“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 8
Nevertheless it had happened at the best possible time, she thought. At the best possible time: it was a few hours after she had caught sight of Jakob and shouted out to him, Jacob, I AM PREGNANT. She lay in the hay and even before she’d opened her eyes and completely regained consciousness she thought that at any rate it had happened at the best possible time, because as soon as she heard the kittenlike crying of the child she understood everything and she recalled Aunt Lela’s voice saying: “Children that are born in the seventh month are only proving that they’re curious about life.” That’s what she’d said to Anijela when she delivered a baby prematurely, but Anijela’s little boy died after two or three days and at that point Aunt Lela told her the truth: that the child hadn’t been born in the seventh month but in the eighth, because if it had been born in the seventh it might have lived; but at least it hadn’t felt any pain, just more of a mortal tiredness, nothing more than a sort of nightmare, as one might have during a heavy sleep. Marija was still partly in shock and at any given time could sink away only then re-emerge once more on the surface. Now — lying alongside deceased Polja and the child — she remembered it alclass="underline" she wanted to think
Child and she wanted to think Jakob’s child (she didn’t know if she’d really heard it or if she only seemed to have heard Žana’s voice saying A SON! A SON! in her half-sleep in her delirium like an angel announcing to Marija with flowers the birth of the Son of God), but just as that bittersweet thought struck she would become disoriented as if from a strong dose of morphine or some otherworldly fragrance; something clutched at her stomach and she thought that it was just the end of the month approaching and nothing worse would be involved than putting on a pad just in case and she already carried a bit of cotton in her handbag (her period always came unpredictably like this); then she rushed to get ready and said to her mother I have some kind of pain in my stomach. Maybe it was that pâté. Do you think it’s because of the pâté? but her mother said No, today is the 22nd and you’ll be getting your period soon; it would be better if you didn’t go to the theater, and then Marija got scared that her mother would make her stay home and so she tried to say indifferently it’s nothing serious it was just one little twinge; everything’s fine again now; I’ll put on a pad just in case, and her mother said You can go to the theater any day but still Marija grabbed her purse and rushed to the streetcar stop and she wished she hadn’t forgotten the pads because her stomach clenched again and an old man with a moronic look on his face and big bags under his eyes and a stiff, starched collar pressed against her stomach with his elbow but she couldn’t switch seats because of the crowd in the theater in which she was now perishing for lack of oxygen. But as the curtain rose and the performance began (in her haste she hadn’t managed to see what was playing and now she was ashamed to ask anyone) the thing in her stomach began to grow more and more painful; I might not be able to follow the plot because of these stomach pains, she thought, it’s a pantomime of some sort, it would be good just to ask somebody, and she turned to the left to get someone’s elbow off of her stomach and she saw that it was the same old man with the stiff collar and the expansive circles under his eyes: “Please move your elbow,” she said, but the old man must have been deaf or was pretending to be deaf because he didn’t so much as bat an eye though someone behind them whispered “ssssh” and she had to squeeze over to one side of her seat and twist her back in such a way that she felt like she was tied into a knot; Rotten old man she thought even while deciding to try nonetheless to follow the play although she understood nothing and actually it was in a foreign language out of which a few familiar words rang, which made it seem to her for a moment that it could be Faust or some Biblical legend or something like that for all at once light flashed on the stage and she saw a man in polished boots and a uniform, with a whip in his hand and she was horror-struck to recognize him as Obersturmbannführer Hirsch and she understood how strange it was that he should materialize in this performance and she abruptly grasped in her chaotic dread the absurdity of these temporal and spatial phenomena, which rapidly became almost self-explanatory to her, but she was in no condition to think and to exclaim I AM DREAMING THIS I AM DREAMING THIS instead she just continued sitting and all she could feel was her belly knotting up with terror and it’s like her legs were paralyzed or tied to the chair by the eyes of the phantom-like Obersturmbannführer Hirsch and she remembered that she hadn’t brought along her sanitary napkins and she felt the sticky fluid slipping down her thighs but she rallied enough strength to rise from her seat with a loud and painful bang and at once she felt her insides breaking open and she felt herself falling, prone, into a dazzling vertiginous abyss. The other thing she remembered then, a little later, was Žana’s voice: “Polja, we have to wash her,” and then: “That eased her pain,” and then right after that the opaque realization arrived that she had given birth even before she grasped the fact that Polja was washing her dress and she sensed with tormented bliss that Žana had placed the child next to her and she heard the kittenlike crying of a baby and Žana’s whisper like Mary’s annunciation: “