Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

It was Soren himself who awakened Sambul, telling him from the doorway that he better get out or his skin might fall off. Sambul made Soren rest for that day, but his patient could eat again, and the cough was occasional, a kind of punctuation. He was resurrected, a minor miracle, again.

The whole estate was uneasy. It had been a week since the drowned man was discovered, and as time progressed from his entombment in the basement freezer, the idea had seemed to grow more and more perverse to the servants, the guides, and Sambul. The easiest and most obvious thing would have been for Soren, as soon as the next day’s sun had risen, to order a few of the workers to load the body into the back of one of the trucks and make the long drive into the city, depositing the anonymous corpse at the municipal morgue. But this had not been ordered during Soren’s incapacitation, and wasn’t now, though Soren was now able to make the car ride to the village himself.

They stood in a dusty square that could have been any square they’d been in so far that day, any place they’d stopped in Amdin or any of the other slums within driving distance of the estate. Colorful wash was strung across the roofs of the dun-colored buildings and flapped gently in the breeze. A group of old men sat in dirty plastic furniture and played dice games while drinking Coca-Cola from glass bottles. Sambul leaned against a building in the shade, keeping an eye on the car.

It had been agreed that this would be their last stop. Soren had made it known to all the servants and guides, some of whom were getting panicked and angry, that if he and Sambul couldn’t find a relative or someone who could speak for the man this afternoon then he would take care of the body the next day and it would no longer be kept so unnaturally. As the locals who spoke to them had, slum after slum, proven unable to place the man, Soren had grown more and more moody and upset. A curl of pink had come into his cheeks, which in a different life might have meant good health but did not in this one, Sambul knew.

Soren, the woman he’d come to see, and a short, round man came spilling out of the shack.

“My sister demands to be compensated for her information!” the fat man was shouting melodramatically.

Soren ignored him. He held up the picture of the dead man’s face and put it right in front of the woman’s eyes. Sambul pushed himself off the wall.

“How do you not ask him where he’s from? How do you not take his name?” Soren shouted at the woman over the fat man’s protests.

The woman ran one of the illegal liquor bars that were rife in the slums. She’d apparently once rented the backroom to the dead man, or someone who looked just like him, for one night. This was all she’d managed to say, however, before her brother had gotten the idea of a reward.

“You didn’t hear his accent, you didn’t know where it was from?” Soren shouted at her.

“No!” the woman shouted back, half-nervous, struggling to be defiant about something, at least.

Soren was still holding the picture right in front of her face. The woman was ducking and moving, trying to look at him around it, but he only moved it with her.

“But you recognize the face, yes?” Soren said.

The woman stopped her bobbing.

“I don’t know,” she said, subdued.

“Now you don’t know,” Soren said.

The woman was quiet. There was a pause. Soren’s heavy breathing was loud in the square.

“You’re a liar,” Soren said, and spit at the woman’s feet.

At this the little fat man rushed forward and shoved Soren, who went flying, tripping backward comically before collapsing in the dry dirt. The fat man immediately began backing away, reaching for his sister and looking around wildly. Sambul started toward where Soren lay, crumpled. As he passed the group of old men, they laughed hoarsely at Soren, who was trying to get up and failing. Sambul hissed through his teeth at them, raising the back of his hand and juking his upper body sharply in their direction, and they shut up, looking up at him with drawn faces as they scooted their plastic chairs inside.

Sambul squatted to help Soren up but Soren pushed him away, so Sambul stood back and watched as Soren — now on all fours, coughing hard, saliva dripping in long strands from his mouth — crawled toward him. When Soren got close enough he used Sambul’s body to drag himself up, finally getting himself to a standing position, where he wavered unsteadily. He listed forward and Sambul caught him, helping him regain his tenuous balance. Sambul left his palms against Soren’s chest, as if keeping him from trying to move. They stood there like that for a minute, Soren looking over Sambul’s shoulder not at the building the man and the woman had disappeared into but instead at the center of the square, at the nothing of the dirt and the dust and the light. Sambul thought of Soren’s face on the day they’d found Peter Oprong, of how much, perversely, he’d loved Soren in that moment, in the sickly hopefulness of his gaze, in the truth already dawning on him, his body already giving up the struggle to get past Sambul, to see what Sambul would not let him see. Now here Soren was, staring at nothing, seeing something else. The double vision commanded by memory. Sambul waited now, watching Soren for a sign that he was done, that he was ready to accept Sambul’s assistance and go, and he thought of the pointlessness of struggling so hard to gain purchase on a world so thoroughly mortgaged by the dead.

In the car on the highway, they were quiet, Soren slouched low in the wide backseat, breathing quickly, shallowly, exasperated, stilled.

“It’s not like,” he said, “it’s not like he doesn’t have a name. It’s not like there’s no one who knows it.”

They’d mistimed their final visit, Sambul could see now, as the sun swung low over the tree line that undulated beside the highway and dusk gathered itself up from the shadows. When the rusted three-wheeled matatu raised on a jack appeared out of the darkness in the middle of the road, Sambul slowed. He was thinking of what would happen to the dead man, the delivery to the dirty municipal morgue, the final slot in the big, ancient crematory oven the government had started using when the land allotted for a paupers’ field had filled up. Sambul could back up quickly, retracing their path, and find a more rural way around to the estate, but the thought of the body having to wait even a few more hours now that its destination had been finally decided seemed somehow perverse to Sambul.

The stretch of highway they’d stopped on was deserted and dark, the asphalt wending its way between the face of a rising bluff on one side and a drop-off on the other, below which the matte-faced waters of a large lake sat low and still in the dark beyond a pale, thin beach of mineral flats. The bulky matatu was angled directly across the narrow road, missing a rear wheel, a single dark figure sitting against its front bumper and smoking.

Sambul began to walk toward him and could feel Soren a few feet behind him. Neither heard what must’ve been the sound of the other men hefting themselves up over the ridge of the shoulder on the lakeside until their footsteps were right behind them. Sambul turned, looking from their blank faces and weapons to the man who’d been sitting on the matatu, the man who now stood and smiled widely, his eyes flashing in the weak light of the Land Rover.

They marched Sambul and Soren down to the mineral flats, which were stiff and crumbly underfoot. As they walked the tiny crystals of the useless chemicals caught the last light of the moon and seemed to lead their way in a shining path. The small band of men stopped them a hundred yards from the water and pushed the prisoners to their knees. Sambul and Soren were about thirty feet apart and Sambul heard Soren overbalance and fall forward, trying and failing to catch himself with his hands.