The Survivors

by Alex Schulman

  “Unfortunately, we don’t have a week. This has to happen today.”

  “I can’t give you the urn unless I know the arrangements have been approved by the board.”

  “Can’t you just look at these forms? You can see there’s no funny business. It’s just that we’re a little pressed for time.”

  “We have a saying around here,” the man says, gathering the documents and placing them in one pile. “ ‘Everything has its time, and one thing at a time.’ You can’t be in a hurry when you do this sort of work.”

  Nils gives an abrupt laugh. He methodically puts the papers back in his folder and closes it.

  “Here’s the deal. Our mother was supposed to be buried today. And last night my brothers and I were at her apartment, to see if there was anything valuable there we wanted to have, before the movers came to throw it all out. In her top desk drawer we found a letter that said If I die.”

  Nils opens the folder again and takes out an envelope. He hands it to the man.

  “You don’t have to read it all, but here.” He points at the final paragraph.

  “Right there, our mother says, plain and simple, that she doesn’t want to be buried here. Which means she doesn’t want the funeral I’ve been planning full-time for the last two weeks. No one would be happier than me to bury her here this afternoon, but we’re just trying to comply with our mother’s last wishes. So we have to stop the interment today. And we have to get the urn.”

  The man’s lips move silently as he reads.

  “Wow,” he says. “I can see how this is disrupting your plans.”

  “Yes,” Nils says. “It’s been a long night.”

  “I can imagine,” says the man. He hands the letter back to Nils. “But I’m sorry. It’s against the law for me to give you the urn.”

  He rests his hands on the counter. His rolled-up sleeves reveal old tattoos, their edges blurred into his skin.

  “It’s a matter of respect for the dead,” the man says.

  The room is quiet. Nils looks down at his folder. Pierre steps forward and stops next to the desk, directly in front of the man. Benjamin sees it right away, in Pierre’s posture, his neck receding into his shoulders, his voice far back in his throat, almost like he’s choking up.

  “Could we at least look at the urn for a minute?”

  “Sure,” says the man. “I don’t see why not.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the urn room. Hold on.”

  The man searches on his computer, muttering a few numbers to himself to memorize them, and walks off; Benjamin hears the jangle of keys in some back room, and after a moment he returns. The urn is green, made of copper. Smooth and round, with a little knob in the shape of a torch on the top. The man places the urn on the counter, and then everything happens very fast. Pierre grabs the urn and hands it to Benjamin, charges the counter and leaps it, knocks the man to the floor, and gets on top of him.

  “You little rat,” he says.

  The man squirms and grimaces, trying to fight his way free, but Pierre’s grip is strong, and he presses his arm to the man’s neck.

  “For fuck’s sake, Pierre,” says Nils. He looks at his brother, a quick glance, makes up his mind, takes the folder, turns toward the door, and heads that way. “Madhouse,” he says to himself, and then he’s gone. Benjamin’s feet are riveted to the floor. He watches Nils leave the room and can’t follow; he sees Pierre attacking the crematorium guy and can’t interfere. He can only stand there and watch the inexplicable events unfolding. He looks at Pierre’s rage. He doesn’t know what it means, he can’t feel the breadth of its power, doesn’t know what Pierre is capable of now. Pierre has a knee in the man’s back and leans over, whispering in his ear:

  “Our mother is dead.”

  “Let me go!” the man cries.

  “Shut up!” Pierre hisses. “Our mother just died. And you’re saying we have no right to her ashes?”

  Pierre must have him in a hold that’s twisting one of his joints, because the man lies still, his face pressed to the floor. After a moment, the man gives up; soon he’s perfectly motionless.

  “I’m going to let you go in a second,” Pierre says, “and you’re going to stay right where you are. Do you understand? You aren’t going to move an inch, because otherwise I’ll hurt you again.”

  Slowly, Pierre loosens his grip. He gets up. The man stays on the floor.

  “You rat,” Pierre says. He jumps back over the counter. “Come on, Benjamin.”

