I got up and brushed down my clothing, which was looking rumpled – after all, I’d slept in it for two Nights – and peeped out of the room. In the hall, in a pool of melted snow, stood two men from the village. Both were tall, with broad shoulders and moustaches. They had come inside because I hadn’t locked the door, and perhaps for that reason they had a justified sense of guilt.
‘Would you please come over to the cottage?’ said one of them in a deep voice.
They smiled apologetically, and I noticed that they had identical teeth. I recognised them – they worked as lumberjacks. I’d seen them at the village shop.
‘I’ve only just come back from there,’ I muttered.
They said the Police hadn’t arrived yet, and they were also waiting for the priest – the roads had been snowed in during the Night; even the road to the Czech Republic and Wrocław was impassable, and the container lorries were stuck in long traffic jams. But news travels quickly about the neighbourhood, and some of Big Foot’s friends had come on foot. It was nice to hear that he did have some friends. It looked to me as if the adverse weather conditions were improving their mood. It’s easier to cope with a snowstorm than a death.
I followed them, trudging through the fluffy, pure white snow. It was fresh, and the low winter Sun gave it a blush. The men were wearing thick rubber boots with felt uppers, which is the only winter fashion for the men around here. Using their wide soles, they trod out a small tunnel for me.
Several other men were standing outside the cottage, smoking cigarettes. They bowed hesitantly, avoiding eye contact. The death of someone you know is enough to deprive anyone of self-confidence. They all had the same look on their faces – of ritual solemnity and formal ceremonial grief. They spoke to each other in muffled tones. Whoever had finished smoking went inside.
All of them, without exception, had moustaches. They stood gloomily around the folding couch where the body lay. Now and then the door opened and new men arrived, bringing snow and the metallic smell of frost into the room. Most of them were former state-farm workers, now on benefits, though occasionally employed to fell trees. Some of them had gone to work in England, but soon returned, scared of being in a foreign place. Or they doggedly ran small, unprofitable farms that were kept alive by subsidies from the European Union. There were only men in the cottage. The room was steamy with their breath, and now I could smell a faint whiff of ingested alcohol, tobacco and damp clothing. They were casting furtive, rapid glances at the body. I could hear sniffling, but I don’t know if it was just the cold, or if in fact tears had sprung to the eyes of these great big men, but finding no outlet there, were flowing into their noses. Oddball wasn’t there, or anyone else I knew.
One of the men took a handful of flat candles in little metal cups from his pocket and gave them to me with such an overt gesture that I automatically accepted them, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I was meant to do with them. Only after a lengthy pause did I realise what he had in mind. Ah, yes – I was to position the candles around the body and light them; things would become solemn and ceremonial. Maybe their flames would allow the tears to flow and soak into the bushy moustaches. And that would bring them all relief. So I bustled about with the candles, thinking that many of them must have the wrong idea about my involvement. They took me for the mistress of ceremonies, for the chief mourner, for once the candles were burning, they suddenly fell silent and fixed their sad gazes on me.
‘Please begin,’ a man whom I thought I knew from somewhere whispered to me.
I didn’t understand.
‘Please start singing.’
‘What am I to sing?’ I asked, genuinely alarmed. ‘I don’t know how to sing.’
‘Anything,’ he said. ‘Best of all “Eternal Rest”.’
‘Why me?’ I asked in an impatient whisper.
At this point the man standing closest to me replied firmly: ‘Because you’re a woman.’
Oh, I see. So that’s the order of the day. I didn’t know what my gender had to do with singing, but I wasn’t going to rebel against tradition at a time like this. ‘Eternal Rest’. I remembered that hymn from funerals I had attended in my childhood; as an adult I never went to them. But I’d forgotten the words. It turned out, however, that all I had to do was mumble the beginning and a whole chorus of deep voices instantly joined in with my feeble one, producing a hesitant polyphony which was out of tune but gathered strength with every repetition. And suddenly I felt relief myself, my voice gained confidence and soon I had remembered the simple words about the Perpetual Light that, as we believed, would enfold Big Foot as well.
We sang like that for about an hour, the same thing over and over, until the words ceased to have any meaning, as if they were pebbles in the sea, tossed eternally by the waves, until they were round and as alike as two grains of sand. It undoubtedly gave us respite, and the corpse lying there became more and more unreal, until it was just an excuse for this gathering of hardworking people on the windy Plateau. We sang about the real Light that exists somewhere far away, imperceptible for now, but that we shall behold as soon as we die. Now we can only see it through a pane of glass, or in a crooked mirror, but one day we shall stand face to face with it. And it will enfold us, for it is our mother, this Light, and we came from it. We even carry a particle of it within us, each of us, even Big Foot. So in fact death should please us. That’s what I was thinking as I sang, though in actual fact I have never believed in any personalised distribution of eternal Light. No Lord God is going to see to it, no celestial accountant. It would be hard for one individual to bear so much suffering, especially an omniscient one; in my view they would collapse under the burden of all that pain, unless equipped in advance with some form of defence mechanism, as Mankind is. Only a piece of machinery could possibly carry all the world’s pain. Only a machine, simple, effective and just. But if everything were to happen mechanically, our prayers wouldn’t be needed.
When I went outside, I saw that the moustachioed men who had summoned the priest were now greeting him in front of the cottage. The priest hadn’t been able to drive all the way here – his car was stuck in a snowdrift, so they’d had to bring him here by tractor. Father Rustle (as I privately called him) brushed off his cassock and gratefully jumped to the ground. Without looking at anyone, at a fast pace he went inside. He passed so close that his scent enveloped me – a mixture of eau de Cologne and smouldering fireplace.
I noticed that Oddball was extremely well organised. In his sheepskin work coat, like the master of ceremonies, he was pouring coffee from a large Chinese thermos into plastic cups and handing them out to the mourners. So there we stood outside the house, and drank hot, sweetened coffee.
A little later the Police arrived. They didn’t drive, but walked up, because they’d had to leave their car on the asphalt – they didn’t have winter tyres.
There were two policemen in uniform and one in plain clothes, in a long black coat. By the time they reached the cottage in their snow-caked boots, panting heavily, we had all come outside. In my view, we were showing courtesy and respect towards the authorities. Both uniformed policemen were stand-offish and very formal, visibly seething with rage because of the snow, the long journey and the general circumstances of the case. They brushed off their boots and disappeared into the house without speaking. Meanwhile, quite out of the blue, the fellow in the black coat came up to me and Oddball.