Psalm 44

The sound of Žana’s steps reached her ears: this liberated her from thoughts of Polja. And then all at once it dawned on her with great conviction that something must have happened. Whatever it was that had held Žana up this long. A message from Jakob. Or from Maks. (“That Maks” was undoubtedly up to something. Present but invisible.) But Žana said nothing. Marija only heard her light, conspiratorial footsteps. (Suddenly this seemed extremely odd to her: Žana had still not taken off her boots.) Then the rustling of straw, the dull thud of her heavy boots shed, the rusty sound of the tin can of water, and once more the rustling of straw, this time over by Polja, and then: the slight clinking of Polja’s teeth against the can. Marija wanted, in vain, to give some sort of signal, to say something about Polja, not only to express her doubt that she could accompany them on their journey but also to say at last what both she and Žana had known since the first day Polja came back sick, the thing that hovered between them unstated but certain: Polja is going to die. But Žana emancipated Marija from that responsibility and she heard her give a whisper that was eerily like listening to another person give voice to your own newborn thought:

“Elle va mourir à l’aube!” Žana said.

Marija merely sighed in response. She felt her throat constricting. As if she were only now becoming aware — just now when Žana said it — of what she herself had already accepted since the day Polja had come back ill: she was going to die. Now Polja’s discordant rambling seemed more audible than the distant song of the big guns. That’s the reason Marija had wanted to start up a conversation with Žana and have her talk about the cannons, about Jakob, about the escape, ultimately about anything, just so that it would set her free from this nightmare and so that she wouldn’t hear Polja’s death rattle, so that she wouldn’t think about how even after she was dead nothing was going to happen, not now not afterward not in two or in two hundred twenty-two days — just as nothing had happened up to this point; no running away, no Jakob, no Maks, not even any cannons, nothing was going to happen except that same thing which was happening here and now to Polja: she was fading slowly, spluttering, as a candle gutters and goes out.

The rhythmic beaming of the floodlights that entered through a crack in the wall tore again and again, clawlike, at the darkness of the barracks, and Marija caught sight of Žana as she stood between a beam of light and the wall; she stepped into it as if to join the illumination and then disappeared again into the darkness. From there, out of that momentarily illuminated darkness, she could hear her voice, her whisper, which like a focused beam of light cut the silence:

“Jan. . How is Jan?”

“He went to sleep,” Marija answered. “He’s sleeping.” But that wasn’t what she’d thought she was going to hear from Žana, she’d expected something different, something completely different than the question Jan. . How is Jan? and she was even certain that Žana had something else to say and it even seemed to her that when Žana greeted her in a whisper, and even before that point, when Žana had still only been thinking of speaking (and it had seemed to the listener that she knew exactly the instant when Žana would start to talk and shatter the silence), that she was going to say something else, for she had to say something completely different, something that (nevertheless) would not be unrelated to this issue; it even struck her now, suddenly (more from the pounding of her pulse than from an actual understanding), that the question Jan. . How is Jan? didn’t differ in essence from the question that Žana really needed to ask. Thus — wondering whether it’s possible to give a whisper even a tiny measure of nuanced differentiation, but wanting nonetheless to make clear that she’s grasped the fact that Žana has something else to say, and that this answer of Marija’s is also nothing more than a preliminary — she gave Žana a status report:

“I washed his diapers. Now I’m drying them. I stretched them out down there, and he’s lying on top of me, here,” as if Žana could see the slight signal from her hand with which she wanted to say: up here, on my chest. “That’s why I wasn’t in a position to do anything about Polja,” but she immediately regretted saying that, not because it wasn’t the truth, but because it seemed to her that doing so had sliced the thread and diverted Žana’s thoughts from what was important; or at least that doing so had postponed by a moment or so Žana’s saying what she still needed to say.