True Stories (32 page)

The drama of the exchange of rings is often dissolved in the comedy of having to push hard to get them over the knuckle.

Two Uruguayans. Their names are fabulously, polysyllabically, mythologically beautiful. The room is suddenly warm and noisy, overflowing with handsome women in jewellery and furs and heartbreaking young men in bomber jackets, one of whom sidles up to the celebrant and says to him in a stage whisper, ‘Listen—lock the door, or he'll run away.'

Two Australian divorcees, both getting on for forty. The man keeps looking round with a goofy grin. He gets through his statement with difficulty, then turns to his friends and says, ‘Phew!'

Equality of the sexes has entered even the wording of the marriage vow: ‘man and wife' has become ‘husband and wife', and there is no talk of anyone having to obey anyone else. But a peculiar rite persists: the institution of The Kiss. ‘John, you may now kiss the bride.' It is usually the signal (among Australians, anyway) for a burst of awkward merriment, of adolescent guffaws and even of risque comments
sotto voce.
I'm sorry, but it's the men who show this extraordinary reaction. When you think about it, though, to kiss in public, to join mouths, is an astonishingly intimate thing to do. And to do it again, at the request of the inevitable slow-thinking photographer— oh là là!

A young German, tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in a subtly coloured jacket and leather trousers, repeats the statement after the celebrant: his accent does something strange to the words, and as he says ‘to be my luffly wedded wife' he stares at her as if he can't really believe that this is what he is required to say. They kiss. ‘That's enough,' says a man's voice from the crowd.

A bloke with a stud in one ear marries a woman in a crown of flowers. When he kisses her there is a laugh then one or two claps…a pause…then a boy in the back row, wearing ripple-soled suede shoes, calls out, ‘Yay!' and they all applaud. The groom turns round and opens his arms to his friends. ‘OK, folks!' he cries. ‘Let's pardy!'

And now two Asian students approach the desk. They look alarmingly young. Can this be wise? They have no wedding party, only an Australian couple in their sixties, the woman in a great deal of pancake and blusher and a lairy fur jacket. Is she his landlady? She seems fond of the young man, who says to the celebrant as he stumbles over the pronunciations, ‘I use Shane as my Christian name.'

‘Just marry them,' says the landlady, ‘before they change their minds.'

Shane's knees are making fast little rhythmic jerks inside his neat trousers. From my angle I can see the bride's chubby cheekbones go up and out, again and again, as she smiles and giggles. Shane kisses her enthusiastically, before he is told he may. Everyone laughs. While the landlady and her friend sign the papers, the new couple compare their rings and giggle.

The landlady's friend, a punter in a snap-brim hat, does his level best to make conversation in the awkward pause that follows the formalities. ‘You're from Sarawak, are you?' he says.

Shane nods, looking eager.

‘It's on the other side—of—um—Borneo, isn't it. I was at Labuan. During the war. It's off the coast of Borneo. Near Brunei.'

‘Course,' says the landlady, wanting to keep the conversation on marriage, ‘during the war a lot of Australian girls wanted to marry American soldiers. Before they could leave the country.' She gives a shrill laugh.

Shane and the bride, puzzled, nod and nod, never losing their eager smiles. They all shuffle towards the door, with the celebrant in attendance. The jollifications of the next wedding party can be heard in the hall outside. The Fairy Blackstick can't bear the tension. I step forward to open the heavy door for them, but they see me coming and think I work here, that I'm part of the deal: they welcome my approach with beaming smiles, and put out their hands to shake mine. The celebrant, a
really nice man
, is grinning at me from behind the ill-assorted four. We shake hands all round and I say, keeping my notebook behind my back, ‘Congratulations! I hope you'll be very happy!'

‘Thank you!' they say.

I open the door, I wave goodbye, I wish them luck, and I mean it!—I do! I do!

1986

Death

WITH A BURIAL
, what you see is what you get. Body in box, box in hole, earth on top. Jews understand the worth of a real burial—not just a few symbolic clods and walk away, but mourners pass the shovel from hand to hand, fill the hole right to the top, cry out loud while the job is done slowly and with physical effort; and who can fail then to feel the grave as a bed, a fine and private place, into which the dead one has been tenderly laid, then covered as a child is tucked in under blankets, and left to sleep?

