Tearless Funeral

Sadness or madness ? You decide.

 

 

A Tearless Funeral

 

 

          With a heavy heart, and at her usual swift pace, Lil walked towards her friend’s house, and reached her destination a little past eleven o’clock. Finding the entrance door ajar, she, without knocking, pushed it and got in to find Hind, as pale as a ghost, awaiting her by the doorsill with a quivering smile on her face.

 

Bewildered by her friend’s unexpected composure and smiling reception, and feeling incapable to smile back at someone whose mother, only few hours ago, died, Lil wrapped her arms around Hind’s scrawny body, and gave it a warm affectionate hug. She dearly hoped that her tiny gesture would speak for her commiseration, for so little she knew what else she could do to bring some consolation to her friend’s aggrieved heart. The right thing to say in such bitter situations was, in fact, something she has always lacked, and so she winded up her hug in silence, thinking that no words of condolence were comforting, considerate, and sincere enough to sooth the woe of someone whose mother is forever gone.

 

Hind seemed but a little anguished and dazzlingly calm though. “I’m not sad,” she said, as if responding to the baffled apprehensive expression that settled on Lil’s face as soon as she fixed her friend’s tearless eyes. “She has been through a lot of suffering, but she is in a better place now. She is released.” added Hind, elucidating the supreme reason behind her fearsome tranquillity, and smiling reluctantly, again.  

 

“Yes, indeed!” said Lil, astounded still, and squeezing her friend’s hand, yet failing to fake a smile back, “she is released, and in Heaven now, if God wills!”  

 

“Amen, yes...if God wills!” said Hind.

 

From the garage bay adjacent to the grounds were the two girls stood came a hale middle-aged woman, with large protruding blue eyes of which one was reddened, who, seeing Lil, approached to greet her.

 

“It’s my aunt.” announced Hind.

 

“My condolences!” said Lil while brushing the woman’s cheeks with two soundless air kisses, “May God induce you with patience!”

 

“Amen!” replied the blue-eyed woman with a compassionate smile, before moving steadily to the nearby stairway, and, reaching its summit, she cried out to her niece: “Bring your friend and come up to the living room; it’s too cold for you to stay outside!”

 

“All right...we’ll come right away!” replied Hind mechanically, and executing her words, she moved towards the stairway, nodding to her friend to follow her. They mounted the first steps silently when, all of a sudden, Hind stopped and turned, and with a distressed countenance and a prickly tone declared, “I don’t feel like going up there again, as there is a crowd of strangers and not a single empty chair!”, and then she paused, looked hither and thither, and lowering her voice, resumed, “Old strangers with faces that look perfectly the same, and seemingly older than was the dear one who passed away, and yet, very early they came and said that they were old friends of hers, and that I’m quite a grownup now, to console me, I guess. I couldn’t believe them. And I don’t believe I can stand seeing them now, some weeping, some tittering, some nattering, and all waiting to be served, as it’s all so absurd!”

 

Hearing this sudden animated declaration, Lil felt surprisingly relieved, not merely for being spared the trouble of mingling with a funeral crowd, but mostly for being assured that that frightening equanimity her friend had been trying to uphold was purely a camouflage for a brimming distress.  

 

“Then let us stay outside. I don’t mind the cold.” suggested Lil composedly.

 

“Me neither.” replied Hind shortly, and they both descended the few ascended steps, and returned to the garden where they sat, side by side, on a frosty cement lemon tree’ ring, and there they remained, still as if utterly numbed by the unrelenting chill, for a good while.

 

Hind gazed vacantly at the ample sky, which was, as she then fancied, nothing but the gateway of that better place where her mother’s soul is to peacefully rest. Yet, with the haziness of her fancy she felt unsatisfied, and though she attempted, she utterly failed to create, on the unhinged grounds of her mind, any clear likeness of that mystifying world. “Is it really a better place?” she asked herself, and the more she thought of an answer the more her head ached, yet the dimmer her assumptions the eager her inquisitiveness grew. Her gaze was then no more vacant, but hopelessly curious to plainly see what was secreted beneath that boundless blue blanket, which her parched eyes swept meticulously, as if seeking out a crevice through which they might peep and discover the cherishingly concealed.

 

Lil, meanwhile, whose heart was clouded by the air of mourning which was hovering over the house, and, at the same time, lulled by the blurry echo of the holy verses which pervaded it, was staring concernedly at the timeworn pair of flip flops that left uncovered the pale feet of her friend who, absorbed as she was in contemplation, had seemingly forgotten about the quiet friendly presence sitting by her side.

 

“I’m afraid”, said Lil suddenly, while rubbing her red and numb hands together to warm them, “you’d catch a cold, as you are not clothed heavily enough. Aren’t you feeling the”

 

“Hind!” cried a vibrant female voice from a small ground-level apartment adjoining the garden wall, “come at once, my little one, come and show me where d’you keep the garlic, and where to find your father, if he can ever be found!”

 

As the calling voice died away, the pair of emerald green eyes, which the sleeplessness of Hind’s angst-ridden nights had encircled with shadowy rings, and of which the irises her tearless melancholy and the exultant roaring sunlight rendered marvellously lighter, turned nonchalantly towards Lil’s large and dark ones, and fixed them with a frail tender and unfathomable stare.

 

That delicate tenderness, which Lil mistook for a resigned expression of pain, troubled her, and she thereupon knew not what she was supposed to feel. Yet, after a couple of seconds, she felt, when she instinctively smiled to her friend, an irksome bit of guilt. Her smile, she thought, was incongruous and improper, as she, though usually not particularly concerned with the spontaneity-killing protocols of good manners, firmly believed that, for the sake of respect of funerals’ etiquette, one’s face must express desolation, even if not heartfelt, or at least no sign of gaiety. “A smile is still a more prudent alternative than words.” she eventually said to herself, while trying her level best not to let loose the question suffocating between her curved lips; the vain question: “What’s wrong?”, the answer to which she no longer believed she knew.

 

“I do not feel a thing.” murmured Hind at last, in a deadly tone, gazing again at a sky where neither a cloud nor the slightest sign of a forthcoming storm could be seen, “And I fear nothing, though nothingness is what used to frighten me the most. But you” she carried on, turning brusquely to her friend, “do feel for me. I know you do. You said you were afraid a while ago, didn’t you? But no, dearest of them all, don’t be so, and don’t, I beg, give me that empathetic look, for I can neither bear it nor help a thing! I can’t even say I’m sorry, though I swear on the name of my treasured withered flowers, on the name of the Daisies I once cried for and on the name of Ophelia’s Violets, that I never meant to scare you!”

 

“And now she’s grown feverish, the poor child, and how distraught her collected words sound, and how strange it is that even death could not make her forget the bloody Daisies!” remarked Lil to herself, growing now seriously alarmed, and reaching fretfully for Hind’s hand. “I think you need some rest.” she observed.

 

“I think rest, when eternal, is a better fate than life in a wheelchair.” said Hind, standing up to placidly face her disconcerted friend. Then, she crouched down in front of Lil, and in a voice that sounded the closest thing to a whisper, she, as if intimating a secret, added, “I think I must tell you, though I know that some things had better be untold and forgotten, that I cannot even remember how horrible it felt to be up there, close to my mother’s deathbed.” And then she paused, her eyes grew wider, and the tone she resumed with creepier, “Nearby, helpless, I stood, while her hallucinating corpse, being by the unseen consumed, stammered some distorted words that shall be forever misunderstood. Nearby, I sat and cried, for having to witness the theft. I wept till my eyes dried, and then the heart in my chest felt fully anesthetized, of all hope bereft. Agony was there, inhaled with every breath. With every bit of air, lodged the smell of death; the stink of despair. And then the hour struck, tick tock, to breathe one’s last. The heavy book was shut, and her soul was by angels courted, to its Lord escorted…to its Lord escorted”

 

“Sorrow, oh my! Sorrow is driving her insane!” exclaimed Lil within herself, while the tears which had been gathering in her eyes rolled down along her hollow cheeks. “But what to do, what can I do to help her cry?”

 

“Why didn’t you come?” shouted suddenly the voice that was calling Hind a while ago, and whose owner, a stout woman who looked from afar strikingly like the blue-eyed aunt, was now heading promptly towards the girls. “I found no garlic”, said she, while passing by them. “Don’t say you don’t have any left! And the fruits, how many shall be put per table? How many tables are there?” she inquired, without looking at the person she was addressing, and it was only as her hurrying steps reached the bottom of the nearby staircase that she halted and turned towards Hind to say, with a stiff and quite formal tone, “I’ll take care of the counting, but I shall go and dress up first, and so shall you. Change your cloths! Put on something proper and black, mind, for we have to look neat and presentable in front of the people up there, and of those yet to come!”

 

This said, the fleshy woman mounted the stairs with the same vigorous and rapid pace that one, when seeing her heavy frame at first, would believe her incapable of maintaining, and as soon as she got in the big house, her head popped again through the open door, and she shouted: “Oh, and then look for you father, and tell him he’s needed and so late! Don’t forget!"

 

“You’d better leave now, as the rest is no fun.” said Hind kindly, with a tinge of irony in her voice, standing up straight, to her friend who imitated her movement, inwardly swearing at herself for having smiled and wept and been of no real help. “Have a nice walk around for me, and cry no more. I’ll wear my old blue dress that you like the most; it’s plain and the warmest one I’ve got, and go looking for the man who’s never there. That would take me some time.” concluded Hind, while walking her friend to the exit door, at the sill of which Lil gave her another hug, rather mechanically, muttered, “you’re a sweet child who’s grown too strong”, and then walked away. 

 

December 11^th, 2013

 

 The Adventures of Lil Elbar