Psalm 44

“We must try to prevent this.” Then he added what she in slightly modified form had told Žana earlier, in a distant echo of this same sentence of Jakob’s uttered nearly a year earlier: “But we cannot put anything at risk. Now is a very bad time to die.”

Chapter 5

When Dr. Nietzsche finally said Perhaps it was too early for this visit and stood up from his chair, she thought: At last, because it seemed to her that if he stayed a minute longer she would have given herself away, probably by passing out. Then she heard the rustling of straw from the bed, from which she could conclude that Jakob had already stood up, and then his footsteps, the key in the door, Nietzsche’s conspiratorial and practically confidential Auf Wiedersehen! and she sensed her legs abruptly giving way beneath her as she slipped down the wardrobe: the last thing she felt was a sharp pain in her shoulder blades as she slid down the plank, and then there was a dull thud and, after that, darkness. .

“Jakob,” she said, and that was the first thing that sprouted in her mind, with a weak flash, amid the crimson swirls, growing brighter and brighter, and then it was between her lips. Then those swirls started to expand in concentric circles and in the emerging gap she could make out Jakob’s face, bent over her, and she could feel his hand on her forehead. “Take that away, Jakob,” she said and with the same effort that it took to speak those words she raised her arm and pushed aside the little bottle of ammonia that Jakob was holding beneath her nose. And without turning her head she gathered that the light brightening Jakob’s face was located somewhere to the side, on the floor: Jakob’s placed the lamp with the shade on the floor, she thought all of a sudden, and she remembered everything that had happened and she clasped her arms around Jakob’s neck. He lifted her up and put her on the bed and returned the lamp with the shade to the table by the bed.

“How long was I unconscious?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “As soon as I locked the door, I raced back to the wardrobe. I realized immediately that something wasn’t right. I reached in my pocket for the key but couldn’t find it. Then I drummed my nails on the door of the cabinet, even though I sensed that something had happened to you. At the same time I recalled hiding the key under my pillow. I grabbed it along with the bottle of ammonia on the table and, wouldn’t you know it, I found you sitting on the floor of the wardrobe with your head tilted over onto your shoulder. . I heard nothing at all when you fell,” he said. . “Poor thing”; and as he caressed her she thought that Jakob must know everything now, because he has to have seen the blood and thus he knows that she is his wife, even if he hadn’t noticed anything earlier; otherwise why would he have said “You poor thing.” And then she said:

“I fell right as he was leaving.” Then, with the concealed pride of being Jakob’s wife: “I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t hold out a single minute longer. Your coat did me in. I don’t know how I can love a man whose coat reeks like this. I will have to find another man.”

Then he said:

“I don’t know how I can love a woman who passes out so easily. I will have to find another woman”; his palms lingered gently on her cheeks. In that moment of forgetfulness her thoughts temporarily swung in the opposite direction, with her eyes now immobile and concentrated on that one single point of focus where Jakob was to be found. She (Jakob’s wife) all of a sudden started to expand and evaporate; the red-hot focal point began to cool off as soon as — having long since learned to take slaps like this in stride — her consciousness began to take in her surroundings: the lamp with the shade — Jakob’s room — window blocked with a blanket — and beyond the window: damp gelid night, pierced by spotlights and barbed wire. The concentric circles then started to radiate through the night, into space and time, grazing the dim border between future and past, and when she quickly and fearfully and forcefully halted the waves being emitted by her mind and when they returned from the obscure and distant stretches of the night to Jakob’s room, to the two of them, all she found was a black, singed hole in her mind, there where, a short time before, there had been the hot focal point of the lamp with the apple-blossom lampshade; now in that place was that unhinged voice once again, a voice that sometimes ended sentences in a falsetto and which was known as “Dr. Nietzsche”. .

“I don’t get it,” she said. “I don’t understand what that guy wanted from you.”