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Why do they always bring them out at funerals? Beautiful flowers, they are. What are they called? Calla, he thinks. That’s one of his lost words, something he never really encountered before he left his homeland. He thinks they’re calla lilies in English, but Russian eludes him. There are so many lost words, and he finds himself forgetting where he picked up the ones he has. Russian, Ukrainian, French, German, English. It’s a curious soup inside his skull.
They make him think of wedding dresses, turned upside down. An elegant lady, Audrey Hepburn, perhaps, walking away, turning, looking over her shoulder.
They have no scent. That’s the strangest thing. He’s used to the overpowering stench of lilies, but he’s standing two feet away and these could be made of wax.
‘You okay?’
Napoleon is nudging against his shoulder. Illya is just standing there, staring at the spray of lilies, hardly seeing the pine coffin they sit on. He’s just thinking of lilies, maybe so he doesn’t think of other things. It feels like a dull surprise to see the coffin, the varnished wood, to know that an entire man has been fitted into that slim space.
It’s such a neat thing. The body was a mess, he knows. Bodies always are. Broken, bloated, falling apart. Bodies always are a mess, but this one was particularly bad.
He didn’t even know him that well. A man he passed in the corridors. A man he chatted with every now and then in the commissary. Not a bosom buddy. Not a partner. Not like Napoleon…
Then it hits him. Napoleon is so live and real next to him. He’s so solid and eternal. Maybe bodies are a mess, but Napoleon is always perfect inside his perfect suits. He can’t bear to think of Napoleon ending up like that.
‘Come on,’ Napoleon nudges him again.
He should be looking after Napoleon, but, yet again, Napoleon is looking after him.
He files away from the coffin, letting Napoleon guide him into the pews. Narrow like the coffin, a light, honey pine like the coffin. This whole room is like a coffin. He can hear someone weeping, more than one someone. There’s family, he supposes. Often it seems like the only family an agent has is U.N.C.L.E., but that’s not true.
What if it’s Napoleon next?
Waverly is there at the front, talking quietly to someone. He must have seen so many of these occasions. Illya has been to a few, but only a few. He’s been lucky. He and Napoleon have both been lucky.
‘One well placed bomb,’ he mutters.
One bomb, well placed by Thrush, and most of the organisation’s top agents and upper management would be taken out.
‘Illya,’ Napoleon chides him in an undertone, and he shuts up.
He remembers that terrible fear, Napoleon lying on the ground, his skull cracked like an egg on Easter morning, as if a child’s hand had come down and smashed at it to get to the goodness inside. Blood on the concrete. That fear. God, that terrible fear, his hand on Napoleon’s heartbeat, shouting for someone to call an ambulance. Fumbling at his breast pocket for his communicator, not trusting that anyone in the crowd around would actually listen to him, be useful, and run for a telephone.
How far had he fallen? He should remember but it’s strangely blurred, because in his mind’s eye all he can see is Napoleon on the floor. Only a single storey, he thinks, but it was enough. Of course Napoleon’s skull had been kept together by the bag of his skin, but he’d seen the x-ray. Cracked like an Easter egg.
Illya had visited him every day after the surgery, brought him chocolates and grapes, sat at his bedside wishing he could hold his hand, wishing he could talk to him there like any person might do to their dear husband. The minutes had felt like hours, the hours like days. How long had it been before he had woken up? Only a day, he thinks, but it had felt so long. There had been all the doctors’ cautious warnings. No way to tell what the damage might be inside. We’ll have to wait and see. And Illya had waited, and seen. He had heard, when Napoleon had first opened his eyes and said, ‘Illya,’ as if he were awakening to a lifeline. Illya had held his hand then, for a brief time, had felt the coolness and dampness and the weakness of his fingers. He had sat there talking to him, listening intently to every word uttered, analysing it for slurring, weakness, confusion. And Napoleon had been as perfect as ever, as eloquent as ever; weak, to be sure, but perfect for all that.
‘Sit. Down,’ Napoleon says, as if he’s been saying it over and over. Maybe he has.
Illya sits. There’s the coffin at the front, the strange, sterile lilies, everyone in black. Napoleon next to him, in black; an unusual colour for him. Illya is the one who wears black. But today everyone is in black, women are wearing silly little black veils attached to their silly little black hats, that cast silly little dots of shadow on their faces. Women dabbing white handkerchiefs to their faces under all that blackness.
Suddenly he can’t even remember the man’s name. John, he thinks. He struggles to remember. He looks down at the order of service that he had forgotten he is holding, and the name is there, softly blurred because he doesn’t have his reading glasses on. John Allen. That’s it. A simple little name. He remembers sitting with him in the commissary, drinking a cup of coffee. That had only been a few weeks ago, he thinks. They hadn’t had much to talk about, but it had been the last table left free, so Illya had drunk his black coffee and John had drunk his white, and that was the last time Illya had seen him. A little nod of acknowledgement as he left the room, and the next he had heard of him was the sober little snippets of gossip in the corridors, then the official notice of the funeral. He had gone to see him in the morgue, more out of curiosity than anything else, and god, he had been a mess.
There had been so much in between. They had gone their separate ways, John to his mission, Illya to his own, Napoleon at his side. Napoleon, who had been healthy and eager to get on another plane, knowing they were facing death again, and finding it made him all the more alive. Then there had been the mission, the chase, then that awful fall, the days in hospital, days and days. John had been lying dead for some of that, he supposes, but he hadn’t known then. He hadn’t known until he had finally left Napoleon, and gone in for debriefing.
There are sermons, and singing. What use are sermons for the dead? What use are they for the living? What use are hymns? Illya moves his mouth but doesn’t sing. He didn’t grow up with these hymns. He didn’t grow up with any hymns at all. The words are in the order of service but the type is too small and he can’t read them, so he just mouths along, following what he thinks the others are singing. Napoleon is singing, though. He can feel the vibration of his voice more than hear it, because it blends in to all the singing around. He wonders if it’s hurting Napoleon’s head to sing.
The sadness is infectious. It’s swelling the room. Illya isn’t sad for John Allen, as such, but he catches the sadness and feels sad for the aching hole he has left behind in so many people’s lives. He’s sad for their sadness, for the weeping women, for the life cut short. Behind the sadness is a terror. A terror for Napoleon. What if one day he’s standing in a service like this, but Napoleon is there in that neat coffin, instead of standing at his side, guiding him through? What if, what if, what if? The thought of it is like bubbles of yeast, magnifying itself, propagating itself through him, until it’s all he can feel. There’s wetness on his cheek, the one facing away from Napoleon, and he doesn’t dare move a hand to wipe it away, because then Napoleon will know. But what if it’s Napoleon next? What if it’s him?
He looks sideways, hardly moving his head. He can see the white bandage around Napoleon’s skull, a white blur in the corner of his eye. It’s as if he’s decided to wear a white hat to counter all those black ones. He remembers the first bandage that was wrapped around his skull, and the red blood seeping through. Napoleon’s precious blood. Sitting with him in the ambulance, talking to him despite his closed eyes, telling him what was happening despite knowing he was far away.
‘Do you want to go to the wake?’ Napoleon asks, and he realises the sermons and singing and talking are all over.
Napoleon’s face is pale. He looks tired. Under that bandage is a shaved patch and a long scar.
‘No,’ Illya says. ‘Everyone we know we see at work and everyone we don’t know, we don’t know.’
Napoleon wrinkles his nose. His eyes are bright and brown and playful despite his fatigue.
‘Is that Russian logic?’
‘It’s just logic,’ Illya shrugs. What’s the difference, anyway? Russian, French, American. It doesn’t matter what language someone is a stranger in. They’re still a stranger.
Napoleon takes out a white handkerchief and dabs daintily at Illya’s cheek.
‘You’re a sensitive soul,’ he says.
They follow the coffin out of the church, and it is slid into the open back of a hearse. It’s too much like the ambulance they slid Napoleon into, that Illya sat in as it bumped and jarred over badly made roads, ridiculously terrified that each bump would bump his brain out of his skull. For a moment it’s as if his heart has constricted, as if everything has stopped around them, and briefly he’s out of this place, back in the ambulance, praying inside his mind that Napoleon will be okay. He looks down at his hands and sees the palms covered in blood, and he wipes them on his trousers because he knows they’re shot anyway, and looks back at Napoleon and sees blood coming from his nose and ear, and from that dark, sticky wound at the side of his head.
‘Come on,’ Napoleon tells him, steering him away from the hearse, back towards the car park that holds various cars, each one a tell-tale of the salary of the owner. ‘Want me to drive?’
‘Don’t be silly, you’re not cleared,’ Illya tells him brusquely. ‘Crashing wouldn’t do your head any good.’
‘I’m not sure which one of us is more likely to crash today. You’re miles away.’
‘I’m driving,’ Illya tells him firmly. The keys are in his pocket, and he’s not about to hand them over.
((O))
They don’t need to be in work. Napoleon hasn’t been cleared to come back, and they’re supposed to be at the wake anyway. The corridors are probably half empty because John was a popular guy. Someone should be holding the fort, but work is the last place Illya wants to be.
He drives them back to Napoleon’s apartment and ushers him upstairs. There’s a great bouquet of lilies there on the coffee table, the petals starting to become limp and the stamens dropping their yellow stain on the wood. Each lily is white on the outside, darkening to pink in the centre, and they all stink. In the hospital room they had seemed a hundred times worse, filling the air, making Illya’s eyes sting. But they had been sent by the girls in Communications, and Napoleon had liked them.
The smell makes him think of sitting in that room, waiting. They make him think of the bleeping of monitors, and the sick worry, and the sight of Napoleon’s white, unconscious face. They make him think of Napoleon waking up, looking about, seeming lost and confused, before finally his eyes had connected with Illya’s, and he had smiled and rested back into the pillow.
‘Illya,’ he had said. ‘You. Of course.’
Those words could have meant a thousand things, but Illya understood.
‘Can I throw them away now?’ Illya asks, and Napoleon looks around the room, momentarily confused, until he follows Illya’s gaze and says, ‘Okay, since you hate them so much.’
‘I don’t hate them,’ Illya says, going to grab the vase. ‘But they’re garish and they smell.’
‘You hate them.’
Illya takes them through into the kitchen and pulls them out of the vase. The stems are slimy, starting to rot in the green water they have been sitting in. The petals keep falling, the stamens keep falling, leaving dirty yellow stains on his skin. He bends the stalks and flowers together into a folded mess and shoves them into the bin, then sets about cleaning up the fallen petals. He goes back into the living room to clear up more petals from the table, and wipe the pollen stains away, and pick up more petals from the carpet where they lie in a trail like something left behind by Hansel and Gretel. So much mess left behind.
The smell is still there in the air as he washes his hands. He puts beans in the coffee grinder and sets it going. He opens a window to let in the spring air. Down in the street he can see trees uplifted with blossom in pinks and whites. Every breeze makes a blizzard. Those flowers are so different to the coarse lilies he’s just thrust into the bin. He hates their little yellow stains. Disgusting things.
‘You can just tell me you hate them,’ Napoleon says from behind him. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘I don’t hate them,’ he tries to protest as he turns. ‘I just don’t like – ’ He huffs a breath. He doesn’t know how to say it, and it comes out in a rush. ‘I just can’t bear the smell, Napoleon. Every time you’re injured one of the girls ends up sending those lilies, and that’s all I can see when I smell them. All I can see, all I can think of. You, in a hospital bed. You, dying.’
Napoleon steps a little closer. He says in his ever so gentle voice, ‘I’m not dead, peach blossom. I haven’t died even once, yet.’
But there’s the bandage around his head. There’s that terrible weight of fear, the warnings of not knowing when he would come round, if he would come round, if he would ever be the same again. There are too many times.
‘Hey,’ Napoleon says, and that handkerchief is out again, and he’s dabbing it again at Illya’s cheek. ‘That was John Allen’s funeral, not mine.’
‘It could have been yours,’ Illya whispers, because he doesn’t trust his voice.
Napoleon wraps his arms around him and just holds him, rocks him a little. His arms feel so comforting. Behind the smell of the suit and aftershave there’s the smell of Napoleon, real and visceral and alive. He can smell antiseptic too, and the stale cloth scent of the bandage, and it makes his stomach lurch again. He wants to have Napoleon away from all that other stuff, naked, just the animal Napoleon with no scent but his own. He pushes back from the hug just enough to kiss him, and he kisses him so hard that it leaves him dizzy.
‘I want to take you to bed,’ he says, his mouth against Napoleon’s cheek, feeling the starting of stubble on his cheek against his lips, and kissing it. ‘I want to fuck you.’
‘I’m not sure the doctors have cleared me for that, either,’ Napoleon says, ‘but then I didn’t ask them.’
Illya laughs.
‘I’m glad you didn’t discuss it with them. I want to fuck you, Napoleon. Come to the bedroom. We can make coffee later.’
Napoleon lays a kiss on his forehead.
‘Well, as long as you’re very gentle with me. I’m not the man I was.’
‘You will be again,’ Illya promises.
The skull fracture is healing well, so the doctors say. The scar is healing well. He knows Napoleon is still very sore and tender. He knows he’s still bruised in far too many places from the fall.
‘Look,’ Napoleon says, turning to stand beside him at the window, his arm about his waist. ‘Look at those trees down there. Aren’t they beautiful?’
Illya looks down. He remembers Napoleon falling, the cry of alarm, the dull thud when he hit. He remembers the blood spreading out on the concrete, standing there looking down for a moment, before turning and hitting their pursuer so hard with his fist that his knuckles still ache, before pounding down the stairs and racing to Napoleon’s side. The crowd was already gathering, people’s voices sharp with alarm, and the grey pavement was dark with blood.
The wind makes a swift gust, and suddenly there are petals in the air, blowing in through the window, scattering a soft, gentle blizzard into the kitchen. They’re so much more beautiful than lilies. There’s one in Napoleon’s hair, and Illya plucks it out and holds the delicate thing between finger and thumb. Cherry blossom. He can remember the words for that in Ukrainian, Russian, French, English, German. They’re all there in his mind. For him, every year, cherry blossom has been about hope.