PSALM 44

by Aleksandar Hemon

  What brought her back was hardly the smell, but rather a sensation of decay, a kind of fluid trembling, maybe simply the realization that there was a dead body in the room. And she remembered that old man, long ago, on the Danube.

  “Pardon me, pardon me,” whispered the old man, leaning or actually lying with his full weight on the elderly woman who was staring blankly ahead in the direction of the green peeling fence. And Marija remembered this: she came back from the Danube and found no one, and it was all clear to her. She took several dresses and a photo album; she even took a bundle of greeting cards and love letters and went dazedly into the street, heading to Aunt Lela’s house, and she paid no attention to anyone or anything, not to the police or to the corpses in the snow, but she just walked on with the small cardboard suitcase in her hands that were turning blue; and then she went into Aunt Lela’s place and placed her suitcase on the table, opened the spring locks and gave Auntie the album, subsequently catching a glimpse of Mr. Rozenberg fils, who—if her mind wasn’t playing tricks on her—she had seen in the line-up at the Danube.

  When she came in, Aunt Lela said:

  “Solomon, don’t”; and when he went on as if he hadn’t heard her: “For God’s sake, Solomon!” but he continued talking with his eyes staring out vacantly and Marija still had the impression that someone else was listening to everything he was saying and not she, although almost all of what she was hearing she had seen herself a few hours earlier at the Danube: she had stood close to the younger Mr. Rozenberg. At least it seemed that way to her. In formations four across, like when they’d stand in line for the showers during a summer heat wave. The trucks kept on arriving. When the line in front of her moved forward a step or two, someone shoved her from behind and she came right up against the green peeling barrier. “It was their turn to take off their clothes.” Mr. Rozenberg continued. “The turn of that old man and woman. Naked and wrinkled examples of Homo sapiens with sagging breasts and skin that was swollen and blue from age and cold. In this condition, without the clothing or the jewelry by which Homo sapiens differentiates itself from the other, less highly evolved species of animals, the whole cohort was after all elemental and antediluvian, with only the occasional gold tooth in a jaw or (less commonly) a few earrings standing as a kind of secret sign of civilization, but these weren’t items of enough consequence to be capable of creating any significant distinction between species or individuals, because with work the human hand can become so refined (it suffices to call to mind Thorvaldsen’s Christus, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and countless violin virtuosos of whom there are, proverbially, many among the Jews) that it, which is to say “the human hand,” is in a position to erase this difference wielding nothing more than an ordinary knife, but that isn’t what I was talking about, it was those old people (I think they were the Bems, pharmacists, you must’ve known them) . . .” and Marija remembered the old man whispering, “Pardon me, pardon me,” like an over-cranked old street organ and she remembered the way a strong bittersweet smell like a corpse’s spread around him, and then the voice of Mr. Rozenberg edged back into her mind, himself talking like an old man in whom every thought was now reconciled to the thought of death but who was himself incapable of grasping whence the organic resistance in him was coming, that thing which biologically could make no peace with death but rather resisted and grasped and emitted foul odors and juices the way that some animals give off poisonous scents when they’re in danger, “as if in him had awakened some embryonic animal that was taking over both mind and man, and his “Pardon me” wasn’t really an expression of apology and shame but more fundamentally a desperate expression of dissatisfaction aimed at that animal which had been awakened; for when the mind is reconciled to death and has accepted nothingness, then the utterly exposed and abandoned animal begins by way of an intricate and almost mathematical inversion to fight for its survival and for its right to live (by its own means, of course), and it starts to dominate because the mind has capitulated to death, again according to its own logic that is not the logic of the animal: the animal doesn’t know about the complicated laws of probability and death doesn’t bear consideration—the animal just wants to live, and that’s it”; and right then Marija grasped why it is that around the old man a bittersweet stench of animal and excrement was floating, and then once more she caught the voice of a soldier:

  “This one here reeks of cholera.”

