Psalm 44

After he had turned off the lamp with the shade, Jakob listened intently and then carefully unlocked the door. The only other thing she remembered was an embrace in the dark and the pressure of his body. Then she slid along the wall down the darkened corridor in the barracks. She could almost recall how many steps she took, feeling the grim cold wall all the while. Then it happened, not even twenty minutes after Dr. Nietzsche’s departure. That’s when the invisible but omnipresent Maks appeared again, out of the darkness. And this is how it went: no sooner had she taken ten steps (with one hand extended into the void before her like a sleepwalker and the other resting against the wall) she felt a sharp pain in her shin and realized in that moment that she had knocked over something that would now echo through the whole barrack and that would be heard from one end of the hall to the other. At the same time she heard, from the end of the corridor, HALT! HALT! and the clacking steps of iron-shod boots. All she knew, all she could know at that moment, was that there was no way back into Jakob’s room, for it was already too late for that. She merely clung to the wall (what would have Žana done at a time like this?) and groped her way to a door. No option remained to her (the door was locked) other than to wait here for the brightening of the sharp beam from the flashlight sweeping murderously through the corridor right in front of her nose. From her precarious haven she could see one end of the heavy wooden bench that she had overturned with her leg and that was now lying lethargically on its back, like some sort of felled animal squirming in agony: the shadow of its fettered legs twisted and flickered in the backlighting of the oblique, whirling beam of the flashlight. She sensed that in a few moments the lethal ray would blind her and she would contort and carbonize as if struck by lightning, but before this thought could sink in completely and she could carbonize and turn black totally by herself as she shuddered with horror, she felt a giant hand grabbing her from somewhere behind her back, covering her mouth, and that same hand, in the same motion with which it had already yanked away the support behind her back, or so it seemed to her, pulled on her so that for a moment she was suspended in the air as if falling into a swimming pool or like when someone pulls a chair out from under you in that moment when you drop onto it tired and anticipating but find an emptiness much deeper than the chair itself, and then that hand pulled her somewhere up and back without ungluing itself from her mouth. Thus, barely comprehending what was happening to her, as if she had just woken up, she could hear the banging on the door and she realized simultaneously (as if that same knocking had revived her) that she was now in a safer refuge than she had been in a few moments ago when she was standing there glued to the wall: crammed under the bed where the invisible hand of the deus ex machina had stowed her in haste, she could only hear how the deus ex machina moved away from her hiding place with powerful slaps of his clogs and how he unlocked the door, and then she could see the beam of the flashlight, which wavered like the flame of a candle, slice through the narrow crack between the floor and the rough blanket hanging over the edge of the bed under which she was ensconced.

“What’s going on?” said the man in the clogs.

“Patrol!” came the voice of the bloodhound: “Somebody’s messing around in the hallway.”

“I did hear something crashing about,” said deus ex machina. “As if someone were overturning that bench. I’d just gotten back from headquarters. (I worked the night shift.) And I had just fallen asleep, when something went bang. And I remembered that somebody had put a bench out there yesterday.”

“Who could have knocked it over? Exiting the premises is forbidden now. It just struck three A.M.”

And Maks said:

“It had to be one of those women from the other end of the barracks.”

The steps of the bloodhound receded and Marija could hear Maks closing the door.

“Stay here until the barking quiets down”: in the darkness she couldn’t see his face. “Are you injured?”

“No,” she said. “I scraped my shin a bit. . Trivial detail, compared to what could have happened.” Then she added: “Just a trifle. . Maks.”

That’s why she told Žana: “I almost saw him one time. Maks, that is.”

Chapter 5