Danilo Kiš - Psalm 44

But she only felt a sharp pinch in her heavy shoes. And that was all. But the sensation that followed — and it came immediately after she forced herself to let go and grasped that she was on firm ground — was that every one of these steps she was now taking, after so long a wait, was being taken by her free will alone, free of commands, free of inspections (albeit still accompanied by the fear of sneak attacks), and pervaded by such a sense of ease that she no longer felt her tight boots and the weight of her steps. And she hardly even felt her fear. Or at least not the same fear that she had almost always felt up to the present moment: the fear of events developing so as to carry her along without a single iota of involvement on her part. This new kind of fear, she thought, is the kind that men feel. And Žana, of course. She called it active fear . It was something completely different. Her hands were on at least one of the levers controlling these events.

They lay pressed to the damp earth, which had just barely begun to thaw. The baby was lying between them and Marija thought for an instant how he knew nothing about what was taking place around them and within them; he just felt the humid and viscous stain, and this place, where he could barely be seen among his cloth rags, and where his tiny nose was probably a little flushed and reddened by cold, and what’s more: the sweet-insipid and thick, sticky taste of warm milk in his oral cavity and sometimes a confused, hesitant rocking. Then she felt hard dirt scattering against her lips and face and its fragile flavor and the nearly imperceptible yet heavy scent of soil that her sense of smell scarcely registered and that anyway you take in more through your tongue and guts: it crackled on her palate and crunched between her teeth while the pores on her skin absorbed it, and then it began to circulate in her blood, which grew thicker because of it and became strong like wine. But she wasn’t thinking about all that; it was only a dim, instinctual feeling in her guts as she flattened herself on the ground and tasted the flavor of earth on her lips.

At the same time she felt Žana’s hand on her biceps and then came an ultra-quiet whisper: “Be careful the child doesn’t start crying,” and in addition: Marija felt Žana squirming and breathing and starting to move. Then she wrapped the baby in her arms and dragging herself along on her knees and elbows (the way the females of some species carry their young when they’re in danger), head bowed, pushing off on the ground with her left hand, she started following Žana’s breathing. From time to time she’d raise her head as if to sniff the air and investigate the obscure space stretching out before her. She sensed above her brow the invisible expanse of the sky and the fresh spaces of the open night. She had no desire to examine what was happening behind her back, where the spotlight must be. She went forward through the darkness creeping behind Žana as if she were climbing along an invisible horizon. As if she were sucking in blood and vital fluids from the very earth and air. Then suddenly she realized that they had reached the wire. Žana slipped through like a cat and she knew: Žana is on the other side ; then she held the child out and thought Jan, I have saved Jan . And then she realized that Žana had laid the baby on the ground and was lifting the wire to allow Marija to pass through. But then, before she could think The important thing is that Jan is beyond the wire , she considered, horrified, what it would mean for the child to burst out crying and give them away. And next the child did start to cry and she had just barely gotten herself through the wire and just been able to think once more This is absolutely the worst moment to die when they were blinded by the floodlight and she threw herself onto the child and enveloped him tightly and she had only just heard the HALT! HALT! rising up like the voice of death itself as she lay there, half-dead, anticipating with the part of her mind that was still clinging to life the burst of machine-gun fire that would nail her in the back, and at the same time she was seized by a gut feeling: that she should suffocate her baby. That thought jolted her conscience and left her forehead scorched before fizzling out on the tips of her fingers even before she clenched them over the child’s mouth. Just as Žana was shaking her she understood the words RUN! RUN! and almost simultaneously a sentence came to her, unclear and at first fully meaningless and hollow, a sentence originating at a distance greater than the one from which Žana spoke: ACH! THEY ARE COMING TO ROB US AGAIN! GET A MOVE ON! NOW! THEY ARE COMING BACK TO LOOT! and then immediately Žana’s whisper from nearby making sense of everything in one fell swoop WE ARE SAFE and she sensed Žana’s hand squeezing hers and realized that Žana felt her struggling with the thought of suffocating the child and that Žana also realized that it had not yet registered for Marija that they were safe — something that she would only grasp later: the Germans had thought when they heard the baby crying that the escapees must have been people from the surrounding villages (how else to explain their child) who had come to steal supplies (for, since the Allies had been pressing forward, their army in its retreat had laid waste to everything behind it and hunger and cold were advancing too, with women starting to forage and steal everything they came into contact with in order to feed themselves and their children whose fathers were still off making war around the world or who lay piled up in mass graves somewhere in the Urals or on the Volga, at El Alamein or in the Baltic or Pacific Ocean. .) Then the child, abruptly, ceased crying. Unexpectedly, just as he’d started. Now all Marija could hear was Žana’s breathing next to her and she felt the pressure of the other woman’s hand. The faroff thudding and rumbling of big guns. And the howling of a dog in the midst of the night.

The child still lay beneath her, but when she came to understand this and lifted her arm and liberated him, he again began to cry with the exultant full-throated voice of a newly freed animal, and from the distance responses came in the form of the rabid barking of a dog and furious artillery volleys. The little creature kept crying in the intense blackness of the night, and his voice rose, twisting like a vine, like the stalk of some miraculously green plant glimpsed among the cavities of skulls, amid the ashes of a fireplace, from out of the entrails of a corpse; and from far away replied the cannon, proclaiming the terrible love between nations.

Beside the rutted road at the point where it branched and continued in two directions, Žana discovered a dilapidated sign. This was on the third day of their flight, not counting that first night. They found themselves some five hundred kilometers from Berlin. Most of the distance they had covered in carts, together with masses of refugees. Žana wanted to make it to Strasbourg. Marija was looking for a way to get to Poland where, as agreed upon, she’d wait for Jakob.

“Take the child,” Žana said and handed the bundle off to Marija.

It was a crisp foggy morning. Žana hurried down the high embankment and turned the road sign over like it was a corpse. Next to the mud-caked signpost, which had barely been moved from the spot where it had lain, a dark fossilized stripe remained; last year’s grass lay in it, withered and pressed as if for preservation. Marija was stamping her feet at the edge of the road, eyeing the pockmarked letters.

“What does it say?” she asked. “What does it say?”

Žana made no reply. She was seated on a stone, with her head bent down low, preoccupied with the bullet-riddled board.