The Gravedigger

In the night, when you're alone, in certain silent places, it's possible to hear sounds everywhere. Faint voices like children faded in the sun, crisp sticks breaking under foot, branches bending of their own will, rustling the silence. It's the case in the graveyard, where the night bends the stones and floods down the roads that are arched by trees, where vast swathes of symmetrical memorials stretch across the land. There's an old chapel by the entrance where the oldest graves stand crooked and overwhelmed by weeds, which has gothic windows and a huge arched doorway that's only opened for death.

The gravedigger is also the caretaker and lives alone on the grounds, in a huge house that nobody would like to own. He tends the grass and removes the husks of flowers by day, and at night, in the living silence, when sleep is beyond him, digs graves for whoever would like one. Times have changed; he's no longer a silent, long-haired figure wielding a shovel, but a young man with a small motor driven digger. He has dark brown hair and a kindly, handsome face, yet sad looking, pale, slightly unhealthy.

Without good reason I'd never enter the place at night, it being so huge and full of dark corners and bubbling trees, every bush concealing a headstone and every headstone bearing an inscription, a date, chilled and dead. But he, accustomed to the silence and the sound, is perfectly natural in the place, and walks down the darkest of paths, amidst the oldest tombs, where thuds really do shake the ground, and he'll pass through the arbour where a hedged patch of graves echo nightly with the sound of children at play, ghosts all and long dead.

He'll sit on any of the many benches and smoke his cigarettes, hunched against the cold, deep in thought. ' And what I wouldn't give to know his mind, at what point he departed from us and took up that perpetual looking back, regret perhaps, longing, despair: who knows, but his thoughts are somehow beautiful, like a pale girl so sick with disease yet glowing, because there is such beauty in her emptiness and everything she utters is perfect.

The grave is dug and the soil lays piled at the side, on a large tarpaulin. He drives the digger back to the garage, shutting up the door yet leaving it unlocked. It's late autumn, October, November perhaps, and cold. The night is clear with stars visible in the sky, but the graveyard is on the edge of the city which washes away most of the stars with its orange glare. A road passes right beside and the whooshing sound of cars is ceaseless, but it's a welcome presence for him, an attachment to a world that seems so distant, that often fails to register in his life for days.

He took the job not because he craved silence; he simply couldn't live without it. It's a strange fact that the loneliest of us are often those who most want to be alone, for their loneliness was born somewhere in the past and can't be corrected, so tied it is to people who are gone or irrevocably changed. Now he never has to leave the place, and the people he meets are mostly swamped with tragedy which gives them a defencelessness, a blunt truthfulness that he finds easy to deal with. He knows what he is to them and exactly where he stands, and nothing more is expected but his silence and compassion, qualities he has in abundance.

He takes out a cigarette and starts to walk about the cemetery, down through the lanes where the trees have lost their leaves and sing solemnly in the breeze. There's a section devoted to children where the stones are small and pretty, covered with teddy bears and little plastic windmills that revolve noisily in the wind, as if their parents truly believe they can listen, that the silence of their own deaths might scare them. He doesn't think twice about any of the graves usually, yet these, these taken ones, bring about a deep sadness within him, and their tiny holes are always the hardest to dig, will always contain his tears.

Even before he worked in the cemetery he thought the place fascinating, perched on the edge of the city yet silent so much of the time, cocooned across time with so many human emotions unrepresented and others taken to such passionate extremes, a haven for the living and an education to see how similar the gravestones look, how like one another we become in death. But don't be deceived, to work in such a place doesn't lead one to thoughts of suicide, the effect is opposite, confronted always by the true finality, the unexceptional event that death is ' it gives perspective, and also a real fear to be lying amongst the stones, in the damp, swallowing earth.

He walks a wide circle, through the oldest parts of the cemetery, and finally arrives back at the night's fresh grave. The space is running out ' there's just one empty green field left and after that a new sight will have to be found. The cemetery will be full and with it people will stop coming ' as time passes the relatives and friends will die themselves and all the graves will be unvisited, like the oldest are now, left to crumble and topple till nothing whatsoever remains.

He stands beside the hole and finishes his cigarette, throwing the butt into the darkness below. With one last look around he jumps down into the pit and lies down, looking up at the rectangular patch of stars above. The wind is picking up and the trees are beginning the monstrous rustle that has turned so many of his winter nights into battles of sound, the roaring of the trees drowning all faint, ancient voices. He can smell the damp earth and feel the chill spreading through his limbs. There is a safety in walls and depth, like the deepest parts of our mind, where we can always retreat to memory, as long as memory has not faded, but memory will always fade, become indistinct and hazy, and if not replaced will leave nowhere to turn, no personal place. Some of the tarpaulin that the earth is lying on has fallen down into the grave and he reaches up and takes hold of it. The stars are there, and the wind cannot move them. He pulls, using all his strength, and the wet grass allows the soil to be dragged towards the edge ' he reaches up and takes hold with both hands and the earth begins to tumble into the hole, obliterating the stars and insulating his ears from the boom of the wind, but there are voices in the earth.