Joan Juliet Buck - Ashes and Salmon

 

Most families have baggage. In the case of my family, it's not baggage, it's luggage. My family were ex-patriates. We left America with my grandparents when I was a baby. We lived in France, and we lived in England and we were always packing and unpacking and coming and going, and nowhere was really home. Then I moved to New York, and after 30 years in Europe, my parents moved back to Los Angeles. But that wasn't home either. And all my life, I've envied people who know where they come from and who know where they belong. 

 

There's just one place that feels right. It's Cannes in the south of France. At one point, we lived there. My grandmother used to love gambling there. She used to go to the casino every night. My dad made movies, my uncle bought and sold movies. I was a movie critic. And the one time of the year that we were all together would be during the Cannes Film Festival in May, with the scent of mimosa on the breeze and the Mediterranean almost the color of summer and all the memories. And then, my dad stopped making movies, and it was just me and my Uncle Don. 

 

My Uncle Don is kind and he's easygoing. He travels a lot. He's distracted. He gets into scrapes. One of Uncle Don's most remarkable scrapes is the story of the smoked salmon. One year, Uncle Don was going down to the Cannes Film Festival, and he bought a smoked salmon in London to share with all his friends, who were there only once a year. He packed it very, very carefully in tin foil and plastic, and he put it in his suitcase. He got off the plane in Nice for the Cannes Film Festival. The suitcase did not get off the plane. The suitcase traveled around the world. The suitcase went to Africa.

 

When the suitcase came back to the airport, they put it in quarantine. [audience laughter] The smoked salmon had melted under the hot African sun. When my uncle finally picked up his suitcase, [chuckles] the smoked salmon had turned liquid, and everything in the suitcase was just rotting smoked salmon. And he said, “I'm never going to pack a smoked salmon again.” [audience laughter] 

 

So, my Uncle Don and I always see each other at the Cannes Film Festival. We're having breakfast on this particular morning. It's the morning after the end of the Cannes Film Festival. We're at the Hotel Splendide, which is not Splendide, but it's really sweet, even if the coffee is bitter and the orange juice is sour and the croissants are so greasy, they fly right out of your hand. I'm loving being in Cannes, and we're both about to go home to different countries and I say, “Uncle Don, don't you wish you lived in Cannes all year round?” And he said, “Oh. You know, why would I live in Cannes all year round? There's no one here. There's no one here in the winter.” 

 

I think of my grandmother, Nana, who's buried here somewhere and whose grave I've never seen and I say, “Don, today's the perfect day to take me to Nana's grave. I really want to see it.” And he says, “I can't. I got to put the car on the train and get a plane back to London.” And I say, “I want to see it.” He looks at me very solemnly, and he shakes his head and he says, “Honey, I can’t show it to you. It’s been desecrated.” My heart stops. The coffee comes up in my throat. I say, “Don, you’re taking me to the grave.” He says, “I can’t. I got to put the car on the train.” But I follow him downstairs and I watch him start his car, and it doesn’t start. It’s a sign. 

 

And the mechanic who comes from the garage with the jumper cables says, “Monsieur, you have to drive this car for at least half an hour to reanimate the engine.” I know that’s Nana speaking. I get into the car next to Uncle Don. I say, “Okay, we’re going.” What can he do? We drive past these pink houses, and then we drive past these factories and then we drive past the factories again. I say, “Uncle Don, do you know where the cemetery is?” And he says, “You know, I haven’t been there in a while.” So, I take the map out of the side of the car door, and I flap it open and I say, “What’s the address?” And finally, he remembers the address. 

 

We get to the cemetery. And it’s beautiful. Birds are singing, breeze in the trees. We walk down between monuments and vaults and headstones. I’m terrified. I’m bracing to see my grandmother’s desecrated grave. And finally, my uncle stops walking, and he points to the ground and he says, “We’re here.” And on the ground is a little rectangle of earth. It looks like an empty plot. It hasn’t been desecrated. It’s never been honored. I turn to my uncle, like, “What?” And he says, “You know, it just wasn’t safe to put up a headstone.” I’m in a fury. I think, why am I the only person in this family who cares? Why am I the only person in this family who pays attention to things? 

 

I get down on my hands and knees, and I smooth out the earth. I pull out the weeds, I get up, I get enough pebbles from the flower beds to spell out my grandmother’s real name, Esther. And it fits exactly, without measuring. It’s a miracle. And my uncle goes, and he gets one stone to put next to her name and he says, “You know, I really got to put the car on the train.” And I say, “No, no, we’re here with the cemetery. I’m getting a headstone today. I’m going to that cemetery office by the gate.”

 

Uncle Don goes to wait in the car. I go into the cemetery office. There’s a guy behind a counter. I give him my grandmother’s name, the year she died. The guy goes through his ledger. He says, “What year did you say she died?” I say, “1973.” He says, “Hmph, this is irregular. She was buried in 1978. Where was she for five years?” [audience laughter] I run back out to the car, where my uncle is asleep in the driver’s seat. I wake him screaming, “Don, where was Nana for five years?” 

 

He runs his hand through his hair and he says, “Oh, honey, remember the story about the smoked salmon?” [audience aww] He says, “You know, the smoked salmon that was in the suitcase that went around the world and then it ended up in quarantine?” I say, “Oh, yeah, that smoked salmon. Yes?” He says, “Well, when I was bringing your grandmother’s ashes down to Cannes to bury them, somebody gave me a smoked salmon to cheer me up. I was not going to pack it in the suitcase, so I left the smoked salmon in the carrier bag, and your grandmother was in one of those pale blue Pan Am overnight bags and I put them both above my seat in the plane. When we landed at Nice, I collected the smoked salmon and I forgot your grandmother.” [audience laughter] 

 

I can just see the pale blue Pan Am overnight bag in the overhead bin with Nana in it. And he says, “Well, the plane went around the world. By the time it got back, I was in New York, and then I was on the coast, and then I was in London. And it was never the right time, you know?” But then I think, wait a minute, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, and I say, “Don, all those years we all came down to the Cannes Film Festival and we didn’t do anything?” And Uncle Don says, “Well, you know, your grandmother was in the lost and found.” I said, “We walked past her in the lost and found?” Okay, this is too much. 

 

I run back into the cemetery office, because now I am really getting that headstone. And the guy behind the counter has another problem. He says, “Madame, your grandmother was buried in 1978. There was a 15-year lease bought on the grave. The lease has run out. If you do not pay up immediately, we are throwing your grandmother’s ashes in the ossuary.” And the way he says this medieval word, ossuary, with such revolting relish makes me draw myself up to my full height, and I say, “Monsieur, we are paying for this grave immediately. I want you to give me the name of the finest marble mason in all of Cannes, because we will be ordering an extremely nice memorial monument.” 

 

He gives me the name. I come running out to the car. Uncle Don says, “You know, I got to get the car on the train.” I say, “Yes, but first, you are dropping me at this address. It’s the finest marble mason in Cannes.” When he drops me off, we don’t hug, we don’t kiss, we don’t wave. He’s angry at me for having basically bullied him all morning and I’m angry at him for being so damn irresponsible with my grandmother’s ashes. I go back and I call my mother in LA and I tell her this whole story. And she’s silent. But I can fix it, because I have all these things from the marble mason. I have pictures of headstones and tombstones and all kinds of things. 

 

And I say, “Mom, we can have pink marble, yellow marble, gray marble, brown marble, black marble. But didn’t you once say that Nana wanted her ashes scattered on the Mediterranean outside her favorite casino? Wouldn’t that be nice?” And on the phone from LA, my mother says, “Oh, honey, keep the grave. Get the tombstone. All your grandmother ever wanted was a bit of security.” So, my cousins and I pay for the grave. We order the headstone. But my uncle, he gets ill, he’s in hospital, he’s dying and he dies the end of August.

 

And my cousins and I know that the only way to really give him a good funeral was to wait nine months and do it on the eve of the next Cannes Film Festival, because that’s when all his friends will be in one place. And of course, he’ll be buried in the same grave as his mother. We tell the marble mason to add his name to my grandmother’s name. 

 

And nine months later, I fly to London to pick up my Uncle Don’s ashes. They’re in a box on a shelf in the crematorium. I put them in a new overnight bag [audience laughter] that’s suede in the color of bread. I put it next to me on the plane, and it’s like Uncle Don’s flying down to Cannes with me again. 

 

We land in Nice in the middle of a total eclipse of the sun. I take the carry-on bag, and I walk it past the lost and found where my grandmother was for five years. [audience laughter] I take him outside the airport terminal and I unzip the bag, because I want to show the eclipse to Uncle Don and I want to show Uncle Don to the eclipse, because this is a monumental welcome home.