There was a small, beautifully sad station by a high grassy berm which hid the river. The train deposited us and moved off along those tracks which made two straight lines below the irregular blur of the berm and led deep into the steppes to a point beyond infinity.
It was a fortification, Istvan told me. Something to do with tank movements in the Second World War.
We walked, then. Through the station, where a set of broken eaves pointed towards a village beyond.
It was one of those circular medieval keeps, with some odd monastic history, with a dry moat running the circumference and a tributary of the river flowing behind. Scattered breezeblock bungalows lay on either side of the broken roadway and lent a melancholy modernist contrast to the pale, off-white limestone of the high walls, the dark, sloping roofs inside them.
There was a bell ringing, a mournful toll as we walked down the cracked pathway of dried mud, cigarette ends and scattered beer cans. For some reason, I thought of the road to Emmaus.
We are either early or late, Istvan said sagely.
We crossed a mound of earth that could have once been a drawbridge, through an old stone archway without gates.
Once, said Istvan, there were villages like this all over. Can you imagine?
I could. The ancient walls with the cracked limestone, the tiny ripples of something like streets, with misshapen doorways and small shuttered windows. I could imagine a young girl running down them, kicking back her heels.
There was a cone or a pyramid rising above the perimeter wall with an off-centre iron cross. That was the church, and there was a shuffle of people moving from it, hardly a procession, towards the archway opposite and the graveyard beyond.
A meandering ribbon of water flowed around it. It must have fed the allotments on the other side, the small communal gardens with their tangles of bean and tomato rows, with hooped coverings of plastic. There was an intermittent, ruined forest beyond, huge beeches and oaks separated by saplings. One could imagine Zhukov’s tanks ploughing through it, years ago. And Putin’s, doing the same, some day soon.
We stopped in the shadow of the other arch. It seemed impolite to go further. I could see the coffin under the shoulders of four men, in the fierce, punishing midday sun. An Orthodox priest walking before it, holding Petra’s mother’s arm. There was a mechanical digger by an open grave. And as they made their way towards it, I recognised the face that had spat on the office carpet, the shoes that had ground the spittle on the floor. He was the left-hand bearer, in a dark Sunday suit.
Why are we here? asked Istvan again.
Because here is where she ran from.
She didn’t run. The mother told us, she was snatched.
No, I said. She ran.
Every kid runs from these places, he said. Sooner or later.
But she ran from him.
I nodded towards him, diminutive in his Sunday suit, bearing most of the weight of the coffin. His face glistened with sweat in the heat. They were at that awkward point at which they had to loose it from their shoulders. There was a flurry of movement from behind them, hands gripping, taking the burden. He stood back, released, and rubbed his shoulder, as if to ease the pain.
Ayee.
Istvan whistled through his browning teeth.
You have evidence?
The only evidence was dead now. So I shook my head.
It all makes sense.
So how does she find – what you call closure?
Like in the cable series?
And the coffin was being lowered now, on brown leather straps.
She is dead. Isn’t that closure enough?
I suspect not.
In these kinds of places, peasant places, they manage things in their own country way.
Aren’t there laws to deal with things like this?
No law out here. Soon no law anywhere.
But they don’t know.
No, he said. Not yet.
He grimaced. I could have almost called it a smile.
You go back to station. Have a beer. Leave this to me.
I sat in the empty station as two trains passed. And the third was trundling by as Istvan joined me once more.
Come, he said. We can’t afford to miss this.
So we took the train back, along the endless berm, until the river made its appearance behind it, glowing gold, like the molten Euphrates. He said nothing for a long, long time.
Then.
I spoke with the mother.
And?
She already suspected.
How?
She is a mother.
Was it why she hired us?
Perhaps. And now she knows. She has brothers and cousins who will . . . how do you say it . . . deal with the whole sad situation, in their own special way.
I had heard that phrase before. A baby-faced cleric, in a bouffant beard and turban. Kill them, he said, in your own special way.
And Jonathan—
He smiled, as if to change the subject.
Your name is dactyl, you know that?
Three syllables, I said. One long, two short.
She told me to tell you to do what she can’t do.
And what is that?
Let go.
Let go, I repeated.
Sometimes there is no closure, Jonathan.