Psalm 44

“Solomon, don’t”; and when he went on as if he hadn’t heard her: “For God’s sake, Solomon!” but he continued talking with his eyes staring out vacantly and Marija still had the impression that someone else was listening to everything he was saying and not she, although almost all of what she was hearing she had seen herself a few hours earlier at the Danube: she had stood close to the younger Mr. Rozenberg. At least it seemed that way to her. In formations four across, like when they’d stand in line for the showers during a summer heat wave. The trucks kept on arriving. When the line in front of her moved forward a step or two, someone shoved her from behind and she came right up against the green peeling barrier. “It was their turn to take off their clothes.” Mr. Rozenberg continued. “The turn of that old man and woman. Naked and wrinkled examples of Homo sapiens with sagging breasts and skin that was swollen and blue from age and cold. In this condition, without the clothing or the jewelry by which Homo sapiens differentiates itself from the other, less highly evolved species of animals, the whole cohort was after all elemental and antediluvian, with only the occasional gold tooth in a jaw or (less commonly) a few earrings standing as a kind of secret sign of civilization, but these weren’t items of enough consequence to be capable of creating any significant distinction between species or individuals, because with work the human hand can become so refined (it suffices to call to mind Thorvaldsen’s Christus, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and countless violin virtuosos of whom there are, proverbially, many among the Jews) that it, which is to say “the human hand,” is in a position to erase this difference wielding nothing more than an ordinary knife, but that isn’t what I was talking about, it was those old people (I think they were the Bems, pharmacists, you must’ve known them). .” and Marija remembered the old man whispering, “Pardon me, pardon me,” like an over-cranked old street organ and she remembered the way a strong bittersweet smell like a corpse’s spread around him, and then the voice of Mr. Rozenberg edged back into her mind, himself talking like an old man in whom every thought was now reconciled to the thought of death but who was himself incapable of grasping whence the organic resistance in him was coming, that thing which biologically could make no peace with death but rather resisted and grasped and emitted foul odors and juices the way that some animals give off poisonous scents when they’re in danger, “as if in him had awakened some embryonic animal that was taking over both mind and man, and his “Pardon me” wasn’t really an expression of apology and shame but more fundamentally a desperate expression of dissatisfaction aimed at that animal which had been awakened; for when the mind is reconciled to death and has accepted nothingness, then the utterly exposed and abandoned animal begins by way of an intricate and almost mathematical inversion to fight for its survival and for its right to live (by its own means, of course), and it starts to dominate because the mind has capitulated to death, again according to its own logic that is not the logic of the animal: the animal doesn’t know about the complicated laws of probability and death doesn’t bear consideration — the animal just wants to live, and that’s it”; and right then Marija grasped why it is that around the old man a bittersweet stench of animal and excrement was floating, and then once more she caught the voice of a soldier:

“This one here reeks of cholera.”

And she saw the soldier, acting with cynical courtliness, almost like a servant, help the old man out of his greasy trousers, his old-fashioned black vest and his shirt with its stiff, starched collar. All that was visible of the old man were the whites of his eyes, as he whispered “Pardon me, pardon me,” as if he were saying “Lama, lama. .” and she heard that lama fade more and more as the old man moved away from the group, off to the left a bit, wobbly on his feet and still leaning on the old woman; then Marija steeled herself to hear the volley but when she didn’t hear anything she opened her eyes once more and looked left, over to where the voice had died out, and she saw him stoop down, naked, into the snow and understood why he had left the group; the old man was squatting in the snow, with only his head and blue shoulders visible.

“What do you think?” a youngish soldier asked. “Will his mama clean him up when he’s emptied himself out? Wipe him off all nice with a lump of snow? That would be fucking hilarious.”

“I bet she won’t,” said a mustachioed one, sticking out his hand. The first soldier shifted his rifle and was about to offer his hand too, but at the last moment he pulled it back: