Read Woman of the Dead for Free Online

it doesn’t frighten her, or at least it didn’t until now. This time is different. Entirely different. Everything she’s ever seen in her life is a joke, ridiculous compared with what lies before her now.
    All she can do is stand there, surveying his torn, hollowed corpse. She can’t cry yet. The dried blood, his face that, as if by miracle, has been preserved intact. Blum’s eyes move over his body; it is all familiar to her. She has kissed every centimetre of his skin. She loves every centimetre of him, so much that she doesn’t know whether she can go on living without him. She stands there, looking, breathing, swallowing. She wants to die so much, simply to be done with it all, to feel nothing any more. She doesn’t want to be reminded that life was once good, that she was happy. Blum feels like bashing her head against the wall, smashing it a hundred times against the white tiles, she wants the pain to stop, she wants the knife in her breast to stop burrowing and digging and cutting. She wants to be dead like him.
    She works in her usual way, as if operated by remote control. All of a sudden she sets to work preparing him. Rubbing the blood away from his skin with cotton wool and albumen solution, she cleans his injuries, lovingly treating them all. Her hands do not tremble as she stitches up his wounds, she tries to reconstruct everything; she opens the stitches on his head, removes clotted blood and carefully stitches the cut up again. She puts him back in order as best she can. She fills deep wounds with cellulose, restores the distorted parts of his body to their proper shape, washes his hair and blows it dry. She shaves him. Blum goes about her work. For a split second she even forgets that it is Mark lying there, that it is his mouth she is closing for ever, exactly as Hagen taught her. She inserts a curved needle into a fold of skin behind his chin, runs it through the soft palate, brings it up below the right-hand side of his upper lip and into his right nostril, and out again into a small fold of skin by his septum. Then she puts the needle through the septum into the left nostril, and takes it back in the opposite direction, through the left half of his upper lip and down. She stitches his mouth up, a mandible ligature just as she has learned to do. It is the most natural thing in the world for her to run the needle back through his chin, pulling the jaw shut with the ends of the thread and tying the knot, forming his lips into a smile. She stares at those lips, and begins to cry. Her tears collect on his skin. Then she forces herself to go on and bandage his head to hide the wounds. Next his clothes. With great effort, she gets him dressed. His body is heavy, but even without Reza’s help she rolls him on to his side. His broken legs. His favourite trousers, his white T-shirt.
    Blum climbs up on the preparation table and lies down beside him. She can’t help it, just one more time. She will lie beside him, hold his hand, feel him very close before he disappears underground. Only briefly, no one will see. Reza won’t come back, Karl will not come into the preparation room either, they are alone. Two bodies fitted snugly on the narrow table. Blum’s fingers are entwined with his, but they don’t move, however hard she squeezes them. However much she wishes they would, there’s no movement, only his cold skin, something like closeness this one last time, a memory of times past before she puts him in the coffin. Before they come to see him for the last time: Reza, Karl, their friends, the children. They will say goodbye to him tomorrow, everything will take its familiar course, the body on show, the blessing, the burial. They will lower him into the grave and shovel earth into it, he will decompose in an oak coffin, be eaten by worms. Soon there will be nothing left but the bones, and later not even those. But now his hand is still in hers. She can still touch him, feel him, he is lying beside her,