PSALM 44

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “Yes,” she said: “every one of them at least brought a nail.”

  “What do you mean, a nail?”

  “When they crucified Christ,” she said. “That’s what it says in the Bible.”

  “It doesn’t say that in the Bible,” the woman replied.

  “Then it was somewhere else,” Marija said.

  “Are you a Protestant?”

  “Yes,” she said. “On my mother’s side. My father is a Catholic.” She went on: “. . . was a Catholic. He perished on the Eastern Front . . . The Jews killed him.”

  The woman lit a sputtering oil lamp and placed it on the table. After that she hauled out an old armchair and set it by the stove.

  “Put the child down,” she said. “I’m going to make a fire. Then we can have our chat.”

  So she brought in an old door made of oak and with a furious racket began splitting it apart with an axe.

  “I don’t make a fire very often,” she said. “I don’t have the wood, and I’m afraid that they’ll come bother me if they see the smoke. There are so many of these refugees, and Jews too. Everything has gone to the dogs.” Then, abruptly: “Are you hungry?”

  “No,” she said. “I have just one favor to ask of you.”

  “I don’t have any money,” the woman said. “If you stay here to work for me, we’ll open a tavern . . . if everything doesn’t go to hell.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not what I mean. It’s a little paper and a pen. Whatever. So I can get in touch with my husband.”

  “Don’t play the saint,” the woman said. She cast a glance at the baby. “That child is not even half a year old,” she said.

  “Three months.”

  “See, what did I say? Not half a year old.”

  “But really,” Marija said. “He’s an officer.”

  The woman brought over a greasy old school notebook full of calculations in smeared ballpoint ink. She flipped around in it a bit until she found a blank page.

  “Here,” she said. “Just don’t play the saint.”

  Marija took the pen and pulled the paper closer to the flame of the oil lamp. Then:

  “I’m sorry. I can’t do it tonight. I’m tired.”

  Two or three days later, after the woman had come to trust Marija enough to leave her at home alone (to tell the truth, she did lock the door from the outside) whenever she left for the nearby villages to run some household errands, Marija wrote Jakob this letter:

  The little one is three months old. By day he sleeps in an old armchair next to the stove.

  When I have work to do in the yard, Mrs. Schmidt watches him. She still thinks that Jan is a bastard. As soon as you get this letter, let us hear from you so that we know whether you are alive.

  I got this address from Mrs. Schmidt. She has promised to get me the addresses of all the displaced person camps.

  That was the first letter. After waiting for three months, she wondered if Jakob hadn’t received the letter because she had posted it without any stamps. She asked Mrs. Schmidt to lend her the money for stamps.

  “All right, all right,” Mrs. Schmidt said. “Give me a letter. I’ll put stamps on it . . . Just don’t you play the saint.”

  “He’ll pay you back, ma’am,” Marija said. “He’s a doctor. We lost track of each other ten months ago.”

  That was after three months. In the second letter was this:

  The little one is six months old. He loves to eat dry bread. Mrs. Smith prepares food and I wait on the customers. Sometimes I get chocolate for Jan from soldiers. Mrs. Smith is a little disillusioned. Things haven’t gone according to plan for her.

  Jakob, I am waiting for you. You taught me how to hope.

  In the third letter she transmitted the brief message that their little boy was eight months old and that she thought he looked a lot like him, like Jakob. He is talking but he isn’t walking yet. He’s quite the little phenomenon. This letter was sent to a special section of the Red Cross and to units of the Allied armed forces.

  After fourteen days of feverish anticipation, she received a la-conic reply:

  Wait for me. I am coming. I love you both.

  Jakob

  She kissed Mrs. Schmidt on the cheek.

  “Fine, fine,” she said. “But you’re still playing the saint.”

  “We haven’t seen each other for nearly a year and a half. Just imagine: eighteen months!”

  “That’s nothing,” Mrs. Schmidt said. “Mine hasn’t been heard from for four whole years. And he wasn’t a bad one, believe me. Saturday evenings we would take little excursions. By morning we’d be on top of a hayrick. Then he’d open up his backpack. ‘Today, my wife, you will be my guest!’ he’d say. Then he would cut two slices of bread and make sandwiches. And pour beer from a thermos into our glasses. Into mine first, then into his . . . Not that I’m not playing the saint here.”

  Chapter 12

  Jakob lay for the third month in an American hospital several kilometers outside Berlin. Along with general exhaustion and stomach problems, he still had an open fistula on the outside of his left knee. He had sustained that injury while escaping from the camp in Oranienburg. That was in November. Two days before the total evacuation of the camp. He still couldn’t eat and he often surreptitiously swapped chocolate for cigarettes. He was smoking a great deal and taking sleeping pills. During the day he stared at the ceiling and quarreled with the patients who shouted back and forth to each other and played préférence.

  “You’re a doctor?” the director asked him one day, in English. That was in February. At four in the afternoon, as Dr. Leo was making the rounds of his patients, Jakob hadn’t even noticed the entrance of the examiners from the medical board. He lay there sprawled across his iron bed as on a catafalque. He stared at the high white ceiling. One of his hands hung down next to the bed like a dead appendage. From time to time he would bring a cigarette up to his lips, nothing more. Then he’d close his eyes for a moment.

  Dr. Leo repeated his question.

  “Yes,” Jakob said absentmindedly, without taking the cigarette out of his mouth. His eyes, fogged over with the powerful doses of morphine, were still contemplating the peeling plaster on the ceiling.

  “Put out that cigarette,” Dr. Leo said in a strict tone. “Our fellow doctor should see to it that he doesn’t require further warnings about such things.”

  Jakob stubbed out his cigarette on the floor, barely moving his hand.

  “Where’d you get the cigarettes?”

  Jakob gave no reply.

  “Where’d you get the cigarettes?” the doctor repeated.

  “Screw the cigarettes,” he said. “Leave me alone. I’ve been getting them however I can.”

  “I explicitly forbade you to smoke,” Dr. Leo said.

  Jakob fell silent once more. Nervously he closed his eyes. Then he said:

  “Why this?”

  “What?” the doctor asked.

  “All of this,” he said. “All this business.”

  That was in February.

  By the next month his condition had only marginally improved. The fistula had ceased festering, but his nerves were even worse. He stopped arguing with the patients. It cost Dr. Leo considerable effort to get so much as a word out of him. He still smoked a lot, but cigarettes were harder to come by now. He wasn’t able to put much effort into it. And now he was covering his head and face completely. He couldn’t stand sunlight. He demanded that the blinds not be raised during the day, but they didn’t listen to him. That’s when he started wrapping his blanket around his head. Only at night did he stare at the ceiling. In the dark.

  At the end of March, Dr. Leo advised him to start showing some concern for his long-term future. He couldn’t stay in the hospital forever. As soon as his wound healed, he’d have to move on.

  “I like it here,” he said. “I can stop smoking,” he said. “If you insist.”

  “What I’m insisting is that you begin thinking,” Dr. Leo sa
id. “That you take care of yourself. Why not write up your experiences, for example? I mean with Nazi medical ethics. Or something along those lines . . . You surely have some valuable, and by that I mean authentic, experiences to share.”

  Jakob waved him off with a barely perceptible movement of his hand.

  “Shall I bring you some writing supplies?”

  “No,” Jakob said. “Why?”

  “You have to find a project. Whatever it is. Play chess at least. Or cards. Anything at all,” Dr. Leo said.

  No answer came. He didn’t even gesture with his hand.

  Then Dr. Leo said:

  “Do you have anyone? Parents or wife?”

  “No one,” he said. “So much the better.”

  “Shall I have them issue you a passport?” Dr. Leo asked. “What are your thoughts about that? So you can head for Palestine? Or America?”

  “No,” he said. “Not Palestine . . . I’ve had enough of all that.”

  “For the US, then,” Dr. Leo said calmly. “There’s none of that there.”

  “None of what?”

  “What you fear: scars. No one will hassle you to write your memoirs,” Dr. Leo replied with a smile. “America is where scars get lost in the crowd. Do you understand? At least there are women there who are still in one piece. And children, of course.”

  “All right,” Jakob said. He turned toward the doctor: “I agree,” he went on listlessly. “Scrounge up a passport for me, if it means so much to you.”

  Dr. Leo promised that it would be ready as early as the middle of April. At the latest by May. Jakob hardly grew any more up-beat. He would take up residence in some quiet spot in Canada. Anywhere. The only thing he cared about was crossing the ocean. That, perhaps, would be his purgatory.

  On the day, the last day of March, when he received a letter from Marija and Jan, he was lying in his bed next to the open window. His head was propped up slightly on his pillow. He was watching the flickering of the sun across the white varnish on the opposite wall. He was imagining a large ship gliding across the Atlantic in calm, sunny weather. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, just before the doctors checked in on their patients. Before they came, the mail was handed out. It was going on right now. All the patients, including those on crutches and the ones in wheelchairs, were in the sun-filled lobby of the building where the mail was usually distributed. Only one other person stayed behind in the ward with Jakob: a boy who had recently had an amputation and been delivered to the ward the night before.

  “There’s some mail for you,” Danijel said, laughing and then straining as he pushed against the narrow planks on the door to make his wheelchair move. One of his legs had been removed—a victim of the Institute of Scientific Research. His voice was unnaturally scratchy and his hair had fallen out. Jakob recognized the symptoms of forced sterilization by means of the “special method.”

  “They’ve already called your name three times,” the boy said, rowing with broad strokes across the smooth parquet floor. “I assumed you were asleep . . . Otherwise you would have definitely heard them.”

  Jakob started, and then reached out apathetically for the letter. He quickly scanned the envelope.

  “Danijel,” Jakob said as he grabbed the boy by the upper arm. Danijel still had a trace of a smile on his face, and he was staring at Jakob. “Have you ever watched someone be resurrected?”

  Now Danijel’s little smile was mournful.

  “No? Watch me, then . . . First a person starts to cry, as you can see. Then he drops his letter. It’s like when someone has gone hungry for a very long time. You can’t gorge yourself right away. Then one lights a cigarette,” Jakob said, and he offered the pack to Danijel. “There you have it. This, this is what it’s like. You see . . . It’ll be you one of these days.”

  Dr. Leo too expressed his surprise.

  “How are you feeling, compatriot? You’re an American now . . . Aren’t you?”

  “Excellent, Doctor,” Jakob said. “I’m imagining my trip across the ocean . . . But, of course, I’m not alone . . . Do you know what I mean?”

  “Bravo,” Dr. Leo said. “But you’ve forgotten again that you aren’t allowed to smoke.”

  “Indeed,” Jakob said. “Forgive me, but I thought that, on the deck of a transatlantic liner, smoking was permitted.” Dr. Leo smiled contentedly.

  That same day, in the early evening, Jakob left his room unobserved. Most of the patients were asleep. Out on the terrace he ran into no one but Danijel.

  “Farewell, Danijel,” Jakob said in a low voice. They shook hands.

  “Where to, Doctor?” the kid asked.

  “Do me a favor, Danijel,” Jakob said. “Give Dr. Leo my apologies and tell him I said thanks for everything.”

  The boy looked as if he understood, so Jakob added only: “But not until tomorrow. No earlier . . . Understand? . . . Not before then.”

  “Have a good trip, Doctor,” the boy said and began to row his wheelchair across the smooth parquet floor.

  Chapter 13

  EPILOGUE

  It was on a humid day in summer that Jakob and Marija paid another visit to the camp. Jan had turned six years old, and he was wearing short pants of white linen and a light-colored shirt. He was a thin boy, with a look of curiosity and mild anxiety on his face. He had Jakob’s demeanor and the shapely, intelligent eyes of his mother. Usually an especially lively and inquisitive boy, he was now tight-lipped and furtive—perhaps just fatigued from the journey. But, ever since the bus stopped at the edge of the camp (it was a special tourist bus from a Warsaw company and it had been rented by the association of former prisoners for the commemorations of the anniversary of the liberation) and since the ceremonies and speeches had begun, accompanied by stifled tears and audible sobs, he had suddenly fallen silent. This left Marija worried. Without waiting for the ceremony to conclude or for the choir to intone its set of mournful songs, among them “The Girl I Adore,” Marija took the child by his hand and led him away from the crowd. She did this as a bus carrying American tourists drew up and, with its loud honking, drowned out the solemn invocation of “The Girl I Adore.” The eyes of the former camp inmates dimmed with reproach at this failure to respect the suffering and memories of others. Nevertheless their agitation grew even greater when the bus’s horn stopped blaring and was replaced by a hoarse bass voice from its radio. A man was singing in raspy tones about how great it was to be alive: “C’est si bon . . .” This brief, unpleasant confusion was sufficient for Marija, Jan, and Jakob to slip away unobserved. Marija noticed just then that Jan was crying quietly. “Didn’t my little man promise me he’d be a hero and not do any crying?” she asked. She already felt a touch of regret at having brought the boy along. Although the two of them had decided to show Jan everything that wasn’t too upsetting, she was sorry now that she had talked to him about the camp, even though what she had said was mild and sanitized, like some kind of fairy tale. But she had wanted to impress on Jan’s very brow the stamp of martyrdom and love: the same symbol that she and Jakob had made of their suffering. But Jan was meant to profit from all that. And Marija was proud of this mission of hers: to transfer to Jan the joyousness of those who were able to create life out of death and love. To bequeath to him the bitter happiness that had resulted from suffering that he had never felt and would never personally experience, but suffering that needed to be present in him as a warning, as joy: like a memorial obelisk.

  In the display cases of the camp museum there are purses and wallets made of human skin. Made in Germany. Human skin from the tannery; when it’s thoroughly dried out, it resembles parchment. And any blank white sheet of paper inflames the human imagination, for all people are artists and are eager to leave some trace of themselves on earth. It was probably that very fact which impelled the Übermensch to inscribe his initials on this completely anonymous human skin, in this ideally white spot, thereby convincing us irrefutably of his artistic inclinations. Ars et artibus, art and d
elight, as venerable old Horace proclaimed, have always been among the essential characteristics of each and every worthy creation. And love is, as always, only a stimulant. Therefore one should not wonder that an Übermensch, in the form of some artistically inclined SS officer, would choose nothing other than a lady’s toiletry case as the object of his craft. To give such a case of human skin to a lady of Aryan blood would mean not only that he was confirming, clearly and palpably, his personal power and artistic proclivities, but also demonstrating and proving to the lady in question that human life is an extremely ephemeral phenomenon; human skin is neither as expensive nor as valuable as one might think. And, furthermore, if the stamp of the artist (that is to say, of a man who is no stranger to metaphysics) is imprinted on the bag in the form of a drawing or watercolor depicting a kitschy and infantile boat, sails filled with wind (a symbol of higher, metaphysical powers) or a stenciled lily (a symbol of bodily and spiritual innocence), then the effect is full and complete. The Übermensch triumphs in love and in art.

  Two American women, faces freckled and wrinkled, sporting sunburns, big straw hats like chandeliers, and loud, multicolored nylon dresses, labored, with the help of a dictionary, to decipher untranslated details about the mattresses stuffed with women’s hair. Locks of hair of various colors, from blonde to red to black, mingled together in a heap and exuding sadness like the golden crowns of famous queens, princesses, or virgins found on a battlefield or in a museum basement. But the essential characteristic of an Übermensch is that he is not sentimental; he knows how to counter the metaphysics of death with the hard, forceful physicality of life. He knows how to take from death almost as much as he gives it. Übermensch—the very word mocks death. Such a man takes bone to make fertilizer, turns skin into purses and wallets and lampshades, produces mattresses and pillows from . . . hair. It is only the vapor of human vanity and nullity that is sacrificed to death. I will teach you life—thus spoke Zarathustra.