I'm your witchdoctor

Here's me standing outside the tomb of Aleksandr Griboyedov [Грибоeдов (pron. Gree-buh-YED-uff)], at Mtatsminda Church on the mountainside above Tbilisi. Griboyedov, a noted poet and Orientalist, was sent to Tehran as Russian minister plenipotentiary.  On 11 February 1829 he was murdered by a mob who stormed the Russian embassy.  His body was subjected to three days of maltreatment in the streets of Tehran and was identifiable only from a scar on his hand from an old duel.  Griboyedov and his wife (nee Chavchavadze) are both buried in this crypt.

Being sensible of the fact that some readers may find my disquisitions on Astrology to be tedious, I have decided to present this afternoon a work of prose--one of my few essays that has actually been published! (courtesy of my dear friends Tim and David Bayly, whose unending pontifications and fulminations can always be read at http://www.baylyblog.com/):

Anyway, earlier I made mention of a pertinent document. We found this in a drawer when we were cleaning out my grandmother's house (she used to rent rooms to students, you see). It is a real gem! Below is a faithful transcription of what it contains (for some reason the writer has consistently and deliberately misspelled "Buswell" as "Bugwell," and I have retained that idiosyncrasy in order to be completely faithful to the original). It appears to be a sort of parable, rather than a record of real events:

"From time to time the old rumors would recirculate--rumors that the College was keeping a great number of corpses in storage. How many exactly, and whose bodies they were, or where they were being stored, and why, no one seemed to know. However, there were a lot of locked doors on campus, a lot of basement storage space and a lot of off-limits areas which could have contained practically anything. There were even suggestions that huge subterrene vaults existed underneath some of the athletic fields. Supposedly you could hear the hollow places as you ran around the track. There was just no knowing.

My father, it so happens, was employed at Blanchard College, and it was frequently his job to make the rounds with the mail truck, delivering mail to the various offices and departments. One of the principal buildings at which he had to stop was the BCG, a huge new facility which housed the grad school and several other offices.

One Friday afternoon, my Dad walked into one of the offices in the BCG to make his usual delivery there, and the secretaries asked if he couldn't help them with something. The problem was that the body of former Blanchard College president James Bugwell, which was usually kept in a closet, needed to be moved to the conference room across the hall, where its presence was required for some scheduled function later on.

The two ladies either lacked the strength or were too squeamish to do it themselves. They showed him which closet the body was in, and my Dad, always cheerful and happy to accommodate, got hold of Bugwell by the feet and dragged him across the hall. The old professor still had his spectacles and was dressed in a three-piece suit; however he'd been in storage since the forties and halfway across the hall he came apart in the middle.

The secretaries were very apologetic and helped my Dad get the body into the conference room, where it was left on the carpet; after which the light was turned off and the door locked.

This story would have seemed hard to believe but for the subsequent events of that humid summer weekend. It was to be the weekend when all the janitor-closets, vaults, and dumpsters of Blanchard College gave up their dead.

On Saturday morning the word spread quickly--something odd was going on at the College. They were having a big sale down at the Physical Plant. They were selling the bodies and their effects.

I got in my car and drove to the College; it was a cool, cloudy Saturday. When I got down there I saw that the rumors were true--a great multitude of corpses was being sold and there was a real run on the place; there were even parking problems in the vicinity. People were returning to their cars with their purchases, including much jewelry and big bales of musty old clothes.

I had a hard time getting near the place because of all the traffic, but finally I got through and drove right past the Physical Plant, which was set back quite a distance from the street. At the entrance to the driveway they had seated a corpse against the fire hydrant with one arm propped up so that it was pointing up the drive toward the Plant. The corpse wore a lot of pearl necklaces and held a sign which read simply, SALE.

By the time I got home I was so angry and disgusted I was ready to choke. I heard my parents talking in the kitchen as I walked into the house.

I started telling them about what I had just seen down at the Plant. Just then I happened to glance out the window and words failed me. From our kitchen window it was possible to see the screened porch which extended perpendicular to the house. Three of those hideous, mouldy old corpses had been fastened up against the screen, along the side of the porch. Their grinning faces had been spray-painted--one of them green, the others yellow and blue, for purposes of identification I suppose.

My Dad had brought them home earlier and hung them up there to dry in the sun. He had been down to the Physical Plant early that morning and actually spent money on those loathsome things.

With an exclamation of utter disgust and horror, I stormed out of the kitchen and rushed upstairs. Halfway up the stairs I stopped suddenly and took my hand off the banister. I had just made the awful connection.

My father had handled those filthy things. He must have subsequently handled the doorknobs on his way into the house. He had probably also gone upstairs and handled this very banister. A little later my mother had handled the banister on her way up with the clean clothes that were now in my drawers.

I uttered a cry of pain and rage; I made the whole house ring with my loud lamentations. Our home had been defiled."

OTTAVIO BELTRANO, vates & astrologus