“The folly of it,” he exclaims angrily, turning away from the coffin.
The guests file by the wall, circling slowly toward the coffin. They pause to admire expensively framed wedding pictures on display. The gifts have been put on the table again: sets of silver salt pits, sugar bowls and ashtrays. Pairs of candlesticks in assorted sizes. Crystal vases and dessert plates. A pile of tablecloths, satin and damask, still as good as new. Boxes still in their wrapping and ribbons are stacked under the table.
Jonathan stands in the doorway. The children were told to stay in the nursery but he sees Toby and Joshua playing hide-and-seek between the forest of legs. He wanders into the room asking, “Have they opened the coffin?” Grandmother catches his arm and holds him pressed against her jutting belly.
One by one people move up to the coffin. “...done by big-name experts. Latest American techniques,” Renata boasts as the guests murmur admiringly, “The sunglasses are haute mode.”
Grandmother, her palm clamped on the child’s forehead, makes a little push forward. He takes a step, but she pulls him back. “It’s not her,” he says, “that’s not her face.”
The child is hushed. They had the best mortician in town restore my face. Sixty fingers working all morning produced half a dozen different faces—impossible to please every member of the family. It was Ezra’s choice in the end. She looks exactly like in the wedding pictures, the guests remark.
The bereaved husband receives condolences with a festive air; positively aglow, he waltzes through the crowd on waves of sympathy. He holds a large handkerchief over his mouth to cover a leer. From every part of the room he casts triumphant and amorous glances into the coffin, and blows his nose vigorously. Such a loss and a cold on top of it! A thick layer of talcum white to cover up the mourner’s stubble makes his lips appear unusually thick and pink. He loves public occasions—a wedding, a funeral, circumcision, inaugural address or political rally—who cares, as long as it is an occasion. There never were enough occasions for poor Ezra. As he confessed to me sadly, but for the fact that he was born a Jew he would have become Pope. He is relieved that fate spared him the dubious status of the divorce. It feels great to be a widower. He has forgiven me, forgiven himself. God has forgiven us all. Once more I am the woman of his dreams, the bride of his youth.
“She was a great woman,” he says solemnly.
I am dead. They can all relax and celebrate.
Renata, too, is relieved. It was hard to love me. The strain of having to love me gave the poor soul migraine. She envied me the children. Now she has them.
More guests keep arriving. There is excitement at the door. A raspy voice rising above the general hubbub sounds like my father, speaking louder and with a heavier Hungarian accent than normally. He keeps asking how much all this cost—the shipping, the rabbi, the mortician, the total sum; he will write a check—so loudly it’s embarrassing. While Ezra placates him, he mutters on about religious atavism, back to the primal horde. There is Uncle Joske, the soccer player from Budapest. Have they all come? The aunts and cousins from Australia, Canada and Paraguay? I see my mother enter, wrapped in a crystal cocoon. No, it was only a reflection. A little draft lifted the edge of the drape over the mirror. Renata has fixed it already.
“I looked,” the child says. “Will I die?”
He didn’t see anything, his grandmother tells him.
It is raining. The guests are becoming increasingly restless. What are we waiting for? someone asks.
I hear my father groan in Hebrew.
Ezra, trying to cheer him up, makes a joke.
“At her funeral at least she is decent. Bekovet.” They have stepped away from the coffin. Ezra, his arm around my father’s shoulder, continues talking heatedly through the noise and confusion. Death the final test “...In the end gathered unto her fathers. The great granddaughter of Reb Smuel Nyitra, after all...Shame how you lived. The parents, she. Freud. Homer. Joyce. Kultur. Cyclon B. Auschwitz. Holy Land.” His hand rises, a finger wags menacingly. “God will judge us!” The finger grows gigantic. The whole room turns a gangrenous black.
Judgment? Not yet.
No, it was only a warning. A window was thrown open. Everything is all right. Ezra emphatically denies rumors that I was to be tried as a witch by a council of orthodox rabbis. Grandmother screamed but Renata is quieting her. The sudden gust raised the drape from the mirror and she saw her daughter and granddaughters thrown into the flames, she wails. Always these little excitements. Renata fastens the windows. Only a vase turned over. The coffin bearers have arrived. Renata tries to pick up the broken pieces. Can’t under the herd of shuffling feet as the guests are leaving. The children are told to wait in the next room.
A man whose face is very familiar leans down over the coffin. One of the coffin bearers? His final look as he lifts his head is blank. They are putting on the lid.
The child, his face pressed against the streaming window pane, straining to see the coffin bearers as they come out on the street, is disappointed that there is no funeral hearse with plumed horses. They watch the men maneuver the crated corpse into the big black limousine. The car slides out of view.
At last we’re outside. Small group stands under umbrellas listening to the rabbi’s voice drone on while the rain whips the earth around fresh-dug grave into a yellow froth.
At some moment, just before lowering the coffin, the rabbi will have to turn around and, facing the congregation, ask if anyone present wishes to object.
The coffin hangs suspended.
THE SKY is an intense blemishless blue. Cables stretched taut on derrick
