Prologue
I stand in the weeping chamber of my own tomb. I hear the dry wheezing of my old lungs. As I lean upon a cane for balance, my
body shakes and trembles. Behind me, the mouth of the tomb opens to the sunlight beyond. Despite the day's heat, here in the peculiar silence that fills any resting place for the dead, it is still cool. My cloak does not keep me warm, but I have given up on expecting my frail bones to hold any heat.
I stand in the weeping chamber of my own tomb.
It is not a large tomb. I purchased the rocky hillside decades ago and immediately hired stone workers to carve a narrow arched
entrance the height of a man's head. Through this opening, the workers continued to hew into the hill, widening and clearing a
space inside. When they finished, the tomb was as high as a man could reach and no more than seven steps in length or width.
They had measured me and chiseled into the rock inside the tomb a grave that would accommodate my body upon my eventual death.
Beside it, they chiseled another measured space for jaala, my wife. As was customary, they left the remaining graves rough and
unfinished, waiting for our children to grow before determining the size of their resting places. Thus, the stone workers left two
finished empty graves in the tomb beside four unfinished-when the work began, Jaala and I had a son and a daughter and were hoping for
more children.
I stand in the weeping chamber of my own tomb.
After my death, mourners will work in this small area overlooking the graves, washing and anointing my body with oil and
perfumes, wrapping me in the grave clothes made of long strips of linen, packing those linens with fragrant spices to take away
the smell of death, and binding my head with a linen napkin.
I do not fear the thought of my death. Not after seventy years on this earth.
Nor do I stand in the tomb's weeping chamber to contemplate how eternity will sweep past my still body, leaving me behind to add
to the dust of previous generations.
I stand in the weeping chamber because it is my yearly ritual.
Five of the graves remain empty.
It is the sixth that draws me into the tomb.
The expensive linen there has long since fallen into tattered strips; the body's odor has long since become a dry mustiness; the
bones have long since collapsed into a small, sad pile that clearly shows my son died as a young boy.
He was my firstborn son. And the first dead.
I have mourned his horrible death for nearly forty years.... |
