The Use of Man

by Aleksandar Tisma

  She was out of work and surprised by how pleased that made her. The office, the inquisitive faces, the men’s eyes glued to her body, openly desiring to undress her, to run their hands over her—all that repelled her. She was better off with these frankly sexual encounters, for which she answered to no one. She would not go to the dining room anymore, she decided, though she still had some unused vouchers; she would eat however she could, wherever she could. So she lived on gifts. As if knowing of her dismissal, no one came empty-handed anymore. The gifts sometimes were things of ridiculously little value—a pair of stockings, a half-dozen handkerchiefs wrapped in newspaper, or small change placed in a neat pile on the table. But, to make up for that, the man who came once a week in the early evening always left two hundred-dinar notes, practically enough for her needs.

  He introduced himself as a local landowner, but his elegance and his fine-quality suits and shirts, although worn, told her that he was lying. No longer young, with thinning hair and glasses on his long, sharp nose, he was humble toward her and at the same time feverishly hungry at her touch. He reminded her of someone from the past, who, she didn’t know; Count Armanyi, perhaps, but older. Was that why she felt drawn to him? Or was she pleased at his generosity? She couldn’t make up her mind. She waited for him more eagerly than for the others, and her heart beat gladly when she recognized his careful knock at the door and saw, through the frosted glass, the silhouette of his wide-brimmed hat, always slanted to the left. After several meetings, in addition to the money he began to leave messages on the table, small scraps of paper typed out beforehand. They each contained a single sentence: “I love you,” or “You’re dear to me,” or “It’s wonderful to know you’re mine.” Later, more boldly, they referred to her body, her lovely derrière, her tiny, scented ear, her armpit with its little tuft of hair.

  One evening, after he got dressed, he stayed longer than usual in the darkness of the room to recover his breath. Sitting in a chair, he asked for a glass of water and, at last, for the light to be turned on. Vera hesitated—it was against her rule—then did as she was asked. Her guest was reaching for his hat, which had rolled to the floor. He lowered his eyes, and suddenly they were filled with tears. “I’m not worthy of you,” he stammered, wiping his eyes behind his glasses. “I’m a friend of your father’s. I lost a daughter the same age as you.” He turned his face toward her, his eyes half closed behind the glasses. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  Vera looked at him and thought hard: In the contours of his face she saw another, firmer, face, full cheeks free of glasses, strong teeth, thick brown hair that fluttered in the wind against a background of green hills, and in an instant the parchment of age was unrolled. “Is it you, Uncle Jacob?” He nodded and stifled a cry. “You knew all the time that it was me?” He nodded again, took off his glasses, reached for a handkerchief in his pocket, and wiped his eyes.

  “Your mother wrote to me,” he said awkwardly. “She asked me to find out what I could about you. I followed you. It was as if I were following my own daughter, our Erika. You remember Erika, how you all played together, you and she and Gerhard? But something in me went wrong, went crazy. You were alive and she was dead. I was alive and your father was dead, and your mother had left you, betrayed you. It seemed like such an injustice. Why didn’t I have my daughter when those who were no more had theirs? An absurd thought, and I rejected it at once.” He was silent for a moment, his mouth working. “But my sinful body,” he shouted suddenly, beating his fist against his sunken chest, “it gave me no peace.” He lowered his head. “I began to lust after you with the vicious lust of an old man. I could see the path you had taken, that you gave yourself wantonly to anyone. The first time I came here, I came to warn you, to try to turn you from that path. But your scent, your youth bewitched me in the darkness when you took me in, put your arms around me. Suddenly, after so many years, I felt that I was still a man, still alive, that I could be of use to someone. Forgive me.” He shook his head in disbelief and closed his eyes.

  Vera felt sorry for him. She picked up his hat—it had been cleaned many times, and the manufacturer’s name was printed on its silk lining—and gave it to him. “Go now, Uncle Jacob.”

  It was as if he had not heard her, but after several minutes he got up from the chair, tilted his hat to his left ear, and wound his scarf around his neck. “I’ll bring you your mother’s letter,” he mumbled without looking at Vera. “She lives in Frankfurt. She begs to be forgiven, wants you to go and live with her. She’s all right. Married again. They keep a tavern.”

  For a second Vera felt a shock of amazement rise up inside her like a sob, but it subsided as suddenly as it had come, and in its place was the image of herself copulating with her mother’s messenger, an act in which she had even found pleasure, and she was nauseated. “Go, go at once,” she ordered, and opened the door. She almost pushed him down the stairs, so she could lock the door as quickly as possible and forget him.

  But no sooner had he gone than her disgust disappeared. She saw him again as he had been when he was younger, as in an old photograph, with other youthful faces around him: her father, mother, Gerhard, Erika. Gerhard and Erika had perhaps even been in love a little, in an innocent way; they would go off together into the hollows and woods when their families took excursions in cabs to the hills around Novi Sad. Her thoughts went back to the pleasure of that slow drive, the clatter of the wheels and the horse’s hooves, the old driver’s back bouncing up and down, his dark coat and tall black hat, the smell of the horse’s sweat and droppings blending with the perfume of plants and the breeze from the Danube, which was a silver ribbon in the distance. Even so, Vera had not enjoyed those outings. She would sit opposite her father and mother, always aware of the tension between them, the fixed smiles, the words held back. She could hardly wait for the cab to stop. The adults would spread out the blanket in front of the cabs after the drivers unharnessed the horses and led them to the edge of the woods to graze, and on the blanket they would sit and play cards. Gerhard and Erika would go off, and she in turn would walk as far as possible, as far as she was allowed, enjoying her solitude among the weeds and bushes. But vegetation didn’t inspire her; she couldn’t lose herself in it, too conscious of the proximity of the group to which she reluctantly belonged, to which she would have to return, and in fact Vera waited impatiently for the time to pass, for teatime, when they went back.

  Bernister, she remembered, used to visit them at home, sometimes alone and sometimes with his wife. He had long discussions with her father in the study, nodding solemnly at her father’s discourse, or correcting him on some point, for Bernister, a trade representative and agent for big foreign firms, was well informed about the movements of commodity prices in the world. Meanwhile, his plump wife chatted affectionately with Vera’s mother about needlework and cooking. Afterward they would all sit at the freshly set table in the dining room, drink coffee, and eat kugelhopf, but Vera would feel distant and impatient, sensing the falseness of that friendly gathering. And she had been right; for the Bernisters, as soon as the trouble began between Germany and Yugoslavia, broke all ties with the Kroners. Vera saw Erika only once after that, in the white socks, shirt, and blouse of the Hitler Youth; she did not see the rest of the family again. But now that Bernister had reminded her of it, she suddenly wanted to return to that time of abundance, tense and false though it was, to the brightness and simplicity of those afternoons.

  Also, she no longer thought of her mother with aversion. At her mother’s side, she would rest, she would be cleansed of the murkiness that led to her shame and defilement. She remembered her mother’s quick, light step, the energy with which she had brought her food and medicine when she was ill, or a dress just ironed. She must join her mother, she decided, and suddenly felt better.

  During the next few days Vera waited for Bernister to arrive. She jumped up at every little noise in the hall. But Bernister did not put in an appearance. Having gone away ashamed the la
st time, perhaps he would never come back. Finally she dressed and went into town to find him. She tried several shops, asked the assistants and managers, all young men, but they looked at her blankly: trade representatives, as one floor manager explained to her, no longer existed. Desperate, she went in circles, but at last, in a newly opened “people’s store,” in a glass-partitioned area behind a row of counters, she caught sight of a stocky man with smooth graying hair and wearing a dark-blue suit. She stepped forward and knocked at his door. He raised a pale, bloated face from his papers, listened to her attentively, but after a moment’s thought said that he didn’t know Jacob Bernister. He got up to show Vera out, but she remained standing in front of his desk. He asked her why she was looking for the former trade representative. When he heard that Jacob Bernister had been a friend of her father and that her father was the late Robert Kroner, whom he had known personally—he said—and respected, he asked Vera to sit down, picked up the telephone, dialed some numbers, spoke to several people in Serbian and in Hungarian, then pushed a slip of paper with an address toward Vera.

  The address took her along the main street past the Post Office, down the road to the station, into a narrow side street, and to a two-story house with a dingy staircase. On the second floor Vera found a door with the name she was looking for. She rang the bell, and the door was opened by Bernister, in a short, shabby dressing gown. He stepped back in dismay, was about to shut the door in her face, but in the dim light of the hallway Mrs. Bernister, now a gray, shrunken woman, appeared. Bernister pulled himself together and introduced Vera. “You remember, Robert and Reza’s daughter, Erika’s friend.” He invited her into the living room.

