Zoe
The daughter starts screaming before I have the lid all the way off.
"She didn't melt. Panagia mou, she didn't melt."
The sound climbs out of the trench and over the graves. Two men by the gate stop talking. A cat on the ossuary roof stops washing its paw.
I keep my hands flat on the coffin's edge and look down.
Kyra Anthoula has been in the ground three years. She should be bones by now, clean enough to wash in wine and lay in a small tin box with her name on the lid. That is the whole job. Greek cemeteries are small and the dead keep coming, so after three years the family returns, the grave is opened, and the bones move to the ossuary to make room. The ανακομιδή. The lifting.
Kyra Anthoula has not been lifted. She lies in her good blue dress with her hands folded and her face still a face, pale and smooth as a church candle.
"Rena." I climb out so I'm not talking up at her. The cold has gone through my gloves and into my knuckles. "Look at me. Not at her. This happens."
"Not to good women." Rena's mascara is running in two black lines. "The earth takes good women."
Her husband steps between us. Stelios. He has spent four days watching me dig with his arms folded, and he folds them again now.
"Three in one week," he says. "Three that the ground spat back. And Athens sends us this." His eyes go down my sleeves, my hands, the rings I've threaded onto the chain at my throat so they won't catch. "A girl with drawings on her arms, to tell us it's nothing."
"I didn't say it's nothing. I said it happens." I point into the trench with my trowel. "Her grave is lined with concrete. The lid was sealed. Rain got in at some point and couldn't get out again. No air, wet, cold. The fat in the body turns into something like soap. We call it grave wax. It keeps the shape."
"Soap," Stelios says, to the men at the gate, loud enough to carry.
One of them laughs. The other crosses himself.
"In my grandfather's day," Stelios says, "they knew what it meant when the earth didn't want you."
"In your grandfather's day nobody lined graves with concrete."
That lands. I watch it land. His jaw works, and Rena makes a small sound and puts her hand on his arm, and for a second the whole cemetery holds still.
I lower my voice. "She goes back in the ground. Dry this time, with lime, the way we do it now. Two more years and she'll be bones, and you'll wash them, and she'll go in the box like everyone else."
"And if she doesn't?" Rena asks.
"Then I come back and explain it again."
It is the only promise I make in this job. It's the one I can keep.
By three o'clock the wind has changed.
It comes up off the caldera cold and wet and full of salt. Manolis lifts his head from the shovel and sniffs it like a dog.
"Sulfur," he says. "The volcano's breathing out. Bad sign."
"I smell salt."
"You smell salt. I smell the volcano, and today it's breathing at me." He crosses himself three times, quick, the way he does before every grave, then points the shovel at the trench. "And you. Behave."
The shovel doesn't answer. He swears at it anyway, softly, with real affection.
Manolis is the cemetery's gravedigger. Close to sixty, thirty years on merchant ships before this, and under his work shirt he is painted from collar to waist with tigers and eagles and grinning masks gone soft blue with age. Every port he ever docked in left something on his skin. On my first morning he looked at my arms for a long time and said, So. Where did you sail? It's the nicest thing anyone on this island has said to me.
His phone is propped on a headstone, playing the radio. Between two songs a man's voice reads the weather for the Cyclades. Gale winds from tonight. Heavy rain. The port authority expects to stop sailings by the weekend.
Manolis listens to the whole thing with his head tilted.
"Close your holes, kori mou," he says. My girl. "Before the sky does it for you."
He means the open graves. Six of them, under blue tarps, each one somebody's grandmother waiting for a box. My van is booked on Monday's ferry. My report is half written. If the sky gets in before I'm done, Monday becomes the Monday after, and the people in this village who want the old women left alone will have three more days to say curse to each other in the kafeneio.
"Go home," I tell him. "I'll do the tarps."
"Alone? In the dark? Here?"
"They're dead, Manolis. They're the quietest people on the island."
He looks at me the way he looked at my arms on the first day. Then he picks up his phone, kisses his fingertips, touches them to the nearest headstone, and goes.
At the gate he stops beside the old woman in black who has been standing there since morning. She hasn't moved all day. She doesn't move now. He says something to her I can't hear, and she answers without turning her head, and her eyes stay on me the whole time.
The rain starts at dusk.
Not much at first. A fine cold mist that beads on the tarps and finds the gap between my scarf and my collar. I pull the scarf tighter over my hair, switch on my headlamp, and work along the rows weighting each tarp with stones.
