Hunger roused her again. She must eat. She looked into the room adjoining; the concierge must be in the courtyard, or else had run off to see a friend, to recount the misfortune that had befallen her with the return of the house-owner’s daughter, whom she had long since written off. “No, you won’t! You won’t!” she said aloud. She went into the larder, cut herself a piece of bread, tore off some sausage with her teeth, her eyes searching among the jars for something pickled to season it with. There was nothing. She heard a door bang and stiffened with fright. What was she doing? She had a right to all this; it was not stealing. With her teeth she straightened off the sausage where she had bitten it; the bread wouldn’t be noticed. She walked back into her room, chewing slowly and with enjoyment.
Life. She must look out for herself. She returned to the kitchen and carefully washed herself, then dressed, meticulously smoothing out every crease. She walked into town. It was early evening. A man in rubber boots with a cap on his head was riding a bicycle with a bucket balanced carefully on the handlebars. Slops! It came back to her: peacetime. She was pleased with herself for being so clever, so composed. She smiled. She must buy a decent dress, shoes, she must get some money. She walked along streets that were the same as they had been a year earlier, but clear of Germans, of danger. There was occasional traffic. She reached a small square; Veličković’s stationery shop was there, where she had often bought notebooks, pencils. She went in; the bell above the door tinkled as it always did. The shop was dark, no customers. Behind the counter stood Mr. Veličković, short, thickset, a graying toothbrush of a mustache beneath his flat nose. Vera remembered her father once telling her mother that the stationer didn’t like being alone in the shop; he couldn’t leave to relieve himself and as a result had bladder trouble.
“I am Vera Kroner,” she said, coming to a stop in the middle of the shop, breathless from just those few words. “I don’t know whether you remember me.”
Veličković opened his small eyes wide; his mouth became rounded. “Oh, it’s you, Miss. You haven’t been around for a long time.” And he stretched out both his short, fleshy hands across the counter toward her.
“I was in a camp,” she told him, and tears came to her eyes, because he seemed genuinely grieved. “I wanted to ask if you could lend me a little money.”
“Of course,” Veličković said quickly, and leaned over the counter to pat her on the shoulder. “The important thing is, you’ve come back alive.” He looked around him. “If only I had someone to look after the shop, I’d take you home so we could have a talk.” Vera wondered if he still had bladder trouble. “And your family?” he asked.
“I’m the only one who came back,” said Vera, again making no mention of her mother. They stood silent for a moment. Then she stuffed the money into the pocket of her tunic and left.
In the next few days she made the rounds of the local offices, received certificates, ration cards. The Confiscated Goods Office she found in an unused mill; an NCO with a mustache showed her into a vast, cold room piled to the ceiling with wardrobes, beds, shelves, tables, and chairs. Spreading wide his arms, he said, “Take your pick, Comrade.” She took her time searching for pieces that would suit her, secretly hoping to come across something of her own. For a moment she thought she recognized a settee from the maid’s room, and she and the NCO clambered up to get it out from under other things. But the flowers on it were different. She took it all the same. She had to arrange for the carrying of the furniture herself, so she ran to the market and hired a porter; he loaded the pieces onto his handcart, and they started down the street. She felt ashamed; everyone was watching her, or so it seemed, but at the same time she had a feeling of triumph, that she had taken something, preserved it. She hurried needlessly, and several times had to wait for the porter to catch up with her. She unloaded the furniture in both rooms—the concierge had moved out the night before—and fell on the settee, exhausted. For days she did nothing. The furniture stood in disarray, and in the evenings she crawled under a bare quilt thrown over the settee. What were those possessions to her?
Yet hunger and discomfort drove her to continue with her petitioning. One office would give information out about another where she could obtain something she still needed. Finally she arrived at the Jewish Society, next door to the synagogue. She went in hesitantly, her heart beating fast, half expecting to find it ravaged, the floors spattered with blood. But when she opened the door, she saw two tidy, sparsely furnished offices; the front one was unoccupied, but in the one in back a dark, heavy-boned, big-nosed woman sat knitting behind a desk. She looked at Vera over her glasses, laid aside her knitting, picked up a pencil, and pulled a thin note pad toward her. She took down Vera’s name and surname, address, inquired about her family. Vera told about her brother, her father, her grandmother, then stopped, undecided. The woman, as if guessing the reason for her hesitation, arched her neck and asked, “And your mother?” Vera explained that her mother was German and had not been deported, that she had gone to live somewhere else while Vera was in the camp. The woman sniffed doubtfully, went into the front office, opened the window, and shouted into the synagogue courtyard: “Deskauer! Deskauer!” or some such name. She shut the window again, and soon thereafter an elderly, round-bellied man appeared at the door. The two whispered, the man nodded from time to time, casting furtive morose looks at Vera, then the woman came back and placed two hundred dinars on the desk in exchange for Vera’s signature. “We can’t give you more,” she said, putting aside the note pad. “We have a lot of people who are old and ill.” Then reluctantly she added: “You can come back again on the first of the month.” Vera went out past the old man, and in the corridor she ran into little wizened Mitzi, a Post Office employee whom she had known casually. Now Mitzi embraced her, pulled her head down onto her thin shoulder, and exclaimed in a hoarse voice, “Poor thing! Poor thing!” She asked Vera to wait, she had only to pick up her monthly allowance. Then they went off together, arm in arm, Mitzi full of questions about what had become of the Kroner family, and Vera replying reluctantly.
But Vera agreed to drop in at Mitzi’s on the way home, and was surprised at the comfort of her room, which was on the second floor of an old mansion. There were armchairs, a couch covered by a blanket, a radio, stands with fresh flowers, even several framed embroideries. Vera asked how she had managed to keep them. But they were not hers, Mitzi explained, she had got them from the Confiscated Goods Office. Hadn’t Vera been there yet? Who knows who they once belonged to—a Jew, or a German who had fled; it didn’t matter. She wanted to make her little nook as cozy as possible in the present circumstances. She offered Vera tea, and soon the sound of water boiling came from the kitchen, cups appeared in whirling clouds of steam and on dainty porcelain saucers, and there were cakes, and even napkins, which Mitzi got from the Post Office, for she was already working. She had cut the thin office paper in squares and folded them diagonally. Her lively, volatile, tireless patter made Vera sleepy.
“Poor thing,” she repeated, sipping tea and offering Vera cakes. “Now you’re alone, and I know it’s hard. But here we are, God wanted us to meet, and now we’ll get together often, won’t we? The few of us who survived that horror must be one big family, we must help one another.” She enumerated the camp inmates who had returned—for Vera, they were familiar or not so familiar names, faces from the pages of an album. Many had already found jobs, and Mitzi knew where. Did Vera want to work? Mitzi could get her a job at the Post Office. Vera had finished high school, hadn’t she? And they agreed that she should get in touch with Mitzi as soon as she was all settled. But to save time, Mitzi persuaded her there and then to fill out an application on the piece of white paper she pulled from a drawer. Mitzi would present it to the personnel officer the next day.
Vera went home in a fever of excitement, full of new discoveries and new decisions. She would arrange her furniture neatly, as she had seen it done at Mitzi’s. But, tired, she stretched out on the settee
and fell asleep. The next day, the meeting, her sudden and artificially fostered friendship, seemed faded to her, unreal. Had she dreamed it? She saw Mitzi’s face before her, expressive with emotion, and then the faces of those she had mentioned, which swarmed around her, dancing a mad reel that wearied her. The room was silent, with the concierge gone, and the creaking of carts in the street and the cackling of hens in a neighbor’s yard could be heard. Sounds of peace, in contrast to that rush of words, which took her back to the madness of killing, pillage, to death instead of the life that was here, warm and sleepy in her body.
Vera spent her days lying on the settee while time passed; she could tell it passed from the bands of light that moved across the floor under the curtained window. She would go out to buy food and cigarettes. She had started smoking on the journey home, and now could find no moderation in the habit, lighting cigarette after cigarette, and the butts piled up on the plates amid the leftover food.
One day, someone knocked at the door, then banged loudly. Mitzi came in, out of breath, her hair tousled, carrying two drooping pink carnations wrapped in thin office paper. She looked in the empty room that gave onto the courtyard, passed into the larger one facing the street, waved her free hand to disperse the smoke in the air, dropped the carnations on the table, went to the window, raised the curtain, and flung it open to the warm early-evening air. “You’re letting yourself go, my dear, and that’s no good!” she said reproachfully. Not limiting herself to words, she asked for water, a match, lit the iron kitchen range with a slip of wood she found in the pantry, and soon the dirty dishes disappeared into a bowl, from which they were resurrected, smooth and wet, to be laid out in perfect order on the top of a crate, which she had also found somewhere and placed on two chairs.
While she bent over the dishes, scrubbing, news came out of her in a stream: Vera’s application had been accepted, she was to put in an appearance at the Post Office tomorrow, she would work in the accounts section, payroll, she would get eight hundred dinars a month, it wasn’t a lot but would provide her with security and access to a good cheap dining room that the Post Office ran. Were those all her kitchen utensils? Mitzi looked around; the housework was finished. As soon as Vera got her first pay, she should buy some crockery, and first and foremost an electric hot plate; nowadays that was an essential part of every household. Why should Vera live primitively? There’d been enough of that during the war; that had been the Germans’ aim, to make progress impossible; that’s why they had it in for the Jews, because the Jews were the most progressive of all, the most resourceful. Now that there was only a handful left, they should not give the enemy the satisfaction of thinking that he had achieved his aim.
The next day, on the top, the fourth, floor of the Post Office, Vera was received by a hefty, slightly stooped woman with broad cheeks; she was kindly, talked in a loud voice, asked which camp Vera had been in, then told how she herself had been interned in Gradiška, in Croatia, until she escaped and joined the Partisans. She brought their talk to an end by banging her fist on the table and took Vera to the floor below, to a large room with six desks at which were seated a cluster of girls and one young man with flaxen hair, his left arm missing. No one seemed surprised when Vera walked in, not even Mara Brkić, a plump girl with a pouting mouth who had been her high-school classmate for a whole year. But they were all attentive; they gave the most comfortable chair to her, turned it to the light, cleaned the desk in front of her, smiled at her, and showed her how to transfer names and figures from small lined lists to a ledger that was half a meter wide. Then they forgot themselves, teased each other, laughed. A pretty, dark girl began to sing a marching song, which the others took up softly. They offered one another cigarettes, divided snacks, and Vera received her share on a piece of paper: bread and meat juice sprinkled with paprika, and water from a green liter bottle. At midday they all rushed off to lunch together, their wooden heels clattering down the corridor, down the stairs, and greeted the old mustachioed doorman as they emerged into the sunlit street and ran across to a dining room, in what had once been a tavern. They sat in two small airless rooms, waitresses brought them food, good-smelling, thick, greasy food, and they gobbled it up fast, because others out there were waiting their turn. Mara brought Vera a book of tickets with dates written on them and stamped with the words “Lunch” and “Supper,” for which she would not pay until the first of the month.
So now Vera had another thing in her schedule: to go from her apartment to the dining room, and back, between seven and nine every evening. In the evening, she was no longer in the company she knew: the people at the table were strangers, but loud and eager to make friends. They asked no questions, they accepted her. Gradually she gained confidence in the group, adjusted to their ways. For these people were not only close to her in age but also like her in their vagabond independence: if they still had parents or relatives, even if they lived with them, they insisted on being separate from them, rejecting the norm in clothing and speech, competing for soldiers’ trousers and jackets, neglecting face and hair, rushing to the dining room as if there was nowhere else to go for food and refuge. Several times, Mara said that she would be glad to visit Vera at home, and although Vera was reluctant to invite her, she couldn’t avoid it the day they left the dining room together and were going in the same direction.
The emptiness and disorder of Vera’s place delighted Mara; she clapped her hands as she turned around and around in the dim room, where clothing was piled high on the chairs and dirty dishes on the table and window sills. She threw herself on the settee, where the quilt and the pillow lay as Vera had left them, stretched her legs, stretched wide her arms. “Ah, what a life you have here!” She saw Vera’s slovenliness as a protest against the bourgeoisie, and must have reported this to the others, for in the next few days Vera was surrounded with offers of friendship. But she shrank from this aggressive camaraderie. She felt that by opening her home to Mara she had exposed something private, secret, that her former isolation had been compromised, and at night she would lie down in disgust on the settee and pull the old quilt over her.