  And she saw the soldier, acting with cynical courtliness, almost like a servant, help the old man out of his greasy trousers, his old-fashioned black vest and his shirt with its stiff, starched collar. All that was visible of the old man were the whites of his eyes, as he whispered “Pardon me, pardon me,” as if he were saying “Lama, lama . . .” and she heard that lama fade more and more as the old man moved away from the group, off to the left a bit, wobbly on his feet and still leaning on the old woman; then Marija steeled herself to hear the volley but when she didn’t hear anything she opened her eyes once more and looked left, over to where the voice had died out, and she saw him stoop down, naked, into the snow and understood why he had left the group; the old man was squatting in the snow, with only his head and blue shoulders visible.

  “What do you think?” a youngish soldier asked. “Will his mama clean him up when he’s emptied himself out? Wipe him off all nice with a lump of snow? That would be fucking hilarious.”

  “I bet she won’t,” said a mustachioed one, sticking out his hand. The first soldier shifted his rifle and was about to offer his hand too, but at the last moment he pulled it back:

  “Your hands are all Jewed up,” he said. “But all right: I’ll bet this that she will,” and Marija saw against the backdrop of grubby snow the yellowish metal begin to swing around his hand, hanging from something that she had no way of seeing but knew was a chain, the way that she knew, so to speak, without looking, that the swinging piece of metal was a watch.

  And she will always remember this: someone else in her watching all of it (she had slowly sunk into sleepy lethargy and barely even felt the cold anymore): just a few meters in front of her a young woman emerged out of the line-up, almost immediately followed by the dark swirl of a young girl’s hair; then she saw the woman bending over the girl and removing her woolen sweater over her curls that bounced and swayed momentarily, and then the white sweater flying in a short arc onto the pile, on top of the old man’s black pants and waistcoat and then a light blue dress of poplin, and then the slow descent of stockings and the sliding of petite shoes down from the top of the pile, followed by the woman’s trembling as she took the little girl into her arms as if hiding her own nakedness. Lastly the woman lifted up her own reddish-blue foot out of the snow with a slow, hesitating movement, but before she could take a step she turned around as if she were standing on a rotating stage and, still keeping the child pressed tightly against her and sheltering and protecting it with her hands, she said in a voice that sounded dead but did not tremble: “Please, when . . . our turn. My little girl . . . catching cold,” after which the soldiers exchanged two or three glances and Marija saw a malicious clean-shaven soldier bow down so far he almost touched the snow and her bluish feet with his forehead and heard him hiss:

  “You’ll get there in time, I beg you to be patient. In just a bit there’ll be kike tea, a ton of tea. The entire Danube, if you will”; then the polyphonic explosion of the suppressed laughter of soldiers and then the sting of those mouths split wide with laughter on the woman’s face from which was peeling layer after layer of reddish-blue and pale green color, and then once more the woman’s slow turn and step across the snow as if on a rotating set. And just then, at Aunt Lela’s house, listening to the whispering and almost uninflected voice of Mr. Rozenberg fils, Marija began to understand everything and to see it all, even those things that had happened ten meters out in front of her, hidden on the other side of the green peeling barrier:

  Beyond, at a distance of two or three meters from the cabins, a hole had been smash
ed in the ice and a plank thrown across it (a plank that was really an old diving board); every now and then a man in civilian clothes (the former lifeguard from the beach) shoved the corpses under the ice with a large gaff, whenever the hole would get clogged; yes, Marija even saw what she was now hearing told for the first time by Mr. Rozenberg: she experienced even that—perhaps because she knew Kenjeri.

  “Do you know Kenjeri?” Mr. Rozenberg asked, not looking at Aunt Lela or at Marija or at anyone living but rather at someplace on the ice-sheeted windowpane and on the broken icy surface of the Danube. “Everyone in this district knew him: the community knacker, Kenjeri. I don’t actually know his first name. He went by his surname. Well, this old Kenjeri has become head honcho over there. You understand: the man’s vocation was a handy one”—and Marija recalled his wolflike jaws and his dirty yellow teeth like a horse’s and his sparse moustache and bristly beard and the lit cigarette sticking to his lips while he said to her mother: “What’re you gonna do? Business is business” (that happened two or three years ago): Dingo hadn’t come home all morning and at noon, just as they were sitting down to lunch, they heard him whining and her mother said: “That’s Dingo!” and she stood up so she could see what it was and then appearing in their door was that set of wolf ’s lips, a cigarette butt on the lower one, saying: “You should watch him better,” and what’s more: “You have to pay the fine,” and right after that were the dirty yellow teeth like a horse’s and his saying “business is business”; thus Marija was able to see all of the things that the younger Mr. Rozenberg had seen after he’d already moved beyond the green peeling fence and she could now imagine almost as well as he that face with the bristly beard as Kenjeri pushed a woman’s neck into the snow with his heavy boot (and Marija thought that that was the very same woman who had gotten undressed after the old man) and she could see, in the spot where there had once been a face (a face that she could no longer remember), a monstrous stain of concentrated terror, there where before there had been eyes and the lines of a face petrified by cold as when bronze gives off a green patina through its creases; and Marija could remember everything as if she’d experienced it herself: how the boy (judging by his wolfish jaws, the son of that same crook) held the nearly dead woman by the legs and the way the woman writhed like a slaughtered hen when the teeth of the saw tore into the flesh on her side and the way Kenjeri went “prrrr” and then snapped at his son, “Steady, you moron!” and the way his son clenched his teeth and tightened his grip on the woman’s legs and then Kenjeri pulling the saw back a bit and pushing it forward and then drawing the serrated tool back forcefully toward himself when the steel found its way down between two vertebrae in her backbone and how, with streams of blood gushing and flooding out into the snow on both sides, the saw began to squish and slip on intestines and flesh. Then, the man snapping at his son once more, “Forget the bitch. I guess her legs won’t be running off without her head,” and the younger Kenjeri still squeezing the woman’s legs and his body twitching and shaking and his father staring at him in amazement, showing his dirty horselike teeth afresh and in protest: “What’s wrong with you, you idiot? Is it that you aren’t used to blood, or do you actually feel sorry for that whore?” And how he pushed his boy with the handle of the saw and how the boy abruptly dropped the woman’s legs and tumbled over into the snow and rolled over onto his belly and submerged his big curly head in the white and bloody snowy mush; then the Kenjeri talking while the boy shook with sobs: “Let’s get these here ready and then we’ll talk,” and then to placate, to instruct, “it’s easier to saw than to bust up ice,” then the kid slowly, indifferently, getting to his feet without raising his head (just excremental snow in his dark hair), then his wiping his nose with the back of his hand and again picking up the legs of their latest victim, gnashing his teeth with the strain, while his father took hold once more of his tool after having taken the preliminary step of pushing the sundered body through the hole and under the ice; Marija even heard the melody that the wind brought from the left bank of the Danube and she felt each revolution of the gramophone disk leaving behind bloody bites on her body from the steel needle: the “Blue Danube” waltz was still fashionable at that time; and then all of a sudden Aunt Lela was standing in front of Mr. Rozenberg and making him snap out of it by yelling into his face:

  “Enough, Solomon, I beg you,” and then, as he stared into space; “Stop, Solomon. Don’t go any further with this,” and then Marija spoke and was amazed at hearing her own voice in this way:

  “I saw it too,” and then she wanted to explain to Aunt Lela what it had been like. She remembered: out of the crowd that had been driven into the courtyard of the municipal administration building, a man had singled out a large-breasted girl with freckles right away and ordered her to come with him for an “extra inspection,” as he put it, and then a third person turned up, apparently the girl’s father, and said that he would go with them.

