Psalm 44

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.

“What does it say?” Marija repeated. “Wipe off the mud. I can’t see anything from here. You know, this fog reminds me of. .”

Žana started to move, lowering herself to her knees. Her head was nearly touching the striped pole. Her arms dangled superfluously, uselessly, at her side.

“What does it say?” Marija asked for the third time. “From here none of it is legible.”

Then Žana said, barely loud enough to be heard and without lifting her head:

“It doesn’t matter what it says. It’s all the same. I can’t read it either.”

“Then we’ll go on in this direction, to the left,” Marija said. “I think we have to go this way. To the left. Don’t you think so too?”

Once more Žana gave no answer. Her body just quivered.

“Are you crying, Žana? You’re crying!” Marija said.

At which point Žana declared firmly:

“Go. Go left. I think that road leads to. . I don’t know where. I don’t know what direction this road sign faced originally. But you should go that way. To the left.”

“And you?” she said. “What about you?”

So Žana turned her head and raised that small hand of hers that had been hanging there as if unneeded. Marija thought she was going to point to the right. Or somewhere into the fog, across the fields. But her hand, with its finger half-clenched, stopped around the level of her eyes, though she didn’t touch them. She went on to say:

“Farewell, Marija! Adieu. . And don’t turn around; I implore you: just do not turn around. I believe it’ll be easier for you that way.”

Marija was still standing at the edge of the road. She watched, panic-stricken, as Žana, now lying on her belly, quaked with sobbing. And suddenly she felt her vision clouding and the baby in her arms becoming heavy as lead. . And wanting to lean on Žana’s shoulder, she embraced only emptiness, and stumbled and then turned and with a frantic burst of pain and strength she began to run along the fog-wrapped road to the left.

Early that evening, fatigued and enervated, she knocked on a door. It was some sort of wayside inn. It looked abandoned to her; no one opened the heavy oak doors for a long time.

“Who’s there?” came a man’s voice from inside.

She knocked again with her fist.

“What do you want?” asked the same voice, now a little closer.

“Please open up.” And she added: “I have a child.”

Slowly the door opened, just a crack.

“Refugee?” the woman asked. Marija was astonished when she recognized in the woman’s voice the deep baritone that had answered from behind the door.

“I can help you with housework,” Marija said. And she added: “Until my husband returns from the front.”

“Hmm,” the woman said. “Come in. I’m also waiting for my husband. He’s in the quartermaster corps.”

“Mine is a doctor.”

“Right,” the woman said suspiciously. “I hear that Germany’s gone down the tubes. What do you think?”

“What about you?”

“Well, I think,” the woman began, “that the Jews have ruined everything. My husband said that they’re to blame for the war. And for everything else.”

“Yes,” she said: “every one of them at least brought a nail.”

“What do you mean, a nail?”

“When they crucified Christ,” she said. “That’s what it says in the Bible.”

“It doesn’t say that in the Bible,” the woman replied.

“Then it was somewhere else,” Marija said.

“Are you a Protestant?”

“Yes,” she said. “On my mother’s side. My father is a Catholic.” She went on: “. . was a Catholic. He perished on the Eastern Front. . The Jews killed him.”

The woman lit a sputtering oil lamp and placed it on the table. After that she hauled out an old armchair and set it by the stove.

“Put the child down,” she said. “I’m going to make a fire. Then we can have our chat.”

So she brought in an old door made of oak and with a furious racket began splitting it apart with an axe.