Woman of the Dead (5 page)

The sun is shining in the cemetery. Reza looks after Karl, supporting the old man. Karl can hardly stand, his legs won’t carry him, he hasn’t been able to eat or sleep. He has aged several years in these three days. Many of the mourners are weeping, the police band plays a funeral march, countless colleagues of Mark’s are present, and Massimo, Mark’s best friend, delivers an address. He remembers the good times, the operations they undertook together. Mark was one of the good cops, says Massimo, a man with a heart, unforgettable, a loss to all who knew him. Massimo sheds more tears.

One by one they throw earth down into the grave. Then the mourners leave him alone. Mark is deep down in the ground, in his coffin. He is on his own, while they all go to the restaurant and drink to him. They offer Blum help and condolences, they assure her that things will get better. She can hardly look them in the eye; they are as powerless as she is. Helplessly, she sits with a plate of chicken soup; helplessly, she tries to persuade the children to eat. There’s no more that she can do. She can only be there for them, love them, give them all she has. She mustn’t leave them alone with their pain and their fear; the children are all she has left of him. How sad they are, and how strong. They endure what has happened, are adjusting to it. They sit still and wait for the storm to pass. Blum strokes their hair, Uma’s hair, Nela’s hair. And Massimo takes Blum aside, puts his arm round her affectionately.

‘Drink this.’

‘No.’

‘Go on, have a drink.’

‘If you insist.’

‘I’m so sorry, Blum.’

‘I know.’

‘And you know that I’ll always be there for you.’

‘But even you can’t bring him back, can you?’

‘No, I can’t do that. Mark was one of the most important people in my life too; I owe him this.’

‘You owe him what?’

‘Taking care of you for him.’

‘No one has to take care of me.’

‘Yes, they do, Blum. Ute and I can help you with the children.’

‘That won’t be necessary.’

‘You’ll need all the help you can get, Blum. Don’t be so stubborn, I mean you well. You know how much I care about you and the children.’

‘You have enough problems of your own.’

‘They’re not important now.’

‘Mark said you’re getting a divorce.’

‘Let’s not discuss that here, please, Blum.’

‘Why not? Let’s talk about your failed marriage; let’s talk about your wife and her little problem.’

‘Why are you doing this, Blum?’

‘What am I doing? Look at her, she’s babbling, she can hardly stand up straight. And it’s only midday. Maybe you’d do better to take care of Ute, not me.’

‘Maybe I should leave you alone.’

‘Maybe you should.’

‘Anything you say. I’ll be off.’

‘Oh no.’

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘Please stay. I’m sorry I spoke like that, Massimo. I didn’t mean it.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I don’t know if I can manage without him. With the children, with everything. I just don’t know.’

‘You have Reza and Karl. You have me.’

‘I wish I could die. Don’t you understand that? I wish I could die.’

‘You don’t, Blum. You’re strong, you’ll cope even without him.’

Massimo passes his right hand over her back, up and down. It’s the only thing he can do, the only thing that helps. Words are no use; Blum doesn’t want to hear them. She doesn’t want to think, to envisage the future. She just wants it to be night, for the lights to go out so sleep can come. She doesn’t want to think, or feel anything but Massimo’s hand going up and down her back.

Two weeks have passed, two weeks without him. It is still summer, the children run round the garden in short dresses. Karl is sitting in his armchair while Blum hangs out washing. It is almost as if everything were all right again; from the outside looking in, life is the same. The garden, the old apple trees, the swing going back and forth, Uma flooding the flower bed in the garden, Nela rubbing earth into a doll’s hair. The sky stands still, not a cloud in sight. It still hurts. When she wakes up, when she goes to sleep, when the children talk about him. Blum knows it won’t get any better, it won’t stop eating away at her, but she has decided not to die, not to drop by the wayside. Instead, she will get up every morning and go on living for the children. Never mind how difficult it is, she must stay here, go on, put one foot in front of the other however heavy her legs feel. And never mind how much she longs to deaden her memories with pills and alcohol. She has to decide against Valium and vodka every evening once the children are in bed. She must be in working order, although she wants only to forget. Every morning she tries yet again to be cold and invulnerable. And every morning she fails.

There’s still no sign of the hit-and-run car. The driver can’t be traced, and seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. He was probably drunk, driving too fast, but he must have seen Mark. The police have no clues, there’s no black Rover in the local garages, they’ve followed up all leads. Hit-and-run, outcome fatal, say the files, driver unknown. A driver who got away with his life and his liberty, snuffing out Mark’s just like that. He could have been on his phone, typing an email, sending a text, maybe he just nodded off. Blum will never know. They’ll never find him, although Massimo is doing his best.

He’s as good as his word and has been there for her ever since the funeral, helping her to wind up Mark’s official life, visiting offices, insurance firms, lawyers, notaries. Massimo shields her from everyday life, and Reza does too. So that she can look after the children, so that she can survive, so that the tears don’t drown her. The business is running as usual because people don’t stop dying. Reza collects the dead from care homes, from the forest, from their offices, their beds, the street; he does his job the way Blum taught him. He works the whole time, he says little, his feelings are hidden somewhere obscure. He has fewer words than Massimo, in fact none at all. So he is glad that Massimo is looking after Blum, acting as a buffer for her, listening to her pain.

Massimo is a friend of many years’ standing, Mark’s colleague and indeed his superior officer. He is only three years older than Mark, but rose quickly in the ranks. Massimo spends more time at the police station than at home. Because he loves his job, he says. Because he doesn’t want to be at home, Mark used to say. His marriage is over; Ute has taken to the bottle. The children they’d wanted never came along. They tried for years. He and Ute saw Blum having babies without any difficulty. Their friends’ happiness showed up their own failure. Much as she wanted to, Ute never got pregnant and even IVF didn’t work. Their unhappiness grew worse, their desperate longing was a heavy burden on their marriage. So heavy indeed that Ute began drinking. Massimo suffers from it more every month; his friends see the unhappiness to which he wakes every morning written on his face. None of his attempts to help Ute have come to anything. He tried persuading her to go to therapy, said he would go to marriage counselling with her. Nothing worked; she wouldn’t let anyone or anything come near her. Blum realises that he is suffering more than he admits. She can see that he has already given Ute up as a hopeless case, and no longer wanted to intervene when she climbed up on the table at the funeral, blind drunk. That was two weeks ago, and he was slow to go to her aid. Trying to restrain Ute was nothing but his duty, and all that he could manage was damage limitation. Shaking his head, embarrassed to know that everyone in the room was staring and pitying him, because Ute had lost control, was screaming and shouting.
Isn’t there some bastard around here can give me a fucking child? Come along, get your bloody prick out and fuck me, why don’t you?
Ute was scrambling over the tables, screaming. Massimo eventually followed, seized her and dragged her outside.

Such marital dramas occur almost daily. Massimo is taking every opportunity to avoid his wife and come to help Blum instead. She gets all that he still has to give, and she is grateful not to be alone, to have someone other than Reza and Karl for company. Someone to put his arms round her. She is glad when his car turns into the drive, when he hugs the children, fools about with them for a moment in the garden, tries to make them laugh. Massimo is a friend – one of the good cops, like Karl and Mark. He disappears into the house with a smile, and comes back with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. Things are all in order, he tells her. She is financially secure; Mark had taken out life insurance. There’s nothing for her to worry about, he says, opening the bottle and pouring the wine. Money for Mark’s death, thinks Blum. A lot of money.
What a bloody awful world
, she says, drinking her wine in long, thirsty gulps.

The children are asleep. Massimo has gone; he put the girls to bed, read them a story, and left, although he would have liked to stay and talk to Blum a little longer. She wanted to be alone in Mark’s study, sitting in his armchair, legs up on the desk just as Mark himself used to sit drinking wine in the earthenware goblets they had brought back from Greece; they liked drinking from those rather than more ornate glassware. The red wine flows down her throat, warming her. She relishes it, for the first time feeling a little of the weight lift from her heart.

