That’s how it always is: first you call on your friends, and then—when the hearses have delivered them—on their graves. Now my turn too has come to exchange people for graves. The cemetery where I go more and more often lies behind high crenelated walls and looks from the outside like a fortress: only when the fighters have all fallen will the gates open. You walk in—first past a chaos of crosses, then past the inner wall—to the new crossless cemetery: gone are the monumental statics of the old human sepulchers, the massive family vaults and stone angels with their penguin-like wings grazing the earth: red metal starts on thin wire stems fidget nervously in the wind.

It’s early spring and earth clings to my boots, gently retaining me: stay longer, if not forever. This is my fourth time meeting him: the slow squelch of his spade as he digs out the dense and difficult earth–the gravedigger. First he’s viable from the waist up, then from the shoulder, a little more, and his head will vanish into the upturned clay. But I come closer, dodging the lobs off his rhythmically ringing spade, and say, “Good day!”

“Well, all right, good day.” He surveys me from his pit.