Countdown in Cairo

FIFTY-SIX

Over the course of the fifteenth century, terrible epidemics of plague, the black death, ravaged Europe. Switzerland was swept by the pestilence as much as any country, and in Geneva, the leaders of the city-in an attempt to quarantine the dying-built a hospital away from the city center. The building sat on a stretch of pasture land called Plainpalais, between the rivers Rhône and Arve.

The surrounding land took the name of the hospital-the plain palace-that stood on the site. And since death from the plague was almost inescapable for the afflicted, it was only a matter of time that the vast fields surrounding the building became burial grounds.

Plainpalais Cemetery, also known as La Cimetière des Rois, was located on rue des Rois in the center of Geneva. Over the centuries, it had also become the largest cemetery in Geneva. As Federov had indicated, and as Alex had already known, Plainpalais was a peaceful, quiet place, filled with a small settlement of old burial vaults and tomb markers. The pathways within the cemetery were lined with large, aging trees, and there was a bittersweet air to the place, somewhat like the famous Cimetière Père Lachaise in Paris.

Some of the gravestones dated back to the late fifteenth century, and notables of Genevois history had been laid to rest here. Here lay John Calvin, the Protestant reformer; Augustin de Candolle, the botanist; Guillaume-Henri Dufour, the engineer and general; James Fazy, jurist and statesman; Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, composer; Charles Pictet de Rochemont, diplomat; as well as many others who, in the course of five centuries, had played a major role in Geneva’s history.

More recently joining them were Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine author of fantastical short stories, and Sergio Vieira de Mello, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who was murdered by a terrorist bomb in Iraq in 2002.

It was bitterly cold on the day that Federov’s ashes were to be interred. True to her promise, Alex had made certain that the cremation had taken place and that the urn containing Federov’s ashes was transferred to the funeral parlor that Federov had designated. The establishment seemed to have an Eastern clientele, as she dealt in Russian with a crafty funeral director named Rodzianko. In keeping with Federov’s wishes, she also ordered a headstone in black granite with Cyrillic letters and, in Russian style, an engraving bearing his likeness.

“That,” she mused with ironic detachment as she signed the papers, “should scare passers-by for another century or two.”

Alex attended the funeral ceremony with Rizzo. They walked a long, cold pathway and arrived punctually at the designated gravesite where a small knot of other attendees also stood. Alex didn’t recognize any of them. Unlike many such ceremonies that Alex had attended in her lifetime, there was no family and there were no tears. There was again a light snow falling, just as there had been for Robert’s interment.

She was in a somber mood, but it was more associations than a sense of loss for the man being buried. As the ceremony began, she wondered if Federov had willed himself into dying, or tinkered with his drugs, while she was still in Switzerland. That way he would make certain that Alex would be in attendance. She was convinced that he had followed one of those courses. Similarly, when she declined to marry him, she was convinced he had released his tenuous grip on life.

The pastor was a young man named LeClerc. He was tall, reed-thin in a heavy coat, and absurdly Harry Potterish with round glasses and an owlish gaze. He conducted the ceremony in French and Russian. His words were brief. A bronze urn rested above an open grave.

It was minus 4 degrees Centigrade. It felt that cold in Fahrenheit.

LeClerc spoke softly, rapidly muttering a prayer that no one could hear. Words on the icy air, brief and appropriate, but impersonal. The knot of people shuffled uncomfortably. Alex counted them. There were eleven-a strange number, but an even dozen including the pastor.

The snow thickened. Then the service was over.

Alex had ordered a bouquet of roses for Federov’s send-off. She took one and laid it on the urn. The flower was frozen but it didn’t matter. Out of decency, Rizzo added a second. Other attendees pitched in, also. No one spoke to anyone else.

Alex and Rizzo turned and started to retrace their path through the cemetery to the exit. They had gone several meters when Alex heard a voice from behind her, a man chasing after her and calling out.

“Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle?”

Alex turned and saw LeClerc hastily pursuing her.

She stopped. So did Rizzo, who remained close. LeClerc arrived slightly breathless and reached to an inside jacket pocket.

“Vous parlez français, madame?” he asked. “On peut parler français?” he asked.

She answered, yes, of course. Bien sûr, she spoke French.

LeClerc was a little breathless and a little befuddled. He searched several pockets and then found what he was looking for.

“There were some special arrangements today,” the pastor explained in French. “I was asked, or I should say, the deceased requested before his death, that if you arrived here on this day, I should give you something.”

“How did you know who I was?” Alex asked.

“He described you.”

“And what if I hadn’t been here?” she asked.

“Well, I asked that too,” the minister said. “But the deceased was insistent. He said he knew you would come.”

“Then what is it that you have for me?” Alex asked.

“I was asked to give you this.”

He handed her an envelope. It was addressed simply, in Federov’s shaky handwriting from his final days, perhaps even the final one.

On the front of it was simply written ALEX LADUCA.

She felt the envelope. It was too thin to be the ring again; she could tell even with a gloved hand. “My condolences in any event,” said the young priest.

“Thank you,” she said.

