I went for a walk in my hometown, for the first time in more than twenty years. I first moved away when I went to university, then did my postgrad work abroad, and after that dug all over the world. Most recently in Iraq, before that in Bosnia. I excavated gravel, soil, mud, sand, in all possible hues of earth, pulling out bones and assembling them into bodies. I collected remains for identification and for evidence that could be used in the trials of mass murderers. I have seen thousands of bodies, killed in every conceivable way—shot, slaughtered, with their heads cut off, sometimes even with their genitalia in their mouths. Their hands sometimes tied behind their back with rope, electric wire, or barbed wire. Whenever I saw one of the commanders on television, on trial in connection with the bodies I’d dug up, I couldn’t connect his ordinary-looking face with the remains that had passed through my gloved hands; the defendants were all commanders, anyway, they had only uttered an order and others, who were not on television, had done the actual killing. I remember the time after my first mass grave, when I went to the mall and stared at passers-by: was it this one, or perhaps that one? But this passed, like all novices’ troubles.

A month ago, my wife sent me an e-mail telling me she was leaving. Lawyers would handle all the property matters, and I could continue visiting my son as usual, every few months, in between work assignments. Was the last sentence meant to be ironic?

I took a week’s leave and got a hotel room in the capital of my home country, which had meanwhile become independent. For a few days I just walked around, looking and noting all the changes. Then one day I found myself at the bus station and realized that I was standing beneath the platform number where the bus to my hometown still departed several times a day. I don’t really know why I boarded it, but when I opened the door of the bar where I’d spent most of my time in high school, I felt as if my Adam’s apple was shooting up my throat like the cork from a champagne bottle.

Nearly the whole of my gang was sitting around the same table as they had twenty years before. Four were missing. One had become a writer and was living in the capital, two were dead (a traffic accident and a suicide), and one was in treatment for alcohol. I recognized the faces, which all looked older and more bloated, and asked myself if I looked that old too. I went to the dingy restroom and found some reassurance in the mirror. I had to pay for a round of drinks. They asked if I had come to see my parents, and I was just about to shake my head, but realized that I would have to give a long explanation about things that I didn’t quite understand myself, so I simply nodded. They asked me what I did, and I mentioned laboratories and examinations; they imagined me taking blood and urine samples and didn’t find it too interesting. They told me their stories. Most had left the town, like me, then lost their jobs or their wives or both and come back to live with their parents. I paid for the next round without being asked, and soon the novelty of my presence had worn off, so they started discussing their usual topics. Pink Floyd wasn’t the same since Syd had left them—Pink Floyd, weren’t they around in the sixties? That was twenty years before our generation. It’s funny, the way debates in small town bars collect like layers of limestone in underground caves, so that just like stalactites and stalagmites, the conversation of each new generation melds into the previous ones and time no longer matters.

I only truly registered the conversation again when the fattest of them, who had always been proud of his intellect and was the most widely read of the bunch, but had never left town because he had to look after his mother, asked a question. His voice had become higher since I had last seen him, his features more feminine. He asked us if we thought that fascism was an aesthetic phenomenon. While they started talking, a vivid scene arose in my mind, a rice paddy from which wet bones protruded, dressed in the rotting remnants of clothes. I got up and left. Those people were a part of my past, not my present.

The town had once been filled by an ironworks, and beside that silos for the workforce. The smell of sulfur was gone now, as well as the pungent smell of ethnic foods. All that was left was the tallest chimney, now draped with advertising banners for the department stores that had filled the spaces left by the demolished factories. I walked the length of the main street, stopping myself from saying hello to a few people I recognized. There were some young people sitting on the edge of the pavement, bedecked with mock gold chains like the ones they had seen in films. In my day, teenagers tried to look like young businessmen; now they were dressing like black rappers from the ghetto. They shouted after me, more because they felt they had to than because they really wanted to harm me.

I reached the end of the town center and continued walking. With a smile, I noticed that I was walking along the route I had covered every day when I worked as a postman during school holidays. Since then the government had demolished the slums and weather had washed out the facades of the blocks of flats. I stopped in front of the last, steep hill where the railway station used to stand and realized that I used to stop in this exact same spot delivering the mail. I laughed out loud, it felt good, and then I walked up the hill.

The railway line had been done away with as workers no longer had to travel to the ironworks from the surrounding area. Somebody had bought the station, transformed it into a small house, and erected a wooden shed, probably a garage, a half dozen meters away. I stopped and hesitated, looking for signs of a guard dog. Then I noticed a man standing with his feet on the deserted railway track, smoking and looking towards the snowy mountains. I recognized him immediately and smiled. Leon, my best friend from school days. After my experience at the bar, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps it was best to leave this old friend in the past, but nonetheless I called to him and waved when he turned around. I stepped closer and noticed the exact moment when he recognized me. He was glad to see me, but in a somewhat muted way, as if he was at the same time very sorry to have to take his eyes away from the view. I was surprised by the redness of the veins in his eyes, the puffiness of his face, the big stomach, and above all, the cigarette that he was holding clumsily, like a screwdriver.

“Hey, you smoke,” I said with surprise. He had never socialized with the guys in the bar during high school as he was a dedicated athlete, and thus he’d been my second-choice company. A forbidden one to boot—Leon had always known he would be a car mechanic and had attended a vocational school, which was far below my parents’ expectations, as well as the intellectual aspirations of my bar mates.

I had preferred to sit debating silly things, yes, probably even aesthetic phenomena, but not for my intellectual growth, only out of sheer laziness. Leon, on the other hand, didn’t like empty talk and had spent most of his time in motion; a world so physical that I would never be able to reach it. In spite of this, I occasionally jogged or played basketball, eventually dropping the latter and supplementing jogging with fitness training. That’s why Leon’s stomach was a surprise; he was obviously still into sports, he was stocky and muscular, but resembled a professional athlete a few months after his career has ended, after he’s taken a long holiday and done everything he wasn’t allowed to before. I noticed an occasional slight tremble moving through his body; I assumed it was caused by trying to keep his balance on the railway track, but it bothered me. In my memory, he was a rock, hard and stable. I could remember running up to him on a basketball court, trying to move him out of the free throw lane, but it was like hitting a wall.

“Yes, I smoke,” he said, “since my wife died.”

The red eyes, the puffiness. I was embarrassed now.

“When?”

“In the spring, with the last snow.”

Our eyes simultaneously escaped towards the mountains and the whiteness gleaming in the sun. The afternoon shadow had already fallen on us. He noticed and smiled briefly. I knew what he was thinking. Although we’d never really shared sports in common, we’d often done things together. And it seemed that the connection between us hadn’t disappeared in spite of the years.

I didn’t know what to say. I expressed my condolences, even though it seemed unsatisfactory and insignificant.

He wasn’t really smoking that cigarette as much as he was sipping from it.

“You knew her . . . we were already going out together back then.”

I remembered a conversation our junior year. We were sitting in the stands at the sports field, alone, and I was trying to persuade him to give up. He had asked her to go to the cinema with him, she had said no. To a dance, no. For a walk, no. To the swimming pool, no. No, no, no, and no. He replied with a certainty that surprised me—that he would marry her and that was that. Then we went to shoot some hoops. And he did marry her.

“What was . . . the matter with her?”

“She committed suicide.”

His eyes darted towards the shed, but too quickly, as if trying to restrain a movement that had gotten out of his control, he turned to me again.

“Snow was falling. The snowflakes were huge, huge. She cooked dinner, in a rush, saying she had something to do, and out she went.”

He stole another look at the shed.

“I thought she had some errands in town. Or perhaps she was going to see a movie. I was tired from work and went to bed. I woke up in the night and she wasn’t back. She wasn’t there in the morning either. I opened the door and there were no footsteps. The snow was untouched. We spent two days searching for her. The fire brigade, the police, volunteers. It was the last snow of the year and it melted quickly, and that’s when we found her. She hadn’t gone to town, she’d gone up the hill, not far from the house. She’d lain down in the snow and waited.”

He stared at the shed as if he wanted to burn through the wood with his eyes. Then he came to and turned to me.

He lit the next cigarette from the end of the previous one. As he was sipping it, the skin on his cheeks sucked in beneath his strong cheek bones. He had lost less hair than I had; it had only just started to recede.

“And you don’t know . . .”

“No. She didn’t leave a message. Not even for our son.”

“How old is he?”

“First year at university.”

He gestured towards the capital. She had waited for the son to leave home and then . . .

I wanted to ask about the autopsy results, but held back. She had walked into the falling snow, lain down, went to sleep, and died. After cooking dinner.

During all my digging up of the dead, I had forgotten that others had problems too. Then I started thinking about my ex-wife and, above all, my son, and since that wasn’t what I wanted to do, I refocused on Leon.

He was looking at the shed again.

“If there’s anything I can do to help . . .”

How stupid that sounded!

He shook his head.

I didn’t know what to do. Should I give him my number or even my card? I hated myself when I quickly said goodbye and walked back to the valley.

*  *  *

The next day I didn’t leave my hotel room. The image of Leon’s dead wife stuck in my head and wouldn’t go away. To me, she was still a rather small eighteen-year-old, even shorter than Leon, with brown hair and a slight figure; this is why it was always such a surprise when she opened her mouth. She had the kind of voice you would expect from someone larger, rougher. I could remember her in motion, the glances over her shoulder and the occasional swearword she would start a sentence with. Gentleness when she was quiet and roughness when she spoke—I kept turning these two opposites around until I pictured a snowy landscape, the softly falling snow. Such a gentle death had never happened on the fields I had excavated.

She must have lain there silently as the snow fell on her.

I recalled the image of snowflakes falling towards my face. Blackness above, they emerge from it, and the closer they get, the whiter they become.

I ran my tongue over my lips, licking the snowy moisture from them as I had done then.

Leon’s look towards the shed. Something terrible, something unpronounceable was in that look.

I called a friend from university days, and he gave me a name and number. It wasn’t difficult; over the past two decades my university classmates had reached the kind of positions that made it possible for me to have the autopsy report in my hands that very evening.

There was a trace of barbiturates in the blood. Not a deadly dose, but still. They obviously didn’t think it suspicious—she wanted to fall asleep as soon as possible, so she took a sleeping pill before walking off into the snow. So that she wouldn’t change her mind?

She was in a hurry, said Leon. That was the last snow, the last chance.

That shed, what was in it?

Leon’s look.

What if she hadn’t taken the barbiturates of her own free will?

No, no, no. Let us just say she was used to taking them before retiring. Could it be possible that someone had taken her from bed and carried her into the snow, not far from the house?

Leon?

I stood up and started walking in circles.

To carry someone who is fast asleep into the snow, is that the perfect crime? Was it possible at all, or would she have woken up?

At what moment did Leon glance towards the shed? The first time was when he mentioned her suicide. There had to be some kind of evidence in there that the police had overlooked . . . but then, they hadn’t really looked at all!

*  *  *

When I had finally bought all the necessary equipment in the capital, I had to run to catch the last bus. I arrived in my hometown as the only passenger at ten in the evening. I thought about large metropolises, where at that time people would be getting ready to go out, while here the main street was completely deserted. Drunken voices floated from the bars and I met only two dog walkers hurrying home. The windows of the apartment blocks flickered blue, and a pizza delivery van cruised among them.

I didn’t climb the hill along the road, but went around, through the woods, and then slowly descended behind the shed. The light from the house looked frozen without a TV flickering. I positioned myself among the branches and began to wait. The smell of pine kernels reminded me of the syrup my grandmother used to make. I expected to spend the night outside and had bought the most expensive mountaineering clothes and shoes, but still the chill of the cold May night crept under my skin. In order to make no sound, I moved only my toes and fingers. The bag containing my burglary tools stood next to a tree, within arm’s reach.

The light went out, and I tried to concentrate on my breathing to relax my body. The muscles on my face were the last to let go, the knot between my eyebrows resisting the longest.

I looked at my watch and decided to wait until midnight.

Then the door opened and Leon came out. Because of the shadows I couldn’t see him very well until he stepped onto the railway track. The moonlight illuminated the lines on his face, making them look deeper, hard. He stood there like the day before, smoking and staring at the snow in the hills. He smoked one cigarette, then another and another, he breathed fire out of them, and I could see his face. His head kept creeping ever closer to his cigarette, and when he was on the last one, he was so bent over that it looked as if he was sharing the smoke with his navel. Suddenly, he let the cigarette fall, sparks sprayed over the tracks, and Leon quickly walked towards the shed. I heard the sound of the lock, the creaking of the hinges. I saw light escaping through the cracks in the wood.

Carefully moving forward, I crept up to the shed and put my eye to a knothole in the wood.

Leon was getting ready to do some soldering. He had put on a face protector with the visor still up, pulled two cylinders to the middle of the room, and placed a lighter on a small table.

Most of the space was occupied by a wonderful car, an old-timer, and the chrome and shiny red finish glowed beneath the naked light bulb.

Had I come in vain? Had I come to stalk a guy who was just doing a bit of work on the side in the evening?

He stroked the car, looking at it for a long time.

Not work on the side, a hobby. I knew a few people who assembled model ships, and the expression on Leon’s face told me that he, a mechanic, was putting together a special car. I had never known much about cars, but this one seemed magnificent.

He sighed, walked to the corner, and grabbed a large military petrol canister. He poured it into the car’s reservoir. He repeated the action with three more canisters, then paused, holding a black jerry can made of plastic. He sighed once more, then raised his arm high up and tipped the can. The petrol began to spray all over him. He stood there motionless. When the flow had slowed, he took the can to the corner, then returned, let down his visor, and took up the blowtorch.

I was already running.

I burst through the door shouting “NO! NO! NO! NO!” and hit him on the right arm with all my strength, knocking away the blowtorch. At the same time, I also managed to hit his face protector, which fell over his face. Instinctively he pushed me back. I could feel my lip going hard, taste the saltiness and the sweetness of blood while I was pulling him out of the shed. Time stretched out, got lost, stumbled, and then started again as we lay outside in the grass.

“Don’t do it, don’t do it!” I kept repeating, swallowing blood.

He was gasping for air like an asthmatic.

The moon glowed past a half of its full size, the stars twinkled, the crystals on the mountains winking at them.

We were lying like we had done then, in the snow, when instead of blood I had licked snowy water off my lips.

Leon moaned and leapt up. A wave of petrol fumes enveloped me. My eyes watered and squinted at the sting.

I got scared that he would try to grab the lighter, so I rose quickly, too, but he just stood there, staring at me.

“How come you’re here?”

I didn’t know what to say.

He didn’t wait for my reply.

“I felt I had to. Had to! I wanted to do it yesterday but then you came. And for a moment I thought there was still hope that . . . that I could . . . I don’t know what. And then you left. And . . . I was so shocked. We hadn’t seen each other for twenty years.”

He pulled a cigarette packet out of his pocket and took one out. “I’ve got to have a cigarette.”

I screamed like a blonde in a horror movie, shaking my hands in front of me.

He jumped and looked at me with astonishment. Then he realized and dropped the cigarette.

“I’ll go and change.”

I followed him.

*  *  *

We sat on the railway track. It felt cold underneath me, but I didn’t want to move. The crystal night had drifted up from the town below and wrapped itself around us. I lit the cigarette he offered me in spite of the fact that I had long ago given it up. I rolled it around my swollen lips, chasing the smoke from my nostrils, but it wasn’t a real temptation.

“Our boy had left to go to university. And even before that, when he was still in high school, he was away from home a lot. But at least in the evenings, and family occasions, and . . . do you understand?”

I nodded even though I didn’t really understand, but I could imagine.

“But then even that stopped. She cooked, I ate it after I got home from work, then I went to work on that car, and she knitted or watched television. And then she went into the snow . . . I don’t know if she moved her arms.”

He looked at me and I nodded. Again, we were thinking about the same thing.

“I was getting more and more obsessed with the car. I said to myself that maybe I should talk to her instead of assembling that beast. But you know very well I’m not good at talking.”

He stuck his nose into the pit between his index finger and thumb and inhaled the fumes the showering couldn’t wipe off.
His lips wavered: “I thought about it a lot after she died. I wanted it to succeed, but at the same time I wanted it to look like a soldering accident, so that the boy would get insurance.”

I nodded.

He shook his head.

“We had grown apart somehow,” he said and pulled on his cigarette, “and never tried to find each other again.”

“So what now?” I burst out. “I can’t fucking leave you, how do I know you won’t try again? Should I tell you it was her decision, that she, too, could have put down her knitting needles and come to you in the garage? Or stuck them in your back if that’s what you deserved?”

There was a short burst of air from him, perhaps even a laugh.

“With every day I felt more and more that I had to do it. But now I don’t anymore. I don’t know if it will come back, I won’t lie to you. But how is it that you came just at the right time?”

“My wife chose divorce, luckily. So I took some time off and came. I don’t know how or why. I had to. Just like you. There you go.”

Leon scratched his few days of stubble.

“When I saw you I remembered that snow, that record year, you know.”

I nodded.

“And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even though that was . . .” he gestured towards the shed, “stronger. I see you remember as well?”

“Yes, I remember it just like you. We were snow angels.”

We stopped talking and let our memories take over. It had been night, too, a long time ago. There was nearly two meters of snow. During the day we jumped from the second-floor balconies, burying ourselves in the white mass. All we did was move the snowy hill marking the hood of our neighbor’s car, and when he went to dig it out, it wasn’t there. He reported the theft to the police. That night we waded into the hills on the other side of the valley. But we didn’t get far. We lay down on a slope, and I don’t know whose idea it was, it must have been something somebody had seen in a movie, we hadn’t done it before. You lie in the snow on your back, spread your arms, and move them up and down. Somebody then has to lift you up, and if they do it swiftly enough, and without any pauses, it leaves an imprint on the snow of a figure with wings.

The point is, you cannot get up on your own, somebody has to lift you up. If you try to do it on your own, all you leave behind is a snowy hole, shapeless and meaningless.

“Do you remember how the snow kept falling?” he said.

Huge snowflakes had muffled all sounds and swept them away. We lay in that whiteness, our arms motionless, sinking deeper and deeper. I could no longer see anything, only the blackness of the sky and the flakes falling on me. I felt as if I was being swallowed by the universe, among stars, immortal and fearless. I didn’t notice that the snow beneath me was giving way and I was sinking lower and lower, into solitude and aloneness. Leon found me in a trance, with my mouth wide open, as he appeared above the gaping hole, offering his hand, saving me, allowing me to make a perfect angel.

Then it was my turn to pull him up.

And that was that.

We looked at each other and made another of our connections. We were both surprised by the tears on each other’s face, and then we touched our own cheeks and wiped away the moisture with disbelief.

“She didn’t have anyone to lift her from her angel,” he said, tears glistening across the rims of his eyelids.

We sat there, crying, our buttocks nearly frozen.

I was putting together a list of everything I had to do in the morning, which included buying an airline ticket, when Leon emptied his nose with a swift move of his fingers, like he used to in his running days, and sighed, “What am I going to do with that car now?”

I knew he wouldn’t expect it, so I offered the obvious:

“Shall we go for a ride?”

And we did.