Digging Up the Dead

Digging Up the Dead

My sister has always been afraid of her dead cat.

The cat visited in her dreams, beginning as a prickling sensation beneath her skin before stalking into the room with his shiny black fur and unblinking green eyes; and my sister would shudder because, like Stephen King said, sometimes dead is better. There was nothing frightening about the cat while he was alive, but upon his death his soul seemed to morph and manifest into something inexplicably different. At least, that’s what my sister told me, and I laughed in her face.

She informed me every time she had the dream, and I listened, both incredulous and amused. According to her, the visitations were always in our childhood home, and always in a different room. The cat entered, trotting into the living room or kitchen or basement as he always did, his eyes casually fixing on her face as he meowed. Always one meow. I think his unceremonious attitude designates what was most frightening to her. In the dreams she was immediately terror-stricken, could do nothing but stand and watch the cat as he padded around the room and rubbed against her legs.

She told her therapist about the dreams, which recurred for months on end, and her therapist advised her that the next time she saw her dead cat stalking through the house, she should confront him. My sister confided to me that she never will; six years later, she hasn’t. And the cat still lords over her dreams.

***

The cats of Paris’s cimetière montemartre are whispered to be l’âmes des morts, souls of the dead. They watch visitors in ugly flatfaced solemnity with their pug-noses quivering in the wet air. My sister and I first encountered them while still streets away after deciding to visit the cimetière on a whim. The cats guard the cemetery—angry and hunched, gargoyles with shoulders raised and eyes narrowed in skeptical annoyance. We ignored them, searching the external span of the graveyard for an entryway. When the cemetery was first constructed, there was only one entrance, a dank narrow staircase inconspicuously nestled in the ground parallel to Rue Caulaincourt, and the graveyard has yet to open itself to the rest of the city anywhere else. My sister and I traversed alongside the yawning expanse of stone wall for nearly an hour, only noticing the stairway out of luck. While descending, we smelled a sort of rotten smell, like old milk. The barrier was not meant to be crossed. The ground is sour.

The stone necropolis was a haphazard neighborhood. We began to meander, picking our way along the damp earth that sucked on our shoes, ignoring the feline glares as we observed the mausoleums. Some were cracked and caved in on themselves like moldering wounds on the landscape. All around us was that wretched putrid milk-stink, and I wrinkled my nose. The entire graveyard inconspicuously passed below the city; car noises hushed reverently, even though bridged streets arched over the graveyard’s hills and pathways. There was a translucent barrier or film hovering between the roads and the cemetery, separating the world of glittering Parisian street life from the realm of bland tombs and wet grass and prowling felines with their hideous little faces, as though we had stumbled into some French underworld.

I looked upwards to the boulevards with a strangely meek yearning for life. Living humanity is grossly obsessed with the rotting dead. We turn to the living to be proud; we turn to the dead to be humbled. Why turn to the dead at all, in that case? Why can’t we leave the dead behind; why must we have such a grotesque desire to disturb what is meant to rot in peace? The specter of death, that to all seems so terrifyingly alive, felt to me like nothing but a damp sigh that filtered through the graveyard—something ancient and tired. No ghosts shrieked or whirled; all I felt was a large, old, gray-haired presence and the eyes of a dozen or so angry cats.

My sister and I spotted one beast that was particularly interesting. Most of the cats had a mottled black-gray-brown coloration in their coats. The beast we noticed stood out as a bundle of dirty white fur; when it crept along in a slouch, locks of its matted muzzle and stomach dragged along the ground. It turned its head once and picked up its trot when it saw us. We watched its humped form lope along the grounds and wordlessly followed, vulnerable and trusting of its unspoken authority.

Paris always had a problem controlling its dead. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the primary burial ground was the cimetière des saints-innocents—cemetery of the holy innocents. In the twelfth century, the church established this graveyard in the heart of Paris, adjacent to its most popular market. It was modestly called champeaux and was recognized as the sole burial ground for Paris’s citizenry. The Catholic Church later renamed it to saints-innocents, in remembrance of the innocent children slaughtered by Herod in his rampant search for the Christ child. At this time (roughly post-Medieval) the dead remained neatly in their individual sepulchers, compartmentalized in stone homes, undisturbed. The cat leading us sauntered past the grave of Alexandre Dumas. His eternalized marble likeness lay stone-still atop his tomb. Wasn’t he a composer? No, a novelist? My straying focus locked once more onto the ambling cat, and our trio trudged onwards.

The cimetière des saints-innocents stood, reliable and ignorable, until the fourteenth century, when death began to be a nuisance. The graveyard grew overcrowded; suddenly, the dead were vying for release. No longer could corpses comfortably reside in their own dark apartments. Modest stone houses became mass graves holding over one thousand bodies each as the citizens of Paris, apparently, had underestimated death’s spotless track record. High walls were established for the sake of preserving both physical and philosophical hygiene. The Parisians also built charnel houses: stone sheds filled with piled heaps of bones, but externally carved with a grandiose likeness to classical architecture and painted with murals. People would rather look at artistic renditions of death than the dry and time-paled ancestors scattered inside, forgotten, good riddance.

