Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [27]
Visiting a famous grave is an odd thing: not only is there no guarantee the dead had any hand in designing their gravestone, but in visiting a famous grave it is likely one is visiting a place the famous person in question never actually saw. But cemeteries have a special relationship with time. For the interred, time has been truly eliminated; the marker above their graves documents the exact moment when, for them, time stopped. A cemetery is a place of quiescence. Unchanging rows of gravestones bestow a sense of stasis upon its visitors, with all evidence to the contrary concealed beneath a thick layer of earth. Busts, photos, and carvings depict faces unmarred by debilitation, disease, or decay. For this reason, just as a widow might visit the grave of her husband to seek comfort, it is possible to visit the grave of an artist who died a century ago and feel as if one is in proximity to a tangible presence.
Visiting a famous grave delivers a thrill of an entirely different order than visiting a famous home. A certain degree of abstract thinking is required when presented with a plaque that reads, “So and so slept here.” An empty home cannot help but bestow a sense of absence and abandonment: the impotence of the personal effects of its former inhabitant is inarguable. No matter how artful the arrangement of materials strewn across a desk’s surface, it is patently obvious that nothing has happened at that desk for a very long time. The visitor has arrived hopelessly late; the party ended long ago. Not so a gravestone. A grave offers the real goods: not the pen that once was held but the hand itself that wielded it. Never mind that the force that caused the hand to move is long gone and what lies beneath the ground might not even be recognizable as a hand anymore. The satisfaction of being in the presence of physical remains is visceral. Certain native tribes once ate select pieces of their dead in order to incorporate their good qualities, so that the dead might continue to live within them. Visiting a body’s resting place is the citified cousin of such an instinct, bestowing a pale sense of that primal communion. It is as close as people get to baying at the moon.
The roster beside Vyšehrad’s gate indicates that the celebrated Czech writer Karel apek is buried at grave number 107, a few rows away from Dvoák. The numbers lead toward the back of the cemetery, just beyond the church’s shadow, but at 107 there is no evidence of the brilliant individualist who coined the word “robot” and who created a parodic world in which humans made war on giant talking newts. Number 107 is a stranger’s grave. A return to the cemetery gate will not clarify this fact: the roster clearly identifies apek as number 107. Only if a visitor is lucky will she be standing by the gate when an old Czech man and his grandson walk through the gate, the grandson peevishly muttering “Karel apek, Karel apek” under his breath in a way that suggests he has been brought here before. These two seasoned visitors will walk past grave number 107 without a second glance and proceed toward the last row before the cemetery wall, a row the uninitiated might well walk down without spotting anything of note. The pair will stop before a cast-iron grave marker in the shape of an open book, Karel apek’s name formed by delicate lines inscribed on its pages and rendered practically invisible in direct sunlight.