Part Five: The Silence Before the Sirens
There was a period — perhaps twelve minutes, perhaps fifteen — between the call and the arrival of the police.
In those minutes, the graveside settled into a particular kind of stasis. Kowalczyk had asked everyone to stay where they were, which he had no authority to enforce but which the crowd observed because they were in the grip of the kind of collective event that produces compliance without the need for authority. Nobody left. A few people moved closer together. Some of the older women had begun to cry, softly, for reasons that were not entirely about Marta.
The priest had closed his breviary and was standing at the head of the grave with the expression of a man encountering something that his years of ministry had not specifically prepared him for, though the general principles of it — the presence of death in places death was not expected — were not unfamiliar territory.
Damian had lowered the coffin lid without replacing the screws. He stood beside it with his hands at his sides.
Tomasz, Marta’s cousin, was sitting on a nearby bench that someone had told him was for the groundskeeping staff, and he was looking at the gravel path between his feet, and he was shaking slightly. Not dramatically. Just the small shaking of a person in shock, which was what he was in.
Irena Wójcik stood with her back to the coffin and her eyes on the sky and her son’s hand on her shoulder and she did not speak.
The man who had been hidden in the coffin was, as far as anyone present knew, a stranger. No one at the graveside recognized him, and most of them had not seen him clearly. He was a fact they did not yet have the context to understand, a weight they could feel but not explain.
The sirens, when they came, were a relief. Not because they resolved anything — they were far from resolving anything — but because they marked the end of the waiting, which had been its own particular kind of unbearable.
