“Jakob, something is going to happen,” she said. “I have a feeling that something is going to happen.”
And he asked, “What could happen?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel like something is going to happen. Maybe someone will find us here”; and then he said:
“Nobody ever comes into my room. Now what would they be looking for in my room?”
“Still, Jakob,” she said. “I’m afraid.”
But she didn’t budge. All she did was say again: “I have a feeling that something could happen,” and at that moment she thought about how Aunt Lela had said that this was as important a thing in a woman’s life as giving birth, and she thought about the blood she was leaving on Jakob’s sheet and about his being a doctor and how he would know what was happening to her. Back then she should have asked Aunt Lela, Is it possible for it to happen and for the man not to notice anything?
Then he said: “Should I turn out the light?”; and she:
“No. Stay with me.”
“If you’re afraid,” he said. Then he stopped.
“I’m not,” she said. “Only you can’t take your hand away.” Then more: “I love looking at that lampshade. It’s been a year since I saw a lamp with a shade.” And again: “I have to go. It’s high time I left,” but still she did nothing that would indicate she was leaving; made not a single movement that would show that she was leaving. She wasn’t capable of making such a motion, although she was no longer lying down (immediately afterward she had stood up and put on her underwear and her dress). Jakob sat at her right side, leaning against the steel frame of the bed. And she just sat there like that, feeling the blood fill up the impression they had made in the straw mattress with their combined weight.
“We’ve known each other for two months already,” she said. “I never could have imagined. .”
“Who could say,” he said. “To me it seems we’ve known each other for a very long time: for a long while before all this.”
“Today’s it’s exactly eight weeks and a day,” she said. “And one night extra. Doesn’t that seem like a short time to you. .?”
“To me it feels like we’ve known each other forever,” he said. “But never mind that now. This night isn’t over yet,” and she still couldn’t move and she seemed to hear a noise in the corridor and all she could do was cling to him and whisper “Jakob!” and at that same time she realized that he was no longer at her side but somehow here and there by the door listening to the thumping of steps audible right outside, and she felt herself losing the ability to speak on account of fear, and before she could snap out of it and think This was perhaps my last night with Jakob, my first and last, before she was in a position to think or say or do anything definite, Jakob was already holding his cupped hand over her mouth. And she was already in the cabinet and realized that its doors were creaking behind her as they closed when she sensed Jakob’s face on hers and heard his breathless whisper: “That’s Maks,” and before she had time to be astonished or at least ask Maks who? she nearly simultaneously heard a key start to turn on the outside of the cabinet door and subsequently Jakob’s Ja, ja and his rapidly receding steps.
Only then did she grasp why she hadn’t seen Jakob’s face when he said “That’s Maks” and that thing about a short-circuit: the light had already been extinguished before he locked the door, for otherwise she would have been able to see Jakob’s face; yet she remembered clearly that he hadn’t put out the lamp with the shade, and that his tall silhouette had still been visible before her, blocking her light with his back, and then visible too when he turned and bent down and stretched his hand out toward her to cover her mouth and lift her up and deposit her in the cabinet. Now it became clear to her that the light had still been burning when he picked her up and carried her in essentially one swoop, because she remembered seeing a broad swath of wide, dark cracks along the open doors of the cabinet and she understood that he would have to use his foot to fully open those doors that were already ajar. The last thing she saw then was the elongated white stain like some kind of unfleeced animal hanging on a hook, but then right away it struck her that it had to be Jakob’s white hospital coat because she could smell the heavy, thick odor of iodoform and ether. So the darkness must have begun at the moment that Jakob’s head appeared and touched her face to tell her not to be afraid and to tell her about Maks and the blown circuits, since the cabinet door must have still been open but she nonetheless wasn’t able to see him, only to perceive his low, low whisper and his breath on her face.
She stood motionless in the gloom, straining her eyes to pick out some light through the crack along the cabinet’s door, and she thought she felt the cabinet vibrating from her suppressed trembling, which the plywood transmitted in every direction, the cabinet shaking and creaking as if it contained a monstrous heart, or else some useless mechanism like a wall clock with no face and no arms with which to carry its weapons: only the frantic, invisible, and pointless click-clack-click-clack of a tremendous pendulum. Her head was at an impossible angle, lying nearly horizontally across the top of her shoulder, but she didn’t dare to feel about with her hands in the dark (lest she send an empty clothes hanger flying) or even push that coat farther away, with its sickly sweet hospital smell permeating her eyes and leaving her insides cramped and ready to heave up bile.
But then all she could do was regret that she hadn’t taken care of the coat a bit earlier, and she was regretting it all the more when Dr. Nietzsche flipped the switch outside the door to no effect and when, right after that, she caught his voice: “This smells like sabotage to me”; she should have done something before that point, at least. Firstly, to move the coat away from her nose (she imagined this movement: sliding the hanger gently along the wooden bar suspended between the two sides of the cabinet, then stopping it with the soft thump of linen on wood, both of these materials springing from plant life, like twins from the same womb, and then her hand making its way back and dropping across her belly and landing on it with no noise as if it were just returning sound-lessly through the air and not touching anything at all, and she imagined her clean, unencumbered breathing and she inhaled the scent of dry fir planks that radiated the smell of resin); then she got into a more comfortable position, sitting diagonally or at least freeing herself from the bar pressing down on her neck. And so it was as if she were in a coffin: a living corpse; and she thought of Anijela. She would always remember: the elliptical tin sign on a flaking red facade, COFFINS MADE HERE — THROUGH THE ARCH, LEFT — hidden in the summer by the leaves of the wild chestnuts and with the gnarled, clumsily painted finger pointing like the hand of fate in the direction of the graves; THROUGH THE ARCH, LEFT under the blooming boughs of the wild chestnut; and she thought back to the heavy aromatic smell of chestnut blossoms and to that cul-de-sac straying off of Grobljanska Street and then going left. Now she could also remember the ice-flowers on the window between which appeared the head of the gray-haired old man inside like the head of some faun among the ferns, and she recalled his mouth of crooked and missing teeth below his big mustache, and when their round faces filled the opaque flowers of his window he exhaled on it to melt the ice. Then, under his reeking breath, the fern withered, and Aunt Lela pulled the scarf away from her face so that he would recognize her: “It’s us, Čika Martin”; then a flickering yellow light came on in the window and after that one could hear the key turning in the lock and she saw the faun’s disheveled head and mustache and immediately she regretted coming, even before the man said: “This one’s not coming to me for a place to stay, is she?” But Aunt Lela said: