After he had turned off the lamp with the shade, Jakob listened intently and then carefully unlocked the door. The only other thing she remembered was an embrace in the dark and the pressure of his body. Then she slid along the wall down the darkened corridor in the barracks. She could almost recall how many steps she took, feeling the grim cold wall all the while. Then it happened, not even twenty minutes after Dr. Nietzsche’s departure. That’s when the invisible but omnipresent Maks appeared again, out of the darkness. And this is how it went: no sooner had she taken ten steps (with one hand extended into the void before her like a sleepwalker and the other resting against the wall) she felt a sharp pain in her shin and realized in that moment that she had knocked over something that would now echo through the whole barrack and that would be heard from one end of the hall to the other. At the same time she heard, from the end of the corridor, HALT! HALT! and the clacking steps of iron-shod boots. All she knew, all she could know at that moment, was that there was no way back into Jakob’s room, for it was already too late for that. She merely clung to the wall (what would have Žana done at a time like this?) and groped her way to a door. No option remained to her (the door was locked) other than to wait here for the brightening of the sharp beam from the flashlight sweeping murderously through the corridor right in front of her nose. From her precarious haven she could see one end of the heavy wooden bench that she had overturned with her leg and that was now lying lethargically on its back, like some sort of felled animal squirming in agony: the shadow of its fettered legs twisted and flickered in the backlighting of the oblique, whirling beam of the flashlight. She sensed that in a few moments the lethal ray would blind her and she would contort and carbonize as if struck by lightning, but before this thought could sink in completely and she could carbonize and turn black totally by herself as she shuddered with horror, she felt a giant hand grabbing her from somewhere behind her back, covering her mouth, and that same hand, in the same motion with which it had already yanked away the support behind her back, or so it seemed to her, pulled on her so that for a moment she was suspended in the air as if falling into a swimming pool or like when someone pulls a chair out from under you in that moment when you drop onto it tired and anticipating but find an emptiness much deeper than the chair itself, and then that hand pulled her somewhere up and back without ungluing itself from her mouth. Thus, barely comprehending what was happening to her, as if she had just woken up, she could hear the banging on the door and she realized simultaneously (as if that same knocking had revived her) that she was now in a safer refuge than she had been in a few moments ago when she was standing there glued to the walclass="underline" crammed under the bed where the invisible hand of the deus ex machina had stowed her in haste, she could only hear how the deus ex machina moved away from her hiding place with powerful slaps of his clogs and how he unlocked the door, and then she could see the beam of the flashlight, which wavered like the flame of a candle, slice through the narrow crack between the floor and the rough blanket hanging over the edge of the bed under which she was ensconced.
“What’s going on?” said the man in the clogs.
“Patrol!” came the voice of the bloodhound: “Somebody’s messing around in the hallway.”
“I did hear something crashing about,” said deus ex machina. “As if someone were overturning that bench. I’d just gotten back from headquarters. (I worked the night shift.) And I had just fallen asleep, when something went bang. And I remembered that somebody had put a bench out there yesterday.”
“Who could have knocked it over? Exiting the premises is forbidden now. It just struck three A.M.”
And Maks said:
“It had to be one of those women from the other end of the barracks.”
The steps of the bloodhound receded and Marija could hear Maks closing the door.
“Stay here until the barking quiets down”: in the darkness she couldn’t see his face. “Are you injured?”
“No,” she said. “I scraped my shin a bit. . Trivial detail, compared to what could have happened.” Then she added: “Just a trifle. . Maks.”
That’s why she told Žana: “I almost saw him one time. Maks, that is.”
Chapter 6
And now she thought once more — still lying there motionless and watchful next to her child — among a great burst of other thoughts about the future (in the distance, the artillery had again begun to sing): How will I find Jakob? Quite directly, and barely acknowledging the sense of peace and security with which she said this to herself, she thought once again: How will I find Jakob? as though that were the only thing remaining to do and as if she were thinking all this from the other side, outside of the wire and outside of the past, even outside of the present: as if this thought had begun to take wing from some already achieved future here at one’s fingertips; all that separated her from it was an insignificant revolution of the clock and two or three relaxed steps as when you’re heading out on an excursion and the shady woods come into view and you begin to smell the wildflowers and conifers and there’s a bit of something to eat in the basket along with a thermos and white napkins and all you have to do is sprawl out on the grass and take out the tablecloth and spread it out over the same rustling green grass: and in her mind reverberated, almost audibly, the words HOW WILL I FIND JAKOB? like a leitmotif that disappears and then rushes back in more and more powerful bursts. She had wanted to say to Žana How will I find Jakob so that Žana would notice that she wasn’t sleeping but then it occurred to her that if she were to announce her thought aloud then it might flinch at the immediate future and collide with this grubby barracks, with Polja’s dead body, and with all the rest of it, and then it would plummet into the straw and remain lying there like a bloody bird with a bullet wound that trembles and squirms before it croaks; and this wouldn’t only happen if she were to say it aloud like that, How will I find Jakob, but really even the fact that she would think it, thereby clearly underscoring that there was no longer any doubt in her mind about Jakob’s freedom or her own — even that was enough to set off a revival of doubt. That decisively articulated thought, aimed squarely at the future, was enough to turn all of her thoughts around toward the past, like a triple echo. Anyway it was only because her newborn thought was incapable of locating Jakob in a clear future perspective that she devoted herself with all her strength to a Jakob who was nonetheless more reliable in the past. And in the present, of course. Therefore she said nothing to Žana. Even if she wanted to say it the way it had arisen in her consciousness — it would be too late. Her thoughts were already seeking a different Jakob in the past. A less optimistic Jakob. But clearer, more real. He was still the only genuine Jakob, perhaps no longer of flesh and blood but only a frozen film frame in her mind: he stands there with raised hands, making some restrained gesture (the way she had last seen him): momentum at a standstill.