Robert Metry

Waldfriedhof Pankow

Nicola Caroli

Waldfriedhof Pankow

Nicola Caroli

Fresh flowers straight ahead of the entrance of the cemetery. New graves with no name. They make me think of the time that comes between the time of death and the public naming of it, in most cases for the last time. [Is it the public naming of death or the dead?] Fresh grief in the process of decay. The liveliness of it, the gaudy mix of flowers, pink and peach gladioli, white lillies, a sunflower, asters, red, yellow and orange roses. I walk past Martha Müller and her husband, Paul. She died 27 years before him. He was presumably longer without her than he was with her, or at least the same amount of time. [The images are vivid but seem not always to connect smoothly (e.g., what is the „it“ associated with "liveliness“?

Most of the people buried here were from the East, East Berlin, and there are not that many newcomers since the wall came down as the area was considered to be way out East. Only in the last five years it has begun to become popular with young families and the old houses are being restored and new ones are being built. In my road alone there are five building sites.

I walk past a row of graves of men, all died 2006/2007. Alone and well kept, their wives presumably attending to them. I'm not from here and I don't want to be buried here. I don't want to be buried anywhere. I don't want to hear the police sirens and the constant traffic noises. But perhaps I shall miss the trees, the fir trees, familiar to me from the Black Forest where I come from. I think it's their constancy that moves me, the way they don't lose face, or rather needles, colour. I shall not miss the statuesque [statuary?], the arrangement of stone, the wooden garbage container for compost only. A grey cat with white paws walks past. It seems to have caught something but after digging a while it seems to have lost it. I notice the spaces in betweeen the branches of a group of firs, like mouths opening and closing in the breeze. Darkness behind the dark green exterior, a way inside. And there are the secretive dots of the yew. [Powerful and evocative imagery, juxtaposing life and death, connecting them through sensation (hearing and seeing) and action (cat digging, fir branches opening and closing like mouths; darkness behind darkness.  I don’t get "the secretive dots of the yew.“]

An old woman in creamy colours walks in the distance with her chocolate brown dog. A younger woman walks past in front of me, all in blue. Jeans, Jeans jacket, blue cowboy boots. She walks steadfastly past me. Dogs are not allowed in this cemetery and some of the gardeners use this prohibiton to make someone else’s life difficult. One of them once shouted at me. The sheer hatred in his face and his voice made me afraid. I hardly ever walk with me dog here now. [blues and browns: colors of sadness and melancholy]

My eyes ache. As if they were endlessly tired. My left kidney feels as if someone were pulling at it. I’m sitting on a green bench with my red coat. As if all the berries from the yew had melted into one blob of colour. The breeze gets stronger, so that it now lifts my scarf at the edges. A woman in a cream and brown outfit further off to my left is attending to a grave, leaning forward, stepping back, rubbing her hands together, kneeling down. When did she get here? She walks towards me to pick up a watering can. Her footsteps on the gravel suddenly an unfamiliar sound. I must have been absorbed by the trees. Then four women almost meet across various paths, a couple of elderly women with small dogs, the woman attending to the grave and the Jeans woman walking back the same way she came. They look like figures on a board game, mechanical, choreographed. As if adhering to a law of symmetry in accordance with the paths. The cemetery was in fact designed geometrically with lime tree [a personal preference: would have expected "linden“ instead of lime trees] avenues and double paths at the turn of the [20th?] century. The thought that there is nothing here for these people [the four women?], no food, no paper, no music, no TV, no attraction. In other words, an oasis [reconsider „oasis“]. Not even the dead are here. The’re not here, among the living, like they are in other cultures. They’re not gone anywhere and they’re not nowhere. They “are”. But where? A cemetery is not a place for the dead but for the love of arrangement, of gardening, of strolling, of respite. And because the dead are not here there is no need for their naming and numbering, the differentiation between young dead and old dead, the dead from the former East and the dead from the East who remained living here after the wall had come down and the dead from the West who moved here and for the dead who don’t know the difference. [profound and moving] Like the child whose ceramic angels had been stolen from her grave this summer. The parents, somehow bereaved a second time, had put up a notice, asking why or how this could have happened, how anyone could have done this and to please, please return them. To whom?

