I said.
It was someone else’s turn to wish Michael a long life, so we shuffled along to a corner of the room and stood next to Carol. She repeated the news of Leo Fein’s cremation in a low hiss. ‘The cheek of him,’ she said. ‘Well, they won’t allow him into the Jewish cemetery like that.’
‘No?’
‘Well, it’s not Jewish, is it? You’re supposed to be buried, simple as that. In the ground.’
‘The son mentioned lawyers were involved,’ said Ma.
‘Michael? Bah! Doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. Shame. He’s sitting shiva, at least.’
‘Well, it was his father’s choice, though, wasn’t it?’
‘Life is for the living, Margot. His poor son, thinking about his father burning like a chop on the braai. It’s an insult to us all.’
‘Not to me,’ said Ma, but Carol wouldn’t have heard.
‘These things are there for a reason,’ whispered Carol. ‘One has to grieve. And for your parents, the most. What chance does he have to say goodbye now? He’ll have this hanging over his head for the rest of his life. Selfish, that’s all it is.’
In Leo Fein’s house, I had hoped to find the vessel to hold what I was feeling, for its walls to resonate with my feelings, for others to find the words to express what it was I felt. I hadn’t been to my father’s funeral, was too young to remember or understand the full extent of the grief.
But this sitting shiva was just so foreign to me, as foreign as the Hebrew prayers and hymns in shul – designed to fill you with great awe, or sorrow, or who knows what, but really, just a series of actions that would remain arcane to me forever.
The Rabbi arrived and a few minutes later he’d gathered a few of the men around him. They stood facing the same direction, as if on a bus, and the Rabbi began to recite Kaddish. Michael just sat on the couch, looking straight ahead.
I’d forgotten the Michael of my imaginings, my competition for the position of accomplice – let’s face it, of son – to Leo Fein. I felt sorry for him. A schlemiel is what Carol called him. The sound of it seemed to fit the shape of him, hunched on the turquoise couch.
The men began swaying forward and back, responding to the Rabbi’s voice with their own. Michael rose and came to the table with the crackers, where I stood. Putting one in his mouth, then another, he spoke loudly, as if there were no men saying Kaddish in his house, as if there were no floury cracker bits in the pit of his mouth.
‘So, what now?’ he said, not looking at anyone in particular.
I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure he was talking to me but figured one had to be very polite in such circumstances. ‘I don’t know,’ I said softly, trying to remind him of the right level to speak at. ‘Your father was a good man,’ I whispered. It seemed obvious to me then that Leo Fein had never taken Michael on any escapades, had never shown him how to break into a warehouse, had never driven a getaway car with him sitting in the other seat. And now he never would.
As Ma and I were leaving, Michael started talking to Carol, who shushed him angrily, then hugged him, patting him on the back.
‘I can’t stand all the swaying and whining,’ said Ma outside. ‘Can’t carry a tune, any of them.’
‘What’s Chevra Kadisha?’ I asked in the car.
‘It’s the burial society. You pay a contribution every year and when you die they come and clean the body. Prepare it for burial.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘I think I like Leo Fein’s way, actually. No fuss. I bet he didn’t want all that stuff in there – the prayers and all that. A simple, clean exit.’
‘But he came to shul.’
‘Did he? I thought maybe he was an atheist.’
‘No, he came, lots of times,’ I said. ‘So if he went to shul, why didn’t he want to be buried the proper Jewish way?’
‘Well, plenty of people go to shul just because they like the tradition, or just to mix with people. They like mixing with people they think of as similar to themselves. Besides, there’s no proper anything. It’s just people – people making up silly traditions.’
‘But aren’t you supposed to say goodbye? That’s what funerals are for.’
‘You never say goodbye, Ben. It’s a myth. That’s a silly tradition. You miss them and you don’t stop missing them, every day. You just kind of deal with it.’
I never witnessed Ma dealing with it. Maybe even ‘dealing with it’ was another myth in the pantheon of self-deceptions as Ma saw it. She hid it away in her fretting over Will and Elliot and the business, trying to mend the weak joins of our family with whatever means she had.
Perhaps it was she who started our family’s national sport, of which the only strict rule was never to show that what any of us said or did got to you. You were the winner if you could remain so firm in your self-assurance that you could brush off an insult like you hadn’t even noticed it. Perhaps that was ‘dealing with it’. (Elliot was the consistent loser of the game because you always knew how he felt, but we all competed.)
‘So you don’t want any funeral?’ I said, turning the focus of all the feelings of my frustrated grief now at my mother.
‘No, I don’t think I do.’
‘What if I want you to have one.’
‘Well, I won’t exactly be able to stop you, now, will I? But I don’t want one, and it’s my life. Or death, at any rate.’
‘Well, it’s my life, too,’ I said, close to crying, close to rage (or as close as I could get without losing the family game).
‘Don’t I get to choose how to finish up my business?’
‘What do you care? You believe you won’t even see it. You’ll be matter or whatever. When you’re dead, you’re dead, right? No ghosts or spirits. So what do you care if the Rabbi’s there or not? Or if there’s a prayer? Or if you get buried or burnt?’
‘When you’re dead, you’re dead. I do believe that,’ said Ma. ‘And I don’t want my funeral to be used as propaganda for religion. Some rabbi is going to stand there and say things about me, about my spirit, that it’s gone to heaven or some bullshit, when in life I didn’t believe any of it. It’s dishonest. And I don’t want to be remembered as someone who went in for that sentimental crap, either. It’s not real. I shouldn’t have brought you today.’
She was losing the game. We both were, and we travelled in silence for a block.
‘The Rabbi says souls can be reincarnated,’ I said.
‘Come on, gimme a break. Listen, if everyone’s soul is reincarnated, how come the world’s population keeps growing? Where do all the souls come from?’
‘Maybe they come from something else. Cattle or something.’
‘Or ants, I suppose they’ll claim.’
‘Amoebas.’
‘Exactly. Bacteria. They make this stuff up. How do they know? They can believe what they want but from what I’ve seen, there’s no coming back.’
‘What about Daddy’s funeral – he was buried, right?’
‘Chevra Kadisha and everything. Well, we had to have that, didn’t we? And I don’t think it would have been his choice, but we did it for the family – for his side.’
‘Like the bar mitzvahs,’ I said.
‘Like the bar mitzvahs.’
I sighed. The bar mitzvah I could have skipped, but funerals I wanted