Woman of the Dead (3 page)

‘Do you know what you want to do, Mark? After school, I mean?’

‘I’m going to join the police. Same as you. The criminal investigation department.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, boy.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘It’s not always a pleasant job.’

‘What job is?’

‘We went to pick up a young mother at her apartment today. She’d shaken her baby to death. Her sister found them and called us. The mother was sitting on the floor cradling the baby; she cried when the paramedics took the child out of her arms. She said the baby wouldn’t stop crying. She just wanted peace.’

‘We’re out of washing-up liquid.’

‘Did you understand what I was saying, Mark?’

‘That’s life, Papa.’

‘No, it isn’t, or only for people like me who decide to earn their living that way. You don’t have to see things like that, you can avoid it.’

‘But I don’t want to.’

‘You should go to university, Mark, and then the whole world’s your oyster, you can always join the police later.’

‘But I want to join right away.’

‘Why?’

‘If it’s good enough for you, then it’s good enough for me.’

‘I know your mother would have wanted you to go to university and study. Economics or medicine.’

‘But my mother isn’t here.’

‘I know.’

‘You really don’t have to worry about me.’

‘I’m so sorry, Mark.’

‘What for?’

‘Everything.’

‘You did everything right by me, everything, don’t you understand that? So now drink that beer and stop worrying.’

Twenty years later Karl is telling the children stories. Uma and Nela love him: his beard – they rub their smooth skin against it – his voice, his arms tossing them up in the air, his laughter. Karl’s life is a simple one now. There are no more crimes, no more corpses, only the children and the armchair where he spends his days. He listens to music sitting in it for hours on end or sits out on the terrace holding his face up to the sun. Mark always keeps an eye on his father, covers him up when he has fallen asleep in his chair. The children love him; their parents can see it in their faces when they come down from the top floor and repeat the stories that Grandpa has told them.

The past is forgotten, Blum’s life before Mark. She sits at the breakfast table, smiling at the way Mark holds out his coffee cup, looking at her. Smiling as she spreads butter on her bread, tells the children how bees make honey, tells them not to dawdle, they have to go to kindergarten. She is impatient but still loving as she hurries them up, asking all the same if they want another slice of bread and honey. Watching them munch and smack their lips, spreading honey all over the table, while she talks to Mark.

‘When will you be home today?’

‘Late.’

‘Difficult case?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is it?’

‘You don’t want to know, Blum.’

‘Maybe I do.’

‘The world’s a bad place; it’s enough for me to have to deal with it.’

‘My hero, my rescuer, the good conscience of the city!’

‘There’s something strange going on here.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘No.’

‘You can, you know. I can handle it.’

‘Yes, but all the same no. I have to be certain first. Right now I’m on my own with it. I could be seeing a crime where there isn’t one.’

‘Trust your instinct.’

‘That’s the problem, because that’s exactly what I am doing.’

‘You’ll get the guilty behind bars and make sure that justice is done. And I’ll see to the old man who’s been brought to the Institute.’

‘How did he die?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Maybe I do.’

All is well, there’s no rage, no anger, no sadness, nothing like that. Nothing hurts, the clients aren’t getting on her nerves this morning, the children are behaving. There’s nothing to worry her; it’s a good day. Blum enjoys this untroubled feeling, her happiness when she looks at Mark. The corners of his mouth turning up, the peace radiating from him, his strength. She feels safe, protected, Mark is her home, he is there and he won’t go away. Never mind how loud she shouts, never mind if she gets angry, never mind whether she sometimes has doubts about life and fears it. Mark will be lying beside her when she wakes. She can sense him there, always.

Blum knows there is something troubling him, some cause for anxiety. It is gnawing away at him, silently and secretly, but Blum notices it. However hard he tries to leave his job behind when he comes home in the evening, he doesn’t always succeed. Blum can see that his thoughts are racing, that he can’t let something go, that it keeps taking his attention away from her and the children. Mark the policeman and his passion for his job. If anyone asks him what he does, he talks about it with enthusiasm. He says that there could be no better career in the world for him, nothing could stop him believing in justice. He loves what he does, he believes in it, and he is also ready to throw away the rule book now and then to achieve his aims. Mark believes in his instincts, and indeed he feels more than he thinks; logic isn’t always his strong point. He follows his gut, trusting to his nose, following up a remark, an impression. He believes in intuition, and he believes everything his father taught him, all the little details that he has observed over the years, discussing his father’s assessment of a situation over his evening beer, their long conversations about unsolved cases, even before Mark had really made up his mind to join the police. Karl was his teacher; he taught him to be human. He might have smiled at the idea of instinct when he was sixteen, but he took it to heart, and he does to this day. Sometimes you have to make decisions, Mark, and never mind what other people say, you will have to do as your heart tells you. No violence, no infringement of the law. Don’t kick a man when he is down. You’re on the side of the angels and you must never forget it. Karl made Mark a police officer, one of the best. And one who sometimes lets pity take precedence over the law. Mark always tries to discover the reason for a crime; he wants to know how it came to pass, why someone comes to be guilty of an offence. Why they will risk contempt and imprisonment. Why a man is prepared to attack a cash dispenser machine with a sledgehammer. Someone like Reza.

It was six years ago. Reza was simply after the money, or some of it, just enough to survive on. He was hungry and wanted to buy food. He had put the CCTV camera on the façade of the building out of action with a stone, and covered the camera in the cash dispenser with sticky tape. When Mark came along he was hitting the dispenser for the umpteenth time. With all his might, again and again, bringing the sledgehammer down where the cash would be. Reza never noticed Mark charging at him. Mark forced him back. It was like the war: a soldier on the ground, injured, desperate, the enemy above him with a gun in his hand. Mark was aiming it at Reza as he made him lie flat on his front and surrender.

Reza is a Bosnian, and for the last six years he has been working as an undertaker. He is Blum’s assistant, her right-hand man. He lost everything in the war, his brothers, his parents, his house. Everything burnt down; not a trace remained. The fact that he survived was nothing short of miraculous; he had hidden, had watched the Serbs slaughtering his countrymen. Overnight, he had to learn what war meant, how brutal life could be, how bloody and raucous death was. He had nothing now, no one who was there for him or cared for him, no roof over his head, no money, nothing. Nothing but blood and war and killing. He had often simply struck out on his own. It had been easy. Even before he was eighteen he had killed people in the war to survive. The memories came flooding back. Reza talked half the night through, laying out his life before their eyes. Mark and Blum listened, open-mouthed, as they heard what he had to say: incredible stories of a child toting a gun.

Mark had been on his way home. It was pure chance that he saw the man with the sledgehammer at all. A brief glance to his right changed everything, and Reza’s life took a sudden turn for the better. What Reza had expected didn’t happen. Instead of ending up in prison, he was in Mark and Blum’s villa. Instead of being kicked and humiliated, he was given food and a roof over his head. No one had seen them, no cameras, no passers-by. Nothing had been stolen; the only harm done was some damage to the cash dispenser. Mark had made his decision; he thought he was doing the right thing. The man on the ground represented no threat, and locking him up was no solution, so he took Reza home with him. He and Blum took the homeless Bosnian in, for the time being. At that time, no one guessed that he would stay for years. Blum made chicken soup, they sat at the kitchen table and listened to his story.
Thank you
, he kept saying, over and over again,
thank you
. Blum didn’t hesitate for a moment. Mark had decided to help him, and she did what Mark wanted. She was looking for a new employee at the time, which probably had as much influence on her decision as the fact that Reza was not afraid of death. It had been an everyday occurrence for so long that he did not fear the corpses on the preparation table. Everything came together. They extended the workshop under the Institute building to make it into living quarters for Reza. He had arrived.

Reza is standing in the garden, washing the hearse. He has been Blum’s devoted assistant for the past six years. Reza has improved everyone’s life; the clients, Karl and the children all like him. To Uma and Nela, Reza has always been there. The man with the funny accent is part of the family. He tosses them up in the air in summer, catches them as they come down, and smiles. Now Reza is carefully polishing the hearse. Mark is getting on his motorbike, Karl will take the girls to kindergarten, and Blum and Reza will finally attend to the old man lying in the cool room.

Blum is curious; she hasn’t seen the body yet, all she knows is that it was a gunshot to the head, the suicide of an eighty-four-year-old man who no longer wanted to live, who put an end to it all with a bullet. Reza and another driver collected him from the forensic lab yesterday. Blum is interested to know what his head looks like, how large a hole the bullet made. Only a little kiss stands between her and her next adventure, a kiss for Mark. I love you, he says again. Then he rides away.

Blum watches him go. Everything follows its normal course; the engine snarls as the man she loves sets off for his day’s work. When he has driven twenty metres, he switches on the indicator and turns back once, briefly, to look at Blum and Reza, then he steps on the gas. Blum is just about to go back into the house when she hears the bang.

She sees it, a Rover, a large black car. At first she can’t work out what is happening, she doesn’t understand. The car. The way Mark disappears. The way the big car pushes him aside, knocks him over. The way he falls, and the car drives over him. Reza beginning to run, with Blum in pursuit. Mark disappearing under the car, the loud sound of metal as the motorbike is dragged along. Mark’s body turns like a puppet, flies through the air like a toy. She runs to him, she wants to help, Reza tries to hold her back. And the car simply drives away, fast and for ever. The driver doesn’t stop to help, to express regret or horror. Just the back of a car driving away from an accident, from a motorbike lying smashed on the asphalt, from a lifeless body. He lies there, he doesn’t move. There is no sound. There’s nothing any more. All that was loud is silent again, as if nothing had happened. A fine day is beginning, the sun is shining. Mark lies in her arms. Blum screams.

Long and loud. For minutes on end her voice rises above the road. She pleads, she begs, her mouth opens and closes. Her upper body rocks forward, rocks back, Mark’s head is in her lap, blood everywhere. Tears everywhere, running down her cheeks, splashing him, wanting him to move, to breathe, to say something. She has taken off his helmet, she holds his face in her hands, she looks at him, looks into his empty eyes, she howls, she whimpers, she strokes his hair again and again with the palm of her hand. Everything is blood, everything is broken, nothing is whole any more.

Reza calls the emergency numbers, an ambulance, the police. He is running around in circles like a frightened animal, he doesn’t know what to do, how to help, there is no way out. Staring neighbours, horrified faces, no one can help. No one can bring Mark back. Five minutes ago everything was all right, five minutes ago there was still life, and now there’s only death. It has knocked everything over and crushed it. Blum knows that there is no going back now. That he will never touch her again, that his fingers will be silent, his hands, his mouth. She knows this. She has seen death a thousand times, she has seen life departed, only a body, only skin going cold. There will be no more talk, no laughing, no one to protect her any more. Mark will not come back. Blum knows it, senses it, feels it. Feels it tearing at her heart, feels everything in her cut to pieces as she screams and screams. Because the pain is growing worse every second.

Blum and Mark are in the middle of the road. The motorbike lies fifty metres away. Blum hears the children screaming too, they are crying, Blum sees Karl and Reza holding them back. They want to go to their father, they want to go to Blum, they can hear their mother. They hear how desperate she is. Police officers climb out of their car and paramedics drag her away. Blum’s fingers touch Mark one last time. The needle goes into her arm. They hold her, they press her down to the ground, she screams. Until suddenly it is warm, and the light goes out.

She has slept for thirty-six hours. Again and again she was briefly awoken, again and again she forced her eyes to close. She didn’t want to come back to the light of day, to reality, didn’t want to feel anything, see anything, accept that it had really happened. Her sole wish was to sleep, immersing herself in the fog that made everything bearable. Blum turns over and goes back to sleep. She never wants to wake again. She wants to numb herself for days on end, for weeks. Not until Uma and Nela crawl into bed with her, and only when little hands begin stroking her cheek, does she come back.