Psalm 44

“Covering his retreat,” Jakob told her. “What else would he be trying to do: protecting his escape route. Understand?”

“Not really,” she said. “It still isn’t completely clear in my mind. . Is he not able to do all of that himself? Isn’t there anyone else he could order around, anyone else he trusts more? It doesn’t quite make sense. . Tell me, Jakob: Is this really it?”

Jakob reflected for a moment.

“Judging by all this — yes,” he said. “By this comedy. .” (Then he told her the real meaning of Nietzsche’s visit; it gave her a modicum of hope, and in the quantity necessary for fear not to take the day.)

She remembered: Jakob had told her then: Yes, judging by all this, and although there was doubt in his voice (at least it seemed that way to her), she nonetheless sensed a flash of hope in him and she sensed too that what was in his voice was only bitterness and not despair; and hope too of course. And more. Just now was the first time that Jakob had added, definitively if a little bit mistrustfully, “Judging by all this.” But he did not say: “Hope is a necessity. Thus we have to imagine it,” nor that other thing he added at the beginning: “Otherwise you won’t be able to hold out for one day in this camp. Without hope it would be as if a person were to break ranks and announce to everyone, to their faces, that they were doomed. Each and every one. Things couldn’t go on like that for even a single day. You have to live. Only the person without hope is a real corpse. Do you understand? That’s why you can’t abandon hope. Even if it flees, finding no room in your heart. . Lure it back. Thaw it out. Revive it with artificial resuscitation, by trick-ery, or even by force. .” But that had been right at the beginning, a day or two after they’d first met; she remembered: at that time she didn’t completely believe him; and alongside all the sincerity that resonated in his words, still it seemed to her that he said what he said out of self-confidence or out of cowardice and those both struck her as being pointless at that moment. Maybe he’s just some devious collaborator, or just a frightened one. Back then she hadn’t known him as well as she would. She’d only seen him one time before that. When she was arriving at the camp. Therefore she had said to him that second time, before she got to know him and while she still doubted him:

“Do you think, Doctor, that I can bother with something like hope here and now, in Auschwitz?” And she amazed herself with the trust in him that her voice then betrayed: “That at this very moment I can tap into the reserve of hope people carry in their hearts?”