Siri couldn’t really understand why Kham was talking about his wife like this. He put it down to shock. “Well, in that case, I’ll just do one or two last checks, finish the report, and – ”
“Oh, I think you can probably finish the report without disturbing her again. We want to get her cremated as soon as possible. Her family and friends are anxious to give her the last rites. They’re waiting for her at the temple.”
“But I need to…”
“Siri, my old friend.” Kham stood and came over to sit on Dtui’s desk, looking down at the doctor. “As a medical man, you’re a scientist. But even a man of science needs to show sensitivity to culture and religion. Don’t you see?”
This was good, coming from a member of the committee that had removed Buddhism as a state religion and banned the giving of alms to monks.
“I – ”
“She’s suffered enough indignities for one day. Let her rest in peace, eh?”
“Comrade Kham, I didn’t write the law. I can’t issue a-death certificate until I’ve confirmed it was parasites that finished her off.”
Kham stood and smiled warmly. “I understand that. Of course I do. What kind of a politburo member would I be if I attempted to ignore the regulations?” He walked to the doorway and stood in the frame. “That’s why I’ve decided to have her own surgeon sign the certificate.”
“What?”
“I’m so sorry you were troubled today, Comrade Siri. But as there is no suggestion of foul play, there really was no need for an autopsy. I must say, for a man who hates his job so much, you do it quite meticulously. I’m very impressed.”
He walked out and left Siri sitting alone at Dtui’s desk turning things over in his mind. Kham had known there was to be an autopsy. He’d given the go-ahead over the phone. Now he was saying there was no need. Siri had wasted three hours looking for a cause of death. That time could have been cut in half if he’d known what he was looking for.
He gazed over at his own desk. There was something out of place there. But before he could organise that thought, he was disturbed by a commotion outside. He took one more quick look at his desk before walking out to see what was happening.
He encountered a group of men who were wheeling a hospital trolley that carried a basic but oversized wooden coffin. Kham walked behind them in the shadows.
“You’re taking her right this minute?”
The men pushed the coffin past him and into the examination room. Kham followed as far as the alcove. It was dark there.
“The family are all waiting.”
Siri looked at the tall man and was overwhelmingly conscious of a dark image some three metres behind him. For some unknown reason it filled him with dread. It wasn’t clear, and there wasn’t enough light to distinguish features, but its shape reminded him exactly – exactly of Mrs Nitnoy.
He recalled the longboat man he’d seen in the semiconsciousness of morning. That had been frightening enough. But then he had had sleep as an excuse. Here he was wide awake. This was no dream. He was seeing the outline of a woman who lay dead in the freezer in the far room. She was standing, shaking. She tensed. She readied herself and charged at the comrade’s back with all the ferocity of a bull intent on goring him.
She ran at him with her full force, and if she’d been real she would have certainly knocked him off his feet. For a brief second the light from the examination room caught her face.
Siri had no doubt it was her, nor did he doubt her look of pure hate. But when her body met her husband’s, she vanished.
Comrade Kham shuddered.
“How do you stand this building? The draughts give me goose bumps.” He turned to the space behind him at which Siri was still staring. “That the freezer in there?”
Siri’s old heart was galloping. He couldn’t speak. The best he could manage was to stumble past Kham into the examination room where the pallbearers were waiting patiently. He went to the freezer and with an unsteady hand pulled down the lever that unfastened the door. It opened slowly.
She was still there, still just as dead as she’d been at lunchtime. Siri hadn’t really believed he’d find her there. He reached into the freezer and trembled as he pulled back the pale blue sheet that covered the head. The face lay slack across the skull. It didn’t wink or give any signs it had been out haunting.
Siri tucked the sheet under Mrs Nitnoy’s body like a shroud to protect her from the rough hands and eyes of the men who had come for her. He pulled out the wheeled platform, stood back and allowed them to take her. Her big feet stuck out like flippers. The men lifted her more gently than they seemed capable of, and lowered her into her box.
“She is all…back together, is she?” Kham asked. “We don’t want bits of her dropping off on the way home, do we, boys?” The men laughed nervously, more because of who he was than because they saw any humour in what he said. If his insensitivity was to be put down to shock, he must have been deeply disturbed by his wife’s death.
But Siri no longer believed this. He looked at Kham, looked directly into his eyes, and the senior comrade turned away, with a hint of embarrassment and something more. Siri didn’t speak again. Kham walked outside.
The labourers maintained a respectful verbal silence and tacked the lid on the coffin as quietly as their hammers would allow. They struggled to wheel the comrade’s wife back through the door. Due to the extra weight, the wheels yanked the trolley to the right and it crashed into the door frame. The bearers reversed once, but the trolley continued to swerve to the right. It refused to be wheeled out to the yard.
With no small effort, the men were forced to lift the cart and its cargo and carry it through the doorway. Comrade Kham was waiting for them outside, a cheap, fast-burning cigarette between his lips. He had nothing to say either. He walked beside the trolley, frustrated by its zigzag trajectory, and disappeared with it around the end of the building.
Siri stood below the morgue sign, his head tilted like a dog listening. But this old dog was paying attention to the debate going on inside his head. He took deep breaths to calm his nerves, but his pulse was still racing.
Half his mind told him to walk away, go home, leave all the doors open, the lights on. Just get out of there and never come back. But the saner half, the scientist half, told him not to be ridiculous. He turned and walked back through the small vestibule and to the examination room.
It was lighted by a flickering fluorescent tube. He stood beneath it in the centre of the room and listened. He could make out the moths bouncing against the mosquito netting at the window, and the buzz of the light above. He could hear distant muffled conversations from the hospital and the crowing of a cock rehearsing. But that was all he heard.
A cockroach scurried by his feet and across to the storeroom. There weren’t enough disinfectants on the planet to keep a hospital free of roaches in South–East Asia. Dtui and Geung mopped and scrubbed four times a day and put down poison and sticky traps, but creatures who had survived the freezing of the earth and the meteor were smart enough to survive Siri’s morgue.
He followed the creature into the storeroom and switched on the light. A dozen accomplices joined the roach in scurrying for gaps and shadows. Everything in the room was double wrapped or trapped in screwtop jam jars so the vermin had no hope of feasting on the samples that lined the shelves. But the aroma of death pervaded the place and to a cockroach, that was like the scent of jasmine on a warm evening.
The shelves were set out in library rows with only enough space to pass between them sideways. He inserted himself between rows three and four and edged down to the specimen jars. Just above his head, Mrs Nitnoy’s brain hung in a noose of cotton in its own small pond of formalin. The cotton prevented it from becoming misshapen against the bottom of the jar. By the next morning, the comrade’s wife might have something to tell them after all.
¦
When Mr Geung arrived at the morgue on Tuesday morning, Dr Siri was already at the workbench. The specimen jar was in front of him, empty, and he was about to slice into Mrs Nitnoy’s brain.
