The Plague by Albert Camus. Part 3ii

But there was darkness also in men's hearts, and the true facts were as little calculated to reassure our townsfolk as the wild stories going around about the burials. The narrator cannot help talking about these burials, and a word of excuse is here in place, for he is well aware of the reproach that might be made him in this respect. His justification is that funerals were taking place throughout this period, and, in a way, he was compelled, as indeed everybody was compelled, to give heed to them. In any case, it should not be assumed that he has a morbid taste for such ceremonies. Quite the contrary. He much prefers the society of the living, and, to give a concrete illustration, sea bathing. But the bathing beaches were out of bounds, and the company of the living ran a risk, increasing as the days went by, of being perforce converted into the company of the dead. That was indeed self-evident. True, one could always refuse to face this disagreeable fact, shut one's eyes to it, or thrust it out of mind. But there is a terrible cogency in the self-evident. Ultimately it breaks down all defences. How, for instance, continue to ignore the funerals on the day when somebody you loved needed one. Actually, the most striking feature of our funeral was their speed. Formalities had been whittled down, and, generally speaking, all elaborate ceremonial suppressed. The plague victim died away from his family, and the customary vigil beside the body was forbidden, with the result that a person dying in the evening spent the night alone, and those who died in the daytime were promptly buried. Needless to say, the family was notified, but in most cases, since the deceased had lived with them, its members were in quarantine, and thus immobilised. When, however, the deceased had not lived with his family, they were asked to attend at a fixed time after, that is to say, the body had been washed and put in the coffin, and when the journey to the ceremony was about to begin. Let us suppose that these formalities were taking place at the auxiliary hospital of which Dr Rieu was in charge. This converted school has an exit at the back of the main building. A large storeroom giving on to the corridor contained the coffins. On arrival, the family found a coffin already nailed up in the corridor. Then came the most important part of the business, the signing of the official forms by the head of the family. Next, the coffin was loaded on a motor vehicle, a real hearse, or a large converted ambulance. The mourners stepped into one of the few taxis still allowed to ply, and the vehicles drove hell for leather to the cemetery by a route avoiding the centre of town. There was a halt at the gate where police officers applied a rubber stamp to the official exit permit, without which it was impossible for our citizens to have what they called a last resting place. The policemen stood back, and the cars drew up near a plot of ground where a number of graves stood open, waiting for inmates. A priest came to meet the mourners, since church services at funerals were now prohibited. To an accompaniment of prayers, the coffin was dragged from the hearse, roped up and carried to the gravesite. The ropes were slipped, and it came heavily to rest at the bottom of the grave. No sooner had the priest begun to sprinkle holy water than the first sod rebounded from the lid. The ambulance had already left, and was being sprayed with disinfectant, and while spade folds of clay thudded more and more dully on the rising layer of earth, the family were bundling into the taxi. A quarter of an hour later, they were back at home. The whole process was put through with the maximum of speed and the minimum of risk. It cannot be denied that anyhow, in these early days, the natural feelings of the family were somewhat outraged by these lightening funerals. But obviously, in times of plague, such sentiments can't be taken into account, and all was sacrificed to efficiency. And though, to start with, the morale of the population was shaken by this summary procedure, for the desire to have a proper funeral is more widespread than is generally believed, as time went on, fortunately enough, the food problem became more urgent, and the thoughts of our townsfolk were diverted to more instant needs. So much energy was expended on filling up forms, hunting round for supplies, and lining up, that people had no time to think of the manner in which others were dying around them, and they themselves would die one day. Thus, the growing complications of our everyday life, which might have been an affliction, proved to be a blessing in disguise. Indeed, had not the epidemic, as already mentioned, spread its ravages, all would have been for the best. For then, coffins became scarcer. Also, there was a shortage of winding sheets, and of space in the cemetery. Something had to be done about this, and one obvious step, justified by its practical convenience, was to combine funerals, and when necessary, multiply the trips between the hospitals, and the burial place. At one moment, the stock of coffins in Rewe's hospital was reduced to five. Once filled, all five were loaded together in the ambulance. At the cemetery, they were emptied out, and the iron grey corpses put on stretchers, and deposited in a shed, reserved for that purpose, to wait their turn. Meanwhile, the empty coffins, after being sprayed with antiseptic fluid, were rushed back to the hospital, and the process was repeated as often as necessary. This system worked excellently, and won the approval of the Prefect. He even told Rewe that it was really a great improvement on the death carts driven by Negroes, of which one reads in accounts of former visitations of this sort. Yes, Rewe said, and though the burials are much the same, we keep careful records of them. That, you will agree, is progress. Successful, however, as the system proved itself in practice, there was something so distasteful in the last rites, as now performed, that the Prefect felt constrained to forbid relations of the deceased being present at the actual internment. They were allowed to come only as far as the cemetery gates, and even that was not authorised officially. For things had somewhat changed as regards the last stage of the ceremony. In a patch of open ground, dotted with latiscus trees, at the far end of the cemetery, two big pits had been dug. One was reserved for the men, the other for the women. Thus, in this respect, the authorities still gave thought to propriety, and it was only later that, by the force of things, this last remnant of decorum went by the board, and men and women were flung into the death pits indiscriminately. Happily, this ultimate indignity synchronised with the plague's last ravages. In the period we are now concerned with, the separation of the sexes was still in force, and the authorities set great store by it. At the bottom of each pit, a deep layer of quicklime steamed and seethed. On the lips of the pit, a low ridge of quicklime threw up bubbles that burst in the air above it. When the ambulance had finished its trips, the stretchers were carried to the pits in Indian file. The naked, somewhat contorted bodies were slid off into the pit almost side by side, and then covered with a layer of quicklime, and another of earth. The latter only a few inches deep, so as to leave space for subsequent consignments. On the following day, the next of kin were asked to sign the register of burials, which showed the distinction that can be made between men and, for example, dogs. Men's deaths are checked and entered up. Obviously, all these activities called for a considerable staff, and Rio was often on the brink of the shortage. Many of the grave diggers, stretcher bearers and the like, public servants to begin with, and later volunteers, died of plague. However stringent the precautions, sooner or later, contagion did its work. Still, when all is said and done, the really amazing thing is that so long as the epidemic lasted, there was never any lack of men for these duties. The critical moment came just before the outbreak touched high water mark, and the doctor had good reason for feeling anxious. There was then a real shortage of manpower, both for the higher posts and for the rough work, as Rio called it. But paradoxically enough, once the whole town was in the grip of the disease, its very prevalence tended to make things easier, since the disorganisation of the town's economic life threw a great number of persons out of work. Few of the workers thus made available were qualified for administrative posts, but the recruiting of men for the rough work became much easier. From now on, indeed poverty showed itself a stronger stimulus than fear, especially as owing to its risks, such work was highly paid. The sanitary authorities always had a waiting list of applicants for work. Whenever there was a vacancy, the men at the top of the list were notified, and unless they too had laid off work for good, they never failed to appear when summoned. Thus the Prefect, who had always been reluctant to employ the prisoners in the jail, whether short-term men or lifers, was able to avoid recourse to this distasteful measure. As long, he said, as they were unemployed, we could afford to wait. Thus until the end of August, our fellow citizens could be conveyed to their last resting place, if not under very decorous conditions, at least in a manner orderly enough for the authorities to feel that they were doing their duty by the dead and the bereaved. However, we may here anticipate a little and describe the past to which we came in the final phase. From August onwards, the plague mortality was, and continued such as far to exceed the capacity of our small cemetery. Such expedience as knocking down walls and letting the dead encroach on neighbouring land proved inadequate. Some new method had to be evolved without delay. The first step taken was to bury the dead by night, which obviously permitted a more summary procedure. The bodies were piled into ambulances in larger and larger numbers, and the few belated wayfarers who, in defiance of the regulations, were abroad in the outlying districts after curfew hour, or whose duties took them there, often saw the long white ambulances hurtling past, making the night-bound streets reverberate with the dull clangour of their bells. The corpses were tipped pell-mell into the pits, and had hardly settled into place when spade-folds of quicklime began to sear their faces, and the earth covered them indistinctively, in holes dug steadily deeper as time went on. Shortly afterwards, however, it became necessary to find new space, and to strike out in a new direction. By a special urgency measure, the denizens of Grant's in perpetuity were evicted from their graves, and the exhumed remains dispatched to the crematorium, and soon the plague victims likewise had to go to a fiery end. This meant that the old crematorium east of the town, outside the gates, had to be utilised. Accordingly, the Eastgate sentry post was moved farther out. Then, a municipal employee had an idea which greatly helped the harassed authorities. He advised them to employ the streetcar line running along the coastal road, which was now unused. So, the interiors of streetcars and trailers were adapted to this new purpose, and a branch line was laid down to the crematorium, which thus became a terminus. During all the late summer, and throughout the autumn, there could daily be seen moving along the road skirting the cliffs above the sea, a strange procession of passenger-less streetcars swaying against the skyline. The residents in this area soon learned what was going on, and though the cliffs were patrolled day and night, little groups of people contrived to thread their way unseen between the rocks, and would toss flowers into the open trailers as the cars went by. And in the warm darkness of the summer nights, the cars could be heard clanking their way, laden with flowers and corpses. During the first few days, an oily, foul-smelling cloud of smoke hung low upon the eastern district of the town. These effluvia, all the doctors agreed, though unpleasant, were not in the least harmful. However, the residents of this part of the town threatened to migrate in a body, convinced that germs were raining down on them from the sky, with the result that an elaborate apparatus for diverting the smoke had to be installed to appease them. Thereafter, only when a strong wind was blowing did a faint, sticky odour coming from the east remind them that they were living under a new order, and that the plague fires were taking their nightly toll. Such were the consequences of the epidemic at its culminating point. Happily, it grew no worse, for otherwise it may well be believed the resourcefulness of our administration, the competence of our officials, not to mention the burning capacity of our crematorium, would have proved unequal to the tasks. Rhea knew that desperate solutions had to be mooted, such as throwing the corpses into the sea, and a picture had risen before him of hideous jetsam lolling into the shallows under the cliffs. He knew too that if there was another rise in the death rate, no organisation, however efficient, could stand up to it. That men would die in heaps and corpses rot in the street, whatever the authorities might do, and the town would see, in public squares, the dying embrace the living in the frenzies of an all too comprehensible hatred. Or some crazy hope.