  A desk and a large typewriter with a black metal cover were all that was left of the trade representative’s office; beyond them, a low, wide couch, armchairs, and cabinets crowded together. “Make us some coffee, will you,” Bernister said to his wife, and as soon as she left the room, he leaned over to Vera and whispered anxiously, “You mustn’t say anything about my coming to see you. Or about your mother’s letter. My wife knows nothing.” But he opened the desk drawer, took out a pencil and a piece of paper, and hurriedly wrote in printed letters: “Theresia Arbeitsam, Frankfurt a/M, Forellenstrasse 17.” “Put that away. We’ll talk as if you had found the address by yourself.” And they did talk, first the two of them, and then in front of his wife, who brought in the two coffees and stood by the door listening. The former trade representative explained to Vera that she had to apply for a passport, told her where, promised to help her fill out the forms if she found that necessary, and, looking at his wife, timidly offered help with expenses Vera could not meet. The coffee was barely warm; they drank it quickly, and Vera got up. They were all victims, Bernister said in parting, though Vera had certainly suffered terribly. The truth was coming out now, things no one ever dreamed of. The Germans, too, had had their calvary; they had barely survived, and poor Erika had perished, so young. Every family had its pain, he concluded awkwardly as his wife wiped her eyes.

  Vera went to the police station, filled out forms, handed them in at the counter with the fee. A young clerk told her she would be notified. When? He couldn’t say. She was not pleased with this answer, for suddenly she was in a hurry. She felt she had wasted those long months since she had come back from the camp, trying to adapt to a life alien to her from the start. Then she received a letter from her mother, not in German, curiously, but in Serbian. It was difficult to read because the handwriting was poor and her mother had forgotten certain expressions.

  “My dear Vera,” said the letter, “I’ve written to Mr. Bernister twice, and have now heard from him that you are well and living in our house. I am sorry I was not there to welcome you, but fate decided otherwise. When they took you away, I had only Hermann left, and he had to escape from Novi Sad, though he did nothing bad. He was kind to all regardless of faith. Hermann is now my husband; he is forty-six, the same age as I am. We were in a camp in Karlsruhe and now live in Frankfurt am Main. We run a small tavern. Hermann says he would like you to come here. He will treat you like a daughter, for he has no children of his own, and he respects me because we manage our little tavern together. I am waiting for you. I wrote to Mr. Bernister also, to tell you to come and that I am expecting you. If you need money for the trip, I cannot send it to you because they told me I could not at the Post Office, but Mr. Bernister will give it to you, and we will pay it back to his brother in Hannover. So come quickly. Your mother, Tereza Arbeitsam, sends you greetings and kisses.”

  Vera placed the letter on one side of the kitchen cabinet, tucking its upper edge beneath the frame of the glass door, and the envelope with its brightly colored stamp on the other. Occasionally she would go up to it, look closely at her mother’s slanted handwriting, read a word or two, or run a finger over the stamp, which depicted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with a wide cravat under his aged, sagging chin. She now had a secret, a goal. When a man came and she gave herself to him in the darkness of the kitchen, her inner eye would go to the cabinet and her mother’s letter, and she would not feel defeated, but somehow, because of her secret, triumphant. How she despised all those males who forced their seed, their unrest into her, quickly, violently, seed she could not germinate, for within her was an emptiness they did not suspect.

  She waited for Bernister, sometimes resolved to refuse him, sometimes resigned to submit to him as before. But he did not come. Nor was there any communication from the police station regarding her passport. She went there, to the window where she had made her application, waited in a long line, inquired, and received from a different clerk the same noncommittal answer. Then she walked to the Bernisters’. This time Mrs. Bernister opened the door; silently she stepped back into the dim hall, showed Vera to a tidy but unheated room, asked her to sit down, and went to make coffee. Mrs. Bernister herself drank no coffee; the doctor had forbidden it on account of her high blood pressure. Mr. Bernister was out of town; the year before, he had bought a vineyard in Fruška Gora, and since two of the rooms in their apartment had been taken over by a high-ranking officer, during the week her husband stayed in a hut he built at the vineyard, coming home only on Saturday and Sunday to wash his clothes. Inadvertently Vera was thus given the explanation for the regularity of his visits. Had Mr. Bernister been home in the last few weeks, she asked. Yes, said his wife, but he didn’t go into town; he was tired and looked as though he had suddenly aged a great deal. That was said with a certain acerbity, with a meaning Vera could not quite unravel. Mrs. Bernister asked how Vera lived; did anyone do the cooking and shopping for her? And when Vera answered, the old woman nodded with a clouded, almost tearful look. Erika, too—she sighed—would have been an independent young woman by now, had she lived. Mrs. Bernister told Vera that Erika died on her way to visit her fiancé, a German airman stationed in Budapest, in the summer of 1943. American planes attacked the train, and a bomb destroyed the car in which Erika was sitting. Only her shoes were found, and that was how she was identified. Mrs. Bernister left the room; when she came back, she placed a pair of red shoes with wide cork heels, virtually new, in Vera’s hands. Vera held them; they were light, like the last pair of prewar shoes her mother had ordered made for her by the shoemaker across the street.