  Pierre takes the urn from Benjamin and the brothers leave, hurrying down the gravel path, past the gravestones. Benjamin sees the car, all the drops of rain on its paint; it’s parked sloppily on the narrow road, its right-hand set of tires on the pavement, its left-hand ones on hallowed ground. Pierre opens the trunk and places the urn inside. Benjamin passes Nils, who’s in the back seat, notices how he’s staring at the cement-colored sky. They get in and drive off.

  “What are we going to do about Dad’s grave?” Benjamin asks.

  “We don’t have time for that right now, because they could very well come after us,” Pierre says. “But I can drive past it on the way out.”

  Benjamin picks up the bouquet of tulips he’d set on the dashboard, fingers their rough stems. Dad and Mom loved tulips, because they were a sign of spring. Each Friday between March and May, as far back as he can remember, Dad had bought a bouquet of tulips; they stood on the kitchen table, waiting for her when she got home from work. There’s the tallest birch in the cemetery, and under it is Dad. It had always been the plan, that his spot would be there. The brothers roll by the tree slowly, look at Dad’s gravestone, a sturdy block with the few symbols that sum up his life. “See the hole?” Pierre says.

  Beside Dad’s grave is a cylindrical hole in the ground. Just the right size for an urn. The caretaker has done his job; everything is ready for this afternoon, when Mom was supposed to be lowered into the ground there. Fog is creeping in from the forest, the heavy birch dips its leaves to the ground around the site, and Benjamin remembers something from a lifetime ago, in Mom and Dad’s bedroom, boxes piled along the wall—they’ve just moved in? Mom and Dad are taking things from the boxes and suddenly they rush to the bare bed, laughter and competition, because both of them want the same side, both of them want to lie on the right. They shout and play-fight, rolling around, and then they kiss. Nils is embarrassed and disappears, but Benjamin stays put, he doesn’t want to miss a thing. When Benjamin looks over at Dad’s gravestone he sees that she would have gotten the right side, and they would lie there being dead together, but Mom’s letter changed everything, and in a few hours the caretaker will come back with new information and fill in the hole, consummating Mom’s betrayal, rendering Dad’s loneliness eternal.

  * * *

  —

  They turn out of the cemetery, and soon they’re on their way, a car loaded with the brothers and a copper container full of their mother’s crushed bones. They drive through the suburbs, through the outer-ring communities, so many red lights, and out to the highway. He looks up at the massive electrical poles along the European highway. Their black cables swoop slowly into the summer outside the car windows, then curve up again, reaching their highest point at the tops of the enormous steel structures that line the road, one hundred yards, then they dip again, curtsying at the meadows below.

  | 17 |

  The Escapees

  The day began with the promise of a ski trip. It was a Sunday in March, two weeks after Benjamin’s twentieth birthday. He was sitting in the kitchen, watching as Dad made himself breakfast. Dad was wearing the pale robe that so unforgivingly displayed the various stains of breakfasts past, his hair was every which way, his glasses hanging by their cord on his chest. He muttered “Damn” to himself as he dropped an egg too hard into the boiling water and it cracked. He was torn
between tasks when the toast popped up just as the kettle began to whistle, but he sorted things and took his tray to the tiny balcony outside Benjamin’s room. Benjamin followed close behind. Fresh, cold air and sunshine that brought warmth only when the faint breeze abated. It was too chilly to sit outside, but Dad didn’t care, he always said he didn’t want to miss spring.

  “You face the sun,” said Dad. “It’s so nice.”

  “No, I want you to.”

  “Are you sure?” Dad asked.

  He remembers sitting out there when the other family members were asleep, watching the morning come into sharper focus. Dad drank his tea, which smelled like tar and poison and steamed in the cold. He gazed out at the snow-covered parking lot, and the woods just past that, encircling the lake. He remembers Dad closing his eyes for a moment and leaning his head back against the building, and that each time Dad opened up a new egg to peel it, he could tell the direction of the wind when the steam disappeared against the façade.

