He would come and stand in front of the Kroner house on the pretext that he had new information, and Reza would run out and talk at great length, wiping away her tears and tolerating his friendly pats on the back and arms. Their meetings did not go unnoticed by the maid and later by Vera, whose own plans had become enmeshed in the activity following Gerhard’s arrest, because the savior she had latched onto had now to be used for the purpose of saving her brother’s life. But that savior was mortally afraid of being involved with a family that had brought down on itself the clanking of chains and the shadow of the gallows. He no longer came out to see Vera; he avoided her on the pretext of heavy new responsibilities. But Vera understood that he had cold feet and that the possibility of escaping with him was gone. She gave up entirely, fell back into the misfortune and shame of her home, tiptoeing around, listening for the front door, hoping for the arrival of a messenger, or even Gerhard, safe and sound, as they all did, but believing it less and less.
When the news came that he was dead, “killed attempting to escape,” as the official communication was worded, she put on black, as did all the family, and wept with them, and tried to comfort them with her presence and gentleness, as she herself was comforted—but knowing, all the while, in the depths of her being, that she had been diverted from her own path, pushed against her will into that bloody and dark gutter that only she had clearly foreseen. Now she was slipping deeper into it, with the others, to destruction. She told Milinko, who came to express his condolences, that she could no longer see him, and the young man went away, agreeing that it would be sacrilege to continue with their courtship. So, too, the conversations about books in Kroner’s study came to an end. The books the policemen had scattered during their search were put back on the shelves, and no one took them down again. What had happened during those last few months refuted them entirely, and they became what they were when not opened and interpreted with trust: objects of paper. With their fine bindings and titles, they looked out blankly at the people who still moved beneath them, who soon would be, under that blank gaze, taken away, torn from their resting place, and turned upside down, just as the books had been, but permanently.
15
Natural deaths and violent deaths. Sarah Kroner, née Davidson, choking in an Auschwitz gas chamber disguised as a bathhouse. Stumbling, without Vera’s arm to lean on, surrounded by shouts whose sense she cannot understand, her fingers too feeble to unbutton the front of her dress, the dress torn off her by someone else’s hand, then her underclothes, down to her wrinkled skin. Her shame, her cry for protection, for her son, who was left behind somewhere, for Vera, who did not come with her, her prayers, no more than a meaningless mumbling, for she has nothing more to hold on to, nothing in the world but a chunk of soap pushed into her hand to fool her. She can see the faces around her turning green, eyes bulging; her own chest is racked by coughing, her mouth gasps for fresh air, but there is none.
In the Gestapo cellar, the shattering of Gerhard’s skull under the blow of a wooden truncheon wielded by guard János Korong. “I didn’t talk! Or did I?” The doubt echoes in his damaged brain. His gaping mouth turns toward his murderer’s hand, his white, bloodstained teeth showing in a snarl at the thought that they may have let slip out names he can no longer remember but which he knows must be concealed by the silence of death.
Fräulein’s struggle against her fever in Boranović’s clinic. Her father’s lame left leg, his limp, the movement with which he would drag his body out of immobility, out of deadness, into the green of the garden, the black silhouette of that leg, toward which she strains her every pulse, as if toward a high safe ledge, above the flames that are consuming her. Her arms have not the strength to raise themselves to touch that silhouette, that saving solidity that is moving away from her, limping, growing smaller, the uneven sound of its steps moving upward, becoming softer.
Robert Kroner lying on his black winter overcoat in the transit camp, his choking “No!” to Vera’s imploring cries, that “No!” to a continuation of the journey, a continuation of the suffering, a continuation of responsibility, sinking into irresponsibility, eyes shut tight, ears refusing to hear, thoughts refusing to understand that he is letting them go, leaving them, being left behind by them, abandoned to the shouts, the blows, the rifle bullets that now, suddenly, hit him at close range, tearing open his chest, setting him free, at last setting him free.
Nemanja Lazukić’s contempt for the roll call, for the lumbering prisoners tied to him, because he doesn’t belong with them, hates them, would like to push them away, spurn the faces and names that intrude on his senses, the ropes that cut into his flesh, because the prisoners are dragged along by their own weight, their clumsiness, their jerking movements, their joints red and swollen, the stench from their sweating bodies. His attempts to catch the eye of one of the guards, whose faces, in the cold gray dawn, show neither interest nor pity. His shout of “Don’t, brothers!,” which is a lie, sour in his mouth, another lie among all the lies, lies from the beginning to this moment when truth is nothing more than contempt, the wish for exceptional treatment of which there is none, the revulsion that the shooting puts an end to, after which he is thrown onto a heap, on top of others, under others.
The amazement of Klara Lazukić at the rifles pointed at her in the same way, two years earlier, her dazed departure from her home (Have I dressed warmly enough? Did I lock the house?), her near-sighted eyes peering at the hail of killing on the other side of the street, which she can’t understand, can’t believe, her shudder at the detonations behind her, her scream, “Maybe they won’t! I’m not guilty! I’ve got children!” Her old-maidish lips twisted indignantly, her eyes raised, askew, toward the blank wintry sky.
The quiet, somnolent last breath of Tereza Arbeitsam, Kroner’s widow, née Lehnart, in the hospital in Stuttgart, whiteness all around. Exhausted by her long illness, dimly aware of a face, the face of a nun framed by a stiff white headdress, the features as severe as a man’s but the skin young and pink, a short, straight nose, red lips, that dear face to which she can no longer put a name or define its relationship to herself, and which swims away in the whiteness, in the cold mist.
Rastko Lazukić, crouched behind the boxes in a cart going at a full gallop, regretting that he didn’t jump off when the firing began, hesitating whether to jump now, but the shaking is cut short by a blow to the back, which jerks him upright, like the horse rearing in front of him, its huge arched back and head high as he falls over the sharp edge of something. “Is that my suitcase?” he wonders, feeling his strength, his consciousness ebb away, pouring warm and sticky from his mouth.
Sep Lehnart moaning for water in the cellar beneath the ruins of the former kolkhoz building in the village of Starukho, deafened by the noise of guns and mortars, which have destroyed everything, burying him among groaning wounded men in a semidarkness filled with dust. He sees their terrified faces, hears their pleas for water, of which there has been none for days and nights, ever since his belly was torn open down there where his moist, numbed hands are holding it together, where it seeps out, where he would place his cracked mouth if he could move, if his innards didn’t split apart at the very thought of moving. The wound pleads in vain for moisture, moisture to replace that flowing out, flowing out, which floods everything, the whine of the bombs, the dust and smoke, the cries that grow fainter, unreal.
Vera Kroner lying in the room overlooking the courtyard, the room that was once her grandmother’s, covered to her armpits with three blankets, for she has heard that the body gradually goes cold. She swallowed the pills from the palm of her hand and washed them down with wine from a big round glass, purchased the day before for that very purpose. Her head falls back with relief, her eyes close. She opens them again to see once more: the table and chair, the empty shelf, the stand with the empty flowerpot—not to bid them farewell, but to make sure that she is leaving nothing important. She is leaving herself, she thinks. But what that self is she can
not define. Noises from the street, a car, the wind whistling among the scattered old crates and rusty hoops in the courtyard. There is nothing else. She feels sick, it must be the medicine. She hopes it won’t get worse, it was only medicine, even though an overdose. Perhaps, instead, she should have lain down in a full tub and opened her veins, or have done that as soon as she swallowed the pills, as she first intended. It is probably too late for that now. Nausea shakes her body; she wants to vomit but knows she must not. With a great effort of will she stills the spasms in her stomach, forcing down the urge to vomit with all her pent-up fear, as with a fist, just once more, once more, she’ll do it as many times as is necessary, it’s like giving birth, but the opposite, she grits her teeth, this is the only way she can do it, and her child will be born.
Sredoje Lazukić, staggering, leaning on the boatman Steva Milovančev’s firm young shoulder, leaving the tavern Stolac, next to the rowing club, his stomach swollen from too much brandy because he drank all the pension money he was just given. Flashes of light dance before his eyes, as has happened to him before, for a long time now, every evening, even when he doesn’t drink. “I can’t see,” he mutters to Milovančev, who is dragging him on, but now his legs no longer answer to his will, they give way, he slips, and now lies on the grass of the embankment, with Steva shaking him and shouting. The flashes of light dance, violet and yellow, the ground is hurting him, there must be a sharp rock beneath him, if only he could move a little, to the left, but how can he tell Milovančev that when his tongue is stiff, his forehead, chest, and stomach are numb. The pressure of the rock in his side becomes unbearable, he pulls his arm out of its numbness and shoves it beneath him, but his fingers can feel nothing there but grass, the pain of the rock is inside him, it spreads through his chest, gripping him like an iron fist. Sredoje writhes. “Is it a rock?” he wonders and loses consciousness.
Around the bed of Milinko Božić, an unusually sharp current of air. Accustomed to sameness, to repetition, he senses danger, something above him, with his sharpened senses he can feel its size, a light breath on his face, male, not female, someone new, he concludes. The blanket is pulled back from his belly, fingers fall on his right thigh, pressing into his flesh, kneading it, looking for a spot to plunge the needle. Something is injected into him, although these last few days he has had no symptom of illness. Drowsiness. He is being anesthetized, then. Are they going to pull a tooth, he still has two or three, what else could it be? A new wound that opened up without his feeling it? The drowsiness enfolds him like feathers. How pleasant, he thinks, if they had kept me on that, I wouldn’t have been trying to understand, but perhaps I would have anyway; a man is a man because he tries to understand, and now I understand almost nothing, and in a moment I’ll understand nothing at all.
16
Vera’s regrets that she missed the chance to get away from Novi Sad were fed by more than the memories of her suffering in the concentration camp. That suffering, once over, was a part of her life, a part of herself, and she could not now imagine that it had never happened. It was her destiny, she decided, to return from the camp to her own town, her own because she had failed, before, to break free of it. Yet she experienced a warmth, a closeness, upon returning, both times, like a troubled attraction of gravity to a planet wreathed in vapors or a sun in mist, drawing her to it, or, rather, treacherously causing her to merge with it. Treacherously on both occasions, for by returning she found that she had gone away from it further than she could ever have imagined. After requesting transportation home from the liberated camp—from its cracked ground covered with bodies, from its torn-down fences from whose posts the corpses of the camp guards were still swinging—it was not home at which she arrived, though it was Novi Sad.
The official truck sent to meet the train from the camp deposited her in the street behind the Baptist church, but on the door of the house was the sign of a government office, a Supply Department, in the rooms a host of desks, and on the desks, chairs, with their legs up, because it was after hours. In what had once been her grandmother’s wing of the house, the concierge came out in answer to her knock, a fat, pink woman, barefoot; she was waiting for her husband, a Hungarian, to come back from the front. Standing in the doorway on one leg, rubbing it with her other foot, she informed Vera indifferently that the last member of the Kroner family, the mother, had left with the Germans in the autumn.
Carrying her bundle tied to a long string over her shoulder, Vera could have turned around and left. But her weariness made her climb the steps past the woman, pushing her aside like a curtain, walk through the rooms, set down her bundle in the biggest, which overlooked the street and was virtually empty, and tell the Supply Department secretary, a middle-aged patriot in riding breeches and boots, who ran upstairs to challenge the intruder, that no one was ever going to drive her out from under her own roof again.
Now she was on her own ground. But where was her own ground? In Novi Sad, a low-lying plain in the middle of a swamp, by-passed by history, and to which the Germans, with their cruelty, their barked commands, their precision, uniformity in behavior and appearance, arrests, internment behind barbed wire, and even murder, had brought a terrible unity, turning the whole of Europe into one vast concentration camp that reeked with the fear of death. Of this unity, after its dissolution, there remained only the tatters of hatred. There remained the fat concierge, her hair unkempt and colorless, usually wearing slippers, always terrified, stranded as on a sandbank by her marriage to the doorman, a member of the “barbed crosses” from some god-forsaken village, to which, after a few days of Vera’s uncomfortable proximity, she would return, in a hired cart, not daring even to take with her the few possessions that were strewn around the big room. And the secretary, sallow, balding, a survivor in the maelstrom of the Occupation only because it was over before he was completely choked by it—by forced labor (twice); by hunger, his own, his wife’s, and his two children’s; by his dismissal from a job in the brewery after it had been taken over and placed under the management of a Hungarian official; by the wounds sustained in the bombing of the textile factory where he had found temporary work; by the denunciations he did not make, for he had been too insignificant for denunciations to be demanded of him.
Living in close quarters with these two, Vera felt almost disappointed: Was this why they had won the war? Her gaunt body seemed hollow, a thing that strained to be filled: she had to obtain food and other necessities. As she made a round of the neighbors, she came upon Gerhard’s former mistress, next door. The woman was frying potatoes in the kitchen, which opened onto the courtyard—it was the month of July, in 1945. At first she didn’t recognize the visitor in her worn-out boots, yellow canvas skirt, and padded Russian tunic, but then she clapped her hands and gasped, as if a large bird had descended on her table. Vera could tell that her joy was not pretended. The woman called her husband from the room where he was reading a newspaper, and shared the surprise with him and then their little girl. The husband offered Vera a chair, and nodding now and then listened to the story of the Kroners’ exile, which carefully left out her mother’s betrayal of her religion and her marriage. It was here that Vera ate her first free meal.
Free? It seemed to her that she had the right to knock on any door and demand anything, simply by invoking her whole long year of deprivation. She felt a need to tell everyone of her terrible suffering, but the words that had not yet been said weighed her down with their truthfulness, and with their nontruthfulness, too, for some things remained stuck inside her, silent, like resin. Suddenly exhausted, sweating from the food, to which she was not accustomed, her stomach in a turmoil, she had to hurry home. There she collapsed on the floor and wept. The words she had spoken and not spoken choked her. The silence and nodding heads choked her. The cry she held back choked her: “And you, what did you do all that time?” She doubled up, a smell of dust reached her through the cracks in the floor, her stomach heaved, and she went into the kitchen to vomit. She looked
sadly at the pile of half-digested food.
Tears came to her eyes as she realized how disgusting it all was, how unnatural. She would look for someone in authority, she thought, to report her neighbor. He should not be allowed, without anyone knowing, to hang around, in the shelter of his room, on top of his plump, red-faced wife, whom her brother, Gerhard, used to take to the cellar any time he wanted. She should go out into the street, to the main square, and shout to everyone all that she knew and they didn’t know. She was about to spring to her feet. But she hadn’t the right, because she couldn’t tell everything. Instead, she cleaned up the vomit and dragged herself back to the big room. She sat in a chair, trembling. Where was she? Alone among empty people, strangers. They gave her food to eat and listened to her story, nodding, they walked in the courtyard of her house, from which her family had been removed, and none of them wanted to know what she knew.
Suddenly she felt that in leaving the camp she had left the one place where she was understood, where she was surrounded by real people. The wasteland covered with corpses rose before her, the twisted bodies of the camp guards hanging from fence posts. She almost felt sorry for them, wanted to kneel at their feet, help them down from the ropes, cry out: “Here I am. Beat me.” Yes, she was still very much there, in that arena of oppression. She unbuttoned her blouse and read the black tattoo. Yes, that was she. Better to have stayed there, dead, like Magda and Lenzi, on her bed, riddled by the last of Handke’s bullets, in the silent room of love adorned with red lights. She craved death as one might crave sleep. The nausea receded, the chair she sat in suddenly felt comfortable, and she dozed off.
The Use of Man Page 13