Decomposed
I file out of the bus in a quiet, dusty town near the Greek-Turkish land border. The air smells like Greek holidays: blooming citrus fruits with a hint of diesel. It instantly stirs up memories of vacationing here as a child: sipping lukewarm orange juice in my pyjamas at sunset; petting the lonesome donkey in the hotel courtyard.
I snap back to the present moment and squint at the hospital towering before me, with its deserted gurneys loitering near the entrance. My colleagues are already entering the building. I follow them through the yellowy corridors and step into the coroner’s office, expecting the smell of formaldehyde. It reeks of cigarettes.
Doctor Pavlidis stands in the centre of his office, surrounded by my seven colleagues. I squeeze into the corner and peek between their shoulders to catch a better glimpse of him. His eyes are sunken; his cheekbones punch against his skin; his hairline is in an advanced state of decay.
‘Thank you for making the time,’ says the EU politician I work for. She’s seated with her fellow parliamentarians on a couch veiled in a ratty throw cover, their knees touching the coffee table.
‘Of course,’ Doctor Pavlidis says. His restless hands sink into the pockets of his khakis. I get the impression he prefers the quiet anonymity of it being just him and a cadaver in a room.
‘So, we understand you identify the bodies of refugees and migrants who have died in this region?’
Doctor Pavlidis nods and takes it as his cue to flee back to the comfort of his desk.
‘I’ll show you the database.’
He pushes his ashtray aside and moves his hands across the keyboard. A flat-screen TV in the corner flicks on. We all turn toward it. An Excel file appears.
‘This contains the DNA of about 550 bodies, collected since early 2000.’
He scrolls through the sterile rows, filled with the curly squiggles of Greek script. I wish I could read this. My eyes focus on the only column with numbers: estimated age. The vast majority of the cells say 18-21. I see one saying 5.
‘These are only the bodies brought to me,’ he explains. ‘And only on the Greek side of the border. I don’t know what happens on the Turkish side. There could be many more. Maybe as many as two thousand.’
‘Where are the bodies found?’ another politician asks.
‘Some have drowned while crossing the Evros river. Others died from hypothermia in the mountains. Hypothermia cases are easier to identify than drownings.’
The Excel file disappears. I watch on the TV screen as his cursor navigates through folders. He opens one, scrolls down, and clicks on a photo file.
My stomach flinches. A muddled whimper escapes me, at the sight of this mass of blackened bones, brown slime, and knotted hair.
‘This body was found after a few months in the Evros river.’
He zooms in. I wish he wouldn’t.
‘See, impossible to identify. In these cases, you really need DNA research.’
I notice myself breathing through my mouth, as if I’ve mistaken seeing for smelling.
‘But this,’ he clicks the photo away and scrolls further. I brace myself. ‘This is a hypothermia case.’
The grey-bluish bloat of a teenage face appears, so close-up it feels assaulting. My eyes flee, looking around the room for reassurance that I’m not the only one who can’t bear to see this. I catch the pained grimace of Alex, the press officer, then change my mind. You came here to witness reality, I scold myself, so witness it. I turn back to face the lifeless boy on the metal table, whose gelled hair still shimmers.
‘I’ll show you something else.’ Doctor Pavlidis pushes up from his desk chair, a manoeuvre he does often, judging from the worn-off lacquer on the armrests. His skeleton-like limbs move across the office as if an invisible weight has seeped into them.
I once read that so many migrants die in the Evros river because smugglers force them to leave their bags behind and wear everything on their body. The weight of multiple layers of clothes makes it difficult to swim, the article said. Doctor Pavlidis walks as if each of those 550 bodies is a heavy, soaked layer pressing down on him. I wonder how this man is still staying afloat.
He disappears through the office door and returns a few moments later with a cardboard box in his arms. He sets it on the coffee table in front of the politicians and pulls out a few large manila envelopes, filled with zip lock bags.
‘These are the personal belongings found on the bodies,’ he explains as he spreads them out. ‘I label each one with the same number as the DNA sample. It’s often the personal belongings that help with identification and family tracing.’
I inch closer and watch my boss inspect a bag. It contains a wedding ring, a piece of paper with bled-out ink, two spools of white and black yarn, and a packet of sewing needles. I try to find a logical connection between the items, hoping to patch together the story of the person who carried this.
Doctor Pavlidis holds up a bag that contains a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. The items feel too commonplace to serve as final proof that a human being existed.
‘How do you find the family members of the deceased?’ my boss asks.
‘When people suspect their loved one didn’t make it, they can send their DNA-profile to the embassy here in Greece for matching. I have contacts with many embassies. Afghan. Iranian. Iraqi. Pakistani. Syrian.’
‘And do you often find the family members?’
‘No, most of the bodies remain unidentified. I keep them here for about six months, and after that, we bury them in an anonymous grave with the DNA-number on the tombstone. So we can excavate them if we do get a match at some point.’
He pulls his phone from his pocket. ‘I also get a lot of questions about missing people whose bodies I don’t have.’
He shows us his WhatsApp. ‘See?’ He scrolls through an endless row of unknown numbers. ‘Every single day.’
‘Is this all part of your job?’ one of the politicians asks.
A dark laugh escapes him.
‘My job is autopsies,’ he says, returning his phone into his pocket.
‘I donate my own time to do this. The Red Cross donated my freezer containers.’ He points through the plastic window slats to the service road out front.
‘Why do you do all this?’ my boss asks.
He stays silent for a second, as if he has hardly ever considered the question. ‘It’s just a matter of respect,’ he finally says with a shrug. ‘For the deceased and their family. For every human life.’
We say goodbye to Doctor Pavlidis and shuffle towards the exit. Outside the revolving doors, where everything smells alive again, I stop at the two massive freezers parked next to the ambulance drive-through, each with a Red Cross logo on it. ‘Those contain the bodies,’ Doctor Pavlidis had said, ‘20 in each.’
I stare at the ribbed metal and try to imagine all those anonymous loved ones, locked in freezing darkness. Just like their family members haven’t found closure, it feels like everything Doctor Pavlidis just told us still lingers, unresolved.
We file back into the bus that will take us to the next appointment of our work visit. I sit down in the same seat, burn my fingers on the metal seatbelt and strap in. Everyone is silent as we barrel down the dirt road. We have been documenting the atrocities at Europe’s borders for years now, causing us to slowly callous over. Doctor Pavlidis sliced right through our hardened layers, hitting the raw nerve again.
I look through the unwashed windows. The barren landscape flashes by. I squint to make out the actual border, but all I see are streaks of blended beige.
It’s disorienting how peaceful this landscape looks. It makes it so easy to pretend that everything is fine, that this is still just the country of my fondest childhood memories. It’s as if these zones of lawlessness, where the barbwire fences and surveillance cameras glint while people in distress are forced to strip naked and are beaten back across the border, do not even exist.
I stare at the murky horizon, behind which the border hides. That never-ending graveyard, where all the values we claim to hold dear have decomposed.
Publised in The Other Side of Hope (2024) volume 4: issue 1