A Separation(32)
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 doppelg?nger, 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.
8.
Among Christopher’s things was an old copy of the London Review of Books, from June of that year. This was hardly surprising, back issues of this and other publications accumulated everywhere in our apartment, the bathroom was overflowing with issues that were as old as a year. That particular issue of the London Review had several interesting articles, which I think Christopher would have enjoyed and no doubt had read—he had brought the issue all the way to Greece, perhaps he had even read it on the plane.
In general, he had with him a considerable array of reading material, a suitcase full of books, journals, notebooks, papers. He must have been intending to stay in Greece for some time, perhaps he genuinely had hoped to finish his book during this trip. At that point, I had not yet gone into his computer, opening the files, looking through documents, checking to see if there was anything that might be publishable, at the behest of his agent and editor and Isabella too—she was, of course, to be involved in all of this. I had been reluctant, postponing the task, from the start I had suspected that it would be an unsettling experience, like prying into the mind, the private thoughts of the dead.