Psalm 44

“Žana,” she asked all at once, “Do you believe in God?” Then she was quiet because it seemed to her that Žana hadn’t heard. Several minutes passed before she responded:

“How about you?” and then after no answer came right away: “Do you believe in God?”

“I don’t know,” Marija said. “Before I had the baby I didn’t think about it.”

“But now?”

“Now I’d like to believe in Him. Tonight of all nights I’d like to believe in God”; and then her father was speaking through her: “I mean, in my God.” Then she paused and there was a dignified silence into which that God was about to come bursting more or less embodied in the form of a newborn child — “equal parts hope, kindness, mercy, love. .”

“. . and hate,” Žana said.

Marija hardly gave this any thought, as if simply taking the measure of the sword in the hands of that little God-fetish that she had drawn out of her own blood, and said:

“Yes. And hate.”

Then Žana said, as if she had seen that absurd naïve deity as it buckled under its massive sword of hope and hatred:

“What would you say if you found that same god in the mouth (and maybe in the mind) of Dr. Nietzsche, for example? Or Obersturmbannführer Hirsch?”

“That’s impossible!” Marija exclaimed. “This is my God and my God only! No one else’s. .” and then she thought better of it not in the sense of a correction but of a minor addendum to the same thoughts:

“Perhaps my parents’ too. . and my child’s.”

Then Žana said: “Say it again,” and once more Marija dug up quantities of that same clay, and almost in the same amounts, that her father had already turned over in his efforts to construct God in his own image, and to which he bowed: equal parts hope, kindness, mercy, love, and. . “Hate!” she repeated. And Žana went even further:

“And fear!”

“So be it,” Marija said. “Is that your God too? Tell me!”

“No!” Žana said. “No, thank you.” Then she added: “That God is too much in my own image. Do you get it? In my own image.”

“The God of hope and love,” Marija said. “So what would you want Him to be like?”

“Like nothing at all!” Žana said. “I want hope and love — without God! Without having to pray or to thank anyone. . and god cannot be made in my image. Because then it might also resemble Dr. Nietzsche. Or Hirsch. Thanks but no thanks.”

“All right,” Marija said. “My God’s name is Jan. My child.”

“Très raisonnable Dieu!” Žana said. “Let us pray!”

Chapter 5

But even before her thoughts could lift her entirely into the future and she could look out over that narrow strip of no-man’s-land, for those few hours, even before she noticed the stench of decaying organic matter, she had a presentiment of — almost failing to believe it, for in her thoughts she was already far off into the future — the presence of Polja’s corpse. And it drew her back, even if she wasn’t fully aware of it, far back to her very origins, so to speak; at any rate, it brought her back from that future into which her thoughts were already marching, with one foot across the thick line of no-man’s-land.

What brought her back was hardly the smell, but rather a sensation of decay, a kind of fluid trembling, maybe simply the realization that there was a dead body in the room. And she remembered that old man, long ago, on the Danube.

“Pardon me, pardon me,” whispered the old man, leaning or actually lying with his full weight on the elderly woman who was staring blankly ahead in the direction of the green peeling fence. And Marija remembered this: she came back from the Danube and found no one, and it was all clear to her. She took several dresses and a photo album; she even took a bundle of greeting cards and love letters and went dazedly into the street, heading to Aunt Lela’s house, and she paid no attention to anyone or anything, not to the police or to the corpses in the snow, but she just walked on with the small cardboard suitcase in her hands that were turning blue; and then she went into Aunt Lela’s place and placed her suitcase on the table, opened the spring locks and gave Auntie the album, subsequently catching a glimpse of Mr. Rozenberg fils, who — if her mind wasn’t playing tricks on her — she had seen in the line-up at the Danube.

When she came in, Aunt Lela said: