PSALM 44

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Then Marija noticed a cool draft blowing in from the corridor when the door opened slightly. The hinges on the door creaked a bit like when a board pops from cold in the dead of night. She felt Žana’s hand on hers. Žana moved forward. Along the wall. In one hand Žana was holding Marija’s boots, while her own, tied together, she carried draped across her other arm at the elbow: the same arm with which she felt Marija’s hand draped over the child like a mooring line.

  They moved noiselessly, just barely touching the wall with their shoulders. There was no gap to be seen in the thick rubber of the night. This because the electricity had been cut. Otherwise a light-bulb would be burning at the end of the hallway. Marija felt Žana touching the rough surface of the unseen wall with her elbow and stepping forward utterly without sound, like a cat, while she despite her concentration and effort dragged her bare feet over the cold concrete and wet boards, trudging along with uncertain steps, with a cautious gait, like a frightened woman and not like a cat at all. But then a moment came in which when she had succeeded in recognizing herself, and Žana, and the child in Žana’s grasp—when she had unwillingly become both a participant and an observer (as when a writer objectifies his or her personal experience even before approaching it as a writer): she suddenly saw herself, from far enough away that one glance took in herself and Žana and the baby but also from nearby enough for her to remain if only for that moment a close but objective observer—seeing how their shadows gleamed white upon the dark nocturnal backdrop: ghosts passing through a cemetery. The mute presence of other rooms, invisible and inaudible, contributed to this feeling like graves yawning open on either side of the corridor, hollowed out of the thick dark wall of the night. Straw rustled somewhere. As if all the women in the rooms were corpses. Polja’s corpse. They were all Polja. Then she sensed the almost physical presence of death and of dark green bruises on the flesh of the night. And all at once, from somewhere in front of them, the scent of the wind and the night that was entering through some window left slightly open, a window invisible in the blackness, or through a crack in the glass or a wall, and Marija felt the damp, ice-cold wind waft in on the back of a new quiet, a quiet that had a different taste and smell and specific weight from the dense quiet of the graveyard that she had left behind: at this moment she was taking in the heavy-milky freshness of a child’s mouth and the sourish warm smell of urine and moreover the crisp current of the night and the clouds and the unseen stars, scents that penetrated like soft light into her agitated senses made oversensitive by the headlong circulation of her blood. They turned abruptly to the right and she thought it might be possible for Žana to have gotten confused but she didn’t say anything because she had more faith at this moment in Žana’s resourcefulness than in her own senses. Then Žana’s hand stopped squeezing and Marija was left standing motionless, as if rooted to the spot. Without a compass. Blinking. But a faint scratching sound let her know: Žana had picked up a board. “Psss,” Žana said in a nearly inaudible hiss. Then she once more squeezed Marija’s upper arm and Marija translated this for herself: “Stop.” Then Žana pulled her downward and she fell to her knees and bent her head. She understood: the searchlight was already playing its silent scale of uniform notes—do-re-mi-faso-la-ti-do—above their heads, and Marija could see now on the wall opposite how through the gap as on white keys its fingers danced and how that resonant light drew nearer and nearer growing into an intense and anxious fortissimo that took her breath away. She lay there, clinging to the wall, between Žana and the baby, right at the very edge of the opening that had been made in the floor of the building. Dark square stain just like an open grave. Two or three boards thrown across it. Everything below was swallowed up immediately and dissolved in the gloom that was becoming even thicker. “Give me the child after I let myself down,” Žana said and that sentence reverberated in Marija like an echo, Give me the child after I let myself down! Give me the child after I let myself down! Then she heard the boards rub against each other as Žana displaced them and then she was trembling and she heard the light thump when Žana touched bottom. Then Marija felt her way to the rim of the opening and leaned over the invisible emptiness. From below—Žana’s breathing. She picked up her child, leaned over the breathing, and immediately felt the weight that had weighed down her hands vanishing abruptly as if she had dropped it into the abyss. “Be careful that you don’t knock down the boards,” Žana said from underneath, from that marvelously confident “underneath” that was giving her the firm footing of damp earth beneath her feet while Marija was still treading the slippery and unsteady boards onstage. Propped up on both elbows and with her body rocking gently, she hesitated for a moment. She could feel that every one of her movements now carried momentous significance for Jan and for Žana as well as for herself. Even for Jakob. Yes, even for him. Dangling over the opening that separated one world and time, one chapter of her history and fate from another, she felt again, without being entirely conscious of it, the denseness of these moments through which passed a nearly tangible current—the past, the present, and the future intersecting, a compact three-way crossroads of time—the dim and dark recorded past cutting across narrow bands of bright new moments and enormous distances sewn with bones and graves (not merely the ones that remained there just behind their turned backs but also all of the graves that she bore in her memory and in her blood, and even all the ones of the unknown people in her family album); the present, swaying slightly in the instant of its birth, issuing forth from the ruptures in the past and, having reached the light of day, heading off to submerge once more in the unknown obscurity of the future: a future that always stands as though on firm footing above the swaying minutes of the present, but which is nonetheless uncertain and unmeasured, dependent upon numerous factors that slice into and blow apart its frames of reference. Then she thought Polja, as if someone were reading aloud the inscription on a grave in which the past had been interred, and then she thought, as if some vague ray from the future into which she was letting herself drop had blinded her, Did Žana get the child out of the way?—and she flinched the way you’d flinch if you began walking up a stairway you’d only imagined: the ground was just a few centimeters beneath her feet after all. If she stretched out her toes she could touch the ground with her now-dangling legs. But she was afraid that her untied shoes would drop off before she reached the bottom. And then she thought of trying to soften her impact. So she pressed her feet together and held them parallel to the floor along some imaginary horizontal line. The bottom seemed like a deep chasm to her, into which she was supposed to hurl herself with acrobatic skill, or near enough. As though she were jumping straight into the heart of the future. Leaping over the present.

