Читаем Psalm 44 полностью

“Your hands are all Jewed up,” he said. “But all right: I’ll bet this that she will,” and Marija saw against the backdrop of grubby snow the yellowish metal begin to swing around his hand, hanging from something that she had no way of seeing but knew was a chain, the way that she knew, so to speak, without looking, that the swinging piece of metal was a watch.

And she will always remember this: someone else in her watching all of it (she had slowly sunk into sleepy lethargy and barely even felt the cold anymore): just a few meters in front of her a young woman emerged out of the line-up, almost immediately followed by the dark swirl of a young girl’s hair; then she saw the woman bending over the girl and removing her woolen sweater over her curls that bounced and swayed momentarily, and then the white sweater flying in a short arc onto the pile, on top of the old man’s black pants and waistcoat and then a light blue dress of poplin, and then the slow descent of stockings and the sliding of petite shoes down from the top of the pile, followed by the woman’s trembling as she took the little girl into her arms as if hiding her own nakedness. Lastly the woman lifted up her own reddish-blue foot out of the snow with a slow, hesitating movement, but before she could take a step she turned around as if she were standing on a rotating stage and, still keeping the child pressed tightly against her and sheltering and protecting it with her hands, she said in a voice that sounded dead but did not tremble: “Please, when. . our turn. My little girl. . catching cold,” after which the soldiers exchanged two or three glances and Marija saw a malicious clean-shaven soldier bow down so far he almost touched the snow and her bluish feet with his forehead and heard him hiss:

“You’ll get there in time, I beg you to be patient. In just a bit there’ll be kike tea, a ton of tea. The entire Danube, if you will”; then the polyphonic explosion of the suppressed laughter of soldiers and then the sting of those mouths split wide with laughter on the woman’s face from which was peeling layer after layer of reddish-blue and pale green color, and then once more the woman’s slow turn and step across the snow as if on a rotating set. And just then, at Aunt Lela’s house, listening to the whispering and almost uninflected voice of Mr. Rozenberg fils, Marija began to understand everything and to see it all, even those things that had happened ten meters out in front of her, hidden on the other side of the green peeling barrier:

Beyond, at a distance of two or three meters from the cabins, a hole had been smashed in the ice and a plank thrown across it (a plank that was really an old diving board); every now and then a man in civilian clothes (the former lifeguard from the beach) shoved the corpses under the ice with a large gaff, whenever the hole would get clogged; yes, Marija even saw what she was now hearing told for the first time by Mr. Rozenberg: she experienced even that — perhaps because she knew Kenjeri.

Перейти на страницу:

Похожие книги