LeClerc gave her and Rizzo a nod, then turned. He trotted back toward the gravesite where workers from the graveyard were readying to lower the funeral urn to its final resting place.

Alex glanced to Rizzo. “Shall I open it now?” she asked.

“Why not?” Rizzo shrugged. “If it explodes, then he’ll get us both.”

“Very funny.”

“It wasn’t a joke.”

They stood in the cold graveyard. Alex pulled off her gloves. She tore away one end of the envelope. She pulled out a letter-sized sheet of paper which also bore Federov’s handwriting, but before she could manage to read it, a small golden chain with an attached pendant slid into her hand.

It landed perfectly in her palm. It had a strange warmth to it, having been carried within LeClerc’s clothing.

Alex gasped.

There, in the open day, under a grayish white sky, in the center of her palm with snow falling on it, was the small golden cross that her father had given her years ago. It was the cross that she had worn so many years, up until the horrible day of the RPR assault in Kiev. It was the cross that she had somehow lost that day. Now, almost inexplicably, it had come back to her.

She opened the brief note and read it.

My Dearest Alejandra,

Following the horrible events in Kiev, after the snow of February had melted, I walked the ground where the assault had transpired. By the hand of fate, or God, or of some force that I do not understand, I looked down and between my boots saw a faint glitter in the mud.

I reached down and retrieved this, which I recognized immediately, not just for the woman it belonged to, but for what it meant to you. I held it with me for some time. I held it to remind me of what I had done, how I had hurt you and so many others so much, and because I wished to have something of yours. But over the last months, I wished to return it to you. I prayed for a proper time and in God’s strange way that time arrived. So that time is here and I return it to you today. May my last act in this world be one of Christian kindness to someone I cared for and may I be judged by my Maker accordingly.

Affectionately,

Y.F.

Her eyes rose to Rizzo’s. She showed him the note and turned away as he read it.

“Sentimental old bird, wasn’t he?” Rizzo said. “Typical Russian. Stabbing you in the back one minute, weeping into his samovar to gypsy violins the next.”

“Like anyone else,” she said, “I suppose he was trying to make his peace. With himself, with the world. With God.”

“Sounds like you’re sympathetic,” Rizzo said. He folded the letter and slid it into the pocket of her coat. “Do with it as you wish,” he said.

She took a moment. She studied the cross and chain in her hand.

“Here,” Rizzo said.

He reached to it and took it from her. He loosened the scarf around her neck. With two hands he reached around her and put the chain in place. He gave her a gentle kiss on the forehead, as a brother might. Then he stepped back.

“Perfect,” he said. “It’s back where it belongs.”

She glanced at her watch.

“Let’s get to the airport,” she said. “I’m finished here.”

Several hours later, Alex sipped from a glass of whiskey that was on the folded-down tray before her. She sat in the seclusion of a business-class window seat aboard a Swiss International Airlines Airbus. Midway into her eight-hour flight from Geneva to New York, there was a consistency to the drone of the aircraft’s engines that was both unreal and therapeutic.

Sometimes it seemed as if all of the humanity had been sucked out of her over the last year. This was a crazy way that she was going through life, she knew, and yet she didn’t know how to throw the switch to reverse courses, to go in any other direction.

She searched herself and the sum of all knowledge she had learned to date. She still had her faith, but she knew she sometimes wrestled with it. She knew she probably always would. Like a cathedral, it was never complete, never finished.

She searched the literature she had read over a lifetime. She didn’t know whether it was because Russians were on her mind, but here in this aircraft the metaphor that she kept returning to was that of a train.

Long ago she had read Anna Karenina, the same as Federov had done on his deathbed. The story had started with children playing with a toy train and then ended with a train wreck and a conversion to deep Christian spirituality.

Well, that Tolstoy had obviously known a few things about the hazards of travel, she mused with a smile, as well as the comforts of spirituality.

She thought back to the train ride she had taken just a few months earlier across central Spain, and how from a window she had seen a small rural funeral that had reminded her of the funeral of her grandmother in Mexico many years ago. She thought about the first time she had flown into Kiev and the last time she had flown out. Then she was ten years into the past, a more innocent time, when she was playing soccer at UCLA. Then there was the summer she had spent in France and the summer she had spent in Russia, the experience that had taught her Russian and paved the way for her being assigned to a spiritual shell of a man named Yuri Federov.

The aircraft banked left at Greenland. The flight became bumpy and the seat belt signs came on. She ordered another whiskey, her third, sipped it, and then, exhausted, slipped easily into a short dream at thirty-five thousand feet. She drifted farther into the Russian psyche.

It would have been absurd to suggest that she had any inklings of love for Yuri Federov. So what was it that she felt?

A strange Christian sense of compassion?

The forgiveness that was a foundation of her faith?

The notion that within every human being there is some shred of decency, even if one sometimes needed to search hard to find it?

She supposed that might have been it.

Could she bring herself to say a prayer for his soul?

Silly question: she had already said many.

In time could she forgive Federov, as he had begged her?

In time, she decided, maybe she could forgive anything. But no one ever said it would be easy.