A Separation

7.

Christopher’s body was found in a shallow ditch outside one of the villages inland, ten miles from the stone church I had visited the previous day. The place was perhaps five minutes from the nearest house by foot, and the road did not see very much traffic. The air of desertion was compounded by the fact that the area had been especially damaged in the fires, all the vegetation burnt to the ground. The body was found resting on dirt that had the color and texture of soot. When they lifted it, a fine powder coated its surface.

The body had been there at least overnight, perhaps longer. Although his wallet had been emptied of its cards and cash, it was not difficult for the police to identify him. Later, we would find that many hundreds of dollars had been removed from his accounts, and that mysterious charges had been made to his credit cards, charges that would later be reversed by fraud protection services, although it seemed beside the point, the man to whose accounts the companies were issuing these credits could not care, he would never open another bank or credit card statement.

He had been mugged and killed, a stupid and anonymous death that could have taken place anywhere—in Manhattan or in London or Rome, there was nothing specific about the nature of his murder, the motivations were both familiar and banal, hardly worthy of notice—and there was something ignominious not only in the fact of his body lying abandoned in a ditch, but in the notion that he had traveled so far, to this foreign landscape and culture, only to confront a death that could have taken place one block from his own apartment in London.

In the first stunned hours after I was informed of his death—when the police arrived at the hotel I was in my room packing to leave, Kostas had already called the driver who had brought me from Athens to Mani and he was due to arrive shortly, of course there was no journey to Athens that day, the driver had likely traveled some distance in order to pick me up from the hotel, a costly inconvenience, but nobody mentioned the matter, this is precisely the kind of thing that people do not bother you about, when there has been a death in the family—my mind remained fixed on this small point, the inappropriateness of his death, its small and even accidental quality.

A friend used to say, in speaking of her ex-boyfriends (and later three ex-husbands, she was an eternal optimist), He’s dead to me, a phrase I did not especially like, it sounded too violent for what is essentially a regular occurrence, the breakdown of a relationship. My friend did not look as if she were capable of thinking such vicious and decisive thoughts, much less feeling them, but she always assured me that there was real sentiment behind the words. Of course, it was only a turn of phrase, but I was always too superstitious to say such a thing, he’s dead to me, it felt like bad karma, although I don’t believe in karma.

And yet, despite my caution, I was the one now living out this macabre phrase, which wasn’t even my own, he’s dead to me. The situation was one you sometimes imagine—in moments of extreme love or hate, in the grip of either fear or fantastical loathing—but which you do not believe to be actually possible. Even when you stand at the altar and declare until death do us part, death remains abstract, something that caps a long and happy life together, two elderly people holding hands, grandchildren and a cottage by the sea. But there were no children or grandchildren in this case, no countryside retreat, there was barely a marriage at all, only something between the two phrases, he’s dead to me and until death do us part.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I left the room and went down to the lobby, Kostas had only said that there had been a terrible accident involving Christopher, at that point I didn’t yet know the full extent of what had occurred. Kostas and the two police officers standing beside him lowered their heads as I approached. A certain respect is accorded to a woman who is about to be informed of her husband’s untimely death, and it dawned on me then that Christopher was dead. Kostas introduced the officers from the local station, unfortunately there had been some very bad news.

Kostas continued, translating for the officers, who spoke without looking at me, apart from the occasional surreptitious glance, perhaps they were sizing me up, they might have been looking for suspects and the first suspect is always the wife or husband, everybody knows that. But as Kostas continued to translate for the men, and I listened, numb, to their words, which I could not comprehend, I decided it wasn’t suspicion but mere awkwardness that was coloring their response, nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news and they had no way of gauging how I might respond, whether or not there would be rage or hysterics or total disbelief, no, I didn’t blame them at all.

I assumed that Kostas had been told at least some of the particulars in advance. Nonetheless, as each piece of information was relayed to him, he gave a little gasp before turning to me with a more subdued expression and telling me that, for example, my husband’s body had been found by the side of the road, that he had been hit on the back of the head, likely with a rock or other blunt instrument, that it looked like a mugging. Perhaps he thought surprise was appropriate, it was a difficult tone to strike, somewhere between sympathetic dismay and bureaucratic vacancy, he was only transmitting the message.

I must have been in a state of shock. I kept nodding, as piece by piece the disaster continued to unfold before me, I asked how long he had been dead and they said they did not know necessarily, that would only come out in the autopsy, but not long, the body was—Kostas stopped, he wore an expression of consternation, as if reluctant to relate what followed—still relatively fresh and undisturbed, apart from the wound at the back of his head, there had not been very much decay. So he had died in the last day, while I was here, at the hotel? The police shook their heads, again, they could not say for certain until they received the coroner’s report but certainly he could not have been there for very long, the area was full of wild animals, the body would not have been as pristine as it was, he looked, they said, almost like he was sleeping.

