Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes Read Free Page B

growths in the cemetery, Oktavian thought. Were the authorities ever going to clean the place up?
    Oktavian and Marianne rode up to the National Hospital one Saturday evening, and saw two large trucks in the parking area of the hospital. A couple of lanterns on the cemetery ground gave some illumination, and they saw figures moving about. On closer inspection, they could see that the figures wore surgical masks, grey uniforms, and wielded picks and shovels with gloved hands.
    “Garbagemen!” Marianne whispered. “Look! They’re sticking the things into big plastic sacks!”
    Oktavian saw. “Then what do they do with the sacks?” he said almost to himself. “Come on. Let’s leave.”
    Only two days later, a garbageman collapsed. His wife refused to let him be taken to the National Hospital, and said he had got sick from working in the cemetery. Her talking took the lid off, because her words were printed in the Anzeiger. At once the other “sanitation workers” began complaining of nausea and weakness. The cemetery and a few meters beyond it were cordoned off by a heavy wire fence with danger-of-death signs attached at intervals. A wide gate in the fence permitted the entry of a bulldozer which tore up the ground. Disinfectants of all kinds were poured on to the soil by workmen wearing coveralls and masks. Patients and staff were evacuated from the National Hospital, and the building itself was washed and disinfected. The Anzeiger said that a strange fungus had attacked the cemetery, and that until the medical authorities learned more about it, it was deemed wise to close the grounds to the public.
    But the growths kept coming, small low-lying curves at first, all over the cemetery’s churned surface, then came faster growth as if out of nowhere—one meter, two meters in a fortnight. Artists came to sketch, sitting on campstools. Other people took snapshots, and the more wary stood at a distance and looked through binoculars. There was talk of massive removal of the cemetery’s soil to a depth of two or even three meters. But where would the authorities dump it? The Preservation-of-the-Sea people had weeks ago pushed through legislation: the cemetery soil from National Hospital Thirty-six of G— was not to be dumped into ocean or sea. Farmers and ecologists of the country protested against the burial of the cemetery on their land or on public land at whatever depth. Border guards of adjacent countries were double-checking lorries going out of the country, lest they be concealing cemetery débris.
    Incineration was therefore decided on. Danger money reached absurd heights for the men who worked with derricks, getting the soil into containers which were wheeled to the hospital’s back door, through which so many corpses had moved in the opposite direction. The big old heating furnace and the waste furnace of the hospital were back in service, the only things in the building that were. The ashes came out to a smaller bulk than the soil, black and dark grey, but were handled by the workmen with similar caution. Were these to be dropped into the sea? No, that was forbidden too. There was really nothing to do with the ashes but store them in heavy plastic sacks in the basement morgue and on the ground floor of the building for the nonce.
    And still the growths came, as if hundreds of spores had been scattered by all the hacking and digging, but that was merely a poetic thought, Oktavian reflected, because tumors did not grow from spores. Still it was amazing how fertile that cemetery soil was! But he forgot the National Hospital while he took his final examinations. Marianne had another year to go. Then they were thinking of marrying.
    Despite some noisy official disapproval, but cheers from the radical-left-in-the-arts, sculptors began to include in their exhibitions works inspired by the forms they had seen and sketched in the National Hospital Thirty-six cemetery. These sculptures were not unpleasing, being composed