Robert Silverberg: Born with the Dead

“Not as much as I’d like to know.”

“When a Parsee dies, he is carried to the Towers on an iron bier by professional corpse-bearers; the mourners follow in procession, two by two, joined hand to hand by holding a white handkerchief between them. A beautiful scene, dear Jorge. There is a doorway in the stone wall through which the corpse-bearers pass, carrying their burden. No one else may enter the Tower. Within is a circular platform paved with large stone slabs and divided into three rows of shallow, open receptacles. The outer row is used for the bodies of males, the next for those of females, the innermost one for children. The dead one is given a resting-place; vultures rise from the lofty palms in the gardens adjoining the Towers; within an hour or two, only bones remain. Later, the bare, sun-dried skeleton is cast into a pit at the center of the Tower. Rich and poor crumble together there into dust.”

“And all Parsees are—ah—buried in this way?”

“Oh, no, no, by no means,” Jijibhoi said heartily. “All ancient traditions are in disrepair nowadays, do you not know? Our younger people advocate cremation or even conventional interment. Still, many of us continue to see the beauty of our way.”

“—beauty?—”

Jijibhoi’s wife said in a quiet voice, “To bury the dead in the ground, in a moist tropical land where diseases are highly contagious, seems not sanitary to us. And to burn a body is to waste its substance. But to give the bodies of the dead to the efficient hungry birds—quickly, cleanly, without fuss—is to us a way of celebrating the economy of nature. To have one’s bones mingle in the pit with the bones of the entire community is, to us, the ultimate democracy.”

“And the vultures spread no contagions themselves, feeding as they do on the bodies of—”

“Never,” said Jijibhoi firmly. “Nor do they contract our ills.”

“And I gather that you both intend to have your bodies returned to Bombay when you—” Aghast, Klein paused, shook his head, coughed in embarrassment, forced a weak smile. “You see what this radioactive curry of yours has done to my manners? Forgive me. Here I sit, a guest at your dinner table, quizzing you about your funeral plans!”

Jijibhoi chuckled. “Death is not frightening to us, dear friend. It is—one hardly needs say it, does one?—it is a natural event. For a time we are here, and then we go. When our time ends, yes, she and I will give ourselves to the Towers of Silence.”

His wife added sharply, “Better there than the Cold Towns! Much better!”

Klein had never observed such vehemence in her before.

Jijibhoi swung back from the window and glared at her. Klein had never seen that before either. It seemed as if the fragile web of elaborate courtesy that he and these two had been spinning all evening was suddenly unraveling, and that even the bonds between Jijibhoi and his wife were undergoing strain. Agitated now, fluttery, Jijibhoi began to collect the empty dishes, and after a long awkward moment said, “She did not mean to give offense.”

“Why should I be offended?”

“A person you love chose to go to the Cold Towns. You might think there was implied criticism of her in my wife’s expression of distaste for—”

Klein shrugged. “She’s entitled to her feelings about rekindling. I wonder, though—”

He halted, uneasy, fearing to probe too deeply.

“Yes?”

“It was irrelevant.”

“Please,” Jijibhoi said. “We are old friends.”

“I was wondering,” said Klein slowly, “if it doesn’t make things hard for you, spending all your time among deads, studying them, mastering their ways, devoting your whole career to them, when your wife evidently despises the Cold Towns and everything that goes on in them. If the theme of your work repels her, you must not be able to share it with her.”

“Oh,” Jijibhoi said, tension visibly going from him, “if it comes to that, I have even less liking for the entire rekindling phenomenon than she.”

“You do?” This was a side of Jijibhoi that Klein had never suspected. “It repels you? Then why did you choose to make such an intensive survey of it?”

Jijibhoi looked genuinely amazed. “What? Are you saying one must have personal allegiance to the subject of one’s field of scholarship?” He laughed. “You are of Jewish birth, I think, and yet your doctoral thesis was concerned, was it not, with the early phases of the Third Reich?”

Klein winced. “Touché!”

“I find the subculture of the deads irresistible, as a sociologist,” Jijibhoi went on. “To have such a radical new aspect of human existence erupt during one’s career is an incredible gift. There is no more fertile field for me to investigate. Yet I have no wish, none at all, ever to deliver myself up for rekindling. For me, my wife, it will be the Towers of Silence, the hot sun, the obliging vultures—and finis, the end, no more, terminus.”

“I had no idea you felt this way. I suppose if I’d known more about Parsee theology, I might have realized—”

“You misunderstand. Our objections are not theological. It is that we share a wish, an idiosyncratic whim, not to continue beyond the allotted time. But also I have serious reservations about the impact of rekindling on our society. I feel a profound distress at the presence among us of these deads, I feel a purely private fear of these people and the culture they are creating, I feel even an abhorrence for—” Jijibhoi cut himself short. “Your pardon. That was perhaps too strong a word. You see how complex my attitudes are toward this subject, my mixture of fascination and repulsion? I exist in constant tension between those poles. But why do I tell you all this, which if it does not disturb you, must surely bore you? Let us hear about your journey to Zanzibar.”

“What can I say? I went, I waited a couple of weeks for her to show up, I wasn’t able to get near her at all, and I came home. All the way to Africa and I never even had a glimpse of her.”

“What a frustration, dear Jorge!”

“She stayed in her hotel room. They wouldn’t let me go upstairs to her.”

“They?”

“Her entourage,” Klein said. “She was traveling with four other deads, a woman and three men. Sharing her room with the archeologist, Zacharias. He was the one who shielded her from me, and did it very cleverly, too. He acts as though he owns her. Perhaps he does. What can you tell me, Framji? Do the deads marry? Is Zacharias her new husband?”

“It is very doubtful. The terms ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ are not in use among the deads. They form relationships, yes, but pair-bonding seems to be uncommon among them, possibly altogether unknown. Instead they tend to create supportive pseudo-familial groupings, of three or four or even more individuals, who—”

“Do you mean that all four of her companions in Zanzibar are her lovers?”

Jijibhoi gestured eloquently. “Who can say? If you mean in a physical sense, I doubt it, but one can never be sure. Zacharias seems to be her special companion, at any rate. Several of the others may be part of her pseudo-family also, or all, or none. I have reason to think that at certain times every dead may claim a familial relationship to all others of his kind. Who can say? We perceive the doings of these people, as they say, through a glass, darkly.”

“I don’t see Sybille even that well. I don’t even know what she looks like now.”

“She has lost none of her beauty.”

“So you’ve told me before. But I want to see her myself. You can’t really comprehend, Framji, how much I want to see her. The pain I feel, not able—”

“Would you like to see her right now?”

Klein shook in a convulsion of amazement. “What? What do you mean? Is she—”