Now Pekkala knew who had sent for him and that it was a summons he could not refuse. He had never expected to see these things again. Until that moment, he had thought they belonged to a world which no longer existed.

He was born in Finland, in a time when that country was still a colony of Russia. He grew up surrounded by deep woods and countless lakes near the town of Lappeenranta.

His father was an undertaker, the only one in that region. From miles around, people brought their dead to him. They jostled down forest paths, carrying the bodies in rickety carts, or hauling them in sleds across the frozen lakes in winter, so that the corpses were as hard as stone when they arrived.

In his father’s closet hung three identical black coats, and three pairs of black trousers to match. Even his handkerchiefs were black. He would allow no glint of metal on his person. The brass buttons which came with the coats had been replaced by buttons of ebony. He seldom smiled, and when he did, he covered his mouth like a person ashamed of his teeth. Somberness was a thing he cultivated with the utmost care, knowing his job demanded it.

His mother was a Laplander from Rovaniemi. She carried with her a restlessness that never went away. She seemed to be haunted by some strange vibration of the earth which she had left behind in the arctic where she spent her childhood.

He had one older brother, named Anton. On the wishes of their father, when Anton turned eighteen he departed for St. Petersburg to enlist in the Tsar’s Finnish Regiment. For Pekkala’s father, no greater honor could be won than to serve in that elite company, which formed the personal cadre of the Tsar.

When Anton boarded the train, his father wept with pride, dabbing his eyes with his black handkerchief. His mother just looked stunned, unable to comprehend that her child was being sent away.

Anton leaned out of the window of his railway carriage, hair neatly combed. On his face was the confusion of wanting to stay but knowing that he had to go.

Pekkala, then only sixteen years old and standing by his parents on the platform, felt his brother’s absence as if the train had long since departed.

When the train had passed out of sight, Pekkala’s father put his arms around his wife and son. “This is a great day,” he said, his eyes red with tears. “A great day for our family.” In the time that followed, as the father ran his errands around town, he never forgot to mention that Anton would soon be a member of the regiment.

As the younger son, Pekkala had always known he would remain at home, serving as an apprentice to his father. Eventually, he would be expected to take over the family business. His father’s quiet reserve became a part of Pekkala as he assisted in the work. The draining of fluids from the bodies and replacing them with preservatives, the dressing and the managing of hair, the insertion of pins in the face to achieve a relaxed and peaceful expression-all this became natural to Pekkala as he learned his father’s occupation.

It was with their expressions that his father took the greatest care. An air of calm needed to surround the dead, as if they welcomed this next stage of their existence. The expression of a poorly prepared body might appear anxious or afraid, or-worse-might not look like the same person at all.

It fascinated him to read, in the hands and faces of the departed, the way they’d spent their lives. Their bodies, like a set of clothes, betrayed their secrets of care or neglect. As Pekkala held the hand of a teacher, he could feel the bump on the second finger where a fountain pen had rested, wearing a groove into the bone. The hands of a fisherman were stacked with calluses and old knife cuts which creased the skin like a crumpled piece of paper. Grooves around eyes and mouths told whether a person’s days had been governed by optimism or pessimism. There was no horror for Pekkala in the dead, only a great and unsolvable mystery.

The task of undertaking was not pleasant, not the kind of job a man could say he loved. But he could love the fact that it mattered. Not everyone could do this, and yet it needed to be done. It was necessary, not for the dead but for the memories of the living.

His mother thought otherwise. She would not go down to the basement, where the dead were prepared. Instead, she stopped halfway down the basement stairs, to deliver a message or to summon her husband and son for dinner. Pekkala grew used to the sight of her legs on those steps, the round softness of her knees, the rest of her body remaining out of view. He memorized the sound of her voice, muffled beneath a lavender-oil-scented cloth she held against her face whenever she stood on the stairs. She seemed to fear the presence of formaldehyde, as if it might seep into her lungs and snatch away her soul.

His mother believed in things like that. Her childhood on the barren tundra had taught her to find meaning even in the smoke rising from a fire. Pekkala never forgot her descriptions of the camouflage of a ptarmigan hiding among lichen-spattered rocks, or the blackened stones of a fire whose embers had burned out a thousand years before, or the faint depression in the ground, visible only when evening shadows fell across it, which marked the location of a grave.

From his mother, Pekkala learned to spot the tiniest details-even those he could not see but which registered beyond the boundary of his senses-and to remember them. From his father, he learned patience and the ability to feel at ease among the dead.

This was the world Pekkala believed he would always inhabit, its boundaries marked by the names of familiar streets, by tea-brown lakes reflecting pale blue sky and a sawtoothed horizon of pine trees rising from the forest beyond.

But things did not turn out that way.

2

THE MORNING AFTER THE COMMISSAR’S VISIT, PEKKALA SET FIRE TO his cabin.

He stood in the clearing while the black smoke uncoiled into the sky. The snap and wheeze of burning filled his ears. The heat leaned into him. Sparks settled on his clothes and, with a flick of his fingers, he brushed them away. Paint buckets stacked by the side of the cabin sprouted dirty yellow tongues of fire as the chemicals inside them ignited. He watched the roof collapse onto the carefully made bed and chair and table which had been his companions for so long now that the outside world seemed more dreamlike than real.

The only thing he saved from the fire was a satchel made from brain-tanned elk hide and closed with a button made of antler bone. Inside lay the gun in its holster and the book and the unblinking emerald eye.

When nothing remained but a heap of smoking beams, Pekkala turned and started walking for the trailhead. In another moment he was gone, drifting like a ghost among the trees.

Hours later, he emerged from the pathless forest onto a logging road. Cut trees were stacked ten deep, ready for transport to the Gulag mill. Strips of bark carpeted the ground and the sour reek of fresh lumber filled the air.

Pekkala found the car just as the Commissar had promised. It was a type he had not seen before. With rounded cowlings, a small windshield and a radiator grille that arched like an eyebrow, the machine had an almost haughty expression. A blue and white shield on the radiator grille gave the car’s make as EMKA.

The car doors were open. Lieutenant Kirov lay asleep in the backseat, his legs sticking out into the air.

Pekkala took hold of Kirov ’s foot and shook it.

Kirov gave a shout and clambered into the road. At first, he recoiled from the bearded ragman who stood before him. “You scared the hell out of me!”

“Are you taking me back to the camp?” asked Pekkala.

“No. Not to the camp. Your days as a prisoner are over.” Kirov gestured for Pekkala to get in the back of the car. “At least, they are for now.”