PSALM 44

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “She sleeps all the time,” the old man said. He took the pipe out of his mouth. Then with his middle finger he tamped down the bowl and she saw that the stunted index finger on his right hand was fastened to his middle finger like some sort of parasite. “I tell her it would be better for her to get some exercise,” he said. “It’s impossible for anybody to come in here without my hearing them first. But she doesn’t want to get up until it passes, as she says. All this must pass.”

  Marija saw Anijela right after that, as they were moving between the workshop and the warehouse. She remembered: the old man latched the door of the workshop, then he took a candle and set off in front of them. She had to walk on for a bit before she grew accustomed to the half-darkness (the man was shielding his candle) and was able to orient herself: coffins, for the most part unpainted, lay diagonally on the shelves like beds on some kind of ship of the dead. She took in the dense, heavy smell of glue, fresh logs, and planks of fir, oil paints, and turpentine.

  Then the man repeated:

  “You see? I told you. She’s sleeping again,” and he raised the lid from one of the caskets in the corner of the room. “All she does is sleep. In the evenings she comes out, but only to go to one place—you know what I mean. Then she comes right back.” Then he told her: “She has feathers in there. And the chimney runs along beside her there. She’s not cold, she says.”

  Just then Marija caught sight of Anijela, who slowly raised her eyelids, and then only the whites of her eyes showed, and these words came dragging out of her mouth:

  “I’m always sleepy,” Anijela said. “As soon as I let the lid down, I fall asleep.” Her eyes were twitching as if the meager illumination of the candle were blinding her.

  At that point, the man said, “That’s from the dust. It would be better for her if she took a shot of rakija. That’d invigorate her, as I say. And give her some courage.”

  “No,” Anijela responded. “The dust helps me sleep”; then she looked at Marija, as if speaking only to her: “I have the same dream over and over: someone is after me and I can’t run away. Then I wake up and see that I’m in a coffin. So I calm down a little. Do you ever dream anything like this, Marija? Someone is chasing you, and you . . .”

  Then Aunt Lela came to her assistance:

  “Sweetheart,” she said, “how about you come out of that . . . out of there. We’ll try to get you a passport. Or something.” Then she added, “Later on, of course. When things have calmed down, a little bit at least.”

  “Oh, no,” said the doll-sleeper. “I’ll wait right here for the end of the war. I like it fine here. Really. This is great for me, Aunt Lela”; and Marija, astonished, disbelieving, looked at her face and her pale eyes: her head shrunken as with those prizes prepared by headhunters, no bigger than a fist; her mouth splitting her face in half, unchanged and so disproportionate in relation to her narrow, knotty nose and the delicate wax lines embossed on the doll-sleeper’s miniature face. Even her eyelashes were of a supernatural length and fell and rose with a sound like the scraping, loud and ungreased, of the wings of a night bird. Then Marija’s eyes stopped on Anijela’s necklace with its chunky artificial beads the color of amethyst; that necklace on the slender neck of the doll-sleeper gave Anijela the look of those mummies found in the pyramids of the Pharaohs: the dignity of a ruler’s death.

  “That’s from my late mother,” Anijela said abruptly, before Marija could inquire about the significance of the necklace and before she could think of anything at all to say, at least anything other than what you would say to someone on their deathbed; “a family heirloom, as they say,” Anijela went on as if responding to Marija’s unspoken question and to her look that had now turned into a wild if suppressed cry. But then her eyes stopped on Anijela’s scrawny, withered fingers, with which she was picking at her necklace as if counting on her rosary; she still had long, well-groomed nails the color of dark silver that somehow, miraculously, matched the bleached-out amber of those long fingers, like a silver crown on the elegant, old-fashioned tube of a precious cigarette-holder.

  “I use it as a calendar,” she said. “If each bead stands for one month, then there is more than three years’ worth here. I guess the war will be over by then. But a bead can also stand for a week. Or a day. Or an hour.” And she repeated: “I’m counting”; and Marija felt that she wouldn’t be able to say a word and that she would have to wait for the old man to put down his pipe for a moment or to mumble something, would have to wait for anything, and anything would do, so long as someone said something and she didn’t have to listen to Anijela’s hoarse whisper anymore, so long as someone said something in a human voice, even for the old man to clear his throat in deep bass tones, or for Aunt Lela, in her manly voice, reeking of cigarettes, to say something pointless or implausible, like that line a little while earlier about a passport for Anijela; but instead of any of that Marija was again forced to hear the whispering of the doll-sleeper: “And when I’m bored I play it a lot,” the mummy said, and her fingers the color of dark amber flew over the necklace, stopping for an instant when they seemed to have found the right note and chord, unregistered by her audience but that showed in her eyes across which scurried the skittish shadows of some unearthly melody (and now she remembered Polja’s figure wrapped around the rising neck of a cello beneath the black canopy of that hearse parked near the crematorium while dark rain trickled from the sky as they were returning to work, soaking wet and fatigued): “So there,” Anijela said then and moved her head back a little so that the point of her chin protruded upward as in those paintings of the descent from the Cross with their impossibly foreshortened perspective in which his toes, the hollow beneath his ribs, and his triangular chin align; “Tramtram-tram-tram,” Anijela conveyed to them the sounds that were crashing around in her mind but remained inaudible to them, all the while tapping her fingers on those glass beads the color of amethyst: “Mozart,” she said as if breathing out the word in a pause of a sixteenth note’s duration or between two half notes: “Requiem,” she said, without stopping her delirious finger movements, her head suspended over the imaginary piano: “I even know when I’m doing it wrong. I know exactly which note is which and as soon as I hit one I can hear it perfectly.”

  And Marija had already opened her mouth to tell Aunt Lela that they had to go because she could no longer stand to listen to Anijela’s Requiem, but then the emergency sirens went off somewhere and took her breath away, but at that moment she would have preferred to hear the hysterical howling of a siren to Anijela’s whispering, and in the same moment she realized that they would have to stay for at least fifteen minutes more until the alarm passed. Fortunately Anijela fell asleep all of a sudden, as if lulled by her own music, and they, the three of them, that is to say Aunt Lela, the old man, and she, could talk about something in the indirect and silly way people usually talk; then the old man said that his common sense told him the war couldn’t last longer than a year because at that point God would either have taken pity on people or have destroyed the whole world with fire and flood, because he knew an old man in their area who up to now had prophesied about several wars and that included the exact day and month and year and he had even predicted the assassination in Sarajevo and had spoken about it in plain terms to everyone and for that reason he was thrown in prison and after it actually happened the way he had prognosticated (in the same way that he had prophesied about several droughts and even the date of birth and name of the heir to the throne) they let him go but first he had to tell them where he had obtained his knowledge of it and he let them know it was all written down, nice and tidy, in the Old Testament and in various books of prophecy; well, it’s this same old fellow who said this too, that this war cannot last for very long because how could it come to pass that people would hurl themselves into trenches this way like animals and pile up in heaps two dozen at a time and he remembered well what it had been like when he’d fought in a war under Emperor Franz Josef—but Marija was no
longer listening to him she was already concentrating on this visit having to be over at some point and she was waiting for the siren to give the signal that the alarm was over and as she did that she looked into the candle so that she didn’t have to look into Anijela’s coffin anymore. Then after an eternity the siren screeched again and Aunt Lela said, “We don’t want to wake her. Let her rest”; and that was all Marija had been waiting for: by the time the old man closed the lid on Anijela’s coffin she was already in the next room and even all the way outside, where she had fled to escape herself and everything else, and then the man said:

  “It wouldn’t be a bad thing for her to take a little rakija. It’s better than dust,” and Aunt Lela:

  “To be sure. To be sure”; but Marija was already standing in the threshold by the door and staring into the clean, newly fallen snow as though at a miracle. Meanwhile now she was still standing, immobile, with her back squeezed up against the rod in the cabinet and with her head practically jammed into that stinking hospital coat until with one of her hands she pressed on her underwear and felt the blood coat her fingers and run down her leg, and she had the impression that she was going to bleed out like a butchered animal hanging from a hook, head down in a slaughterhouse while blood slowly drips and congeals on the concrete down below in a thick scarlet stain. It was obvious to her: she could do nothing; she would have to remain standing in this impossible position until something happened, until Dr. Nietzsche left or Jakob tried something; all she had to do was see to it that she didn’t pass out because to do so would betray her presence, and that she go on waiting there, her teeth clenched. She had already heard the doctor’s deep harsh voice that sometimes ended sentences in an unpleasant and unexpected falsetto and suddenly she realized that the light was burning again outside and that, therefore, the blown fuses had been fixed, for along the cabinet’s door a sharp fissure of light had appeared. That Maks had again managed to get away with it, she thought, and at the same time she heard Jakob’s voice too.

  “He’s gotten us out of a lot of tight spots,” Marija said after a brief pause: she said us because that word also means “you,” meaning Žana, because it was clear that the preparations for their escape were in large part Maks’s work; he was there in the background; he pulled unseen strings; he created light and engineered blown circuits. He. Maks. Whom no one saw.

  Then she heard Žana’s voice in an echo of a sentence spoken just before:

  “Damned clever fellow,” and Marija thought that this was the only way Jakob would ever be able to compliment another man. Not that Žana had any such difficulties. But her “Damned clever fellow” was welcome nonetheless. And Marija imagined telling Žana about what came after, when Dr. Nietzsche finally departed and she said good-bye to Jakob and headed toward the barracks door, at the end of the hallway; and then she thought It would be better if I tried to sleep a bit. I need to be rested. And she pressed the child to her and said in a whisper, without turning her head:

  “I have the impression that time is passing more slowly than ever. I think it would still be the best thing for me to sleep a bit. Especially if it’s past midnight.”

  Chapter 4

  And although she wasn’t able to sleep, she was also not in a position to tell Žana what happened later, not only because she was upset and afraid but also because she was preoccupied with herself to such an extent that she was hardly able to think in chronological terms and she hardly knew what came before and what afterward, and it was as if all kinds of time had flowed into one, and it was also because it seemed impossible to her to separate from the whole web of occurrences one single story like the one about Maks, nearly indistinguishable from the shapeless mass of achronicity out of which her mind now selected things in no apparent order. So she was fully in the grip of all this, and she wouldn’t have been able to tell Žana even if she’d wanted to, or even tell herself, what happened later.

  But she could still hear the doctor’s voice and she tried to make sense of the sequence: first she heard the scraping of the chair on the floor, and then the chair creaked under its load (and she understood that Dr. Nietzsche had lowered his weight onto the chair and she immediately thought that something was wrong here if a Dr. Nietzsche, also known as the Nazi Hippocrates, a highly regarded researcher with “human guinea pigs” and a highly placed secret advisor on racial questions, if, therefore, a person like that arrives unannounced and without escort and what’s more at that time of night at a subordinate’s room, the room of a non-Aryan colleague—according to his own (Dr. Nietzsche’s) racial theory), and she began to recount to herself everything Jakob had told her about that man who supervised the crematorium and the “Institute for Scientific Research.” And even without all that, even if she hadn’t known of Dr. Nietzsche and if Jakob hadn’t talked to her about him, the former professor of anatomy at the University of Strasbourg, she would have grasped that something wasn’t right when a German doctor paid a visit to Jakob and did so at that time of night; she knew that something unusual was occurring as soon as the chair groaned and even before the doctor inquired of Jakob in an almost confidential tone:

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes,” said Jakob. “Of course. Who would be here at this time of day?”

  “For example, one of those women whom you saved from the camp and took for your own.”

  “That would be the same as there being no one here. They’re only guinea pigs.”

  “Never mind that now,” Dr. Nietzsche said. “I’m here on a confidential matter.” Then he paused before saying:

  “We consider you a trustworthy person.”

  “I’m only a doctor,” Jakob replied.

  “Do you really mean only a doctor?” asked Dr. Nietzsche, “or do you mean a trustworthy doctor?—I guess you’ve thought about that.”

  “Yes,” Jakob said. “As has every doctor. I think of my professional oath, Herr Nietzsche: I will endeavor to justify the trust that my patient has in me.”

  “And have you, Herr Doktor, justified that trust? Always?”

  “Yes,” Jakob said.

  “And you have always done for your patients everything that lay within your powers?”

  “I believe I have,” Jakob said again. “Within the limits of my powers.”

