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PARTISAN REVIEW
switched from lulling whispers to an ear-shattering crescendo, and
his chant, though obviously affected and rehearsed, tugged at the
heartstrings, where grief and ceremony blend .
Afterward everyone stood up and began to file past the coffin to
look at the corpse, as if for reassurance that they, the living, still
possessed curiosity and strength. He did not join in this procession
and went outside . The rabbi who had just concluded the eulogy was
now matter-of-factly directing the cars, which had to maneuver in
the narrow street to pick up mourners for the trip to the cemetery.
The rabbi had forsaken his role as reverend and assumed the part of
traffic expert, having cast off his solemnity like a mask.
For a while it appeared as if he, Bessie's friend, would be over–
looked in the throng of mourners and bystanders, but one of the
relatives spied him and directed him to a vacant seat in a limousine.
He sat in the car among strangers. A man and a woman talked inter–
minably about a lost key to her apartment, and the dire conse–
quences of having lost it on a Sunday, when they'd been unable to
locate a locksmith and had been forced to pierce the metal door with
an electric drill. The relating of this incident did not exhaust the
topic. The lost key became the theme of the trip. All the passengers
offered up similar happenings, their own and their neighbors'.
He sat there astounded. Why had they bothered to come to the
funeral at all, with so little respect for the deceased? Or was this a
way to forget and ignore death while facing it? Such callousness in
itself was an enigma. He pressed his face against the pane . He
wanted to disassociate himself from these people. The car hurtled
through the wilds of Brooklyn, through streets and avenues so
strange they might as well have been in Philadelphia or Chicago.
The Sunday quiet made them even uglier and more desolate than on
a weekday.
They rode past a vast cemetery, a city of graves. The tomb–
stones resembled a forest of toadstools, extending as far as the eye
could see . Here and there among the crosses loomed the statue of an
angel, its wings laden with snow, sorrow in its blind eyes. The living
had in some mysterious fashion poured their fears and regrets into
the stone and remained hollow shells themselves.
After a while, the limousine turned into the cemetery. Every–
thing had been prepared beforehand: the open grave, the arti–
ficial grass, which did not even pretend to create an illusion. A
woman cried out. Some man said Kaddish, reading the Aramaic
words transliterated into English on a leaflet printed especially for
