Burglary During Father's Funeral

The burglary during the narrator’s father’s funeral turns a day of public mourning into an ordeal of private, hurried labor. After leaving the requiem, the narrator finds the family home broken into and ransacked. While the mourners are still at church, he searches the house, cleans the burglars’ revolting mess, and tries to restore order before his mother and the other guests return. The theft is not discovered by the police first, but by a grieving son who feels he must make the house presentable before anyone else sees what has happened.

The Funeral and the Return Home

The burglary follows five crowded days spent organizing the father’s death and funeral. At the funeral, the mourners are composed, in marked contrast to the earlier funeral of the narrator’s brother, where people had wept aloud and supported one another. The distinction makes this gathering quieter, but not easier for the narrator: he cannot endure the requiem. When the priest describes his father as a man of action, the narrator leaves the church and drives home.

At the front door, the key will not turn because the chain has been fastened from inside. Hearing something, the narrator climbs over the garden wall, circles the house, and reaches the back entrance. There a broken window and an open door confirm that someone has entered. The route from the funeral to the house abruptly changes the day’s task: instead of returning to the family’s bereavement, he arrives at the scene of a crime.

The House Ransacked

Inside, the damage is widespread. Drawers have been pulled out and emptied, and the narrator finds no one in the house. In the kitchen, the intrusion is made unmistakable by its filth: someone has defecated on the table. Cold platters and bowls of fish, brought from the psychiatric hospital kitchen, have been hurled against the walls. Salmon and slices of ham lie scattered through the room.

The narrator takes a large knife and goes upstairs, shouting as he moves from room to room and searches the cupboards. His anger is immediate, but the search finds no burglar. Returning downstairs, he confronts the kitchen again, now with the knowledge that the mourners will soon be coming back. The house is both a crime scene and the place where the funeral gathering is expected to resume; the mess cannot simply be left for the family to discover.

Cleaning Before the Guests Return

The narrator concentrates on removing the evidence of the intrusion. He scoops the feces into a bag with a spoon, scrubs the table with a cleaning product, and kneels on the kitchen tiles to push together the scattered pickled herring and eel pieces. The smell of the burglars’ excrement, the fish, and the cleaner turns his stomach. He goes to the bathroom and vomits, then returns to the work.

He hides the plastic bag beneath other rubbish in the outdoor bin and scrubs his hands with his father’s nail brush. He vomits again, rinses his mouth, and goes back to tidying. The sequence is practical and physical: conceal the worst of the mess, clean what can be cleaned, and put the rooms back into a condition that will not confront the returning family with the full scene. His father’s nail brush, an ordinary personal object, becomes part of this unceremonious work of cleaning up after the dead man’s funeral has already begun.

Discovery and Aftermath

By the time the first mourners return, the narrator has at least put the drawers back in place. Only then does he call the police. The delay means that the burglary is reported after the funeral gathering has already been disrupted and the narrator has spent time cleaning and restoring the house. Around twenty friends and relatives had come to the home between the funeral and requiem, and most had left their handbags there. Most discover that something is missing. The narrator’s grandmother is the exception: she had hidden her handbag behind an armchair.

The narrator’s mother is badly shaken, and the narrator’s strength is fading too. A police officer explains that a gang often targets homes during funeral ceremonies. He adds that the family was fortunate not to have found a so-called watcher left behind by the burglars. The officer’s explanation gives the break-in a wider pattern, but does not undo its intimate consequences: the family’s gathering has offered an opportunity for theft, and the narrator has had to meet the violation alone before he could tell anyone.

Significance of the Interruption

The burglary collides with mourning at its most ceremonial. The narrator leaves a requiem he cannot bear, only to find the home invaded; then, rather than immediately summon help, he undertakes the work of making the house fit for the mourners’ return. The episode’s force lies in that change of duties. Funeral arrangements have occupied the preceding days, but now the son is cleaning fish from the floor, hiding a bag of excrement, and putting drawers back while his father’s friends and relatives are still gathered elsewhere.

The account does not present the break-in as a mystery solved through clues. Its immediate emphasis is the physical sequence of discovery, anger, searching, disgust, cleanup, and delayed reporting. The narrator’s effort to spare his mother the sight of the mess is concrete in the work he undertakes before she returns. Yet the theft cannot be made harmless by restoring the rooms: the missing belongings, his mother’s distress, and his own exhaustion remain after the house has been put back in order.