Out among the vines, Dure was bending over something with a damp cloth, wiping it down slowly from end to end, making a visible effort not to move it around too much. It was a suitcase of some kind, an old-fashioned valise, patent leather cracked, handles frayed gray. This, I realized, was why Dure had been confident that the body would eventually make an appearance, why he had been willing to overlook the reality of dogs and floods: he had safeguarded the cousin—whom I had previously imagined to be the occupant of a shallow grave—by stuffing him into a suitcase. Dure was wiping the sides down slowly, with great care, enormous relief at having recovered the case evident in his face. Twelve years of accounting for his inability to return the body, his negligence in leaving a family member behind, loyalty suspect, always defending himself from the conclusions they must have been drawing when he explained himself—had he abandoned a dying man? Killed him and disposed of the body? And the illness itself, how his thoughts must have turned straight to the body when his wife and children began falling ill, one by one; how he must have circled around his own guilt, hinted at it while he searched for cures from the village crone, until the old woman finally caught on and told him what he wanted to hear, pointed to his recklessness and irresponsibility with the body, absolved him by confirming that the burden was his.
The evening began with a blessing. This had been scrawled on a piece of neon-green paper in handwriting that was presumably illegible; Dure read it aloud, slowly, stumbling over the words, over the name of the Father and of the Son, and over some invocation that mystified him so thoroughly he was forced to summon help from some of the other diggers. While they tried in vain to decipher their guidelines, I imagined the old woman who had sent them here, alone in a small, cold house high above Dure’s village, as milky-eyed and supple-limbed as a toad, devoting every ounce of strength to composing this blessing she knew by heart, but had never written down. Her notes urged the diggers to wail, but their hesitation made their efforts seem halfhearted. Shawled and bent, the old woman would have given the process dignity, produced a sound long and hollow and endless, a sound that would have dispersed the audience along the vineyard fence. Instead, the discordant howl of the diggers roused the onlookers into a steady chorus of “wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind” that started first among the most inebriated of the men, but pretty soon spread up and down the line.
Undaunted, the heavyset man turned away from the fire and shouted “Motherfuck you!” to everyone.
“Stop fucking around,” Dure said to him, and lost his place on the page. “That’s not part of this,” he said, turning to Fra Antun, “should I start over?”
“I really don’t know,” the monk said.
Fra Antun had incense, and he was swinging it back and forth helplessly over the valise while Dure read on, and the diggers coughed and crossed themselves. There was still no sign of the little girl.
The heat of the day, compounded by my early morning in the vineyard, had caught up to me. I felt I’d waited years for the body to be found, though I’d only heard about it that morning—somehow being in Zdrevkov had changed everything, and I didn’t know what I was waiting for anymore. My backpack was on my knees, my grandfather’s belongings folded up inside. I wondered what they would look like without him: his watch, his wallet, his hat reduced by his absence to objects you could find at a flea market, in somebody’s attic.
The opening of the valise was preceded by a baptism with holy water from one of the diggers’ herbed bottles. Fra Antun sprinkled it himself, and then Dure tried the zipper—not surprisingly, after more than a decade underground, the zipper did not budge. In the end, they agreed to cut the suitcase open, and someone ran for a kitchen knife from the house, which Nada handed over from the balcony. The diggers were deliberating over where to make the incision. Total silence from the spectators for Dure’s backswing and then the knife went in. A strained creak, followed almost immediately by the stench of decay. The body groaned. The sound, straining like a violin, stretched between the fire and the fence. Someone behind me called for God. Arms swung into action; up and down the fence, people were crossing themselves.
Zora, meanwhile, had been standing by all this time, watching the proceedings, her whole body tensed up like piano wire. I would later find out that, before things got under way, she had asked Dure if he really expected to find a heart in the valise, and he’d said: “What do you think I am, some sort of idiot?” to which Zora—by no small miracle—did not reply. But now that groans from the valise had shaken the entire town into paroxysmal supplication, she couldn’t restrain herself any longer. “That’s just the gases depressurizing,” she said, loudly and to no one in particular.
But the diggers were undeterred. More chanting and wailing, Fra Antun refusing to touch the herbed bottle, renouncing their holy water but still swinging that incense patiently over the suitcase, the pot catching the light of the falling sun. Zora waited for another opportunity to offer her opinion, but minutes went by and none came. She drew back to my side of the vineyard, came up the slope dusting her hands against her coat, and stood over me. I pushed myself across the rock ledge to make room for her.
“I have a message for you,” she said. She handed me her coat, and then took off her sweater. She laid the sweater out on the ground beside me and sat down on it, took her coat back across her knees. “Your grandma says: you open the bag, you’d better not bother coming home.” Zora said this without looking at me. Her throat was beaded with sweat from standing too close to the fire. “She was emphatic on that point.”
Zora had begun wearing a new perfume two months ago, and I hadn’t been able to get used to the smell of it yet—but, sitting there with the smoke in her hair and the day coming out of her skin, the smell of alcohol and soap and cigarettes, her mother’s detergent in the starchy smell of her coat, the iron in her earrings tinged by sweat, she came back to me completely. Everything I had expected her to say she let fall between us, and I couldn’t remember the answers I had been preparing.
Dure had moistened a clean rag with water from the herbed bottle and was taking the cousin out of the suitcase, bone by bone, rubbing the long yellowed blades of the legs gently with the cloth, laying them down on a clean sheet on the ground. The other diggers hovered over him, smoking, their backs to the fence. They had closed off the ritual, speaking quietly, with smaller gestures, either following the directions of their village crone or owing to the animated reaction of the onlookers—who, having guessed that the liveliest portion of the proceedings had come and gone, were beginning to lose interest anyway.
“What would you do?” I said.
“That depends,” said Zora. “What would your grandfather say?”
“He’d tell me to humor my grandma, not to open the bag.” After a while, I said: “And he’d tell you to testify.”
“We’ll never get back by Saturday,” Zora told me. “But you know that.” She took my hand and held it on her knee, and didn’t say anything.
The wet rag was passing from hand to hand, and they were squeezing the water out of it onto the bones, the cracked dome of the skull, wiping down the empty sockets and the crooked lines between the teeth. The spinal column was materializing on the sheet, the vertebral discs like toys. So many hands in the suitcase it was hard to tell who was removing what, but someone was meticulous and organized, sorting the pieces out on the sheet, joints here, fingers there, even though the whole thing would be folded up into itself later. Then they were breaking the thighbones, sawing through them with a cleaver so that the body could not walk in death to bring sickness to
