Letter from Washington, Freud and the city of the dead

This article first appeared in Australian Book Review, September 2004

I am in Washington on a fiercely hot summer day, soon after the opening of the World War II Monument. It would have done Mussolini proud. Like all the other tourists, I am dwarfed by the sheer scale of it: its arches stand forty-three feet high. If the inspiration is European, the materials are all American: the monument is made from stone quarried in Georgia and South Carolina. I think of Kim Stanley Robinson's recent science fiction novel, Forty Signs of Rain, in which climate change results in the flooding of Washingtonin which climate change results in the total flooding of Washington. Only the tops of its taller monuments can be seen; little islands scattered across a massive lake.

The Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Wall, across the way, was opened twenty years ago. Its black granite hails from Bangalore in India. When I walk over to it, I see that it is actually two intersecting walls cut into the slope of a low hill. The monument embraces you. People touch the walls and make rubbings of names. They cry, leave flowers and 45rpm singles wrapped in plastic; they leave notes and photographs. One man makes a promise to his long dead father: 'We'll get you out, Dad.' I overhear a guide telling people that names are still being added to the existing 58,235 as more remains are found, DNA-tested, and repatriated.

It is Sunday, June 27, the day of the pride march in New York. Here in Washington, the AIDS Names Project Quilt is spread on lawns not far from the White House. It is some years since I have seen the quilt, and the acres of colourful material, patchwork and embroidery shock me all over again. As I wander around these fabric diaries, love letters and memorials, people read the names of those who have died over loud speakers. There are quilts to Christians, leather queens, fathers - and to a poodle breeder named C.H. Stardust, whose two giant poodles gaze out at me plaintively from a photograph set under plastic. There are quotes from Auden, Keats and The Princess Bride: 'Death cannot stop true love, all it can do is delay it for a while.' Back at the World War II Monument, people are looking skyward, at coats of arms and sculptures of eagles, with hands set like visors over their eyes to protect them from the glare.

In Washington, monuments to the dead cannot be avoided. In Paris, my visits to such places are more deliberate. The heroine of my next novel is fascinated with death. She is to visit the catacombs, so I go there on her behalf. At first, for a hundred stairs and a kilometre or so of underground tunnels, there is nothing to see. Then, suddenly, the drama of a sign carved in stone two hundred and fifty years ago: 'Stop! Beyond Here is the Empire of Death.' After I step through this door, it takes me a few moments to realise that the walls are no longer made of bricks, but of bones - The remains of six and a half million skeletons excavated from cemeteries in the late eighteenth century. The femurs and skulls are arranged in patterns - hearts, crucifixes, and skull and crossbones - though, apparently, in the less touristy sections they are as often chucked in heaps. The tunnels, of which I walk a fraction, were built out of the quarries that provided the limestone for Paris's earliest buildings, back in Roman times.

People have got lost and died in here, though some walls, usefully, still have the names of the streets that are above them. Members of the French Resistance were down here during World War II, as were the Nazis, though neither knew the other was there, so ornate is the maze of tunnels. People come down here to have sex, I am told, acting out in the most literal way Freud's struggle of Eros and Thanatos. It is impossible not to think of such things as the teenagers who walk through the tunnels at the same time as I do snuggle and kiss while the bones of the dead are all around us.

But the place to go if you really want to make friends with the dead is the Cimetière Père-Lachaise. I visit it with the help of a guide whom I call Marie de Parisbecause that is the tour logo she has pinned to her elegant raincoat. Marie du Paris sings and hums her way through bits of Chopin, Pottier and Piaf. (A digression: in the Marais, there is a clothes shop with a stuffed cat in the window wearing a label that claims it was Edith Piaf's cat.) We laugh at the well-rubbed trousers on the bust of the grave of the young journalist Victor Noir. 'Women who are very silly lie on him,' Marie du Paris laughs, pointing to her head in the international gesture of looniness. 'They think it will give them babies.' She lowers her voice at the grave of Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, as she tells of Montand's affair with Marilyn Monroe and how it drove Signoret to drink. At Jim Morrison's tomb, she tells us, approvingly, that while he had his demons he also had an IQ of 149. And then she starts to sing, pitch perfect though playing fast and loose with the lyrics: 'Father / I want to kill you / Mother, I want to Fuck you / this is the end.'