Wabuka arrives in Bunia by motorbike from Mongbwalu at four in the afternoon. Eighty kilometres of dirt road. He has ridden without stopping. His shirt is stuck to his back.

In the courtyard is his sister-in-law Béatrice. She holds the hand of her small son, Olivier, seven. She nods towards the back room.

"They brought him this morning," she says.

"I know."

"The coffin is already here."

Wabuka goes into the room. The coffin rests on two trestles of red-painted wood. It is grey plywood. The edges are not smoothed. The points where the saw left its teeth are visible. A hospital label is stuck on the long side, in French and in Lingala: NE PAS OUVRIR.

Wabuka goes out into the courtyard.

"Who brought it?"

"The hospital. They give it themselves now. They said it was protocol."

"What protocol."

"I don't know, Wabuka. Mukoso died last night at two. They called me at six. When I arrived he was already in the coffin."

Wabuka washes his hands with water from the drum. Olivier watches him.

"Uncle Wabuka, where's papa."

"Papa is in the back room, Olivier."

"Can I see him."

"No."

At five his cousin Léon arrives. Léon is a tailor. He sewed Mukoso's brother's suits for three family weddings. He looks at the coffin. He touches the wood with two fingers.

"This is not a coffin to bury a Banande in," he says.

Wabuka does not answer.

"Let's go to Mukatama," Léon says. "Mukatama makes the sangwa coffins for the parish. A hundred and eighty dollars. It takes two hours."

"Sealed," Wabuka says. "It says sealed."

"Sealed means we have to open it."

Wabuka looks at his sister-in-law. Béatrice does not look at anyone.

"Let's go," Wabuka says.

They go to Mukatama by motorbike. The new coffin is hard dark wood, with four brass handles. Mukatama says he knew Mukoso at his mother's funeral, in 2019. He charges a hundred dollars now and eighty after the burial. They load the coffin on the box of Léon's motorbike and go back to the courtyard.

At nine in the evening they eat little. Cassava bread, beans, two Primus beers. Olivier falls asleep on the mat beside his mother. Léon says he has also brought the candles and the oil for the body, because the relatives will want to touch him one by one, tomorrow at the funeral.

"The dead are touched, here," Léon says. "Not like in Kinshasa."

"The dead are touched," Wabuka says.

At ten Léon goes out. He will come back the next morning at six.

Béatrice sits on a plastic chair beside the door of the back room. She does not get up. She does not speak. Wabuka goes in.

The plywood coffin is where he left it. Wabuka puts his hands on the lid. The lid is not nailed, it is only resting on four screws. Wabuka takes the screwdriver from the back pocket of his trousers. He unscrews them.

On the inside of the lid there is writing. Blue indelible marker, large hand, in French. Four lines.

NE PAS OUVRIR. HÔPITAL GÉNÉRAL DE BUNIA. PROTOCOLE SUSPECT FHV. DR. KAMBALE — 5/05.

Wabuka reads it once. He reads it a second time. FHV: he does not know what it means. He thinks: fever. He thinks: virus. He thinks: protocol. He thinks Dr Kambale is the young one who saw Béatrice's sister last year.

Béatrice is standing in the doorway.

"What does it say."

"Nothing. It says not to open it."

"You said so."

"Yes."

Wabuka looks at his brother. Mukoso has his eyes shut. His lips pressed together. A white gauze on the neck, fixed with two plasters. The skin is yellow. The hands are crossed on the chest.

Wabuka thinks he had not been in Bunia for Mukoso's fever. He had told him on the phone: I'll come next week. Three times. Next week then became the funeral.

He puts his hands under his brother's armpits. He lifts. Mukoso is lighter than he remembered. He moves him from the plywood coffin to the hard wood one Léon brought in half an hour earlier. Béatrice helps him with the feet. The gauze on the neck slips. Wabuka puts it back in place.

He pulls the blue marker out of the old lid. It had come half loose from the pressure of the screws.

"I'll take it," he says. "To write the name on the new coffin, tomorrow."

He puts it in the inner pocket of his jacket.

They screw the lid on the new coffin. They leave the plywood one on the ground against the wall. Béatrice brings water to wash their hands. They wash their hands.

At half past eleven Wabuka goes out into the courtyard. Olivier is asleep. Léon has left a bag of candles by the door. The moon is high.

Wabuka thinks tomorrow at least seventy people will come to the funeral. His brother had eight living brothers, eleven first cousins, a network of clients who had ordered church benches from him. They will all come.

He thinks Mukatama will say the new coffin is the finest he has ever made. He thinks Béatrice will be grateful to him. He thinks Mukoso, if he could see him now, would say: well done, I knew you would come.

He thinks he lifted him with bare hands.

Three weeks later, on the twenty-sixth of May, Wabuka is queueing at the Ebola triage centre in Mongbwalu, on the road to the old cemetery. Ahead of him there are eighteen people. Behind, thirty-two. Almost all are from Mukoso's village and from Béatrice's family.

Léon died yesterday at dawn.

Béatrice is in a coma at the hospital in Bunia.

Olivier tested negative on the first test, and they sent him to his grandmother in a village in Beni where they do not yet know.

Wabuka has not felt his left arm since this morning.

Under his right arm he has a packet. He opens it for the triage, when his turn comes. Inside there are: the identity card, an envelope with two hundred dollars for treatment, a clean handkerchief, and the blue indelible marker from the lid of the Bunia coffin.

He had slipped it into his pocket to write his brother's name on the new coffin.

He had not done it. On the new coffin, in the end, the name had been written by Mukatama, with a chisel, in his tailor's hand.

Wabuka takes out the marker. He looks at it. The tip is still intact. The ink has not dried. He puts it back in the packet.

The triage nurse takes his temperature. Thirty-nine point two. She lets him into the yellow tent. Inside, on the registration table, there is a box of black markers for writing names on the patients' wristbands.