His grandmother had been buried in a coffin, but among the freshly dug earth there remained only fragments of broken wood, a rotting board and indistinct white fragments. When he realized what he was looking at he quickly turned his head and forced himself to look the other way, but it was too late. He had seen the skull caked with earth, clumps of white hair falling over empty sockets. He had seen her vertebrae scattered in the clay. He understood.
