PSALM 44

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “Now the young lady should insert in the appropriate place the words VERBOTEN and FÜR JUDEN VERBOTEN” and her mother could only cry out one more time:

  “Edi! For heaven’s sake, Edi! I beg you!”

  Chapter 8

  Nevertheless it had happened at the best possible time, she thought. At the best possible time: it was a few hours after she had caught sight of Jakob and shouted out to him, Jacob, I AM PREGNANT. She lay in the hay and even before she’d opened her eyes and completely regained consciousness she thought that at any rate it had happened at the best possible time, because as soon as she heard the kittenlike crying of the child she understood everything and she recalled Aunt Lela’s voice saying: “Children that are born in the seventh month are only proving that they’re curious about life.” That’s what she’d said to Anijela when she delivered a baby prematurely, but Anijela’s little boy died after two or three days and at that point Aunt Lela told her the truth: that the child hadn’t been born in the seventh month but in the eighth, because if it had been born in the seventh it might have lived; but at least it hadn’t felt any pain, just more of a mortal tiredness, nothing more than a sort of nightmare, as one might have during a heavy sleep. Marija was still partly in shock and at any given time could sink away only then re-emerge once more on the surface. Now—lying alongside deceased Polja and the child—she remembered it all: she wanted to think Child and she wanted to think Jakob’s child (she didn’t know if she’d really heard it or if she only seemed to have heard Žana’s voice saying A SON! A SON! in her half-sleep in her delirium like an angel announcing to Marija with flowers the birth of the Son of God), but just as that bittersweet thought struck she would become disoriented as if from a strong dose of morphine or some otherworldly fragrance; something clutched at her stomach and she thought that it was just the end of the month approaching and nothing worse would be involved than putting on a pad just in case and she already carried a bit of cotton in her handbag (her period always came unpredictably like this); then she rushed to get ready and said to her mother I have some kind of pain in my stomach. Maybe it was that pâté. Do you think it’s because of the pâté? but her mother said No, today is the 22nd and you’ll be getting your period soon; it would be better if you didn’t go to the theater, and then Marija got scared that her mother would make her stay home and so she tried to say indifferently it’s nothing serious it was just one little twinge; everything’s fine again now; I’ll put on a pad just in case, and her mother said You can go to the theater any day but still Marija grabbed her purse and rushed to the streetcar stop and she wished she hadn’t forgotten the pads because her stomach clenched again and an old man with a moronic look on his face and big bags under his eyes and a stiff, starched collar pressed against her stomach with his elbow but she couldn’t switch seats because of the crowd in the theater in which she was now perishing for lack of oxygen. But as the curtain rose and the performance began (in her haste she hadn’t managed to see what was playing and now she was ashamed to ask anyone) the thing in her stomach began to grow more and more painful; I might not be able to follow the plot because of these stomach pains, she thought, it’s a pantomime of some sort, it would be good just to ask somebody, and she turned to the left to get someone’s elbow off of her stomach and she saw that it was the same old man with the stiff collar and the expansive circles under his eyes: “Please move your elbow,” she said, but the old man must have been deaf or was pretending to be deaf because he didn’t so much as bat an eye though someone behind them whispered “ssssh” and she had to squeeze over to one side of her seat and twist her back in such a way that she felt like she was tied into a knot; Rotten old man she thought even while deciding to try nonetheless to follow the play although she understood nothing and actually it was in a foreign language out of which a few familiar words rang, which made it seem to her for a moment that it could be Faust or some Biblical legend or something like that for all at once light flashed on the stage and she saw a man in polished boots and a uniform, with a whip in his hand and she was horror-struck to recognize him as Obersturmbannführer Hirsch and she understood how strange it was that he should materialize in this performance and she abruptly grasped in her chaotic dread the absurdity of these temporal and spatial phenomena, which rapidly became almost self-explanatory to her, but she was in no condition to think and to exclaim I AM DREAMING THIS I AM DREAMING THIS instead she just continued sitting and all she could feel was her belly knotting up with terror and it’s like her legs were paralyzed or tied to the chair by the eyes of the phantom-like Obersturmbannführer Hirsch and she remembered that she hadn’t brought along her sanitary napkins and she felt the sticky fluid slipping down her thighs but she rallied enough strength to rise from her seat with a loud and painful bang and at once she felt her insides breaking open and she felt herself falling, prone, into a dazzling vertiginous abyss. The other thing she remembered then, a little later, was Žana’s voice: “Polja, we have to wash her,” and then: “That eased her pain,” and then right after that the opaque realization arrived that she had given birth even before she grasped the fact that Polja was washing her dress and she sensed with tormented bliss that Žana had placed the child next to her and she heard the kittenlike crying of a baby and Žana’s whisper like Mary’s annunciation: “Premier-né d’Israël!” and all at once she recalled everything: tracing her thoughts backward across a blurry trail until she reached a still darker past: she recalled the dream and Jakob and Aunt Lela’s voice and her father’s bitter alcohol-tinged words that night when she returned from the village; and now (still lying on her back, frozen through but excited to have the child on her chest, feeling his warmth permeate her as if at this moment their blood and their flesh were mingling, feeling the baby that awakened and drank deeply from her breast and emptied himself into her and mixed his blood with hers, as if in that moment, here on the border of a new epoch very nearly physically present, a time in her and therefore also in her child’s history, all the currents of blood were merging) she felt faced with this magnificent something that she was supposed to encounter and the presence of which she sensed in and around herself, the same vague sensation of the moment being not only familial but also historical, the same feeling that her father must have had on the night before the raid. Because it looked as though death, or birth, was supposed to intervene (from the familial and historical points of view, they were the same thing) in the daily course of events, as if a person could imagine himself or herself above a river of that blood out of which we surface and into which we once more sink and which flows, invisible as an underground river, within us, and that we catch sight of precisely at those moments when obscure new currents are created within its flow or when floods break out or when a drought comes and the river starts to recede. Her father must not have been aware himself of what actually turned his thoughts in that direction and what impelled him on that evening immediately before they were to take him away to start making his last speech, to begin speaking with her or at least in her vicinity (she had just turned fourteen) in the same way as he could usually converse only with the elder Mr. Rozenberg—maybe. Now she realized that her father had said what he said—ten days after that night he’d been drunk and she had taken off his slimy shoes—at a moment precisely akin to this current one, that is to say like this very span of a few hours tonight separating her from escape or death and that possessed a density greater than an ordinary night by at least the degree to which the air here in the barracks was denser than the night air outside, hours that weren’t noted in red oil paint on the calendar of blood for the family or history but the density of which is filled with new perceptions and presentiments: it must be that those hours about which her father had spoken to her possessed a specific heaviness, for he had told her that “the ancient rising of the blood can be felt then, rising from its veiled wellspring in the guts of our most distant progenitors and reaching all the way to some descendant in the distant future; I mean, it’s
possible,” he said on that evening, not knowing himself that it was his valedictory talk with life, with the message carried in his blood, if one may put it that way, but without doubt it must have been that he wasn’t too far away from an almost metaphysical pre-sentiment, “as in some ancient religions, a belief not in the transparent illusion of life beyond the grave, like we have in the Jewish or Christian faiths, but believing in the indestructibility of that part of the human being representing an indispensable and necessary link in the chain created by nature; and in which case it isn’t of vital interest (vital of course for nature though not for us, and maybe not even for us if we were able to look at everything through different eyes, from a standpoint broader than that of a human being—that’s what I mean to say) whether the person (I’ll say person in the absence of a better term) reappears in some murky future in the form of a bird or, let’s say, an insect; I’m saying all of this precisely because I feel that the time has come when I must tell you everything I can, that is, everything I know how to tell you as a father and of course because your ignorance stung me two or three days ago when we talked about some of these same things; but it looks like I should have started with that question of yours Why FORBIDDEN FOR JEWS, which was bound to make me angry because you’re already old enough (oh sweetheart I experienced FÜR JUDEN VERBOTEN up close and personal and learned what it meant when I was fourteen, but that’s neither here nor there) to know a few things not just for today and tomorrow but for your whole life and it’s best for you to learn them as soon as possible; later on I’m going to come back to what I started telling you about blood (I shouldn’t start with blood because it’s pretty confusing to me too there’s no way simply to say it all just like that) but the issue is that you should learn now that what you have inside you is of Jewish blood and that this is not a thing you’ll be allowed to forget or that you can forget; I know, you want to say that you don’t see any difference on God’s green earth between yourself and Ilonka Kutaj (let’s use her as an example) but that’s exactly it—she sees a difference, and that’s more than enough to make you suffer. We, that is your mother and I, have tried hard to make it so that you never felt this difference that would make you unhappy, for you took no notice of it yourself, but other people will always point it out to you (as for us, we didn’t need reminding: your mother’s parents still lived in the ghetto and my forebears fled Germany after being chased out of their home by pogroms, and I got thrown out of the university in Budapest in 1918 and they spat on me and the small group of other Jewish students too and if the cops hadn’t pulled us out of that crowd I wouldn’t be talking to you this way today); as I was saying, we tried to keep you from feeling singled out not to mention branded and for that reason we didn’t raise you within any sort of religion and I think that aside from the pastries your mother prepares once a year you haven’t been exposed to any religious rituals or ceremonies that might distinguish you from Ilonka Kutaj or Ludviga Fuks or the Miletić sisters or from any of your classmates whatsoever; I have to admit that I don’t know what your mother might have taught you on her own or how she instructed you and what she talked about with you (given the fact that her mother that is to say your grandmother was Catholic and raised her in her faith; here I must correct myself: I said that your mother’s parents lived in the ghetto: in fact that’s a reference to your grandfather on your mother’s side) but no one really cares how you pray to God; that’s why (I guess) I didn’t set much store by that sort of thing and neither your mother nor I, as you’ve seen, ever concerned ourselves with forms or rituals. That’s why I said that you and Ilonka Kutaj pray to the same God but I’d like to communicate to you what I understood that to mean, even though I’ve already explained something about it to you when we were reading in the Bible, and even I’ll say once more that I don’t really know what your mother taught you and what kind of views about all these things you might have picked up at school (at your age I had already—I believe I had—asked myself the God question and answered it, I think, according to my own lights—but that’s not important at the moment); but look, I want to tell you—and this is the reason I called you here to have this conversation—that my God (I wanted to tell you this immediately and so that’s why I digressed into this vague interpretation of religion and blood, for you are after all my sole offspring, you are, I mean, of my blood, just as your own children will be . . .)—my God is simply the incarnation of justice and philanthropy and kindness and of hope”;—and she listened to him not knowing whether to reply or to tell him, anyway, that she felt a God inside her who was also something like that but who she wouldn’t have been able to define, wouldn’t have been able not just then but maybe would never have been able to in her life, had he not said this to her at that time: “. . . a God who bears that name because people gave it to him, but be that as it may, isn’t really anything other than a symbiosis of those principles—not to mention of goodness and virtue—that I’ve just listed for you; only my God is, it seems to me, more beautiful, and better (because in any event every person, every person who believes that he is a good and worthy person, has and should have his own God), and whenever I say out loud or just to myself “God help us” I am actually thinking to myself: “Be just,” “Demonstrate love of your fellow men and women,” and: “Find hope in your own kindness and in that of your neighbors”;—and she still remembered all this too and etched it into her mind that evening, not knowing at the time whether she was constructing in herself an identical God who was nothing other than the image and incarnation of her father and his words, and it took the fact that her father never returned (the very next day he was taken away during the raid, first to Lampel’s cellar and from there to the Danube) for her to realize what he had wanted to say to her and what he was thinking when he spoke of “blood that’s eternal, like water, only thicker and harder to see through.”—And now she suddenly understood—not without trepidation—those vague pronouncements by means of which her father had wanted to explain to her the meaning of those times in which “the eternity of blood and of the moment” could be sensed. It was this same feeling that was now permeating her to the marrow as the child sucked at her breast, clinging to her, and the moment did indeed have the density of eternity and blood; a great moment when the currents of the past, the future, and the present intersected.

  “Žana,” she asked all at once, “Do you believe in God?” Then she was quiet because it seemed to her that Žana hadn’t heard. Several minutes passed before she responded:

  “How about you?” and then after no answer came right away: “Do you believe in God?”

  “I don’t know,” Marija said. “Before I had the baby I didn’t think about it.”

  “But now?”

  “Now I’d like to believe in Him. Tonight of all nights I’d like to believe in God”; and then her father was speaking through her: “I mean, in my God.” Then she paused and there was a dignified silence into which that God was about to come bursting more or less embodied in the form of a newborn child:—“equal parts hope, kindness, mercy, love . . .”

  “. . . and hate,” Žana said.

  Marija hardly gave this any thought, as if simply taking the measure of the sword in the hands of that little God-fetish that she had drawn out of her own blood, and said:

  “Yes. And hate.”

  Then Žana said, as if she had seen that absurd naïve deity as it buckled under its massive sword of hope and hatred:

  “What would you say if you found that same god in the mouth (and maybe in the mind) of Dr. Nietzsche, for example? Or Obersturmbannführer Hirsch?”

  “That’s impossible!” Marija exclaimed. “This is my God and my God only! No one else’s . . .” and then she thought better of it not in the sense of a correction but of a minor addendum to the same thoughts:

  “Perhaps my parents’ too . . . and my child’s.”

  Then Žana said: “Say it again,” and once more Marija dug up quantities of that same clay, and almost in
the same amounts, that her father had already turned over in his efforts to construct God in his own image, and to which he bowed: equal parts hope, kindness, mercy, love, and . . . “Hate!” she repeated. And Žana went even further:

  “And fear!”

  “So be it,” Marija said. “Is that your God too? Tell me!”

  “No!” Žana said. “No, thank you.” Then she added: “That God is too much in my own image. Do you get it? In my own image.”

  “The God of hope and love,” Marija said. “So what would you want Him to be like?”

  “Like nothing at all!” Žana said. “I want hope and love—without God! Without having to pray or to thank anyone . . . and god cannot be made in my image. Because then it might also resemble Dr. Nietzsche. Or Hirsch. Thanks but no thanks.”

  “All right,” Marija said. “My God’s name is Jan. My child.”

  “Très raisonnable Dieu!” Žana said. “Let us pray!”

  Chapter 9

  But even before her thoughts could lift her entirely into the future and she could look out over that narrow strip of no-man’s-land, for those few hours, even before she noticed the stench of decaying organic matter, she had a presentiment of—almost failing to believe it, for in her thoughts she was already far off into the future—the presence of Polja’s corpse. And it drew her back, even if she wasn’t fully aware of it, far back to her very origins, so to speak; at any rate, it brought her back from that future into which her thoughts were already marching, with one foot across the thick line of no-man’s-land.