After the death of his father, a guest worker from the very beginning, writer Mohammed Benzakour considers the last years of his life every two weeks – the old age and the pains, the flaws, the cheerful and the absurd, the memories and the nostalgia.
And there the coffin sinks into the ground.
Above us a drizzly roof through which a weak sun squeezes.
In a circle we watch as six young men lower the coffin with ropes. Not an easy task, father weighs around ninety kilos and in his healthy years even weighed over a hundred. They lower the coffin with a remarkable amount of enthusiasm. Two have their dresses rolled up and expertly tied at the waist. Blubber sand and dress are not a good combination in this country.
I wait for the moment to burst into tears, but they are not. Instead, I take a particular interest in the footwear. I watch the gym gyms of cousins and uncles I’ve neither seen nor missed for half a lifetime. A funeral is a reunion for people who are not close to each other. The imam, a young man wearing blue and white Nike sneakers, is also clearly caught up in the zeitgeist. A tightly trimmed beard on his chin and a round black cap on his head. He rattles off a series of pleas at a pace that would make Max Verstappen jealous. Besides, they are certainly enviable things that he wishes my father.
The women are huddled a bit further on, watching. They are not allowed to be there, according to tradition. They are too emotional and start screaming loudly and nobody wants that, least of all the dead.
The box has now reached the bottom. A moist, Dutch soil. Today I witness one of the many surprises this life has in store for us: Father’s entire life was destined to end in the hot, dry soil of his native village in northern Morocco. Next to mother. But today it sinks into the clammy clay soil of Bergen op Zoom.
65 years inseparable together, day in and day out, and then ripped apart at last, with a sea and a continent between them.
All his life, father dutifully paid the funeral premium from bank Chaabi, in which everything was guaranteed, ablution, coffin, refrigeration, plane ticket, ambulance transport to the cemetery in his native village, which was surrounded by mountains. But he ends up in the ground of Bergen op Zoom, where there is not a mountain to be seen. Why? Morocco has stopped all air traffic due to corona.
When the imam has finished chatting and the last ‘amen’ is sounded in unison, my brother steps up to him and secretly and ostentatiously presses a 50 euro bill into his hand, which the cleric, as the etiquette dictates, kindly refuses, but then enough.
Then there is father. There is an era. In the Muslim corner of a Catholic cemetery, beneath a measly mound of consecrated sand. The tombstone has yet to be ordered. Multicultural coexistence is the crowning achievement of multicultural coexistence.