The job was done. The words on there, here, her stone…
“My God,’ my sister Daisy said, ‘it’s weird to imagine her there, isn’t it?”
That’s when I realized that so much land was wasted on dead people.
“Yes, that’s ridiculous”, I said.
Two years later I visited a war grave somewhere in the South of France, and as I stood on the foot of what were at least five hundred war graves, I thought again and again, what are we getting here? What kind of view is this giving us? Remembrance? A statement? I imagined all the houses, trees, and parks that could be built on this stretch of nature.
Five years later, I was sitting at my publisher's to choose the color of my book’s cover; apple green or dusty pink? We had a laugh about the undertitle: A history of the graveyard (main title: The Bone Ground). Which we thought sounded rather silly, in the end, as if there was nothing left on earth to explore than this.
Six years later, I was staring at a picture in a small museum in Weimar, Germany, and understood that this classic natural painting (showing the facial structures of the man in question delicately) was it. I worked out the fact that it’s in the tenacity of the individual that it shakes off what it doesn’t want. I laughed at this prospect of myself. No, I don’t want to be forgotten either, I mused, I just don’t want to waste a piece of this earth on my decaying body. I thought about my dead Mother and I wished she was there besides me.
Two months later, I was sitting on a tall chair somewhere in an atelier in London. I could barely touch the ground with my feet. But as I was told by the artist, a man called Pamuk, this was better for my posture throughout the sitting.
“Have you ever known anyone with insufficient talent that was unable to acknowledge it nor give up on it?”, said Pamuk. He always asked strange to the point questions, which made him have this naughty curl of a smile around his lips almost all the time.
I sighted and thought about it for a couple of minutes (the point was, I believe, that the sitter would be deep into introspection, through which Pamuk could have great insight into the soul, although this is my interpretation).
“Yes,’ I said, ‘I believe my Father always thought himself to be very funny, although no one ever laughed at his jokes.”
“Did that hurt you as a child?”
“You mean, did I feel ashamed? Hm, no, I think it shaped me to be the man I am today. I have become a man who wrote a biography on the graveyard without any irony.”
We were quiet for hours after that. We became sort of in trance. This rhythm we followed for six weeks in a row, every Friday for four hours. At one point, Pamuk stood next to his canvas and symbolically dropped the brush to announce the doneness.
“Mr. Pamuk,’ I said, ‘the moment suprême!” I stood from my uncomfortable chair and walked around the canvas. In the picture was a handsome man, but was that I?
Years later, at the end of my life, my two daughters arranged the cremation. They walked into the crematorium space and discussed with the owner that Pamuk’s painting should be the only decoration in front of the room. When the owner asked them why their Father did not even want a casket, flowers, or the ashes as a keepsake, they could only answer with a simple declaration.
“He wanted it that way.”