Psalm 44

“Do you know Kenjeri?” Mr. Rozenberg asked, not looking at Aunt Lela or at Marija or at anyone living but rather at someplace on the ice-sheeted windowpane and on the broken icy surface of the Danube. “Everyone in this district knew him: the community knacker, Kenjeri. I don’t actually know his first name. He went by his surname. Well, this old Kenjeri has become head honcho over there. You understand: the man’s vocation was a handy one”—and Marija recalled his wolflike jaws and his dirty yellow teeth like a horse’s and his sparse moustache and bristly beard and the lit cigarette sticking to his lips while he said to her mother: “What’re you gonna do? Business is business” (that happened two or three years ago): Dingo hadn’t come home all morning and at noon, just as they were sitting down to lunch, they heard him whining and her mother said: “That’s Dingo!” and she stood up so she could see what it was and then appearing in their door was that set of wolf ’s lips, a cigarette butt on the lower one, saying: “You should watch him better,” and what’s more: “You have to pay the fine,” and right after that were the dirty yellow teeth like a horse’s and his saying “business is business”; thus Marija was able to see all of the things that the younger Mr. Rozenberg had seen after he’d already moved beyond the green peeling fence and she could now imagine almost as well as he that face with the bristly beard as Kenjeri pushed a woman’s neck into the snow with his heavy boot (and Marija thought that that was the very same woman who had gotten undressed after the old man) and she could see, in the spot where there had once been a face (a face that she could no longer remember), a monstrous stain of concentrated terror, there where before there had been eyes and the lines of a face petrified by cold as when bronze gives off a green patina through its creases; and Marija could remember everything as if she’d experienced it herself: how the boy (judging by his wolfish jaws, the son of that same crook) held the nearly dead woman by the legs and the way the woman writhed like a slaughtered hen when the teeth of the saw tore into the flesh on her side and the way Kenjeri went “prrrr” and then snapped at his son, “Steady, you moron!” and the way his son clenched his teeth and tightened his grip on the woman’s legs and then Kenjeri pulling the saw back a bit and pushing it forward and then drawing the serrated tool back forcefully toward himself when the steel found its way down between two vertebrae in her backbone and how, with streams of blood gushing and flooding out into the snow on both sides, the saw began to squish and slip on intestines and flesh. Then, the man snapping at his son once more, “Forget the bitch. I guess her legs won’t be running off without her head,” and the younger Kenjeri still squeezing the woman’s legs and his body twitching and shaking and his father staring at him in amazement, showing his dirty horselike teeth afresh and in protest: “What’s wrong with you, you idiot? Is it that you aren’t used to blood, or do you actually feel sorry for that whore?” And how he pushed his boy with the handle of the saw and how the boy abruptly dropped the woman’s legs and tumbled over into the snow and rolled over onto his belly and submerged his big curly head in the white and bloody snowy mush; then the Kenjeri talking while the boy shook with sobs: “Let’s get these here ready and then we’ll talk,” and then to placate, to instruct, “it’s easier to saw than to bust up ice,” then the kid slowly, indifferently, getting to his feet without raising his head (just excremental snow in his dark hair), then his wiping his nose with the back of his hand and again picking up the legs of their latest victim, gnashing his teeth with the strain, while his father took hold once more of his tool after having taken the preliminary step of pushing the sundered body through the hole and under the ice; Marija even heard the melody that the wind brought from the left bank of the Danube and she felt each revolution of the gramophone disk leaving behind bloody bites on her body from the steel needle: the “Blue Danube” waltz was still fashionable at that time; and then all of a sudden Aunt Lela was standing in front of Mr. Rozenberg and making him snap out of it by yelling into his face:

“Enough, Solomon, I beg you,” and then, as he stared into space; “Stop, Solomon. Don’t go any further with this,” and then Marija spoke and was amazed at hearing her own voice in this way:

“I saw it too,” and then she wanted to explain to Aunt Lela what it had been like. She remembered: out of the crowd that had been driven into the courtyard of the municipal administration building, a man had singled out a large-breasted girl with freckles right away and ordered her to come with him for an “extra inspection,” as he put it, and then a third person turned up, apparently the girl’s father, and said that he would go with them.