Death in Moscow

Friday, 06 January 2006,
B’s funeral: As with weddings the Russians take a conveyer belt approach to burials: six corpses in one room, the priest walks up and down the line swinging his metal ball of incense and checking bits of paper on the deceased’s’ heads to recall the names for the liturgy. No pretence at a personal element here, no banal homilies about how they were loving and loved. Likewise, at the crematorium the buses full of mourners are queued up, waiting as the documents are put in order; thankfully, no one shouts “Next!”
An odd mix of soviet functionalism and orthodox ritual; I have a Bach mass on the mp3 player but it fails to cut through the banality.
In place of a hearse we have an old soviet bus with the back seats removed to facilitate the sliding in of a coffin through a little, specially made door; at the windows there are blue nylon curtains and in the front window, where the destination would have been once: “ritual”.

Now back at home S leads the mourning dinner, telling lies about how kind and clever she was, neglecting to mention how rarely he visited her in the last years. I always feel such falsehood does a disservice to the dead as well as the living; they were what they were and we have no good cause to pretend otherwise. His prayer book lies beside his plate of ham the table and later he will take it up and we will have a revivalist meeting of sorts. He did the same at T’s funeral until V told him to shut up. This being his mother, it seems unlikely that any such saviour will arise this time.
The day went well enough; not many tears to speak of, B looked unrecognisable in the coffin; a measure of how much her character held her expression together perhaps.

As the churchifying starts I come back to my room, and remember Death in Leamington by Betjeman

She died in the upstairs bedroom

By the light of the ev'ning star

That shone through the plate glass window

From over Leamington Spa

Beside her the lonely crochet

Lay patiently and unstirred,

But the fingers that would have work'd it

Were dead as the spoken word.

And Nurse came in with the tea-things

Breast high 'mid the stands and chairs-

But Nurse was alone with her own little soul,

And the things were alone with theirs.

She bolted the big round window,

She let the blinds unroll,

She set a match to the mantle,

She covered the fire with coal.

And "Tea!" she said in a tiny voice

"Wake up! It's nearly five"

Oh! Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness,

Half dead and half alive.

Do you know that the stucco is peeling?

Do you know that the heart will stop?

From those yellow Italianate arches

Do you hear the plaster drop?

Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,

At the gray, decaying face,

As the calm of a Leamington ev'ning

Drifted into the place.

She moved the table of bottles

Away from the bed to the wall;

And tiptoeing gently over the stairs

Turned down the gas in the hall.