One Trait

My mother's voice answered from a stone three alleys away from her grave. For twelve years I had walked around that place, and she asked so matter-of-factly, as if I were merely running a little late on the road: - Marko, are you close now? I stood three alleys away, by the composer's crypt, but I felt her voice. Beyond the wall a tram clanged, and the city retreated.

Only the cemetery remained - earth under which thousands of bodies lay silent, each of them once a whole world. The fog rose slowly from the ground, the breath of those who could never be brought back. I felt every one of them; their sorrow welled up in the corners of my eyes. My mother's voice sounded again. I wanted to give in and follow it, but a downpour drove me into the crypt. The door locked behind my back.

I kept telling myself the voice had only lost its way among the cemetery alleys and come out through the cracked lyre I had been mending that day. I leaned toward the instrument, pressed my ear to the cold stone and ran my finger along the crack, across the strings... One of them quivered under my finger. An unfamiliar melody poured out around me, and a voice. - I need hands. I had almost finished. Around me stone necks crunched.

The angels in the corners, one after another, turned their nearly worn-away faces toward me. Someone's hand jerked me back from the lyre. The Watchman wore an old coat, and on his belt he carried so many keys he might have had to unlock every single grave. - Promise them nothing. They remember only what outlived the person in them.

He led me to the grave of a violinist who played one bar without end. His stone fingers were bleeding, but the music kept moving them. - The artist's soul is gone, - said the Watchman. - But the music has not agreed to end, even now. We set off toward the gate along another alley. Water squelched underfoot, and from behind the wet leaves and the fog, on the mute stone, peered the faces and names of people no one spoke aloud anymore.

- Such beautiful faces you have, but why are you so silent? - I whispered. A letter fell from the judge's slab. The crack opened like a mouth. - Your mother sometimes pretended she was worse, so that you would come. I struck the stone. - Be quiet. - Is the truth to blame that it hurts you? The Watchman set the fragment back in place. - Truth without pity always believes itself innocent. After those words something changed in the silence itself.

What until then had lived only as a voice began to take on a body. A stone warrior stepped down from his pedestal and climbed onto the roof of the crypt, calling me after him. - What is left of him is courage that forgot fear sometimes saves a life, - the Watchman explained. Farther on, a woman stretched out empty hands. - Give me a child. I will hide it from everything. She did not remember whether she had ever had one of her own.

From the niches whispered love, faith, care, talent. Everything that had once made a person beautiful now begged for someone else's body. Taken alone, each virtue became monstrous. I asked the Watchman why he kept them here. He fingered his keys for a long time. - I have done my duty for so long that I have forgotten to whom I owed it.

Then I noticed on his finger a pale band left by a wedding ring - the last trace of the man he had once been. He too must have had a name, a home, and someone who waited for his return. All of it worn away. From the dark alley it came again: - Marko, are you close now? The cemetery fell quiet; it must have been listening with me. We reached my mother's grave. A small window was carved into the slab.

Behind it glowed a room that could not exist inside stone: a chair, a cup, the yellow light of evening. - Mama, I have come. - Am I waiting for you? - For me, Mama. Your son. The voice slowly repeated, as if hearing it for the first time: - Son?... Her voice remembered what the waiting had been made of: the rumble of every cart, cold tea on the windowsill, the dusk and the road that stayed empty. But it did not remember the one for whose sake all of it had been endured.

Of my mother, only the waiting remained here, and it had long since ceased to care whom it waited for. - Then why are you still here, Mama? - If I stop waiting, nothing of me will be left. The Watchman laid a hand on my shoulder. - Your mother has long been gone from here. Her soul left. The cemetery held on only to the waiting. I did not want to hear it. For twelve years I had mended other people's monuments, as if stone could teach me to make peace with death.

But every slab only proved it: a person ends, and our guilt sometimes lives longer than they do. - She waited because of me. May I take it? Please... - It does not want to be set free, Marko. Understand, it wants to go on. I touched the window. - I will carry you. Will you let me? The light in the stone went out. Beyond the gate, footsteps sounded at once. I sat down by the grave for only a minute. In that minute the leaves yellowed, fell, rotted and unfolded green again.

Moss climbed the angels' faces and then crumbled off them as dust. In a puddle my hair was turning grey. The Watchman pulled at my shoulder. - Come. - A little longer. She is close now. Did I still know who "she" was? The waiting no longer needed the person it had been waiting for. It needed only a life to enslave. Age spots showed on my hands. Around me appeared fragments of a future: a woman I had not yet met, a child's palm in mine, a house where I was meant to grow old.

The moment I looked at them, they dimmed and sank into the earth, down to the other unlived moments. - Waiting takes more than time, - said the Watchman. - It turns everything that was meant to happen after it into endless expectation. Only the memory of the one it had belonged to could return it to the stone. The price was my mother herself. From the puddle an old man with my eyes was already looking back. I crawled to the slab and pressed my forehead to the stone window.

I gave up the Sunday when I had promised to come. My mother's hands in flour. Her wet hair. The song in the kitchen. Her name. Each memory flared in the stone and went out in me. The window grew brighter, and I no longer understood whom I was grieving for. The last thing I gave: - You waited for me, Mama. And the waiting remembered. - Marko, my son. After that the stone fell silent. At dawn the gate opened. I walked out older by several years and lighter by a whole life.

In autumn I was called back to that slab. Only a smooth hollow remained in the stone. I laid my palm against it and for some reason wept bitterly, at the emptiness where a forgotten memory had been. My body still remembered how to love my mother, though my memory no longer knew who she had been.