The evening before, Jakub told him, they could be as noisy as they wanted to be. They could drink, sing, shout. Many people even went out into the streets in the middle of the night and screamed, and nobody complained. Nobody got upset, not usually. If they responded at all, it was only to smile indulgently.
Berat found this surprising. When his family had first moved from Istanbul to just outside of Leipzig, to Borsdorf, he already knew about traditions like Oktoberfest, though he didn’t partake of alcohol himself. Nobody in his family did, for cultural reasons more than religious ones. He knew about Spargelzeit, the season when Germans went wild for asparagus, even if he didn’t share their enthusiasm. It was only asparagus, after all. But he had never even heard of Totensonntag.
“Dead Sunday?” he asked. “It’s really called that?”
Jakub just nodded. “Of course, they don’t have it where you’re from.”
Berat wanted to correct Jakub, tell him that now he was from here, from Borsdorf, but he knew Jakub didn’t mean anything by it. Jakub’s family was from Poland, just over the German border, and he still thought of the small town he had grown up in there as home, even though it was only a stone’s throw from Germany. So Berat just shook his head.
“It’s the Lutherans,” said Jakub. “That’s what my father says.” Jakub’s family was Jewish. “They don’t think the regular holidays are good enough, so they made up a bunch of their own.”
“You don’t celebrate it?” asked Berat.
“No, no,” said Jakub. “Of course I celebrate it. It’s an official holiday after all. And why pass up a chance to have fun?”
Jakub explained that really it was not Totensonntag he celebrated per se. That was a strange day. But the eve of Totensonntag was all about making noise. You could eat and drink and be as loud as you wanted until morning came. Nobody stopped you. In fact, everyone encouraged it.
“But the next day’s the actual holiday?” asked Berat, confused.
“Yes, but it’s Sunday and all the shops and businesses and schools are closed anyway, so you already have the day off. But there’s something different about Totensonntag. The hush.”
“The hush?”
“It’s the opposite of the day before. You can’t make noise for the whole day, from sunrise to sunset. It isn’t allowed. You must be silent. No concerts, no music, no dancing, no loud voices, no radio, no TV, no dinners out, nothing. If you speak, you must speak only in a whisper. All you can do is visit graves. In silence, you light candles to the dead, and then you listen.”
“Listen for what?”
Jakub looked at him with astonishment, as if it were obvious. “Why, for the dead, of course.”
Berat was not sure of Jakub was telling the truth. Perhaps, he thought, some of it was true and some was embellished. But yes, Berat had confirmed, there was a holiday called Totensonntag, that much was true anyway, on the last Sunday of something called the “ecclesiastical year”, which, curiously, ended not in December but in early November. God’s year and the secular year apparently didn’t coincide.
When, between classes, he asked Jakub if maybe he’d exaggerated just a little, Jakub shrugged and said, “Come see for yourself.”
Later, walking back from school to take the Mitteldeustchland S-Bahn home, Jakub said, “There’s a story, you know. I can tell it to you if you’d like.”
Why not? Berat thought, and nodded.
So Jakub began:
“Totensonntag began in 1816. It was started not by the Lutheran Church but by decree of the king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm III. His decree was meant to create a day to honor and respect the Prussians who had died fighting Napoleon. That much is known for fact.
“But nobody knows for certain how the practice of silence and of listening for the dead originated. There are many stories about it, which may or may not be true.
“The story as I had it, from my father, who had it from his German workmate Lutz, who had it in turn from god knows who, who had it (so I was told) from a priest, was that there once was a Jewish boy who was orphaned and mute. It was the first Totensonntag or the second, 1816 or 1817, and there was no mandate for silence, just one for visiting the dead. While everyone else when to Lutheran services and then visited the graves of those who had been taken from them after services, this boy, let’s call him Zev, went to the graveyard early in the morning. He went silently from grave to grave while everyone was still at church. He would stop at a grave, read the name on the stone, silently moving his lips, nod at it, and then move to the next grave.
