Kile Smith

This is not the Pines. It might as well be, I’m thinking, but it’s not South Jersey. It’s not Central, that’s New Brunswick, isn’t it?—but South… well, no, it can’t be South this far up. Well, then, it must be Central, has to be Central Jersey. Not the suburbs, although there are housing tracts among the horse farms and tree farms. Every once in a while there’s a lake that is quiet and pretty but so are all lakes; these aren’t picturesque so much as alone. There are outlets: they must be different from stores, or they would call them stores, wouldn’t they. They look just like stores. But they call them outlets, Premium Outlets, they call them. Great Adventure is here, right around here anyway, but you don’t see it, signs you see. School Bus Stop Ahead signs you see here, too, so there must be people around, with children enough, among the few houses that were here before the tracts, one or two or three at a time, within the waves of eastern white pine and white oak and pitch pine and thin, wild rhododendron that lap against the shoulders of the roads running through them.

No, to me—who grew up well below, two miles from the widening Delaware, on a latitude with Petty’s Island and Philadelphia’s Port Richmond, nestled in Coolidge-era housing separated by small, reckless highways designed for slower cars, by industrial parks producing ink resins and truck parts—to me it’s that large swath between Fort Dix and, oh, Freehold, say—between Lakehurst and the waist of New Jersey just below Trenton—where a road will connect two towns and the name of the road is the name of the two towns, so that you know where it begins and where it ends, that is, if it doesn’t change names at a bend or if they don’t just call it by its three-digit county number—where leafy Moorestown’s Main Street becomes sun-baked Marne Highway skirting the freight tracks and then something else and again something else once more—pushing an hour or so by car in the direction… well, in the direction of (why not?)… of Providence, and of Newfoundland: not mysterious, not really, but out there somewhere and certainly not known, not really, not on the way to anything—not the Shore, not the Pines, not New York; even for the northern Shore towns you’d take 70 or even 195 if you started from up that way—no, you wouldn’t go anywhere around here unless you knew somebody, and I never did.

I came here to look at the grave of Alexander Gretchaninoff, and I found it. In front of a church on a hill I am standing in front of it, looking at an egg sitting on the lower ledge of the six-foot-high gravestone, an egg left there a few weeks earlier, probably, after Russian Orthodox Easter, to symbolize the life of the Resurrection. It symbolizes the Resurrection but it also tells you that somebody was here, and that’s a good symbol, too.

It could be why Jews leave stones on graves. I’ve never asked, but I know it’s why they piled up stones at Gilgal, after 40 years in the wilderness, after crossing the Jordan on dry ground into Canaan; they said so. It might be called an altar, but it’s just stones piled up, piled up so that when, years later, a boy would ask his dad Why are there stones piled up like that?, his dad could tell him It’s because that’s where we crossed the river, son, on dry ground, after 40 years in the wilderness. A boy knows, everybody knows, that stones don’t pile up like that by themselves, and stones don’t sit on graves, and eggs don’t sit on graves. Somebody has to be there. And now you’re here, and here and now you have been attached to someone else. The someone else who was buried here and the someone else who was standing here.

You’ve just been attached and that’s a good symbol, that’s more than a symbol now that you think about it.

The accent is on the third, not second syllable: Gretchaninoff. Two Russians have instructed me on this point. Nicolas Slonimsky also states this, in his translator’s foreword to Gretchaninoff’s autobiography My Life. Where I work we spell it Aleksandr Grechaninov. I know the reasons behind the spelling, behind the transliteration from the Cyrillic, but to be honest we spell it that way because the Library of Congress spells it that way and to communicate you must have standards; I understand that. But here, where this Russian Orthodox church buried him and carved this stone, that seems to me to be a pretty good standard, too, and they spell it Alexander Gretchaninoff.

Thanks to Sandra Dackow for the photo

His name’s in Cyrillic on the front, but they inscribed the “English” or Roman letters on the side and while I’m standing here I’m thinking that it was kind of them to do that. Under his name and dates is the word Composer, and his profile is on the front, too, in bas-relief. They are proud of him. In front of this church that sits on a hill in New Jersey is his grave.

The Czar gave him a salary because of the religious music he wrote, but the Revolution took the Czar away and then the Revolution took the Composer’s salary away. He left in 1925, moved to Paris, moved to New York City, and the Philadelphia Orchestra played his Fifth Symphony, his last symphony, in 1939. He became an American citizen in the 1940s.

He was never in style. Fashions came and went—Scriabin, Prokofiev, Stravinsky early, middle, and late—and he, being a foregone 19th-century Romantic, avoided every fashion. Maybe because of that or maybe because he wrote religious music as if it meant so much it hurt him or maybe because of a hundred other reasons, waves of reasons that floated him west, he had no money. Friends gave concerts of his music to support him, talked famous people into performing his music, gave him envelopes with cash so that he wouldn’t starve. Then his wife died, the woman he left Russia with, and then he died, and then the church buried him here, 91 years after he was born. Died the year I was born.

My brother, who knows more about these roads than anyone I would know, told me, in the way older brothers tell younger brothers things, “make a right at the first intersection and keep your eyes open,” and I did. I came here to look at the grave of Alexander Gretchaninoff, and I found it, and I am standing in front of it, and with my eyes open I am looking at an egg sitting on the lower ledge of the six-foot-high gravestone.

I walked back to the car in the parking lot. I walked over the spiky hard grass that grows in the sandy New Jersey coastal plain, to the car under the trees where it was cool. And driving back I wanted to keep to the three-digit county roads, not too soon crossing back across the river. And somewhere approaching New Egypt I felt that I was not driving, but that the car was running, like the way they say a ship runs, running along a channel, parting the waves. And through the pines and rhododendron I was trailing a silver Maxima that slowly pulled away, and I was running, floating west over the macadam that sparkles (there is a kind of macadam that sparkles, perhaps you’ve seen it).