Blum looks around the room, at his computer, his files, and a thousand other things lying just as he left them twenty-two days ago when he rode off. Everything here is waiting for him to come back: objects that want to be touched, tools that want to be used. Nothing in the study shows that he is dead, and Blum still hasn’t changed that. It is the first time that Blum has been back in this room; she had simply closed the door, almost as if to shut in what was left of him. The air that he breathed, his personal things, his films, the untidiness on which he insisted – his little bit of freedom, he always said. This room was his retreat, the cave into which he shut himself when he was working, or simply when he wanted to get away from the children. His personal preparation room, he used to say, laughing. The place where he sat and thought.

She has dealt with everything else. His clothes, his shoes she has either given or thrown away. She has emptied his cupboards. Only his study was still shut up’. The mere thought of clearing it out hurt. Now she is sitting here, drinking wine. Not in pain, not oppressed by her grief. She has it under control, she can sit here drinking her wine and waiting. She has been sitting here for over an hour now, surveying the room. She doesn’t yet dare pick anything up, open a drawer, remember more than will do her good at this point. She hesitates; she wants to but she can’t. She has time, she has the night ahead of her, and the cellar is full of wine. Two hundred bottles. The thought gives her courage. Another cork comes out. Tears are no longer important, not now. She raises her wine glass and drinks to him, to her husband, her happiness. She remembers the little things: his laughter in the bathroom in the morning, his jokes after the fourth glass of wine, the way he pretended to like DIY. He was so clumsy, he hurt himself so often because he didn’t pay attention, he really had no clue what he was doing. What a darling he was.

Summoning all her courage, Blum picks up his telephone. A little world opens up, his engagements, notes, games. Blum leafs through the records of his time, she smiles because he could be so childish and playful. A grown man, a police officer, playing Tetris. His fingers caressing the display. All those text messages he sent her over the years. Their love went back and forth; a kiss would often come from him only half an hour after they had parted, and then she would send one back. All the messages he sent are stored. What she said, what he said. Memories that do her good now. Blum continues to explore, she plunges in, she swims. She and Mark are on their own for almost two hours. But then Dunya arrives.

Blum opens the folder on his mobile which contains all his saved conversations. She really just wants to see what’s behind the icon; she doesn’t mean to pry. Suddenly, his voice is back again. Mark breathes and speaks. He is back, a little tap on Play and she can hear him. Talking to a woman, a stranger whom Blum doesn’t know. At first she doesn’t understand what the woman is talking about, what Mark wants to find out. She just hears his voice, hears the sympathy in it as he speaks to the woman cautiously, almost affectionately. Mark wants her to go on talking, he wants her to tell her story. Blum listens. Seconds pass, minutes. Blum sips her wine. She wants to know who this woman is, why he is talking to her, why she is frightened. She hears Dunya, and Mark trying to reassure her.

‘Leave me alone. Please. I haven’t done anything.’

‘You don’t have to be afraid of me.’

‘Leave me alone. Don’t touch me. Go away, please. Just go away.’

‘I want to help you.’

‘I haven’t done anything.’

‘I know that. I’m not here to take you anywhere. I told you, I only want to talk to you about what happened.’

‘Go away and leave me in peace. Please.’

‘I believe you. I believe what you said.’

‘I was talking nonsense. It was nothing. I was drunk.’

‘You were under the influence of medicinal drugs. Strong tranquillisers.’

‘Exactly. I was hallucinating. I made it all up.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘I did. So now go back to your cosy little world. You don’t want to stay around here. No one does.’

‘I can help you to find those men.’

‘No.’

‘Trust me.’

‘I said no.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re a man.’

‘I’m a police officer.’

‘I’ve been to the police already. I told you all about it, I begged and pleaded, and you ignored me. You put me in a hospital bed and shook your heads over me.’

‘I’m sorry that happened. Honestly. I know we ought to have taken it all far more seriously. We shouldn’t have doubted your story for a second.’

‘You should have helped me then, but it’s too late now. I’m fine here.’

‘Living under a motorway bridge? You don’t even have a roof over your head. Someone has to look after you.’