Psalm 44

“No,” Marija said. “From the wet diapers. I didn’t dare go to sleep (it was just some kind of half-dozing state). I should have changed position”—then she sensed once more Polja’s mute presence in the room (she felt it from the silence) and she remembered that she was supposed to make more diapers out of her sheet. But she didn’t get up. She couldn’t begin tearing Polja’s sheet right away and making diapers. And sanitary pads. Then she asked, “How old was she?” but she already knew that she wasn’t going to be able to stand it another second in that position and that her stomach and legs were about to disintegrate abruptly like in Poe’s story about the corpse of M. Valdemar, which has been artificially kept alive by means of hypnotism and which then suddenly dissolves into gooey, slimy rot. And even before she could hear Žana’s answer, “Seventeen, I think,” she had already pushed her hand under the child to extract Polja’s sheet, which she then laid next to her on the straw and she laid the child across it and wrapped it up with the other hand. Then she turned to the side for a moment, felt for the edge of the diaper, arched her back, and started unwrapping the wet, blood-covered rags around her legs. “She seemed older to me,” she said so that her rubbing the dry edge of a diaper on her benumbed skin to wipe away the blood couldn’t be heard.

“Corpses don’t have an age,” Žana said, and then Marija felt the blood beginning to circulate slowly beneath her skin, rising up through the capillaries to the surface, all over her buttocks and her thighs, and then she stretched out her legs and sat up in the straw, leaning her shoulder blades against the cold wall of the barracks. She wiped her fingers on a damp rag and began groping about in the dark for a dry piece of linen to make a pad.

“You met her before I did,” she said, locating her underwear in the gloom beneath the fingers of her right hand, and then she put the folded portion of linen into place between her legs and slid her underwear back up.

“Yes,” said Žana. “She was one of those. You know. One of the chosen ones. Along the way she tried to flee. They gave her a thorough beating. Then she got sick and instead of taking her into the Lebensborn they dispatched her here. What saved her was the fact that she played the cello. I heard that the overseer who beat her was punished. The Germans regretted that a flower like her should end up on the inside. .”

Then the straw beneath Žana began to rustle and Marija turned in her direction, following the narrow band of light; she was still lying on her stomach with the straw between her teeth and her eyes fixed on the crack: she was following the movement of the floodlight’s beam along the barracks and wire.

The field guns, with their ever-faster salvos in the distance, suddenly fell silent.

“If Polja had lived—” Marija said, and though she wanted to tell the truth: if she had stayed alive till two, in other words until the point at which Maks was going to give the sign, and if she had been left alone in the barracks (since, being so sick, she couldn’t go with Žana and Marija) — tomorrow they would have crammed her into a truck anyway and taken her off to the gas chamber, she just couldn’t let it end that way for her, so she said: “—she would have been in Odessa in a month or so. . I believe she was from Odessa”; and Žana said:

“Or maybe if she had just lived a few more hours.”

“They won’t take any risks,” Marija said. “That Maks is a damned clever fellow.”

“Yes,” said Žana. “Damned clever,” and then she asked, “Have you ever seen him? Maks, that is?”