Psalm 44

“My God, you aren’t a child anymore! Haven’t you seen anything around you that might give you a hint?” and then, as if she were pointing out the letters in a primer to someone just learning their alphabet or pretending not to know what was what or even that he couldn’t see them: “Read that. There, you see, the white letters. By the door. . Do you understand? You speak good German. . Yes, that placard on the streetcar. Next to the door. FÜR JUDEN VERBOTEN. Do you understand: für Juden verboten? Do you understand now?”—and Marija grasped it all immediately, at least as far as the translation from German went, of all things her mother hadn’t needed to translate that, but she understood something else too in the murky fabric of events, though still she felt she hadn’t been given sufficient cause to alter the expression on her face or to stop pursing her own lips like that, like a cantankerous little witch, and then she resolved firmly and just out of spite to tell her father everything anyway, in order to find out the remainder of what she didn’t know, the remainder of the truth that was still hiding from her but that she must ultimately find out, lest she remain or become a genuinely cantankerous witch and go on pursing her lips forever, or at least until she finally came to know what it meant that people all of a sudden, while she’d been in the village, had written FÜR JUDEN VERBOTEN on the streetcars, which is to say why this was so, why she was no longer allowed to ride on the streetcar,

What about the yellow one, Mama

Not the yellow one either

child, you aren’t allowed on any streetcar

understand: not any

But can Ilonka Kutaj ride them?