The smell of butter and mushrooms. A soft wind under a milky sky. Leaves changing color. Friends, family, announcing their arrival. A mother imagining her son being burned right now. (Diary, 14.09.2014, day of Christian's cremation (+06.09.2014)
For Ruth Foto: Detail from a modern Greek Orthodox icon (privately owned)
I see him lying there. His right eye is wide open and looking at me. His left eye is tightly closed. His bare skin is white, almost yellow. His sex is covered. One arm hangs over the edge of the stretcher. He always looks at me. One glassy eye, its color of blue glass, too. From above I see him lying there. Then I see a man in a green coat pushing him away. Into a bright room that is tiled up to the ceiling. The man puts him down in front of a metal gate with two wings and leaves. I watch as he lies there. The light goes out, but I can still see him. It's as if he's glowing very faintly.
I see two men in green coats washing him. They turn the body and wipe his back, his legs, his ass, his sex with alcohol. I see myself standing in front of a yellow plastic tub in which he is lying. I wash his legs, his tummy, his face. He kicks and smiles. One of the two men leaves and comes back with a bundle. They are clothes he has been wearing. His face is washed. The eye remains open. He is combed. The men make an effort to clothe the heavy, stiff body with the clothes he last wore. Now they are finished. They leave and put out the light.
I see him making a fire. A tower of logs and brushwood as high as a tree. He laughs at me and drinks vodka to my health. I don't understand how he could get so huge. Hands and feet like ships. First out of me and then so big. I see the gate open. Behind it is an empty room and a hatch between the rails. I watch as one of the men pushes the stretcher onto the rails. He slowly pushes it inwards, feet first, until a red light above the gate comes on. The man steps back, presses a button on the wall and the two wings close. I see him lying in the chamber, the top of his head with his thinning hair.
I see a bank on the Ganges that he has never seen. A young man lies wrapped in a linen sheet, laid out on logs and brushwood as high as a tree. A man with an orange-colored turban brings a burning chip. Men, women and children in yellow and white robes stand in front of it and watch. I see him being carried down a shaft on a stretcher. Flames shoot out of the walls. They ignite his hair like straw, lick over his skin, his face. The skin burns and blisters. It crusts over, burns like coal. Underneath, fat blazes, roasting flesh, scorching muscles and tendons. I see him rearing up, pulling his head back. His eyes melt like wax in their sockets. I see his heart boiling in the heat, the wings of his lungs burning up, his intestines scorching. I can see the bones now. The flames go out. In the darkness I see the ashes, smoke, bones, teeth and his skull.
I see us leaving the house in the morning, his little legs dangling from the baby carriage. I see him carrying his little sister in his arms and smiling. Holding the school bag, the gun, two little puppies in Kosovo. How he cries in the month when his girl and his grandmother died. When he dug a moat for me in the garden like a Hercules. I see us crossing the bridge to West Germany, the little girl on my left hand, him at thirteen on my right.
Author: Titus David Hamdorf, Berlin, Germany (this text written
Translated by DeepL.com
I wrote this text on 22th of January 2015. My wife has never read it. She wouldn't stand it.
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