Apart from the wound at the back of his head. A large patch of blood, the likes of which would never be seen on the head of a sleeping man, it hardly made sense to describe him as such. And yet it might have been as they said—perhaps when the body was found he was lying on his back, the blood concealed, the eyes closed, could his eyes have closed in death, was it possible that when he was found his eyes were not staring out in horror, the unexpected fact of his death, but were indeed closed, his face peaceful? Like a man who had decided to lie down in the road, a man who had fallen asleep on the asphalt.

Can you go with them now?

I looked at Kostas blankly, I had lost the thread of what he was saying. Where? I said stupidly. He said, To the police station, to identify the body, they need someone to identify the body. Of course, I said, I just need to get my things, there is a phone call I need to make. I needed to tell Isabella—the moment they said the words confirming Christopher’s death it was already too late, by that point she should have already known. Isabella was the person who should be here, Isabella the one to claim the body of her son, I was only—a former spouse, I realized belatedly, or near enough.

One of the officers cleared his throat impatiently, as if to say that they had waited long enough, there were limits to their sympathy and discretion. I said again that I only needed to go back to my room to gather a few things, one quick phone call and then I was free to go with them and they nodded. I intended to call Isabella from my room but as I stood by the side of the bed, I hesitated, the men were waiting downstairs, it was hardly the work of a minute or two. I didn’t know what I would say, I couldn’t imagine the words—Isabella, I have some very bad news, Isabella, something terrible has happened.

It would have been easier if I had been crying, I thought, hysterical. Isabella would have told me to calm down, to get hold of myself, she would have put herself in the false position of being in control, when she was not, when neither of us was, any longer, in control of anything. I waited a moment longer and then I did not call her, I said to myself that I would leave her a few last hours, during which her world remained coherent, still rational, both an act of kindness and an act of cruelty, she would have wanted to know at once, we all would have.

When I returned to the lobby, one of the men had disappeared and Kostas stood beside the remaining police officer. Kostas told me as we departed that the police would arrange for a car to take me back to the hotel. Or perhaps one of the officers would drive me, but in any case I should not hesitate to contact him if I needed anything. He gave me a card with his mobile phone number written on it. Then he said that he assumed I would no longer be leaving that day, and offered to call the airline to cancel my ticket, he assured me that there would be no difficulty, a death in the family.

I thanked him and hurried after the officer, who was already leaving. As we exited the hotel I saw that the car was waiting, the other officer was behind the wheel and the engine was running. We got inside. The first officer insisted that I sit in the front passenger seat while he sat in the back of the car, alone, like a junior partner. Perhaps he worried that if I sat in the back while the two officers sat in front it would look too much like they had arrested me and I was being brought in for questioning, already as we drove through the interior people were stopping to watch, peering into the windows of the car as if I were a criminal.

But as I sat in the front of the car, the officer beside me driving in silence, the officer in the back staring at the headrest before him or occasionally staring out the window, it was not guilt that I felt. Nor did I yet feel grief. I felt only a sense of incredulity, that this had befallen us, something I could never have imagined, something that was at once entirely possible (it had happened, so it must be) and yet still experienced as impossible, the impossible thing that had somehow came to pass, some stammer in the divine speech.

At the same time, one part of my mind was preoccupied with the practicalities, of which there were bound to be many, and of which I knew I was not the correct executor. I would need to tell someone—although not these officers, within the domain of the law I was still his wife and there was something shameful about airing the confused state of our marriage to these strangers, in this moment—that I was in a false position, not exactly an impostor but nonetheless operating under false pretenses. In short, I would need to tell Isabella. About the separation, the true state of affairs between her son and me. And then it would fall to her, the funeral arrangements, the transportation of the body, whatever else needed to be arranged.

The police car pulled into the station, a single-story concrete building, there were dogs outside but they were chained, intimidating animals, it was easy to imagine them lunging and snapping at the end of their leashes. As the car slowed, I saw the officers turn to look at me. I averted my gaze, I felt myself to be playing the part of the grieving widow—a sensation that, had I genuinely been a grieving widow, I never would have felt, there was a small but definite wedge pushing between the person I was and the person I was purporting to be.

