le cimetière

Everything fights you the moment you enter le cimetière. The elements are the first to present themselves. Today, the sun and the humid languor that come with the summer slow you before you even enter the gates. Once inside, you feel the mighty oaks with their gnarled limbs reaching almost to the earth as though they were sentinels, guarding what the world has forgotten. You leave the paved avenue, and the paths are in such disrepair you find it difficult to walk any semblance of a straight line, weaving right and left to miss the heaved cobbles, the roots that grab your feet, that attempt to hold you and prevent your progress.

Your mémé had shown you the first time you came, and again the second time—and by the third, you knew the way. The route wasn’t easy: two turns to the center of the cemetery, down a narrow gravel path; turn left and walk across M. Beauchamp’s grave, for it was the only way. Count the headstones and there you’ll be—you hope.

You remove your hat as you stroll along the great tombs of the prominent citizens. You’re in the shade now, and when you’ve reached la treizième division—they’ve all been carefully numbered in the French way, following some arcane inscrutable logic—a new series of obstacles awaits. Here, the graves are of the most modest variety, for persons something less than a marquis or chevalier. But they attack the heart as well now, for you can read the inscriptions, the ones not worn smooth by the forces seeking to eradicate the past.

These people are forgotten. That’s your first thought. They’re packed so close, almost one on top of another. And none look to have been visited in any recent decade. No paths worn in the grass, no fresh flowers, no juvenile whimsies on a child’s grave. If anyone has ventured this far, the earth has taken the vestiges back. And on everything there is something. In the grass there are weeds and thistles. The once gray monuments are now mottled, colors of black and green with mold and lichen. Even the trees are not themselves, consumed with all types of parasites, ivy, moss, mistletoe. Yes, there is life in this place of the dead, but life that grows chaotic, uncontained, like a symphony without a score, every musician finding his own way to a dissonance that repels.

The earth rises as you come close to the spot, and you nod to M. Beauchamp as you pause a moment to catch your breath. Then you count the stones like your mémé taught you. Starting at the broken concrete planter, still upset even after the decades, you begin. One … two … three stones, the low iron fence, and there, beneath the canopy of a chestnut.

How could it be unchanged after all these years, for you swear it looks the same? The last time you were here you were eight, and now twenty years later—the colors, the scents, the sounds—they transport you and you become that child again, the one whose hand your mémé held tight. You would tell her you were afraid, sad, but she would shush you and say, we’re all sad here, mon petit chou, but we must.

You didn’t know her, this person without a face beneath your feet. Neither did mémé, but she said someone needed to remember. And she would kneel before the stone and clean it with stiff bristles. It always looked the same after she finished, yet she did. Then, she would take a pair of hand shears from her bag and cut the grass away from the stone and say the words aloud. You couldn’t read them, for even then they were worn almost to nothing, as though permanency was never intended.

Ici repose Mme Aliénor Clément. Ne m’oublie pas.

Despite being all but dissolved, the letters still insisted. Don’t forget me.

“She asked that we don’t, so we won’t,” mémé would add. And she made it clear it would be up to you someday.

But you did forget. First, mémé was gone, spread in the wind as she wanted, and you didn’t see the reason, so you avoided, feigning busyness. Then you ran away, left Paris, distracted by your own life, your own loves, everything but this, and how could you, with so far to travel? Until now, and you feel the shame of neglecting something so simple, but so meaningful to someone.

You pull the shears from your pocket. Snip, snip, snip, and you finally read the words aloud to no one in particular. But this time there’s no fear, just sadness. And then you see, perhaps the way mémé saw, that it’s not for Mme Clément, but for you.

This story is a work of fiction. Except where explicitly identified, the names, characters, and incidents herein are a product of the author’s creation and any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.

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