  “Should we do something today, just you and me?” Dad asked.

  “Sure. Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “Shall we go cross-country skiing?”

  Benjamin looked at his dad, puzzled. “Cross-country skiing? Do we have skis?”

  “Yes, of course. They must still be around. I think they’re in the basement somewhere.”

  It felt like a different life, but he and Dad used to go skiing together when Benjamin was little. White tracks through black forests, up over vast expanses with views over valleys where Dad was so moved that he had to just stand there for a moment and look. They got out their bag lunches, double rye sandwiches with caviar that had squished out at the edges, sticking to the plastic wrap, and oranges they peeled with frozen fingers. And then they kept moving, the sun low and diamond sparkles on the snow, fast down the hills, into the forest, which was silent, deserted, and dead, but there were marks of claws and hooves over the ski tracks, as if the forest lived a secret life when no one could see it, and they came home with rosy cheeks and lay down on the sofa and Dad rolled Benjamin’s feet in his hands as if he were making meatballs, to warm them up again.

  “It would be wonderful to go skiing again,” Benjamin said.

  “Wouldn’t it?” Dad said.

  “Just you and me,” said Benjamin.

  “Yes, just you and me,” said Dad.

  Benjamin found Dad’s skis in the basement, but his own were missing. And anyway, wouldn’t they probably be too small for him? They decided to go buy new boots and skis for Benjamin. They walked across the parking lot, taking the gravel paths through the snow that led to the shopping center, and just when they got to the dry fountain, where homeless people often argued with each other in the summer, Dad suddenly brought his hand to his head. He staggered forward, reeling in a circle until he was back where he’d started. Benjamin grabbed on to him.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Dad said. “All of a sudden I just got such a headache.” Dad stood there for a moment, his forehead creased, gazing down at the snow, and then he bent over to pick up his hat, which he’d dropped. That’s when he fell over. Benjamin threw himself down over him, turned him onto his side, tried to get control of his flailing head. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he whispered. “It’s like something burst inside my head.”

  That’s how it went, the morning Dad had his stroke.

  * * *

  —

  The ambulance came, and the paramedics’ detachment made Benjamin feel calm; they wouldn’t have worked so slowly on someone who might be dying. They got out of their vehicles, examined Dad, and casually opened the back doors and pulled out the shiny metal stretcher. They let him lie down on it himself, fastened him in with a belt over his belly. Dad observed everything going on around him wide-eyed. One of the paramedics laid a gentle hand on Dad’s arm, finally got his attention, and Dad looked him straight in the eye.

  “You’ve had a stroke,” said the man.

  “You don’t say?” Dad said. As if it were some amusing factoid.

  No one was allowed to ride in the ambulance. Benjamin stood to the side and watched as they loaded Dad in. Their eyes met. Dad took Benjamin’s hand, waved it like a flag. “And here we were supposed to go skiing,” he said.

  The door closed and the ambulance slowly maneuvered past the curious onlookers on the square.

  Later on, Pierre and Benjamin and Mom gathered around Dad’s bed in the ICU, and when the doctor arrived, the news was clear: everything had turned out okay after all. Dad had had a minor bleed in his brain, and the scan showed that none of his brain functions had been damaged. His oxygen levels were still low, and that was of mild concern to the doctor; Dad would be placed under observation in the hospital for a few days, but if all went well he would soon be able to come home again.

  Nils, who lived outside the city, arrived at the hospital an hour later. With him was a woman in a wig. Benjamin knew who she was—they’d met once before, about six months ago, when Nils brought her for a Sunday dinner at Mom and Dad’s. “You might be wondering about the wig,” she said, just a few minutes into dinner. They were. The wig was blond, almost white, and had such a pronounced set of bangs that there could be no doubt it wasn’t her real hair. The woman told them that this was the point. She had an illness that made her lose her hair. In a world where most people would be ashamed of being bald, she had decided to be the opposite. She didn’t feel an ounce of shame, she said. She made the wig, the hair loss, all of it, into part of her identity. She talked fast and refused to be interrupted, and Benjamin was afraid that Mom would soon lose patience with her. She stroked Nils’s arms on the table as she spoke, scratching him gently with her long nails. When Nils went to fill the water carafe, Benjamin watched him wandering toward the kitchen, saw that he was standing up straight, full of a confidence Benjamin didn’t recognize.

  Near the end of the meal, the woman with the wig took it off and placed it on the table beside her. She did it without comment, so no one else commented either, but an uncomfortable silence settled over the table like a lid, the clatter of flatware on china and all eyes sneaking looks at her smooth head, the light of the candles on the table gleaming against her skull. There she sat, the woman with a wig, now wigless, in the family’s inner sanctum, behind every vault, like a lack of boundaries become flesh. Maybe she wanted to stir things up or make an impression, and maybe she succeeded for a little while, but once she’d left it was like stirring syrup: after a moment, everything was just as it had been.

  The woman with the wig came to the hospital hand in hand with Nils, and she hugged each and every member of the family. This was the first time Benjamin had seen Nils in months, but maybe it was thanks to her that their reunion felt simpler than Benjamin could have imagined. Dad was shaken. He peered at the rolling cart next to his bed with that searching gaze, like after dinner during summers at the cottage, when he was picking everyone else’s plates clean. He looked at his children.

  “The ambulance was scary,” Dad said.

  “I can imagine,” said Benjamin.

  Pierre handed him a glass of juice and Dad sucked thoughtfully at his straw as he gazed at the ceiling.

  “But those ambulance guys were nice,” Dad said.

  “What did you talk about?” Pierre asked.

  “They mostly asked a bunch of questions and made me do a bunch of silly things, to see how I was feeling.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “They asked if I could smile. And of course I could. Then they asked me to stretch out my hand and hold it there for five seconds. And then they asked me to repeat a simple sentence, to see if I was slurring.”

  “What was the sentence?” Benjamin asked.

  Dad answered, but Benjamin couldn’t understand what he said. A brief exchange of glances betwee
n the three sons.

  After a while, Dad was tired and wanted to rest, and once he was asleep the family left the hospital; Mom said she would come back the next day. But Benjamin stayed, keeping watch over his sleeping father.

  * * *

  —

  The day progressed and it got dark early, the room grew dim, there was a stripe of warm yellow at the bottom of the door that led to the corridor, with black shadows moving across it each time someone passed. Dad woke up later, managed to sit up in bed and ask for strawberry juice. The evening went on, they sat there together, and a quiet rain fell outside. Perhaps that last conversation could have been put to better use. There were, of course, things that Benjamin wished he had said, afterward, or questions he wished he’d asked. Memories he needed help sorting, things he’d heard Dad say or do a long time ago that he still didn’t understand. But they didn’t talk about the past, they never had and they didn’t now, because neither of them knew how to do it, and maybe it wasn’t necessary, maybe this silence was the most beautiful thing they could have together, because it was just Benjamin and Dad, Mom wasn’t there and they were free and clear, beyond her force field, like two prisoners who managed to break out and were recovering after their escape, savoring the silence together. They didn’t talk, not really, but maybe they were still happy that day, as they looked around the room alertly, and sometimes their eyes met and they smiled at each other.

  “This is all so silly,” said Dad.

  “What is?”

  He lifted his hands, gestured at the room. “This.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Benjamin.

  “For us two, too,” said Dad. He gazed at Benjamin with his watery eyes. “We were supposed to go out hunting.”

  Dad said he was tired and lay down on his side, and an hour into his sleep, he had his second stroke. Its only signs were a sharp intake of breath, a wrinkle between his eyebrows, and that the machines started beeping and the room was suddenly full of activity, and Benjamin stood pressed against the wall during all the feverish commotion, and then a doctor took him into the hall and told him that Dad wasn’t going to pull through this time. Benjamin called the others, and they returned to the sickbed one by one. Pierre was last; he stormed in and was astonished to find that no one was fighting for Dad’s life.