“What I don’t understand,” said Kirov, when his teeth had finally stopped chattering, “is why Major Lysenkova is here at all. NKVD has dozens of investigators. Why send one who only investigates crimes within the NKVD?”
“There’s only one possibility,” answered Pekkala. “NKVD must think one of their own people is responsible.”
“But that doesn’t explain why Major Lysenkova would be in such a hurry to wrap up the investigation.”
Pekkala balanced the gun cartridge on his palm, examining it in the firelight. “This ought to slow things down a bit.”
“I don’t know how you can do it, Inspector.”
“Do what?”
“Work so calmly with the dead,” replied Kirov. “Especially when they have been so … so broken up.”
“I’m used to it now,” said Pekkala, and he thought back to the times when his father would be called out to collect bodies which had been discovered in the wilderness. Sometimes the bodies belonged to hunters who had gone missing in the winter. They’d fallen through thin ice out on the lakes and did not reappear until spring, their bodies pale as alabaster, tangled among the sticks and branches. Sometimes they were old people who had wandered off into the forest, gotten lost, and died of exposure. What remained of them was often scarcely recognizable beyond the scaffolding of bones they left behind. Pekkala and his father always brought a coffin with them, the rough pine box still smelling of sap. They wrapped the remains in a thick canvas tarpaulin.
There had been many such trips, none of which plagued him with nightmares. Only one stuck clearly in his mind.
It was the day the dead Jew came riding into town.
His horse trotted down the main street of Lappeenranta in the middle of a blizzard. The Jew sat in the saddle in his black coat and wide-brimmed hat. He appeared to have frozen to death. His beard was a twisted mass of icicles. The horse stopped outside the blacksmith’s shop, as if it knew where it was going, although the blacksmith swore he’d never seen the animal before.
No one knew where the Jew had come from. Messages sent to the nearby villages of Joutseno, Lemi, and Taipalsaari turned up nothing. His saddlebags contained no clues, only spare clothing, a few scraps of food, and a book written in his language, which no one in Lappeenranta could decipher. He had probably come in from Russia, whose unmarked border was only a few kilometers away. Then he got lost in the woods, and died before he could find shelter.
The Jew had been dead for a long time—five or six days, thought Pekkala’s father. They had to remove the saddle just to get him off the horse. The hands of the Jew were twisted around the bridle. Pekkala, who was twelve years old at the time, tried to untangle the leather from the brittle fingers, but without success, so his father cut the leather. Since the Jew’s body was frozen, they could not fit him in a coffin. They did their best to cover him up for the ride back to Pekkala’s house.
That evening, they left him on the undertaking slab to thaw so that Pekkala’s father could begin the work of preparing the corpse for burial.
“I need you to do something for me,” his father told Pekkala. “I need you to see him out.”
“See him out?” said Pekkala. “He’s already out.”
Pekkala’s father shook his head. “His people believe that the spirit lingers by the body until it is buried. The spirit is afraid. It is their custom to have someone sit by the body, to keep it company until the spirit finally departs.”
“And how long is that?” asked Pekkala, staring at the corpse, whose legs remained pincered, as if still around the body of the horse. Water dripped from the thawing clothes, its sound like the ticking of a clock.
“Just until morning,” said his father.
His father’s preparation room was in the basement. That was where Pekkala spent the night, sitting on a chair, back against the wall. A paraffin lamp burned with a steady flame upon the table where his father kept tools for preparing the dead—rubber gloves, knives, tubes, needles, waxed linen thread, and a box containing rouges for restoring color to the skin.
Pekkala had forgotten to ask his father if he was allowed to fall asleep, but now it was too late—his parents and his brother had all gone to bed hours ago. To keep himself busy, he thumbed through the pages of the book they had found in the Jew’s saddlebags. The letters seemed to have been fashioned out of tiny wisps of smoke.
Pekkala set the book aside, got up, and went over to the body. Staring at the man’s pinched face, his waxy skin and reddish beard, Pekkala thought about the spirit of the Jew, pacing about the room, not knowing where it was or where it was supposed to be. He imagined it standing by the brass-colored flame of the lamp, like a moth drawn to the light. But maybe, he thought, only the living care about a thing like that. Then he went back and sat in his chair.
He did not mean to fall asleep, but suddenly it was morning. He heard the sound of the basement door opening and his father coming down the stairs. His father did not ask if he had slept.
The Jew’s body had thawed. One leg hung off the preparation table. His father lifted it and gently set it straight beside the other. Then he uncoiled the leather bridle from around the Jew’s hands.
Later that day, they buried him in a clearing on the side of a hill, which looked out over a lake. His father had picked out the place. There was no path, so they had to drag the coffin up between the trees, using ropes and pushing the wooden box until their fingertips were raw from splinters.
“We had better make it deep,” his father said as he handed Pekkala a shovel, “or else the wolves might dig him up.”
The two of them scraped through the layers of pine needles and then used pickaxes to dig into the gray clay beneath. When at last the coffin had been laid and the hole filled in, they set aside their shovels. Knowing only the prayers of a different god, they stood for a moment in silence before heading back down the hill.
“What did you do with his book?” asked Pekkala.
“His head is resting on it,” replied his father.
In the years since then, Pekkala had seen so many lifeless bodies that they seemed to merge in his mind. But the face of the Jew remained clear, and the smoke-trail writing spoke to him in dreams.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Kirov said again.
Pekkala did not reply, because he did not know either.
Flames snapped, flicking sparks into the blue-black sky.
The two men huddled together, like swimmers in a shark-infested sea.
AS KIROV DROVE THE EMKA THROUGH THE KREMLIN’S SPASSKY GATE, with its ornamental battlements and gold and black clock tower above, Pekkala began to do up the buttons on his coat in preparation for the meeting with Stalin. The Emka’s tires popped over the cobblestones of Ivanovsky Square until they reached a dead end on the far side.
“I’ll walk home,” he told Kirov. “This might take a while.”
At a plain, unmarked door, a soldier stood at attention. As Pekkala approached, the soldier slammed his heels together with a sound that echoed around the high brick walls and gave the traditional greeting of “Good health to you, Comrade Pekkala.” This was not only a greeting but also a sign that Pekkala had been recognized by the soldier and did not need to present his pass book.
Pekkala made his way up to the second floor of the building. Here, he walked down a long, wide corridor with tall ceilings. The floors were covered with a red carpeting. It was, Pekkala could not help noticing, the exact same color as clotted arterial blood. His footsteps made no sound except when the floorboards creaked beneath the carpet. Tall doors lined the walls of this corridor. Sometimes these doors were open and he could see people at work inside large offices. Today all the doors were closed.