Part Ten: The Second Funeral
The second funeral was small. November, a different Saturday, a different corner of the same cemetery — she had chosen to keep Marta at the same cemetery, which some people advised against and which she had decided firmly, because the ground was not responsible for what had been done in it.
Eight people. The family, two of Marta’s closest friends from university, Kowalczyk the funeral director who came as a private individual and stood at the back and did not speak. The priest was the same priest, who had accepted the invitation with the specific gravity of someone who understood that certain ceremonies needed to be done again, made clean.
The coffin this time was lifted easily.
Six men. The ordinary weight of an ordinary terrible loss.
Irena stood at the graveside and watched her daughter lowered into the earth, and this time there was nothing else, only what should have been there, only the grief that was hers and the loss that was hers and the October-becoming-November sky above a cemetery in Kielce.
Afterward, Paweł walked with her to the car.
“Are you all right?” he said, which was not quite the right question but was the question available.
She thought about it.
“I’m not all right,” she said. “But I know what happened now. And she’s where she should be.” She looked at the sky, which was doing its gray thing, indifferent and steady. “That has to be enough. I’m going to make it enough.”
He took her hand.
They walked to the car.
Behind them, the groundskeepers began their work — the slow, necessary, unhurried work of closing a grave, filling it in with the particular care of people who understood the meaning of what they were doing, who performed the same function at the end of every burial and had learned to bring to it the attention it deserved.
The cemetery returned to its ordinary quiet.
Leaves moved in the trees. A bird settled on a stone and considered something and flew away.
Somewhere in Warsaw, in a building that belonged to the courts, eleven weeks of investigation were becoming a case file that would take another year to become a trial, and the trial would last six weeks, and the sentences would be long, and none of that would return anything to anyone it had been taken from.
But the grave was clean.
The grave was only what it was supposed to be.
And the woman who had said open it, standing at her daughter’s coffin on a gray October morning with the certainty of someone who had decided that knowing was necessary, had given everyone else in that cemetery — in that case, in that long and terrible sequence of events — the only thing that could be given:
The truth, when it was ready to be seen.
And someone, finally, had looked.
