A Separation(49)

Perhaps Mark wanted to share his grief with someone other than Isabella, other than me—a stranger, who is without his or her own grief, around which you are not obliged to step, can be of greater comfort than those who are in loss’s trench beside you—or perhaps he was enjoying the contact with another man, he was a man who liked to be among other men and he was mourning the loss of his son, it had been the two of them and Isabella and now he was alone in the marriage. Mark continued, You know that my son was killed, and the driver again nodded, yes, a terrible thing, he had two children, he could not imagine anything worse in this world.

Mark turned toward the driver. We could stay, but what would be the point? Our lawyers say that we can continue to pressure the police from London. There will be an inquest in England, the British government will be involved—after all, a British citizen has been killed, it’s a matter of some interest. But that will not bring Christopher back. It will not even necessarily find the man who killed him. He paused. The incompetence of the Greek police is a force beyond comprehension.

There is no reason for us to stay. But at the same time it is hard to leave, hard to leave without feeling as though we are abandoning Christopher—our son, his name was Christopher. We are taking him back with us, he will be buried in England. But even so, I feel as though we are leaving him behind, there is unfinished business here. Isabella was still staring out the window, as if she could not hear a word Mark was saying, perhaps she had grown accustomed to not listening to her husband. I suppose the living will always feel this way, Mark said, everything you do is a betrayal.

This was even more intimate than what he had already said to this man, it had the quality of a confession. He stared at the road ahead, as did the driver, two men staring at a road. After a brief silence—the driver remained silent, as if at last Mark had confounded him—Mark turned to look out the window on his side of the car.

We had driven farther inland than I had been before, through several villages and then onto an empty stretch of road. There was burnt brush on either side of the single-lane road, in amidst it stood clusters of singed cactuses, their arms drooping and partially melted. Through the blackened earth small green shoots were beginning to show, although it wasn’t the season for things to be growing, further evidence of madness. It might have been a place like this, between two villages, an evening walk, Christopher was prone to doing such things.

The driver cleared his throat. He must have been unnerved by Mark’s speech, he would have known that it was out of character, not in keeping with the tense and upright demeanor of this Englishman, the stony fa?ade crumbling due to grief. He had been speaking the simple truth when he had said that he could not imagine it—the grief, the loss of the child. We are near, he said, almost reluctantly.

Isabella stiffened, the whole of her body going rigid at once. In front, Mark resumed speaking, as if he had not heard the driver, as if to deny or at least postpone the meaning of his words, he would have liked to keep driving, for hours if possible. No father expects to outlive his son, he said, it goes against nature. But even as he spoke, the driver slowed the car and we came to a halt outside a small village and then Mark did not say anything further. Without the noise of the engine it was suddenly silent. Isabella shifted in her seat.

Is this it?

Her voice was harsh and disapproving, she sounded as if she were being shown a substandard property by an incompetent real estate agent, I’m sorry but this house will not do, it does not meet my needs at all. But there could be no house wide enough for her grief, with an abrupt movement she unbuckled her seat belt and stepped out of the car. Mark sat in the front seat with his hands resting in his lap, he did not look at Isabella, who stood outside with her hand resting on the roof of the car. The driver also opened his door and stepped out, Isabella then moved away from the vehicle.

How do you know this is the place?

The driver looked away. Isabella’s tone was imperious, as if grief were a service industry like any other, her experience of grief was failing to meet her standards, she would like to speak to the management. Inside the car, Mark inhaled—a noisy, ragged kind of a breath, the man was gathering himself—and then opened the door and stepped outside. After a moment, I followed, I could not remain in the car, although I would have liked to.

Are you sure this is the place? Isabella insisted.

The driver then nodded, Yes, this is the place, without doubt. I wondered then if he, like Stefano, had chanced to drive by that morning, if he too had seen the roadblocks and the police car, perhaps even the body, or what was visible of the body, the legs under the tarp, the feet askew. That road is the fastest route between the two villages, a dozen people must have driven past that morning alone.

I turned to look for Mark and Isabella, they had not gone very far, they were perhaps twenty feet away. They stood side by side, looking out across the stretch of blackened dirt. The horizon was cluttered with telephone wires and abandoned shacks and rusted oil drums, a cluster of squat concrete buildings. Mark and Isabella were still, they were not touching but they were physically close, in some ways more intimate than I could remember seeing them since their arrival in Greece, than I could remember seeing them in recent years.

And yet it did not seem to be a moment of reconciliation, much less one of closure, they looked like an elderly couple who had gotten lost in a foreign place and who could not rely on each other to find their way out, a terrible fight could easily follow, one of them walking off into the distance without looking back, the other remaining by the car, waving a map helplessly in one hand. How has it come to this? What am I doing here? They looked at the black dirt and the charred or wilting vegetation, they might have hoped that it contained clues, but there was nothing, it was a place like any other place, there was nothing they could hope to learn from it.