In Chivay (2)

After lunch came one of the hardest moments of our trip.  We assembled at the local headquarters of the High Mountain Rescue Unit, not far from the main square of Chivay, and sat down on low, worn out armchairs around a table.  A short, ordinary looking man appeared, wearing civilian clothes.  We were told that he worked for the regular police force in Chivay, and he wasthe one  responsible for keeping Asher's knapsack.
In early January, when Diego discovered Asher's body at the bottom of a cliff, he saw Asher's hat and his knapsack before he saw the body itself.  He rushed up to report to the police, who returned to the scene.  The High Mountain Rescue Unit was responsible for recovering the body, but the regular police took the knapsack - ostensibly for investigative purposes.  In Ofer's presence an inventory was taken of the contents of the knapsack, but the police wouldn't release it, although the body itself was taken to Arequipa for an autopsy and then released to the Jewish Community of Lima after Ofer identified it.
Although there was no suspicion of foul play, the police retained the knapsack as evidence of some kind, apparently until we, his parents, came to claim it.  This is one of those situations where we could get no clear answers from anyone.  Was it necessary for us to come all way from Israel to Peru to obtain release of the knapsack, or could we have delegated someone to get it?  What did the local police want it for?
Now we were given the choice.  We could go with the man from the police department and pick up the knapsack there, or we could wait at the Rescue Unit's headquarters and he would bring it to us.  We chose to wait.  The man left and came back shortly with the small green canvas knapsack Asher had taken with him on an excursion that was supposed to have been short.
The procedure was formal and bureaucratic.  The man from the police department brought with him an official list of the contents of the knapsack, which we had to sign.  With a straight face, he told us that four hundred soles (about $130) in paper money, that had been with Asher, had completely disintegrated.

Everything else in the knapsack was in surprisingly good condition, dry and intact.  We took items out one by one.

There was his camping gear: a sleeping bag, a silk liner for the sleeping bag, a poncho, a first aid kit, a compass.

There was a transistor radio, a good pocket knife from Granada, Spain, which we had bought there and given him years ago, his excellent digital reflex camera (which was irreparably broken by his fall), and some other personal things.

There were disposable contact lenses, condoms, dirty clothes, a couple of knitted wool hats, and his journal - written in Hebrew.

There were a couple of CDs, a waterlogged Spanish dictionary, and that was about it.

Nothing so valuable that the police had to keep it for a year.

Sorting through his belongings, invading his privacy, really, brought him intensely close and infinitely far away.  Every thing that we touched was a reminder that he is really dead.

I haven't read the journal yet.  He left another one in his large pack in the hotel in Arequipa, an intensely personal, self-revealing document that Ofer read last year, when they found it, hoping to find some clue about what had happened to Asher.  I looked at a few pages of it and saw that the material is privatel, so I set it aside.  Were he alive, he would never have shown it to me, and I think it's wrong to invade his inner life.  But I can't bring myself to throw it away either.  Perhaps some time I will want to know more about him.

According to Ofer, Boaz, and Hannah, who have read it, his travel journal, the one that he had taken in his small pack, is simply an enthusiastic description of where he'd been and what he'd done.  His handwriting is hard to read, but within the next month or two I intend to transcribe it and translate it into English.  I'll post it here, if it's interesting.

We were hoping that the memory chip that was in his camera would contain more pictures from Peru, aside from the ones he'd emailed to us, and perhaps give us an idea of where he was before he fell.  But, there was no chip in the camera, and the one that was in the camera case had no pictures from Peru on it, as we found out when we returned to Israel.  The chip that was in the camera has disappeared, along with Asher's banknotes.