November 12, 2009
IN THE CEMETERY AT SERECOURT
It’s powerfully cold here, with thick opalescent mist that has ceased to lift throughout days that offer only a few hours of light. Depending on my mood, it’s merangue, or a cataract. Opaque.
In the fields next to the house, the flock of tender-eyed sheep are soaking wet, with wool coats that seem to heavy to move. Their knees are muddied where they kneel to sleep near their salt blocks.
Everything cold, everything partially frozen – a slick sogginess within a thin veneer of brittle frost. The ducks passed overhead a few days ago, heading south towards Dijon. A fierce jubilation. Now all is silence except for the donkey — tied to his tree, he watches it all with a shriek — and the mossy bronze bell of the 11th century church behind the house, which counts the hours and the demihours between now and the apocalypse.
Returning from Strasbourg near midnight last night, I saw a thin drunk man in yellow overalls topple out of his half-opened door. He had come out to urinate heavily into the street. He wavered, sloppy, uneven, rubber farm soles gripping the icy stones of his stoop, handling his zippers and buttons with a dull confusion in the fog.
Whatever has died in the walls has now frozen. For some time, the scent of its decay wafting through the walls suggested an afterlife, a ghost odor, perhaps immortal. But winter has even eviscerated the mouse corpse, and it will remain in a state of advance dolorosa until spring.
There is a new grave in the cemetery – the mayor’s assistant died suddenly of heart failure. The cemetery is perhaps 100 meters from their office, and thus it was a short procession along the grave road in front of this house. The bouquets of flowers are encased in shrouds of cellophane and shrink wrap, to forestall their freezing. Inside the plastic they are confused, perhaps resigned, creating a humid vapor of life that crystallizes within moments, and turns black.
At the highest point on the Haut de Fee burial mound is hidden a small square pillar, some Vosges granite, nearly flush with the earth. Sunk down feet deep and immobilized, showing only its head, a few inches square at most, and flat topped. Its face deeply etched with an x that marks a crossroads between the worlds. The Celts planted it, anointing a place where the underworld and the earthworld intertwine. Above it, a rough hewn stone of a meter square that once held a goddess, but now a painted cast of St. Joseph behind iron bars. On Samhain, or Halloween, the villagers placed in his hand the last corn cob of this harvest. He surveys the fields with apology, for he knows he is an interloper in that shrine, built for Diana or her kin. For some wild Mary of the old ways.
A few steps further along there is a small grove of plum trees. Several of the trees have split or died, and they are host to huge round bundles of mistletoe. A shocking succulent green nested within the black branches, with thousands of plump round egg-white berries, like dolls eyes bereft of pupils.
Winter brings new isolation to the cobblestone streets and sober blackened walls to the faeries and the Dutch and the few sad French who rest here with their thoughts and their wine and a cumulous cloud of duvet.
Vosges is the Appalachia of France – poor, isolated, forgotten, wrapped in grief from their great civil war of 1918, where the Germans and the French marched back and forth over this patch of land, so many times owned by one and then the other, inbred, cross bred, everyone related by blood and tongue and appetite for milk and egg and grape. The trenches still run here, supposedly empty, yet in truth filled with lost limbs and lack of recompense.
Each village a small obelisk draped in flags with the names of lost boys of the town. No memorial to the Second World War, no plaques, no monuments to the war dead. In these parts, the Germans merely arrived. No bloodshed. No martyred French boys of Christian descent. A hundred thousand Jews left their empty beds behind and perhaps that should be the memorial in these towns – a sort of emptiness. Perhaps that is the memorial in these towns – emptiness. Sorrow. Grief for who has vanished here.
This is a land of absence, a land of lack. Not enough money, not enough attention, or education, or communication. Yet not always: three thousand years ago, this the Jerusalem of the goddesses – beside every spring a priestess, a seer. A tribe of female druids alongside the riverbank, making love and prayer beneath the mistletoe and plum trees. Two thousand years ago, it was a land of midwife and faerie, of pagan love for land and harvest. This the fertile place marked with grave and stone. So many half-humans and demigods buried here that their holy meadows became corporal in the flesh of the humans born here. Known to be strong, to be guided by visions and uncanny knowledge.
Perhaps with Christians came lack. Came the ten thousand ghosts of witches burned along these streets. Came Joan of Arc, and the Black Death, and the losing battle against the victory of something hopeful over something horrific.
The faeries run underground, out of view. The Celts killed by the Catholics. The wise women and witches burned. The boys gashed and gassed in wrenching spurts from canister and bayonet, and bombs great gashes in the flesh of the earth goddesses, where their blood ran into the soil and made it too full of iron for planting wheat. And then the Jews, plucked out one by one in daylight, their possessions gathered up and distributed by the mayor, their houses appropriated while their windows still left the white winter print of fear from little noses pressed close, watching out for the Gestapo.
Each neighbor has a tale of something seen in the fog, a shape in the house, black cloaked figures hunched along a wall, or singing. Visions. Lights that flicker where there are no windows. The house of the Jewish butcher a few doors down – one afternoon hauled away to the train in Lamarche and then to the camps, and how the dogs will no go into his bedroom, and bark for hours at what had been his closet door.