"Amen."
Father Crawford sprinkled the holy water, and the cemetery workers covered the grave with a marble slab. London on September 2 was the same as ever, the sky gloomy and overcast, thick fog and smog tangled endlessly among the living, ravaging everyone's lungs and mood. Even the sinking sun did nothing to let the sky taste the bright colors of dusk. Above the cemetery, crows circled in silence, and under the wash of the sky, even the white marble had picked up a heavy smear of gray.
Nelson wore a deep black suit. He bent down and wiped Jonas's gravestone with his palm.
"Jonas Nicklaus (1885–1939): His era was too cruel, and so the pen he held in the end did not make him a poet."
"Sloppy, isn't it?" He raised his head and rested his arm on Tom's shoulder. "Such a big man, and in the end he was put into one tiny box and buried in a grave no more than a square meter. Even his whole life can only be summed up in one simple sentence like this."
The guests who had come to mourn were all dressed in solemn black formalwear. Under the priest's direction, they gathered around Bella, looking at Jonas's photograph in silent grief.
"Nel." Tom turned to face Nelson, stretched out both arms, and hugged him, patting Nelson's back hard. "The dead are gone, but you still have us. You still have Aunt Bella. You have to look ahead."
"I've always been looking ahead." Nelson returned the same hug, then broke free and looked toward a group of grave-faced Germans at the edge of the funeral. They were relatives from Jonas's hometown, from Trier. Nelson had never heard Jonas mention them before—he did not know how, in such war-torn times, they had