Psalm 44

She remembered: at that time all of the women who had arrived with her were already dead, likewise all those who had replaced them in her barracks in Auschwitz. She no longer recalled faces, more just columns of skeletal reminiscences. Though faceless, she could still however remember some, maybe even all of the women she had gotten to know during those days when a mechanical hand wasn’t dispatching each and every one of those countenances into oblivion; though mainly recalled the Babylonian confusion of languages, the times when somebody, so-and-so, would slip through the fingers of that mechanical hand, especially when it was one of the early arrivals, one of those that formed a solemn procession ending with Polja, who was now lying there dead beside her. The first was Eržika Ignac. The one who Dr. Nietzsche picked right at the beginning, as a guinea pig. Then Nameless, who played in the prisoners’ orchestra;—but the mechanical hand that would light a red light to warn of rebellion and go into action to sever contact before any misfortune could occur, or at least before the great shock of a dose of high-voltage current arrived, that hand had now compressed the column of women with one powerful sweep and covered it up with a clean white shroud of the type placed on the catafalques of heroes or virgins; Marija was the only one, the only one for a long time now, who stood next to that catafalque like a soldier who by some miracle had remained alive after the explosion of a bomb that fell into the trench where his unit was fighting, and who now stands bare-headed next to the mass grave, with flowers in hand, reading from the marble the names of those who had been his comrades-in-arms and with whom he had shared his cigarettes and exchanged in moments of weakness family photographs and memories, and who now in anguish thinks back to all of those friends at rest under the marble obelisk, transformed into golden letters, and he wonders how this could be, by dint of what miracle had he missed being part of the formation at that final roll call, for his place was there, in that line, right alongside the first in the row, who was A, and the one behind, who was C, and whose names were now impressed in the marble of the monument.

That’s how she felt now in front of the obelisk of memories: standing with a bouquet of flowers and amazed, hardly believing her eyes. Consequently she now needed to search for Jakob in her memory, there where she had left him nearly an eternity ago, actually not quite a year ago, if one assumes that at some point she really took leave of him, for in all honesty spiritual presence is itself nothing more than a marble obelisk, but now she wanted to find that Jakob, the one who was more than an obelisk perpetually present, because an obelisk is raised to those who are absent for good, which is the same thing as death, albeit a somewhat nicer way of saying it.