Psalm 44

“I don’t know,” Žana replied. “Maybe because of hoping.” Then she got up and Marija realized, although she didn’t see it, that Žana had risen to give Polja the can with water; “Now it’s a human being that’s dying,” Žana said. “You understand: a human being and not an animal.”

Then Marija repeated what she had said a short while before, but she wasn’t thinking of that, she was already thinking I should return the sheet to Polja and she was wondering if Polja could hear the artillery and she was thinking it would be better if Polja couldn’t hear it, but all she said was:

“Yes, it’s on account of hope”; and Žana repeated:

“Up to now it was an animal dying. It’s easier, I believe, to die like that.”

The other woman didn’t respond. All she felt was the way her body was going numb from lying there, immobile, in the damp: the wet diapers she had wrapped around her naked body were releasing an icy moisture that her skin was absorbing from her stomach to the middle of her thighs; it gave the impression that her skin had become pasty and rotten like that of a corpse, although she didn’t really feel like she had skin at all anymore, rather just some gelatinous mass, which together with the wet rags was glued to her bones. But the child wasn’t cold; she thought: I folded Polja’s sheet over twice and laid it across the wet diapers so that the moisture wouldn’t reach the baby. I didn’t dare put the wet diapers on my stomach, she thought. I could only wrap them around my thighs, and I didn’t dare take off my underwear; it wouldn’t be good if I got my period now. It’s always so unpredictable; a few sniffles are enough to bring it on; then she thought that it would be best if she got up and moved the diapers a bit lower. It was probably just past ten now, and Maks was going to give the signal after two, and then she would have to move and she was frightened by the prospect of her legs completely freezing up and turning into some icy, inert mass.

Thus it was necessary to undertake something, above all to push those damp diapers lower and to return the sheet to Polja. But then, on the very cusp of the movement with which she wanted to raise the infant off of herself and to position him so she could stretch her limbs and give Polja back the sheet, she stopped, restrained the movement that was almost finished being born, feeling the way its mild charge crept across her body (a charge that should have set her hand into motion) and sagged from the tips of her fingers: Polja is going to die, and she sensed with bitterness that it was precisely this thought that stayed her limbs, not because she now at long last comprehended that Polja was really not coming with them (she was conscious of that: though Polja would remain alive until two, she would nevertheless not be able to come with them), but rather because she realized that she herself had acquiesced to the fact that Polja would not be going with them.

“Žana,” she said, and when she noticed the other woman had moved: “Help me pull Polja’s sheet out from under the baby.”

“He has more need of it, the baby,” Žana said unexpectedly. “And you do too. . Do you understand. .?”—and before Marija could gather her thoughts and say anything, she heard the rustling of the straw and the quiet knocking of the tin can.

“You see, it’s too late for that,” said Žana. “For Polja, it’s too late already.”

“What time is it?” Marija asked, at the same time as a narrow blade of light scraped over Žana’s face and she saw her lips moving:

“It’s not yet midnight. I don’t think it’s midnight yet.”

Marija was just then shifting her frozen legs.

“I got my period,” she said. “Or so it seems.”

“That’s from the fear,” Žana said; then she corrected herself: “From the excitement.”