paused for a moment. He cleared his throat and looked first at the coffin and then down at his feet. “I think of you all the time, Hank, when I try to raise my son. I want him to feel what you made me and Adam feel—that he’s worth something, that he always has a place. I will miss you terribly, Hank.” Danny stepped back from the grave.
Adam felt like he should say something, anything. But the words wouldn’t come.
When Danny looked at him, Adam just bit his lip. Steven hunched his shoulders and offered Adam a wan smile. No one spoke for a while. Finally, Adam picked up his shovel and managed to croak out, “Let’s get to work.”
Danny took off his jacket, folded it and put it on the ground several steps from the grave. He laid his prayer book on top of his jacket while Steven went to put his jacket and dress shirt in his car. By the time Steven returned, Adam and Danny had already picked up their shovels and had begun moving the dirt from the pile to the grave. The dull thud as the dirt struck the coffin was much louder than Adam had expected.
Danny worked like an animal, his muscles straining in the hot sun. He used his shoulders, his knees, his back. Within a few minutes, the sweat was dripping from his forehead and staining the armpits of his shirt. It wasn’t long before his undershirt was drenched. You could see its outline through the shirt above. Adam was determined to match Danny’s labor, but Danny was relentless and Adam couldn’t keep pace. He looked over at Steven, but Steven went at his own speed, pausing every once in a while to make a comment or a small joke.
The three men worked steadily for a couple of hours, stopping only for a few short water breaks until the hole was filled at last. Danny had overestimated the time it would take them, but not the effort. Adam was exhausted. He wiped the sweat from his face and the back of his neck and planted his shovel deeply into the small pile of dirt that remained next to the grave.
The others stopped as well. Danny wiped his forehead. Steven bent forward, hands on his knees to catch his breath. Adam surveyed the gravesite. He hadn’t been to the cemetery in a long time. The three older graves holding his parents and grandmother lay flat under their headstones, the grass growing over all of them so that you couldn’t tell where one grave ended and the next began. Adam realized for the first time that there wasn’t any space for him there in what his grandmother used to call “the family estate.”
Soon, Adam thought, Danny’s crew would flatten the loose mound on top of his grandfather’s grave and before long, they would plant grass there. In a year, they would put up a headstone and the Drascher family plot would be complete; a tidy little story with a beginning, middle, and end. He wondered if it ever occurred to his grandparents that they had left him floating, rootless.
“We should eat,” Adam said. “Are you hungry?” I’ve got sandwiches in the car. Egg salad with pickles.”
Danny smiled. Adam’s grandfather had served that to them countless times. Adam went to his car and brought back a small cooler filled with the sandwiches and more water. Steven had a blanket in his car, and they spread it out on the grass next to the graves of Adam’s parents and sat down to eat.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Adam said. “Both of you.” He looked at the ground between his legs and then up at Danny. “I should have been there when he died, Danny. I had no idea how sick he was . . .”
Danny shook his head. “You couldn’t know, Adam. He hid it from everybody. Even when I called you, I thought he’d pull through. And he was really proud of you, being on that dig. He told everybody he met. ‘My grandson is in Israel,’ he would say. ‘He’s an archaeologist. He studies ancient history.’ He joked about it, but he was really proud. ‘I have no idea what he’s doing,’ he’d say, ‘but it’s very impressive.’”
“Did you find anything on the dig?” Steven asked. “How was it over there?”
Adam looked out over the cemetery. He shrugged. “Maybe. I think so. We found some writing that could turn out to be something.”
“Ancient prophecies?” Steven asked. “Magic incantations? An ancient genetics textbook?”
“I haven’t had a chance to read it yet,” Adam said. He tried to force a smile. “If it turns out to be genetics, I’ll let you know. We can collaborate.”
Adam glanced over at Danny and gestured toward the rows and rows of headstones dotting the ground—all different sizes, colors, and textures as far as he could see, in blocks about a hundred yards square separated by narrow, tree-lined roads. Many of the newer stones were granite or polished marble, tall and engraved in deep letters in Hebrew and English. Some of the older stones were in Yiddish.” So many graves.” Adam said. “Do you ever wonder what’s going to happen to all of them?”
“They’ll be here.” Danny said. “That’s kind of the point, right? Cemeteries are forever. That’s part of why I bought in. It’s permanent.”
“Yeah, but I mean in a really long time: a thousand years, two thousand years. I’ve been on digs where the site was a lot younger than that. A lot changes in that amount of time.” Adam stood up and picked up three small stones from the ground. He placed them in front of the headstones of his mother, father, and grandmother in the traditional mode of marking a visit in a Jewish cemetery.
“In a couple of thousand years I don’t even think much of the DNA would be left in these bodies,” Steven said, his voice low. “Not in this climate. I doubt if there would be enough to identify them.” He looked down at the ground, as if he could see the chemical decomposition taking place at his feet. “Just about all the original molecules would have been degraded. A lot of them would have been built up again into new molecules in worms, or plants, or insects, or bacteria. That would have all happened many thousands of times in two thousand years. Everything that had made up the people while they were alive would be growing in some other body in some other place.”
Adam sat back down and ran his hand along the lush grass in front of him. “Chemical recycling. It’s hard to get any comfort from that.”
Steven shrugged. “I don’t find it disturbing. We’re all a part of something bigger, something oblivious to our concerns. It’s been going on for billions of years and it will continue for billions of years if we don’t screw it up too badly. That’s something. And also, it’s true. I see that as a big advantage over a lot of beliefs people have.”
Danny shot Steven an angry look. “Hank wasn’t just his body,” Danny said. “Science doesn’t know everything.”
Adam caught Steven’s patronizing smile and he intervened before Steven could respond. “We see bones at the digs, sometimes,” he said, “along with jewelry and tools, and a lot of trash.” He tore off a few blades of grass as he spoke. “Everything gets buried one way or another, and some of it gets dug up later, sometimes with some sense of reverence, but not usually. There’s nothing magical about any of it, you know. The bones won’t live again any more than the rest of it will, I don’t think. The people aren’t in their bones, and they aren’t in their stuff. We can sometimes learn about the people or how they lived, but they’re gone.”
He gestured toward the grave they had just filled. “My whole family is here, but nothing that’s really them.” He looked at Steven. “Maybe in a couple of thousand years they could be part of someone’s PhD project.”
Steven smiled. “That’s a kind of immortality I could believe in,” he said. “And if I could help someone get a degree, so much the better.”
Adam
