Toussaint

‘Until the moss had reached our lips
and covered up our names.’
- Emily Dickinson

Bright cushions of colour have sprung up, overnight, like mushrooms, punctuating the greyscale landscape of the churchyard. Today is Toussaint. The celebration and commemoration of all the saints, known and unknown, as if sanctity might creep up on you and take you unawares. Tomorrow is Le Jour des Morts, or Les Défunts. That is what the flowers[1] are technically in honour of but here the dead and the divine are collapsed together. I am not surprised. For some of us the dead are household saints. We devise small shrines in their memory, light candles to them. We pore over their lives and deaths for evidence of their goodness and complexity, the nature of their patronage. We keep their relics and wear them.

I visit the cemetery in the mid-morning, seeking, perhaps, an unacknowledged saint. A couple skirt the perimeter with a pull-along trolley carting a final lemon-yellow chrysanthemum in a pot, repeating the name of the relative whose plot they are trying and failing to find. The majority of the plots have already been tended, with at least one floral tribute luminous among the lichen and stonework. A man in a cream cable knit jumper, lumpy and misshapen with wear, passes me acknowledging my presence with nod and a glance which makes me feel I have been misidentified as a fellow mourner. He stands at the foot of a grave, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. He stands there in complete stillness for at least a minute, then raises his head, with the air of a job well done, and makes his way out of the churchyard into the secular safety of his car and away.

After he has gone, I look at the grave he inspected. There’s no clue as to what his relationship was with the deceased, I get no sense of them from their monument, nor of any of the other owners of the surrounding headstones. The 23 year old who died ‘en deportation’ during the second world war. Cher Stéphanie, who lived for two days between the 22nd and 24th of November in 1970. I wish there was someone to ask about each of these people. Their likes and dislikes, their mannerisms, their best and worst day. Instead, the monuments here stand enigmatic, especially the more modern headstones composed of synthetic marble, which make you feel like your gaze slides off it as you attempt to read it. Other plots have garnered a collection of smaller tributes, placed on the top of the horizontal stone. Plaster Madonnas the height of a child’s ruler. A mass of dried flowers captured in resin and faded to echoes of themselves. All of them claim the dead person as their own. Notre Fil. Notre Pére. Notre Copain. The cemetery for a moment a vast web of interaction and minute detail, lost to time, the names and dates and inscriptions the epigraph to the book of a life, with the rest of the pages torn out.

Perhaps the dead are like that. Elusive. Like the weather-worn older stones, incomprehensible. One or two of the graves are clearly new, anonymous sheets of stone laid on the ground as if their owners have yet to be decided. The high winds of the last few days has upturned many of the flowerpots and they lie on their sides, like overturned carnival floats. Some plots, only a very few, have no flowers at all and a sadness like standing water pools around them. I wonder what year it was, that these graves were last visited by someone at Toussaint. If, when they walked away, wiping damp soil from their fingers, they knew it was the last time they would come. A squally shower tantrums through the churchyard as I look up and see it is empty and I am alone.

And so we come to that of which we cannot speak. Those to whom we cannot speak. That the dead are the reason I am here is true in more senses than one, though there are always reasons to shrug off a part of one’s life like an old coat and disappear into someone else’s. A good metaphor or a bad one? I have been wearing a dead man’s jacket since we arrived here, since before then, and yet it was a jacket I never saw him wear, one worn only in the most specific of situations. I wear it now not in the cockpits of light aircraft, as he did, but processing through the Norman countryside, and I think of him. He came here twice. Once when he and I barely knew each other and once when he was dying, unbeknownst to him and to us all.

Others we have lost and barely had time to grieve. A friend who comes to my mind now like a crystal or a prism, their edges and faces reflecting light at unpredictable and endlessly illuminating angles, entirely precious and unique. To whom I had written a postcard with the constellation containing Arcturus on the front, one of the brightest stars in the night sky. I never sent it, for want of a stamp, and it sits on a different desk in another country, gathering dust next to the bar of chocolate also intended for that package, untasted sweetness held in suspension because my friend has left me no forwarding address. I feel as though they have stepped off a train several stops earlier than me, our tickets turning out to have different destinations, and I cannot go back for them. I miss their careful hands and neat nails. I miss their accent. I miss drinking tea with them in tiny cafes where steam clotted the windows in winter and blotted out our place of work. I read tarot now because they did and whenever I draw the Page of Wands it is them that I see. But when I ask where they have gone the cards just reflect myself back to myself (as they always do, in truth) and I go on with the long work of mourning. Erecting a monument to my lost friend inside myself and returning and returning to visit it there, my hands clasped behind my back, my head bowed. Some of the tended graves in St Nicolas are over 100 years old.

I take the dog, Inka, for a walk. Toussaint is a holiday here and once the chrysanthemums are doled out our time is our own. If you go down to the woods today, the men of the commune of La Haye du Puits are out hunting. Inka’s days with the chasseurs are over, the only vestige being her orange collar, a nod to the fact that hunters and dogs alike here are decked out in orange to prevent them being mistaken for prey. We hear the guns in the distance, Inka’s nose high in the air, catching ribbons of scent which float across the fields and collect in the ditches of the bocage. Later still I climb into the attic of the potting shed and fall asleep in the eaves, listening to the rain on the corrugated iron roof, the birds in the poplars. The door knocking gently in its frame as I ask whatever is waiting to come in.

[1] Almost without exception these flowers are potted chrysanthemums, both real and artificial, whose plastic petals gather dust under supermarket halogen.

Martinmas

The Animals That Therefore We Are