obiit

The elderly woman travelling with her family was the first to speak. ‘It was probably a mentalist,’ she said, ‘they often do things like this.’
Of course, there was nothing to support this. The only thing the conductor had said was that a dead body had been found near the railway track, and so we would have to wait in Roermond for buses to take it us a little further south, rather than taking the train. It would be a minimum of two hours before railway traffic could resume, he warned. He had been the most considerate: ‘er valt een lijk te betreuren‘, he had said, ‘there is a dead body to grieve over’, which didn’t display any particular care for the deceased, but did, at least, take into account this was not an event in an empty void, but a human act with human repercussions.

The first and most plausible cause for a body being found near the railway is, of course, suicide. Whether the elderly woman was right in assuming that everyone who kills himself is a mentalist is another matter (and, indeed, it put into perspective the comments said on TV yesterday, when the new mayor of Maastricht hoped that the suicide of Anthonie Kamerling would make the killing of oneself something that could be more easily discussed – no one in the train ever uttered the word suicide, but everyone was thinking it), but the fact remains that people had little respect for the dead. The term itself, ‘lijk’, a human-specific term for cadaver, may in part be responsible for this. As opposed to ‘dead body’, ‘lijk’ no longer has any link with the living. Once dead, one becomes a lijk, an inanimate object. At best, a problem. In the tightly packed bus heading towards Sittard a woman was on the phone to presumably the university, informing them she’d be late for her lecture. ‘But,’ she said somewhat chirpily, ‘I can start my speech by talking about how things like this damage the economy. Just think of all those employees who are late. This must be expensive!’
I frowned. Half the people in the bus had a cup of coffee in their hands. Twenty-three buses had been ordered by Dutch Rail to make up for the railway ‘inconvenience’. The problem had arisen only at the end of the traffic jam, when many people would already be at work. I had a delay of only an hour.

In Maastricht I made my way to the archive and transcribed the information for the last 94 houses in the 18th century housing register. Every name in it represented a dead person, and in some cases they had died in time for a scribe to make a note. ‘Obiit‘, it would say. Deceased. Here, too, the dead received little compassion, I thought.

Then I reached house 302, located in the Capucijnenstraat, which a certain Jan Switskebel rented from Bottij (who himself lived near the Leurepoort, the register informed me). Switskebel, a salesman of old clothes, had died at an unspecified date, but, uniquely, a note was added behind the obiit:

Er valt een lijk te betreuren.

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