  “And how many of your patients have died?—I mean from among those who trusted you?”

  “No one trusts anyone anymore,” Jakob answered.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Herr Doktor. How many of them have died?”

  “I don’t remember,” Jakob said. “Many of them . . . though I don’t think it was through any fault of mine.” Then he added: “Many of them were killed.”

  “You mean at headquarters and in the gas chambers?”

  “Yes,” said Jakob. “In those places also, of course.”

  She was already anticipating the turn the conversation would now take, following all that Jakob had said.

  “Have you ever considered, my dear colleague, trying it out yourself? Having a look at all this from the inside?” Dr. Nietzsche asked. “Maybe it would interest you to inquire personally about the degree to which the gas chamber is more humane than, let’s say, the guillotine. Or the hangman’s rope. Don’t forget: there is still time for everything.”

  “I know,” Jakob replied. “Whenever I’m about to forget that, even for a moment—” (but he didn’t finish, and she was certain that she would now give herself away with some desperate movement meaning “No, Jakob, don’t go on!” or that she would collapse unconscious or otherwise announce her presence from the cabinet against her will like a broken wall clock when all of a sudden it begins to clang before one of the mechanisms snaps and it finally falls silent . . . but nothing happened. Even Dr. Nietzsche didn’t demand that Jakob finish what he had started but instead, as if he were saving him, he brought down the blade of his axe before Jakob’s head could reach the chopping block):

  “Let us imagine,” said Dr. Nietzsche, interrupting,
“that someone orders you to carry out a certain experiment on a group of prisoners who, you have been told or have found out some other way, are going to be killed anyway,” after which there was a slight pause, “would you not feel that there was a certain professional, scientific gain in that? Being able to conduct observations of living beings, of human beings, actually? At any rate, you’d have to admit that every experiment has human testing as its ultimate goal.”

  “Perhaps,” Jakob said, “assuming I had their agreement. Perhaps then . . . under certain circumstances.”

  “What do you mean?” Dr. Nietzsche asked.

  Jakob didn’t answer right away. Then he said:

  “Let us say that I consider these experiments . . . reasonable. Not merely useful from a professional, scientific point of view. Let’s assume . . . ”

  “But,” Dr. Nietzsche interrupted again, and Marija managed to tear herself away from the conversation long enough to reflect that she now understood almost nothing of this situation and that she couldn’t fathom where this whole discussion was leading, although from the fear that was constricting her throat she sensed that Jakob wanted to add something to his “Let’s assume” that would be dangerous for him in the extreme, and therefore dangerous for her—but at the moment she heard Dr. Nietzsche’s voice interrupting Jakob’s she could only think how she understood nothing of what their two voices were saying, and she imagined the two of them facing off against each other in the darkness that was for her impenetrable and blotted out all distinctions and she perceived them only as half-whispers painting the invisible speakers with expressions of tense, concealed attentiveness; now Nietzsche’s tense and rushed whisper had the floor once more, and now the two of them—in their unseen combat—more readily resembled conspirators hatching some plan than what she knew them to be: enemies, separated by opposing convictions and prejudices about race and ideology and power and every other possible and impossible difference, but who for a moment were accepting (illusorily at least) points of view that were in essence the opposites of their own so that in this way, by means of that ostensible identification, they could each prove to the other that their adversarial standpoints were in fact shared; even though they were both likewise convinced that such duplicity was in fact one of the easiest ways to allow their own convictions to come into view. Of course, that ostensible identification was doomed: this was a game of poker between a king and one of his subjects, in which the king would allow himself to lose only by virtue of his mercy so long as he found some form of satisfaction in competing on an equal footing with his people: ultimately he must emerge as the winner because he’s holding three kings in his hand; the subject displays his hand with a triumphant smile and starts to slide the whole of the state exchequer toward himself when the king gives a sign to his armed guards: Stop. Here are three kings, and I make—four. And smiling bitterly the subject gives back the money to which he had added everything he still possessed and he laughs along with the others at the king’s deceit and applauds his wit, and then he steps out and fires a bullet into his own mouth in front of the palace gates as a symbol of protest: that is as much as Marija comprehended of the proceedings when Dr. Nietzsche resumed playing and she heard the continuation of that word “But”: