by Jason Wilson
When we arrived at the Holy City, the Christ of the Wichitas welcomed us with his open arms and the Gloryland Band was singing old-time gospel music out of a shiny blue trailer in the parking lot. Terry and I wandered into the gift shop—run by the nonprofit Wallock Foundation—to get presents for the girls in order to assuage our guilt over leaving them. Inside, we found Holy City spoons and thimbles and embroidered patches; Indian dream-catchers; snow globes with Native warriors on horseback; granite chips from the Holy City in small glass vials; bookmarks with cheerful, upbeat religious messages on them: Prayer is a deposit in heaven, read one. Even on the darkest day, His light shines through to show the way, read another.
Outside, the wind had picked up and there was a light mist. Silhouettes of cypress trees rose up against the gray sky. Behind the gift shop, concealed from view, were the riding club’s trailers. Horses stood outside them, their red Roman blankets trimmed in gold and thrown casually over their backs like dressing gowns. The disciples of Jesus flirted with the girls of Jerusalem. Angels in white robes and wings walked among us along the stony ground.
I confess that we spent nearly the entire pageant inside our station wagon, drinking coffee and eating peanut M&Ms, trying to keep warm. The temperature had dropped into the low forties after the sun went down, and the wind across the open valley was piercing. We’d brought along a quilt, which we awkwardly wrapped around ourselves. Terry fell asleep. From time to time I would leave the car and nestle myself into the red stones, trying to find a spot protected from the wind where I could watch the pageant. From the loudspeaker across the hills, the disembodied voices of the narrators carried the story, and the actors gesticulated to the words while floodlights illuminated one scene after another and then went dark. It was all just as Richard Matthys had told me it would be—the blue neon star over the stable, the Magi leading the camels, Mary and Joseph and the real baby Jesus, who had come, as all infants do, to save the world. “Glory to God in the highest,” the narrator with the voice of the Lord reminded the shepherds, and the choir sang “Angels We Have Heard on High” as the hills lit up the angels of the Wichitas, who had been lodging unseen in the rocks all along but now were visible to everyone, for there is nothing covered that shall not one day be revealed. There were the miracles too—the wedding at Cana, the cripple healed—which told us that if we asked, we would receive, and if we sought, we would find. There was the woman saved from stoning. Later, when Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and upset the tables of the money changers, the high priest, perhaps sensing some new dispensation, proclaimed that this man from Nazareth had simply gone too far. Then Judas betrayed the Lord for thirty pieces of silver, and Pilate washed his hands of the whole affair. On the rooftop of the temple that would soon be destroyed, all except for the Western Wall, the risen Jesus appeared to poor doubting Thomas. “Blessed are those,” the narrator intoned, “who haven’t seen and who believe.”
Just before the pageant had begun, while Terry was getting hot dogs for us at the concession stand, I’d gone into the Holy City’s World Chapel. Here, beginning in 1940, Irene Malcolm, a local portrait artist and WPA muralist, spent nearly a decade of her life, unpaid, creating ceiling and wall murals and carving the wooden pews. In “The Impish Angel of the Wichitas,” a 1952 article from the Daily Oklahoman, Malcolm is called a disciple of Reverend Wallock, and her work “an embodiment of the dreams he bared to her.”
But this work seems utterly her own. In the vestibule, the walls are covered with tiles she shaped and fired from native clay, their green glaze the color of cedar needles. Sculpted into those tiles, which number nearly four thousand, is the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi. “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy Peace,” it begins. “There is so much selfishness,” Malcolm explained to the reporter. “I was searching for something to combat it and found this.” Inside the chapel proper, a mural of Gabriel blowing a trumpet covers the entire ceiling. Behind the lectern, two other angels hold a painted scroll of the Lord’s Prayer. Old iron sconces line the white plaster walls. Between them hang portraits of the disciples, also done by Malcolm. Even Judas Iscariot is here. “I painted Judas as a weak character, not as a wicked one,” Malcolm told the Daily Oklahoman, a little subversively. “Judas was almost as bad as the rest of us.”
I decided that my favorite works of Malcolm’s were the two murals on either side of the pulpit: the Crucifixion scene and the Resurrection. The Wichita Mountains supply the background for both paintings. In the foreground of each, there is no Christ on the cross, no Savior dressed in white. Instead you see only the feet of Jesus: in the one, they are bloodied, the nail driven through; in the other, they are free of wounds, lifting into the air. Around his feet the faithful stare wide-eyed, unbelieving. Dashing past the Crucifixion is Malcolm’s white dog, Emily, seemingly chasing some creature that has caught her attention, not at all aware of the man who happens to be nailed to the cross. She’s completely missed the sign. In that newspaper article, Malcolm, seated for a photo on the top steps of a ladder near Gabriel, in the fleecy clouds, said, “Up here in Heaven, it’s not as nice a place as they said it was.”
Malcolm on the ladder, looking down upon her earthly homeland, recalls the Wichita myth of “the Woman Who Married a Star,” which George Dorsey recorded more than a century ago, as the Native people of the region began more and more in their dreams to converse with the stars, and the world of the Wichitas seemed to be coming to an end. A woman was watching the night sky, the story goes. She imagined that the stars might once have been people, dim stars the old ones, bright stars the young. There was an especially brilliant star that she was sure must have been a fine-looking young man and she wished to have him for her husband. That night she dreamed she was with the man who had been a star, and when she woke, she was sitting by a fire with an old man. She had been mistaken. He was the star she had seen from the earth and he claimed her for his wife. Time passed. There was a large rock which the man forbade her to move. But one day she disobeyed, and when she moved the rock, she could see the earth down below, through the chasm. Longing for her home, she made a rope of soapweed bunches braided together and climbed down to her native country, the land that had borne her.
When we’d come here with our daughters, in February, before the long drive back home to Houston we’d taken them out to the refuge to show them the buffalo and the place we used to hike when Terry was stationed at Fort Sill. Back then we would often head to an area called Charon Gardens, which the guidebook describes as “an untamed garden of Eden, a pristine, primeval wilderness.” There, massive oval boulders of red granite balance precariously on ridges, and a sheer cliff drops down to a pool of deep water. But that wintry day we stood with our daughters at the edge of the precipice and looked out upon everything from a great and high mountain and beheld that it was very good. Above us was blue sky. Below, the cold dark water. Like angels, we hovered somewhere in between.
DIMITER KENAROV
Memento Mori
FROM The Believer
I
I WAS FIVE when my grandmother Parashkeva first took me to a funeral. She was the mayor of a small village in northern Bulgaria, and one of her responsibilities was to read eulogies for her dead constituents. Priests were no longer welcome back then, with their mumbling promises of a better world (what could be better than life in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria?), so my grandmother became a secular priestess of sorts, a female Pericles. She married people and she buried them.
I remember my first body, laid out in a simple casket propped on two chairs in the garden of the dead man’s house. Dressed in a black suit, he had a burning taper stuck in his lap, wax dripping onto his hands. It was a hot summer, the ripe tomatoes in the vegetable patch glowing bright as embers. A few black-veiled women wailed softly by the coffin, one of them swatting the gathering flies with the loose ends of her headscarf. I was standing at the head of the attending crowd, holding on to my grandmother, mesmerized, while she read
out the eulogy she had written earlier that day on stationery paper. Her voice was clear in the heat, formal and martial, the voice of a schoolmarm tackling a patriotic poem. The wailing grew louder as she praised the dead man, his useful life as a mechanic, his good standing in the Communist Party.
An open trailer draped in black hitched to a red farm tractor pulled up next to the house. In one smooth motion the pallbearers shouldered the casket and loaded it onto the flatbed, then helped the veiled women climb up. At an invisible signal, the tractor revved its engine, shot up a plume of exhaust, and jerked forward. Staggering, three gypsy brass players took up a drunken version of Chopin’s funeral march with the mourners following on foot behind them. At every bump in the road, the tractor-trailer jolted and shook out forgotten grains of wheat onto the cracked blacktop.
II
My first dead man has been resting in the soft, fertile loam of northern Bulgaria for almost twenty-five years now, but each time I go back to my grandmother’s village, his face is still there, on the front door of his former house, on the fragrant lindens, on the old telegraph poles, staring at me from the windows of the general store and the shuttered bakery. He is clean-shaven and officious, youthful-looking, his eyes ruefully fixed upon some invisible object in the distance.
This is not a gothic tale. There is nothing particularly ghostlike about those sheets of A4-size paper with a passport-size photo of the deceased—the fluttering, flimsy miniature tombstones are just necrologues.
III
Necrologues are street obituaries that announce or commemorate the passing of a member of the local community. MOURNFUL NEWS, the black header says, or FAREWELL, or SORROWFUL REMEMBRANCE. The loose leaves quickly yellow in the sun and molder in the rain—but their sheer numbers safeguard their existence. Among posters for the upcoming concerts of Madonna and Elton John, among homemade ads offering English-language lessons and weight-loss recipes, peek out thousands of lusterless eyes. Some municipalities have tried to contain the spread of necrologues by allotting special bulletin boards for that purpose, but all efforts to sanitize and discipline urban spaces have come to naught. The eternal border between the upper world and the underworld, the city and the cemetery, has disappeared in Bulgaria. No one is truly dead without a necrologue, and yet necrologues are meant to keep the dead alive. As long as the photographic image of the deceased lasts, as long as passersby are willing to stop to look at that face and read the name, death has no dominion. “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living,” Cicero once told the Roman senators, when trying to convince them to erect a bronze statue in honor of his late friend Servius Sulpicius Rufus. Memory has always been death’s most dangerous adversary.
IV
Monastic institutions and churches recorded the names of their illustrious dead (kings, abbots, benefactors) in special registers called necrologies. On certain days of the year, these death rolls would be read out loud during service as both commemoration and prayer, for the road to salvation lay through the gates of memory. A soul could be easily lost if her name was forgotten.
Necrologues and obituaries trace their roots to that tradition. By the mid-nineteenth century many European and American newspapers had sections dedicated to the dead. Some were simple death notices, marking the date and circumstances of the passing, while others were elaborate biographical portraits of luminaries and celebrities, like the famous eulogy Emerson wrote for Thoreau in 1862: “His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”
It was around that time, with the ever-growing power and availability of printing technologies such as the steam-powered press (invented in 1814) and the rotary printing press (1843), that death burst through the bounds of newspapers and spilled out into the streets and squares. Few people today are aware that in the second half of the nineteenth century there were street obituaries in Paris and Vienna, London and Rome. Necrologues were hip; to die a modern death one had to have a necrologue. As late as 1957, the town of Santa Maria, California, was trying to deal with the proliferation of funeral notices in public places. Following the contemporary trend to censor morbid images, local officials finally outlawed the practice.
Today necrologues still survive in some Balkan countries, and Italy and Israel have their local versions as well, but only in Bulgaria do the dead outnumber the living. Necrologues were, ironically, a fashionable borrowing from Western Europe, a way for Bulgarians—liberated in 1878 from the clutch of the dying Ottoman Empire—to announce to the world their birth as a modern nation. There, necrologues thrived.
V
In 1897, Hariton Ignatiev published A Detailed Epistle, in which he prescribed a structure for necrologues. They should include, he wrote,
the names of all close relatives of the deceased, even the youngest ones;
All distant blood relatives, as well as information pertaining to their children;
Their names, nicknames, and the nature of their relation to the deceased;
What kind of illness—prolonged or swift, severe or painless—was the cause of death;
What was the age of the deceased;
The day and hour of death;
The day and hour the body will be taken out of the house;
The church where the service will be held;
If the deceased is not well-known, his/her house and street number.
The death notice, which Ignatiev also called “a funeral invitation,” was to be printed on a sheet of paper with black borders, a Christian cross, or an allegory of death on top. He also advised the use of cheaper paper when the deceased was an older person, and glossier varieties for the youngest.
VI
When the Communists took over the Bulgarian government in September 1944, they banned newspaper obituaries, deeming them too morbid and backward for the brave new world they planned to build. Unable to get rid of the sting of death entirely, at least not at that socioeconomic stage of development, they did allow street necrologues to survive. For weren’t they like the holy icons of the proletariat, every dead worker a pedestrian saint in disguise?
In 1949 the Bulgarian navy published a rather elaborate necrologue on the death of Georgi Dimitrov, the first Communist leader of Bulgaria, whose embalmed body lay for the next forty-one years in a glass coffin in a mausoleum in downtown Sofia.
With a heavy heart, the officers of the Bulgarian Navy learned of the sad news affecting our whole nation and all progressive humanity: the death of our beloved teacher and leader GEORGI DIMITROV.
In these decisive times, when our nation is straining every sinew to build Socialism in our country, we painfully feel the loss of the one, who led, inspired, and instructed us in the struggle for peace, democracy, and socialism.
We don’t despair in this cheerless moment, but like a granite rock we stand steadfast behind our favorite Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, the defender and heir to the work for which our eminent DIMITROV fought and toiled.
We PLEDGE and stand under the OBLIGATION to do everything possible to strengthen the solidarity of our combat units, learning from the rich inheritance DIMITROV left to us—his living example and work.
We promise to raise to the highest level our combat and moral-political readiness; we won’t spare our strength and life to make DIMITROV’s work a part of life.
We will work relentlessly and tirelessly to learn from the rich experience of the MIGHTY SOVIET UNION—our defender and teacher, under the wise leadership of the mighty STALIN.
We promise to preserve the eternal friendship between our people and the other democratic peoples, led by the mighty and majestic Soviet Union, the way comrade Dimitrov instructed us.
We promise to guard like the pupils of our eyes our maritime border for the successful building of socialism in our beloved Motherland.
DIMITROV DIED, BUT HIS WORK W
ILL LIVE FOREVER!
VII
By the end of the 1950s, with the growing availability of photography, the streets began filling with ever-greater numbers of necrologues. Left with no other meaningful funeral rites, Bulgarians enthusiastically embraced them as the only available prayer for the dead. The bereaved now added commemorative notices to honor family and comrades who had passed away three and six months ago, one and two and three and five and ten years ago. Often there were separate necrologues from family, coworkers, and institutions.
Of course, the genre required a few political modifications. The cross at the top of the page was replaced with the Communist star, or, if the deceased happened not to be a member of the Communist Party, the space was left blank. Second, the textual template needed to reflect the new atheistic values. Death became a manifesto, gushing about the merits of the laborer and the inconsolable pain resulting from the loss of productivity. “Today one workplace was left unoccupied,” said one necrologue from that era.
History returned the joke in kind. After the Communist government passed away, on November 10, 1989, someone pasted the following necrologue in downtown Sofia: