Asher pulled the coat closer around him, feeling the light fall of rain begin to seep through to his skin despite his best efforts, and the large umbrella being held over him by Uncle Melvin (not really one of his uncles at all, but an old family friend). After seven years in America, he had almost forgotten how much he hated English summers.
Drum beat rain beat down on the hollow pine as the coffin was lowered gently into the black earth. It was quite unreal.
Someone nearby burst into tears and had to be gently consoled - it would not do to have to great a display of emotion. His mother seemed to tut in disapproval under her breath, her face an empty mask as cold as the wind roaring over the hilltop cemetery, and whistling between the low forest of tombstones and memorials.
No, ‘Emma Grunfeld does not cry’, he heard her mother’s austere voice saying in his mind. And neither did he.
Someone handed him a shovel.
Asher had never been to a Jewish funeral before - he’d been a young boy when his grandmother had passed away, and hadn’t been allowed to go to the graveside, though the memory of the shiva service in the evening still lurked somewhere in his brain. But a helpful relative - or perhaps an old family friend - had tried to explain it all to him in the cab on the way from the airport. He would have to recite kaddish - did he know the kaddish? Asher did not. Well, maybe they would have transliteration. It was a sacred custom for the mourners to help bury the… deceased. She had tripped over the word, not quite sure how to phrase it just yet. It seemed that words were hard to pin down around Asher and his mother at the moment, they kept escaping from people’s minds, or slipping from their tongues. The deceased, the body, the dead… All definite articles but strangely detached from their object.
He took the shovel and tried to remember what he was meant to do.
The sky, the grass, the trees were grey and lifeless, wrapped in mist and drizzle. Only the earth stood out, a black pit into the ground.
The rabbi gestured to the fresh pile of earth slowly turning to mud beside the open grave. All things considered he hadn’t done a bad job of it, especially since it had all been a rather rushed affair. The body had been flown in some distance, apparently, though Asher still had not been told from where - his mother would only shake her head sternly and refuse to discuss the matter. The rabbi had been reduced to generalised statements of loss and death, returning to whence we came, giving back to God that which had only been given on loan.
Asher hadn’t really been listening. He had been looking at the people that had come that morning - a dozen or so old family friends that he had never really known, Uncle Melvin, Melvin’s two sons, Jack and John. With his mother living in Israel these days she had no friends to support her, and all his friends were in New York.
He dug the shovel into the mud, feeling it sink slowly into the mire, and heaved a clod into the grave’s open mouth. It thudded against the wood with the sound of finality - someone burst into tears once more.
“For God’s sake, someone get her out of here,” Asher’s mother whispered under her breath so only Asher could hear it.
They had been divorced for over ten years.
He picked up more earth and threw it after the first - this could take all day. The wood was slick in his hands and wore against his skin in a way he knew would give him a blister. Another clod hit the casket.
“It’s okay,” the rabbi said, putting a hand on his shoulder, “you can pass it on whenever you’d like.”
Asher nodded and offered up the shovel. His mother, made a token gesture, and began to march back to the chapel.
“You should go with her,” Melvin said, “she shouldn’t be alone right now.”
That didn’t seem right, but Asher was in no mood to argue, so he wandered back along the path, avoiding the growing puddles. He had been told to wash his hands but with all the rain coming down he didn’t feel like it, so stepped back inside the chapel. His mother was already preparing to leave.
“Mum, I don’t think the service is over yet.”
“Maybe not,” she said, “but I’m finished with it. Someone has to sort out the money for all this.”
Asher felt like his face had been slapped.
“I’m doing my best, Mum, I have a flat, a job.”
“Oh yes, you’re doing splendidly I’m sure,” she said, not quite looking him in the eye. “Now I’ll take care of the funeral director and you can meet me in the café at two - I’ll buy you tea.”
“Mum…” he said a little weakly.
“What is it, Asher?” she said, smiling at him just as she had his entire adult life, a smile that suggested he couldn’t quite look after himself.
“Nothing, I’ll see you later.”
“Indeed,” she said, turning to go, calling “don’t be late” behind her, as the doors to the chapel squeaked closed.
Water was dripping down Asher’s face, getting in his eyes. He brushed it off absently.
“Has Mrs. Grunfeld left already?”
Asher found the rabbi standing at his side.
“Yes,” he answered, “she had some business to see to.”
“I see,” the rabbi said, in a way that suggested he really did not. “That is a shame, I was hoping to speak to her.”
He shrugged. The rabbi seemed young - maybe just a few years older than Asher himself - with a small goatee and a large black kippah.
“What do I do now?” he asked blankly.
“You’re officially a mourner now,” he said, “so you need to take a seat on one of these low chairs.”
Asher nodded and sat down heavily, spreading his long legs to dry off as much as possible.
The rest of the service went by in a blur, as the rabbi spoke some words and tried to lead them all in song. Asher didn’t feel like singing. He hadn’t played a song, or even listened to music, for the last two days, since that night in New York when… No that was impossible - demons weren’t real. Just a fevered dream brought on by alcohol, not to mention the email from his mother.
He shouldn’t have come back, Asher thought - he had left to get away from the monotony, the greyness of England - what in the world had made him come? He had thought… Nothing. A miracle, and it was naive and childish, and everything his mother probably thought of him wrapped up in a ball of stupidity. That if he came to see, maybe he wouldn’t be… dead.
The rabbi was trying to conclude the service now, but someone had just come up to the lectern and was having quiet words in his ear. Asher couldn’t hear what was being said, except one word that rang clear through the room.
“…Eliav…”
He sat upright with a jolt, hearing his father’s name spoken from the lips of this total stranger. And yet, try as he might, Asher could not see his face. He was wearing a grey cowl, but that wasn’t it - there was something fuzzy about his features, an ill-defined quality to his body and every movement, as if Asher was seeing him through frosted glass.
The stranger moved up to the podium as the rabbi took a seat off to the side, an almost stupefied grin on his face.
“Thank you Rabbi Goldstein for allowing me to speak,” the stranger said, in a voice that shifted like the tides. “The Torah states that Parents shall not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; but each will die for their own sin. Eliav was a wonderful man, a man of wonderful accomplishments that we have already heard so much about - and his death leaves us all the poorer. But children must not suffer for the sins of their parents but be given their own free choices to make in this world - I am not here for Eliav but for his son. Asher, I know this must be hard for you.”
Asher felt all the blood drain from his face - this wasn’t how the funeral was supposed to go, with a strange man addressing him from the pulpit, speaking about his relationship to his father as if he knew anything. He wanted to get up and walk out but could not as his legs became shaky and unstable as water.
“Losing a parent is a terrible thing, and my heart overflows with sadness for your grief. But know that your choices are your own, in this world and the next.”
He paused a moment, the air began to swim around him. “And I think I’ll be seeing you again very soon.”
The stranger disappeared, leaving no sign he had ever been there at all.
The rabbi got up as if nothing had happened, thanked everyone for coming, and wished Asher a long life.
“Who was that last speaker?” he asked Uncle Melvin when the other mourners had gone.
“Who?” Melvin asked confused, “the rabbi?”
“No, the guy in the hood.”
“Sorry…” Melvin began, but stopped mid-sentence as if beginning to recall something, but it slipped from his grasping mind. “Sorry, Asher,” he said, shaking his head, “there was no other speaker.”
As Asher got into the taxi to head back to town, his head was still reverberating to the stranger’s words, the music of his voice as it rose and fell: each will die for their own sin. He thought back to his memories of his father, always travelling overseas - ‘business trips’, his mother had called them, some kind of intercontinental consulting firm. Perhaps that guy had been an associate of Dad’s, a business partner or something. He must have dozed off for a second and missed him leave - the jet lag was really kicking in now. It all made a kind of sense.
But deep down, his heart felt like a scattered jigsaw, missing all the crucial pieces.
His father was gone, and nothing made a damn bit of sense any more.
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