Psalm 44

That was when a kapo ordered Eržika Kon and her to head for the station and deliver something there. She didn’t know if this order was genuine or if it was only one of Maks’s tricks to make it possible for her to run into Jakob, but she set off toward the station with Eržika Kon, accompanied by a soldier who walked in lockstep with them. She still did not know (and even to this day has not found out) if this had simply been some subterfuge on the part of Maks to enable a meeting with Jakob or if it was mere happenstance that she was summoned from the group and told to go to the depot.

On the way she was wondering if this transport, supposedly containing Jakob, was going to make a stop in the station or just pass through, but she was utterly incapable of doing anything, although she knew that everything beyond this point depended on her and that she had no idea what time it was nor could she inquire of anyone what time it was, although it did appear to her that the time was at hand (they were walking along the new road that the camp inmates had built and she several times considered asking the soldier what time it was but then she took fright at the thought of putting everything at risk and forfeiting the opportunity that had come her way for her to see Jakob) and from that she concluded that Maks had had a hand in all this, but she didn’t know if they needed to hurry up or slow their stride even though the soldier was dictating their pace.

And so all at once she found herself at the station, looking at the long row of sealed cars out of which peered phantomlike faces at the small grated windows and she recognized the Babel of cries for help that she herself had heard at the time she was transported in cattle cars of that same type, that outcry which becomes a dry and morbid whisper: in all the languages of Europe the word water being pronounced as if it were the very stuff of life, even more so than that ancient Hellenic ur-element and essential substance belonging to every living thing, along with air and earth, of course — the way that word now transformed itself on Polja’s lips, the chaos of the cattle car shrinking to the monotone whisper of a moribund. And then the train moved just as she caught sight of it, right in front of her nose like some enormous antediluvian dinosaur ejected from its watery home onto firm dry land several millennia after its epoch, and she sensed all at once the thirst in Jakob’s guts and in her own and she began to run down the line of cars, now starting to rock, and they collided with a bang and she was like a condemned soul having her guts gnawed out by the plague and she was utterly transformed into screaming into the cry into “Jakob! Jakob!” as if that reptile were beginning to rouse itself and make a getaway, gasping for breath, completely metamorphosed into that stegocephalian dinosaurian Babylonian and European “Water! Water!” and suddenly she saw a rag appear from a high, narrow window of the car ten meters in front of her, like a reliquiae reliquiarum of Jakob, and after that the hand holding that rag and waving it like death’s own flag — that clenched hand without a face, motioning with the rag — that was Jakob now, the Jakob who had remained when with a bang the stage and set had been destroyed and she looked backward: gray drifts of dust.

But Žana was still going on:

“Maks’s orders,” she said, not waiting for the flood of blood inside Marija to ebb, the blood that was pounding her and rocking her off her foundations: “Tonight at 2:30,” she said. “Get prepared and try to get some sleep. You need to be rested. I’ll wait for Maks’s signal: two long and two short knocks.”

“Okay. I’ll try,” Marija responded. “I’ll try to sleep at least a bit.”

Chapter 2

Žana lay on her stomach in the straw, propped up on her elbows, head thrust between her palms; her legs trembled slightly. Chewing on a short piece of straw, she looked out through the crack in the direction of the fence. Periodically a fine edge of light slid across her face and tore open the intense darkness of the barracks; then Marija, without moving her head or disturbing the baby asleep on top of her, could see Žana’s profile with that straw in her mouth.

“She’ll be dead by dawn,” Marija said, but her voice made itself heard against her will; and then as if meant for herself: “I should return this sheet to Polja.” She heard Žana’s suppressed sigh and thought That is an answer, but right away she caught another whisper:

“So much the better for her. You understand: tomorrow it will be harder to die. Even in an hour or two it’s going to be harder”; and then, “It’s already hard enough to die.”

“Because of hoping?” Marija asked.