“This one here reeks of cholera.”
And she saw the soldier, acting with cynical courtliness, almost like a servant, help the old man out of his greasy trousers, his old-fashioned black vest and his shirt with its stiff, starched collar. All that was visible of the old man were the whites of his eyes, as he whispered “Pardon me, pardon me,” as if he were saying “Lama, lama. .” and she heard that lama fade more and more as the old man moved away from the group, off to the left a bit, wobbly on his feet and still leaning on the old woman; then Marija steeled herself to hear the volley but when she didn’t hear anything she opened her eyes once more and looked left, over to where the voice had died out, and she saw him stoop down, naked, into the snow and understood why he had left the group; the old man was squatting in the snow, with only his head and blue shoulders visible.
“What do you think?” a youngish soldier asked. “Will his mama clean him up when he’s emptied himself out? Wipe him off all nice with a lump of snow? That would be fucking hilarious.”
“I bet she won’t,” said a mustachioed one, sticking out his hand. The first soldier shifted his rifle and was about to offer his hand too, but at the last moment he pulled it back:
“Your hands are all Jewed up,” he said. “But all right: I’ll bet this that she will,” and Marija saw against the backdrop of grubby snow the yellowish metal begin to swing around his hand, hanging from something that she had no way of seeing but knew was a chain, the way that she knew, so to speak, without looking, that the swinging piece of metal was a watch.
And she will always remember this: someone else in her watching all of it (she had slowly sunk into sleepy lethargy and barely even felt the cold anymore): just a few meters in front of her a young woman emerged out of the line-up, almost immediately followed by the dark swirl of a young girl’s hair; then she saw the woman bending over the girl and removing her woolen sweater over her curls that bounced and swayed momentarily, and then the white sweater flying in a short arc onto the pile, on top of the old man’s black pants and waistcoat and then a light blue dress of poplin, and then the slow descent of stockings and the sliding of petite shoes down from the top of the pile, followed by the woman’s trembling as she took the little girl into her arms as if hiding her own nakedness. Lastly the woman lifted up her own reddish-blue foot out of the snow with a slow, hesitating movement, but before she could take a step she turned around as if she were standing on a rotating stage and, still keeping the child pressed tightly against her and sheltering and protecting it with her hands, she said in a voice that sounded dead but did not tremble: “Please, when. . our turn. My little girl. . catching cold,” after which the soldiers exchanged two or three glances and Marija saw a malicious clean-shaven soldier bow down so far he almost touched the snow and her bluish feet with his forehead and heard him hiss:
“You’ll get there in time, I beg you to be patient. In just a bit there’ll be kike tea, a ton of tea. The entire Danube, if you will”; then the polyphonic explosion of the suppressed laughter of soldiers and then the sting of those mouths split wide with laughter on the woman’s face from which was peeling layer after layer of reddish-blue and pale green color, and then once more the woman’s slow turn and step across the snow as if on a rotating set. And just then, at Aunt Lela’s house, listening to the whispering and almost uninflected voice of Mr. Rozenberg fils, Marija began to understand everything and to see it all, even those things that had happened ten meters out in front of her, hidden on the other side of the green peeling barrier:
Beyond, at a distance of two or three meters from the cabins, a hole had been smashed in the ice and a plank thrown across it (a plank that was really an old diving board); every now and then a man in civilian clothes (the former lifeguard from the beach) shoved the corpses under the ice with a large gaff, whenever the hole would get clogged; yes, Marija even saw what she was now hearing told for the first time by Mr. Rozenberg: she experienced even that — perhaps because she knew Kenjeri.
“Do you know Kenjeri?” Mr. Rozenberg asked, not looking at Aunt Lela or at Marija or at anyone living but rather at someplace on the ice-sheeted windowpane and on the broken icy surface of the Danube. “Everyone in this district knew him: the community knacker, Kenjeri. I don’t actually know his first name. He went by his surname. Well, this old Kenjeri has become head honcho over there. You understand: the man’s vocation was a handy one”—and Marija recalled his wolflike jaws and his dirty yellow teeth like a horse’s and his sparse moustache and bristly beard and the lit cigarette sticking to his lips while he said to her mother: “What’re you gonna do? Business is business” (that happened two or three years ago): Dingo hadn’t come home all morning and at noon, just as they were sitting down to lunch, they heard him whining and her mother said: “That’s Dingo!” and she stood up so she could see what it was and then appearing in their door was that set of wolf ’s lips, a cigarette butt on the lower one, saying: “You should watch him better,” and what’s more: “You have to pay the fine,” and right after that were the dirty yellow teeth like a horse’s and his saying “business is business”; thus Marija was able to see all of the things that the younger Mr. Rozenberg had seen after he’d already moved beyond the green peeling fence and she could now imagine almost as well as he that face with the bristly beard as Kenjeri pushed a woman’s neck into the snow with his heavy boot (and Marija thought that that was the very same woman who had gotten undressed after the old man) and she could see, in the spot where there had once been a face (a face that she could no longer remember), a monstrous stain of concentrated terror, there where before there had been eyes and the lines of a face petrified by cold as when bronze gives off a green patina through its creases; and Marija could remember everything as if she’d experienced it herself: how the boy (judging by his wolfish jaws, the son of that same crook) held the nearly dead woman by the legs and the way the woman writhed like a slaughtered hen when the teeth of the saw tore into the flesh on her side and the way Kenjeri went “prrrr” and then snapped at his son, “Steady, you moron!” and the way his son clenched his teeth and tightened his grip on the woman’s legs and then Kenjeri pulling the saw back a bit and pushing it forward and then drawing the serrated tool back forcefully toward himself when the steel found its way down between two vertebrae in her backbone and how, with streams of blood gushing and flooding out into the snow on both sides, the saw began to squish and slip on intestines and flesh. Then, the man snapping at his son once more, “Forget the bitch. I guess her legs won’t be running off without her head,” and the younger Kenjeri still squeezing the woman’s legs and his body twitching and shaking and his father staring at him in amazement, showing his dirty horselike teeth afresh and in protest: “What’s wrong with you, you idiot? Is it that you aren’t used to blood, or do you actually feel sorry for that whore?” And how he pushed his boy with the handle of the saw and how the boy abruptly dropped the woman’s legs and tumbled over into the snow and rolled over onto his belly and submerged his big curly head in the white and bloody snowy mush; then the Kenjeri talking while the boy shook with sobs: “Let’s get these here ready and then we’ll talk,” and then to placate, to instruct, “it’s easier to saw than to bust up ice,” then the kid slowly, indifferently, getting to his feet without raising his head (just excremental snow in his dark hair), then his wiping his nose with the back of his hand and again picking up the legs of their latest victim, gnashing his teeth with the strain, while his father took hold once more of his tool after having taken the preliminary step of pushing the sundered body through the hole and under the ice; Marija even heard the melody that the wind brought from the left bank of the Danube and she felt each revolution of the gramophone disk leaving behind bloody bites on her body from the steel needle: the “Blue Danube” waltz was still fashionable at that time; and then all of a sudden Aunt Lela was standing in front of Mr. Rozenberg and making him snap out of it by yelling into his face: