Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [28]
The act of seeing a name on a grave marker that has previously only graced the spines of books and title pages births a reflexive, physical response: the mouth curves into a grin, the eyes widen, and the heart beats a little faster. This is recognition. It is no different than the response sparked by spotting a familiar face while walking down the street. It is a response unaffected by the fact that apek has been dead for over sixty years. He is here: there is his name.
FRANZ KAFKA
Franz Kafka is not buried in Vyšehrad. Nor is he buried in Olšany, which lies in the district of Žižkov, on Prague’s southeast perimeter, and which has served as the city’s Christian burial ground since the eighteenth century. Gravestones mark the final resting places of gentile professors, city officials, businessmen, and merchants. There are a few scattered busts, but the graves here are far more conventional and plain-spoken than Vyšehrad’s. The remains of three centuries of regular citizenry take up five hundred thousand square meters and are divided into thirteen different sections, each representing a different portion of the cemetery’s—and the country’s—history. Olšany’s gravestones reflect Prague’s shifting governance across the centuries and function as a granite history book. The oldest section of the graveyard, dating from the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is populated with German headstones. With the advent of the country’s independence and national awakening in the early 1900s, German-language headstones give way almost entirely to Czech ones. After the 1940s Czech graves begin to admit into their midst the occasional Cyrillic headstone, but these again give way to Czech. Jan Palach, the Czech college student who set fire to himself and became the country’s most famous anti-Communist martyr, was originally buried here in 1969, but his body was disinterred and removed from Prague a few years later by wary Communist authorities when his grave became a place of pilgrimage for Czech citizens. His remains were returned to Olšany in 1990.
On a nascent spring day, Olšany is a busy place. The flower shops beside the cemetery entrance are doing a brisk business. A coin-operated machine vending memorial candles just inside the front gate has been emptied. Old ladies arrive in brightly colored coats, carrying bottles of water and dust brooms. They walk with the purpose and confidence of frequent visitors. Weeds are plucked; new flowers are planted; old plants are pruned and watered; marble is swept free of dirt and dust in acknowledgment of winter’s approaching end. From the back of one section comes a steady tapping sound, like that of a woodpecker: at a family tomb, a white-haired man in a baseball cap and a down vest carves new names into the stone with a hammer and chisel, his hand gilded with white marble dust. Further on, as her daughter pulls stray weeds a young woman rakes the dirt covering her husband’s grave until it resembles a Japanese meditation garden. Above the carved name on the left half of the headstone is a small oval photograph of a man with a moustache. The right half of the headstone is blank. In Olšany, as in almost any other cemetery, a blank headstone seems purely practical in nature: the purchaser of a family stone trusts that future deaths will leave bodies