Psalm 44

And Marija had already opened her mouth to tell Aunt Lela that they had to go because she could no longer stand to listen to Anijela’s Requiem, but then the emergency sirens went off somewhere and took her breath away, but at that moment she would have preferred to hear the hysterical howling of a siren to Anijela’s whispering, and in the same moment she realized that they would have to stay for at least fifteen minutes more until the alarm passed. Fortunately Anijela fell asleep all of a sudden, as if lulled by her own music, and they, the three of them, that is to say Aunt Lela, the old man, and she, could talk about something in the indirect and silly way people usually talk; then the old man said that his common sense told him the war couldn’t last longer than a year because at that point God would either have taken pity on people or have destroyed the whole world with fire and flood, because he knew an old man in their area who up to now had prophesied about several wars and that included the exact day and month and year and he had even predicted the assassination in Sarajevo and had spoken about it in plain terms to everyone and for that reason he was thrown in prison and after it actually happened the way he had prognosticated (in the same way that he had prophesied about several droughts and even the date of birth and name of the heir to the throne) they let him go but first he had to tell them where he had obtained his knowledge of it and he let them know it was all written down, nice and tidy, in the Old Testament and in various books of prophecy; well, it’s this same old fellow who said this too, that this war cannot last for very long because how could it come to pass that people would hurl themselves into trenches this way like animals and pile up in heaps two dozen at a time and he remembered well what it had been like when he’d fought in a war under Emperor Franz Josef — but Marija was no longer listening to him she was already concentrating on this visit having to be over at some point and she was waiting for the siren to give the signal that the alarm was over and as she did that she looked into the candle so that she didn’t have to look into Anijela’s coffin anymore. Then after an eternity the siren screeched again and Aunt Lela said, “We don’t want to wake her. Let her rest”; and that was all Marija had been waiting for: by the time the old man closed the lid on Anijela’s coffin she was already in the next room and even all the way outside, where she had fled to escape herself and everything else, and then the man said:

“It wouldn’t be a bad thing for her to take a little rakija. It’s better than dust,” and Aunt Lela:

“To be sure. To be sure”; but Marija was already standing in the threshold by the door and staring into the clean, newly fallen snow as though at a miracle. Meanwhile now she was still standing, immobile, with her back squeezed up against the rod in the cabinet and with her head practically jammed into that stinking hospital coat until with one of her hands she pressed on her underwear and felt the blood coat her fingers and run down her leg, and she had the impression that she was going to bleed out like a butchered animal hanging from a hook, head down in a slaughterhouse while blood slowly drips and congeals on the concrete down below in a thick scarlet stain. It was obvious to her: she could do nothing; she would have to remain standing in this impossible position until something happened, until Dr. Nietzsche left or Jakob tried something; all she had to do was see to it that she didn’t pass out because to do so would betray her presence, and that she go on waiting there, her teeth clenched. She had already heard the doctor’s deep harsh voice that sometimes ended sentences in an unpleasant and unexpected falsetto and suddenly she realized that the light was burning again outside and that, therefore, the blown fuses had been fixed, for along the cabinet’s door a sharp fissure of light had appeared. That Maks had again managed to get away with it, she thought, and at the same time she heard Jakob’s voice too.

“He’s gotten us out of a lot of tight spots,” Marija said after a brief pause: she said us because that word also means “you,” meaning Žana, because it was clear that the preparations for their escape were in large part Maks’s work; he was there in the background; he pulled unseen strings; he created light and engineered blown circuits. He. Maks. Whom no one saw.

Then she heard Žana’s voice in an echo of a sentence spoken just before: