PREDELLA

Wandering from room to room on a hot summer afternoon as if looking for a room he had never been into, Joe settled on the living room and picked up a magazine with an article about the Soviet Union during World War II. He opened it to this photograph. Shocked, he shut the magazine quickly, but then he sat on a rocking chair and placed it on his knees and rocked back and forth until, with a pang of helplessness, he opened the magazine again and stared at the photograph.

The photograph was of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a Soviet partisan who had fought for her belief in the Soviet Union and was captured and tortured and hanged by the enemy Germans. Looking at it, Joe felt once more the pang come over him with a terrible helplessness.

He closed the magazine and put it down and for a moment remained still, then he went out of the house into the backyard, where there was a clothesline with sheets and pillowcases and shirts hanging, and a wicker laundry basket on the scruffy grass next to a red, slated lawn chair. On three sides of the yard were woods, woods with birch trees leaning across one another and tangled with yellowing wild grapevines, the sunlight shining down through the high, thin-leaved branches, and through the trees shone a lake in sunlight. On the fourth side of the yard was the house—a brown, clapboard house with a fieldstone chimney from which a tangle of honeysuckle hung, and a screened-in back door with a stoop of large, flat stones. By the door was the closed bulkhead into the cellar. Seagulls were flying round high above the roof.

Helpless not to think about it, he thought of that photograph of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, and his thinking made him walk back and forth across the grass, along the clothesline. He leaned against one of the wooden posts from which the clothesline, sagging with sheets and shirts, was strung.

He said, “God.”

Unable to be still, he walked again along the clothesline to the post at the other end.

Where he would go and what he would do he didn’t know. He thought of going to the Holy Land, but he knew at the same time that that would be no help.

Joe walked to the edge of the woods and looked into the trees, some dead, stripped of bark and pale, with broken branches hanging from the trunks.

He didn’t know where he would go and what he would do any more than he knew why such a profound helplessness was roused in him by the photograph of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.

Back in the hot, still house, Joe went into the living room to pick up the magazine with the photograph in it, then upstairs to his bedroom. Hanging on the wall over his bed was a crucifix, the contorted Corpus ivory white and the cross ebony black. Joe shut his door and sat on the edge of his bed and studied yet again the photograph of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya: the way one of her breasts had been cut away to her ribs, the way her neck was elongated and her head twisted by the rope she’d been hanged by, her closed eyes, her ragged hair.

The impulse came to him to get up and kneel on his pillow and lean his forehead against the foot of the cross. But he heard footsteps outside his room, and, with a start, he became rigid.