‘…We commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’
These were Misha’s first words.
Not that it is unusual for a boy to have first words; it is, however, highly irregular for these first words to be learned in a cemetery.
Nevertheless, so it was for Misha.
For he was not as alive as he would have liked to be.
He watched as the mourners, with rather ostentatious hats on their bowed heads, peered into the pit that had been dug into the soil of Margravine Cemetery, Hammersmith. He saw the soil tumble down onto a coffin. Had he been alive, he certainly would have shed a tear for the dear departed.
Death was, thought Misha, a sad spectacle.
It was the final service of the day. The priest looked at the Bible and then at his watch. Eventually the graveyard emptied of mourners. The people left in pairs or in small groups. A gentle rain began to fall. The last of the hangers-on ran for shelter beyond the cemetery gates. Night unzipped around the cemetery like an empty duffle bag carrying the moon in it.
Misha was left all alone.
There were other tombstones and statues scattered about, of course, but few of them were inclined to conversation.
Misha’s story, such as it is, began in a basement. In the unlikely workshop of a man called Ivan. Ivan made headstones. And he looked like a man who made headstones. But underneath the Gothic, unkempt exterior, a sculptor was hidden: a sculptor with an unlikely talent. Ivan’s thin fingers did more than carve images and letters into rock; they crafted stone symphonies. Objects that could sing. His tombstone decorations were so lifelike, that they seemed to vibrate with a visceral, pounding energy.
Ivan had completed his work on Misha in the early hours of one Saturday morning. Just in time for the funeral on Sunday. Looking at the statue, carved in sandstone, lying on the bottom of a big crate full of newspaper, Ivan knew that it was his best work to date. If you squinted, the little boy seemed to come to life. It was uncanny. Remarkable, thought Ivan. He laughed to himself as he scratched his beard. But if he had known what he had done, he would not have been laughing. For Ivan’s unique gift had written a small life into being on a rock-face; it had given an insentient pebble its very own ‘I’.
Misha seemed so lifelike because he was.
Not in the usual way, to be sure. He did not have the tubes, valves, ventricles and fluids of biology. He could not breathe. He could not speak. He could only see in a straight line in front of him. And yet he was alive. More so, even, than most people. It was a sad irony that a stone with so much life in it should be plonked down to watch over the cadaverous remnants of human non-existence.
Misha’s hard, sandstone skin hid soft feelings. Right now, in the cold and the wet, one of these soft feelings was winning. Like all little boys left alone in the dark, Misha was feeling lonely. Very lonely. Misha was cavernously, painfully lonely. And he felt more than a little sad as he looked down at the mound that concealed a life below him – a life that had been lived to its very end, a life out of time, like wound-down clockwork.
If I could live, thought Misha, as the gentleman in the coffin had done – before they tied a bow-tie around his neck, and made his cheeks pink with rouge, giving them a supernatural, deathly flush – I would go for a walk. That would be an adventure. First, I would like to see whether the world carries on behind that wall over there, he thought, or if it stops abruptly. Maybe it stops. Maybe, when you open the gates of the cemetery, you dangle over an abyss: a great, gaping Nothing. Misha did not find this thought convincing. He supposed that there must be much more than a canyon full of Nothing. All the mourners he had seen would need somewhere to live for a start. Besides, they moved a lot more than the dear departed, so their houses would have to be larger than coffins. There had been at least fifty of them. The world, therefore, concluded Misha, must be a very large place indeed, to house so many mourning folk. At least three times as big as the little patch of a cemetery he had been planted in.
In the postage stamp of night sky that made up the frame of his vision, Misha caught sight of something zipping through the air. A bird was silhouetted against the moon for a moment. And for a moment the sandstone boy imagined that he was flying up there, in the duffle bag of the night, along with the flying thing. It must be exhilarating so high up, he thought. He imagined that the breeze, gently gusting around his sandstone nose and cheeks, was the air zipping by him as he flew. But then he looked down at his sandstone shoes. He was certainly not flying. He would never be able to get airborne with feet made of rock.
They would probably weigh me down, he thought. Look at them. Firmly planted to the spot.
The rain was falling very hard. It was a night meant for endings not beginnings.
Trying not to think of the cold, wet darkness around him, Misha focused on the bird in flight. What would it be like, thought the headstone? What would it be like up there in the sky, above the rain? He imagined himself silhouetted against the moon, far above the burial plot. Misha’s sandstone heart was heavy inside his stone chest. He almost wished that he had not been born at all. And if he had had to be born, it certainly would have been better to be born with pink fleshy feet that could move, and not these heavy sandstone moon boots. Life with stone boots was no life at all.
Yet it was the life that Misha had been given.
So he lived it.
The night passed, as nights tend to do. And day came. The sun rose over the graveyard, the shrubs and the gravel. A gardener came by to tend to the borders.
Death, thought Misha, really likes things tidy.
Eventually, night came along again, and Misha felt he had been bundled into a sack. Hours later, when the sun peeked out from behind a tall pine tree by the cemetery wall, Misha finally understood the notion of a diurnal cycle. After that, the days and nights passed in a blur of motion. Metaphorically speaking, of course, for Misha stood in the same spot, and didn’t move a sandstone muscle.
The little headstone loved the daytime. People passed through the cemetery and he would spend hours observing them. He wanted to emulate the motion of their limbs. But movement, he concluded, is very difficult for sandstone to learn.
The nights were slower, yet Misha learned to love these too. A cemetery can be a busy place under the cover of darkness.
The years went by like this:
‘…We commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’
‘…We commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’
‘…We commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’
‘…We commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’
A decade later, Ivan passed away. He was hit by the 220 Bus on the Fulham Palace Road, and laid to rest in the very same cemetery where Misha stood, watching over his little half-circle of grass, stones and trees.
Unlike Ivan, Misha had remained the same. He had not changed. Not one bit.
Well, that is not entirely true. All things change. If you look closely enough and wait long enough they show you their changes.
Close up, Misha had shed some atoms. His edges had softened a little in the rain. A yellow lichen had found a peaceful home on his back, and a thin crack had opened up on one of his sandstone shoes.
Then, one day, a change took place that even Misha could see. A flower. It had taken root in the crack in his left shoe and when it blossomed its yellow face smiled at him. He felt warmed by the light reflected from this miniature sun. It was soft and it bobbed around in the breeze. Misha always wondered how it had managed, fragile as it was, to pierce through the sandstone flesh of his leg. It was a beautiful jewel, bobbing up and down on his boot. And it attracted insects too, which was very interesting for Misha. He marveled at the fat hairiness of the black-and-yellow striped things, and the iridescent blue sheen of the slightly smaller buzzing things. His favourites were the spindly, delicate, coloured things with wings like enormous triangles. Insects were much better than birds; less noisy and more mysterious, like flying sapphires, rubies and emeralds.
The flower marked, like a bright yellow full stop, the end of Misha’s loneliness. And the beginning of a miracle.
One day, about three weeks after the flower appeared, it happened. The crack on Misha’s shoe, which had grown, imperceptibly – inch by inch, day by day– had reached his sandstone knee. Misha was admiring it.
A burial service was in progress not far from Misha’s plot.
‘…We therefore commit his body to the ground…’
Before the priest could finish his sentence there was a loud ‘Crack!’
Misha fell over.
The sound of a falling headstone caused quite a stir in the congregation. The priest had to assure several old ladies that the deceased had definitely not escaped from his walnut coffin.
Misha could hardly believe his luck. It was suddenly as if he was one of them. One of the fleshy ones. He had always known that he was destined for life. And finally, fate had smiled upon him. He had moved! He had moved! One of his sandstone shoes had fallen off and now he was lying there with his face in the grass, relishing the experience. The smell of the earth filled his sandstone lungs (Ivan had been a meticulous creator, and observer of the natural world.) Misha had a feeling, as he smelt the perfume of the wet ground. It did not smell like death, as he had expected it would. Instead, it smelt like life. Like seeds, and hedges. And earthworms. Like minerals, and small rocks. It smells, thought Misha, just like me! I am alive. As alive as freshly turned earth!
