Tag: essay

by Rachel Unkefer

I sit on the back porch, picking them out with my fingernails. They’ve embedded themselves between the layer of mesh and the layer of smooth nylon surface on the tops of my running shoes. From a distance they look like mud spatters, but they’re clusters of organic torpedoes, hundreds of them, each a centimeter long. These wild grass seeds, with their tiny grappling hooks, have hitched a ride to Virginia from a German cemetery.

I picked up these wanderers in the small town of Grünstadt in the Rhineland-Palatinate, about an hour’s drive southwest of Frankfurt. Grünstadt has a vibrant Jewish history that is documented back to the early seventeenth century. At its height, the Jewish community numbered some five hundred souls. What remains in 2012 is the neglected cemetery.

Unlike many German Jewish cemeteries that are now deep in the woods, Grünstadt’s sits in an open field in an industrial park, a few trees providing cover from the road. Two of us, one American and the other German, stand outside the fence, peering in from the driveway of the factory building next door. We’ve visited many cemeteries together, my husband’s fourth cousin Christopher and I, as genealogy research collaborators for more than fifteen years.

The government protects Jewish cemeteries, usually surrounding them with metal fences and standard locked green gates for which visitors must locate the person guarding the key. In some towns, this requires a scavenger hunt of epic proportions. In Grünstadt, no sign on the gate tells us where to obtain the key, so we drive to the town administrative building, only to find it’s closed on Wednesdays. We rearrange our itinerary.

Returning to the town office on Friday, we inquire at an information desk and are sent to the office of a woman who, it turns out, doesn’t have the key but helpfully makes a call to find out who does. She sends us across the street to another office, where another official informs us he doesn’t have it either; it’s held at the Standesamt (town registry), which is back across the street, in the building we just left. Finally, at the Standesamt, another official photocopies Christopher’s German national identification card and informs us the key must be back in an hour and a half, before the office closes for the weekend.

At least in this town, we’re trusted with the key, unlike in nearby Mehlingen a few days before. The town official there was unable to obtain the required permission from the local Jewish community, recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. After two hours of trying, she took pity on us and arranged for two town maintenance workers to unlock the gate and guard us while we were inside.

Although it’s noon and nearly ninety degrees in Grünstadt, I’m glad to have worn jeans and closed shoes, because we have to wade through waist-high weeds to get to the older sections of the cemetery. Photographing inscriptions involves parting curtains of wild grass and stamping down slender stalks, giving seeds a chance to break free and latch onto us. Headstones in the far corner are buried under a thicket of six-foot-high shrubs that we would need a machete to get through. The roots will push these stones up out of the ground and topple them eventually.

Many of the older stones’ Hebrew inscriptions are still legible; only a few have been chiseled off by vandals. Newer ones have German on the reverse side. We split up, weaving back and forth through the rows, taking quick photos, no time to pick out the graves belonging to my husband’s ancestors.

I see Christopher in the distance, his head covered by the yarmulke he keeps with him for cemetery visits, even though his family no longer practices Judaism. He carries a bag of white pebbles in the trunk of his car, for the Jewish custom of placing them on relatives’ headstones as a sign of respect and remembrance. We each distribute a handful randomly among the graves.

Germans lavish attention on their dead. Non-Jewish cemeteries teem with relatives carrying watering cans from the central spigots to the burial plots, many of which have been turned into elaborate gardens. Small statues, stuffed animals, and other decorations are on display among the flowering plants.

This resting place receives no such care. Waves of Grünstadt’s Jews, including my husband’s family, began emigrating to America in the 1850s. The ones who didn’t–we can guess what happened to them. On this day, the two of us are the closest relatives in the vicinity: a great-great-great-granddaughter-in-law and a great-great-great-step-nephew. I wish we had enough white pebbles to leave one on every single gravestone.

As we emerge from the dry grass, our pants and shoes are covered with seeds. Some of them have worked their way through the tops of my shoes into my socks. It’s a relief to finally get to the car and take shoes and socks off to pick out the barbs that have been getting under my skin.

Later, packing for the trip home in the airport hotel, I think of throwing these shoes away. They don’t seem salvageable. But I wrap them in plastic and put them in my suitcase anyway.

Now at home, I sit, pulling the seeds out, throwing them on the floor of my screened porch, where some fall through the slats. Maybe they’ll root in the soil underneath. I realize now that I inadvertently lied on the customs form yesterday when I answered “no” to the question about bringing foreign plants into the United States.

My fingernails are too big to reach under the mesh to extricate the more stubborn seeds. Instead of getting tweezers, I leave a few, as a reminder of the cemeteries the Germans have forgotten. And if one occasionally works its way through the shoe to poke my foot, so much the better.

