PSALM 44

by Aleksandar Hemon

  That evening Žana returned to the barracks a little late. It was a wet November night, ice cold, and the grim wind carried the worn and ill-tuned sounds of the prisoners’ orchestra playing Beethoven’s Eroica as well as the camp tune “The Girl I Adore.” Polja was still babbling unintelligibly. In Russian. Dying. No one dared light a lamp and Žana made her way, groping, over to her bunk (she oriented herself by Polja’s death rattle). Marija feared that Polja, however, was beyond hearing. Then she freed her child from the straw and rags in which it was sleeping: a little wax doll. Marija didn’t dare get too close to Polja. She feared for her child. And for herself. His mother.

  The sound of Žana’s steps reached her ears: this liberated her from thoughts of Polja. And then all at once it dawned on her with great conviction that something must have happened. Whatever it was that had held Žana up this long. A message from Jakob. Or from Maks. (“That Maks” was undoubtedly up to something. Present but invisible.) But Žana said nothing. Marija only heard her light, conspiratorial footsteps. (Suddenly this seemed extremely odd to her: Žana had still not taken off her boots.) Then the rustling of straw, the dull thud of her heavy boots shed, the rusty sound of the tin can of water, and once more the rustling of straw, this time over by Polja, and then: the slight clinking of Polja’s teeth against the can. Marija wanted, in vain, to give some sort of signal, to say something about Polja, not only to express her doubt that she could accompany them on their journey but also to say at last what both she and Žana had known since the first day Polja came back sick, the thing that hovered between them unstated but certain: Polja is going to die. But Žana emancipated Marija from that responsibility and she heard her give a whisper that was eerily like listening to another person give voice to your own newborn thought:

  “Elle va mourir à l’aube!” Žana said.

  Marija merely sighed in response. She felt her throat constricting. As if she were only now becoming aware—just now when Žana said it—of what she herself had already accepted since the day Polja had come back ill: she was going to die. Now Polja’s discordant rambling seemed more audible than the distant song of the big guns. That’s the reason Marija had wanted to start up a conversation with Žana and have her talk about the cannons, about Jakob, about the escape, ultimately about anything, just so that it would set her free from this nightmare and so that she wouldn’t hear Polja’s death rattle, so that she wouldn’t think about how even after she was dead nothing was going to happen, not now not afterward not in two or in two hundred twenty-two days—just as nothing had happened up to this point; no running away, no Jakob, no Maks, not even any cannons, nothing was going to happen except that same thing which was happening here and now to Polja: she was fading slowly, spluttering, as a candle gutters and goes out.

  The rhythmic beaming of the floodlights that entered through a crack in the wall tore again and again, clawlike, at the darkness of the barracks, and Marija caught sight of Žana as she stood between a beam of light and the wall; she stepped into it as if to join the illumination and then disappeared again into the darkness. From there, out of that momentarily illuminated darkness, she could hear her voice, her whisper, which like a focused beam of light cut the silence:

  “Jan . . . How is Jan?”

  “He went to sleep,” Marija answered. “He’s sleeping.” But that wasn’t what she’d thought she was going to hear from Žana, she’d expected something different, something completely different than the question Jan . . . How is Jan? and she was even certain that Žana had something else to say and it even seemed to her that when Žana greeted her in a whisper, and even before that point, when Žana had still only been thinking of speaking (and it had seemed to the listener that she knew exactly the instant when Žana would start to talk and shatter the silence), that she was going to say something else, for she had to say something completely different, something that (nevertheless) would not be unrelated to this issue; it even struck her now, suddenly (more from the pounding of her pulse than from an actual understanding), that the question Jan . . . How is Jan? didn’t differ in essence from the question that Žana really needed to ask. Thus—wondering whether it’s possible to give a whisper even a tiny measure of nuanced differentiation, but wanting nonetheless to make clear that she’s grasped the fact that Žana has something else to say, and that this answer of Marija’s is also nothing more than a preliminary—she gave Žana a status report:

  “I washed his diapers. Now I’m drying them. I stretched them out down there, and he’s lying on top of me, here,” as if Žana could see the slight signal from her hand with which she wanted to say: up here, on my chest. “That’s why I wasn’t in a position to do anything about Polja,” but she immediately regretted saying that, not because it wasn’t the truth, but because it seemed to her that doing so had sliced the thread and diverted Žana’s thoughts from what was important; or at least that doing so had postponed by a moment or so Žana’s saying what she still needed to say.

  “Poor Polja,” Žana said; but it could just as well have been (at least so it seemed to her) “Poor Marija” or “Poor Jan”; and Marija became completely engrossed in the following thought: was it all the same whether Žana said Poor Jan or Poor Marija? For if that too were a matter of indifference, it would mean that nothing had happened and that nothing was happening. Polja can’t go with us: she pretended that she was thinking this for the first time and that she was only now grasping the gravity of the whole situation, but all she said was:

  “She didn’t regain consciousness the whole day.”

  Then Žana said: “It’s better for her . . . Understand?” Her opinion once more in four words of black crystal; and then immediately: “I’d like it to happen as soon as possible. Understand? As soon as possible.”

  Finally something had been said that retied the sliced thread into a knot and Marija sensed that this once again meant something, something different and something more than the bitter and straightforward truth Polja is going to die or Polja will not be able to come with us, for it also meant We are going to go or at least we will attempt it. And she rebelled against the slow birth of a truth already obvious and it seemed to her even a little bit hypocritical that not one of them would admit to herself that they had reconciled themselves to this truth—the fact that they would attempt an escape without Polja—and that this had already been decided and determined not by their wills or by common agreement but simply, terrifyingly and simply, decided and nothing else now remained for them to do beyond acquiescing (or not acquiescing, it was all the same) with this fact.

  “She won’t be able to come with us,” Marija said, attempting—even if she wasn’t conscious of it—to condense every part of the nightmare into this single sentence that she could get out in one breath the same way that one tries to choke down a bitter pill or poison with one swallow. So she said it hoping to help Žana say once and for all what she needed to say or to do what she had planned or was considering doing, but Žana watched doggedly through the crack in the plank, until she said, as if giving out a slightly altered echo of her own words:

  “That’s why I want it to happen as soon as possible. You understand: it’ll be easier,” but then she (Marija) wanted to completely unburden her conscience of these accusations that weighed heavier and heavier upon her and now upon Žana too and she thought, Perhaps Žana is thinking something out right now and perhaps nothing has happened but really things only gave her that impression because she wanted them to be that way, just as she likewise wanted something to happen because she knew that it wasn’t possible to wait any longer—the cannons were slowly demolishing the concrete parapet of passive anticipation and resignation to fate. But then—as soon as she heard Žana’s voice, to try to calm herself down, for she knew that she wouldn’t be able to get to sleep tonight, at least not until Žana said what she was thinking—she said:

  “I’m going to try to sleep,” and then—as if doing so would hasten the answer and ultimately the decision abou
t which Žana was thinking and in the absence of which it didn’t seem to her (Marija) that she could think of anything else or do anything else, not until whatever it was came out, whatever it was concerning herself and those three other women, for little Eržika Kon had been among them at first, Eržika Kon who had earlier, one night, hurled herself at the wire and fallen, riddled with bullets, forgetting everything, because that’s what death is, To forget everything, she thought—she asked: “What time could it be?” as if through this question the hand of death or at least its sister would be summoned to close her tired eyes, but with this question resistance was born in her consciousness, as a consequence of some dim recollection of the ultimate interconnectedness of forgetting-death-sleep-and-time and her consciousness, which set this whole causal chain in motion and must rank highest in its hierarchy, hand-in-hand with time.

  “I don’t know,” Žana said, but then, as if resistance had been awakened in her too, she went on to say, as though picking up a forgotten weapon: “I think it’s past eleven. I don’t think it’s any later than that.” Then like a buoy it popped up to the surface, that which until this moment had filled the gloom and which now all at once crystallized and condensed into the space of two or three words in a whisper: “Tonight we’ll try.”

  And even before Marija succeeded in turning her thoughts to anything specific, to being fearful or overjoyed, to crying out or to screaming or all of it together in the inferno that was the tumult of her mind and the chaos of her organism, in the savage circulation of blood that cascaded throughout her body like some hot, interior wave leaving behind on the shore the broken and disordered remnants of thought (only the briefest glance at the innumerable associations that were saturating and trampling each other) as well as the secretions of her glands and ovaries—even before she managed to realize that she was trembling on the edge of unconsciousness in this intense assault, Žana added what it was no longer necessary to say: “I didn’t want to tell you right away. I was thinking you should get some sleep. You need to be fresh.”

  In that way she kept Marija from thinking about Polja and from feeling sorry for her, or repentant: Žana had with her words simply wiped Polja away by not mentioning her; she didn’t even refer to her as “Poor Polja,” which again would have signified something; instead she simply said we will try, and in this we nothing and no one else could be present save the three of them, that is, Žana, Jan, and Marija: to wit, only the living, and Polja was already beneath a shroud. But Marija could still sense Polja, not because of her quiet gurgling, which was no longer communication in any earthly language but simply a slight whisper in the tongue of death itself; rather Marija could sense her through the fact that she was obliged constantly to push Polja’s corpse to the side, out of the current of her own thoughts, down under the ice (they had already buried Polja), just as they had shoved under the Danube’s ice the corpses of those women, back then, at the beginning—so that she could make room for the living or at least for those she hoped were living: for Jakob, in fact; who else? And she now all at once caught a glimpse of Jakob—it was the first time she’d pictured him since their last meeting—no longer in the perspective that revealed itself, forlorn and grim, behind her when she looked back at him, but rather in some future, almost imaginable: Jakob stands there, just like that, tall and pale, his face covered in a reddish beard, worn down and worn out from his return but with his eyes radiating happiness and his arms open wide and stretching down the road toward where she’s standing, Jan in her arms, offering Jakob the child like bread and salt, like the sacred miracle at Bethlehem. But that momentarily glimpsed perspective on the future began to collapse immediately like a canvas backdrop thrown up in the desert—and only Jakob himself remained in that real wilderness from which the wind had carried off the set, abandoned save for gray drifts of dust.

  She thought back to that last meeting with Jakob, not so long ago, actually five weeks ago, Jan was barely two weeks old at that point, no more. She recalled clearly that Jan had been two weeks old: she had given birth on the same day that she saw Jakob for the first time after their separation. But that was further back. She saw Jakob (who else could it have been) a second time back there at the train station; and this is how it was: from Maks she had received a message (she had found the message in the barracks, beneath the headrest in the straw) stating that Jakob would be walking past with a transport, that evening, around seven. She subsequently spent the whole day pondering how she could get away from the worksite and make it to the station to see Jakob and tell him that he was becoming a father and then when she cried out JAKOB, I AM PREGNANT she couldn’t have been imagining it and she knew that he had to have heard her cry and recognized her voice, for who else would shout that out to him and do so from the formation that was already approaching the entrance to the camp; hence she had to see Jakob, if not on account of that other thing at least so that she could convince herself that he was alive and so that she could ask him what he thought of all this while he hammered on that coffin at the camp gates and couldn’t he have at least stopped swinging the hammer in his hand so that she would at least see that he had heard that she had yelled to him that she was pregnant. And then something unexpected appeared, right when she was thinking in her despair that the only thing she could do was to throw down her shovel all of a sudden and run for it, which would have been pure suicide, and she was already envisioning how she’d fall, shredded by the machine guns, breathing her last, seized with spasms, attempting to pronounce the words “Jakob, Jakob” through the blood rushing out of her mouth, as if he would be able to hear and understand that she was trying that she was doing everything she could that she wanted nothing other than to see him.

  That was when a kapo ordered Eržika Kon and her to head for the station and deliver something there. She didn’t know if this order was genuine or if it was only one of Maks’s tricks to make it possible for her to run into Jakob, but she set off toward the station with Eržika Kon, accompanied by a soldier who walked in lockstep with them. She still did not know (and even to this day has not found out) if this had simply been some subterfuge on the part of Maks to enable a meeting with Jakob or if it was mere happenstance that she was summoned from the group and told to go to the depot.

  On the way she was wondering if this transport, supposedly containing Jakob, was going to make a stop in the station or just pass through, but she was utterly incapable of doing anything, although she knew that everything beyond this point depended on her and that she had no idea what time it was nor could she inquire of anyone what time it was, although it did appear to her that the time was at hand (they were walking along the new road that the camp inmates had built and she several times considered asking the soldier what time it was but then she took fright at the thought of putting everything at risk and forfeiting the opportunity that had come her way for her to see Jakob) and from that she concluded that Maks had had a hand in all this, but she didn’t know if they needed to hurry up or slow their stride even though the soldier was dictating their pace.

  And so all at once she found herself at the station, looking at the long row of sealed cars out of which peered phantomlike faces at the small grated windows and she recognized the Babel of cries for help that she herself had heard at the time she was transported in cattle cars of that same type, that outcry which becomes a dry and morbid whisper: in all the languages of Europe the word water being pronounced as if it were the very stuff of life, even more so than that ancient Hellenic ur-element and essential substance belonging to every living thing, along with air and earth, of course—the way that word now transformed itself on Polja’s lips, the chaos of the cattle car shrinking to the monotone whisper of a moribund. And then the train moved just as she caught sight of it, right in front of her nose like some enormous antediluvian dinosaur ejected from its watery home onto firm dry land several millennia after its epoch, and she sensed all at once the thirst in Jakob’s guts and in her own and she began to run down the
line of cars, now starting to rock, and they collided with a bang and she was like a condemned soul having her guts gnawed out by the plague and she was utterly transformed into screaming into the cry into “Jakob! Jakob!” as if that reptile were beginning to rouse itself and make a getaway, gasping for breath, completely metamorphosed into that stegocephalian dinosaurian Babylonian and European “Water! Water!” and suddenly she saw a rag appear from a high, narrow window of the car ten meters in front of her, like a reliquiae reliquiarum of Jakob, and after that the hand holding that rag and waving it like death’s own flag—that clenched hand without a face, motioning with the rag—that was Jakob now, the Jakob who had remained when with a bang the stage and set had been destroyed and she looked backward: gray drifts of dust.

  But Žana was still going on:

  “Maks’s orders,” she said, not waiting for the flood of blood inside Marija to ebb, the blood that was pounding her and rocking her off her foundations: “Tonight at 2:30,” she said. “Get prepared and try to get some sleep. You need to be rested. I’ll wait for Maks’s signal: two long and two short knocks.”

  “Okay. I’ll try,” Marija responded. “I’ll try to sleep at least a bit.”

  Chapter 2

  Žana lay on her stomach in the straw, propped up on her elbows, head thrust between her palms; her legs trembled slightly. Chewing on a short piece of straw, she looked out through the crack in the direction of the fence. Periodically a fine edge of light slid across her face and tore open the intense darkness of the barracks; then Marija, without moving her head or disturbing the baby asleep on top of her, could see Žana’s profile with that straw in her mouth.

  “She’ll be dead by dawn,” Marija said, but her voice made itself heard against her will; and then as if meant for herself: “I should return this sheet to Polja.” She heard Žana’s suppressed sigh and thought That is an answer, but right away she caught another whisper: