Jutta Profijt - Morgue Drawer Four

OK, that was enough. I had to create some spiritual distance. I had to think about something nice or just about the harshness of reality, instead of drowning here in religious, philosophical, or other sentimentalities. This funeral wasn’t changing anything about my current situation. What the hell difference should it make if my body was lying in a refrigerated morgue drawer or inside a box underground?

Martin entered the dim light of the chapel and sat in the second-to-last row. I stayed with him for a moment, but of course I couldn’t recognize the attendees just from the back like that. Stupid. So I set out, passing along the wall nice and discreetly toward the front. My parents were sitting in the front row, and behind them a couple of aunts and uncles I hadn’t seen for an eternity. The women who lived on either side of my parents’ house, who apparently didn’t have anything better to do, or just wanted to wear their black coats out again. And my elementary school teacher. Wow! I hadn’t thought about her for ages. Back in the day I had idolized her. She was the coolest teacher at school: bleach-blond, single, smoker. All the boys in my class wanted to marry her. In those days I thought she was very young and good-looking, and that was a just decade and a half ago. Now I thought she looked old and frumpy. Still blond, still a smoker, as suggested by her yellow, nicotine-stained fingers, but I couldn’t tell if she was married or not. Didn’t matter now anyway. She was here, in any case, and I thought that was pretty strange. Did she feel something for me in those days, too? But if so, then she must have been pretty seriously disturbed. After all, I was ten years old and had only about seven teeth in my mouth, as I mentioned before.

My mother had hardly changed in the four years since I’d seen her last. Why should she? She’s been wearing her hair that way since the nineteen seventies, and this is exactly how she looked then, too. Her corpulence was still keeping the skin of her face relatively taut—that’s the benefit of extra fat pads: they keep wrinkles from forming. Her legs were stuffed into thick, black pantyhose that better hid the waning juvenescence around her ankles than did the flesh-colored ones she normally wore, but hers were still the ugliest legs I’d ever seen in my life. A disaster for a woman who never wore pants. I used to be pretty embarrassed about my mother’s legs when I still needed them to lean on. My mother looked like a country-butcher’s wife, and basically that’s what she was, too. Her father had been a butcher, her husband was one—at least, he was until he became a wurst manufacturer who earned money by stuffing chopped offal into artificial casings and selling them to people who believed the ham sausage actually had ham in it. Have I already mentioned that for a few years I refused to eat anything but recognizably coherent meat? That is, schnitzel and steak. But that’s when I was still living at home; only the best was served at our dinner table. Later on due to lack of money I transitioned back to ground meat products. Whether a burger between two pieces of cardboard passing for bun, or currywurst, it ultimately didn’t matter.

Compared to his butcher’s wife, my butcher father cut a finer figure, on the outside. Tanned, only ever so slightly overweight, with stylishly short hair, rimless glasses, and a fashionably tailored black jacket. People would never have thought him capable of the less-than-fashionable blows to the head he inflicted whenever his brat of a son wasn’t minding.

The brief glances my father was exchanging with my elementary school teacher also explained her attendance. Pretty ballsy bringing your mistress to the funeral of your only son—but then class (ha!) was something he’d never really had. And the assertiveness to stand up to him was something my mother had never really had, either. She knew about his affairs but played along as though nothing were going on. In front of me, the neighbors, and my mother’s family. To my father she kowtowed. He gave her a housekeeping allowance, he determined what was served at the dinner table, and he selected the vacation destinations. Often enough they were places teeming with willing women. Mom pretended she didn’t notice anything and wrote postcards about gorgeous beaches and nice people. The only thing she had to hold onto was me, and unfortunately that was too much for me to deal with. They were both too much to deal with: her love, and his expectations. They had both crushed me, and here and now before my coffin both of them seemed to have conveniently forgotten all that. If I had a sentimental bent I would drivel on right now about how there was more being buried at this funeral than just a body.

I’ll spare you and me the description of the other guests and bulimic priest, who was leading the devotion. The clergyman was pretending he had known and liked me, but that’s probably his job. Coming out of his mouth my life also sounded way more ordinary, successful, and conformist than I’d ever thought it was, but maybe the mistake was mine.

Now, you may have noticed that so far I’ve been talking a lot of shit about other people to dodge the actual topic. My coffin. It was grandiose. Black. Shiny black. Like a concert grand piano you might see in the symphony halls of this world. With red roses on top. The color of love. Or of a Ferrari. Or of Pamela Anderson’s bikini. It looked fucking sweet.

The priest finally finished the devotion, droning, “…eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord…” Martin winced as tinny organ music pealed out of a ghetto blaster. A couple of men came forward, grabbed hold of the cart with the casket on it, rolled it out of the chapel, and all the mourners trundled along behind. My father supported my mother, who was sobbing uncontrollably. Everyone else looked awkward or bored; only the elementary school teacher had a poker face on. And Martin looked sad. Really sad. I steered clear of his gloomy thoughts.

The other cemetery visitors that day lowered their heads as the funeral procession passed by, pretending to pray for the new admit for a moment, and some of them may have even really done so—but I bet most of them were thinking thank God it wasn’t me.

Since there wasn’t anything exciting happening apart from this mass shuffle to my grave, my eyes wandered around some, which is when I saw her. Miriam. I thought. I wasn’t totally sure of her name. But I recognized her without a doubt. She was Gugi’s little sister.

Gugi got his name because he used to talk like those babies on that TV show: some weird kind of double Dutch consisting mainly of random noises. He had a serious speech impediment, but he was the best fucking automotive painter this side of Santa Fe. He could conjure up fantastic worlds, mythical beasts, or smoking-hot women onto cars and trucks. Either following a picture or freehand—however the customer wanted it. He once covered a truck with the entire crew of the starship Enterprise . That rocket ship left all kinds of traffic accidents in its wake from drivers craning their necks at Captain Kirk, Spock, Bones, and the rest. Yup, he painted only the original crew. And Gugi had a little sister who we of course had never paid any attention to. Little sisters are like measles, mumps, or scarlet fever. In the early stages no one notices them, and then ultimately you end up in bed with them. Miriam—or whatever her name really was—had still been in the early stages in those days. But, holy hotrod, what was she doing here now?

I had let her distract me, so I missed the end of the procession to my grave. As I looked for Martin, everyone was already standing around the hole, and the coffin was swaying on two wooden planks over it. This kind of sucks, I thought.

The priest said another couple of words, and then the strong boys walked up to the grave and lowered the coffin into the cold, dark hole. My mother was sobbing louder now; she threw a few roses onto the casket, and then my father pulled her to his side. The other mourners each took a turn stepping forward; I’m sure you’ve seen that before, so I don’t have to describe it in epic detail here. Everyone shook hands with my parents, took a couple of steps to the side, and then they all stood there in a group. Finally Martin walked up to my parents. Martin?!