One of the officers ran to open the car door for me. I stepped out, the sky was overcast again and I wondered if it would rain. The officers motioned for me to follow them into the station, a building so small that I wondered where they could be keeping the body, whether there was enough room for a morgue. I followed the officers inside, in their extreme politesse they were behaving as if I were an oversized ship being steered into a narrow port, waving their hands like air traffic controllers. They wore a general expression of anxiety and would be relieved when I was no longer their responsibility, when I was finally taken off their hands.

Inside, the station was near empty, there were a couple posters on the wall—I couldn’t decipher their message, they were written in Greek and the images themselves were opaque. The overhead lights blinked irregularly. I was hurried through the waiting area, there were two rows of plastic chairs with seats that had warped over time, all empty, although it couldn’t be that the area was without incident, the fires alone must have generated so many cases (missing persons, unidentified bodies, grieving parties). I was shown into a small office, a man stood up to greet me, although there was not very much in the way of an introduction, he merely rose to his feet and indicated that I should sit down.

I sat down. He also returned to his seat and began flipping through various files, as if he were simultaneously very busy and also a little bored by the situation, in a way it was understandable. He must have had a great many responsibilities, and although the matters that brought the public into his office were necessarily of great individual concern, to him it was just another day’s work, he couldn’t be expected to live his life at a pitch of continual crisis, day after day, it was his job to remain calm, rational, he couldn’t give way to his emotions.

Indeed, the entire atmosphere in the station was overwhelmingly sterile, nothing like what you might expect from watching police procedural shows on television, which are populated with colorful characters and extreme human dramas, there was nothing of the sort on display here. Eventually, the officer looked up at me and asked to see my passport, which luckily I had thought to bring, neither of the two officers had told me to bring identification of any kind. As I handed the passport to the officer I said, I didn’t take his name when we married, I kept my own.

He nodded, perhaps this information wasn’t relevant. He rose and said, holding the passport in one hand, that he would be back in a moment. I sat in the chair, I put my hands in the pockets of my jacket, I was reminded again that I had not called Isabella, that Isabella did not yet know that Christopher was dead. The reality of his death was everywhere around me, here in this room, and yet Isabella knew nothing of it, however material this new reality, it was not yet consistent, not yet pervasive. It had been a little more than an hour since the police had come for me. The officer returned, carrying both my passport and a laptop, which he opened and placed before me.

Here is your passport, he said. I thanked him, he pushed the laptop a couple inches away and sat down on the edge of the desk, he said that he would be showing me a number of photographs on the computer—he waved a hand in the direction of the laptop—from which I would identify the body. I understood this to mean that I would look at photographs of the body before proceeding to the body itself—as though the images were a form of preparation, the way a nurse practitioner swipes your arm with an alcohol swab before an injection, a ritual that only exacerbates your dread.

This seemed much worse and I told him I would rather proceed directly, I would rather just see the body. He shook his head, perhaps he thought his English was failing him. I apologized for not being able to speak his language and he shook his head again. He motioned to the laptop for a second time. Only the photos, he said, and then repeated, Only the photos. For a moment, I wondered if the body had been lost or destroyed or in some way compromised, only the photos remained—a furthering of the nightmare, conceived in an instant. Then I realized that he meant only that the photos would be used to identify the body, only the photos, the body itself would remain elsewhere.

He asked if I was ready to begin and I nodded. The situation was not what I had expected, how strange it was, that one could have expectations for a situation never before imagined, and yet it was the case. I had been prepared to see the body and now I would only see photographs of the body, something that felt insufficient, too slight for the gravity of the situation, he had died alone and now he would be alone in his death, unwitnessed by anything apart from the flash of a camera.

I could have wept, it was so appalling. The officer touched the keyboard, rousing the machine from sleep, there were almost no icons on the desktop, which still had the preset factory image as its wallpaper. He frowned as he clicked on a folder—I couldn’t read the name of the folder, it was in Greek, it might have said autopsies or ID or simply photos, I had no idea—and then began scrolling through a surprising number of files, at least fifty or sixty. The task took some time, he started to hum tunelessly, his finger on the mouse pad.

Perhaps there had been many deaths in recent weeks, it wasn’t impossible, people must have died in the fires, I dreaded to think what those photographs would look like. The officer made a little sound of satisfaction—at last, he had found what he was looking for—and then without further ado (he had, after all, already warned me) he clicked on the file and the screen was filled with an image of Christopher’s face in death, his head resting on a metal surface, presumably the examining table at the coroner’s office. I stared at the image, the officer was watching me, then he looked away, discreetly, as if to give me privacy. After a moment, he cleared his throat and I looked up, startled.

Well?

