the alphabet from the cemetery in that town languishing in the sun. I could put it this way, too—death was my first primer. The dead taught me to read. This statement should be taken absolutely literally. We went there every Thursday and Saturday. I stood reverentially before the hot stone crosses. I was as tall as they were. With a certain dread, I dragged my finger along the grooves, reading more through my skin, I memorized the half-moon of C , the door of H , and the hut of A . Language seemed warm and hard. It had a crumbling body. Only a bit of dust and fine sand remained on my fingers from the stone. The first words I learned were:
rest
eternal
here
memory
born – died
God
And names, so many names, cemeteries are teeming with names.
Atanas H. Grozdanov
Dimitar Hadzhinaumov
Marincho – 5 years old
Dimo Korabov
Georgi Gospodinov
Egur Sarkissian (Granny Sarkistsa’s son)
Calla Georgieva
. . .
What happened to the names after their owners died? Were they set free? Did the names continue to mean something, or did they disintegrate like the bodies beneath them, leaving only the bones of consonants?
Words are our first teachers in death. The first sign of the parting between bodies and their names. The strangest thing about that cemetery was that the names repeated themselves. I stood for a long time in front of a headstone with my name, freed up by someone who had used it for only three years.
Years later, I make a point of visiting the cemeteries in the cities where I am staying. After paying my respects to the central streets, the cathedral on the square, and solemnly passing by the memorial to the relevant king on horseback (will today’s presidents jut out above granite limousines tomorrow?), I hasten to inquire after the city cemetery and sink down the walkways of that parallel city-and-park rolled into one. Death is a good gardener. I understood this even back then, at age six, amid the furiously blooming roses, lilies, aromatic bushes, the plums, wild apples, tiny cherries, and rotting pears of the village cemetery.
The crematorium at Père Lachaise resembles a cathedral with a chimney. Adorno says that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. But can you have crematoriums at all, even in cemeteries?
The dead taught me to read. I write this sentence again and realize that it says more and different things than I had intended. The people who taught me to read are no longer with us. The things which I have read since then were written primarily by the dead. That which I am writing out now are the words of a person who has set off . . . I did not know that so much death dozed beneath language.
G
After the primer of the graveyard I ran up against the real primer for first grade and felt simultaneously enlightened and confused. Every letter was connected to a word and a picture.
What word starts with the letter G ?
God—I hastily called out, what an easy question. But something wasn’t right, the teacher blanched, she was no longer so smiley. She came over to me as if afraid I might say something more. Where did you learn that word? Uh, in the graveyard. Then one of the girls in the front rows said: “Government, Comrade.” That was the right answer. And the teacher latched on to that lifeline, excellent, my girl. While I felt so lonely with my God. Strange that you can’t have two words with one and the same letter, as if G’s curving back was too slippery to hold two such truly grandiose words.
The word “government” begins with G. There is no God in our government! That’s just gobbledygook, the teacher accented every G, we’ll learn about that later in the upper grades. Are we clear on this?
But he’s there in the graveyard . . .
This here is a school, not a . . .
Geez, all these problems just from a single word, I’m going to start hating school before long.
That
rest
eternal
here
memory
born – died
God
And names, so many names, cemeteries are teeming with names.
Atanas H. Grozdanov
Dimitar Hadzhinaumov
Marincho – 5 years old
Dimo Korabov
Georgi Gospodinov
Egur Sarkissian (Granny Sarkistsa’s son)
Calla Georgieva
. . .
What happened to the names after their owners died? Were they set free? Did the names continue to mean something, or did they disintegrate like the bodies beneath them, leaving only the bones of consonants?
Words are our first teachers in death. The first sign of the parting between bodies and their names. The strangest thing about that cemetery was that the names repeated themselves. I stood for a long time in front of a headstone with my name, freed up by someone who had used it for only three years.
Years later, I make a point of visiting the cemeteries in the cities where I am staying. After paying my respects to the central streets, the cathedral on the square, and solemnly passing by the memorial to the relevant king on horseback (will today’s presidents jut out above granite limousines tomorrow?), I hasten to inquire after the city cemetery and sink down the walkways of that parallel city-and-park rolled into one. Death is a good gardener. I understood this even back then, at age six, amid the furiously blooming roses, lilies, aromatic bushes, the plums, wild apples, tiny cherries, and rotting pears of the village cemetery.
The crematorium at Père Lachaise resembles a cathedral with a chimney. Adorno says that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. But can you have crematoriums at all, even in cemeteries?
The dead taught me to read. I write this sentence again and realize that it says more and different things than I had intended. The people who taught me to read are no longer with us. The things which I have read since then were written primarily by the dead. That which I am writing out now are the words of a person who has set off . . . I did not know that so much death dozed beneath language.
G
After the primer of the graveyard I ran up against the real primer for first grade and felt simultaneously enlightened and confused. Every letter was connected to a word and a picture.
What word starts with the letter G ?
God—I hastily called out, what an easy question. But something wasn’t right, the teacher blanched, she was no longer so smiley. She came over to me as if afraid I might say something more. Where did you learn that word? Uh, in the graveyard. Then one of the girls in the front rows said: “Government, Comrade.” That was the right answer. And the teacher latched on to that lifeline, excellent, my girl. While I felt so lonely with my God. Strange that you can’t have two words with one and the same letter, as if G’s curving back was too slippery to hold two such truly grandiose words.
The word “government” begins with G. There is no God in our government! That’s just gobbledygook, the teacher accented every G, we’ll learn about that later in the upper grades. Are we clear on this?
But he’s there in the graveyard . . .
This here is a school, not a . . .
Geez, all these problems just from a single word, I’m going to start hating school before long.
That
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