The Journey (34 page)

The crematorium is practical and hygienic. It’s one of the nicest and most useful inventions of the modern era, something that not only is an
inspiration but also the product of the refined sensitivity of a civilized heart, quickly taking care of what must be done, as well as saving the grave diggers a good deal of work. The furnance can be fueled with oil, but as a result of today’s advanced research it can also run on electricity. The length of time it takes to burn the body of a grown rabbit, which is similar to the time needed for that of a full-grown man, is about ten minutes, thanks to regular improvements, which will eventually reduce the time even further. This length does not suit the sensitive yet uneconomical cremation of a single corpse, but instead can simultaneously take care of twenty to thirty customers at a time.

The natural decomposition of the body is reduced to a manageable amount of time. This indeed means no food for the worms, but they can apply at the unemployment office for a new and better profession, such as agriculture or earthworks. That will also be healthier and more morally acceptable to the worms, for whom the decomposition of corpses, to put it mildly, is unappetizing. Isn’t it horrible to think of how the obsolete way of decomposition occurs? But now the flame is lit, the energy is turned on, while from a religious standpoint the departed should be ready to be welcomed. It’s regrettable that this Copernican act is met with so much enmity, but it requires proper explanation in order to overcome the last reservations. Look here, Vera, this was your uncle, a little paper bag that is neatly labeled and with a couple of dry little crumbs as its contents. It’s just like it happens in fairy tales! You can put it all, bag and crumbs, into a tasteful container, ranging in price from a lead box to a Greek urn, which Dr. Plato selected, an embroidered barrel of sorrow that one can hold dear and can also be stamped with ornate lettering. The ashes were born on ________ followed by a lifted torch; the ashes died on ________ followed by a lowered torch. Up and down, so and so, one and two, back and forth, left and right, one in the earth, one in the urn.

Mixing ashes is completely forbidden in our line of work. A great deal of care is taken and everything is carried out under the official eye of a sworn expert in order to expand the public awareness among the savages. The executor personally seals each box and witnesses each bag being filled. Better that babies be swapped in a maternity ward rather than ashes! In addition the urns can be buried, and thus advantages of cremation are then linked with the preference for burial. How wonderful! And cheap!
Take advantage of it today! Reduced rates for suicides! How fortunate, an enormous step forward for the culture as a whole! Check out our free prospectus about our special offers on executions! Beautifully illustrated! Informative! Special editions available for children, with text that gently helps them understand! How entertaining! The electric chair belongs in the storage room next to the iron maiden!

Also, our executions are carried out in the quickest manner in our crematoriums. After disrobing, the patients are shot from behind on marble tiles, everything done with the utmost consideration in order to avoid any undesirable mess-ups. The corpse is then placed immediately on a conveyor that feeds into the fire of the furnace such that the lifeless corpse is never touched by human hands. As a result the danger of infection is reduced to a minimum. The perfect diet! Success guaranteed! Other methods of execution that are supposedly as good can hardly compare! One’s last wishes can be fulfilled on demand or denied. Spitting within the crematorium, and especially during executions, is strictly forbidden! Afterward, the personnel must rinse out their mouths with an antiseptic solution. Technical malfunctions in the shooting mechanism are also unacceptable! Should the service be faulty then full compensation will be due! The crematorium and all of its equipment are completely protected against sabotage. All extraneous agony is to be avoided. Should it occur that the delinquent willingly gives in to his fate, this artificial way of dying is far preferable than any other means of separation from life.

Nonetheless Zerlina spits because she cannot control herself. She says she is sorry. “I did it out of overwhelming disgust!” The offense is severely reprimanded by the guards on duty, though it is also greeted with a considerate smile from the indentured engineer because the orderly completion of the systematic execution has been disrupted.

At reasonable cost the ashes can be sent to your house in a simple mail packet that holds an urn carefully wrapped in wastepaper, the package addressed and insured against loss and theft. Because it is likely that only a few will want such a service, a special public depository is constructed out of concrete, lead, and glass that allows for a tasteful display of human ashes. The rows run back and forth in an amazing zigzag fashion, left and right of the main street from the town gate. It’s like being in a bazaar or the terrarium of a zoological garden, everything is done to attain the most
comfort for the public, which wants to behold such things in orderly fashion. In this installation the urns live one atop another in four vertical rows, one next to another, much like postal boxes, each one magnificently decorated, a jewel locked behind glass. Whoever rents a box has one key, which the crematorium makes sure that you have, while a second key remains in the administrative chambers of the enterprise itself. Thus anyone passing by can take it all in with complete comfort. Everywhere flowers decorate the little boxes, whether it be inside next to the urns or outside hung from hooks and rings, thus signifying the eternal gratitude of those left behind.

Different classes of execution can be carried out, according to the resources available to the family or the readiness of the victim himself. Allowances are happily made for individual tastes by making various choices beforehand. Zerlina has paid a great deal. She wants to hear the cinema’s organ play a chorale and the national anthem. It’s a moving moment that leaves not a single eye dry. It’s a rare treat. One can’t often afford such a splurge. The organ whimpers and whines and complains to the living that they should be bold enough to not have anything to do with executions. Suddenly a rabbit runs into the middle of the ceremony. No one knows how it got into the hall. It disrupts the somber atmosphere inside the theater, but eventually everyone is lightened by laughter because the sight is so strange. Luckily a press photographer is also there who has a flashbulb and the presence of mind to use it. A couple of snapshots calm the bedazzled little creature. This is also true for the inconsolable widow, who, bent over, has taken her seat in the first row of the parquet, and who is moved as much by the lavish flowers as by the music, but for whom nothing is better than to push back the black veil in order to have a better view of the innocent animal as it hops about the suffering hall without a care in the world.

Only the officials from the ash factory are upset and become angry, because they are afraid that such an unheard-of incident will lead to bad rumors circulating in the city. Yet the manager knows what to do. That’s why he acts fast and presses the electric bell that is normally used at the end of any execution ceremony. Immediately a servant appears with a large broom. The man sweeps lightly back and forth in order to shoo away the rabbit as he pushes the broom across the smooth floor until Zerlina grasps the seriousness of the situation and is already outside without having
had a chance to pluck a flower or a garland, which was her most pressing wish.

Now the execution of Dr. Kmoch, the deserving president of the Medical Board, can proceed without further disruption. The national anthem begins, the powerful tremolo chords of the cinema organ are tenderly accompanied by the melody of the lead violin. Most of the audience rise to their feet. On the brightly lit stage copper-brown doors open left and right, set in motion invisibly as the scaffold draped in black, which holds the beautifully decorated coffin, moves forward soundlessly. Slowly it moves away, as is tactfully appropriate to such an occasion, the farewell itself being somber, as is proper. Now the flower-draped box is almost to the rear of the hall as it wobbles slightly, as if timidly entering a dream, the Medical Board on its feet and standing still at the back. The copper doors close again as mysteriously as they opened. Now the organ opens all registers to send forth the rhythms of the national anthem in thick waves of sound over the ceremonial hall and outward into every corner of the crematorium, as far as the oven that runs efficiently, and then farther into the open, where the running rabbit can hear it as well.

Suddenly the instrument returns to complete silence. Everyone is moved and weeps for the nation. Still the guests look on as the black-and-brown curtain is drawn across the stage with rustling cords, signaling an end to it all. The opera is over, the audience abandoned. The performance was wonderful and has made an unforgettable impression on everyone gathered here. Everyone has forgotten the incident with the rabbit. How surprised people will be to see it tomorrow in the newspaper. But maybe that won’t happen, for the crematorium has a lot of influence, maintains the most crucial ties, and won’t be above employing bribery to prevent the publication of the photo. Such things cannot happen on opening night. There can be only one view of the quality of the execution. The actors have carried themselves valiantly. The staged performances were appropriate and suited the exaggerated pretensions one can make on a fine stage. The music was met with the approval of the critics and the listeners, and even if the incident with the rabbit gets out, it doesn’t matter, because its entrance was charming and only demonstrated a great love of animals. All in all the production and direction were superb, the media is impressed, it greets the production with enthusiastic praise, only finding
fault with the meager courtesy of the star attraction, the doctor having neglected at the end of the execution to step out from behind the curtain and acknowledge the cheers of those left behind.

Yet nobody reads the papers anymore, for none exist. The crematorium is also empty. It doesn’t matter that the doctor didn’t take a bow, for he is no longer behind the curtain. He has disappeared. Nor is there anybody in front of the curtain, there are no mourners there. Actors and audience have dissipated. The crematorium’s curtain separates nothing from nothing, death is everywhere and there is nothing else but what once was, and that is nothing as well. It’s all in the past, long gone, finished, utterly changed, outside of time, Ruhenthal now gone and Leitenberg gone. There was only the journey and that’s all there still is. Yet nobody journeys anywhere, but instead they just keep traveling, from rubble to rubble, from one spot to another, the rubbish of reality all that there is, and yet not even that, because that’s also the nothing that hides in the face of nothing, the grave itself, the threadbare wall, the unseen face that does not look back, the fairy tale of nothing, the fairy tale devoid of magic, betrayal that cannot betray, steps that lead nowhere and without reason and without sense, where no one gets on and no one gets off.

Locales are abandoned because no locales exist. Leaning out of the window has become even more dangerous. Nobody dares to. No one sees anything. The faces are either hidden or drowned. Nobody has a home. Everyone is in flight and keeps on the move, because there’s no other choice. Not even the ground exists onto which one might collapse. If anyone still runs around, it’s mere folly. The graves that exist have been torn open and then sealed again without a hand having stirred. Nothingness has set in motion its own journey and whirls along because it can do nothing else. Chopped-off hands, which used to indicate directions on signposts, lie everywhere. They don’t belong to anyone, nor is anyone afraid of them. They cause no fear; they are either just a last vestige of danger or simply a new trend. Yet there is nobody there who can understand what they mean.

If an eye looks at a hand it’s with an empty gaze that does not recognize it or anything else. Yet an idea is still there, itself the first moment of creation, as it looks, imagines itself, and seeks to imagine, and since it wants to look, then something is again there. It wants to know itself, and
in doing so gives rise to something more than itself, a being, whether it be a being that consists of nothing or is indeed a being, an idea that dares to exist, a nascent idea. It roams around outside, it cannot remain buried. It wants to make sense of the hands that cannot be untangled, that point their fingers in no direction that can be found on any map. Yet the idea grows stronger because it is. It doesn’t give up and keeps trying, finally sorting through the images before it says: “There!”

The hands also point in that direction. And whatever once was reawakens again and exists once more, a “there” that is once again where it used to be. Yet what once was meant to follow the idea no longer exists. The immense effort now appears to have been in vain, a moment of creation that led to no creation, such nothingness being immensely powerful as it threatens Being with forgetting. Uphill or downhill everything is empty. There are or there are not destroyed graves. Yet the idea does not shrink, does not give in. It wants to belong to someone and command him. It’s a person. He is not happy, but the idea makes him happy. He wants to follow it, yet he is too tired, the effort too much. The body cannot do what the idea wants it to. The body is too tired, and what the chopped-off hands point to doesn’t make sense. They don’t point toward anything and don’t connect to any idea, but are pointless direction with no end. Thus everything is senseless.

The eye focuses and then discovers names next to the hands. They once named roads. Yet now there are no roads. The names mean nothing, they are faded, the color having drained from the names, separated from the hands, which are nothing more than dust-covered stumps. And no matter how much the gaze wishes to join together the hands and the names, it still cannot figure out how they belong to each other; they are so badly injured that they no longer mean anything. The names are mixed up and cannot find their owners. Yet there are no owners, there are just Anybodys, who are not names and not hands, but rather figures that belong to no one and which creep between the hands and the names, looking for a direction in which to head, although the eye sees no direction to recommend to them. They turn this way and that, each step changing the direction, then they grow tired and appear to rest, but only for a short while, an irrepressible drive pushing them on. Yet there is no road they can take, since none exists.