Each morning on the bus to work, I pass the cemetary in the centre of Nuuk, a field of sparse, white crosses against a pale blanket of snow. The bus pauses there by that bare white field with its rigid crosses, gathered in by a wooden fence that holds back the steadily encroaching apartment blocks looking down upon that barren space. I’m reminded of a man to whom we’d offered a job a few years ago. He was ready to pick up his life and move here. But then his wife learned that the house they would move to was on a hilltop overlooking this cemetary. She couldn’t bear the thought of looking out each morning onto the dead. They did not come.
Me, I’ve always loved cemetaries, these places filled with fragments of the past, memories long faded, the texture of epitaphs under my fingertips, words plucked from grief and growing ever dimmer through the years.
In Greenland, perhaps more than other places, one can almost feel the dead among the living. Greenlanders are superstitious. They feel the spirits walking among them – ghosts in the living world, moving in the half light between nature, life, and the spirit world. But even literally, the dead are among them. On an island in the fjord, I recall watching children picking over the stony ground, peering fascinated, excited, afraid, through dark rocky holes at bleached bones, empty sockets – people who lived here not so very long ago. Even in Nuuk, on the hummocky slope that stretches from the hospital down to the shore, the bones of people not so long gone – not much more than a hundred years – lie scattered just under surface, covered by loose rocks. With no deep soil to swallow them, they lie here still among us, where the cold wind blows in from the sea, the dead and the living sharing their memories.
I look out of the bus window at those silent crosses, shielded from the morning rush by the simple wooden fence, and I notice there are no footprints in the snow, no flowers. The dead sleep here, for the moment still buried beneath this last snow. But with spring upon us, the dead will soon emerge from winter’s warm blanket. The bus pulls away from the roadside, and as we pass the cemetary, I notice that dark pools of earth are appearing around the bases of the crosses through the thinning snow. Soon, there will be footsteps. Soon there will be flowers. The dead will emerge and the living will move among them once more.