  But she only felt a sharp pinch in her heavy shoes. And that was all. But the sensation that followed—and it came immediately after she forced herself to let go and grasped that she was on firm ground—was that every one of these steps she was now taking, after so long a wait, was being taken by her free will alone, free of commands, free of inspections (albeit still accompanied by the fear of sneak attacks), and pervaded by such a sense of ease that she no longer felt her tight boots and the weight of her steps. And she hardly even felt her fear. Or at least not the same fear that she had almost always felt up to the present moment: the fear of events developing so as to carry her along without a single iota of involvement on her part. This new kind of fear, she thought, is the kind that men feel. And Žana, of course. She called it active fear. It was something completely different. Her hands were on at least one of the levers controlling these events.

  They lay pressed to the damp earth, which had just barely begun to thaw. The baby was lying between them and Marija thought for an instant how he knew nothing about what was taking place around them and within them; he just felt the humid and viscous stain, and this place, where he could barely be seen among his cloth rags, and where his tiny nose was probably a little flushed and reddened by cold, and what’s more: the swe
et-insipid and thick, sticky taste of warm milk in his oral cavity and sometimes a confused, hesitant rocking. Then she felt hard dirt scattering against her lips and face and its fragile flavor and the nearly imperceptible yet heavy scent of soil that her sense of smell scarcely registered and that anyway you take in more through your tongue and guts: it crackled on her palate and crunched between her teeth while the pores on her skin absorbed it, and then it began to circulate in her blood, which grew thicker because of it and became strong like wine. But she wasn’t thinking about all that; it was only a dim, instinctual feeling in her guts as she flattened herself on the ground and tasted the flavor of earth on her lips.

  At the same time she felt Žana’s hand on her biceps and then came an ultra-quiet whisper: “Be careful the child doesn’t start crying,” and in addition: Marija felt Žana squirming and breathing and starting to move. Then she wrapped the baby in her arms and dragging herself along on her knees and elbows (the way the females of some species carry their young when they’re in danger), head bowed, pushing off on the ground with her left hand, she started following Žana’s breathing. From time to time she’d raise her head as if to sniff the air and investigate the obscure space stretching out before her. She sensed above her brow the invisible expanse of the sky and the fresh spaces of the open night. She had no desire to examine what was happening behind her back, where the spotlight must be. She went forward through the darkness creeping behind Žana as if she were climbing along an invisible horizon. As if she were sucking in blood and vital fluids from the very earth and air. Then suddenly she realized that they had reached the wire. Žana slipped through like a cat and she knew: Žana is on the other side; then she held the child out and thought Jan, I have saved Jan. And then she realized that Žana had laid the baby on the ground and was lifting the wire to allow Marija to pass through. But then, before she could think The important thing is that Jan is beyond the wire, she considered, horrified, what it would mean for the child to burst out crying and give them away. And next the child did start to cry and she had just barely gotten herself through the wire and just been able to think once more This is absolutely the worst moment to die when they were blinded by the floodlight and she threw herself onto the child and enveloped him tightly and she had only just heard the HALT! HALT! rising up like the voice of death itself as she lay there, half-dead, anticipating with the part of her mind that was still clinging to life the burst of machine-gun fire that would nail her in the back, and at the same time she was seized by a gut feeling: that she should suffocate her baby. That thought jolted her conscience and left her forehead scorched before fizzling out on the tips of her fingers even before she clenched them over the child’s mouth. Just as Žana was shaking her she understood the words RUN! RUN! and almost simultaneously a sentence came to her, unclear and at first fully meaningless and hollow, a sentence originating at a distance greater than the one from which Žana spoke: ACH! THEY ARE COMING TO ROB US AGAIN! GET A MOVE ON! NOW! THEY ARE COMING BACK TO LOOT! and then immediately Žana’s whisper from nearby making sense of everything in one fell swoop WE ARE SAFE and she sensed Žana’s hand squeezing hers and realized that Žana felt her struggling with the thought of suffocating the child and that Žana also realized that it had not yet registered for Marija that they were safe—something that she would only grasp later: the Germans had thought when they heard the baby crying that the escapees must have been people from the surrounding villages (how else to explain their child) who had come to steal supplies (for, since the Allies had been pressing forward, their army in its retreat had laid waste to everything behind it and hunger and cold were advancing too, with women starting to forage and steal everything they came into contact with in order to feed themselves and their children whose fathers were still off making war around the world or who lay piled up in mass graves somewhere in the Urals or on the Volga, at El Alamein or in the Baltic or Pacific Ocean . . .) Then the child, abruptly, ceased crying. Unexpectedly, just as he’d started. Now all Marija could hear was Žana’s breathing next to her and she felt the pressure of the other woman’s hand. The faroff thudding and rumbling of big guns. And the howling of a dog in the midst of the night.

