Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

It might have been the old-fashioned rumpled suits I had never seen them wear, dark gray or black, wrinkled, smelling of moth balls and spotted with mildew like soup stains: an old ill-fitting suit makes the wearer seem shy. The wrinkles were not in the usual places, the consequence of sitting or reaching, but were in unlikely places, across the chest of the jacket, pinches on the back and sleeves, drawer folds, creases from storage, the cuffs bunched up; the trousers were more faded than the jackets and this mismatching together with the seediness of the suits reminded me of something Yates had once whispered at the Bandung. “Tell me, Jack,” he said, “don’t we look like the legion of the lost?”

It seemed disrespectful to smoke near the crematorium, so we were all more edgy than usual. The hearse driver and his assistant slid the coffin out and Yardley, Frogget, Smale, and myself carried it across the dusty compound to the entrance where the rest stood behind the cleric. I thought I heard Yardley mutter, “He’s damned heavy,” but he might have said, “It’s damned heavy.” It was. I was afraid we might drop it. The others had been up drinking the night before and I had not been able to sleep. I knew they were worried about dropping it too, because they were carrying it much too fast.

“Wally,” I said.

Wally stood blocking the door, looking inside, with his back to us.

“Wally!” I said again. He didn’t hear. His square head was turned away. My hands were growing moist and slipping on the chrome fixture I was holding, and I snapped, “Move it or lose it!”

He jumped out of the way, and we proceeded inside and unsteadily down the aisle, panting, the six busy overhead fans in the room of folding chairs mocking our forced solemnity with practical whirrs. We placed the coffin on a high wheeled frame at the front of the room and took our seats with the others.

After a few moments Yardley leaned over and asked, “What’s the drill?”

I shrugged. It was my first cremation, and in that bare room of steel chairs, the only ornaments the photographs of the President and his wife, I could not imagine what was going to happen. We sat expectantly, the chairs squeaking and clanking. Hing loudly cleared his throat, so loud it made me want to spit, and as one person’s hacking inspires another’s, particularly in a still room, soon Smale and Coony were at it, coughing in shallow growls. Outside, the pooppoop of firecrackers continued; and beside me Gladys began beating her fan, scraping it against her chin. The cleric walked up the aisle, his starched surplice rustling. The coughing stopped; now there were only the fans, the chair squeaks, and the distant firecrackers.

“Fellow brethren,” he said, looking at us with uncertainty and distaste; he clung to his Bible, holding it chest high, and nodded at everyone individually with his pink flushed face — making suspense. He took a breath and began. His sermon was the usual one, but he was young enough and had delivered it few enough times to make it sound as if he believed it: life was short and difficult, a testing time loaded with temptations; and he pictured God as the all-seeing bumptious neighbor, rocking irritably on his celestial porch and passing judgment. He talked about our weaknesses and then concentrated on Leigh’s soul, which he addressed with great familiarity. The worst religions, I was thinking, rob you of your secrets by reminding you that you’re all in the same sinking boat; harping on your sameness and denying you fancies and flesh and blood and visible hope, they reduce you to moaning galley slaves, manacled to a bloody oar, puking in a sunless passage and pulling blindly toward an undescribed destination; and constantly warning you that you might never arrive. “Believe in God,” the cleric was saying, and I thought, Yes, that’s easy, but does God believe in me? I liked my religion to be a private affair ashore, a fire by a stone, a smoky offering; one necessary at night, the light giving the heavens fraternal features to surprise me with the thrill of agreeable company. It was to make the authority of ghosts vanish by making holiness a friendly human act and defining virtue as joy and grace as permission granted.

“—to judgment,” the cleric was saying, and as he spoke he jerked around several times to nod at Leigh’s coffin, as if Leigh was listening as long as his corpse was whole, and needed only combustion to get him to paradise. “We are all of us sinners, wallowing in the flesh,” the cleric said. Gladys stopped fanning herself. She sniffed and began to cry; and I hoped she was not planning to repent and back out of the appointment at the Palm Grove. She was the only person weeping; the Hings were impassive and pale, Mr. Tan and Wally limply crestfallen; Yardley and the others were sweating, but the sweat ran like tears and wet their faces and was almost like grief.

My face was streaming, too, but I wasn’t crying; my thoughts were too confused for that. Leigh, alive, had reminded me of myself, and his death warned me about my own — a warning so strong it made me ignore his death for part of the time. But I was also thinking: Now he can’t tell anyone about my plans, my silk pajamas and cigars; and I felt childish relief mingled with adult sadness that he was out of the way. When the engines stop on a ship in midocean the whole ship ceases to vibrate and it makes a silence so sudden after three weeks of continual noise that you think your heart has stopped and you wonder for seconds if you’re dead. After those seconds you understand mortality, and the silence that terrified you is a comfort. Leigh’s death affected me that way, and at the cremation I felt peaceful. It seemed better that he was going to be reduced to ashes — a corpse made small and poured into a little pot was not a corpse; it was so tiny and altered you couldn’t reasonably weep over it. Cremation simulated disappearance; it really was like flight, a movement I knew well. Bodies decaying underground made people cry, but a dozen pots on a shelf, a bottled family, were uncharacteristic relics of the forgettable dead, who might have simply skipped off and left their urns behind, one apiece. Burning, as the cleric hinted — and here I agreed — was like deliverance; it was only bad on a hot day.

My thoughts stopped coming: the cleric had stopped talking. There was a clatter at the door; a scrape; a shuffle-thump, shuffle-thump. The cleric stared. We all turned. Gopi was cycling in, his shoulders heaving, making his sleeves flap. His eyes were big from the physical effort of his pedaling, and his shirt was stuck in a dark patch to his back. He took a seat at the front, alone, and he watched the coffin as if it was a magician’s box.

The cleric, who might have thought Gopi was going to interrupt with Hindu wailing, quietly resumed, “Let us pray.”

We knelt on the stone floor. Gopi had to look back to see how it was done. I was anxious for him, balanced on that wobbly knee; he managed by steadying himself on the chair next to him.

A sound of enormous wheezing filled the room as we stood; it was not ours. A clapped-out harmonium had begun asthmatically to breathe “Jerusalem” at the back of the room. Yardley and the others seemed glad to have a chance to sing, and they did so with the hoarse gusto they gave the obscene songs Frogget started at the Bandung on Saturday nights. Frogget had a fine voice, higher than one would have expected from a feller his size and (Gopi and Gladys were both weeping for Leigh — why?) all the voices rang in the room, echoing on the yellow walls and drowning the fans, the firecrackers, and even the woofing harmonium with the hymn.

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

We gave the lines in the last part— Bring me my bow of burning gold, Bring me my arrows of desire —the sahib’s emphasis, trilling the r in the command resolutely.