“It’s not so simple, really,” the doctor began anew.
Wim turned back the covers and measured the length of the body. “It seems to me, Doctor — like this — if we lay him across our shoulders, like a plank, I could maybe do it myself…”
“Impossible! You think with a dead body…!”
“Or I could have him on my back, piggyback, and you could prop him up from behind so that he doesn’t fall backward”—and he lightly bent forward and pulled the arms into two curves at chest height, as though putting them into two stirrups—“like this.”
The doctor hesitated before he answered: “The joints are still too stiff.”
Wim was silent.
“Have you ever actually seen a corpse?” the doctor asked suddenly, and turned the body onto its back. Wim gave a start.
“Of course,” he said hastily, “my father, a long time ago, I was very young.”
“I see.” And then he went on, staring at the blankets: “I am always surprised how few grown men and women have actually really seen a dead body. That is, in normal times. A lot of people see one for the first time in their thirties. It’s strange. Everyone has a lot more to do with love, earlier and more often, of course. But they should have to see a dead body at least once a week. Then everyone would have a better sense of equilibrium, and lots of fears and anxieties would just disappear.” He pulled his gaze back from the blankets and raised it to Wim. “Do you still remember it, then?”
“Sure I do,” Wim answered, and reflected back, thinking hard.
He was a boy, seven years old, when one day — he was wearing a black velvet coat with a cream-colored pointed collar — his mother called him into the music room, where there was an open coffin. She herself was standing, with tear-swollen eyes, in a posture that he would never forget, tall and straight with her thin figure, as though she were growing from one minute to the next, leaning against one of the double doors and saying in a soft, melodious voice — she was a singer — and a tone he had never heard her speak in before and would never hear again: “Wim, that’s Father. He is dead. Say goodbye to him, my boy.” And Wim had stepped up to the open coffin, which had a long piece of glass lying across the top, lengthwise, and had looked closely at Father. What was that under his chin? A long, wide block of wood lay on his chest and held up Father’s chin. His face looked serious and was almost totally without wrinkles. He looked different, better than he did before when he was lying sick in bed. He was wearing a frock coat with a big white carnation from the garden in the buttonhole. Wim examined the carnation and noticed that you can’t smell a flower through glass. Only in this flower, blooming behind glass but giving off no more scent, did the astonished child recognize the sign of death. His father also lay behind the glass covering and you could see him but not smell him. Two thick, burning candles stood at the head end of the coffin, and at the foot end lay a big wreath with a blue ribbon, on which was written in golden letters: TO THEIR BELOVED DADDY — THE CHILDREN.
“He’s still too young,” his aunt whispered to his mother when she saw the boy standing there.
“Thank God,” his uncle whispered back. Father’s brother had been living in the house for a week and taking care of all the necessary business. The following year, he married Wim’s mother and moved to India with her. The children were sent to boarding school.
When Wim’s aunt led him quietly out of the room, Coba came in through the other door. She was very pale and sobbing uninterruptedly. Even though she was older, the rules of family precedence demanded that the son take his leave of his father first…
“The two of us will manage it.” The doctor interrupted the silence.
“Yes,” Wim answered with conviction, as though he had had the exact same thought at the same time. How yellow Nico’s teeth looked already, like wax. Were they cold to the touch too?
“Grab his feet,” the doctor said as he gripped under the armpits and lifted the upper body from the sheets. They laid him on the floor. Then they started over, their faces turned toward each other, Wim at the foot end and the doctor at the head end, and they carried the corpse by the armpits and feet, the way it was done in old “Burial of Christ” paintings, slowly and carefully — Wim was walking backward — out of the bedroom and down the stairs.
The light was on in the stairwell. When they opened the door, they would be visible from outside.
“Let’s put him down again,” the doctor said. He seemed uncomfortable carrying the body this way.
“Here in the hall?” Wim replied, and laid the legs down on the carpet. Something inside him resisted the idea of laying the dead body right down here in the hallway, where everybody walked back and forth all the time.
The doctor straightened up, since he had been bent over the whole time they were carrying the body. “A sheet — we need some kind of sheet to wrap him up,” he said. “The pajamas will be too bright outside.”
“Marie, get a sheet, or a blanket,” Wim said after opening the door to the room where Marie sat waiting with nothing to do. “We need to wrap him in something dark.”
“A blanket?” She stood up quickly and hurried from the room. She had been staring at the clock the whole time; it was after 10:30 and there was no time to lose if Wim was to get home again before curfew. He wanted to call after her that he would get the blanket himself, if she would only tell him where… But she was already out of the room.
She was not prepared to see him again, here in the hall and lying on the floor in such a position. She had no doubt heard the men slowly, step by step, coming down the stairs with a heavy weight. But still, catching sight of him like this came as quite a shock. There, where the milk bottles and bread basket and all the other everyday things stood during the day, where the letters fell when they were slipped through the mail slot, where you walked in and out, and where he himself had come in — there he lay now, dead. The doctor was standing on the stairs, his right elbow propped on the banister and his head in the palm of his hand. In front of him, on the floor between the stairs and the door to the front room: the body.
Since she had left the front room at full speed and shut the door behind her, she had no other choice, her feet acted on their own, defending themselves as though she were suddenly standing in front of an abyss, taking a couple of tiny steps and then jumping over Nico with a little leap, a small, barely noticeable jump, just enough to clear the body. Her eyes, reflecting horror, shame, and sadness, were looking at the doctor, who was watching this performance — first her hesitation and then her helpless decision — without changing his position, bent over with his head in his hand. He nodded to her. “And some safety pins too,” he whispered, “please—”
“Of course,” she breathed, and crept sideways up the stairs.
The three of them wound the body in a blanket that had earlier been on his bed, and fastened the bundle with pins as though preparing him for a sailor’s grave. When they were done, the clock in the hall showed ten minutes to eleven. In ten minutes they could have all this behind them.
Marie turned out the light in the hall and opened the house door.
The moonless night was cold. Marie shivered. It’s good that he’s snugly wrapped in a warm blanket, she thought, and this curious idea wouldn’t let her go even though she realized in the same moment that whether it was cold or warm he wouldn’t feel anything. Nico, Nico…
The men in their coats stared out into the shapeless, chilly darkness and listened tensely for any sound. A house door banged shut a little farther up the street. There was a whistle. A dog came bounding with muffled, flying leaps across the gravel, shooting through the night. Silence.