Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Oh, she gasped, stunned, my God, clasping a hand over her mouth in horror. Burnette already felt something tipping out of balance, the increasing volume of troubled noise jumping through the congregation, divided into camps of approval and disapproval, eddies of mortification, spouts of wanton encouragement.

What’s he saying?

He is speaking improperly, she said.

What did he say?

It’s not proper, she said. His language is bad. He is using a word that for you is fack? Fuck? Kovacevic says the Turks killed his father and chopped his head and killed his aunt and fucked his mother and fucked his daughter and, oh, my God—

There was Scarecrow and Bill and he could see Chambers in the pulpit and he told the woman to wait here and Crow asked, What’s happening? and Burnette walked out onto the tiles between the front pews and the altar steps. I’m getting him down, he said, but Vasich seemed to have the same idea, rising from the first pew on the far side of the center aisle and calmly mounting the altar toward the undersecretary’s perch, murmuring sympathetically, words Burnette could not hear or understand, the honest sound of respect itself the meaning. A tense hush spread through the cathedral. Chambers fell silent and his face lit up with angelic benevolence as he observed the general’s approach, each man beckoning the other to come, and then Vasich was beside him in the pulpit, gently taking Chambers’s arm.

Then Steven Chambers was singing most gloriously and Vasich seemed taken aback for a moment but he turned to stand with his hand over his heart and sing, too, joined a few notes later by the choir, and then it seemed everyone in the archbishop’s cathedral was singing, Burnette slowly retreating toward the woman, staggered by the transcendent vibrations of so many lungs exhaling such a rumble of harmony, this newborn nation of voices, the spectacular power of humanity’s chorus not so much rising up toward the heavens as inducing heaven to lose altitude, shimmer on the roof beams, transforming the cathedral for Burnette into a space he saw and felt for the first time as a place of earthbound beauty.

My God, the woman whispered into his ear, your Kovacevic saved himself. He is singing the anthem. The name is called “Our Beautiful Homeland.”

Then the song was finished, Vasich again took the undersecretary’s arm and escorted him back to his pew, the priests rose from their thrones at the rear of the chancel, the altar boys rang their bells, and the Mass for the Dead resumed.

At the burial of Davor Starevica in Zagreb’s Mirogoj cemetery, the ghosts out and about, Eville Burnette walked at Steven Chambers’s side past the Wall of Pain to gather with the crowd at the foot of the open grave, the crush of mourners obscuring the adjacent plots. Since leaving the cathedral Chambers had seemed enervated, his eyes clotted with confusion, then glittering with unspent tears. At the arcaded entryway into Mirogoj, Burnette had summoned whatever courage or stupidity it took to remind Chambers of what the undersecretary had mentioned earlier in the day, something he wanted Ev to see, but the reminder mystified Chambers.

I’m not sure what you’re talking about, he said, and Burnette didn’t press the matter because he could hardly believe himself Tom Harrington’s claim, wondering if he would find Dottie here or not, if he wanted to, or if he could survive not finding her, or survive that moment of discovery if in fact he found her. And hadn’t she, after all, made a habit out of dying, forfeiting her credibility as a mortal? She had.

Who died in Landstuhl? He had held her hand.

Who died in Haiti? He had lifted her up.

The president of the republic stepped forward, digging his right hand into the black pyramid of his native soil to pitch its crumbs into the hole, the arm of an attendant poking through the encirclement offering a white handkerchief, which the president used and passed along to Steven Kovacevic to clean the dirt from his own hands. Stepping away, Eville confided into his mic. Two minutes, he whispered, listening to Scarecrow and Bill affirm the transmission.

He went to find her grave and it was right there and it demolished him. There too her grandmother’s, people standing on them, the turf muddied by their shoes, and he said to himself, Are you here? thinking what use was memory when everything about the journey ahead was unknown, and death bestowed as a homecoming, the end of homelessness, and a family restored to a thing it had lost when it was no longer young, which was togetherness. Hey, he said and squatted before the stone and traced her name with trembling fingers and kissed the stone, reading the inscription, The soul is a field in the heart of man.

Hey, I found you, but I have to go .

Scarecrow was talking in his ear, reporting the ceremony’s conclusion, asking him how he wanted to handle this and he found Vasich and let him know the change in plans and Vasich said he understood. It’s for the best, I think, he said, and went to arrange an escort to the airport and Eville hooked back up with the undersecretary and his detail and there was the woman with her clipboard and her cameraman and Tom hovering in the background. You promised, she said and Eville said I know, but I can’t let you ask him about politics, is it a deal?

What can I ask?

Ask about his childhood or something, he said, and stepped around her to speak to Harrington who once again beat him to the draw.

You saw the grave?

Yeah. Thanks.

How did she die?

I thought you were an investigator, Tom. I expect you’ll get to the bottom of it.

Help me get that kid out of jail.

I don’t know if I can but I’ll check it out, he said and looked back over his shoulder at the ITN crew and the undersecretary and told Tom they had to cut the interview short and leave and walked back over to the visibly frustrated woman and said, Okay?

He’s not well, she said. He only wants to know when he’s going to lunch. He says he’s hungry.

BurnOne, he heard Crow say into his earpiece, our boy’s walking.

Copy that, said Burnette, his eyes following the undersecretary into the crowd, Chambers headed toward a smoky kiosk out by the entrance selling kebabs. He’s not going anywhere, he told Crow, and he slowly followed Dottie’s father, who was trying to pay for a skewer of meat with a hundred dollar bill.

Then Chambers seemed possessed, his mouth full of lamb, chewing and talking maniacally about the embassy, the embassy wasn’t an intelligence failure, you know, we warned them again and again, he had no information she was going through Nairobi to spend a few days with Mary Beth before the wedding in Zimbabwe, go out to Mombasa, you know, lay on the beach, I suppose, she never told me a fucking thing about that, said Chambers, the tears finally coming. They dug out the two of them side by side in Mary Beth’s office, did you know that? She wasn’t there a minute before the bombs went off and the blast, the glass, the glass flying into her eyes. Did you know that, Ev? Did you see the reports?

He wanted to return to Mirogoj, he said, to the cemetery, there was something there Ev should see, he wanted them to see it together and say the requiescat and be at peace with all of this and then they were walking to the vehicle, his hand on Chambers’s shoulder, opening the door for him, and it struck Eville Burnette as merciless, an existential blow, a man condemned forever to chase the imperiled verities, that this is what we forget about our hearts, that they are with us, that they are there.

First Readers, First Responders:

Barbara Petersen, Bruce Weber, Ed Tarkington, Peter Ives, Mace Fleeger, Susan Moke, Maruta Kalins, Guinotte Wise, John Domini, Keith Jardim, Gail Hochman, Kevin Fedarko, Mark Mustian, Barbara A. Jones