“Your hands are so heavy,” she says. “It’s the cement.”
“It set,” he says.
“You work so much,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He pauses before answering:
“I don’t know.”
Silence.
Sabana holds David’s hand in hers and looks toward the road. She speaks, her voice even and low:
“Tonight, in the frost and ice, in the desolate cold, there is Jeanne, out in the cold desolation.”
“Jeanne?” asks David. “Where?”
He almost cries it out. His voice sounds dull, broken.
“I’m not sure,” says Sabana. “You forgot,” she says to the Jew, “we’re afraid for Jeanne, night and day.”
“Why?” asks David.
Sabana doesn’t answer David. She speaks to the Jew. “She works against Gringo, she’s trying to subvert him, she’s trying day after day.”
David pulls his hand from Sabana.
“That’s not true!” he cries.
Sabana does not answer. Her gaze is fixed, her voice broken, like David’s.
“She thinks she can. She’s crazy.”
Silence.
“When Jeanne gave her report tonight, I wasn’t sleeping,” says Sabana. She gestures at David. “David was sleeping. But I heard. Gringo told her to write down ‘criminal lies,’ but she wrote ‘criminal liberties.’ Gringo wanted her to say ‘in service of the great power of the merchants,’ but she wrote ‘the ideological aberration.’ Gringo cried out. Jeanne said she went to wake up David to ask him what the Jew said in the café, and after she wrote exactly what David said. Gringo laughed. He told Jeanne not to treat him like a child. Then Jeanne wrote the word, ‘liberty.’”
Sabana leaves David’s side and walks over to the door that opens onto the darkened park.
“Jeanne doesn’t know that I know,” she says, turning toward David. “You didn’t know.”
“No,” says David. He waits. The intensity of his waiting slowly shows in his face.
“You don’t know anything?” she asks.
“A little. I came to know,” he admits. “Gringo did say once that Jeanne was useless, a wreck.”
Silence.
“Jeanne is young, like David,” says Sabana. “She is the same age as him. Beautiful like him.” She looks at the Jew. “And one day they will kill her like they will kill you.”
“Shut up!” cries David.
Sabana turns to the darkened park.
“We live together,” she says. “We are both David’s wives.”
A sob bursts from her chest. She presses her palms against the cold glass of the window. Then presses them to her forehead.
A racket bursts out in the part of Staadt beyond the darkened park.
“There’s shooting!” cries David. “Near the ponds!”
Sabana does not move. David’s face has again taken on the expression of a child.
“What are you afraid of?” asks the Jew.
David does not answer. He stares at the Jew. His gaze wavers.
Sabana returns to David’s side.
•
Again the cry of a dog. In the field. A strange cry, a strangled bark, a whine.
“Diane,” says David.
“You were still sleeping?” Sabana asks.
David sits up with difficulty.
“I heard you from far off,” he says to her, “as if you were on the other side of the park.”
“With the dogs.”
He listens.
“Diane. It’s Diane.” He starts as if seeing Sabana for the first time by his side. “Oh, there you are.”
“She is dreaming, the dogs are dreaming,” Sabana says.
“No,” says David.
“Or Gringo is trying to kill her.”
David starts and then suddenly calms.
“No. No.”
“They didn’t say anything about killing the dogs,” says Sabana.
“No,” says David.
Sabana turns from David. She goes to the door opening out onto the park. She looks out into the darkness. The cries cease.
“This dog of the Jew’s, Diane,” she murmurs, “has love in her voice.”
“Yes,” says David. “A kind of smile in her eyes.”
“A dog for you to play with,” she says.
“Yes.”
“But they’ll kill her,” Sabana says. “They want only guard dogs here. There are a hundred of them in the field of the dead. The princes of Staadt.”
David listens to the soft, quiet voice of Sabana. Her hands quivering.
“They eat everyday,” she says. “They sleep. They train at sunrise. Sometimes, they put them in the police tanks going to the Jewish neighborhoods. Gringo showers them with praise, throws flowers on them, gives them medals, hangs them on their collars.”
She takes a few steps toward David, then stops before reaching him. They look at one another. She says:
“Sometimes they are free, they release them, they say: ‘You are free, go kill.’ When the Jews pass through the barbed wire on the other side of the field, where the ponds are, we say to them: Go kill.”
“‘You are free,’” repeats the Jew.
David rises. His eyes are flat, opaque. He searches for his gun. Sabana doesn’t seem to have noticed him moving. She says:
“You are free.”
David releases his gun. He looks at Sabana, standing before him. His hands tremble. He smiles at Sabana, a tight and empty smile:
“I don’t understand,” he says.
“You didn’t shoot,” she says.
Silence.
In the park, that same sad howl.
“Diane,” says the Jew.
David turns to look at the Jew, then at Sabana. His gaze focuses and sharpens.
“She cries from despair,” says Sabana.
“A dog?” David asks.
“One can never know” says the Jew.
“A dog crying from despair?” David murmurs to himself.
“Who can ever know,” says Abahn.
•
Silence.
“What time is it?” asks David.
The voice of Abahn:
“Nearly day.”
David sits up straight, frightened. He looks toward the road for the first time. He trembles.
“No, it’s still night,” says the Jew.
“There’s no more shooting near the ponds,” says Sabana. “They’ve left again.”
“I don’t understand,” David murmurs.
They are silent.
This time, in the park, a long plaintive cry. David straightens, says to the Jew:
“They’re hurting Diane.”
The Jew, like him, is listening to the cry. David turns toward Abahn.
“Is she crying out because of the night? The cold?” asks Abahn.
“I don’t know,” says the Jew.
“From fear, I think,” says David.
“That she’ll be killed?”
“That there will be killing,” says Sabana slowly. She falls silent. She has gone back to sleep.
•
The silence.
Sabana leaves David, moving slowly toward the table, to the area where the Jews are. She turns back to him. She seems worried, bothered. “The Jew is going to give you his dogs. You can have them.”
David’s air changes. Happiness seems to break out over him, in his eyes, mixed with the sadness.
“Diane,” says Sabana. “You could take her.”
David waves his hand to silence her.
“Diane,” she repeats, “the Jew’s dog. She could be yours.”
The softness of her voice brings tears to his eyes.
“What are you doing in the house of the Jew?” she asks, “Leave though the forest.”
He shakes his head: no. He says, “Gringo would never want that.”
Silence.
“You know the forest?” asks Abahn.
“Yes,” says David. “Beyond the barbed wire.”
“Big?” Sabana asks.
“Wild,” says David.
“There are jackrabbits.”
“Yes.”
They are silent before this unchanging dream, desperate. Their eyes fixed on some indefinite point in the darkness outside.