I looked back at the photograph. I didn’t say anything—yes, of course it was Christopher, but I didn’t recognize the man in the image, that is to say, it was and it was not Christopher. I had never seen him in such a state, one eye was half opened and the other closed (it turned out they were neither opened nor closed in death but both, and this seemed to me a terrible thing, that nobody had bothered to close the other eye) and his mouth hung open as if he were in a state of shock, the shock of his death, which had been unusually violent—Christopher was no more accustomed to violence than the rest of us, possibly even less so.

It was a face that did not often confront you in life: the unvarnished face of death, so different from the face of the dead as presented in funeral parlors or in death masks, a face that has been processed, to which the dignity has been restored, and from which the emotion has been washed. He looked as if he were sleeping, a common thing to say, an attempt to deny the finality of death, sleep being some intermediate state between being and nothing, presence and absence. But it was more than this, he looked as if he were sleeping—it was also, I now understood, an attempt to pretend that the journey into death, the process of dying, was in some way peaceful, when it was almost certainly not.

Christopher’s face was not the face of a man sleeping, a man at peace. It was the face of a man who had been afraid. All faces are made stupid by fear, the emotion overrides intelligence, charm, humor, kindness, the qualities by which we know people, and for which we fall in love. But who is not afraid in the face of death? It was for this reason I was unable to say at once and definitively, This is Christopher, it was and it was not, the expression was unrecognizable and even the features themselves did not look like they belonged to the man I had been married to for five years, the man I was still married to.

The officer leaned forward, he clicked on the folder again. I had not responded to his question, he must have thought I needed to see more photographs in order to identify my husband, as if that single image was not enough, perhaps in some cases it was not—as I’d just seen, death transformed the face beyond recognition. I raised my hand to stop him, I didn’t need to see anything more, it was evidently Christopher, or rather, the sense I had that it was not—that it was a doppelgänger, a visual illusion, something other—would not be dispelled by further photographs.

It’s him, I said. That is Christopher.

I said it and that rather than he, people often do, the sentence He is Christopher sounded unnatural, it was impossible to pronounce. Nor was it reflective of the truth, there had been no he, there was nothing substantial to what I had seen, simply a collection of pixels, a file on the laptop. I had no desire to see the body and yet I could not believe that I was not going to see the body. I suddenly felt that I should at least ask. I raised my voice and said, Where is the body? I could not say, Where is he, it sounded like denial but in fact was almost acceptance, or at least an affirmation of the fact that once a death has occurred, the person is departed and there is nothing left but the body, it and not he, a mere semblance of the living person.

The officer—who lifted his hands from the computer as soon as I spoke, as if he too had no desire to look at any more images and was relieved, it might have been his job but that didn’t necessarily mean that he enjoyed the process—shrugged. The body is next door, he said. The phrase next door sounded too casual for such a serious thing, the location of my husband’s body. Next door, I repeated, the body is next door, Christopher is next door? And he shrugged again, waving his arm in the general direction of the hall, as if Christopher’s body had no concrete location, as if it were only out there, moving from place to place, traveling from room to room.

He asked, Do you wish to see the body? The question took me by surprise, although it shouldn’t have—of course such a thing would be offered to the wife, the widow, particularly one who had inquired after the location of the body, who had been so surprised to be confronted with photographs rather than the thing itself—and I hesitated, it was not that I was squeamish, although there was that too, seeing the photographs had been bad enough. It was more that I wondered if I had the right, if there was a woman—it’s always a woman at the side of the body, Mary Magdalene, Antigone, Lady Capulet, woman in multiple guises—who should have been there instead of me, perhaps Isabella, perhaps someone else.

Christopher had gone. What happened now was private to himself—as there are apartments in our own minds that we never enter without apology, we should respect the seals of others—and what was more private than one’s death, particularly when it was violent or unnatural? Wasn’t that why photographs of bodies torn from crime scenes and car accidents struck us as so tasteless, why we despised ourselves when we could not help but rubberneck at a car accident, the feet (still shod) sticking out from under the blue tarp? It wasn’t simply the horror of the dead body, it was the invasion of a stranger’s privacy, the act of seeing what should not be seen.

How could I know whether Christopher would have wanted to be seen by me, in this state—his eyes askew, his mouth propped open, he was a vain man, he had a sense of propriety, even the thought of such a death would have humiliated him—how could I know what I had been to him, in the final moments before his death? And yet he needed to be seen, by someone. I had not yet called Isabella, she would not arrive until tomorrow at the earliest, by which point the body would have been dead forty-eight hours or longer, in some state of partial decomposition, hardly a sight for an elderly woman, however stern her moral fiber—no, the body could not go unseen for so long.

Yes, I said to the officer, who looked up, as if in surprise, I would like to see the body, and he nodded and reached into his pocket and withdrew a set of keys.