The Forgotten Dead

by Tove Alsterdal

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘You were in Spain a week ago. I read about it on the Internet.’

  ‘Oh, is this about my passport, or something?’ She suddenly sounded interested. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Have you found it?’

  ‘No. But I read that you found a man on the beach. That was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ I heard the girl snuffling. ‘Sorry. I’ve got a slight cold,’ she said. ‘Papa says it’s from the wind. Or maybe the shock. I don’t know.’

  Her English was good, though it had a Swedish lilt to it.

  ‘In the interview you say that the man had a tattoo. Is that right?’

  ‘Where did you say you’re calling from?’

  ‘From Lisbon.’

  ‘Do you work for a newspaper or something?’

  The girl blew her nose, blasting into the phone.

  ‘What did the tattoo look like?’ I asked.

  ‘It was on his shoulder.’

  ‘Which shoulder?’

  ‘On the guy lying there, of course.’ She giggled. ‘I was sitting on a big rock that stuck out of the water. And it was when I climbed up that …’ The girl abruptly stopped. ‘You don’t happen to know Alex, do you?’

  I had a tight grip on the phone.

  Who the hell was Alex?

  ‘No, I don’t know any Alex,’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘But it’s possible that I know the man you found.’

  ‘But he was from Africa.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘But he was. I’ve dreamed about him. That he gets up from the water and grabs hold of me. It’s scary, and yet it’s not. He looks almost alive. Which newspaper do you work for?’ Terese was definitely awake now. She seemed happy to have the attention. ‘I don’t understand why anyone gets a tattoo. It must hurt awfully. I fainted when I got my ears pierced, but I was only thirteen, of course.’

  I dug my fingernails into the bedspread.

  ‘What sort of tattoo was it?’ I asked.

  ‘It was nice. It really was. Two flowers crossed. Not roses, or anything like that. More like imaginary flowers, a really nice design.’

  A really nice design. The words echoed in the room, and the intertwining flowers appeared before my eyes. I could see them curling over a black shoulder and down towards the muscles of the upper arm, and I bit down on the hand that wasn’t holding the phone, bit as hard as I could, the pain keeping me in control.

  ‘But the police weren’t interested in it. They mostly wanted to know what I was doing on the beach, and stuff like that.’ Terese blew her nose again. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but it’s hard to talk about this. It brings it all back. Papa thinks it will take time to get over something like this.’

  ‘Did it say anything?’ I whispered.

  A rustling on the phone. The girl must have changed position.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Did it say anything on the tattoo?’ I almost shouted.

  ‘Oh, you mean on his shoulder? Sorry, this is a bad connection. I don’t know what it meant. I don’t know those languages.’

  ‘So it did say something?’ I heard my own voice echo on the line. Everything I said was repeated with a nano-second delay. ‘A name?’

  Name, name. The word reverberated.

  ‘I have no idea whether it was a name. They said he was from the sub-Sahara, that lots of people have died there in the sea. Just think if I’d gone swimming there the day before. Maybe he was already in the water. But I thought it was too cold and the waves were too big.’

  ‘What did it say on the tattoo?’

  ‘Why do you sound so angry?’

  ‘Sorry, I’m just tired.’

  Tired, tired.

  ‘I don’t know why I kept looking at that tattoo. First I thought it was an animal he had on his shoulder, but then I realized it was a tattoo. It was like I didn’t want to look at his body, he was totally naked, you know, and I didn’t dare look at his face …’

  ‘What did it say?’

  Far away I heard the girl answer.

  And I felt my left shoulder burning. From the tattoo I had there. Patrick’s name on my skin, a souvenir of that crazy night in Chinatown, the night we got engaged and we’d had each other’s names etched into our skin. Much better than rings! It was a permanent commitment, something we would never lose, an insane means of provoking his parents, an impulsive idea of mine when I saw the light shining in the tattoo parlour in a basement across from Mott Street. I hadn’t thought he would dare. That he’d so clearly want me. For all eternity. For all eternity.

  The girl’s voice was forcing its way into my ear.

  ‘It said “alone”. Isn’t that strange? That’s what the word means in Swedish, anyway. “Allena”. Although it was spelled with only one “l”. Alena. Almost like “alone” in English. It was kind of horrible, because he was actually all alone there in the water. And I was alone too, because Alex … But I can’t talk about that. It still hurts too much.’

  I dropped the phone and the voice was somewhere in the dark all around me. I wanted to scream for it to stop, but it went on and on: ‘And then I thought that it must mean something else altogether in his language. Do you know what it means? I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about that. I don’t think anybody ever gets over something like this. My life will never be the same. Hello? Are you there? Is it him? The man you know?’

  Chapter 14

  Tarifa

  Thursday, 2 October

  Ahead of me lay the last stretch of road like a lonely pencil line extending straight out to sea. A military warning sign popped up and then disappeared. In a gully stood a partially collapsed sheep shed.

  This is the end, I thought. There is no way out of here.

  I squirmed on the seat, shifted position. It didn’t help. The back of my neck and the base of my spine ached, and my butt was sore after spending the night on various buses, first from Lisbon to the Spanish border, then onward to Seville, where I caught an even older and more ramshackle bus heading for Algeciras, and then this local bus with its hard seats, bringing me the rest of the way. It seemed only right that my body should be hurting. I wanted to feel pain. I paid no attention to any of the places we passed. I had closed my eyes, but hardly slept at all, merely conjuring up one picture of Patrick after another, memories that I had to preserve and hold on to before they were lost to me. The smile tugging at his lips, the warmth in his eyes, and the touch of his hand, the tone of his voice. If I didn’t store away every little detail, I would have nothing left.

  I felt sick. Nothing but white bread and ham since last night. I imagined the baby wallowing in those swollen carbohydrates, but I didn’t care about that either. I hadn’t asked for this trespasser inside my body who screamed for food and forced me to go on living.

  An old woman got off the bus in the midst of the fading landscape of hills covered with dead grass and scorched bushes. Along the ridge stood a row of wind turbines. They were wildly rotating their wings against the clouds, like drowned men trying to find their way up to the surface.

  I closed my eyes and sank back into the images of Patrick.

  Alive.

  When he brought a cup of coffee over to the sofa in the living room. With exactly the right amount of milk in my cup. His lips soft against my forehead. American Idol on the TV. A fun little argument about who should be eliminated. Amanda Overmyer was in trouble, and Patrick favoured Carly Smithson. He always voted for the European contestants, while that season I’d had a weakness for that cute David Archuleta, and he’d teased me about starting to show my age and falling for sweet little sixteen-year-olds. We’d eaten take-out from the Chinese place on 19th Street, and then we’d sat at either end of the sofa. I read the newspaper, while Patrick read a book as the TV show kept going, and the votes were counted and there was an infinite amount of time. And it was supposed to be like that for ever.

  The bus turned and then turned again and bra
ked. And even though I didn’t want to, I opened my eyes.

  Tarifa.

  First there was the wind. It struck me full-blast as I got out of the bus, practically knocking me over. Dry and hot and relentless, it tore at my hair, tangling it all up, and lashing at my face.

  This is the world’s end, I thought.

  The bus station was a barracks of a building, made from corrugated metal, planted on a windswept heath. I saw a bulldozer, tilting precariously and abandoned among the rocks and thickets. Further away were blocky apartment modules with laundry fluttering from the balconies. I squinted at the glaring sun. Beyond the buildings I caught a glimpse of the sea.

  The offices of the Guardia Civil were located in a brown brick complex that occupied an entire block. Behind the buildings, barbed wire reached high above the walls.

  Spain had three types of police forces. I’d read that on the web when I was in Lisbon the day before. It was the Guardia Civil that handled security for the border areas, and they were also mentioned in the articles about illegal immigration.

  In the waiting room a black-clad woman held a whimpering infant against her shoulder. The child was wrapped in a blanket. Next to her, two men were slumped in their chairs, sound asleep. I was summoned before any of them were called.

  ‘So you’re an American citizen?’ The police officer sat behind a desk that stood in the middle of the cold room. ‘We don’t get many American tourists on this side of Gibraltar.’

  ‘I’m not a tourist,’ I said, sitting down before being invited to do so.

  ‘I see.’ The officer leaned back and looked at me with a slightly insolent expression. On the wall behind him was a picture of the Virgin Mary.

  ‘Last Monday a man was found dead on the beach here in Tarifa,’ I said.

  ‘Are you a reporter?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘No,’ I said, struggling to draw a breath. ‘I’m his wife.’

  The policeman laughed. A loud, hearty laugh that quickly died away.

  ‘No, no, you are mistaken, señora. We’re talking about an illegal immigrant. A sub-Saharan. They try to get here by boat, you see. Taking hopeless little pateras across the straits. We thought we’d put a stop to that sort of traffic here, but there are always people trying to slip through.’

  I took the photograph of Patrick out of my bag and placed it on the desk in front of him.

  ‘Is this him?’

  The officer leaned down to look at the picture and then glanced up at me. His expression sceptical. Disapproving. He picked up the photo and then tossed it back on the desk.

  ‘Who is this man?’

  ‘His name is Patrick Cornwall. He’s an American journalist, living in New York. He’s my husband.’ I’d carefully considered in advance how to formulate the sentences in Spanish, wanting to use words that were in the dictionary and not just spoken on the streets in Lo-i-saida.

  The officer looked me up and down.

  ‘You don’t sound like an American.’

  ‘I grew up in the Puerto Rican neighbourhood of New York,’ I said. ‘A place where we learn a little of everything.’

  ‘And this is supposedly your husband?’

  He tapped his pen on the photograph.

  ‘He disappeared from Lisbon two weeks ago. He was murdered.’

  ‘Maybe we’d better slow down a bit,’ he said. He got up and nodded at the Virgin Mary’s saintly face before he turned to face me again.

  ‘We know that a boat left the coast of Morocco on the night before.’ He pointed in the direction of the sea. ‘We know that it capsized, or else the people on board jumped into the water. Sometimes they’re ordered to do that so the captain can make it back to Morocco and hide before we catch him. Maybe they jumped in too soon this time.’ He came around the desk and went over to a map hanging on the wall. ‘A body washed ashore here,’ he said, jabbing his pen at a spot on the map where the land met the sea. ‘The next day we had two more bodies in Cádiz, a man and a woman. She was pregnant, in her sixth or seventh month. During the past week the Guardia Civil and the Moroccan coastguard have recovered a total of seven bodies.’

  I took off my jacket.

  ‘He had a tattoo on his shoulder,’ I said as I pulled down my shirt from my left shoulder. The man’s eyes crept over my skin as I exposed the tattoo. Two flowers intertwined, and the name that was etched there for all eternity. Patrick.

  ‘It says Alena on his tattoo,’ I explained. ‘I know that’s the tattoo that the man on the beach had.’

  The officer took a few steps closer. He leaned down. Pressed his finger on my tattoo, stroked it lightly. His breath was close to my ear.

  I shivered, but didn’t move. He went back to his desk and sat down again.

  ‘Was your husband into water sports?’ he said finally.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tarifa is popular among surfers.’ He leaned back, rocking his chair. ‘Kitesurfers and windsurfers come here from England, Scandinavia, and all over Europe. They have no respect for the winds or the sea. They think it’s a game out there. I’m sure some Americans come here too.’

  Patrick as a surfer? The idea was so idiotic that at first I couldn’t think of a thing to say. If there was one thing he was afraid of, it was deep water. I shook my head.

  ‘He could hardly even swim.’

  The officer leaned forward to press a button at the side of his desk. The door opened and a younger man peeked in.

  ‘Bring me the papers on the sub-Saharan from last Monday.’

  When the door closed he leaned across his desk, his eyes as penetrating as knives.

  ‘I’ve been on the force for fourteen years,’ he said. ‘I know this border. I know what goes on here. New ideas spread as fast as wildfire on the other side. For a time we had overloaded pateras entering our territory every week. Then, after we set up radar surveillance, it was popular to hide under car chassis on the ferry from Tangiers. After that it was tankers. I’ve seen just about everything.’ He laughed and leaned back, clasping his hands behind his neck. ‘But this is the first time anyone has ever claimed that an American was trying to cross the straits.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was trying to cross the straits,’ I told him. ‘He was murdered.’

  The subordinate policeman came in, carrying a folder, which he handed to his boss. Before he left, he cast a glance at me. I straightened my shirt, which was still pulled down to show my left shoulder.

  The officer seated at the desk opened the folder and took out several photographs. I felt an icy shiver race through my body and I felt an urge to flee. He shoved three photos across the desk to me.

  The first was a full-length picture of Patrick lying on the beach. He was naked. He screamed, I thought. He screamed when they threw him into the sea. The words kept whirling through my mind. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. Forced myself to look, touched the image. A smooth surface. Dead.

  The next picture was a close-up. I quickly turned away. I already knew. Didn’t want that to be my last image of Patrick, taking over the one of him kissing me before he ran downstairs to get in the cab and ride out to Newark to catch his plane to Paris. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and forced myself to look at the last photo.

  It showed the tattoo on his shoulder, the flowers intertwined around my name, like something Botticelli might have painted. It was bright red and green. After our first visit to the Chinese tattoo artist, he’d gone to another one to have the colours filled in. The Chinese artist had only limited experience working with tattoos on black skin. Light colours disappeared against the skin tones, but the deep red showed up nicely, as did the green. Alena in red, the flowers in green.

  My stomach turned over. I murmured something as I pressed my hand over my mouth and leaped up, running through the waiting room where the woman and her child flickered past, like something black on the periphery of my vision, as I stumbled my way to the ladies’ room.

  I bent over the toilet and threw up. White bread
and ham and juice. Shaking all over as my stomach turned inside out and the last bit of hope spilled out with everything else.

  I spent a long time rinsing my face with cold water. Pressed the palms of my hands to my cheeks. Dried off my face with toilet paper.

  The police officer had changed his attitude by the time I came back. He was sitting up straight behind his desk, his expression sombre.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  I merely shook my head. My legs trembled as I sat down.

  ‘We need to identify the body,’ he said, gathering up the photographs. I refused to look at them again.

  ‘It’s him,’ I said, pressing my hands against my thighs to make them stop shaking. ‘That’s Patrick Cornwall. He’s thirty-eight years old. An American citizen.’

  The officer scratched his neck. ‘This isn’t sufficient to pronounce him dead, you understand. There are very specific procedures.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I fell back on my street Spanish from my childhood.

  ‘Anybody could come in here and say “that’s my husband” and then claim the inheritance. I’m not saying you’re doing anything like that, but other people might.’

  ‘I’m telling you it’s him.’

  The officer furrowed his eyebrows. They merged into one above the bridge of his nose.

  ‘We need positive identification,’ he said, taking some papers out of the folder.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  I drew my jacket closer around me.

  ‘If we have a Moroccan immigrant, we contact the Moroccan police and then they take over. When it’s an immigrant from south of the Sahara, it’s not so easy.’

  ‘But don’t you understand anything?’ My voice rose to falsetto as my throat closed up. ‘He’s not some fucking sub-Saharan. He’s American, and his family goes back seven generations in the States.’

  The officer waved the papers he was holding and then set them down on the desk.

  ‘We can’t identify bodies that wash ashore,’ he said. ‘We don’t even know what country they come from. Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Sudan … Where would we even begin to look?’