Kurt embraced Mira in front of the students with all that Eastern European physicality she remembered from her year in that part of the world—smelling strongly of cologne, literally lifting her off her feet.
“Mira!” he said, and set her back down.
When she turned back around to her class, they were staring at her with what could have been alarm, but mostly, she supposed, they were registering their surroundings (the starkness, the coldness) and smelling the lively, corporeal presence of Kurt against the antiseptic smell of the autopsy room on the other side of the sliding doors, from which he’d emerged wearing his white smock, red hair tucked up into a gauzy blue cap, big grin sans one front tooth.
“Mira,” he said again, and then looked at her students looking at him. He raised a hand to them and said, “Welcome to the morgue.”
There was a burst of laughter, followed by nervous silence. The students nodded back with more energy than usual. Mira could already tell which of the girls were hoping to faint—although these were rarely the ones who actually fainted. The actual fainters were usually the tough guys or the serious young women who’d always wanted to be surgeons.
“We’ll be entering the ‘Waiting Mortuary’ in a moment,” Mira said, and gestured for the class to follow her through the sliding glass doors. “This is the part of the morgue that was specifically designed for the purpose of confirming that a dead body was actually deceased. Until very recently, as we’ve already discussed, there were no trusted methods for verifying death, and people had sincere fears of being buried alive. The Waiting Mortuary was designed to house the dead for a period of time during which attendants would be on alert for any sign of life. Right, Kurt?”
Kurt nodded sincerely. He was nothing if not sincere. When Mira had first met him, they had been leaning over a grave full of Serbian dead together, peering down.
Skeletal remains. Some scraps of clothing. A couple of wristwatches. A ring.
Kurt had turned to her, looked at her for what seemed like a long time, and then he’d reached over and put his hand over her eyes.
Since his move to the States, Mira had seen Kurt only during these visits with her classes to the morgue. She’d asked him to have coffee with her once, but he’d said he was busy. She invited him over to dinner once, but he’d declined.
“Your husband wouldn’t like it.”
“No, he would like it,” Mira insisted. “Clark would like to meet you. He’s heard so much about you.”
“No,” Kurt said again. “I am a single man. He looks at me one time. He knows I feel for you. I am a shy man, Mira. Large, yes, but timid. I do not want to fight your husband.”
“Fight?” Mira had exclaimed, and laughed out loud, but Kurt was serious, and she realized that because of this seriousness, there could be no dissuading him without insulting him, without implying that her husband would never have considered him a rival, that there would be no fight. So she hadn’t argued—although, when Clark had laughed and laughed after she told him about Kurt’s fears, so adamantly amused, she’d briefly considered telling him, that, actually, Kurt had been a figure for quite a while in her sexual imagination.
His large Eastern European presence with his scent of cologne and his experience of the world, and war, and hardship, and death.
Kurt bowed a little to Mira’s students then and said, “You must be very quiet, although of course the dead cannot hear.” (Again, excited and uneasy laughter.) “But because, you know, the word morgue, it is a French word. It means, at one and same, ‘to look at solemnly,’ and ‘to defy.’ ” Kurt waited for this to sink in, and then said, “You see, the sameness? And the strangeness?”
They were all nodding by this time. Perhaps they did understand, or maybe they were starting to feel as if their lives depended upon the goodwill of this man, their diener.
They stopped at the sliding glass doors. Mira turned and said, “Here we are in what the Victorians quaintly referred to as the Rose Cottage. At children’s morgues, they called it the Rainbow Room. And though these euphemisms might be charming, and funny, we have to remember that eventually most of us will find ourselves in a morgue, not viewing, but viewed.”
“Too-day,” Kurt said, “we have a man who has had a brain aneurysm. We have a woman of old age. We have a suicide. But I must warn you, because it is disturbing, there are a family, two children, father, grandmother, they were hit by a head-on. It is a busy day at the morgue.”
One or two of the students took a step backward, and began to look around as if in a panic to find the exit.
“As I’ve said,” Mira said (pointlessly, because no one ever left), “this is optional. You can wait for us here, or leave altogether if you need to. No penalties.”
The shock turned to resignation then. In some, it looked like excited anticipation. They might insist that they did not want to see dead bodies, but they did. And each semester this viewing was a turning point in her class. For a while afterward, anyway, they would feel in a way they hadn’t felt before that the living body was a temporary condition. Funereal black would no longer be a fashion statement. They would communicate with one another and with her more carefully.
The glass doors slid open, and Kurt stepped through them, and Mira and all of her students followed.