If only those Tartar eyes hadn’t brushed his hand as the young lips touched it! He now had a clear notion of what the cleaning woman must have looked like. For the first time since his involvement in the affair, he felt obliged not only to see it through all the way to the end but also to feel it all the way, too.
He closed the shutters, returned to the consular bed, buried his face in the velvet pillow with a slight feeling of nausea, and covered himself again. It was late in the day when the loud, merry voice of the consul’s returning husband woke him.
He slipped into his shoes, folded the blanket, straightened the bedcover, and entered the living room. The consul and her husband were sitting down to another meal.
“You’re all set.” The old farmer’s blue eyes twinkled. “We’ve found you a good four-by-four vehicle with snow tyres for the roughest roads. The doctor and I had a look at the document you brought. It could use some literary editing, but its contents are encouraging.”
“Meaning?”
“That she’s been properly embalmed and is in no rush to be buried. You can travel to the ends of the earth with her. That’s no cause for concern.”
“Then what is?”
“The storm that’s on its way.”
“Your wife …” The resource manager felt a nervous flutter. “She must have told you how much I’d like you to come with us. You can be in charge. That way I’d have a private consul of my own …”
“He’s already my private consul,” said the consul affectionately, stroking her husband’s silver curls.
“In a manner of speaking,” the husband chuckled, planting a kiss on his wife’s cheek.
“Naturally, you’d be compensated for your time and effort.”
“Don’t worry about that,” the old farmer said. “I’d do it for nothing, out of sheer sympathy and curiosity. But if you want to pay me, why not?”
“I’ll pay handsomely.” The emissary was moved. “I’ve had faith in you from the moment I met you.”
The consul smiled and put another dumpling on her husband’s plate. “If you have faith in me too,” she said, “you’ll pull up a chair and eat some solid food. Do you hear that wind? It’s getting stronger and whispering, ‘It’s time to get going.’”
PART THREE The Journey
1
Tell us, you hard people: After desecrating the Holy Land and turning murder and destruction into a way of life, by what right do you now trample on our feelings? Is it because you and your enemies have learned to kill each other and yourselves with such crazy impunity, bombing and sowing endless destruction, that you think you can leave a coffin, with no explanation or permission, in the courtyard of an apartment building in someone else’s country and disappear without so much as a by-your-leave?
How could you have failed to think of our children, suddenly faced, among garbage cans and gas canisters, with an anonymous death not hallowed by flowers or prayers? Didn’t you think of the nightmares they might have? Of the questions they might ask us? Heartless though you are, you must know that only a clever neighbour with the wits to shield them kept their play from turning into horror.
And what were we supposed to do? How were we to protect ourselves? By calling some numskull of a policeman and bribing him to believe that we had nothing to do with it? How could we prove that a corpse that turned up one Saturday afternoon in our courtyard belonged to no one?
There was nothing to do but clench our teeth and look out of our windows until you returned. At dusk you came breezing back in an armoured vehicle from some ancient war. We recognized you at once: hardened foreigners, a raceof cunning wanderers who — again without explaining yourselves — loaded the coffin ontoa trailer and disappeared into the darkness. The dictators who ran our lives until recently behaved the same way.
And even afterwards, oddly enough, we felt no relief. A faint, inexplicable sorrow continued to gnaw at us. We still didn’t know whose body it was or how it had died. Where had it come from? Where was it going? Our biggest grievance against you is: Why did you make off with it so quickly?
It wasn’t easy for the two journalists to set out on such short notice from a small hotel in which they had made themselves at home. Yet in a winter like this they could never have managed to reach the grandmother’s village on their own. Moreover, they knew that a coffin’s voyage over distant steppes, undertaken at the whim of an orphaned boy, would grip their readers more than a mere grieving old woman reunited with her dead daughter.
The transportation offered them was better than they had expected, the driver having convinced the consul’s husband — now promoted by the human resources manager to full acting consul — to rent, not a minibus, but a converted army-surplus personnel carrier. Square and steel-plated, it had huge wheels that kept it well off the treacherous ground; to enter it they had to use a ladder. Though its exterior was still combat grey, great pains had been taken to refashion it comfortably within. It had been stripped of its battle stations and given wide, well-upholstered seats, baggage racks, and overhead lights. Inside, all that remained of its military past were the silent green dials on its dashboard and two tripods welded to the floor. The trailer bearing the woman’s coffin had no doubt once been used to transport a heavy mortar or ammunition crates.
The driver had been reinforced as well. The acting consul, who wore his wife’s warm red wool cap as the badge of his promotion, had acceded to the young man’s request and drawn on the emissary’s generous expense account to hire a second driver, who just happened to be the first driver’s elder brother. An expert navigator and mechanic, he urged the group to set out without delay and use the night time to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the approaching storm.
The resource manager, unfamiliar with local prices, had no idea what all this would cost. Yet the fact that the pittance he had paid the embittered ex-husband had sufficed to make the man drop all complaints encouraged him to think that in this case, too, the expense would not be great. For a reasonable sum he would restore the owner’s humanity, which had been maligned by the journalist who now joined the photographer in admiring the converted carrier.
“But where’s the child?” the resource manager asked anxiously, concerned that the handsome youngster might have vanished at the last moment.
“Child?” The new consul objected to the term. “Is that what you take him for? Wait till you see where we’re about to pick him up. You can tell me then whether you think he’s a child …”
The city’s streets were broad and deserted. There were few pedestrians and the shops were closed, because of the night or, perhaps, the storm. The high-placed headlights of the vehicle were reflected by the stairways and entrances of monumental buildings decorated with turrets and spires and guarded by bearded sentinels in sheepskin coats. A group of middle-aged, snugly wrapped women with shopping baskets stood silently on a corner, awaiting transportation back to their village.
On the outskirts of town, the party entered a parking lot. It belonged to an abandoned factory, beside which piles of unidentifiable raw materials lay rotting. A loudspeaker attached to a tall chimney blasted earsplitting disco music. The powerfully built mechanic, doubting the consul’s competence in such matters, went inside and emerged a few minutes later with the delicately built boy in tow. The young man’s face had an alcoholic flush; he carried a small backpack and was dressed in the same pilot’s hat and overalls he’d worn that morning. They seated him in the back among the bags and suitcases and told him to keep an eye on his mother’s coffin, which, though firmly connected to the trailer, might be jolted loose.