then get into a comfortable relaxing canter. So I touched his sides lightly.
Molon Lave & my son Alex Now, in retrospect, I know that opinion does not appear to differ considerably on this point: Racehorses are trained to gallop as soon as their jockeys touch their sides. However, this was a detail unknown to me at the time. In consequence, the achievements of many reputable car makers for the zero to sixty miles per hour world record were left in the dust we raised behind us as we gracefully and terrifyingly galloped around the narrow and winding scenic pathways of the sports complex. I remember thinking incongruously how the jasmine had bloomed early that year and, less incongruously, wondering at that worthy plant's abilities to break my fall if I decided to throw myself off "Molon Lave" into their hopefully waiting branches. I sadly realized though that at the rate of speed we were going, I would have to take into consideration most of the scientific NASA theories on trajectories , meaning that if I wanted to land in Portsmouth, I would have to jump off somewhere near Southsea.
I knew that the pathway made a ninety degree left turn at a point at which it met the fencing of a paddock and prepared myself to lean to the left, always sensitive to the animal's comfort. At that point, "Molon Lave" decided to take into consideration the meaning of my desperate pulling on the reins, sharp, short, left-and-right pulls on the bit in the hope of getting through to him that a slower pace would make the scenery more enjoyable. He stopped. As I gracefully flew over the paddock fencing, I remember thinking that this was the moment my whole life is supposed to flash before my eyes and I was quite looking forward to reviewing, in fast-forward mode, those 15 glorious minutes behind the barn with Camilla P.
When I woke up at the hospital, the first thing I realized was that I was wearing a neck brace. The second was that I could move my hands and toes. The third was that I could taste earth in my mouth. Then I realized that the stable master, that wonderful, generous Christian soul had constantly insisted that the paddocks were always abundantly supplied with soft earth so that the horses' legs would not have to endure hard shocks after going over fences.
Dimitris Mita
DeGreek
http://hubpages.com/hub/Second-Life-Alergies
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