Gerhard had no liking for school, for work, for anything that achieved its goal through long-term effort. He accepted almost with relief this change, though for him it was a reversal, and he looked with mocking eyes at the spectacle of humiliating falls and arrogant promotions, sucking noisily through his teeth whenever he spoke of them. Measures that affected him directly, such as the summons to forced labor for all those in his age group, he simply ignored. “If anyone asks, I’m still in Belgrade,” he told his father, who tried to warn him, the day the notices were posted, of the dangers of failing to report. “But what if they see that you are here?” his father argued. “Tell them I just arrived and I’ll report tomorrow.” But that tomorrow never came, and while other young Jews pulled on their old clothes at the crack of dawn and hurried off, shivering, to the mustering points—to cart bricks, accompanied by blows and curses, all day long at the airport and to fill in craters made by German bombs—Gerhard stayed in bed, or loitered around the courtyard, or sat in the kitchen eating fruit from the basket the maid brought from the market, or vanished into the cellar with the neighbor’s wife, or read Hungarian and German detective novels, with which the newspaper kiosks were flooded. Kroner thought this behavior provocative; everyone could see Gerhard, including Count Armanyi, the store official, who often stood at the office window watching. But Reza would not agree to Gerhard’s remaining hidden in the house; the lack of sun and fresh air could harm his health. As for the regulations, announcements, and the threats they implied, she decided quite simply that they did not concern her son. She had agreed to let him accept the Jewish faith because at that time she believed that all Jews were wealthy, but now that the newspapers and the radio were accusing the Jews of being responsible for the war and the high prices, calling on Christians everywhere to help rid the land of them, she ceased considering him a Jew. Her own hatred of the Jews returned, especially after Sep’s visit, which reminded her of her past servitude to that race, a race alien to both of them, and had she been asked to give her opinion, she would certainly have approved of their extermination. And her son would have, too.
The more brutally the Jews were persecuted and the greater the humiliations they suffered, the more bitterly Gerhard despised them. It was as if he had made all the Christian prejudices his own, while still belonging to the Jewish faith. He would leer mockingly when a dusty column of civilians passed in the street, driven on by two soldiers, forced sometimes to march at double time and sing some nationalist Hungarian song, often anti-Semitic. He would imitate their unmilitary stride, their cowed stance, would pout to make his lips full, like theirs, and flare his nostrils to enlarge his nose. As few dared, particularly now that taunting carried the threat of real danger, of the deprivation of all one’s rights, he would say loudly, “Those Yids” or “Is he a Yid?” or “Are you a Yid?” to some unsuspecting fellow Jew, and the only reason he was not answered by a blow was that the butts of his mocking tongue were all too wretched, too frightened. It was this resignation that exasperated him.
He took a curious pleasure in studying the caricatures of Jews that appeared more and more frequently in the newspapers; the caricatures presented them as potbellied, hairy, thick-lipped, and having fleshy hooked noses, features that conjured up the vices of their race: greed and cunning. He could not stand the jokes that at that time the Jews were directing against themselves, for he was astute enough to understand that the purpose of that humor was to blunt the pain of reality. If anyone told him the kind of joke in which a Jew, in a situation of no escape, outwitted his enemy or found consolation in irony, Gerhard, instead of laughing, would say, in deadly earnest, “Yes, and then they grabbed hold of your Cohen and hung him on the nearest tree.” And only then would he bare his regular, white teeth: “Haha.”
Gerhard became so unpleasant that Jewish circles in Novi Sad spoke of him in indignant whispers. Some thought him mad; others said that he had joined the Gestapo, making good use of his half-German origin, and had been given the special job of demoralizing the Jews. They began to regard even Gerhard’s father with suspicion. Kroner’s relatively favorable position in the requisitioned store and his friendly footing with Count Armanyi suggested an accommodation with the Germans. And when it became known that Sep Lehnart was staying in the house, and when a bunch of old ladies on an afternoon visit to Grandmother Kroner came upon the young SS officer in the gateway, spick-and-span and about to go off into town, the disgust became total. Only the attempt on Sep’s life, had it been made, could have dispelled this suspicion. But Gerhard’s plans came to nought, and his associates, Franja Schlesinger and the Karaulić brothers, under the pressure of rumor and the disappointment of their failure, began to avoid him. This suited him well, because he did not have much confidence in them, particularly when their plan of escape by crossing over into Srem did not materialize. Now, left alone with his project, he could take action without having to worry about anyone else.
Like his uncle, he often went for long walks, but not in the center of town; instinctively, his wanderings took him to the remote streets on the outskirts. Those back streets, overgrown with grass and lined with squat, low houses, almost entirely inhabited by Serbian agricultural workers and small tradesmen, were scenes of the greatest cruelty when the Hungarian troops arrived. The soldiers, carrying out their raids, were not in the least restrained by the sight of such modest means, such neglect. There, among the houses with damp walls, faded flowers in the windows, the image of the killings still hovered, muted. The people who in the evenings came out to talk at their gates still pointed to the lampposts from which their neighbors had been hanged, and to the darkened windows of the homes from which a friend had been led away. For these people, there was no topic of conversation more lively. Gerhard enjoyed listening. He knew almost no one there, but was helped by Milinko, who lived in the area and who, unaware that he was doing him a service, was flattered by the attentions of Vera’s older brother. Milinko introduced him to his friends, his neighbors, and took him to the “promenade,” the longest tree-shaded street in the neighborhood, where the young people, boycotting their haunt in the middle of town as a form of silent protest, now congregated. Gerhard’s coarse ways were liked here; they went with the atmosphere.
After the tremendous shock caused by the senseless, wholesale killing, the young people, previously pacifists, slipped into the opposite extreme. The crimes committed against them and their like freed them from responsibility. Forgetting the ghastly gaping mouths of the people who had been hanged, they began to speak of them as simple fools who had not taken seriously enough the frenzied armored troops. It was as if this were no more than a soccer match, the first half of which had passed in blows and a confused passivity. But now that half time had arrived, they were preparing for a counterattack, rapidly hardening themselves to use the same means by which they had been beaten. Everyone now talked of rifles and revolvers, even couples holding each other close in doorways. So it was not difficult for the Communists who had managed to escape the first wave of arrests to find new recruits.
With the instinct of animal trainers, the Communists immediately chose Gerhard, because of his loud mouth, his arrogance, and his self-castigating outbursts against Jewish weakness, as the best of the lot and enlisted him in a shock group. Every day he walked a dozen kilometers, always taking a different route, to a small wood between Novi Sad and Kać, and there, with a whistle as a signal, met with three other comrades and a reserve lieutenant who taught them to fire a revolver and throw grenades, weapons that despite the regulations he had held onto. To avoid being discovered and to save ammunition, it was usually an empty revolver that they aimed and fired, and rocks instead of a bomb that they threw at a target. But Gerhard imagined, with every click of the hammer and every thud of a rock against a tree trunk, a mutilated body sprawled at his feet. His participation in the shock group filled an enormous void, and he stopped his insulting, his mocking. He became serious, precise, almost good-humored. He had no furth
er use for Milinko, because now he knew the people in this neighborhood better than Milinko did, but he did not abandon them. Rather, he tried to convince him, in a few heart-to-heart chats, that he ought to dedicate himself to the destruction of the invader. But Milinko was too much an individualist to become part of a collective aim and will. His thoughts, spell-bound by the quest for knowledge, kept him high above the ground he walked on, and his association with the elder Kroner and, through him, with the spiritual riches of Germany, dissipated any wish for vengeance. Milinko made excuses to Gerhard, who in turn shrugged him off. Also, while Gerhard spent more and more time away from the house because of his revolutionary activities, Milinko, as Vera’s official boyfriend, spent much of his time there. Which was not to the liking of Vera herself.
Vera had had no fondness for her home, and when the steamroller of war passed over it, turning it into a house of people deprived of all rights, her feelings were given external justification. Now it was a trap for her. Sometimes she tiptoed from room to room, from windows facing the street to windows facing the courtyard. The building in the back, the storeroom, was a barrier to her possible retreat, and the windows on the street side were breaches in the defending wall. Sometimes she listened to people’s voices—voices ordering merchandise, giving directions to the kitchen, greeting a guest—and they sounded to her like a strange ghostly jumble, confused echoes from another world. She asked herself what she was doing there and what bound her to the house. There were family ties, of course, ties, by her birth, to a father, a mother, a grandmother, and a brother. Yet when she searched their faces—she felt a need to look at them closely—she decided that her connection to them was a matter of chance, and harmful besides. Each one of them had his or her own idea of life, which was either different or else totally contrary to Vera’s. Her mother, for example, considered life to mean serving Gerhard, which Vera thought was altogether lacking in taste, while Gerhard dreamed only of rebellion, of deeds that were clearly doomed to fail and dangerous for the whole family. When she learned from Milinko that Gerhard was consorting with the hotheads on the outskirts of town, she tried to explain to him where this would lead, but he, condescending to her as always, laughed: “You, young lady, take care of your own nice round little bottom and keep quiet.”
But why should she keep quiet when it was her life that was being put at risk? In order to die quietly with the rest of the family? She had no stomach at all for such a family end, yet the house, remaining in the house, forced her toward death. Would leaving it bring salvation? But where to go, and with whom? She would not be able to escape by herself, not with this inexperienced, newly matured body of hers, so sensitive and vulnerable; she could see that clearly. With Milinko? But Milinko, coming to the house to see her, only stared wide-eyed at her father in the semidarkness of his room, and at his books, as if they contained clues to salvation, as if they could rescue one from being beaten, cursed, spat upon, killed. Several times she confided in him, told him of her terror, but in response received only moonstruck assurances of the inevitability of the victory of reason over the temporary forces of darkness, and in this she had no difficulty recognizing the self-absorbed delusions of the ineffectual father of the family, Robert Kroner. So she shut herself off from Milinko into a malicious silence, a silence broken only by a still more malicious, almost mocking encouragement, through which she pretended to be his pupil, the pupil’s pupil, and watched him swell with pride as a result of the deception. She began to think that everyone was pretending, boasting of a power they did not have, while those who had the power did not talk but simply made use of it.
When her mother’s brother, Sep, showed up unexpectedly at the house—she could just barely remember him as a boy from her rare childhood visits to Grandmother Lehnart’s village—he was serious, dry, unresponsive, with a revolver at his side, the symbol of his power over life and death. For a while she hoped (as she had hoped about many others) that perhaps he could save her. She tried to approach him, but he sought only Gerhard’s company; he even avoided her, for he was troubled by her youthful, sensual beauty, the alluring softness of her hips, the whiteness of her skin, her thick red hair, all of which, along with the knowledge that she was half-Jewish, even though his niece, aroused in him a secret lust.
Once, returning home late from his walk and supper, he could not find his key, and from the courtyard knocked on a window, thinking it was the maid’s. But it was the window of Vera’s room, and stretching out from it in her thin white nightgown with a deep opening between her swelling breasts, she handed him her key. That night he dreamed of a completely different redhead, much bigger than Vera, hovering above him, grazing his lips with huge, warm, milky breasts, but when he awoke, he knew that it was Vera. And Vera, too, dreamed. She dreamed of him as Saint George from a brightly colored picture she had seen in her childhood at Grandmother Lehnart’s: on a horse, holding a lance that pierced a green dragon with a thin red darting tongue. Mounted on that horse, they galloped off together, his strong, muscular arm around her waist. Stone echoed beneath her, the Turkish cobblestones of her street behind the Baptist church; sparks flew from the horse’s hooves; the wind sang, and it was a German song, in the voice of a male choir, “Der Erlkönig,” which she once learned at Fräulein’s, “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind,” and she knew that the dragon was behind them, dead and crushed, that they were leaving the town and, with it, all dangers and ties. She saw a new, unknown region splitting open before her eyes, craggy and mountainous, uninhabited and therefore safe. Saint George with the face of Uncle Sep dismounted from the horse and helped her down, placing a firm hand beneath her foot. When she stepped on the ground, he disappeared, and all around her, squatting on the soft grass, half hidden among luxuriant ferns, were a rabbit, a squirrel, a fox, a hen, a partridge, and a dozen other animals, all tame, whose shapes she recognized but whose names she did not know. Without interpreting her dream, in fact unaware that she was acting under its influence, she decided to tell her father that she wished to leave Novi Sad, to go to a place where she was not known, abroad if possible.
She found, to her surprise, that this was an idea that had been constantly on his mind, an idea that he was grateful for the opportunity to share with someone. He knew a great deal, it turned out, about the attitude of various governments toward the Jews, and of their treatment in countries in which they had already become the object of special measures. In Serbia, where the Germans ruled directly, without an intermediary government, from the very beginning the Jews had been placed outside the protection of the law; all their possessions were confiscated, they were driven from their houses, stripped of rank and profession, of the right to earn a living, used without payment as slaves for the most menial tasks, killed out of hand once they could no longer work. In Croatia, under the Ustaša government, there were no Jews at liberty; they were all in camps, and it was only a matter of time before they were exterminated. The Bačka, belonging to Hungary, which still clung to its bourgeois, even feudal traditions, was at the moment the best possible refuge among all the regions of dismembered Yugoslavia. In Hungary proper, said Kroner, the Jews still lived almost untouched, especially in the two-million-strong jungle of Budapest; the laws and regulations introduced against them had been subverted by the money and resourcefulness of the merchants, industrialists, and an active Jewish intelligentsia that had been absorbed into the public and cultural life of Hungary. To go to Budapest, to move there, would virtually mean returning to the old legal order, with just a few restrictions, but still with opportunities for work and earning a living, and for Vera and Gerhard it would mean a chance to study perhaps, and take part in the activities that were suitable for their age.
But when Vera expressed surprise that no steps had been taken yet for them to move there, her father suddenly became less definite, his lips quivered, his hands retreated into his coat pockets. He spoke of decades of work, his own and his father’s before him,
of the business, the house, the accumulation of furniture, the goods in the storeroom for which he had not been given a receipt; he reminded her how attached his mother was to Novi Sad and her few remaining acquaintances, without whom she would probably die of grief; he mentioned his wife’s familiarity with the town’s market, and—showing an obtuseness that disheartened Vera, as if he were not talking to her but to a third person—he mumbled something about her own attachment to the town in which she had been born and grown up. Vera replied sharply that all these reasons counted for nothing against the alternative—physical annihilation—which would make short work of both habits and possessions. The reference to this extreme danger caused Kroner to lose his head altogether; he began to stammer, to breathe heavily. Assertions became exclamations, impotent curses, revealing what lay behind the appearance of reasoned argument: the dispiritedness of old age.
So Vera went back to her original plan of saving herself by making a break with her family. She told her father reassuringly that she had no intention of forcing anything upon him, but that she simply wanted to leave on her own, mentioning as a possible source of help her uncle Sep, who had, as an SS man, exceptional authority and power, which most probably included the ability to help someone secretly across the border to a country beyond the rule of Germany. What country? Kroner pricked up his ears. Switzerland, she answered, or another neutral country, like Turkey, Sweden; how should she know? Now it was Kroner’s turn to be surprised at how well informed she was, because he had thought that she paid no attention to the discussions at the table or the talk on the radio. Pulling himself together, he promised to speak to Sep about it.
On several occasions he attempted to do just that, asking timidly, between his brother-in-law’s ominous descriptions of massacres, if it was possible to escape them, to flee, under such close scrutiny, the wrath of the German forces. Many parents, he said, would gladly pay for their child to be exempted from the fate of their people and tribe, particularly if they didn’t belong completely to that tribe, his own children being a case in point. But since he did not spell out his proposition, and Sep was not quick-witted enough to understand it in that form, such digressions from their conversation were met with silence, no response, quickly choked off by new episodes of SS heroism and terror. At first it seemed to Kroner that this was a stratagem to lure his fatherly concern to offer a greater and greater sum. By the time he discovered that this suspicion was unfounded and that Sep had simply not understood, it was too late. Sep was about to leave.
The Use of Man Page 11