build your house around my body by violet kupersmith

It depicted a dead or dying soldier draped across the lap of a seated woman, his fingers still clenched around his rifle, the shirt of his uniform falling open to reveal the artist’s careful rendering of his abdominal muscles. The statue was over fifteen feet high, carved out of sumptuous black granite. Towering dark and noble over the graves at the center of the cemetery was the envy of all the neighboring towns: the new war monument. A thumb-shaped chunk of pale limestone, worn egg-smooth, marked the final resting place of an elephant named Su-Su, who had passed away in 1953. One wealthy local clan with several well-polished tombs to their name had cultivated an elaborate cactus garden around the perimeter of their plot, designed to shield from view the five small dirt heaps of the adjacent tract where five children were buried, all of them dead from malnutrition back in the early eighties. There were some, of course, whose families had not been able to afford stones, so they lay beneath simple mounds of earth ringed with bricks, their incense sticks jabbed directly into the ground instead of arranged carefully in ceramic vases.

On important anniversaries, painstaking care was taken to clean the graves and offerings were burned by the interred inhabitants’ progeny, so the air was usually spiced with smoke and sandalwood from somebody’s devotions. From a distance, the cemetery resembled a dazzling miniature city with a skyline formed from the layered angles of crosses and stupa spires. Though they themselves lived in drab boxes of brick and thatch, they enshrined their dead in tombs painted peach and celadon and gold, with eaves that curled heavenward like lotus petals. Here, the living looked after the departed. The local people’s council would occasionally petition for the graves to be exhumed and their contents relocated so that the valuable acreage could be converted into more farmland, but they were never successful.

But the widest, evenest expanse of land-just west of Ia Kare, the small and unremarkable town to which it belonged-was occupied by the cemetery. Their slopes were horizontally striped with rows of coffee plants and staked peppercorn vines, and in the flat stretches between the hills farmers also tended patchy plantations of durian, lychee, cashew, and avocado trees.

Twelve hours north of saigon by bus and fifteen by motorbike, low red hills covered the land like a maculopapular rash. She has lived in Da Lat and Saigon in Vietnam, and currently resides in the United States. Kupersmith is the author of the short story collection The Frangipani Hotel.

The following is excerpted from Violet Kupersmith's debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body, about the fates of two women who are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands.

Build your house around my body by violet kupersmith