Mao II - Don Delillo [77]
The voice said, Crowds estimated, and the picture showed the crowds of mourners and Karen could go backwards into their lives, see them coming out of their houses and shanties, streams of people, then backwards even further, sleeping in their beds, hearing the morning call to prayer, coming out of their houses and meeting in some dusty square to march out of the slums together.
The voice said, Weeping chanting mourners.
There were mourning banners in the streets. Great photographs of Khomeini hung from building walls and many people in the crowd beat themselves on the head and chest.
The voice said, Rivers of humanity, and Karen realized this was the next day now, the funeral, with crowds estimated at three million and everybody dressed in black, all the streets and highways packed with black-clad mourners, and there were people who ran twenty-five miles to the cemetery, ran in grief and mourning, collapsed, carried, pulled along by others, and the roof of a bus fell in under the weight of people trying to see the body.
The voice said, Frenzied mourning. Beating their hands against their heads in grief.
The body was wrapped in a white burial shroud in a refrigerated van that could not get through the streets. Police fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd and make way for the body and there were pictures of fire hoses spraying tight arcs.
The crowd grew and clamored and the van turned back and the body had to be transported to the cemetery by helicopter.
There were aerial shots of the burial site surrounded by crowds. Karen thought they were like pictures of a thousand years ago, some great city falling clamorously to siege.
Then the helicopter landed and the crowds broke through the barriers. The living were trying to bring the dead man back among them.
Karen’s hands were over her mouth.
The living forced their way into the burial site, bloodying their heads and tearing at their hair, choking in the thick dust, and the body of Khomeini rested in a flimsy box, a kind of litter with low sides, and Karen found she could go into the slums of south Teheran, backwards into people’s lives, and hear them saying, We have lost our father. All the dispossessed waking to the morning call. Sorrow, sorrow is this day.
The living fell upon the body and knocked it to the ground.
The living do not accept the fact that their father is dead. They want him back among them. He should be the last among them to die. They should be dead, not him.
The voice said, Distraught and chanting mourners.
The living beat themselves and bled. They ripped the funeral shroud and tried to take the dead man into their tide, their living wave, and reverse the course of time so that he lives.
Karen’s hands were pressed to her face.
The living touched the body, they pressed the imam’s flesh to keep him warm. They had bloody shirts and there were towels around the heads of many men, soaked with blood.
Karen felt she was among them. She saw the shrouded body on the litter surrounded by bearded men, black-clad mourners and revolutionary guards, and they were fighting to touch the imam and take pieces of his shroud.
She could see his thin white legs exposed to the light. They were fighting over the body and beating their own faces.
She thought of the delicate tending of the dead and watched the frenzy of this scene and believed she might pass out. It was an injury to the idea that the dead are protected. His delicate hands and legs were so unfairly exposed. The living paraded the body around the compound and there were soldiers firing shots and men with bloodied heads.
But they were only trying to bring him back among them. The voice said, Eight people trampled to death and many thousands injured.
But it was the tale of a body now. It was beginning to be the story of a body that the living will not yield to the earth. They were passing out