Free Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland Page A

many as half a million eggs laid on the corpse. In a single day the maggots which hatch from these eggs can reduce a full-grown man to half his body size. In a week”—he jerked his head to the side, a movement he used for emphasis but which appeared more like an involuntary nervous twitch—“there might be nothing left but bones.”
    Having seen many bodies laid out on his father’s marble work slab, Pekkala was not squeamish. He did not flinch when Bandelayev thrust a lung into his hands or handed him a box of human finger bones. The hardest part for Pekkala, accustomed to his father’s quiet reverence for the bodies in his care, was Bandelayev’s total disregard for the people whose corpses he alternately pulled apart and reassembled, allowed to rot or pickled in preserving fluid
.
    His father would not have liked Bandelayev, Pekkala decided. There was something in Bandelayev’s breathless enthusiasm which would have struck his father as undignified
.
    When Pekkala mentioned that his father had been an undertaker, Bandelayev seemed equally unimpressed. “Quaint,” the doctor said dismissively, “and ultimately irrelevant.”
    “And why is that?” asked Pekkala
.
    “Undertaking,” said Bandelayev, “is the creation of an illusion. It is a magic show. Make the dead appear at peace. Make the dead appear asleep.” He glanced at Pekkala, as much as if to ask
—and what could be the point of that?
“Osteology is the exploration of death.” Bandelayev
wrapped his lips around those words as if no person could resist the urge to pull apart a corpse with bare hands and a blade
.
    “Alive,” he continued, “you are of little interest to me, Pekkala. But come back to me dead, and then I promise you we will become properly acquainted.”
    Pekkala learned to differentiate between the skulls of women—narrow mouth, pointed chin, streamlined forehead, sharp edges where the eye sockets met the forehead—and the skulls of men, immediately identifiable by the bony bump at the base of the skull
.
    “Identity!” said Bandelayev. “Sex, age, stature.”
    He made Pekkala chant it like a spell
.
    “The external occipital protuberance!” announced Bandelayev, as if introducing a dignitary to a gathering of royals
.
    Pekkala learned to tell the forward-angled teeth of an African from those of a Caucasian, which grew perpendicular to the jaw
.
    He studied the zigzag lines of cranial sutures, rising like lightning bolts over the dome of a skull, while Bandelayev leaned over his shoulder, muttering, “What is it saying? What is it telling you?”
    At the end of each lesson, Bandelayev assigned Pekkala books by such men as the Roman Vitruvius, from which he learned that the length of a person’s outstretched arms corresponded to his height and that the length of a hand corresponded to one-tenth of a body’s length
.
    Another day, Bandelayev sent him home with a translation of the thirteenth-century Chinese doctor Sung Tz’u’s book
, The Washing Away of Wrongs,
in which the devouring of a body by maggots was described in language Pekkala had previously thought was reserved only for religious rapture
.
    Soon the reek of death no longer bothered him, even though it lingered in his clothes long after he had left Bandelayev’s laboratory
.
    Throughout the weeks they spent together, Bandelayev returned over and over to the question “What is it saying?”
    One day, Bandelayev was teaching a lesson on the effect of fire upon a corpse. “The hands will clench,” he said, “arms bend, knees bend. A
body on fire resembles the stance of a boxer in a fight. But suppose you find a body which has been burned but discover that the arms are straight. What does that say?”
    “It says,” answered Pekkala, “that perhaps his hands were bound behind his back.”
    Bandelayev smiled. “Now you are speaking the language of the dead.”
    To Pekkala’s surprise, he realized that Bandelayev was right. Suddenly from every jar and