A Separation(31)

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.