A Separation(45)

But Christopher could hardly be called upon to die a second time. And the law remained only too keen to declare the bond between Christopher and myself. We were married, there could be no doubt on that account—and yet we were not, just as the Colonel and the Countess were not, regardless of whatever the lawyer Derville might uncover or prove. And so despite the clear differences, life rarely finds its exact likeness in a novel, that is hardly fiction’s purpose, there was a similarity to the situations, a resonance that was the product of the mutual chasm between the letter of the law and the private reality. The question was which to service, which to protect.

Never mind, Yvan said. This is not the time to be talking of such things.

One of the men had risen from his seat outside the taverna and stood by the edge of the embankment, he had his arms extended and he held aloft a glass of some kind. The other men were cheering him on, perhaps he was making a toast or telling a story, they were men in the company of men, it happened less and less, special provision was made for it—the Sunday soccer match in the park, the monthly poker game—but it was not the same thing, it was then a little too orchestrated and self-conscious. I would not see Christopher among that group down on the embankment but perhaps he had been there as little as a week ago, perhaps he had.

The figure that beckons from a previous life—particularly when that life is genuinely good and gone, when it is not a question of real options, a marriage to be repaired, a life to be restored, either right or left, yes or no—can be uncannily persuasive. There is a reason why the living are haunted by the dead, the living cannot haunt the living in the same way. When it is a question of joining the living, you are reminded of all the reasons why you would rather not (or in most cases, as was the case with Christopher and me, you hardly need the reminder). But with the dead, who are sealed off in a separate realm, it is different.

No, I said, we should talk. We should talk before it is too late. And Yvan was silent for a moment and then he said, Okay. Let’s talk.





11.





Whatever I said to Yvan, I knew that I would not tell Isabella and Mark about the separation. Not because I wished to protect Isabella, as I had told Yvan, nor out of any loyalty to Christopher, as Yvan suspected, and not because I had made a promise, to him or to myself or to anyone else. I wouldn’t for more selfish reasons: because I wanted to pretend that it was as I had led everyone to believe, that there was no separation, no disintegration of our marriage, no pending divorce. It was the desire to continue to exist in the space—suddenly and inexplicably alive—of our marriage.

How much of this reasoning did I understand then, in the days following Christopher’s death? I would say that at the time, my own motivations were opaque to me. I acted on poorly defined sensations—what are called instincts and impulses—at first the only indication of this vast alteration in my feelings toward Christopher, toward our marriage, was the fact that the world of Gerolimenas, in which I was a charlatan, and which was therefore paltry and insubstantial, had nonetheless become more concrete than any other place, as if the world had reduced itself to this single village on this Greek peninsula.

Even more so as the prospect of our departure neared. I saw neither Mark nor Isabella until the next morning, when they appeared at breakfast, looking entirely like themselves, only perhaps slightly more subdued versions. Isabella looked up when I reached the table and then said, without warning, Will you be ready to leave tomorrow? I had not even sat down. There’s nothing more to be done here, and I would like to take Christopher home.

She was wearing large sunglasses, which she did not remove (she might have been concealing red and swollen eyes), and she called the body by its name, she called the body Christopher. Previously the body had been it, nameless, a small thing that was nonetheless revealing. She had decided to leave and so she had decided to begin grieving, to begin naming things, not as they were—a decaying corpse—but as you wanted them to be—your child, still human, still named and intact.

Isabella said nothing about the investigation—how Mark had persuaded her that there was nothing to be done I still do not know, everything in Isabella’s nature would have fought against it. She turned her head restlessly. The decision to let the investigation rest—I assumed for the time being, I assumed the fight would resume once she had returned to England, once she was back on solid ground—had freed her in some way, and I saw that she was ready to leave, to literally move on.

I would like, she continued quietly, still without looking at me although I now sat beside her, to visit the place where he died before we go. She did not say the place where he was killed or the place where he was murdered, she said the place where he died. Already the specificity of his death was being sanded down, a gloss was being put on it, not killed and not murdered but died. I don’t expect it will help, she continued, but I would like to do that. And then I never want to come back to this place again.

Mark nodded, it was obviously something they had discussed, he even reached across the table and took her hand. The desire to stand in the place where her son had been killed, a place like any other place, death making its claim along a meaningless stretch of road. She would convert that meaningless landscape into something else, it was an act of memorial, she wanted things to become what they were not. The emptiness of death is too hard to sustain, in the end we barely manage to do it for a day, an hour, after the death event itself.