Psalm 44

“No,” Marija said: “Never. . though actually—” But she couldn’t finish her thought, and Marija should have said We’ll get through this or We’ll make it or something else just not They won’t take any risks. And even though she’d stopped with that, and had fallen silent, she began to get clumsily entangled in that heavy net of men, thinking that in terms of needlepoint it was a ridiculous pattern and with the delicate, finely pointed needle of a woman’s passivity she began poking into its empty spaces until she found herself wrapped up in the tough, thick threading of the nets and had to call for help from more men, first from Jakob — in her mind — and then, aloud and with desperate entreaty in her voice, that other man too, Maks. The Maks she had still never seen but who had existed for her for months now as a synonym for salvation, the incarnation of masculine god-agency. That’s why she’d wanted to say I’ve known him as long as I’ve known Jakob, but she changed her mind, for she remembered that the true sense of Žana’s question lay elsewhere. At least it seemed that way to her. Žana simply wanted to point out that she herself (Marija) wasn’t in any condition to do for herself or for her child anything other than submit to the fate that she identified with Jakob, and that that Maks (and she always said “that Maks” herself) was merely the executor of the will of fate-Jakob, and wasn’t even a concrete person, with no face and shoulders, no hairy chest and great, powerful hands. Instead: an unknown agent, the hand of God, or the devil himself, or precisely some invisible and unknown powerful third thing that works miracles: he flips some unseen lever or cuts a wire and darkness breaks in. . Like that night in the corridor when she was coming out of Jakob’s room. And before that, too. Ten minutes earlier: all at once the darkness fell. And it was like this:

When Dr. Nietzsche halted in front of Jakob’s door he screamed: “These working conditions are impossible! Every five minutes, that power plant! This smells like sabotage to me,” and then Jakob covered her mouth so she wouldn’t cry out, and then he pushed her, or actually placed her in the cabinet like she was an object and locked her in. But before he shut the door:

“That was Maks,” he said. “He shorted out the fuses.”

This happened several months ago. Actually more than half a year back. And that was the first time she’d heard of Maks.

Chapter 3

She sat on Jakob’s bed with her legs crossed (blood running down her thighs and along her bottom) and she felt unequal to any new task.

“Jakob, something is going to happen,” she said. “I have a feeling that something is going to happen.”

And he asked, “What could happen?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel like something is going to happen. Maybe someone will find us here”; and then he said:

“Nobody ever comes into my room. Now what would they be looking for in my room?”

“Still, Jakob,” she said. “I’m afraid.”

But she didn’t budge. All she did was say again: “I have a feeling that something could happen,” and at that moment she thought about how Aunt Lela had said that this was as important a thing in a woman’s life as giving birth, and she thought about the blood she was leaving on Jakob’s sheet and about his being a doctor and how he would know what was happening to her. Back then she should have asked Aunt Lela, Is it possible for it to happen and for the man not to notice anything?

Then he said: “Should I turn out the light?”; and she:

“No. Stay with me.”

“If you’re afraid,” he said. Then he stopped.

“I’m not,” she said. “Only you can’t take your hand away.” Then more: “I love looking at that lampshade. It’s been a year since I saw a lamp with a shade.” And again: “I have to go. It’s high time I left,” but still she did nothing that would indicate she was leaving; made not a single movement that would show that she was leaving. She wasn’t capable of making such a motion, although she was no longer lying down (immediately afterward she had stood up and put on her underwear and her dress). Jakob sat at her right side, leaning against the steel frame of the bed. And she just sat there like that, feeling the blood fill up the impression they had made in the straw mattress with their combined weight.

“We’ve known each other for two months already,” she said. “I never could have imagined. .”

“Who could say,” he said. “To me it seems we’ve known each other for a very long time: for a long while before all this.”

“Today’s it’s exactly eight weeks and a day,” she said. “And one night extra. Doesn’t that seem like a short time to you. .?”