The light of Genevieve

Every year there was a big gathering at the Saint Mary’s Cemetery. A positively unlikely event, considering it wasn’t a funeral. They paid the gazebo rent quite a good penny so the attendant didn’t mind them.

This year they were the most numerous, twenty people and counting. One of them brought a suitcase, which pinged at the metal detector frame. The man was sturdy and business-looking, so the sudden scare seemed to make him look boyish and younger than he probably was. They were all of a certain age, when people normally lose their connections to the world, getting trapped in work, achievements or children.

The man asked to open the suitcase without him and behind the curtain. He explained that it was a sort of a surprise for the party, and he didn’t want to spoil it for himself as well.

“What do you mean, sir,” the attendant was getting furious, “You bring something you don’t even know the contents of?!”

“I’m sorry, I am just sure there is nothing criminal,” the man answered. He wiped the sweat off his burly neck though.

There was nothing criminal indeed. Some personal belongings, although rather curious in their combination. The attendant dug through a pile of knickers, a couple t-shirts wrapped in a frilly but shabby skirt, and found a great deal of metal stuff. There was a whole coffee maker! Aside from binoculars and a tiny - one saucer wide - pan. He shook it all through and when nothing blew up in his face, he decided to let it go.

The sturdy business man hurried with the suitcase to the gazebo, where others had been already waiting. The music was playing, the whiskey was served to their personal liking - someone requested to try brandy sour. It said on the gravestone it had been the buried’s favourite.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the man hopped on, presenting the small suitcase. Everybody looked at it, then at him. “Behold, as they say. This is what’s left of the Gene.”

One of the women looked at the suitcase, “I thought it’d be bigger…”

The other woman nodded at her, “I rather thought that it would be… I don’t know… colorful.”

A man snickered, “Yeah, it’s an easy assumption, considering the whiskey she left for us.”

“Well, it is what it is, and I believe it has all the clues we need to uncover who the hell was she.”

“And or if we are related.”

That was kind of crucial. The whole company had met one day at the lawyer, who announced that the legator, Genevieve Oskleide, had left them each a sum. It wasn’t a big sum - some had bought a new but cheap car, some invested into some project of theirs, others just ate it away. The code to get it though was on her grave - together with an invitation to the post-mortem party, as the wording went. It suggested that each year they would gather and get a whiskey from the cemetery attendant and dance, and just - get together. Be good friends with each other, the suggestion went on. Support each other.

It was a pretty hilarious suggestion though, as each one of them lived really far away from the other. Milana resided in Canada with her husband Nick. Jessica came from Scotland. She was already widowed, and her children came to these parties only once or twice. There were two couples from Russia, one from Ukraine, one from Belarus. Leila from Georgia, Jonas from Cyprus, and there was even a line from Turkey. 

It was Viktor from Bulgaria who brought the suitcase. They couldn’t find anyone in their familial archives who would go under Genevieve Oskleide, or any mentions of her. Their families were not connected in any sort of way, it seemed. It was kind of thrilling and just a little bit scary to learn why - why on earth did she decide to tag them in such a way? How had she known of them? 

“And most importantly, what happened to her children.”

None of them were her children. But what if they were? The woman died almost a century ago. She might be their great-great-gran or something but it was rather excluded from the start - the family trees were logged in the world’s identity systems nowadays.

“Ok, I am ready! Vitya, open it,” said Ethan, the youngest among them, coming from the USA and also - not quite the same generation, more like Jessica’s children.

“I’m not ready-I’mnotready!” panicked Sofia from India.

But the man already took to opening the suitcase, having put it on his side of the bench. 

Yet again the people of the world were exposed to the sight of an elderly lady’s knickers. Big and black, they were rather like shorts and had a nice sporty look to them. Their quality almost made the idea of spotting them forgivable.

“Wow. My mom used to wear something like that…” A woman mumbled and took a pair of black shorts into her hands. It was Stephania from Russia. “She said our gran was such a fussy wearer that she ordered stuff from some very specific places. Like… yeah! They are exactly like my mom’s. I know the shop, huh. In fact, we have a habit of ordering all our undies there.”

Everyone exchanged glances. “No, I can’t be her granddaughter. I mean, I knew my gran! I’ve got a picture of her - they look nothing alike.” She began to search for the picture.

The next lot was the skirt wrapped around the bunch of t-shirts.

They looked at the skirt all the ways, trying to find any embroidery, any hidden pockets, or just plain pockets - and the latter they found but they were empty, aside from a completely faded paper bill. They all stared at it with the air of museum-amateurs and someone even said, “Wow, real paper.”

“Maybe she was a millionaire, after all.”

Then there was a gasp from Jessica, “Leila, look! I’ve seen one like this on your husband just last year!”

It was a rather intricate tie-dye, there were words. “You’re right,” Leila said, looking for a brand name, but eventually found nothing. “I think he found it in his mother’s house and decided to keep it.”

“I mean, the tie-dye used to be rather popular back then.” They all agreed that it wasn’t any sort of an interesting lot to look too deep into, even though the pattern looked too difficult to imagine it being implemented with the tie-dye technique.

Sofia plucked out the expensive portable coffee maker. “Well, if anything, she was a descendant of Moominmamma, I guess.”

“What if she was a writer herself?!”

But no, they checked, it wasn’t Astrid, and it wasn’t the right century.

“Whoa, a whole dragon!” Ivan pulled out a knee-high knitted black sock. It had a long Chinese-style dragon in full 3D form attached to it, like it was weaving around the leg.

“I’ve got the same dragon but in a different color at home…” It was Anastasia, from Ukraine. “It’s so well-worn that we mainly use it as a Christmas tree ornament. And I’ve no idea where the other one is.” She smiled. “Well, obviously we shall find some connections to those things, but it still gives us no new info as to through what we are connected, sadly.”

They looked through all the baggage contents and found out that there was a rainbow jumping rope that had an engravement on its handle “Astana 2035”, and surely someone from Georgia had the same one back at home. There was a bike cup holder - rather used, but it bore no clues as to where it was acquired and in relation to what. There was a smelly hammock, with the “From Lera with love” embroidered on it, and one of Americans exclaimed happily “My gran’s name is Lera! Valeria! And I know she loved to visit Karelia where they would rock-climb and have a hammock party afterwards!”

Everyone cheered, as if that brought them some clarity. 

“Still. “With love?”

“Here I thought our grandparents were clients of our Gene.”

“Yeah, and she was a lesbian lover of his gran then?”

They clearly hoped to find out that Gene was someone extraordinary.

Perplexed, they looked around for some more. There was a bag of meds, well overdue, and someone even looked at them, and they weren’t anything saying - just some painkillers, blood pressure regulators, antihistamines and whatever was there in the recommendations for the first aid kit. They found binoculars next, and a corresponding grandparent with a bird watching hobby. A calligraphy pen and a tiny pan said nothing, and a still working (they tested it - it was becoming darker and colder) hand warmer in the shape of gingerbread cookie, bought, if they were to trust the markings, somewhere in China. Underneath it all they finally found something really worthy. It was an A5 case with an actual code lock on it.

“I bet this case holds it all.”

“The Holy Grail.”

“Can we cut through it? We’ve got really fancy scissors here, given by my gran.”

“No need, it’s two-five-one-one”. The voice from the twilight spooked a couple of ladies. 

“Oh my god, announce yourself!”

A young man stepped into the gazebo. He wore a dark purple hoodie and green yoga pants, and his backpack contained a cat that he began to let free the moment the party people made some space for him to sit.

Viktor unlocked the case successfully. Inside of it they found a small journal, bloated with some stickers, receipts, photos and clippings.

“Oh, that’s my grandpa!”

They all took a turn at flipping through the journal, finding their grandparents with the same lady. Now they knew how Gene looked at different ages.

“Where did you find the suitcase?” Asked the newcomer, taking the journal.

“It was in the Poetry Museum, they contacted the lawyers that initially came to us with the heritage.”

“Heritage,” he half-smiled.

“By the way, who would you be? Were you sent here by Anjelika? Or Joseph?”

“Who?” he frowned and immediately reacted, “No, no.”

“Do you somehow know how we all are connected?”

The young man looked at them with dumbfounded surprise. “My great-gran and your grannies were friends.”

“Just friends?”

They sounded disappointed. “She was just an ordinary person then, right?”

“Why the money then? I thought she’d be obnoxiously rich if she did that…”

“All this whiskey! It’s good by the way.”

“You mean, you wouldn’t do something like that for your friends?” He interrupted their chatter.

“For friends, sure. For their children… and grandchildren… It is rather weird.”

“What is weird is your absence, young man! Where were you or your parents all these years?”

The actual relative huffed out. “To make the story short, my own gran went into cryo just yesterday, so I sneakily allowed myself to defrost my great-grandpa. And he told me all about it. We just didn’t know the location of the grave, like, at all. My gran, daughter of Gene, was furious that her brother decided to fulfill the wish of Gene - to be actually buried. You see, she had some nasty cancer right after her husband went into the cryo. But instead of freezing herself - and having some really small chance of actually surviving the procedure, the cryogenics back in the days wasn’t the humanity's forte - she decided to travel around the world and visit her friends. She made it pretty far before the cancer got her. My gran was also too far to override the authorities, so the body was just sent back to where it belonged. I think it was my uncle who arranged for this all in accordance with her will. Trying to hide it from her daughter, who was trying to hide the place of the grave. Some scandal. Hence the generational lag. Now if you’ll excuse me… I brought batteries.”

“Oh, right! We got so caught up with this treasure chest that we totally forgot!”

They abandoned their snacks and drinks, left the suitcase open, and rushed towards the grave. It was a bed full of hyacinths, now in full bloom, with a grey tombstone above it. In the tombstone there was a special chiseled lining for a lighting chain. Or, more accurately, for the ending of the long line, which started somewhere six feet under and had a small tail here - which had the battery box. 

Each year they bought the longest-lasting batteries for their Gene. 

“My great-grandpa told me that one of her friends once questioned her priorities in packing her suitcase. Like, is it really a necessary thing to be put in a small carry-on suitcase? And she said it is the thing that brings her so much joy that she’d wish to be buried, wrapped in it.”

They stood there, imagining a skeleton in twinkling lights. 

And laughed.

The young man added then, looking around himself, “Maybe she was an ordinary person, but she sure knew how to make people smile.”