  The child still lay beneath her, but when she came to understand this and lifted her arm and liberated him, he again began to cry with the exultant full-throated voice of a newly freed animal, and from the distance responses came in the form of the rabid barking of a dog and furious artillery volleys. The little creature kept crying in the intense blackness of the night, and his voice rose, twisting like a vine, like the stalk of some miraculously green plant glimpsed among the cavities of skulls, amid the ashes of a fireplace, from out of the entrails of a corpse; and from far away replied the cannon, proclaiming the terrible love between nations.

  Chapter 11

  Beside the rutted road at the point where it branched and continued in two directions, Žana discovered a dilapidated sign. This was on the third day of their flight, not counting that first night. They found themselves some five hundred kilometers from Berlin. Most of the distance they had covered in carts, together with masses of refugees. Žana wanted to make it to Strasbourg. Marija was looking for a way to get to Poland where, as agreed upon, she’d wait for Jakob.

  “Take the child,” Žana said and handed the bundle off to Marija.

  It was a crisp foggy morning. Žana hurried down the high embankment and turned the road sign over like it was a corpse. Next to the mud-caked signpost, which had barely been moved from the spot where it had lain, a dark fossilized stripe remained; last year’s grass lay in it, withered and pressed as if for preservation. Marija was stamping her feet at the edge of the road, eyeing the pockmarked letters.

  “What does it say?” she asked. “What does it say?”

  Žana made no reply. She was seated on a stone, with her head bent down low, preoccupied with the bullet-riddled board.

  “What does it say?” Marija repeated. “Wipe off the mud. I can’t see anything from here. You know, this fog reminds me of . . .”

  Žana started to move, lowering herself to her knees. Her head was nearly touching the striped pole. Her arms dangled superfluously, uselessly, at her side.

  “What does it say?” Marija asked for the third time. “From here none of it is legible.”

  Then Žana said, barely loud enough to be heard and without lifting her head:

  “It doesn’t matter what it says. It’s all the same. I can’t read it either.”

  “Then we’ll go on in this direction, to the left,” Marija said. “I think we have to go this way. To the left. Don’t you think so too?”

  Once more Žana gave no answer. Her body just quivered.

  “Are you crying, Žana? You’re crying!” Marija said.

  At which point Žana declared firmly:

  “Go. Go left. I think that road leads to . . . I don’t know where. I don’t know what direction this road sign faced originally. But you should go that way. To the left.”

  “And you?” she said. “What about you?”

  So Žana turned her head and raised that small hand of hers that had been hanging there as if unneeded. Marija thought she was going to point to the right. Or somewhere into the fog, across the fields. But her hand, with its finger half-clenched, stopped around the level of her eyes, though she didn’t touch them. She went on to say:

  “Farewell, Marija! Adieu . . . And don’t turn around; I implore you: just do not turn around. I believe it’ll be easier for you that way.”

  Marija was still standing at the edge of the road. She watched, panic-stricken, as Žana, now lying on her belly, quaked with sobbing. And suddenly she felt her vision clouding and the baby in her arms becoming heavy as lead . . . And wanting to lean on Žana’s shoulder, she embraced only emptiness, and stumbled and then turned and with a frantic burst of pain and strength she began to run along the fog-wrapped road to the left.

  Early that evening, fatigued and enervated, she knocked on a door.
It was some sort of wayside inn. It looked abandoned to her; no one opened the heavy oak doors for a long time.

  “Who’s there?” came a man’s voice from inside.

  She knocked again with her fist.

  “What do you want?” asked the same voice, now a little closer.

  “Please open up.” And she added: “I have a child.”

  Slowly the door opened, just a crack.

  “Refugee?” the woman asked. Marija was astonished when she recognized in the woman’s voice the deep baritone that had answered from behind the door.

  “I can help you with housework,” Marija said. And she added: “Until my husband returns from the front.”

  “Hmm,” the woman said. “Come in. I’m also waiting for my husband. He’s in the quartermaster corps.”

  “Mine is a doctor.”

  “Right,” the woman said suspiciously. “I hear that Germany’s gone down the tubes. What do you think?”

  “What about you?”

  “Well, I think,” the woman began, “that the Jews have ruined everything. My husband said that they’re to blame for the war. And for everything else.”