  The next time, Vera went on a Saturday, and found Bernister at home. Covered with dust, he was pulling sacks of fertilizer from a shed. He wiped his hands with a rag, inquired about the status of Vera’s passport, and went into the house to type a letter requesting a quick response to her application. Vera signed the letter and put it in her handbag. Mrs. Bernister brought in two cups of coffee and stood, as usual, at a distance, watching them attentively. When Vera was ready to go, Mrs. Bernister accompanied her to the door and asked her to come again.

  This Vera did on working days, when Mrs. Bernister was alone. She liked the semidarkness of the cluttered room, whose old bourgeois furniture so much resembled her family’s. She missed those familiar surroundings, surround
ings that had not been happy or free but soothed by virtue of their emptiness. Her own home was difficult for her, tense. Her mother’s letter and envelope tucked between the glass and the frame of the cabinet now seemed to threaten rather than promise. They said that nothing changed, they pressed down on Vera like a stifling shroud, like mildew.

  From time to time Mitzi showed up to reproach her for not having kept in touch, for not having put her life in order. Or some man would bring his desire and leave money. Vera dreaded both. She found it hard to sit still while Mitzi, chattering, went about the housework she felt it her duty to do in the unkempt rooms, or served tea and cakes, and when Mitzi left, Vera breathed freely again, as if she had escaped an attack on her life.

  With the men, Vera truly feared an attack on her life, feared that one of them would strangle her in the middle of an embrace, or stab her in the stomach with a knife pulled out of nowhere. Why did she allow strange men into her locked room, allow their powerful hands to explore her body, even its most private places? She swore that she would never again let anyone in, that she would tell the next man who knocked to go away, acting tough, as she had done that time with the secretary, and if they didn’t listen, she would rush to the window and call for help. But when a visit was actually announced by a catlike scratching on the door, her throat tightened, and her body, accustomed to its servitude, despite fear and common sense, began to inch toward that summons, her arms reached out, her fingers turned the key, and when the strange hands seized her, she melted and spread herself wide to accept the onslaught.

  One day, after she had been tossing and turning on her settee for hours, she jumped up, got dressed, and rushed off to see Mrs. Bernister. She rang, threw herself at the woman’s feet, and poured out her anguish. The uncomprehending Mrs. Bernister helped her into the living room, sat her down on the couch, stroked her hair, mumbled words of comfort, and she, too, burst into tears, as if someone else’s misfortune had broken down a barrier, and began hurling reproaches at her husband. All he had ever cared about were his indecent pleasures, the gratification of his urges. He had urged Erika on to her destruction by allowing her to become involved with a man in the middle of the war, who was thousands of kilometers away; Mrs. Bernister had begged him to act like a father, to make Erika come to her senses, but all in vain. And now he was running away from responsibility. Instead of finding work, like everyone else, he bought a vineyard to avoid being with her, to avoid sharing her grief and loneliness, the hardship of a divided apartment; he hid himself from her eyes, from her accusations, crawled into the ground like a mole, or else chased after peasant girls. “But I’ll help you, my child,” Mrs. Bernister assured Vera. Her subtenant, the officer, was a serious man, alone in the world, not well; she could see he was not unkind, and he certainly had influence; she understood nothing about those stars on his uniform, but a soldier delivered a newspaper to the house for him. She had never asked for any favors, though they had shared an apartment for three years. Every day she cleaned the bathroom they used in common and sometimes out of pity put a piece of his dirty laundry, left lying in a corner, in with her own, so that he wouldn’t have to worry about it. Mrs. Bernister would invite him for coffee that evening, and Vera should join them. Now that they had a plan of action, the two women calmed down, and Vera left.