This complacency could only last so long, though, as the pregnant earth bulged with the dead. Louis XV was horrified to hear of the filthy conditions, so he took the route frequented by kings when something unexpected happens: raising prices. People could no longer bury their dearly departed unless they coughed up an exorbitant sum, which many could not. Bodies were denied a chaste Christian burial and were instead forced to remain exposed in unsightly indecency during their decomposition. The godawful stench; it worsened distractingly as we meandered further into the graveyard; my sister told me that it was sulfur, that the grounds below were full of it. This information slightly dulled the nagging discomfort of superstition that had swelled inside me as we intruded deeper, deeper into montemartre. We were scaling a hill when I slipped and found myself knee-deep in mud. I snorted with an amusement that was only vaguely clouded with annoyance while my sister helped me upright. Brushing off my filthy knees, I lifted my gaze; the cat was gone. We stood in frantic solitude until we saw its shape, seeming to peer expectantly at us from behind the final resting place of Edgar Degas.

Mud. Mud. Mud. A particularly wet spring in 1780 stirred the ground of saints-innocents into a cemetery stew: the final straw. Citizens were appropriately horrified to find their dead had been purged from their graves and were now strewn across the relieved earth, dismembered and foul. Promptly, there was a city-wide ban on burying corpses in the graveyard. From thenceforth the bodies began to be exhumed, despite protestations from the Catholic Church for disrespecting the already-mangled cadavers. The unlucky ones picked for the job attempted to piece bodies back together and thus preserve a long-dead dignity, but the scattered bones were gathered in cartloads and lined along the walls of abandoned underground mines, now known as the Paris Catacombs. The intact bodies were moved to two graveyards, far outside the city boundaries: one in northern Paris and one in the south. Cimitière montemarte was originally cimetière du nord, the northern cemetery. Half the bodies were reburied there, an abandoned gypsum quarry that had outlived its previous use as a mass grave after the French Revolution. After the remains were moved, the transportation of the dead back to their own realm was complete. We had regained mastery. Extra fat from the bodies was turned into candles and soap for the lucky living.

The Parisians thought that by exiling the dead to quarries they could forget about them forever, but the troubles of the city’s death industry were, of course, not over. The city inevitably expanded, creeping closer to the edges of the cemeteries. The people fought, but the dead fought back; they would not be moved. To remedy this issue, the people of Paris pointedly decided to ignore it. They built their city over the tombs and mausoleums, thus shoving the ghosts back into their shadowy hell. Cimetière montemartre now remains a substantial gorge at the foot of Montemartre, the famed hill which lifts the cathedral Sacrè-Cœur as though on a grand pedestal. Montemartre does not lift up the graveyard but pushes it away, below the roads and below the buildings and below our feet that skidded in the wet earth.

Paris hardly realizes that its innards are filled to the aching, groaning brim with centuries of its dead. The architects could hardly admit this when they had to remap their underground mètro entirely to avoid collision with the dozens of miles of bone-stacked catacombs, and the citizens can hardly admit this when they have to walk three or four extra miles to catch a train because it’s impossible to find a station in the Latin Quarter, and the café host could hardly admit this when we asked for directions to a cemetery because years and years ago they all decided to ignore it, and now I had the terrible feeling that something again was rising, something rotten and milk-smelling, swollen beneath my feet. And here we walked, pompously trekking atop thousands, millions, all the while praying that this beast of a cat will lead us to some sort of answer and knowing that these cats don’t inhabit the souls of the dead but believing it anyway.

Humans created ghosts to understand the dead, and we created graveyards to cope with what we didn’t like about the ghosts, and through this we found a veneer of convenience over the broiling fear of having to look over our shoulders every time we feel a breeze because they may be with us. And even the most structured cemeteries will gluttonously expand into labyrinthine neighborhoods, shoved down by humanity but pulsating, waiting to burst once again into our lives, like a cat that died when you were twelve but keeps intruding into your nightmares, staring into your horror-struck face, but even I cannot look at death through the face of my sister’s cat and here I am, pathetically twice-removed, glimpsing into her dreams, like a coward, hiding from the confrontation with the green eyes that were demure, expectant, almost friendly, and definitively waiting…

The cemetery cat disappeared into a cracked tomb in a flurry of muddy hindpaws. My sister and I halted, silenced. I glanced around: we stood beneath a bridge backed into the valleyed convergence of two walls. It began to rain. I noted the muggy sounds around me: drip drip drips of water collecting and pattering onto peat and stone, systematic rumbles of cars crossing the overhead bridge, French conversation fluttering down from above. I looked back towards the gaping scraggled maw of the broken grave. A thrill of terror went through me. I approached the crevasse, slowly, and peered inside, shivering.

The tomb was empty.