Funeral Rites Read Free Page A

of the fallen prick. A funereal flavor has often filled my mouth after love.
    Upon entering the church:
    “It's as dark here as up a nigger's asshole.”
    It was that dark there, and I entered the place with the same slow solemnity. At the far end twinkled the tobacco-colored iris of the "oeil de Gabès,” and, in the middle of it, haloed, savage, silent, awfully pale, was that buggered tank-driver, god of my night, Erik Seiler.
    Despite the trembling of the tapers, from the black-draped church door there could be discerned on Erik's chest, as he stood on top of an altar supporting all the flowers of a stripped garden, the location of the mortal hole that will be made by a Frenchman's bullet.
    My staring eyes followed Jean's coffin. My hand playedfor a few seconds with a small matchbox in the pocket of my jacket, the same box that my fingers were kneading when Jean's mother said to me:
    “Erik's from Berlin. Yes, I know. Can I hold it against him? One's not responsible. One doesn't choose one's birthplace.”
    Not knowing how to answer, I raised my eyebrows as if to say, “Obviously.”
    Erik's hand, which was between his thighs, was pressed against the wood of the chair. He shrugged and looked at me with somewhat anxious eyes. Actually I was seeing him for the second time, and I had long known that he was Jean's mother's lover. Since his force and vigor compensated for what (despite great austerity) was too frail in Jean's grace, I have ever since made great efforts to live his life as a Berlin youngster, but particularly when he stood up and went to the window to look into the street. With a gesture of needless caution he held one of the double, red velvet curtains in front of his body. He stood that way for a few seconds, then turned around without letting go of the curtain, so that he was almost completely wrapped in its folds, and I saw an image of one of the young Nazis who paraded in Berlin with unfurled flags on their shoulders, wrapped in folds of red cloth buffeted by the wind. For a second, Erik was one of those kids. He looked at me, again turned his head with a brief movement toward the closed window from which the street could be seen through the lace, then let go of the curtain so that he could raise his wrist and see the time. He realized that he no longer had a watch. Jean's mother was standing quietly by the sideboard and smiling. She saw his gaze—I did too—and the three of us immediately looked in the direction of a small table near a couch where two wristwatches were lying side by side.

    I blushed:
    “Look, your watch is over there.”
    The mother went to get the smaller one and brought it to the soldier. He took it without a word and put it into his pocket.
    The woman did not see the look he gave her, and I myself did not understand the meaning of it. He said:
    “It's all over.”
    I thought that everything was over for him, me, and Jean's mother. Nevertheless, I said:
    “Not at all, nothing's over.”
    This was an obvious answer, but I hardly thought about what I was saying, since, inspired by the image of Erik in the folds of the curtain, I was in the process of going back to his childhood, of living it in his stead. He sat down on the chair again, fidgeted, stood up, and sat down a third time. I knew that he had hated Jean, whose severity did not allow for indulging his mother. Not that he condemned her, but the child who went all over Paris with valises full of guns and anti-German pamphlets had no time to smile. He also realized that the slightest truckling, the slightest witticism, might relax his attitude, which he wanted to keep rigid. I even wonder whether he felt any tenderness toward me.
    On the sideboard in a frame adorned with flowers and shellwork foliage was a portrait-photograph of him. When I went to see him at the morgue, I was hoping that his perfectly scrubbed, clean, naked, white skeleton, which was composed of very dry scraped bones, of a skull admirable in shape and