November 2, 1999. It is late afternoon when I board the train from Bratislava to Budapest. I’ve taken this three-hour train ride down the spine of Eastern Europe every Wednesday for the past two months, as I commute from my home in the Slovak capital city to the Hungarian capital city to teach.
My coat stays on as I slide into an empty car. The seats are torn; the curtains are thickened with dust. Cryptic graffiti splays across the walls, and the car smells like a Goodwill store. The winter skies outside appear tufted with scouring pads. Slovakia and Hungary are still largely unfamiliar—appealing, but unfamiliar. I find comfort in the contained and knowable contours of this train ride.
And then I see the cemetery, the one this train ride passes about halfway through the trip, the first of three. It is luminous with candlelight and crowded with people sitting on graves, lying on blankets, sweeping around the tombstones. It looks like a party silhouetted against the dusky sky. So does the second cemetery a few minutes further into the ride. And then the third.
When I ask my students what I had seen, they tell me about All Souls Day in Slovakia and Hungary and much of the region I would call home for four years. Halloween—the commercial, sugar-laden holiday—I knew about. It eclipsed All Saints Day, which I had learned about in a toss away sentence or two in Catholic school. But All Souls Day, this pilgrimage to honor the dead, was something else entirely. I was moved by the spectacle of hundreds collected in cemeteries, lighting candles and gathering to be as near to those alive as those departed. The fleeting sight of the cemetery aglow and alive imprinted a vivid scene that made me wonder: Where is the day set aside to remember my father, my grandmother, my uncle Alan, my aunt Dinah and all the generations who had come before me, creating the chain I am linked into?
Eleven months after I saw my first All Souls Day, waist-high plastic barrels choked with beefy carp appeared outside of Tesco, the big box department store in the heart of Bratislava’s old town. Beside the barrels, flower vendors crouched amidst rows of yellow chrysanthemums tied into bundles with cheap, plastic twine. Inside the store entryway sat palettes of votive candles in red plastic cups. These, I knew, were the Slovak accessories of All Souls Day, the decorations as ordinary to Slovaks as candy and carved pumpkins are to me. By then I knew that Slovakia has designated All Souls Day a state holiday. I knew the schools closed. The shops closed. I knew that thousands of Slovaks traveled to the cemeteries that held their ancestors. They placed flowers on graves and burned specially decorated candles to help the departed souls find their way to everlasting light.
November 2, 2000. I hunch over my city map and see what looks like the largest cemetery in the Bratislava city center: Ondrejsky Cintorin. It is late morning, my second year in the country. I make a sandwich, grab my journal and bundle up against the chill. I walk by closed shops and empty tram stops toward the cemetery, already humming with activity. I see graves inscribed in Slovak, German and Hungarian beneath spindly canopies of bare-branched trees. I sit on a bench and watch as men and women hunch over broomsticks and cluck over vases of yellow mums. People huddle, sharing food and chatting. They greet friends; they kneel in prayer.
I sit and I watch, spiraling deeper inside toward memory and softness. I am part of the celebration, and I am someone viewing if from afar—a reverent visitor in the unfolding of something sacred, something she never knew she longed for until she chanced upon it.
“You don’t have a soul, you are a soul,” C.S. Lewis said. And there on that day in that cemetery, all those in my life who had gone before me and all those who had passed whom I’d never known—I believed them to be hovering benevolently, a whisper above my head. They encircled all of us left alive with our bruised hearts and our rememberings. They enfolded us, and in doing so, promised to light our way, as we had come to light theirs.
