By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
Wandering through Woodbine Cemetery, I thought I might write some small fates.
In 1906, the French writer Félix Fénéon created a new form of literature, writing pithy little stories of just a few lines for a Paris newspaper. This sort of thing had been common in the papers since the nineteenth century; the brief announcements, based on news items, were used to fill in blank spots in the layout, and were known as fait-divers, usually translated as “small fates.” But Fénéon revolutionized the practice, using his irony and wit to transform this space-filler into a literary genre. A collection of his small fates was published under the title Nouvelles en trois lignes, which can mean either “the news in three lines” or “novellas in three lines.”
Fénéon’s small fates often contain a wry comment or twist: “Strikers in Ronchamp, Haute-Saône, threw in the river a worker who insisted on continuing his labor.” With a deadpan tone, they point out things that are surprising or absurd: “In Le Brabant, Vosges, M. Amet-Chevrier, 42, and his wife, 39, are from now on the parents of 19 children.” Since newspapers report on crime and violence, the terseness of the small fates can give their humor a caustic edge: “Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.”
It must be the brevity of the small fates that made me think of them in the cemetery, where lives are summarized in such a concise way, often just a name and a pair of dates on a headstone, occasionally with a single additional word, such as Mother. From the dates, you can tell whether a person died old or young. You can guess at historical events that might have had an influence: an outbreak of disease or a war. From the nearby stones, you can sometimes connect the members of a family. But that’s all. Those who bore these names were here, they lived, and they died, and all those years, all the experiences, loves and hatreds, frustrations and hopes, are summed up briefly in a carven sign.
Catbirds squalled in the high trees. The weather was finally beginning to turn, and I walked with my hands in the pockets of my jacket. The mountains in the distance made a collage: a dark line of forest, in which I could make out the individual treetops, pasted onto the blue, opaque shape of the ridge, and behind them the canvas of the sky, pale where it met the mountaintops and layered with a slatey wash of clouds. I never find it depressing or morbid to stroll in a cemetery. Walking the paths among the old graves, passing the obelisks, the urns, and the pillared family mausoleums, I was filled with the calm that comes from taking the long view. The mute stones are a reminder that the stresses of life, its strife and uproar, and even its most horrible events will end in silence.
Fénéon’s small fates adopt a similar perspective. In these laconic lines, everyone’s story becomes tiny, a mere scrap of newspaper filler. The small fate, I reflected, might be the right form for a small city, where people live lives of limited influence, and no one is expected to play a major role in the events of the day. Our newspaper reports are of merely local interest. I thought I might make some good small fates out of the crimes described there. I remembered stories I’d heard that could serve as material, like the one about the housebreaker who, surprised in the night, jumped out a window and fled, but was easily identified afterward because he’d left his prosthetic leg behind on the lawn. Or the one about the would-be burglar who banged on a front door, claiming to be a police officer, and whose trick failed because, as the inhabitants of the house could see clearly in the porch light, he had neglected to put on a shirt.
And there was the break-in at our house, too—surely a small-scale crime, emblematic of the misdeeds of ordinary people in a commonplace town. One night we awoke to a sound of shattering glass. Dulled by sleep, we assumed one of our kids had dropped something in the dark. We saw a cellphone light glinting on the stairs, which we also took as belonging to one of our own teenagers. In my groggy state, I found it odd, but not shocking, that this kid was wearing sneakers in the middle of the night, which I could hear squeaking on the floor.
My husband got up to investigate and found the living-room floor covered with glass from a broken pane in our front door. The intruder had simply reached in and unlatched it (prospective burglars, please note that we have installed better locks!). He was now sitting on the couch, clad in a hoodie and texting on his phone, for all the world like our own son, but although he was young—in his early twenties, based on my husband’s best guess in the dark—he was definitely not our child.
“Sir,” my husband said sternly, “you need to leave.”
Oh, the ineptitude of small-town crooks. Their sorry, haphazard, goofy schemes. They will never get into the history books. Not one of them will destroy a river or start a war halfway around the world. What was this ninny doing? Slumped on the couch, he seemed hardly aware that he was in somebody else’s house. I imagine him tapping out melancholy, disappointed texts (there wasn’t even a TV in here!). Ordered to leave, he obediently went outside. My husband suspected he was deeply under the influence of some drug. Lacking the sense to leave the scene of the crime, he sat down on our front steps. My husband had to shoo him off the place.
In the cemetery, I walked up to the pretty little chapel, admiring its greenish, coppery doors and art nouveau rosettes, thinking of our small thief, remembering how we called the police more for his protection than ours—if he’d broken into the house next door, our neighbor, who kept a pair of guns at the ready, might have shot this addled boy. The chapel was locked, as usual. I peered through the bars at the window on the far wall, whose stained glass filled the interior with color, the brilliant hues of an image of Jesus in a red robe, cradling a lamb, surrounded by an aquamarine sky. Such vibrancy hidden behind the stone walls, like the life behind a name, or the drama and suffering behind one of Fénéon’s small fates. I realized I’d already thought too much about our break-in, and even now I was wondering what had happened to that young man. And I knew I would never write my small fates, because I couldn’t get into the right mindset. None of our fates seemed small to me.
