The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [111]
The ambulance came slowly along the rutted road and entered the cemetery gate. It stopped and the driver and his helper got out. Eddie and Mosca went to help them. Mosca saw that they were the two men who had brought Hella to the hospital for childbirth. They had the two rear doors of the ambulance open and as they, shoved out the black box, Mosca and Eddie gripped the handles of the end near them.
It was rough wood stained watery black, the handles dull rough iron, the color of the sky. The two ambulance men faced Mosca over the coffin but pretended not to know him. They swung the coffin around so that they would lead. It was very light. They took a path through the scarred and broken tombstones until finally they came to an open pit Two little round-shouldered Germans in caps and dark jackets rested on their black, heart-shaped spades and watched the coffin being set down near the hole they had made. Behind them was a great pile of raw brown earth.
The little Opel car came through the gate, its smokestack pouring a rope of mourning to the sky. The minister came out. He was tall and thin and his cragy face was stern. He walked slowly, slightly bent, dragging his long black robe against the damp earth. He spoke a few words to Frau Saunders and then to Mosca. Mosca kept his eyes on the ground. He could not understand the heavy Bavarian accent The stillness of the air was broken by the even, guttural prayer of the minister. He heard the words love and pray and the German word pray was like die word beg, he heard the voice saying forgive forgive and accept accept accept and something of the wisdom and mercy and love of God. Someone gave him a handful of earth, and he threw it before him, heard it strike wood, then heard other little pats of earth. Then he heard great chunks striking like great slow steady heartbeats, growing softer and softer until there was just the inaudible sighing of earth falling on earth, and above the blood pounding in his head, Mosca could hear Frau Saunders weeping.
Finally there were no more sounds. He could hear them moving. He heard the roar of a motor, then another, then the jeep.
Mosca looked up. The mist from the city they had left behind had stolen through the graves and stones. He raiset his eyes to the opaque and sunless sky as men raise theii eyes to pray. In his heart he cried out with hatred, impotent anger,/believe, I believe. Crying out that he believed in the true God, that his vision was clear, that he saw the true tyrannical Father, merciless, pitiless, bathec in blood, drowning in terror and pain and guilt, devours and consumed by His insane hatred for mankind. In his heart and mind great fissures opened to receive the God he saw and then a pale-gold sun appeared before the cur-taind sky and forced his eyes to earth.
Across the plain that lay before the city he could see the empty ambulance and the Opel car rising and falling on the bumpy road. The two black spaded men had disappeared. Frau Saunders and Eddie sat in the jeep waiting for him. Frau Saunders had the blanket wrapped aroun< her, hiding her mourning. It was very cold. He motionec that they should leave and watched the olive-drab jeep move slowly through the gate. Frau Saunders turned for a last look, but he could not see her face. Her black veil, heavy threaded and covered with mist, shielded her eyes,
And now alone for the first time Mosca could look Hella's grave, the mounded earth, the raw brown dirt hei body had displaced. He felt no sorrow, only a bewilderec sense of loss, as if there was nothing he could ever want to do and no place in all the world he could go. He looked across the open field to where the city began and under whose ruins more bones were buried than would ever fill this prepared and holy ground. TTie dead winter sun, shrouded in clouds, shed its pale yellow light and Mosca tried to see across the field to his own life and everything he had felt and known. He tried to reach back over a great