Page 70 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #10

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Cemetery Scene with Relatives
“It’s the biggest graveyard in Europe,” says Aunt Lyolya. “It grows faster than the city.” On her knees are the artificial lilacs she bought at a road- side stand where red orange pink purple fabric flowers had blazed through the cloud of hanging dust like flames through smoke. Her lilacs are vibrant. The real daisies I bought just a few hours ago have wilted. We’ve spent the past half hour driving carefully through alleys between endless plots looking for her cousin’s grave. Aunt Lyolya seems to be guiding us in meandering zigzags. Aunt Sasha maintains a saintly calm, but Uncle Lyonya is about to snap. “Here!” he barks, “Do you recognize this outhouse?”
photographs of the deceased on them, some glazed onto ceramic plates, others etched in white onto dark granite. That’s the strangest part, the faces of the dead massing in the woods like refugees driven from their homes. These dead don’t have calm Egyptian smiles idealized by artists. They don’t look wise, or at peace, or ready. A guy with a skeptical smirk, a confused balding man, a plump lady lost in her private thoughts, they couldn’t have known when their photographs were taken that they were posing for markers of grassy mounds. They likely didn’t even think much about the fact that later photo- graphs would show them as less fit, less attrac- tive, less healthy, their hair more brittle, their skin sagging, and that these images chronicling their changing appearance would remain after they themselves were gone and reach, like light traveling from a dead star to distant places in the universe, the eyes of people they wouldn’t live to meet.
“Yes,” Aunt Lyolya concedes. “And after that?”
“After that I don’t know.”
People like me.
Earlier, Uncle Lyonya had backed up into another car, an old blue Volga that had been just out of sight of the high rear window of his Toyota SUV.
I thought there would be an exchange of licenses and insurance info like there would have been
When I return, the gravedigger is asking Aunt Lyolya if she’s given some thought to the kind of faceplate she wants. “When I die, then I’ll think about it,” she says.
in the States, but the owner of the Volga simply told Uncle Lyonya to watch where he was going and drove away, and Uncle Lyonya, finding no reasonable outlet for his anger, continued silently forward through narrow lanes between graves overgrown with weeds and reeds and by a living birch forest.
“All right then,” he says and walks away disap- pointed.
“Look what handsome men are working here,” Aunt Lyolya says, referring to some gravediggers, “former athletes, most of them.” We stop to ask them for directions. “Vot, vsyo zdes,” says the one in camouflage army fatigues and a rattail haircut.
Fiddlehead ferns, buttercups, bluebells, wild grasses, leaves that resemble wild strawberry leaves or parsley. Aunt Sasha is raking away dead, clotted growths from the mound and dig- ging with a hand trough to plant Aunt Lyolya’s artificial lilacs, while Uncle Lyonya, having deliv- ered the women, now oversees their work.
We get out of the car, and follow him to a gravesite. I wander away for a bit to look at head- stones, a mix of crosses, obelisks, and slabs with
“These are peas, right Sasha?” Aunt Lyolya asks, pointing to a sprout with radiating leaves. She scrubs the dirt from a nearby headstone with a scrub brush. “These people saved me,” she says,
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