Ruslan gaped at the Ford, feeling as though his stomach had been sucker punched again.
What was his father’s car doing here at Calang?
The intelligence officer’s sly voice spoke into his ear. I’ve had talks with your father, he said. Make sure you look inside the smashed-up cars for bodies, he said.
Ruslan ran to the car and then halted several feet away. He didn’t want to look. He couldn’t look. He called to the merchant. “Can you see if anybody’s inside?”
“What’s the matter, son?”
“Please look.”
The merchant peered through one of the shattered windows. “Nobody.” He frowned curiously at Ruslan. “You know this car?”
“My father’s. It shouldn’t be here. It should be in—” A memory sharp as a blade cut off Ruslan’s voice. This morning, the first awful truckload of bodies being dumped into the mass grave. That body in the gray overalls…maybe those marks on the arms hadn’t been tattoos but bruises. Perhaps the body had looked fatter than his father because dead bodies bloated.
The dump truck stood a hundred yards down the road, loaded up for another run. The driver was just getting into the cab. Ruslan sprinted and jumped up in the back as the driver started the engine. Ruslan crouched down by the awful cargo as the driver eased the clutch, the truck shaking and rattling in first gear. A gunshot rang out through the air, followed by the private’s shouting. The truck halted, and the driver stuck his head out the window to yell, “What now?”
Ruslan yanked off his distinctive yellow shirt and stuffed it underneath a corpse. Then, with a queasy twist of his stomach, he wormed his way into the bodies on the truck bed, arranging the blue-eyed woman’s arm so it lay across his head.
Revulsion and claustrophobia swamped him. He pressed his face to the bed’s hard metal and hyperventilated with short little gasps. He was about to abandon this insane ploy and bolt out of the truck when something curious happened. The woman’s arm, instead of being a dead weight, became a mother’s encouraging embrace. His mother. He heard her voice: Calm down, my love, calm down.
His revulsion passed, a breeze swept away his claustrophobia, and his tumult quieted.
“Well, he isn’t here,” he could hear the driver saying in annoyance to the private, who was still breathing hard from his run. “I got a job to do, let me do it.”
The truck bumped down the road and after a while slowed to a stop. The cab door opened. What was going on? This wasn’t the grave site.
Above him the driver’s breath rasped heavily. Ruslan tilted his chin and cracked his eyes. The truck had halted behind a screen of fallen trees, and the driver was kneeling by the woman’s side. He reached for her hand to tug off the gold wedding ring. “You won’t need that,” he muttered.
An incandescent fury shot through Ruslan. He bolted upright and grabbed the man’s throat. The driver screeched, his eyes bulging with terror. He yanked away from Ruslan’s grip and fell backward off the truck, his head hitting the ground with a solid thud. He lay still in a limp heap.
Ruslan’s anger was still with him. Serves him right, the corpse robber. Nonetheless, he checked the man’s breathing and pulse. Satisfied the man would live, he tugged him into a patch of shade and then climbed up into the cab behind the driver’s wheel. After some grinding of clutch and gears, he got the truck going and barreled down the road, swinging into the turnoff with a squeal of tires.
The excavator looked like a busy one-armed creature, hard at work making a second burial trench. The first hadn’t yet been covered. A man was shoveling lime over the bodies.
Ruslan jumped out of the cab and ran to the edge of the grave, ignoring the lime shoveler’s astonished stare. He walked around the lip of the hole, peering down at the horrible puzzle of dead bodies piled at random, their congealed mass lightly coated with lime, like sugar frosting. The corpse of the man in gray overalls was to the side of the pile, where it had rolled to a stop facedown at the bottom of the trench’s steep slope. Ruslan slid down the side and turned the corpse’s shoulders. A pockmarked face, the old acne scars clearly visible despite the skin’s greenish bloat. Not his father.
“What the hell are you doing?” The guard stood at the edge of the grave, his rifle unslung, ready to use.
Not his father. Ruslan climbed back up in a daze. It was the most curious sensation, relief that wasn’t relief. Just because this dead man in the gray overalls wasn’t his father didn’t mean that his father wasn’t dead.
“The driver got sick,” he told the guard. “I was assigned to replace him.” He jumped into the back of the truck and picked up the young, blue-eyed woman. She felt light as air in his arms, even when he jumped off. He gently placed her on the ground and waved his arms at the excavator operator, who stopped the gears and leaned out the side of his cab. “Dig her a grave,” he told the operator. “A private grave, away from the others, so we can mark it with something.”
The guard slung his rifle over his shoulder. “A relative?” he asked sympathetically.
“Yes,” Ruslan said. In his heart he added, my mother. His mother, who had died as young as this unknown woman. The mother he’d never known, except for one sweet second just minutes ago, when she had come to him to calm his terror.
He removed the woman’s wedding ring, its inner circle inscribed with a date. He was sure that somebody would recognize the ring and have at least the mercy of knowing where a loved one was buried.
There had been no ritual washing of the body, and there was no shroud, but in the truck’s cab were several white T-shirts still in their plastic packages that the driver had no doubt looted. Ruslan put one on and tucked another around the woman as a symbol for all that was lacking. He said the prayer for the dead, the guard and excavator operator and lime sprinkler respectfully standing behind him.
When he was finished, he turned around. Two men in civilian clothes had appeared out of nowhere to join the impromptu mourning. One had a scarred arm, the other a dead white eye.