Leavetaking Read Free

opened for me. Inside, next to a coffin covered with flowers and wreaths, lay my father on a cloth-draped bier, dressed in a black suit now too large for him, in black socks, and with his arms folded across his chest, embracing the framed photograph of my mother. His gaunt face was relaxed, the thin hair, hardly gray at all, curling in one soft lock over his brow, and something of pride, boldness I had never noticed in him before stamped on his features. His hands were perfect, the fingernails symmetrical, bluishly shimmering mussel shells. I stroked the cold, yellowish, taut skin of his hands, while the Sister waited out in the sun a few steps behind me. I recalled my father as I had last seen him, lying on the living-room sofa under a blanket after my mother’s burial, his face gray and blurry, blotted out by tears, his mouth stammering and whispering the name of the deceased. I stood there frozen, felt the cold wind, heard the whistles and puffs of steam coming from therailroad embankment, and there before me a life become a completely closed account, an enormous outlay of energy dissolved into nothingness. Before me lay the corpse of a man in an alien land, no longer reachable, a corpse in a shed by the railroad embankment, a man in whose life there had been office spaces and hotel rooms, and always large dwellings, big houses with many rooms filled with furniture, and in this man’s life there had always been the wife who waited for him in the house they shared, and there had been children in this man’s life, children whom he always shied away from and with whom he could never talk, but when he was away from the house he could perhaps feel tenderness for his children and longing for them, and always he carried pictures of them with him and certainly looked at them, all worn out, creased from so much handling, nights in hotel rooms when he was away on his trips, certainly believing that this time on his return he would find trust, but when he got back there was always disappointment and the impossibility of mutual understanding. In this man’s life there had been ceaseless effort to support home and family, amid worries and sickness, together with his wife, and he had stuck fast to owning his own home, without ever experiencing happiness in it. This man, who now lay lost before me, had never given up believing in the ideal of a permanent home, but he had suffered death far away from this home alone in a sickroom, and if at his last breath he had stretched out his hand to the bell, it would have been, perhaps, to call for something, for some kind of help, some kind of relief, inthe face of suddenly rising coldness and emptiness. I looked into my father’s face, I still alive and preserving within me the knowledge of my father’s existence, into a face in shadow grown strange to me. With an expression of contentment he lay in his remoteness, and somewhere his last large house was still standing, piled high with carpets, furniture, potted plants, and pictures, a home that could no longer breathe, a home that he had kept intact throughout the years of emigration, through the constant resettlements and difficulties in adapting to new environments and through the war. Later that day my father was laid in a plain brown coffin that I had bought at the undertaker’s and the nun took care that the picture of his wife stayed in his arms, and after the lid had been screwed tight two hospital porters to the accompaniment of continuous rumbling and clattering of freight trains carried the coffin to the hearse, which I followed in a hired car. Here and there at the side of the road to Brussels, farm laborers and workmen, lit up by the afternoon sun, took off their caps to the black car in which my father, for the last time, journeyed through a foreign country. The cemetery with the crematorium lay on a rise outside the city, and the gravestones and bare trees were besieged by a cold wind. In the circular chapel the coffin was