The last row runs along the old wall. The wall is the original churchyard boundary, rough stone under a hundred coats of lime, flaking now in long white curls. When the village grew, the new graves spilled past it onto a strip of rough ground outside. Modern marble, photographs in little glass frames, plastic flowers. Nothing out there is older than the 1970s.
I'm turning back when my light catches something wrong.
The last grave on the strip is tilted. Its marble slab has dropped at one corner, the way a table drops when you kick out a leg. The rain has been running under it for an hour and has carried a wedge of earth down the slope with it.
I crouch. Under the foundation, where the soil has slumped away, there is a straight dark edge.
Wood. Old wood, black and soft, and running the wrong way. Not under the modern grave. Across it.
I pull the cemetery plan out of my jacket and hold it under the light. The strip outside the wall is marked plot by plot, names and dates in a clerk's careful hand. The tilted grave belongs to a man who died in 1994. There is nothing beneath him. There is nothing older than 1971 on this whole strip.
There is a coffin under him anyway.
An earlier burial, cut through when they dug for the new one. It happens. Somebody poor, most likely, buried outside the wall where nobody paid for the ground. A fisherman washed up after a storm, a stranger nobody claimed. A hundred years old, give or take. I can already see the line in my report.
Beside the dark edge, a hand's width to the left, the soil changes color. A second patch, browner and looser, the kind of stain an old pit leaves when it's been dug and filled in again. I mark both on the plan. Feature 1: exposed coffin. Feature 2: earlier disturbance, adjacent, undated.
Then I look at the sky. It's going to rain all night. By morning that slope will have slid, and whatever is in that box will be in pieces at the bottom of it, mixed with roots and marble and mud. Exposed remains get recorded before they're lost. That's the rule. It's also my name on the report.
I take the small trowel from my belt and climb down.
The coffin lid is mostly gone. The wood comes away in wet soft handfuls and I lay it aside piece by piece, the way you'd turn the pages of something that might tear.
Cloth first. White, or it was. Linen gone the color of old teeth.
Then wide dark trousers gathered at the knee. I've seen trousers like that behind glass in a museum, on a mannequin with a painted mustache. Island breeches. Sailors wore them. Nobody has been buried in them for a very long time.
Then a hand, and I stop.
A man's hand, broad, lying open on his chest. The skin is pale and gray and whole. And across the back of it, small and blue and perfectly clear, someone has inked a row of crosses.
Tattoos.
My shoulders come down a fraction. Tattoos mean modern. Tattoos mean a prank, or a film prop dumped by a production company, or worse and simpler, a tourist who drank too much at a sunset bar and walked off the wrong cliff and was put somewhere he shouldn't have been. A police case. Ugly, and very ordinary.
Except for the trousers. Except for the nails in what's left of the coffin, with square heads, hammered by hand.
I clear the soil from his face with the soft brush and my breath catches somewhere I don't let it out.
He is maybe thirty. Long hair, dark gold under the dirt, tied back with a cord. A full beard. More crosses climb his neck out of the shirt collar, and on a leather string at his throat lies a small dented silver case no bigger than my thumb.
His face is a face. Not wax. Not smooth as a candle like Kyra Anthoula's. A man's face, with lines at the eyes from squinting into weather, and a mouth that looks like it was about to argue with someone.
Somebody once looked at that mouth and thought trouble.
I pull my head back to the work.
Photographs. Wide, then close. Scale bar. The hands, the neck, the silver case. I press two fingers to his wrist through the nitrile, checking the give of the skin for grave wax.
There's no wax. The skin is cold and soft and it gives like skin.
Something is wrong.
It takes me a long second to find it, crouched there in the rain with my headlamp shaking. Then I have it.
The smell.
Every body that keeps its face keeps its smell. I have opened two hundred graves and I know it the way a baker knows yeast. Sweet and heavy and impossible to wash out of your hair.
This grave smells of wet stone and cold air and, very faintly, the sea.
Nothing else.
I sit back on my heels. Under my glove, under my sleeve, there's a small bone inked on the inside of my wrist, the first one I ever identified. I press my thumb to it, the way I have in every grave since I was twenty.
Cold. Sealed. Something in the soil. There is a reason. There is always a reason. I haven't found it yet.
"Okay," I tell him. It's what I tell all of them. "Let's see what happened to you."
The light isn't good enough for the silver case. The writing on it, if there is writing, is lost in the dents. I lean in, closer, closer, until my face is a hand's width from his and the rain is ticking on the back of my jacket and the headlamp turns his skin almost gold.
My breath goes out white in the cold and settles over his mouth.
His eyes open.