No, I should not like to hear the traffic noises around me when I’m dead and I should not like to be bound to the earth with ceramic angels, if anyone should miss me that much. Perhaps I should not like to be bound to the earth by love so that I should need angels to lift me up and take me away from the living. I should like to go somewhere I have not been before or to cease or to be able to diminish every trace I have left: steps, gazes – perceived or not perceived, thoughts and the repercussions of thoughts that have generated further thoughts, my own and others’. The dead are what they leave behind: their debris, their remains and I wonder if it would be better if they had nothing and left nothing. Perhaps the living grieve because the dead can’t be destroyed and living lasts forever. [The thoughts in this paragraph seem to clash with those of the preceding paragraph.  For example, if "the dead are not here“ how could the dead you "hear the traffic noises?"]

The cemetery runs along a road that used to be called Bahnhofstrasse (Station Road). During the cold war this was the wall strip running parallel to the S-Bahn station Wollankstrasse. Another 50 metre of the cemetery area was taken for an extension of the wall strip. For people trying to flee from the East to the West the cemetery was a favourable point of departure. A labyrinth of stone and tree, masking other vertical entities as long as they were sufficiently sharp and fast to conceal their mobility. I wonder if anyone of these escapees is buried here and who got away. For me, sitting here, there has neither been confinement nor escape. I am well visible in my red coat on the green bench. In writing this I am revealing something which I’m going to share with other people, with strangers. Without fear of them, without fear of getting caught, without fear of dying. I wonder why I do this.

It’s getting cold. Even though it’s early September it feels like late Autumn. The weather has changed from warm to cold from one day to the next. I get up from the bench and walk towards the exit. There is the flower shop whose owner had also once shouted at me for going into the cemetery with my dog. As if she’d known for certain I wasn’t attending to a grave. And as if that had given her the right to vent all her aggression on me, for everything that was the matter with her that day and every dog that had ever pissed against her hedge. I’d hated her for instilling such fear in me every time I went in there, fantasized about threatening her with ill omens about the future of her shop, threatening her with thrusting my chest out and showing her my fist, trying to rev myself up in case I encountered her again. Mostly heather plants for sale now. I’m not going buy any here.

I’m just cold now and not looking forward to the way home because on my bicycle I will continue to be cold. Soon I’m absorbed by the activity in the street, of the park with mothers with their prams, joggers, dogs and the noise of the planes flying overhead. I have no physical enemy to contend with. No one stops me from going where I want to go, I’m not dying, I’m not grieving.

Three days later she sits in a spot where the sun partially touches her through the branches. Planes pass overhead, their bellies hidden by the trees. She sits under two linden trees whose crowns meet above the middle of the path. Their crowns are shaped like the roof an arch. She sits on an unpainted wooden bench, obliquely opposite the grave of Anneliese Metzenthin, 1936 -1985. “Geliebt, beweint und unvergessen”. (Beloved, wept over and unforgotten). A rose is engraved over the name. Anneliese Metzenthin wasn’t much older when she died than she [the narrator?] is now.  She likes that name, lots of “i”s and “e”s, but that’s not the reason. The name sounds like it belongs to someone who is kind. There’s a trimmed hedge around her grave with a few busy lizzies and other small red flowers. She thinks of her friend Cristina telling her that cutting roses is an erotic act – “Collige, virgo, rosas” – Girls, enjoy your youth and beauty, cut the roses while they are in bloom before time will spoil them. [a lovely rendering] Cristina is working on a textile installation about dowry, using lines from Argentinian poet Alfonsina Storni. Alfonsina Storni talks a lot of roses, of cutting roses in her poetry. Thinking of Cristina’s project in turn reminds her of her friend Mirja’s new project about Ophelia, whose suicide by drowning transformed her from a pretty girl that doesn’t say much into a mermaid like figure = sex icon. Cut down and flourishing. [An image of flowering after death. Awkward wording.] Women. Roses, mermaids, her artist friends.

Alfonsina, like Ophelia, committed suicide by drowning. Though Alfonsina walked into the sea. She is a most beloved South American poet. There are countless songs about her life and death, the final act that made her into a tragic heroine. Most people like to leave out that she had cancer when she walked into the sea. They prefer her to just walk into the sea. [Work on the prose.  Too reportorial.  Apply your gift for imagery.]

