Psalm 44

“I’m always sleepy,” Anijela said. “As soon as I let the lid down, I fall asleep.” Her eyes were twitching as if the meager illumination of the candle were blinding her.

At that point, the man said, “That’s from the dust. It would be better for her if she took a shot of rakija. That’d invigorate her, as I say. And give her some courage.”

“No,” Anijela responded. “The dust helps me sleep”; then she looked at Marija, as if speaking only to her: “I have the same dream over and over: someone is after me and I can’t run away. Then I wake up and see that I’m in a coffin. So I calm down a little. Do you ever dream anything like this, Marija? Someone is chasing you, and you. .”

Then Aunt Lela came to her assistance:

“Sweetheart,” she said, “how about you come out of that. . out of there. We’ll try to get you a passport. Or something.” Then she added, “Later on, of course. When things have calmed down, a little bit at least.”

“Oh, no,” said the doll-sleeper. “I’ll wait right here for the end of the war. I like it fine here. Really. This is great for me, Aunt Lela”; and Marija, astonished, disbelieving, looked at her face and her pale eyes: her head shrunken as with those prizes prepared by headhunters, no bigger than a fist; her mouth splitting her face in half, unchanged and so disproportionate in relation to her narrow, knotty nose and the delicate wax lines embossed on the doll-sleeper’s miniature face. Even her eyelashes were of a supernatural length and fell and rose with a sound like the scraping, loud and ungreased, of the wings of a night bird. Then Marija’s eyes stopped on Anijela’s necklace with its chunky artificial beads the color of amethyst; that necklace on the slender neck of the doll-sleeper gave Anijela the look of those mummies found in the pyramids of the Pharaohs: the dignity of a ruler’s death.

“That’s from my late mother,” Anijela said abruptly, before Marija could inquire about the significance of the necklace and before she could think of anything at all to say, at least anything other than what you would say to someone on their deathbed; “a family heirloom, as they say,” Anijela went on as if responding to Marija’s unspoken question and to her look that had now turned into a wild if suppressed cry. But then her eyes stopped on Anijela’s scrawny, withered fingers, with which she was picking at her necklace as if counting on her rosary; she still had long, well-groomed nails the color of dark silver that somehow, miraculously, matched the bleached-out amber of those long fingers, like a silver crown on the elegant, old-fashioned tube of a precious cigarette-holder.

“I use it as a calendar,” she said. “If each bead stands for one month, then there is more than three years’ worth here. I guess the war will be over by then. But a bead can also stand for a week. Or a day. Or an hour.” And she repeated: “I’m counting”; and Marija felt that she wouldn’t be able to say a word and that she would have to wait for the old man to put down his pipe for a moment or to mumble something, would have to wait for anything, and anything would do, so long as someone said something and she didn’t have to listen to Anijela’s hoarse whisper anymore, so long as someone said something in a human voice, even for the old man to clear his throat in deep bass tones, or for Aunt Lela, in her manly voice, reeking of cigarettes, to say something pointless or implausible, like that line a little while earlier about a passport for Anijela; but instead of any of that Marija was again forced to hear the whispering of the doll-sleeper: “And when I’m bored I play it a lot,” the mummy said, and her fingers the color of dark amber flew over the necklace, stopping for an instant when they seemed to have found the right note and chord, unregistered by her audience but that showed in her eyes across which scurried the skittish shadows of some unearthly melody (and now she remembered Polja’s figure wrapped around the rising neck of a cello beneath the black canopy of that hearse parked near the crematorium while dark rain trickled from the sky as they were returning to work, soaking wet and fatigued): “So there,” Anijela said then and moved her head back a little so that the point of her chin protruded upward as in those paintings of the descent from the Cross with their impossibly foreshortened perspective in which his toes, the hollow beneath his ribs, and his triangular chin align; “Tramtram-tram-tram,” Anijela conveyed to them the sounds that were crashing around in her mind but remained inaudible to them, all the while tapping her fingers on those glass beads the color of amethyst: “Mozart,” she said as if breathing out the word in a pause of a sixteenth note’s duration or between two half notes: “Requiem,” she said, without stopping her delirious finger movements, her head suspended over the imaginary piano: “I even know when I’m doing it wrong. I know exactly which note is which and as soon as I hit one I can hear it perfectly.”