Free Pavel & I by Dan Vyleta Page B

melted some water by the oven and patiently wiped down his body, first the front and then his back. There was less bruising than he would have predicted; his skin shone youthful and white. A hand’s breadth above the buttocks Pavel discovered a slender hole, a quarter-inch across. Its edges were perfectly smooth.
    â€˜He has been stabbed,’ he said to Sonia. ‘Boyd told me he’d run him over. With his car. Cats licking at his blood.’
    â€˜Your friend lied to you?’ she asked, and he wondered whether she was teasing him for his naivety.
    â€˜Yes,’ he said. ‘He must have thought I would judge him.’
    â€˜Would you have? Judged him?’
    He thought about it.
    â€˜Who knows,’ he said. ‘It’s hard not to judge murder.’
    She bit her lip then and for a moment he was sorely tempted to reach out and stroke her cheek. His hand, he noticed, was encrusted with blood, especially around the fingernails. He dropped it and looked for words to explain himself.
    â€˜Sonia,’ he said, ‘I know this isn’t fair on you, but I don’t want the Colonel to know. About the midget. Not yet, in any case.’
    She shrugged like it wasn’t much to ask. All she wanted to know was: ‘Why?’
    He looked down at the midget. ‘The truth is, I have no idea. No idea at all.’

    They decided to remove the body to the attic. In summer it was used for hanging up washing; in these temperatures it would be deserted even by rats. They wrapped a blanket around him as one would around a dead child. He tried to lift him but found he could not. In the end it was she who cradled the corpse in her arms and walked it up two flights of stairs. The attic was enormous, the space cut up by wooden posts that helped support the roof. Washing lines hung taut between these posts, empty save for a single, hole-ridden sock that balanced an icicle off its stiffened tip. Sonia wedged the body into the utmost corner of the enormous room. Pavel watched her do it, holding a candle high above her shoulder. When they turned around in the doorway, they were no longer able to make out the bundle; it had been swallowed up by shadows. On the way back they snuck past the doors of the other tenants.
This is what it must feel like,
thought Pavel,
to be a thief.
It was a lonely feeling. He felt expelled from the brotherhood of men.
    Back in his apartment, they struggled to clean the floor, then cut all the remaining lining out of the trunk and stuffed it in the oven. The trunk itself Pavel pushed under his bed. It was too big to burn. The smell of the corpse lingered and Pavel felt compelled to force open a window. The cold that blew in hurt him in his teeth, his lungs, the skin of his tongue.
    â€˜Let’s go to my place while it airs,’ Sonia suggested. He followed her demurely, and accepted some cold coffee, along with a bread roll. She sat at the piano and played some music for him. At first he did not listen, but then the melodies drew him into themselves and he began to recognize various fragments.
    â€˜Beethoven?’ he asked her when she took a break to warm her hands.
    â€˜Yes. Do you like him?’
    â€˜I always thought him melodramatic.’
    She shook her head in reproach. ‘Melodramatic? I just helped you hide a frozen midget.’
    God, it felt good to laugh.
    He stayed far too long and was conscious of doing so. Over a second cup of coffee she explained to him that the Colonel wanted her to lure him away to the doctor’s the next day, so that he could search Pavel’s flat.
    â€˜He doesn’t trust you,’ she said. ‘He thinks you are hiding things.’
    â€˜It’s okay,’ he shrugged, ‘I’m going out tomorrow anyway. Boyd told me to go look for a woman. If anything went wrong, he said, go look for Belle. One of his girls, you know. A prostitute. “
Find Belle!
” That’s what I’m going to