Psalm 44

“I guess you can hold the candle for us,” the first man said, kicking the other in the stomach. The girl’s father then collapsed to his knees, and so two men in civilian uniforms ran up and knocked him into the snow with their clubs. One of them stood with his foot on the father’s neck while the other twisted the prone man’s moustache around his fingers and then with a single jerk ripped it off his face and then blood spurted across the snow; the father bellowed and tried to free his neck from the boot but then the first man leaned on his neck with his whole weight; then the second one pulled out a short bayonet that he carried on the belt around his heavy civilian coat barely reaching down to his hips and he sliced off the man’s nose. He threw the bloody leftover out in front of the crowd: “Let that be a warning. Don’t stick your noses into everything,” he said. The one who had grabbed the girl had already dragged her over to the steps from which a heavy machine gun was aimed at the crowd, and they could still see the girl resisting, clutching at the snow, and then, naked and exhausted, she collapsed, seemingly unconscious, and then, while the man removed the belt from around his coat, she let out a scream and dashed back toward the crowd, but the man swung his belt and looped it over her head: “So we’re still not ready to calm down, eh?” he said, “Haven’t come to terms with your fate yet, have you?”: with one hand he tightened the belt around her throat while with the other he twisted her arm and he pinned her bare legs with his boot. She tried to free her throat from the slipknot but the man drew the belt tighter and she dropped into the snow and after that he turned her over onto her back and with great difficulty forced apart her knees as when someone uses his bare fingernails to open up a shell;—and afterward: she remembered how the man got to his feet and tightened his belt again around his short gray coat and how he knelt down next to the girl and whipped out his bayonet, and then the thing Marija didn’t see but understood nevertheless: how the man squeezed the girl’s cheeks with his left hand until her jaws spread apart and then with two strokes sliced open her mouth on both sides all the way to her ears and then how he pounded on her gold molars with the butt of his gun until he could shake them out into his palm: her head gaped open like some sort of freakish man-eating fish; Marija grasped what she had not seen: for the earrings, no bayonet had been required: when tissue freezes, it becomes brittle and cracks easily.

But she told Aunt Lela none of this. She simply repeated what she had said earlier: “I saw all of it myself, Aunt Lela. I remember everything: from somewhere on the other bank the wind carried across the melody of that waltz: traaaa-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la.”

Then she felt a warm wetness coming from the diaper she had wrapped around her child; it penetrated to her skin and delivered her back into the present, which in the following instant would again turn into the past or the future, and she said:

“Is there time for me to do it?” And without waiting for the answer: “For me to get Jan ready.”

And even before Žana could say anything at all in response, Marija began unwrapping the wet cloth from the child.

Chapter 5