“He was almost alone in the cemetery, but not quite. There was another man, a moderately well-off merchant named Wolf, who was not Lutheran but Catholic, and who was already there. He was just inside the open door of his family crypt, kneeling before his wife’s casket. She had died in childbirth only a few weeks before, leaving this Wolf both without a child and without a wife. When Zev came into the doorway of the crypt and bowed to Wolf’s wife’s casket, Wolf, possessive, demanded to know what he was playing at and why he claimed to know Wolf’s wife? Being dumb, Zev could not answer. When Wolf asked again, Zev turned away. Wolfe reached out and shook his shoulder, Zev jerked free. Wolf was yelling now, and Zev was very afraid, afraid enough to try to hit the much larger man. Zev didn’t mean anything by this, he was just trying to get away, he honestly didn’t understand what was happening. In any case, one thing led to another and before you knew it Wolf had strangled Zev before his wife’s casket.”
“That’s terrible,” said Berat.
“Remember,” said Jakub, “this is just a story. It might not have happened. Maybe nothing happened at all. Or maybe what really happened was worse.”
“Once he came to his senses, Wolf realized he never would be able to explain why he had killed Zev. He would be blamed for Zev’s death, and would no doubt be sentenced to death himself. And so, thinking quickly, he bundled the boy’s body into a corner of the crypt, hastily locked the door, then fled.
“So far, so good. Wolf suffered perhaps a few pangs of guilt, but being a man of means and flexible morality, he was hardly the sort to feel guilty for more than a day or two. He quickly pushed the murder into the back of his mind and went on with his life.
“A week later, maybe two, dead Zev began to appear to Wolf. When he appeared it was just to stand there, beside Wolf’s bed, late at night. Wolf could not tell if he himself was awake or asleep whenever this happened. Sometimes it felt like one, sometimes the other. Zev did nothing, just stared at him, never blinking.”
They had reached the entrance to the S-bahn station, but Jakub made no move to go in. Neither did Berat. Instead, he gestured at Jakub to continue.
“Zev came and came again, night after night, just as silent as he had been in life. Each night, when he reappeared, he was a little closer. He was there only for a few moments, but while he was there Wolf couldn’t move. It was as if his body didn’t belong to him.
“And then one night, perhaps six months after the murder, Zev came very close to Wolf indeed. He reached slowly out and placed a hand on Wolf’s chest. Being the hand of a dead man, this hand was cold, very cold. Wolf couldn’t move. As he watched, Zev’s hand pushed its way through the flesh of his chest and wrapped its cold fingers around his heart.
“Wolf awoke gasping for breath. His heart felt like it was going to burst. He cried out until his manservant came. A doctor was sent for. When the doctor declared there was little he could do, that by morning Wolf would either be on the mend or dead, the manservant sent for a priest.
“By morning Wolf was dead. But before dying, he confessed everything to the priest, and this is how we have the story.”
Berat blinked. “But what does all that have to do with being silent?”
Jakub smiled. “Once Wolf was dead, they went to place his coffin beside his wife’s in the crypt. They opened the crypt and found Zev, his fingertips scraped to bone from trying to get out. He had not been able to cry for help since he was mute, and though he had pounded on the walls he had nothing but his hands to pound with and the noise had not been loud enough. When Wolf placed him in the crypt, Zev had not been dead after all. But he certainly was dead now.”
Jakub turned to Zev, smiled.
“We are silent because we are listening for Zev’s fists as his ghost tries still to find a way out of the crypt.”
The night before Totensonntag, Berat went along with the others. He didn’t drink, of course, but he still did his best to share the mood—singing, dancing, even yodeling. He was not a good yodeler, but neither was Jakub, nor, really, any of the others. He hardly knew most of the others. He recognized a face or two from school, but there were also three older boys, tradesmen or college students, and even, on the margins, a pair of bearded adults.
They stumbled along, shouting and singing, performing their fun. Berat did his best to give himself over to it. He wasn’t exactly having fun, but it was still fascinating.
Or at least it was for a while. After a bit, it felt somewhat boring: a lot of walking, the same shouted phrases, the same bits of song. Berat almost regretted having come. He wouldn’t, he told himself, come next year.
That was when a bottle shattered against the wall next to him, shards of glass spattering his skin.
“Foreigners out!” a nasal voice shouted. “Go back to Pakistan!”
Turkey, Berat nearly corrected, but realized this was hardly the point. It was a cluster of three men with shaved heads and backboots. They were all staring at him, with disgust. Another threw a bottle and Berat ducked it, and now those of his own group were circling around him, hemming him in, protecting him.
“Leave him alone!” shouted Jakub.
“He and his kind, coming over here, taking all the jobs, a blight on good German values!” spat a third. And then the first addressed Jakub, “I know you, with your hooked nose: a dirty Jew!” Another bottle was thrown, and this time it was Jakub dodging it.
The bearded adults, who had been the quietest of their group for most of the night, suddenly erupted. They were on the three fascists instantly, a flurry of fists and knees and boots, a rush of violence. Even though there were only two of them, the other three quickly retreated.
Everyone watched them go, hooting and calling after them. One of the bearded men brushed sparkles of glass off Berat’s shirt. The man’s knuckles were bloody, swollen. “You all right?” the bearded man asked. “Not too shaken?”
Berat nodded.
“Good,” said the bearded man. “I fucking hate Nazis.”
The other bearded man, Berat saw, was talking to Jakub, making sure he was okay too. It made him feel warm inside. “Come on,” said the first bearded man. “The night is still young.”
Near three a.m. they split up, smaller clusters wandering in different directions. The two bearded men, yawning, counseled the rest of them to go to bed and then hopped on a night bus and headed home. Another cluster started walking back toward the city center, hoping to find a 24 hour Späti open so they could buy more beer.
As for him and Jakub, they just kept walking. Jakub seemed a little drunk, even though Berat couldn’t remember him lifting a bottle often to his lips. Maybe he was simply drunk on the atmosphere of the holiday. Or of, rather, the holiday eve.
“Where shall we go?” ask Berat.
Jakub shrugged, then said, “We’ll go to the cemetery.”
It seemed to Berat that even if they did walk for a while more it would still be a little early to go to the cemetery, but this was his first Totensonntag: what did he know about what people did?
The cemetery, as it turned out, was far away. Either that or Jakub was drunk or tired enough to get them lost a few times. Soon, his feet were aching.
By the time Berat realized they were being followed, he wasn’t sure how long it had been going on. He realized he had been hearing the sounds for quite some time without understanding quite what it was he was hearing. When he looked over at Jakub, he could tell by how wide his eyes were that he had heard them too.
“What do we do?” said Berat.
“Maybe it’s nothing.”
“If it was nothing, they wouldn’t be following us.”
“Could be some kids just messing around.”
“We have to find somewhere safe, somewhere with people and streetlights.”
But they weren’t near anywhere like that. They were out in the middle of nowhere, far from the city center, on the edge of some sort of park.
Something struck him hard in the back. A rock maybe. “Foreigners out!” yelled several rabid voices behind them. “Death to Jews!”
“Run!” cried Jakub, and they did. But no matter how hard they ran, the shouts and screams behind them grew closer and closer.
Berat lay there for a long time, aching. There was something all over his face, probably blood. But at least he was conscious again.
We were lucky, he thought. They had punched and kicked them and spit on them but then, before they could do more, suddenly something must have frightened them and they fled.
After a while, he heard a groan beside him. Jakub. That was enough to get him to his knees. He crawled over to his friend.
“All right?” he asked. He could taste blood in his mouth. He swallowed it.
Jakub shrugged. “I’ve been better,” he said.
Together they helped one another up. “What do you think scared them off?” ask Berat.
“I don’t know.”
“Do we go home?” Berat asked.
But Jakub shook his head. “We’re nearly to the cemetery,” he said. “We might as well go in.”
Indeed, it wasn’t far, perhaps just another hundred meters or so. But it was still early when they got there, and the gate was locked.
“No problem,” said Jakub. Somehow, despite just having been beaten, he clambered up the wall right beside the gate. From the top, leaning back over, he thrust out a hand, and Berat, not knowing what else to do, took it.
With Jakub’s help he pulled himself up. It hurt, his body protesting, but not nearly as much as he thought it would. Maybe the beating had been interrupted sooner than he’d thought.
They climbed down to the other side. Berat hadn’t been in a German cemetery before. It felt different than the one in Instanbul where his grandparents were buried. Fewer cats, for one thing, as in not a single cat. Where are all the cats? he wondered, not for the first time. Cats were everywhere in Istanbul. In Istanbul, too, water basins were placed at so many graves, to quench the thirst of the deceased and for the birds as well. Birds, there, in cemeteries especially, might be divine messengers—though that didn’t stop the cats from eating them. Birds in Germany, on the other hand, were just birds.
For a long time, they just wandered, moving from headstone to headstone, reading what they could see in the dim light. The deathdates were mostly in the 1940s and 1950s. German names, all. No Turkish names. None of them even, so far as Berat could tell, obviously Jewish. Perhaps Jews had their own cemetery somewhere. In any case, none seemed to be buried here. He suspected they’d been packed off to camps in Poland and exterminated, left to rot in mass graves.
“I wish it had been different,” Jakub said.
“You wish what had been different?” asked Berat, confused. It had been a fine enough evening for the most part, except for being beaten up.
Jakub just shook his head.
They wandered deeper into the cemetery. Here, somehow, despite there being no trees to speak of, the moonlight was diminished. Berat could no longer read the names on the tombstone. Probably just clouds, he thought.
Jakub fell to his knees, sat, and then leaned against the back of a headstone. The body was on the other side, he explained to Berat, so it wasn’t like he was sitting on someone. There was nothing to worry about.
After a moment’s hesitation, Berat settled in too, against the tombstone beside Jakub’s. Soon after, exhausted, confused, he slept.
When Berat woke up, it was late morning. Jakub was still sleeping beside him. Berat shook him until he opened his eyes too.
All around them, people visited graves, moving silently about, not saying a word. It was like watching ghosts. The two of them, embarrassed, dusted themselves off and stood.
They wandered along, pretending to be looking for someone’s grave. A relative’s, even though clearly this was not a cemetery for Turks or Jews. A friend, then. They would make up a story if they were asked. But the several dozen or so people they passed in the cemetery ignored them, so they didn’t have to.
They walked slowly toward the gates. Still nobody was looking at them.
“Something’s off,” said Berat.
Jakub shushed him. “It’s Totensonntag,” he whispered. “We have to be quiet.”
But even when Berat had spoken aloud, at normal volume, nobody cast him a disapproving look.
They passed a woman standing, head bowed, over the grave of a little boy. Hans Horn was the name on the stone. He had died when he was six. The woman had just placed a toy car on the headstone, upside down so it wouldn’t slide off. Or maybe it was upside down because Hans Horn had died when the car he had been in had flipped over. Perhaps this woman had been driving. Perhaps she was his mother. Worse: perhaps both.
“Hello?” said Berat touching her elbow softly. “Was this your child? I’m sorry . . . ”
Jakub shushed him again. At that Berat would have stopped, if he hadn’t realized that the woman wasn’t paying any attention to him at all.
“Hello?” said Berat, waving his fingers in front of her face.
“Don’t,” pleaded Jakub.
“Hello?” said Berat again. “Hello?” But for her, he was not there.
Astonished, Berat turned to Jakub, but his friend just shook his head. “Come on,” he said.
Berat followed him. On the way they passed four more people, none of whom paid them any heed. Two of them Berat reached out and touched, but they didn’t respond even to that.
“What’s happening?” he asked Jakub.
They came to the gates but Jakub stopped there, without going through.
“It’s too late,” he said.
Berat had no idea what Jakub meant. He pushed past him and left the cemetery. Only somehow even once he had passed through the gates, he found himself back inside, beside Jakub.
“It’s too late,” Jakub said again. And then added. “We’re dead now.”
“What?” said Berat.
But he knew.
Soon, or eventually anyway, their bodies would be found and would be laid to rest somewhere, even if not here. Perhaps, with a little luck, once the bodies were buried they would figure out a way back to them and would be able to rest eventually as well.
“I’m sorry,” said Jakub.
Berat didn’t respond. He just stared. And then, not knowing what else to do, he started screaming.
Nobody noticed. For them this was Totensonntag. For them, there was nothing but silence, despite their claim to be listening for the dead. He could scream all he wanted, he knew, but it wouldn’t do any good.
