Dada 76

Soon afterwards, one of the women started to cry. She was sitting in the second row, hidden by one of her friends, and I couldn’t really see her. She cried softly, continually; I felt she would never stop. The others didn’t seem to hear her. They were huddled in their chairs, sad and silent. They looked at the coffin or at their canes or some other object in the room. They seemed to see nothing else as if their thoughts were already contained in jars.

The woman kept on crying. I was very surprised because I didn’t know who she was. I wanted her to stop. But I didn’t dare tell her. The caretaker leaned over and spoke to her but she just shook her head, mumbled something and carried on crying with the same regular rhythm. My Ma told me that many people had once cried for Dada, especially women. But she said it with such disgust through pursed lips as if she had eaten something sour.

‘They cried for him all their lives.’  She said.

Then the caretaker came over and sat down beside me. After a long time and without looking at me, he explained: “She was very close to your Dada. She says that he was her only friend here and that now she has no one.” We sat like this for a long time. The woman`s sighs and sobs grew fainter and fainter. She sniffed a lot.

Finally, she fell silent. I wasn’t sleepy any more but I was tired and my back ached. At that moment, it was the silence of all those people that was hard to bear. Every now and then, I heard a strange sound, but I couldn’t make out what it was. In the end, I worked it out: some of the old people were sucking in their cheeks, making odd clicking noises. They were so engrossed in their thoughts that they didn’t realise they were doing it. I even had the impression that this dead man stretched out in front of them meant nothing to them only that they were rehearsing their own wake but I could have been wrong about that.