 

Rachel Unkefer’s work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Citron Review, and elsewhere. She has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Writers in the Heartland. She is one of the cofounders of WriterHouse, a non-profit writing community in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The hearts of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything in them, the sun of their microcosm.

William Harvey, De Motu Cordis et Sanguines [1628], Dedication to King Charles

 

I return to that house, that night, that instant almost every day. It wasn’t late, not even quite 7:30—this we know from the call records on our cell phones—but it was cold and dark enough to feel much later. I arrived first. I could see that a light was on in the living room, but there was no light through any of the other windows.  The car was in the driveway.

I turned my own car off and waited in the dark, but I had no way of guessing how long Abigail would be. Finally, after what I now know was just a couple of minutes but what seemed at the time like an eternity of indecision, I walked up to the front door and unlocked it.  

I’ve spent the last year trying to understand what I found when I went inside the house. Not the body: that came later. But what puzzles me is that enormous, palpable absence that flowed through the house like a cold draft the minute I closed the door behind me. It wasn’t as though I had never been in Mary’s house before when she was gone, but this was different. The smells were the same, the hum of the refrigerator was the same, the cat box, the scissors and books on the dining table, the mosaics on either side of the fireplace, the knitting on the coffee table; all the same, but there was something else there that had never been there before: a stillness, a not-thereness that was as real as the furniture.

What was it?  I’ve tried on different rational explanations, but I can’t find one that fits. I know that when there is another person in the house we unconsciously register all the tiny movements and rustlings of existence, so it would make sense that we would be aware when they were no longer there. But how would that explain the difference in the emptiness I felt that night versus the more everyday sense of absence when I went in to drop off a book or feed the cat when Mary was out of town? I knew as soon as I entered the house that Mary was gone. I knew without any doubt that she had become a gone-ness that was going to be with me until the day I become an absence myself.

***

It’s hard to put one’s mind back into a world in which something as self-evident as the circulation of the blood and the action of the heart was not recognized. Not simply not recognized but actually gotten wrong: Aristotle got it wrong; Erasistratus, the classical anatomist who got the valves and so many other things right still got it essentially wrong; Galen, who identified the difference between venous and arterial blood and whose theory of the four humors stood for 1300 years, got it wrong; Vesalius moved the entire field of human anatomy forward but, when it came to the circulatory system, he didn’t question the assumptions of earlier researchers. He got it wrong. Even Fabricius, William Harvey’s own brilliant teacher, got it wrong. William Harvey—who was prickly and outspoken, practiced medicine and studied anatomy during Britain’s turbulent  seventeenth century, and served as physician to both Charles I and James I—had an intellectual integrity that wouldn’t let him ignore the evidence of his own experience, however unpopular his discoveries. In his brief biography of  William Harvey, written a century after Harvey’s death, David Hume said, “Harvey is entitled to the glory of having made, by reasoning alone, without any mixture of accident, a capital discovery in one of the most important branches of science.”

Harvey brought the body, with its diligently pumping heart, closer to being a machine than it had ever been before, but it was still a machine with a soul—”the instrument of the soul,” in his formulation. Nonetheless, Harvey’s methods, as much as his discoveries, called into question the place in our lives of blind faith and received wisdom. A hundred years later, David Hume, Harvey’s admirer, through reasoning alone dismantled any belief that could not be demonstrated through empirical evidence to be true. “By the mere light of reason it seems difficult to prove the Immortality of the Soul,” he crisply said. And not only is there no immortal soul, there is no distinct and actual self—the self we carry around in the instrument of our body is simply a bundle of experiences and impressions held together by consciousness, but no more.      

***

If Hume is right, then what I felt that night was the absolute and profound absence of a self that had shattered and dispersed as soon as the brain was extinguished. The art, the poetry, the love of jewelry, the self-absorption, the chocolate and gossip and silly laughter, the longing, the joy, the fears, the love, had all disappeared. “The annihilation, which some people suppose to follow upon death,” Hume wrote, “and which entirely destroys this self, is nothing but an extinction of all particular perceptions, love and hatred, pain and pleasure, thought and sensation. These therefore must be the same with self since the one cannot survive the other.”

The heart, it turns out, is a machine driven by simple hydraulics, so it goes on a little longer, pumping blood into the bedsheets, into the mattress, into the rug and onto the floor until it is completely empty.  

Then, it too stops.

 

When her life was shattered by her sister’s suicide, Liz Seymour found unexpected comfort in a big old-fashioned volume of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Every night, she would drop her finger (I Ching-styled) into the book and go wandering through her thoughts with the world’s most quotable companions. Liz lives in Greensboro, NC.