Psalm 44

“Edi, please, Edi, leave the child alone. I’ll take your shoes off. She’s still tired out from the trip. Can’t you see that she’s tired?” and then, after a brief, perilous interval, her father’s voice rang out:

“She ought to get used to it. . Soon she won’t have a choice. All girls. .” Then once more her mother’s outcry:

“Edi! Please, Edi! Don’t be cruel to the child.” And her father’s voice again:

“Our young lady doesn’t even know what it means to be forbidden to ride the streetcar. .”

(“Edi, I beg you!”)

“. . or what FÜR JUDEN VERBOTEN means; well now, she should learn it then; it’s high time she learns, and when, if not now?”: and then he said, having miraculously sobered up all at once (at least it appeared that way to her eyes or maybe it was also because he had put his glasses with the steel frames back on, as when he was getting ready to quiz her about her German lessons) — “Come on then, give your nose a good blow with my handkerchief, sweetie”—and he wiped her nose with his handkerchief that stunk of tobacco, as did his fingers, and he went on to say to her that she should go wash her hands and bring him the German dictionary, but there was no way for her to foresee what he was getting at and why it had occurred to him to give her a vocabulary quiz now in the middle of vacation — but there he was already holding the book pressed to his chest, the same way women do with prayer books or lousy orators do with their cheat sheets (and her mother was still standing to the side, and it seemed either that she didn’t know what she should do or that she was simply waiting to see what he, her father that is, would do next), and without opening the dictionary so much as a single time, for neither she nor he had need of that, he asked Marija how to say in German: to think, to breathe, to live, to love and several other verbs that have now slipped her mind, and as she was answering without pausing to ponder he merely uttered “Bravo” after every word and nodded like a professor, and then, at the end, after one final “bravo,” he said:

“Now the young lady should insert in the appropriate place the words VERBOTEN and FÜR JUDEN VERBOTEN” and her mother could only cry out one more time:

“Edi! For heaven’s sake, Edi! I beg you!”

Chapter 5