“Well, then, you have no cause for concern. Just give me your number.”
The conversation having ended, the resource manager went over to the coffin. He had now devoted three whole days to this woman, labouring faithfully on her behalf after giving his impulsive word to make her anonymous death his business. So far he had kept it. Now, in a locked room, the two of them had finally met. Although it wasn’t the face-to-face encounter proposed to him in the morgue, it seemed intimate enough. It’s a pleasure to meet you, he smiled. I’m the manager of the bakery’s personnel department, better known as its human resources division — and you, Yulia Ragayev, having worked as a cleaning woman there, have all the rights of a terror victim as defined by National Insurance.
He placed a firm hand on the coffin to see what it was made of and to test the strength of its joints. A sleeping angel, the lab technician had called her. Was that just to goad him into identifying her, or had that expert on corpses truly detected in this one a rare, soul-stirring beauty? Now, it lay a few feet from its captive chaperone, itself a captive in the strangest of limbos, trapped between worlds, detained in a baggage terminal that was no longer in his country and not yet in hers. If he could open the coffin, he would gladly take a farewell look. Perhaps a close-up view would tell him if the Tartar eyes were real or imagined. The state of her body would not deter him. He was young and could take it. He had the pluck and imagination to reconstruct her beauty even if it was gone.
But suppose that the coffin, which had been pushed against the wall, was locked on its far side? And the room’s single window tall and set high in the wall, did not look as if it could be opened. What if there was a bad smell? He decided that it would be best to take his leave of her with words alone, in a musing, questioning eulogy. What did you want from us, Yulia? What did you hope to find in the hard, sad city that killed you? What kept you there when you could have gone home with your only son?
Had the lid of the coffin lifted and the woman inside it sat up to reply, he would not have been fazed. After all, he had everything she might need. Her good clothes were in the suitcase for her; there was also cake and bread if she was hungry, and even notebooks, pens, and pencils she could use to jot down her impressions of dying while they were still fresh …
The satellite phone rang, interrupting his thoughts. It was the consul’s husband again, still worried about him. “If you’re feeling anxious, relax. We haven’t forgotten you. If we can’t get the little pain-in-the-ass to sign, we’ll find someone to relieve you by the coffin.”
“I’m not anxious and don’t you be, either,” the resource manager replied. “I never thought this mission would be simple. Take all the time you need. I’m fine for now.”
He looked for the light switch. Unable to find it, he put the two cartons on top of the suitcase, propped his feet on them, covered his eyes with the black eye mask he had been issued on the aeroplane, and lay back to get some rest.
10
The eye mask did its job, which was fortunate, because it took the consul’s husband a while to get him released. The suspicious officer, fearful of being saddled with another coffin, was loath to exchange his foreign hostage for a local one.
The resource manager was dozing when he felt a friendly hand on his shoulder. It belonged to the consul’s husband, a sturdy man of about seventy with a head of grey curls, who had come to keep his promise. An ex-farmer with hearty looks and a bluff manner, he seemed to have come straight from the fields. Pulling off his boots and shaking the snow and mud from them, he removed several layers of clothing, spread them casually on the coffin, took a pair of reading glasses from his pocket, whipped out the weekend edition of a Hebrew paper that had arrived on the flight from Tel Aviv, and declared his readiness to settle in for the duration. Only then did the officer, persuaded the substitution was genuine, permit the emissary to exchange the gloomy terminal for a foggy morning.
Climbing back up to the ground floor, he found himself locked in a second time, the small airport having been shut down between flights. A key had to be sent for before he could exit and join the group waiting for him beneath a small canopy. A flashbulb popped as he cautiously made his way between banks of black slush. He looked up to see the grinning photographer. He was not, he thought ruefully, going to have much privacy on this trip.
The tall consul, dressed in a black fur coat, a red woollen cap, and galoshes, made him think of a fairy godmother — or of an old peasant, like her husband, magically transported from some penurious henhouse or barn to a position of state. Underneath the canopy, which stood in an icy expanse devoid of a single building or tree — or anything at all except an old, one-winged military aeroplane — she embraced him warmly, apologized for the treatment he had received, declared that the authorities’ apprehensions were nevertheless not unfounded, and introduced him to the deceased’s husband, Mr Ragayev, a tall, gaunt engineer with dull eyes in a haggard face. His obsequious bow suggested that he had been informed by the consul or her husband, or perhaps even by the weasel, of the compensation sent by the bakery from the land of horrors he had left behind. And yet even though he had since remarried he seemed in no mood to forget the grief and insult meted out to him by the woman who had abandoned him and was now returning in a metal box. Since she was deaf to his complaints, he was forced to voice them to her chaperone.
“Tell him to be quick,” the resource manager whispered to the consul, who was translating. A brightening dawn flung glittering swords at a low, leaden sky. He was only now beginning to grasp what the arctic cold of this country was like. Moreover, the consul was finding it difficult to be concise, since she felt compelled to defend the country she represented against the ex-husband’s bitter reproach that that country had irresponsibly extended the visa of a woman to whom it would offer only poverty, solitude, and death. Once that peculiar friend of hers had fled back home in disappointment, the gaunt engineer complained, his ex-wife should never have been allowed to remain only to perish in a blood feud that was none of her concern. And the most absurd part of it (the consul was translating as fast as she could) was that he was now expected to take charge of the body of the woman who had two-timed him! He realized, of course, that the consul’s government was paying the costs. But this was the least it could do after causing the needless death of a foreign worker whom it had neglected to expel … and who would pay for all his time and mental anguish? He was a busy engineer and not in the best of health; truth be told, it wasn’t sorrow or compassion that he felt for his ex-wife, but anger and humiliation. Of course, he was a grown man and could cope. But what about his son? The boy was so devastated by the death of the mother who had sent him back to his native land that he had refused to bury her without the presence of his grandmother, thus forcing him, the father — as if he hadn’t got enough on his mind! — to twist the boy’s arm for the sake of a woman who had let him down …
His grievances listed, the gaunt man seemed content. The shadow of a smile flitted over his pale face as he lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew out perfect smoke rings. A moment later, however, the cigarette had flown from his mouth and lay glowing on the ice. Shutting his eyes, he turned red and doubled over in pain, racked by a fit of coughing that caused him to leave the cover of the canopy, tear open his jacket, vest, and shirt, and bare his gasping chest to the elements.
“Don’t let him fool you,” came a whisper as the paroxysm continued. It was the weasel — who, in all the excitement, had forgotten the resource manager’s warning to steer clear. “It’s just an act to make you up the ante.”