“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.”
“No,” Marija said. “From the wet diapers. I didn’t dare go to sleep (it was just some kind of half-dozing state). I should have changed position”—then she sensed once more Polja’s mute presence in the room (she felt it from the silence) and she remembered that she was supposed to make more diapers out of her sheet. But she didn’t get up. She couldn’t begin tearing Polja’s sheet right away and making diapers. And sanitary pads. Then she asked, “How old was she?” but she already knew that she wasn’t going to be able to stand it another second in that position and that her stomach and legs were about to disintegrate abruptly like in Poe’s story about the corpse of M. Valdemar, which has been artificially kept alive by means of hypnotism and which then suddenly dissolves into gooey, slimy rot. And even before she could hear Žana’s answer, “Seventeen, I think,” she had already pushed her hand under the child to extract Polja’s sheet, which she then laid next to her on the straw and she laid the child across it and wrapped it up with the other hand. Then she turned to the side for a moment, felt for the edge of the diaper, arched her back, and started unwrapping the wet, blood-covered rags around her legs. “She seemed older to me,” she said so that her rubbing the dry edge of a diaper on her benumbed skin to wipe away the blood couldn’t be heard.
“Corpses don’t have an age,” Žana said, and then Marija felt the blood beginning to circulate slowly beneath her skin, rising up through the capillaries to the surface, all over her buttocks and her thighs, and then she stretched out her legs and sat up in the straw, leaning her shoulder blades against the cold wall of the barracks. She wiped her fingers on a damp rag and began groping about in the dark for a dry piece of linen to make a pad.
“You met her before I did,” she said, locating her underwear in the gloom beneath the fingers of her right hand, and then she put the folded portion of linen into place between her legs and slid her underwear back up.
“Yes,” said Žana. “She was one of those. You know. One of the chosen ones. Along the way she tried to flee. They gave her a thorough beating. Then she got sick and instead of taking her into the Lebensborn they dispatched her here. What saved her was the fact that she played the cello. I heard that the overseer who beat her was punished. The Germans regretted that a flower like her should end up on the inside. .”
Then the straw beneath Žana began to rustle and Marija turned in her direction, following the narrow band of light; she was still lying on her stomach with the straw between her teeth and her eyes fixed on the crack: she was following the movement of the floodlight’s beam along the barracks and wire.
The field guns, with their ever-faster salvos in the distance, suddenly fell silent.
“If Polja had lived—” Marija said, and though she wanted to tell the truth: if she had stayed alive till two, in other words until the point at which Maks was going to give the sign, and if she had been left alone in the barracks (since, being so sick, she couldn’t go with Žana and Marija) — tomorrow they would have crammed her into a truck anyway and taken her off to the gas chamber, she just couldn’t let it end that way for her, so she said: “—she would have been in Odessa in a month or so. . I believe she was from Odessa”; and Žana said:
“Or maybe if she had just lived a few more hours.”
“They won’t take any risks,” Marija said. “That Maks is a damned clever fellow.”
“Yes,” said Žana. “Damned clever,” and then she asked, “Have you ever seen him? Maks, that is?”
“No,” Marija said: “Never. . though actually—” But she couldn’t finish her thought, and Marija should have said We’ll get through this or We’ll make it or something else just not They won’t take any risks. And even though she’d stopped with that, and had fallen silent, she began to get clumsily entangled in that heavy net of men, thinking that in terms of needlepoint it was a ridiculous pattern and with the delicate, finely pointed needle of a woman’s passivity she began poking into its empty spaces until she found herself wrapped up in the tough, thick threading of the nets and had to call for help from more men, first from Jakob — in her mind — and then, aloud and with desperate entreaty in her voice, that other man too, Maks. The Maks she had still never seen but who had existed for her for months now as a synonym for salvation, the incarnation of masculine god-agency. That’s why she’d wanted to say I’ve known him as long as I’ve known Jakob, but she changed her mind, for she remembered that the true sense of Žana’s question lay elsewhere. At least it seemed that way to her. Žana simply wanted to point out that she herself (Marija) wasn’t in any condition to do for herself or for her child anything other than submit to the fate that she identified with Jakob, and that that Maks (and she always said “that Maks” herself) was merely the executor of the will of fate-Jakob, and wasn’t even a concrete person, with no face and shoulders, no hairy chest and great, powerful hands. Instead: an unknown agent, the hand of God, or the devil himself, or precisely some invisible and unknown powerful third thing that works miracles: he flips some unseen lever or cuts a wire and darkness breaks in. . Like that night in the corridor when she was coming out of Jakob’s room. And before that, too. Ten minutes earlier: all at once the darkness fell. And it was like this:
When Dr. Nietzsche halted in front of Jakob’s door he screamed: “These working conditions are impossible! Every five minutes, that power plant! This smells like sabotage to me,” and then Jakob covered her mouth so she wouldn’t cry out, and then he pushed her, or actually placed her in the cabinet like she was an object and locked her in. But before he shut the door:
“That was Maks,” he said. “He shorted out the fuses.”
This happened several months ago. Actually more than half a year back. And that was the first time she’d heard of Maks.
Chapter 3
She sat on Jakob’s bed with her legs crossed (blood running down her thighs and along her bottom) and she felt unequal to any new task.