Cristina, Mirja, Alfonsina, Ophelia and their artistic projects. Trying to get out of their bodies, shedding their skins. She is like them, her hand lightly warmed by the sun, casting a huge shadow over the page as she writes down her thoughts, streaming forth from her mind in the same kind of motion as the traffic on the road alongside the edge of the cemetery further behind her. That’s just the way it is. Is it to do with the men in their lives? Genes? What do they want? What do they hope to gain or lose?

The light of the sun sways on her page as if on the surface of water. The swaying is caused by the movement of the branches, not by water.

Anneliese Metzenthins’s grave is now also lit by the sun, the hedge is a succulent green, like the colour of wheatgrass. Her chest is heavy, it often feels like that when she’s exhausted herself. She lies down on the bench and looks up into the linden roof. She almost falls asleep. Someone is walking past, on the path, behind her head. From this position the footsteps sound like knocks [knocking?], not at all like footsteps.  A mosquito on her face jolts her upright. She sits up on the bench and the sun is gone behind a cloud and it’s suddenly cold.

Her grandmother and her great grandmother were from East Berlin, Lichtenberg. Her grandmother had never shown her where she’d grown up, only the places where she lived after she was married and better off financially. Her mother can’t remember where her grandmother lived. She’d kept asking questions but no response. What would she do with streetnames, house numbers anyway? Why would she want to go back there?

Her great grandmother’s name was Anna Blau. A wedding photo exists of her and her husband. She’s upright. Slim. Even her gaze is upright. Not warm, not cold. Her wishes don’t betray her [She does not betray her wishes?], she keeps them to herself. She doesn’t look at herself, but she doesn’t look at another either. What does she see when she serves her customers each day, sausages, black pudding, brawn, drawing beer, pouring Schnaps, echo of the tray on the counter. What is she looking at? A sensible woman, Anna Blau. [Does all this come from the wedding picture?  If not, place after pub disclosure below.] Born and died in Lichtenberg, her husband swallowed up in the Second World War. As the Russians were marching in he was still wearing his uniform. He was going to make it home. Even in the wrong uniform. His whole life seems to have been like that. A life in which you die because you forget to change. He didn’t seem to mind. “I don’t mind” his face is saying, because – it’s not my fault. I’m innocent. Like a child that one day doesn’t come home. Never died, still around somewhere, maybe but not likely. Did Anna mind? She married again and opened a pub with “Uncle Willy”. [Here the image of serving beer and sausages]

It’s gotten cold. She gets on her bike and cycles back through the park to where she lives. Just a couple of streets away. In the former East, from the West. In her thoughts going back to the former East, before it was East Berlin and Anna Blau could not have imagined the wall. Or that a Russian would be saviour [confusing: save from what?], a rapist and one day keep her from meeting her daughter at Savignyplatz at the arranged time.

She doesn’t feel at home here or where she comes from. Recently she went to visit her father’s sister, another aunt. They looked at her curiously, anxious about what she might say. She doesn’t tell them about Alfonsina Storni, that she walked into the sea, about her walks in the cemetery, about the ceramic angels or the planes passing overhead. It’s too far away, for them and for herself. Even what is near is far away like the planes’ bellies.

Like waking up from a dream, looking at oneself in the mirror or living with someone. Feeling together, feeling alone. Familiar and estranged at the same time and uncertain for how long. That’s what she likes about cemeteries. The dead don’t become more dead, they don’t move away or leave. You can address them, they can address you, without touching. There’s no skin between you. It’s a place peopled by no one. A congregation of names and dates on stones.

[Assuming that English is not your native language, I am impressed at your ability to build such evocative word pictures of the tangible and intangible: concepts, feelings, events, trees, graves, people.  Woven like tapestry.  Your story inspired me to Google “Waldfriedhof Pankow” and from there to access Wikipedia and source materials.  You juxtapose life and death in so many ways and so effectively, although sometimes the images become confusing or appear contradictory.  You use the sun to portray both light and shadow, reinforcing the sense of death/dying as an integral part of life/living.  You have nailed the essence of the feminine as the “dark” force, the earth, the yin, the erotic, especially with your deft use of literary sources (Ausonius, Shakespeare, Alfonsina Storni).  Edit your work more carefully to realize the full effects of your gift.  Check spelling.  Tighten your prose. ]