PSALM 44 (8 page)

“
Stop!
Damit genug
! We have to be cautious
”
: the voice rose to a falsetto.
“
I think . . .
Verstehen Sie
? . . .
Verstehen Sie
?
”

“
Ja, ja, ich verstehe . . . Aber ich denke es ist doch nicht. Zu klein. Das Becken wie eines Kindes . . . Aber, insofern, Herr Kollege, denkt sie ist anziehend gen
ü
glich
. . .
”

“
Du, Abschaum
!
”
said the man with the yellow star.
“
Common trash . . . Permit me, Dr. Berta . . .
”
Behind her, he humbly moved his stethoscope to a spot under her shoulder blades. She was unable to see his face. She only heard his voice. It was the woman with buckteeth, the one they called Dr. Berta, who was asking the questions for her chart. Marija answered with that automatic strength that kicks into action during an onslaught of fear of death or tiredness.

“
Mutan gemi
š
t
—
mongrel,
”
said the voice behind her as she rattled off her answers mechanically, thereby laying bare her origins and conjuring up stray ghosts.
“
Definitely a mongrel.
”

Then the voice that broke into a falsetto asked:
“
Would
Frau Judengemischte
—
that
’
s what you said your name was, if I
’
m not mistaken
—
would
Frau Judengemischte
answer one more question for us? Let
’
s make this . . . essentially off the record, okay?
”

Her eyes fixed, as if seeking refuge, on the woman with the protruding teeth, and then they scrolled over the shiny skull of Dr. Nietzsche, finally coming helplessly to rest on the grubby, shadowy square of the nearby window. She clenched her teeth in a desperate effort to transfer her thoughts through the window, outside to that invisible wire bisecting the horizon, but she lacked the power to carry this out. She could hardly think anything at all.

“
Don
’
t just stand there. Answer.
”
Then loudly, cynically:
“
FRAU JUDENGEMISCHTE
! HA HA HA.
JUDENGEMISCHTE
!
”
—
and the first part of the sentence was spoken in Polish, whispered, intimate.

Doctor Nietzsche was very taken with her. He grinned.

“
Frau Judengmischte
! Have you ever had occasion to mix some Aryan substance into your mongrel self? I don
’
t mean in terms of your genealogy. Directly. A little pure Aryan fluid. Or any other kind, for that matter?
”

The stethoscope on her heart transmitted to Jakob
’
s ear nothing but the waves flooding across the deck and the incantatory beginning of that ancient prayer recognized all over the world both on the sea and dry land: SOS! SOS! SOS! SOS! SOS! SOS!

“
No,
”
she said, speaking in time with the slide of the stethoscope in Jakob
’
s hands from left to right, left to right, across her ribs:
“
No.
”

“
With your permission,
”
Jakob said at that point, laying aside the stethoscope,
“
in my opinion the
Frau
here is not suitable for such uses. Ordinary trash. A waste of time. Go away! Be gone!
”

That had been her first meeting with Jakob, immediately after her arrival in the camp. And that
’
s the reason she was able to answer him a few days later:
“
Yes, I do
,
”
when he asked her if she trusted him. That
’
s why she was able, without embarrassment, to bring out the words:
“
Yes, I do. I believe I do.
”

Quietly she came to the door and signaled that she was ready. Then he turned off the already dimmed light of the lamp with the shade.

“
Ž
ana,
”
she said now in a whisper.
“
Did I ever tell you: switching on the lamp with the shade was actually a signal for Maks. That
’
s why Jakob had put a lightbulb in it that evening.
”

“
No,
”
said
Ž
ana absently.
“
You never told me about that . . . But sleep now. It
’
s still early. I
’
d say it
’
s just past midnight. If I haven
’
t completely lost my sense of time.
”
Marija could hear the rustling of the straw beneath
Ž
ana and she realized, without opening her eyes, piercing the gloom with them, that
Ž
ana was still lying on her stomach in the straw, propped up on her elbows, her eyes fixed on the crack. This position of alertness and the tension in her muscles, like in a cat ready to pounce
—
this Marija could only interpret as the result of the experience that
Ž
ana had gained in the resistance movement, which was hinting something to her again now. Although she had great respect for this sense of caution, so unknown and so nearly masculine to her, a respect likewise inspired by
Ž
ana
’
s reflexes, and although she now felt a bit uneasy because of her own passivity, she also considered at least telling
Ž
ana about what had happened afterward, but all she said was:
“
Once I almost saw him. Maks, that is
”
;
Ž
ana repeated her statement from before:
“
Devilishly clever fellow. That Maks
.
”
—
Therefore Marija couldn
’
t tell her
—
anyway not in just a few words
—
what it was like. That same evening, after the surprise visit from Dr. Nietzsche. Less than an hour afterward. As soon as she had left Jakob
’
s room.

After he had turned off the lamp with the shade, Jakob listened intently and then carefully unlocked the door. The only other thing she remembered was an embrace in the dark and the pressure of his body. Then she slid along the wall down the darkened corridor in the barracks. She could almost recall how many steps she took, feeling the grim cold wall all the while. Then it happened, not even twenty minutes after Dr. Nietzsche
’
s departure. That
’
s when the invisible but omnipresent Maks appeared again, out of the darkness. And this is how it went: no sooner had she taken ten steps (with one hand extended into the void before her like a sleepwalker and the other resting against the wall) she felt a sharp pain in her shin and realized in that moment that she had knocked over something that would now echo through the whole barrack and that would be heard from one end of the hall to the other. At the same time she heard, from the end of the corridor, HALT! HALT! and the clacking steps of iron-shod boots. All she knew, all she could know at that moment, was that there was no way back into Jakob
’
s room, for it was already too late for that. She merely clung to the wall (what would have
Ž
ana done at a time like this?) and groped her way to a door. No option remained to her (the door was locked) other than to wait here for the brightening of the sharp beam from the flashlight sweeping murderously through the corridor right in front of her nose. From her precarious haven she could see one end of the heavy wooden bench that she had overturned with her leg and that was now lying lethargically on its back, like some sort of felled animal squirming in agony: the shadow of its fettered legs twisted and flickered in the backlighting of the oblique, whirling beam of the flashlight. She sensed that in a few moments the lethal ray would blind her and she would contort and carbonize as if struck by lightning, but before this thought could sink in completely and she could carbonize and turn black totally by herself as she shuddered with horror, she felt a giant hand grabbing her from somewhere behind her back, covering her mouth, and that same hand, in the same motion with which it had already yanked away the support behind her back, or so it seemed to her, pulled on her so that for a moment she was suspended in the air as if falling into a swimming pool or like when someone pulls a chair out from under you in that moment when you drop onto it tired and anticipating but find an emptiness much deeper than the chair itself, and then that hand pulled her somewhere up and back without ungluing itself from her mouth. Thus, barely comprehending what was happening to her, as if she had just woken up, she could hear the banging on the door and she realized simultaneously (as if that same knocking had revived her) that she was now in a safer refuge than she had been in a few moments ago when she was standing there glued to the wall: crammed under the bed where the invisible hand of the
deus ex machina
had stowed her in haste, she could only hear how the
deus ex machina
moved away from her hiding place with powerful slaps of his clogs and how he unlocked the door, and then she could see the beam of the flashlight, which wavered like the flame of a candle, slice through the narrow crack between the floor and the rough blanket hanging over the edge of the bed under which she was ensconced.

“
What
’
s going on?
”
said the man in the clogs.

“
Patrol!
”
came the voice of the bloodhound:
“
Somebody
’
s messing around in the hallway.
”

“
I did hear something crashing about,
”
said
deus ex machina.
“
As if someone were overturning that bench. I
’
d just gotten back from headquarters. (I worked the night shift.) And I had just fallen asleep, when something went bang. And I remembered that somebody had put a bench out there yesterday.
”

“
Who could have knocked it over? Exiting the premises is forbidden now. It just struck three
A.M.
”

And Maks said:

“
It had to be one of those women from the other end of the barracks.
”

The steps of the bloodhound receded and Marija could hear Maks closing the door.