  “I guess you can hold the candle for us,” the first man said, kicking the other in the stomach. The girl’s father then collapsed to his knees, and so two men in civilian uniforms ran up and knocked him into the snow with their clubs. One of them stood with his foot on the father’s neck while the other twisted the prone man’s moustache around his fingers and then with a single jerk ripped it off his face and then blood spurted across the snow; the father bellowed and tried to free his neck from the boot but then the first man leaned on his neck with his whole weight; then the second one pulled out a short bayonet that he carried on the belt around his heavy civilian coat barely reaching down to his hips and he sliced off the man’s nose. He threw the bloody leftover out in front of the crowd: “Let that be a warning. Don’t stick your noses into everything,” he said. The one who had grabbed the girl had already dragged her over to the steps from which a heavy machine gun was aimed at the crowd, and they could still see the girl resisting, clutching at the snow, and then, naked and exhausted, she collapsed, seemingly unconscious, and then, while the man removed the belt from around his coat, she let out a scream and dashed back toward the crowd, but the man swung his belt and looped it over her head: “So we’re still not ready to calm down, eh?” he said, “Haven’t come to terms with your fate yet, have you?”: with one hand he tightened the belt around her throat while with the other he twisted her arm and he pinned her bare legs with his boot. She tried to free her throat from the slipknot but the man drew the belt tighter and she dropped into the snow and after that he turned her over onto her back and with great difficulty forced apart her knees as when someone uses his bare fingernails to open up a shell;—and afterward: she remembered how the man got to his feet and tightened his belt again around his short gray coat and how he knelt down next to the girl and whipped out his bayonet, and then the thing Marija didn’t see but understood nevertheless: how the man squeezed the girl’s cheeks with his left hand until her jaws spread apart and then with two strokes sliced open her mouth on both sides all the way to her ears and then how he pounded on her gold molars with the butt of his gun until he could shake them out into his palm: her head gaped open like some sort of freakish man-eating fish; Marija grasped what she had not seen: for the earrings, no bayonet had been required: when tissue freezes, it becomes brittle and cracks easily.

  But she told Aunt Lela none of this. She simply repeated what she had said earlier: “I saw all of it myself, Aunt Lela. I remember everything: from somewhere on the other bank the wind carried across the melody of that waltz: traaaa-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la.”

  Then she felt a warm wetness coming from the diaper she had wrapped around her child; it penetrated to her skin and delivered her back into the present, which in the following instant would again turn into the past or the future, and she said:

  “Is there time for me to do it?” And without waiting for the answer: “For me to get Jan ready.”

  And even before Žana could say anything at all in response, Marija began unwrapping the wet cloth from the child.


  Chapter 10

  Then she had to wrap the baby back up in the diaper that she had dried out on herself. And she tore off a small piece from Polja’s sheet and wiped the moisture from her skin. She bundled the child up in a blanket and wrapped it around several times with a narrow strip of linen. Once again she sat down in the straw and leaned her back against the cold barracks wall. The distant thundering of cannon and the rustling of straw from Žana’s bed were still all she could hear. And she thought: I should count. Thirty was half a minute. Sixty—one minute. Five times sixty . . . How much was five times sixty? Doesn’t matter. Maks will be giving the signal in a few moments. The baby is still asleep. She felt the warmth of his soft lips and his hot, slippery tongue on her nipple. In the gloom she could almost make out the elemental mechanism of her own heart pumping the white foamy liquid to the rhythm of her blood into that warm little ring tight around her nipple like a knot. And even before Žana touched her, although she could hear no sound, Marija sensed her proximity. “Now they’re going to short out the lights,” Žana said. Then Marija let Žana help her get to her feet, although it seemed to her that she was only interested in taking the child. “No,” she said, “I can do that myself,” but Marija nonetheless felt faint when she stood up and leaned the weight of her whole body, though without letting go of the child, onto Žana: “I think I can do it myself.” They had already reached the door when she heard Žana’s barely audible whisper: “Take off your shoes,” and then: “give me Jan,” and she groped in the darkness for Žana’s hands reaching out for her and for the child, and after that she handed Žana the bundle and pulled back her hands as soon as she felt the full weight of the child slide out of her embrace. Her shoulder propped against the wall, she removed one of her shoes and then shifted her weight onto her other leg and took off the other. Without letting go of the heavy boots in her left hand, she stuck out her right through the darkness toward Žana and touched the rough blanket and under it the bound strips of half-wet linen. Then she felt Žana’s hand searching for something in the gloom and right after that she felt the weight of the boots vanish as well.