The Cemetery Without Graves: The Epic of the Dead Who Were Never Buried

After wars, earthquakes and migrations have erased its graves under roads and buildings, a city decides to build a cemetery without digging any grave: slender glass columns and threads of light from which the names of the dead hang in the air. Visitors come: an old woman whose fingers pass through her husband's name, a child relieved not to find the name of his missing father, and a man who finds his own name and is told by a clerk that the system cannot change the records of the dead. A storm mixes the names of soldiers with those of their enemies, the rich with the poor, rulers with the ruled; a name that refuses to glow leads families to leave small stories beneath the names, and when some names vanish the city learns that a person can die again when his name stops passing through anyone's memory. For the dead whose names nobody knows, the drowned, the missing and children never registered, an artist proposes luminous empty rectangles that become the most haunting part of the place. Near the end the names rise above the city like a human galaxy saying only “I was here”, and long after the city has gone a lone light in the desert tells a child that others stood there before him.