“
Stay here until the barking quiets down
”
: in the darkness she couldn
’
t see his face.
“
Are you injured?
”

“
No,
”
she said.
“
I scraped my shin a bit . . . Trivial detail, compared to what could have happened.
”
Then she added:
“
Just a trifle . . . Maks.
”

That
’
s why she told
Ž
ana:
“
I almost saw him one time. Maks, that is.
”

And now she thought once more
—
still lying there motionless and watchful next to her child
—
among a great burst of other thoughts about the future (in the distance, the artillery had again begun to sing):
How will I find Jakob
? Quite directly, and barely acknowledging the sense of peace and security with which she said this to herself, she thought once again:
How will I find Jakob
? as though that were the only thing remaining to do and as if she were thinking all this from the other side, outside of the wire and outside of the past, even outside of the present: as if this thought had begun to take wing from some already achieved future here at one
’
s fingertips; all that separated her from it was an insignificant revolution of the clock and two or three relaxed steps as when you
’
re heading out on an excursion and the shady woods come into view and you begin to smell the wildflowers and conifers and there
’
s a bit of something to eat in the basket along with a thermos and white napkins and all you have to do is sprawl out on the grass and take out the tablecloth and spread it out over the same rustling green grass: and in her mind reverberated, almost audibly, the words HOW WILL I FIND JAKOB? like a
leitmotif
that disappears and then rushes back in more and more powerful bursts. She had wanted to say to
Ž
ana
How will I find Jakob
so that
Ž
ana would notice that she wasn
’
t sleeping but then it occurred to her that if she were to announce her thought aloud then it might flinch at the immediate future and collide with this grubby barracks, with Polja
’
s dead body, and with all the rest of it, and then it would plummet into the straw and remain lying there like a bloody bird with a bullet wound that trembles and squirms before it croaks; and this wouldn
’
t only happen if she were to say it aloud like that,
How will I find Jakob
, but really even the fact that she would think it, thereby clearly underscoring that there was no longer any doubt in her mind about Jakob
’
s freedom or her own
—
even that was enough to set off a revival of doubt. That decisively articulated thought, aimed squarely at the future, was enough to turn all of her thoughts around toward the past, like a triple echo. Anyway it was only because her newborn thought was incapable of locating Jakob in a clear future perspective that she devoted herself with all her strength to a Jakob who was nonetheless more reliable in the past. And in the present, of course. Therefore she said nothing to
Ž
ana. Even if she wanted to say it the way it had arisen in her consciousness
—
it would be too late. Her thoughts were already seeking a different Jakob in the past. A less optimistic Jakob. But clearer, more real. He was still the only genuine Jakob, perhaps no longer of flesh and blood but only a frozen film frame in her mind: he stands there with raised hands, making some restrained gesture (the way she had last seen him): momentum at a standstill.

That was the most recent and only real Jakob, the last one she
’
d seen with her own eyes. Not, therefore, the phantomlike and unreal Jakob about whom she was receiving news through the even less visible Maks. For how could she have a clear conception of Jakob when from somewhere or other, like a bolt from the blue or straight out of hell itself, she
’
d get coded messages like
“
The trip went fine
”
or
“
The weather was nice
”
and all sorts of other such meteorological issues in which she was supposed to, first of all, unearth a meaning such as
“
Jakob has been moved
”
or
“
Jakob will contact you
”
and so forth, but also, secondly, discover under all of it a living, real character, that of Jakob. Even the infrequent oral statements that reached her third-hand from Jakob by way of Maks
’
s representatives, even these reports didn
’
t help her much to
see
Jakob
—
nothing did
—
apart, of course, from things she remembered, insofar as she had any memory at all and could recognize even for a moment the face that with all of her powers she was always trying to call to mind.

She remembered: at that time all of the women who had arrived with her were already dead, likewise all those who had replaced them in her barracks in Auschwitz. She no longer recalled faces, more just columns of skeletal reminiscences. Though faceless, she could still however remember some, maybe even all of the women she had gotten to know during those days when a mechanical hand wasn
’
t dispatching each and every one of those countenances into oblivion; though mainly recalled the Babylonian confusion of languages, the times when somebody, so-and-so, would slip through the fingers of that mechanical hand, especially when it was one of the early arrivals, one of those that formed a solemn procession ending with Polja, who was now lying there dead beside her. The first was Er
ž
ika Ignac. The one who Dr. Nietzsche picked right at the beginning, as a guinea pig. Then Nameless, who played in the prisoners
’
orchestra;
—
but the mechanical hand that would light a red light to warn of rebellion and go into action to sever contact before any misfortune could occur, or at least before the great shock of a dose of high-voltage current arrived, that hand had now compressed the column of women with one powerful sweep and covered it up with a clean white shroud of the type placed on the catafalques of heroes or virgins; Marija was the only one, the only one for a long time now, who stood next to that catafalque like a soldier who by some miracle had remained alive after the explosion of a bomb that fell into the trench where his unit was fighting, and who now stands bare-headed next to the mass grave, with flowers in hand, reading from the marble the names of those who had been his comrades-in-arms and with whom he had shared his cigarettes and exchanged in moments of weakness family photographs and memories, and who now in anguish thinks back to all of those friends at rest under the marble obelisk, transformed into golden letters, and he wonders how this could be, by dint of what miracle had he missed being part of the formation at that final roll call, for his place was there, in that line, right alongside the first in the row, who was A, and the one behind, who was C, and whose names were now impressed in the marble of the monument.

That
’
s how she felt now in front of the obelisk of memories: standing with a bouquet of flowers and amazed, hardly believing her eyes. Consequently she now needed to search for Jakob in her memory, there where she had left him nearly an eternity ago, actually not quite a year ago, if one assumes that at some point she really took leave of him, for in all honesty spiritual presence is itself nothing more than a marble obelisk, but now she wanted to find
that
Jakob, the one who was more than an obelisk perpetually present, because an obelisk is raised to those who are absent for good, which is the same thing as death, albeit a somewhat nicer way of saying it.

She had received a message from Jakob to the effect that the camp was going to be evacuated (so it could be host to a new wave) and that Maks had bribed the guards with jewelry that he had discovered in a secret hiding place. Then, with the combined help of Jakob and Maks, she was transferred to Birkenau, thus skirting death once more, although she had to part from Jakob. Maybe forever. But she still knew, when they separated her from him, that she would have to see him again, even if it was only once more; she felt, undeniably, that she
would have to see Jakob
. Especially when she grasped that she was not only his wife but also the mother of his child. She thought back to that meeting: she recognized him then, the first time since their parting, right at the moment he stood up and then bent down again to lift something that lay next to the coffin by his boot-clad feet. But just now she wasn
’
t even certain that it was he, although this man in his white hospital coat (he was standing sideways in front of her, leaning against the enormous wooden crate that reached the level of his chest, while with his right hand he was brandishing a hammer, and she, a short distance away, would see his arm first rising and then, not simultaneously but just an instant later, hear the dull impact, as though she were watching from a great distance as someone split wood) bore many similarities to Jakob, and she could recognize him also by the jolt with which her body had made this known even before in her consciousness that lightbulb with the label JAKOB blared it out as well; for the first few months, since she arrived at Birkenau, since the last time she had seen Jakob before her transfer, everything that had happened to her seemed unreal, as if the world now needed thorough verification through a prodigious effort of her senses and her brain, for slowly everything seemed to be turning into a dream or delirium that would resist casual authentication by the senses;
—
but then she
’
d caught sight of his profile, his brow, and the soldiers who were standing beside him and next to the enormous wooden crate with widely spread legs helped her dispel these doubts, not because soldiers with machine guns couldn
’
t belong to a dream legion (having infiltrated her dreams from the real world) but because she was already used to dreams about Jakob staged in a well-nigh absurd setting, strange even for a dream: intimate, gentle light filling a room, with the almost unreal radiance of an aureole; or: a landscape illuminated by sunlight, softness like the backdrop of a photograph in which he, Jakob, appears; nevertheless she started to read once more, after innumerable times, the sign above the camp entrance surrounded by barbed wire: ARBEIT UND FREIHEIT and then TIEHIERF DNU TIEBRA, as if the very fact of her reading the sign backward authenticated this reality in the midst of which she had glimpsed Jakob standing there in his white hospital coat, tall, with his swinging hammer, so similar to himself and so unreal, both apotheosis and phantom. She figured out when her column would draw even with him and she strained, with all her might, to devise for that brief instant the cleverest and most earnest manner of exploiting this miraculous meeting (they were moving along four to a row, heads shorn, covered in mud, in greasy convicts
’
clothing with dingy yellow stars, dragging their bloodied and blistered feet in heavy, tattered clogs through the sodden sleet, spades on their shoulders and singing
“
The Girl I Adore,
”
a song that they
’
d learned from the prisoners at the work site and that they always sang as they returned to camp)
—
and to call out to him that she too was there among those singing scarecrows and that she couldn
’
t hold out any longer; feverishly she wondered how she would shout to him, with what words and in what tone of voice, that she was there and that she was pregnant and that she was incapable of doing anything save yelling JAKOB, I AM PREGNANT, which would be the end of it all; and before she had succeeded in choosing the shortest and most resonant word (as with a poet who in a flight of inspiration has nothing to choose because the one and only correct word is coming, pouring, out of him, as if by its own accord), and before she grasped or in the very instant she grasped that in two or three minutes it would be too late for anything because the cohort was turning left, JAKOB, I AM PREGNANT flashed through her mind and simultaneously she heard her own voice breaking into the open air and boring like a bullet through the flapping cloak of the song
“
The Girl I Adore
”
and immediately thereafter she felt, before the satisfaction of having done it, or rather of doing everything she could so that Jakob would hear her, before that she felt the fear of punishment: when she felt the dull blow in her ribs she had already been obsessed with this thought and the fear (as if this thought had shattered against her head with more force than the rubber club in her ribs) that none of this had anything to do with Jakob and that he had not been transformed in the Germans
’
eyes but only in hers and that he really didn
’
t care whether she kept the child for how was it possible that he hadn
’
t stopped brandishing the hammer in his hand (she cried out during that infinitely small portion of a second when the hammer in his hand had reached its point of maximum height and stopped moving, in order to change direction, as if she had been waiting precisely for that sign and as if she were afraid that the next swing of his arm would slice through her decision, her voice), how was it possible that he didn
’
t turn his head or a muscle didn
’
t twitch on his face or that he didn
’
t at the very least give her a wink.
—
Jakob in his white hospital coat with the Moses-like motion of his right hand: that image remained engraved in her consciousness like a picture of the crucified Christ that she had seen once, long ago, when she was still a child, in a film being shown
—
in a village in the Vojvodina where along with her mother she was spending a few weeks of vacation
—
by Catholic missionaries in a village school, not too long prior to the war: hair waving in the wind above the high, anguished brow of the young crucified Christ (that was her very first movie, since her father had still never allowed her to go to the cinema)
—
and then through the hall ran the sound of prayers and petitions and the weeping of pious ladies as if they were witnessing a holy instance of unexpected epiphany and then the young friar stopped the wind and the hair ceased its fluttering above Christ
’
s pale countenance, though his eyes were still looking out with vanquished meekness and the people fell to their knees, sobbing:
—
in this way Jakob
’
s figure in its white hospital coat and with its upraised arm engraved itself on her consciousness, crucified between two robbers. And while her unit, right after that, in the dead, ominous quiet listened to the announcements and roll call on the hellish, muddy grounds of the camp (the dead they carried from the worksite on their backs and placed in formation at their old spots, straightening their shorn, mud-covered skulls with the point of their bulky clogs), they too stopped her movie but that petrified swing of his arm with its hammer still preyed more upon her mind than the fear of punishment; just when she heard her number, her name, when that five-digit stamp slapped her in the face and began to sizzle and pop in her flesh and heart, it seemed to her that the interrupted arc started to move once more and then that the raised arm with its hammer had suddenly descended onto her head (the young friar started up the film projector again: the arrested moment soared back into motion, the hair fluttered again above the pale, martyred countenance of the young Christ); but then, as she went between the two rows of cudgellers down the narrow corridor to her cell (she hadn
’
t seen their faces, only felt the swings of the arms with bastinados that came down everywhere on her body: blunt and knotted pains on her ribs and stomach and head) she was still watching in her nearly extinguished consciousness nothing but the multiplied image of a man wielding a hammer and bringing it down on her head. (And then the movie was over and darkness came upon the little village school and the women wiped their tear-stained eyes and kissed the hands and feet of the young missionary like those of a medium on an intimate footing with the supreme being and someone rang the bell in the village church and the leaden, pious sound of its copper quivered in the air like intense heat, and Ilonka Kutaj said to her, back then, coming home from school:
“
Your father crucified Christ
”
: and then she added, so that people could see what she meant when she said
“
Your father crucified Christ
”
:
—
“
Or he at least gave them the nails,
”
and then she continued:
“
And you gave them nails, too,
”
and Ilonka
’
s mother told her:
“
Stop talking that way, sweetheart, as though Marija were guilty. She wasn
’
t even born yet, and neither was her father,
”
but then Ilonka jeered:
“
Neither was her great-great-grandfather,
”
and then:
“
You told me yourself that all the Jews are responsible for the death of the Son of God;
—
that
’
s what you said
—
they contributed the nails at least; and didn
’
t I hear you say that at least five hundred and fifty million times, a billion times, a trillion?
”