Vera continued to receive only Mitzi, who dropped in and, chattering on and on, washed the dishes and made tea for both of them on the electric hot plate she had finally bought for Vera and installed herself. Did Vera tolerate Mitzi because Mitzi was Jewish? No. Vera stayed away from the few Jews who had come back, and whom Mitzi wanted her to meet. Nor did Vera go again to the Jewish Society. She was afraid of questions that would probe too deep, a fear she did not feel with Mitzi, in whose curiosity she sensed an innocence, as of a spinster who never saw beyond the façade of married life, a façade of order, work, and family gatherings. It was as if the hatred and distrust caused by inhuman cruelty had not touched Mitzi.
Yet Mitzi, too, had suffered: for four years she had worn on her chest and on her back the yellow star; had spent a year in a concentration camp; had been in the same transport as Vera and her family. Often they reminisced about the humiliations they had been subjected to, but in Mitzi’s lively mouth those reminiscences were dry, clean, comprehensible. “You needed will power to survive” was her conclusion, as if she were talking about the treatment of an illness. “Anybody who gave up, who gave in, was done for. Me, I never did.” Jutting her chin obstinately, she told how once, under the kapo’s very nose, she grabbed a handful of potato peels from the rubbish heap and ran off through a fence gate that happened to have been left open, into a hut where she could not be recognized; and how, sent off to work in the salt mine, she had treated the chilblains on her feet with her own urine so the doctor would not send her to the crematorium.
“Your poor grandmother, of course, was too old to withstand all those ordeals,” said Mitzi, allowing that exception to the rule. “But your papa, so proud and helpless, he had to break. It’s better that they didn’t suffer long. Think of it that way and you’ll be able to console yourself.” And as she listened, Vera felt that some higher, colder justice spok
e through Mitzi, granting passports only to the strongest. Or to the most bestial. Mitzi’s stories brought back images, and Vera saw a procession of shrunken, shaven heads on thin necks and emaciated bodies, like a field of sickly plants above which leered the ghastly faces of the kapos, masks from a madman’s dream. She saw the Zimper sisters before they were taken out to be beaten, saw them sitting on the edge of a bed huddled close, their hands entwined, then saw their thin naked bodies tied to the wooden vaulting horses, heard the whistle of the blows. How was it that Vera was spared? Because of her faith in life? Or because of her lack of faith, her baseness, her submission to force? Having survived, she was numbered among the victors, and here she was with Mitzi, wielding wisdom over the mistakes of the dead. Ridiculous, vile. In the name of those who had died she ought to smash that cackling head. Instead, she was drinking tea, saying nothing, nibbling on cakes.
She went to work at the Post Office, to the dining room for lunch and supper, then home to rest. She filled out, her skin grew tauter, her hair became silky, flowing. “What do you wash your hair with?” her colleagues asked, touching enviously the thick red cascade. They envied her beauty, she could feel it. A circle of mistrust formed around her; the offers to visit ceased; Mara, who had invited her to see her place, stopped mentioning it. Only official invitations came to Vera, tossed from desk to desk, typed sheets of paper with spaces for signatures that were mandatory. These were meetings, called “conferences,” of Youth, of the Popular Front, and were usually held in the early evening in the front hall of the Post Office. Stern new faces emerged in the light of the electric bulbs, among them the personnel officer, a hard, sharp woman, Comrade Jurković, who delivered a speech about lateness for work and the time wasted in talking. She read out a list of the names of the guilty parties, directing a glance at each one in the rows of chairs and benches. Roll call, it suddenly came back to Vera, and her throat tightened in fear. Would she be singled out, accused, ordered to take off her clothes, and tied to a pillar in the hall? Would each blow on her body be counted out loud? She broke into a sweat. She looked at the faces around her, terrified faces, like those of the girls in the house of pleasure when the Barrackenälteste passed between the beds, tapping the back of her boot with a whip. Vera had to be obedient, to hide any resistance. At the thought of how much easier it was here than in the camp, she almost cried out with happiness. She set her face in an expression of admiration and kept it that way until the end of the meeting.
The Use of Man Page 14