They left him lying there. Breathing in the heady aroma.
Later – much later, when the sun was low in the sky – a caretaker picked the little sandstone boy up, and dusted him off.
For a brief, terrifying moment Misha feared the caretaker would put him back. Instead, the man muttered something about repairs. The words came out in gusts and pushed the caretaker’s moustache out like a curtain. Misha needn’t have worried. The caretaker wrapped him up in a papery gauze. Before the veil of print completely covered his eyes, Misha caught sight of his precious flower. He must have crushed it as he fell. It was little more than a yellow smear on the grass! The newspaper veil scratched against the bridge of his nose. And Misha was sorry. He should never have moved! He wanted to walk back to his spot, and put the squashed, yellow mess back together again.
He had never lost anything before. There was a tightness in his chest. Of course, he knew about death. He saw it every day. But he had never thought that his own little flower would end up like one of the men in the boxes. Then the crack in the paper closed completely, hiding the yellow smear from view.
Misha had little time to think or be sorry. Blindfolded as he was, he was unceremoniously bundled into the back of a van. There was the sound of an engine roaring into life. And then the juddering started. The van bumped over a rut in the road. Misha was thrown up into the air and landed heavily on his side. The violence of the impact knocked his grief right out of his head. It was difficult to concentrate as he bounced around in the back of the white van. He rolled around like a pin-ball, and his thoughts were scrambled by the bumping. There was a welling sensation in his chest. Next to the sadness for the squashed dandelion. A much better feeling.
He was going somewhere. He was moving, and the movement hinted at the size of the world he was in.
Life isn’t what I had imagined, thought Misha. It is not a flight silhouetted against the moon, among the night birds, he thought. It’s terrifying. Noisy. And painful. But at least it’s something.
The van, with Misha in it, disappeared over the brow of a hill and into the great, gaping Something that was the world beyond the cemetery wall. The little sandstone boy in the back of the white van, whose life had been passed watching over the dead, was finally living.
These were Misha’s first words.
Not that it is unusual for a boy to have first words; it is, however, highly irregular for these first words to be learned in a cemetery.
Nevertheless, so it was for Misha.
For he was not as alive as he would have liked to be.
He watched as the mourners, with rather ostentatious hats on their bowed heads, peered into the pit that had been dug into the soil of Margravine Cemetery, Hammersmith. He saw the soil tumble down onto a coffin. Had he been alive, he certainly would have shed a tear for the dear departed.
Death was, thought Misha, a sad spectacle.
It was the final service of the day. The priest looked at the Bible and then at his watch. Eventually the graveyard emptied of mourners. The people left in pairs or in small groups. A gentle rain began to fall. The last of the hangers-on ran for shelter beyond the cemetery gates. Night unzipped around the cemetery like an empty duffle bag carrying the moon in it.
Misha was left all alone.
There were other tombstones and statues scattered about, of course, but few of them were inclined to conversation.
Misha’s story, such as it is, began in a basement. In the unlikely workshop of a man called Ivan. Ivan made headstones. And he looked like a man who made headstones. But underneath the Gothic, unkempt exterior, a sculptor was hidden: a sculptor with an unlikely talent. Ivan’s thin fingers did more than carve images and letters into rock; they crafted stone symphonies. Objects that could sing. His tombstone decorations were so lifelike, that they seemed to vibrate with a visceral, pounding energy.
Ivan had completed his work on Misha in the early hours of one Saturday morning. Just in time for the funeral on Sunday. Looking at the statue, carved in sandstone, lying on the bottom of a big crate full of newspaper, Ivan knew that it was his best work to date. If you squinted, the little boy seemed to come to life. It was uncanny. Remarkable, thought Ivan. He laughed to himself as he scratched his beard. But if he had known what he had done, he would not have been laughing. For Ivan’s unique gift had written a small life into being on a rock-face; it had given an insentient pebble its very own ‘I’.
Misha seemed so lifelike because he was.
Not in the usual way, to be sure. He did not have the tubes, valves, ventricles and fluids of biology. He could not breathe. He could not speak. He could only see in a straight line in front of him. And yet he was alive. More so, even, than most people. It was a sad irony that a stone with so much life in it should be plonked down to watch over the cadaverous remnants of human non-existence.
Misha’s hard, sandstone skin hid soft feelings. Right now, in the cold and the wet, one of these soft feelings was winning. Like all little boys left alone in the dark, Misha was feeling lonely. Very lonely. Misha was cavernously, painfully lonely. And he felt more than a little sad as he looked down at the mound that concealed a life below him – a life that had been lived to its very end, a life out of time, like wound-down clockwork.
If I could live, thought Misha, as the gentleman in the coffin had done – before they tied a bow-tie around his neck, and made his cheeks pink with rouge, giving them a supernatural, deathly flush – I would go for a walk. That would be an adventure. First, I would like to see whether the world carries on behind that wall over there, he thought, or if it stops abruptly. Maybe it stops. Maybe, when you open the gates of the cemetery, you dangle over an abyss: a great, gaping Nothing. Misha did not find this thought convincing. He supposed that there must be much more than a canyon full of Nothing. All the mourners he had seen would need somewhere to live for a start. Besides, they moved a lot more than the dear departed, so their houses would have to be larger than coffins. There had been at least fifty of them. The world, therefore, concluded Misha, must be a very large place indeed, to house so many mourning folk. At least three times as big as the little patch of a cemetery he had been planted in.
In the postage stamp of night sky that made up the frame of his vision, Misha caught sight of something zipping through the air. A bird was silhouetted against the moon for a moment. And for a moment the sandstone boy imagined that he was flying up there, in the duffle bag of the night, along with the flying thing. It must be exhilarating so high up, he thought. He imagined that the breeze, gently gusting around his sandstone nose and cheeks, was the air zipping by him as he flew. But then he looked down at his sandstone shoes. He was certainly not flying. He would never be able to get airborne with feet made of rock.
They would probably weigh me down, he thought. Look at them. Firmly planted to the spot.
The rain was falling very hard. It was a night meant for endings not beginnings.
Trying not to think of the cold, wet darkness around him, Misha focused on the bird in flight. What would it be like, thought the headstone? What would it be like up there in the sky, above the rain? He imagined himself silhouetted against the moon, far above the burial plot. Misha’s sandstone heart was heavy inside his stone chest. He almost wished that he had not been born at all. And if he had had to be born, it certainly would have been better to be born with pink fleshy feet that could move, and not these heavy sandstone moon boots. Life with stone boots was no life at all.
Yet it was the life that Misha had been given.
So he lived it.
The night passed, as nights tend to do. And day came. The sun rose over the graveyard, the shrubs and the gravel. A gardener came by to tend to the borders.
Death, thought Misha, really likes things tidy.
Eventually, night came along again, and Misha felt he had been bundled into a sack. Hours later, when the sun peeked out from behind a tall pine tree by the cemetery wall, Misha finally understood the notion of a diurnal cycle. After that, the days and nights passed in a blur of motion. Metaphorically speaking, of course, for Misha stood in the same spot, and didn’t move a sandstone muscle.
The little headstone loved the daytime. People passed through the cemetery and he would spend hours observing them. He wanted to emulate the motion of their limbs. But movement, he concluded, is very difficult for sandstone to learn.
The nights were slower, yet Misha learned to love these too. A cemetery can be a busy place under the cover of darkness.
The years went by like this:
‘…We commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’
‘…We commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’
‘…We commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’
‘…We commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’
A decade later, Ivan passed away. He was hit by the 220 Bus on the Fulham Palace Road, and laid to rest in the very same cemetery where Misha stood, watching over his little half-circle of grass, stones and trees.
Unlike Ivan, Misha had remained the same. He had not changed. Not one bit.
Well, that is not entirely true. All things change. If you look closely enough and wait long enough they show you their changes.
Close up, Misha had shed some atoms. His edges had softened a little in the rain. A yellow lichen had found a peaceful home on his back, and a thin crack had opened up on one of his sandstone shoes.
Then, one day, a change took place that even Misha could see. A flower. It had taken root in the crack in his left shoe and when it blossomed its yellow face smiled at him. He felt warmed by the light reflected from this miniature sun. It was soft and it bobbed around in the breeze. Misha always wondered how it had managed, fragile as it was, to pierce through the sandstone flesh of his leg. It was a beautiful jewel, bobbing up and down on his boot. And it attracted insects too, which was very interesting for Misha. He marveled at the fat hairiness of the black-and-yellow striped things, and the iridescent blue sheen of the slightly smaller buzzing things. His favourites were the spindly, delicate, coloured things with wings like enormous triangles. Insects were much better than birds; less noisy and more mysterious, like flying sapphires, rubies and emeralds.
The flower marked, like a bright yellow full stop, the end of Misha’s loneliness. And the beginning of a miracle.
One day, about three weeks after the flower appeared, it happened. The crack on Misha’s shoe, which had grown, imperceptibly – inch by inch, day by day– had reached his sandstone knee. Misha was admiring it.
A burial service was in progress not far from Misha’s plot.
‘…We therefore commit his body to the ground…’
Before the priest could finish his sentence there was a loud ‘Crack!’
Misha fell over.
The sound of a falling headstone caused quite a stir in the congregation. The priest had to assure several old ladies that the deceased had definitely not escaped from his walnut coffin.
Misha could hardly believe his luck. It was suddenly as if he was one of them. One of the fleshy ones. He had always known that he was destined for life. And finally, fate had smiled upon him. He had moved! He had moved! One of his sandstone shoes had fallen off and now he was lying there with his face in the grass, relishing the experience. The smell of the earth filled his sandstone lungs (Ivan had been a meticulous creator, and observer of the natural world.) Misha had a feeling, as he smelt the perfume of the wet ground. It did not smell like death, as he had expected it would. Instead, it smelt like life. Like seeds, and hedges. And earthworms. Like minerals, and small rocks. It smells, thought Misha, just like me! I am alive. As alive as freshly turned earth!
They left him lying there. Breathing in the heady aroma.
Later – much later, when the sun was low in the sky – a caretaker picked the little sandstone boy up, and dusted him off.
For a brief, terrifying moment Misha feared the caretaker would put him back. Instead, the man muttered something about repairs. The words came out in gusts and pushed the caretaker’s moustache out like a curtain. Misha needn’t have worried. The caretaker wrapped him up in a papery gauze. Before the veil of print completely covered his eyes, Misha caught sight of his precious flower. He must have crushed it as he fell. It was little more than a yellow smear on the grass! The newspaper veil scratched against the bridge of his nose. And Misha was sorry. He should never have moved! He wanted to walk back to his spot, and put the squashed, yellow mess back together again.
He had never lost anything before. There was a tightness in his chest. Of course, he knew about death. He saw it every day. But he had never thought that his own little flower would end up like one of the men in the boxes. Then the crack in the paper closed completely, hiding the yellow smear from view.
Misha had little time to think or be sorry. Blindfolded as he was, he was unceremoniously bundled into the back of a van. There was the sound of an engine roaring into life. And then the juddering started. The van bumped over a rut in the road. Misha was thrown up into the air and landed heavily on his side. The violence of the impact knocked his grief right out of his head. It was difficult to concentrate as he bounced around in the back of the white van. He rolled around like a pin-ball, and his thoughts were scrambled by the bumping. There was a welling sensation in his chest. Next to the sadness for the squashed dandelion. A much better feeling.
He was going somewhere. He was moving, and the movement hinted at the size of the world he was in.
Life isn’t what I had imagined, thought Misha. It is not a flight silhouetted against the moon, among the night birds, he thought. It’s terrifying. Noisy. And painful. But at least it’s something.
The van, with Misha in it, disappeared over the brow of a hill and into the great, gaping Something that was the world beyond the cemetery wall. The little sandstone boy in the back of the white van, whose life had been passed watching over the dead, was finally living.
