“Žana,” she asked all at once, “Do you believe in God?” Then she was quiet because it seemed to her that Žana hadn’t heard. Several minutes passed before she responded:
“How about you?” and then after no answer came right away: “Do you believe in God?”
“I don’t know,” Marija said. “Before I had the baby I didn’t think about it.”
“But now?”
“Now I’d like to believe in Him. Tonight of all nights I’d like to believe in God”; and then her father was speaking through her: “I mean, in my God.” Then she paused and there was a dignified silence into which that God was about to come bursting more or less embodied in the form of a newborn child — “equal parts hope, kindness, mercy, love. .”
“. . and hate,” Žana said.
Marija hardly gave this any thought, as if simply taking the measure of the sword in the hands of that little God-fetish that she had drawn out of her own blood, and said:
“Yes. And hate.”
Then Žana said, as if she had seen that absurd naïve deity as it buckled under its massive sword of hope and hatred:
“What would you say if you found that same god in the mouth (and maybe in the mind) of Dr. Nietzsche, for example? Or Obersturmbannführer Hirsch?”
“That’s impossible!” Marija exclaimed. “This is my God and my God only! No one else’s. .” and then she thought better of it not in the sense of a correction but of a minor addendum to the same thoughts:
“Perhaps my parents’ too. . and my child’s.”
Then Žana said: “Say it again,” and once more Marija dug up quantities of that same clay, and almost in the same amounts, that her father had already turned over in his efforts to construct God in his own image, and to which he bowed: equal parts hope, kindness, mercy, love, and. . “Hate!” she repeated. And Žana went even further:
“And fear!”
“So be it,” Marija said. “Is that your God too? Tell me!”
“No!” Žana said. “No, thank you.” Then she added: “That God is too much in my own image. Do you get it? In my own image.”
“The God of hope and love,” Marija said. “So what would you want Him to be like?”
“Like nothing at all!” Žana said. “I want hope and love — without God! Without having to pray or to thank anyone. . and god cannot be made in my image. Because then it might also resemble Dr. Nietzsche. Or Hirsch. Thanks but no thanks.”
“All right,” Marija said. “My God’s name is Jan. My child.”
“Très raisonnable Dieu!” Žana said. “Let us pray!”
Chapter 9
But even before her thoughts could lift her entirely into the future and she could look out over that narrow strip of no-man’s-land, for those few hours, even before she noticed the stench of decaying organic matter, she had a presentiment of — almost failing to believe it, for in her thoughts she was already far off into the future — the presence of Polja’s corpse. And it drew her back, even if she wasn’t fully aware of it, far back to her very origins, so to speak; at any rate, it brought her back from that future into which her thoughts were already marching, with one foot across the thick line of no-man’s-land.
What brought her back was hardly the smell, but rather a sensation of decay, a kind of fluid trembling, maybe simply the realization that there was a dead body in the room. And she remembered that old man, long ago, on the Danube.
“Pardon me, pardon me,” whispered the old man, leaning or actually lying with his full weight on the elderly woman who was staring blankly ahead in the direction of the green peeling fence. And Marija remembered this: she came back from the Danube and found no one, and it was all clear to her. She took several dresses and a photo album; she even took a bundle of greeting cards and love letters and went dazedly into the street, heading to Aunt Lela’s house, and she paid no attention to anyone or anything, not to the police or to the corpses in the snow, but she just walked on with the small cardboard suitcase in her hands that were turning blue; and then she went into Aunt Lela’s place and placed her suitcase on the table, opened the spring locks and gave Auntie the album, subsequently catching a glimpse of Mr. Rozenberg fils, who — if her mind wasn’t playing tricks on her — she had seen in the line-up at the Danube.
When she came in, Aunt Lela said:
“Solomon, don’t”; and when he went on as if he hadn’t heard her: “For God’s sake, Solomon!” but he continued talking with his eyes staring out vacantly and Marija still had the impression that someone else was listening to everything he was saying and not she, although almost all of what she was hearing she had seen herself a few hours earlier at the Danube: she had stood close to the younger Mr. Rozenberg. At least it seemed that way to her. In formations four across, like when they’d stand in line for the showers during a summer heat wave. The trucks kept on arriving. When the line in front of her moved forward a step or two, someone shoved her from behind and she came right up against the green peeling barrier. “It was their turn to take off their clothes.” Mr. Rozenberg continued. “The turn of that old man and woman. Naked and wrinkled examples of Homo sapiens with sagging breasts and skin that was swollen and blue from age and cold. In this condition, without the clothing or the jewelry by which Homo sapiens differentiates itself from the other, less highly evolved species of animals, the whole cohort was after all elemental and antediluvian, with only the occasional gold tooth in a jaw or (less commonly) a few earrings standing as a kind of secret sign of civilization, but these weren’t items of enough consequence to be capable of creating any significant distinction between species or individuals, because with work the human hand can become so refined (it suffices to call to mind Thorvaldsen’s Christus, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and countless violin virtuosos of whom there are, proverbially, many among the Jews) that it, which is to say “the human hand,” is in a position to erase this difference wielding nothing more than an ordinary knife, but that isn’t what I was talking about, it was those old people (I think they were the Bems, pharmacists, you must’ve known them). .” and Marija remembered the old man whispering, “Pardon me, pardon me,” like an over-cranked old street organ and she remembered the way a strong bittersweet smell like a corpse’s spread around him, and then the voice of Mr. Rozenberg edged back into her mind, himself talking like an old man in whom every thought was now reconciled to the thought of death but who was himself incapable of grasping whence the organic resistance in him was coming, that thing which biologically could make no peace with death but rather resisted and grasped and emitted foul odors and juices the way that some animals give off poisonous scents when they’re in danger, “as if in him had awakened some embryonic animal that was taking over both mind and man, and his “Pardon me” wasn’t really an expression of apology and shame but more fundamentally a desperate expression of dissatisfaction aimed at that animal which had been awakened; for when the mind is reconciled to death and has accepted nothingness, then the utterly exposed and abandoned animal begins by way of an intricate and almost mathematical inversion to fight for its survival and for its right to live (by its own means, of course), and it starts to dominate because the mind has capitulated to death, again according to its own logic that is not the logic of the animaclass="underline" the animal doesn’t know about the complicated laws of probability and death doesn’t bear consideration — the animal just wants to live, and that’s it”; and right then Marija grasped why it is that around the old man a bittersweet stench of animal and excrement was floating, and then once more she caught the voice of a soldier: