“It’s Psalm 24,” whispered Myrna.
The Star of David banner-thing stirred in the breeze.
The yarmulke was causing me great anxiety; the bloody thing was always sliding off the back of my head and I cursed myself for forgetting to bring hairgrips.
Hairgrips. I found myself thinking that the words I inhabit, that inhabit me, would be unknown now to the young. Kirby grips they’d been called in my boyhood and youth, bronze-coloured, six on a card, and in America, bobby pins . . .
“Now it’s Psalm 103.”
The rabbi then delivered a lame eulogy mentioning Annie Gurwitz’s activities and many friends at the Golden Age Club, her knitting, her green thumb, her renown at euchre and casino, her kindness to fellow-residents at the Retirement Home—
Who among us having partaken of her bounty will ever forget her cholent, her brisket like a dream . . .
Then the contentious niece unveiled the headstone, wrinkling upwards the banner-thing.
Following this, the cantor sang El Malei Rachamim
God, full of compassion
The Moorish cadences plangent.
It was with the recitation of Kaddish that the day became indelible in memory. Only film could have captured the full pleasures of the proceedings. And perhaps only one actor/director could have created the flow of movements and moods. The film is black and white. The actor/director (d. 1982) is Jacques Tati. The template for my film is that homage to Buster Keaton, Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953).
The scene from Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot that Norman’s unveiling brought to mind was Monsieur Hulot changing a tire. His car has stopped beside a cemetery where a funeral is taking place. Monsieur Hulot’s inner tube bowls away from him, he madly chasing. The tube, picking up sticky leaves as it goes, wheels into the funeral proceedings. An officious mourner, thinking it a wreath, hangs it on the cross above the grave where, hissing audibly during the obsequies, it steadily deflates.
My inadequate film would open with a high dolly shot—the grave, the semicircle of mourners—tracking down onto the cantor, Norman, the rabbi . . .
The cantor fell silent.
The rabbi looked up at the gravel sounds as the mourners grouped themselves more closely. He raised his prayer book an inch or so above his waist like a baton, turned slightly and inclined his head towards Norman. Then rabbi, Norman, cantor, and the mourners launched into Kaddish.
Norman’s voice was distinct because halting and humdrum; he had no knowledge of cadence, modulation, inflection, the musical pleasures I thought of as “the twiddly bits.” I resolved to look up—what would you call it? Prosody? psalmody?
“. . . and say, Amen,” proclaimed Norman belatedly.
Myrna squeezed my hand making her “Ere-we-go! face” as they moved into the next line.
The rabbi was looking at Norman.
Pecking glances.
Muffled mercifully somewhat by the staggered recitations of the doddery mourners, Norman stumbled on.
rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb
Then the rabbi—puzzled? unhappy?—moved closer and was blatantly trying to look over Norman’s shoulder at Norman’s prayer book; Norman shielded it with humped shoulder and edged away. The rabbi followed. The cantor followed the rabbi. With each of the trio’s advances, the mourners drew away, giving them space.
I found the morning’s events deliciously funny and satisfying but had Jacques Tati been filming, the sequence would have had exquisite pacing and the inevitability of a piece of extremely expensive machinery at work and would have been inbued with feelings that would have haunted one for years.
Tati made only five feature films in his career. Following Jour de fête came the three great “Hulot” films, Les Vacances, Mon Oncle, and Trafic. The Oxford Dictionary of Biography refers to Tati as “internationally known as a comic actor”; the Penguin Encyclopedia describes him as “the greatest film comedian of the post-war period” while the Concord Encyclopdia describes the “Hulot” films as “comic film masterpieces”; producers and investors came to hate him for his money-squandering pursuit of perfection.
I imagined Tati filming the unveiling as a kind of dance, a dance with the formality—albeit a somewhat grubby formality—of a pavane. That sweat-stained fedora! The horrid beard! With the mourners something like a chorus of urban Jewish versions of Silence, Shallow, Shadow, Doll, and Feeble.
Unfocussed thoughts of Henry V and Under Milk Wood.
rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb
At last, at last, it came to an end.
“. . . and say, Amen.”
Cantor, Norman, and rabbi had performed more than half a circuit of the grave.
* * *
Har gow!
Shu mai!
Ginger squid!
The girls pushed the carts of dim sum along the aisles; we’d caught the tail end of lunch at the Yangtze.
The waitress clunked down three bottles of Tsingtao.
“It’s pronounced something like ‘Ching-dow.’”
“It smells,” said Norman, “just like apples!”
“It’s Chinese but the brewmasters are German.”
“Oh, then,” said Norman, “Prosit!”
Fry noodles!
Sticky rice!
The sticky-rice packages always gave me a quiet pleasure, the colour of the leaves, the fact that they were leaves—banana?—the yellow raffia that tied the solidity of the green packages.
“The yellow with the black in the middle,” said Norman, “there’s a song . . .”
“Pardon?”
I glanced at Myrna.
Perhaps catching the glance, he said, “The Canada geese.”
“What do you mean?”
“It has a banjo in it.”
Chopsticks and shrimp arrested mid-air, I stared.
“You mean,” said Myrna, “that the Canada geese in the corn field remind you of a flower that’s yellow with a black centre and there’s a song with the name of the flower in it—and a banjo.”
Norman nodded encouragingly as she made each point.
Setting down her glass of Tsingtao, she sang,
Oh, Susannah,
Oh don’t you cry for me
For I come from Alabama
With a banjo on my knee.
“How do you know that!”
“We used to sing it at camp when we were kids.”
“Black-eyed Susans,” I said.
“Rudbeckia,” said Myrna.
Norman beamed.
“Isn’t it all,” spreading his arms expansively, “isn’t it all jolly.”
John Metcalf
Ottawa 2017
I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, and Other Stories Page 55