With a cremation you get a curtain drawn between the weeping and the fate of the body. People must have wanted this at some stage, or it wouldn't be the industry it is. But isn't there a curiosity we feel is morbid, a longing to know what happens to the coffin after it clunks down and out of sight? What weird ideas do we brood on? I told a friend of mine—in her forties, intelligent, worldly, witty, who's held my hand at more than one funeral—that I'd spent a day at Melbourne's Springvale crematorium.

‘Oh, don't tell me,' she said with a shiver. ‘They cut the body up into pieces, don't they.'

‘Oh no!' I said, astonished. I told her what I'd seen. She listened. When I'd finished she gave a sigh.

‘What you said makes me feel better,' she said.

The funny thing is that anyone could go out there and find out what they want to know.

‘You can look at anything you like here,' says the manager.

‘Otherwise you get the hidden mysteries.'

‘The what?'

‘The mysteries. The unknown.'

He shows me the layout of the place—the huge garden, the four chapels, the furnace room—then goes back to his office and leaves me to my own devices. This surprises me: I'd expected to be kept under surveillance and given a laundered view of events. I feel like a kid suddenly given more freedom that it knows what to do with. I know what I really want to see, but I am embarrassed by my curiosity which I still cannot help feeling is
morbid
, so I go for a long walk round the garden, through the enormous cemetery.

It is a cool, sparkling morning. A couple of the gardeners, full-blown eccentrics with unidentifiable European accents, corner me and bash my ear. One of them tells me a long and comical story with actions.

‘One day I was raking,' he says. ‘Like this. And I saw on the ground, just near the tap, a black handbag. It had an address, a hundred and seventy-five dollars and a pension cheque. I took it to the boss. Other blokes they say, Eddy, why didn't you take the money and dig the bag into the garden? No one will know. I say, No, honesty is the best thing in this world. There
is
no honesty in this world.

‘Some time later she comes out, a lady, she says to me, Are you Eddy? I say, Lady, I am Eddy but I don't know you. She says, You found my handbag. She gives me an envelope. I start to walk away, I say, Lady, I don't need anything. I don't need your envelope. But she runs after me—and she's not young—fifty-eight or sixty—and she sticks the envelope in my back pocket, here, this one—I didn't even feel it go in, I was walking away. But later I find it in my pocket, and there's five dollars in it.'

His colleague, a freckled man in a towelling hat, wheeling a barrow and whistling with expert trills, shows me a little area where the gravestones are decorated with artistic and fanciful sculptures. He is content to draw my attention to them but Eddy hurries up to interpret them for me.

‘Some people spend seventeen thousand dollars on a memorial. See? This is all bronze. They come out and put a kind of wox—a yelly—on it. See this? This is the
Mona Lisa.
See the little dove on her hand? And what do you reckon this means? A river? Course it's not a river! It means—the ocean! Crossing the ocean.

‘And these? Yes! It's a choir of angels! You look at it from over there. Makes a nice effect, don't you think? One day someone came out and put a lighted cigarette in their mouths. It dropped—see these marks? Tsk tsk. Oh, she was wild.'

This is highly entertaining but not what I have come for. I find myself drawn back towards the chapels and to the furnaces: where the action is. The first funerals have begun and I stand at the back of one of the chapels listening to the limp-backed tributes that are being paid by a minister to a man he never met. We have to get paid functionaries to do even our speaking for us. What a pathetic, stiff, frightened lot we are.

I go outside and loiter between the chapels in the sun. I am longing to go back to the furnace room but I'm scared. Scared of what? Not of what I'll see, but of
what people will think
. What people?
I
don't know. Anyone who sees me. They'll think I've got a sick mind. They'll think…

I am saved from this nonsense by a man from the furnace room, to whom the manager introduced me an hour ago before the fires had been lit. He's wearing his uniform of maroon blazer and grey trousers, but on his feet are Frye boots and his hands are tattooed. He sees me dawdling with intent, strides up to me and gets straight to the point. ‘Do you want to come and have another look?'

He takes me through a little door marked ‘Private'.

Oddly, this is the most shocking moment of the day, this one quick step from the outside world of colour—sun and leaves—into the monochrome of the furnace room. I panic, my legs go weak, I think,
It's the gas chambers, it's the underworld,
I can't write this, only a photographer could show this place as it is,
it's made of dust, there's no blood, everything's a shade of pale grey,
the huge ovens are grey, the walls and floor are grey, the workers
are grey, the air is grey. I'm not going to faint but I'm going to lose
control of my bowels.

This does not happen. The shock lasts two seconds and passes, and I see I am in a long cement-coloured area that must link the business ends of the four chapels which are built in pairs, back to back. Men are walking about. There is a low roaring sound.

My guide gives me a sharp look. ‘You don't mind seeing the actual…umm…' ‘No! That's what I'm here for.'

He nods, and leads me to the end furnace. I think they call them cremators in the official brochures, but a furnace is what it is, huge, wide and tall, like a giant pizza oven.

My guide opens a door, like the door of an old fuel stove, only bigger, and I bend over to look in. First, with relief, I see colour, the only colour in the place—orange flames—and then the small end of a coffin. The heat is so tremendous that everything wavers: the coffin is covered with a network of fine cracks, its surface reminds me of an old porcelain jug in an op shop, with a glaze that's covered in lines while the china's still in one piece underneath.

I've never been so curious in my life. I want to stare and stare. As I look, squinting against the heat (they burn at between eight hundred and a thousand degrees Celsius) the end of the coffin goes
pouf!
and disintegrates. I can see two burning lumps. I gape. What I am looking at is
a man's feet.
In the heat of their consumption they turn slightly, almost gracefully, as if he were moving to a more comfortable position in bed.

I don't see them as pink human
feet
, you understand, with skin and heels and toes, but as two shimmering dark-centred objects of flame, which the context instructs me can only be feet. This is not the slightest bit horrible or disgusting. I am not aware of any smell.

Perhaps this wonder I am feeling is a very exaggerated version of that dreamy hypnosis that comes over us when we stare into a fire of wood, or coal. Why are we so drawn to fire? It's the spectacle of matter being transformed. And that's what I'm seeing here.

My guide glances at me. I'm struck dumb. All I can think to say is ‘Wow'. He nods again. The rest of the coffin loses form and collapses. What I can see now is a sort of humped, curved lump: it is his torso, the line of his spine, the bulky part of his body. ‘The feet take only a few minutes,' says my guide. ‘The head goes last. The oil burner's aimed at the head and the torso. They're the hardest parts of the body to burn.'

He closes the door and leads me to the next furnace. Here a body has been consumed and a man is about to rake out the top section of the burning chamber to allow what they call the CRs, the cremated remains, to fall through a grille into a lower part, for collection. I can see a long bone, a femur, pale and dry-looking. ‘The thigh-bone's connected to the kneebone,' I foolishly think, but nothing's connected to anything any more, all the links have been burned away and the furnace floor is covered with ordinary-looking ash in which the few bones, fragile and ready to be crushed, lie about as naturally as if they had been bleached not by fire but by a pure desert sun.

The man is raking and raking and the crumbly ash tumbles down into the under chamber.

Like a lot of people, I used to think that when the coffin disappeared behind the curtain in the chapel it was devoured instantly by flames, as if the chapel were built astride a hell where fire forever raged.

Of course, it's not like that at all. My guide takes me up some steps to a concrete area like a garage, open at one end to the garden. Here we stand and wait. A red light on the wall goes off. This means that a service is over and a coffin is on its way out of the chapel. It heaves into view, thickly encrusted with flowers. A young man in jeans and runners tips the bouquets off into a wheelbarrow and briskly takes hold of the coffin. He straps it to a metal arrangement of rails, a kind of overhead conveyor belt. We go down the stairs again and I see the coffin go sliding smoothly above our heads on its elevated track. Down and round it goes to the furnace room, where it is unstrapped and put to wait its turn outside one of the furnace doors.