Psalm 44

They moved noiselessly, just barely touching the wall with their shoulders. There was no gap to be seen in the thick rubber of the night. This because the electricity had been cut. Otherwise a light-bulb would be burning at the end of the hallway. Marija felt Žana touching the rough surface of the unseen wall with her elbow and stepping forward utterly without sound, like a cat, while she despite her concentration and effort dragged her bare feet over the cold concrete and wet boards, trudging along with uncertain steps, with a cautious gait, like a frightened woman and not like a cat at all. But then a moment came in which when she had succeeded in recognizing herself, and Žana, and the child in Žana’s grasp — when she had unwillingly become both a participant and an observer (as when a writer objectifies his or her personal experience even before approaching it as a writer): she suddenly saw herself, from far enough away that one glance took in herself and Žana and the baby but also from nearby enough for her to remain if only for that moment a close but objective observer — seeing how their shadows gleamed white upon the dark nocturnal backdrop: ghosts passing through a cemetery. The mute presence of other rooms, invisible and inaudible, contributed to this feeling like graves yawning open on either side of the corridor, hollowed out of the thick dark wall of the night. Straw rustled somewhere. As if all the women in the rooms were corpses. Polja’s corpse. They were all Polja. Then she sensed the almost physical presence of death and of dark green bruises on the flesh of the night. And all at once, from somewhere in front of them, the scent of the wind and the night that was entering through some window left slightly open, a window invisible in the blackness, or through a crack in the glass or a wall, and Marija felt the damp, ice-cold wind waft in on the back of a new quiet, a quiet that had a different taste and smell and specific weight from the dense quiet of the graveyard that she had left behind: at this moment she was taking in the heavy-milky freshness of a child’s mouth and the sourish warm smell of urine and moreover the crisp current of the night and the clouds and the unseen stars, scents that penetrated like soft light into her agitated senses made oversensitive by the headlong circulation of her blood. They turned abruptly to the right and she thought it might be possible for Žana to have gotten confused but she didn’t say anything because she had more faith at this moment in Žana’s resourcefulness than in her own senses. Then Žana’s hand stopped squeezing and Marija was left standing motionless, as if rooted to the spot. Without a compass. Blinking. But a faint scratching sound let her know: Žana had picked up a board. “Psss,” Žana said in a nearly inaudible hiss. Then she once more squeezed Marija’s upper arm and Marija translated this for herself: “Stop.” Then Žana pulled her downward and she fell to her knees and bent her head. She understood: the searchlight was already playing its silent scale of uniform notes — do-re-mi-faso-la-ti-do — above their heads, and Marija could see now on the wall opposite how through the gap as on white keys its fingers danced and how that resonant light drew nearer and nearer growing into an intense and anxious fortissimo that took her breath away. She lay there, clinging to the wall, between Žana and the baby, right at the very edge of the opening that had been made in the floor of the building. Dark square stain just like an open grave. Two or three boards thrown across it. Everything below was swallowed up immediately and dissolved in the gloom that was becoming even thicker. “Give me the child after I let myself down,” Žana said and that sentence reverberated in Marija like an echo, Give me the child after I let myself down! Give me the child after I let myself down! Then she heard the boards rub against each other as Žana displaced them and then she was trembling and she heard the light thump when Žana touched bottom. Then Marija felt her way to the rim of the opening and leaned over the invisible emptiness. From below—Žana’s breathing. She picked up her child, leaned over the breathing, and immediately felt the weight that had weighed down her hands vanishing abruptly as if she had dropped it into the abyss. “Be careful that you don’t knock down the boards,” Žana said from underneath, from that marvelously confident “underneath” that was giving her the firm footing of damp earth beneath her feet while Marija was still treading the slippery and unsteady boards onstage. Propped up on both elbows and with her body rocking gently, she hesitated for a moment. She could feel that every one of her movements now carried momentous significance for Jan and for Žana as well as for herself. Even for Jakob. Yes, even for him. Dangling over the opening that separated one world and time, one chapter of her history and fate from another, she felt again, without being entirely conscious of it, the denseness of these moments through which passed a nearly tangible current — the past, the present, and the future intersecting, a compact three-way crossroads of time — the dim and dark recorded past cutting across narrow bands of bright new moments and enormous distances sewn with bones and graves (not merely the ones that remained there just behind their turned backs but also all of the graves that she bore in her memory and in her blood, and even all the ones of the unknown people in her family album); the present, swaying slightly in the instant of its birth, issuing forth from the ruptures in the past and, having reached the light of day, heading off to submerge once more in the unknown obscurity of the future: a future that always stands as though on firm footing above the swaying minutes of the present, but which is nonetheless uncertain and unmeasured, dependent upon numerous factors that slice into and blow apart its frames of reference. Then she thought Polja, as if someone were reading aloud the inscription on a grave in which the past had been interred, and then she thought, as if some vague ray from the future into which she was letting herself drop had blinded her, Did Žana get the child out of the way? — and she flinched the way you’d flinch if you began walking up a stairway you’d only imagined: the ground was just a few centimeters beneath her feet after all. If she stretched out her toes she could touch the ground with her now-dangling legs. But she was afraid that her untied shoes would drop off before she reached the bottom. And then she thought of trying to soften her impact. So she pressed her feet together and held them parallel to the floor along some imaginary horizontal line. The bottom seemed like a deep chasm to her, into which she was supposed to hurl herself with acrobatic skill, or near enough. As though she were jumping straight into the heart of the future. Leaping over the present.