“So much the better for her. You understand: tomorrow it will be harder to die. Even in an hour or two it’s going to be harder”; and then, “It’s already hard enough to die.”
“Because of hoping?” Marija asked.
“I don’t know,” Žana replied. “Maybe because of hoping.” Then she got up and Marija realized, although she didn’t see it, that Žana had risen to give Polja the can with water; “Now it’s a human being that’s dying,” Žana said. “You understand: a human being and not an animal.”
Then Marija repeated what she had said a short while before, but she wasn’t thinking of that, she was already thinking I should return the sheet to Polja and she was wondering if Polja could hear the artillery and she was thinking it would be better if Polja couldn’t hear it, but all she said was:
“Yes, it’s on account of hope”; and Žana repeated:
“Up to now it was an animal dying. It’s easier, I believe, to die like that.”
The other woman didn’t respond. All she felt was the way her body was going numb from lying there, immobile, in the damp: the wet diapers she had wrapped around her naked body were releasing an icy moisture that her skin was absorbing from her stomach to the middle of her thighs; it gave the impression that her skin had become pasty and rotten like that of a corpse, although she didn’t really feel like she had skin at all anymore, rather just some gelatinous mass, which together with the wet rags was glued to her bones. But the child wasn’t cold; she thought: I folded Polja’s sheet over twice and laid it across the wet diapers so that the moisture wouldn’t reach the baby. I didn’t dare put the wet diapers on my stomach, she thought. I could only wrap them around my thighs, and I didn’t dare take off my underwear; it wouldn’t be good if I got my period now. It’s always so unpredictable; a few sniffles are enough to bring it on; then she thought that it would be best if she got up and moved the diapers a bit lower. It was probably just past ten now, and Maks was going to give the signal after two, and then she would have to move and she was frightened by the prospect of her legs completely freezing up and turning into some icy, inert mass.
Thus it was necessary to undertake something, above all to push those damp diapers lower and to return the sheet to Polja. But then, on the very cusp of the movement with which she wanted to raise the infant off of herself and to position him so she could stretch her limbs and give Polja back the sheet, she stopped, restrained the movement that was almost finished being born, feeling the way its mild charge crept across her body (a charge that should have set her hand into motion) and sagged from the tips of her fingers: Polja is going to die, and she sensed with bitterness that it was precisely this thought that stayed her limbs, not because she now at long last comprehended that Polja was really not coming with them (she was conscious of that: though Polja would remain alive until two, she would nevertheless not be able to come with them), but rather because she realized that she herself had acquiesced to the fact that Polja would not be going with them.
“Žana,” she said, and when she noticed the other woman had moved: “Help me pull Polja’s sheet out from under the baby.”
“He has more need of it, the baby,” Žana said unexpectedly. “And you do too . . . Do you understand . . . ?”—and before Marija could gather her thoughts and say anything, she heard the rustling of the straw and the quiet knocking of the tin can.
“You see, it’s too late for that,” said Žana. “For Polja, it’s too late already.”
“What time is it?” Marija asked, at the same time as a narrow blade of light scraped over Žana’s face and she saw her lips moving:
“It’s not yet midnight. I don’t think it’s midnight yet.”
Marija was just then shifting her frozen legs.
“I got my period,” she said. “Or so it seems.”
“That’s from the fear,” Žana said; then she corrected herself: “From the excitement.”
“No,” Marija said. “From the wet diapers. I didn’t dare go to sleep (it was just some kind of half-dozing state). I should have changed position”—then she sensed once more Polja’s mute presence in the room (she felt it from the silence) and she remembered that she was supposed to make more diapers out of her sheet. But she didn’t get up. She couldn’t begin tearing Polja’s sheet right away and making diapers. And sanitary pads. Then she asked, “How old was she?” but she already knew that she wasn’t going to be able to stand it another second in that position and that her stomach and legs were about to disintegrate abruptly like in Poe’s story about the corpse of M. Valdemar, which has been artificially kept alive by means of hypnotism and which then suddenly dissolves into gooey, slimy rot. And even before she could hear Žana’s answer, “Seventeen, I think,” she had already pushed her hand under the child to extract Polja’s sheet, which she then laid next to her on the straw and she laid the child across it and wrapped it up with the other hand. Then she turned to the side for a moment, felt for the edge of the diaper, arched her back, and started unwrapping the wet, blood-covered rags around her legs. “She seemed older to me,” she said so that her rubbing the dry edge of a diaper on her benumbed skin to wipe away the blood couldn’t be heard.
“Corpses don’t have an age,” Žana said, and then Marija felt the blood beginning to circulate slowly beneath her skin, rising up through the capillaries to the surface, all over her buttocks and her thighs, and then she stretched out her legs and sat up in the straw, leaning her shoulder blades against the cold wall of the barracks. She wiped her fingers on a damp rag and began groping about in the dark for a dry piece of linen to make a pad.
“You met her before I did,” she said, locating her underwear in the gloom beneath the fingers of her right hand, and then she put the folded portion of linen into place between her legs and slid her underwear back up.
“Yes,” said Žana. “She was one of those. You know. One of the chosen ones. Along the way she tried to flee. They gave her a thorough beating. Then she got sick and instead of taking her into the Lebensborn they dispatched her here. What saved her was the fact that she played the cello. I heard that the overseer who beat her was punished. The Germans regretted that a flower like her should end up on the inside . . .”
Then the straw beneath Žana began to rustle and Marija turned in her direction, following the narrow band of light; she was still lying on her stomach with the straw between her teeth and her eyes fixed on the crack: she was following the movement of the floodlight’s beam along the barracks and wire.
The field guns, with their ever-faster salvos in the distance, suddenly fell silent.
“If Polja had lived—” Marija said, and though she wanted to tell the truth: if she had stayed alive till two, in other words until the point at which Maks was going to give the sign, and if she had been left alone in the barracks (since, being so sick, she couldn’t go with Žana and Marija )—tomorrow they would have crammed her into a truck anyway and taken her off to the gas chamber, she just couldn’t let it end that way for her, so she said: “—she would have been in Odessa in a month or so . . . I believe she was from Odessa”; and Žana said:
“Or maybe if she had just lived a few more hours.”
“They won’t take any risks,” Marija said. “That Maks is a damned clever fellow.”
“Yes,” said Žana. “Damned clever,” and then she asked, “Have you ever seen him? Maks, that is?”
“No,” Marija said: “Never . . . though actually—” But she couldn’t finish her thought, and Marija should have said We’ll get through this or We’ll make it or something else just not They won’t take any risks. And even though she’d stopped with that, and had fallen silent, she began to get clumsily entangled in that heavy net of men, thinking that in terms of needlepoint it was a ridiculous pattern and with the delicate, finely pointed needle of a woman’s passivity she began poking into its empty spaces until she found herself wrapped up in the tough, thick threading of the nets and had to call for help from more men, first
from Jakob—in her mind—and then, aloud and with desperate entreaty in her voice, that other man too, Maks. The Maks she had still never seen but who had existed for her for months now as a synonym for salvation, the incarnation of masculine god-agency. That’s why she’d wanted to say I’ve known him as long as I’ve known Jakob, but she changed her mind, for she remembered that the true sense of Žana’s question lay elsewhere. At least it seemed that way to her. Žana simply wanted to point out that she herself (Marija) wasn’t in any condition to do for herself or for her child anything other than submit to the fate that she identified with Jakob, and that that Maks (and she always said “that Maks” herself) was merely the executor of the will of fate-Jakob, and wasn’t even a concrete person, with no face and shoulders, no hairy chest and great, powerful hands. Instead: an unknown agent, the hand of God, or the devil himself, or precisely some invisible and unknown powerful third thing that works miracles: he flips some unseen lever or cuts a wire and darkness breaks in . . . Like that night in the corridor when she was coming out of Jakob’s room. And before that, too. Ten minutes earlier: all at once the darkness fell. And it was like this:
When Dr. Nietzsche halted in front of Jakob’s door he screamed: “These working conditions are impossible! Every five minutes, that power plant! This smells like sabotage to me,” and then Jakob covered her mouth so she wouldn’t cry out, and then he pushed her, or actually placed her in the cabinet like she was an object and locked her in. But before he shut the door:
“That was Maks,” he said. “He shorted out the fuses.”
This happened several months ago. Actually more than half a year back. And that was the first time she’d heard of Maks.
Chapter 3
She sat on Jakob’s bed with her legs crossed (blood running down her thighs and along her bottom) and she felt unequal to any new task.
“Jakob, something is going to happen,” she said. “I have a feeling that something is going to happen.”
And he asked, “What could happen?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel like something is going to happen. Maybe someone will find us here”; and then he said:
“Nobody ever comes into my room. Now what would they be looking for in my room?”
“Still, Jakob,” she said. “I’m afraid.”
But she didn’t budge. All she did was say again: “I have a feeling that something could happen,” and at that moment she thought about how Aunt Lela had said that this was as important a thing in a woman’s life as giving birth, and she thought about the blood she was leaving on Jakob’s sheet and about his being a doctor and how he would know what was happening to her. Back then she should have asked Aunt Lela, Is it possible for it to happen and for the man not to notice anything?
Then he said: “Should I turn out the light?”; and she:
“No. Stay with me.”
“If you’re afraid,” he said. Then he stopped.
“I’m not,” she said. “Only you can’t take your hand away.” Then more: “I love looking at that lampshade. It’s been a year since I saw a lamp with a shade.” And again: “I have to go. It’s high time I left,” but still she did nothing that would indicate she was leaving; made not a single movement that would show that she was leaving. She wasn’t capable of making such a motion, although she was no longer lying down (immediately afterward she had stood up and put on her underwear and her dress). Jakob sat at her right side, leaning against the steel frame of the bed. And she just sat there like that, feeling the blood fill up the impression they had made in the straw mattress with their combined weight.
“We’ve known each other for two months already,” she said. “I never could have imagined . . .”
“Who could say,” he said. “To me it seems we’ve known each other for a very long time: for a long while before all this.”
“Today’s it’s exactly eight weeks and a day,” she said. “And one night extra. Doesn’t that seem like a short time to you . . . ?”
“To me it feels like we’ve known each other forever,” he said. “But never mind that now. This night isn’t over yet,” and she still couldn’t move and she seemed to hear a noise in the corridor and all she could do was cling to him and whisper “Jakob!” and at that same time she realized that he was no longer at her side but somehow here and there by the door listening to the thumping of steps audible right outside, and she felt herself losing the ability to speak on account of fear, and before she could snap out of it and think This was perhaps my last night with Jakob, my first and last, before she was in a position to think or say or do anything definite, Jakob was already holding his cupped hand over her mouth. And she was already in the cabinet and realized that its doors were creaking behind her as they closed when she sensed Jakob’s face on hers and heard his breathless whisper: “That’s Maks,” and before she had time to be astonished or at least ask Maks who? she nearly simultaneously heard a key start to turn on the outside of the cabinet door and subsequently Jakob’s Ja, ja and his rapidly receding steps.
Only then did she grasp why she hadn’t seen Jakob’s face when he said “That’s Maks” and that thing about a short-circuit: the light had already been extinguished before he locked the door, for otherwise she would have been able to see Jakob’s face; yet she remembered clearly that he hadn’t put out the lamp with the shade, and that his tall silhouette had still been visible before her, blocking her light with his back, and then visible too when he turned and bent down and stretched his hand out toward her to cover her mouth and lift her up and deposit her in the cabinet. Now it became clear to her that the light had still been burning when he picked her up and carried her in essentially one swoop, because she remembered seeing a broad swath of wide, dark cracks along the open doors of the cabinet and she understood that he would have to use his foot to fully open those doors that were already ajar. The last thing she saw then was the elongated white stain like some kind of unfleeced animal hanging on a hook, but then right away it struck her that it had to be Jakob’s white hospital coat because she could smell the heavy, thick odor of iodoform and ether. So the darkness must have begun at the moment that Jakob’s head appeared and touched her face to tell her not to be afraid and to tell her about Maks and the blown circuits, since the cabinet door must have still been open but she nonetheless wasn’t able to see him, only to perceive his low, low whisper and his breath on her face.
She stood motionless in the gloom, straining her eyes to pick out some light through the crack along the cabinet’s door, and she thought she felt the cabinet vibrating from her suppressed trembling, which the plywood transmitted in every direction, the cabinet shaking and creaking as if it contained a monstrous heart, or else some useless mechanism like a wall clock with no face and no arms with which to carry its weapons: only the frantic, invisible, and pointless click-clack-click-clack of a tremendous pendulum. Her head was at an impossible angle, lying nearly horizontally across the top of her shoulder, but she didn’t dare to feel about with her hands in the dark (lest she send an empty clothes hanger flying) or even push that coat farther away, with its sickly sweet hospital smell permeating her eyes and leaving her insides cramped and ready to heave up bile.
But then all she could do was regret that she hadn’t taken care of the coat a bit earlier, and she was regretting it all the more when Dr. Nietzsche flipped the switch outside the door to no effect and when, right after that, she caught his voice: “This smells like sabotage to me”; she should have done something before that point, at least. Firstly, to move the coat away from her nose (she imagined this movement: sliding the hanger gently along the wooden bar suspended between the two sides of the cabinet, then stopping it with the soft thump of linen on wood, both of these materials springing from plant life, like twins from the same womb, and then her hand making its way back and dropping across her belly and landing on it with no noise as if it were just returning sound-lessly through the air and not touching anything at all, and she imagi
ned her clean, unencumbered breathing and she inhaled the scent of dry fir planks that radiated the smell of resin); then she got into a more comfortable position, sitting diagonally or at least freeing herself from the bar pressing down on her neck. And so it was as if she were in a coffin: a living corpse; and she thought of Anijela. She would always remember: the elliptical tin sign on a flaking red facade, COFFINS MADE HERE—THROUGH THE ARCH, LEFT—hidden in the summer by the leaves of the wild chestnuts and with the gnarled, clumsily painted finger pointing like the hand of fate in the direction of the graves; THROUGH THE ARCH, LEFT under the blooming boughs of the wild chestnut; and she thought back to the heavy aromatic smell of chestnut blossoms and to that cul-de-sac straying off of Grobljanska Street and then going left. Now she could also remember the ice-flowers on the window between which appeared the head of the gray-haired old man inside like the head of some faun among the ferns, and she recalled his mouth of crooked and missing teeth below his big mustache, and when their round faces filled the opaque flowers of his window he exhaled on it to melt the ice. Then, under his reeking breath, the fern withered, and Aunt Lela pulled the scarf away from her face so that he would recognize her: “It’s us, Čika Martin”; then a flickering yellow light came on in the window and after that one could hear the key turning in the lock and she saw the faun’s disheveled head and mustache and immediately she regretted coming, even before the man said: “This one’s not coming to me for a place to stay, is she?” But Aunt Lela said:
“No. She’s not. She just came by to see Anijela. How is Anijela?”
They stood in the corner of his darkened workshop and warmed up by the low fire smoldering in a round sawdust-fed stove. Two or three times the man lifted the lid and peered in at the embers, each time spitting into the fire and then sticking his pipe back in his mouth. But she had still not seen Anijela. They were waiting until they had warmed up a bit, but Marija had already firmly decided that she would not be staying, whatever happened. It wasn’t precisely on account of the old man but much more because of the low ceiling, smoky and peeling, and due to the sense that death had permeated everything here; she almost couldn’t look at that black gilt-edged coffin lid standing upright by the door.
PSALM 44 Page 3