The Use of Man

by Aleksandar Tisma

  Men and women crowded into the compartment, carrying bundles and baskets, which they pushed under the seats; sitting, they took out bread, bacon, and bottles of slivovitz and water, offered food to Vera, who refused, even though she was hungry. They chomped and slurped, lit cigarettes, their bodies exuding the smell of sweat. It was a familiar smell, one that had surrounded her all her life but had been conspicuously absent on her mother’s premises. Frequent baths, Vera concluded simply, and saw her mother in the room above the Beim vollen Tisch telling her to wash after the journey, and that vision melted into the face of the Blockälteste, her arm pointing imperiously, sending prisoners to the showers. Was bathing part of the mania of cheerfulness? The air in the compartment grew thick with the smell of greasy food, exhaled by the gaping mouths of those who fell asleep. The sleepers: faces bony and swarthy, hands big and dark, bodies sprawled, legs stretched out in an unfinished movement, clumsy and uncomfortable. Their clothes were rumpled and not particularly clean, either. Poverty. Vera was slowly sinking into poverty, dropping on the social scale. The train passed through empty fields; barking dogs could be heard; at the stations shouts and curses echoed; faces glistening with dew or sweat appeared in the doorway, took a long look at the sleeping passengers, though it was clear from the start that there was no room.

  At Stara Pazova, Vera got out to wait for her connection. It was early morning. The restaurant was closed, the waiting room full of scaffolding and buckets of whitewash. No shelter there. Shivering people were grouped around a heap of suitcases tied up with string. Then they all boarded a rattling, filthy old train that was saturated with the smell of urine. Chugging, wheezing, whistling desperately, it struggled over the bridge across the Danube. Novi Sad was her station: familiar porters, railroadmen, drawled speech. She took a streetcar home, entered the apartment, in which everything was just as she had left it. Disorder, neglect. Opening the windows wide onto the empty, quiet, barely awakened street, she had a sense of teetering over a pit of darkness and mud.

  She had no regrets about the life she had left behind, but much regret about the life she now had chosen. Regret about everything: the quiet streets, the exhausted passers-by, the unsightly grass that pushed up between the worn Turkish cobblestones, the houses that seemed a shade darker since she last saw them. She went to the Bernisters’ to pick up her first allowance; it was a working day, but the trade representative was at home, as if expecting her. He gave her the money; his wife brought in coffee and stood in the doorway. They asked about Germany, Frankfurt, her mother, about Bernister’s brother, whom Vera had seen only once and who had asked similar questions about his relatives in Novi Sad.

  She went to see Mitzi, but found someone else’s name on the door. She rang the bell, and an elderly woman, the new tenant, informed her that Mitzi had passed away two months ago. Mitzi had retired from her job, was about to move into an old-age home in Zagreb, had made all the arrangements, paid the first installment, chosen the room, and on her last day said good-bye to her neighbors, packed her belongings, sold or gave away what she didn’t need, and in the evening dashed off to the hairdresser’s to have her hair done. She came home, got undressed, went to bed, and the next morning, when the taxi driver she had ordered to take her to the station arrived and the neighbors broke down the door, they found her in bed, neatly covered, her freshly waved gray hair held in position by a hairnet, dead of a heart attack.

  Vera went to the cemetery, found the mound with a polished wooden board at its head giving Mitzi’s name and years of birth and death. She looked around and left, visiting no one there but Mitzi, because they had all gone unmarked—her father, grandmother, brother—and it was hard enough to see the grave in which Mitzi lay, with her wrinkled face and waved hair, slowly decomposing. Whom should Vera mourn the most? She mourned them all. She remembered the old ladies, her grandmother and her friends, who, along with Mitzi, only a few years earlier, had left their houses in a column escorted by soldiers with bayonets fixed. How they had wept, turning back to look at this dusty town, which, indifferent, continued to live without them.

  She walked home, and as she approached it from the corner, the house looked the same as always, its foundations deep in the ground, its walls scarred by rain and wind, and its roof blackened, with the apartment that had once been her family’s turned into an office, and her father’s shed transformed into a store-house for lentils and beans. She had the feeling that she was entering yet another cemetery. Here, at the gateway, she had usually met someone, her father, her brother, the maid; and from there her grandmother, absurdly dolled up in her black dress with white polka dots and black straw hat, used to go off on her visits; and there Count Armanyi had stopped her and, clutching his hat to the breast of his expensive gray suit, spoke of his longing for her. She mourned him, too, now, that man in whom she had once placed her hopes even though she had seen through his selfish intentions from the start. Even his selfishness, male and petty, she mourned, wondering what it had become, what the man had become. Was he alive, or dead like Mitzi, under a mound in Hungary or somewhere else?

  Vera mourned everyone who had ever spoken to her, who had longed for her, whether out of love or out of lust, even the German soldiers whose convulsive spasms on top of her before they left for the front were the last expression of their will to live. They were all shadows now, voices from the past. Was there anything solid on this earth, anything that stood firm, so one would not need to say of it: That, too, has passed? It seemed to her that there was nothing. Desires, plans, people sending their calls of love and screams of pain into the air, and ultimately all this dissolved into a fog that floated aimlessly. And she herself was a wisp in that fog, lost among strange shadows and voices. Did she exist, or was she just another of those shadows and voices? She didn’t feel like going in, didn’t feel like eating or drinking. She had no need of anyone’s company.

  A person from the past found out that she had come back and, in the early evening, day after day, knocked at her door. She saw his silhouette in the frosted glass. It was not Bernister, it was a young outline, with a lock of unruly hair combed to one side. Unable to remember anyone like that and not wanting to, she simply waited for the man to go away.

  And out there the seasons changed. It was autumn again, early autumn, still warm; the earth swelled; the trees in the courtyard bent low with dusty leaves; flies and bumblebees buzzed their way in through the window but could not find their way out. Vera got dressed and went out to buy food. (She went out only in the evening.) The windows were lighted; she could see women getting beds ready for the night, she could hear music blasting from a radio and a child’s voice shouting “Mammaaa! Mammaaa!” in despair that there was no response. The cry grew softer as Vera moved down the street. Perhaps Mama was lying beneath Papa, or was out in the yard hanging up the wash, or had not come back from her afternoon visit. Who could tell? Not that it mattered—the misunderstanding remained, the child’s vain call determined by some remote, unknown inevitability. Vera’s eyes were moist: she knew that she would never be the cause of such a misunderstanding, because that possibility had been torn out of her. The sense of futility grew unbearable; she felt that she was ill, ill in her mind and heart, as if some germ had found its way into the coils of her brain and was digging, digging, and she could do nothing about it. And when it dug to the center, she would collapse or go mad. Then she heard her name repeated several times and saw a man of medium height hurrying toward her; his teeth gleamed in the light of a street lamp as powerful arms folded around her in a familiar embrace. When the arms released her, she looked closely at the man’s face and saw that it was Sredoje Lazukić. She dropped her head on his shoulder and sobbed.

  17

  Sredoje’s meeting with Vera Kroner concluded a long, roundabout chain of events that began with his acceptance of the role of obedient son.

  Six days after the outbreak of war, he left Novi Sad with his father, who dared not await the German and Hungarian forces und
er his own roof, having no desire to leave his male offspring as hostages to the enemy. Always loud in his public denunciations of Germany, as well as of the other nations who could play the aggressor on their own and threatened to do so, Nemanja Lazukić greeted the tearing up of the pact with Germany by making a speech from the balcony of the Town Hall, immediately after Dr. Marko Stanivuk, the leader of his party. He did not believe that he would actually have to make the sacrifices he vowed to make as he shook his fist above the heads of the assembled citizens; quite the contrary, he believed that his pronouncements would discourage the enemies in Berlin, Budapest, and Sofia. It was with this sentiment that he calmed his wife on returning home from the banquet that evening. And even when the sirens wailed and the silver German aircraft passed slowly across the sky in neat formations, he was troubled only for a moment. In the quiet of the dry cellar to which he had led his family, he declared, eyes raised prophetically to the ceiling, “This will cost them dear. They will have to subdue the entire country, and the Serbian soldier will stand firm.”

  After the alert was over, he went into town and returned with the news that Belgrade had been bombed. “Good. Everybody will hate them now.” He packed his shaving kit and a towel into a small bag, because he had volunteered, being a captain in the reserve, for the post of deputy commander at the civil-defense headquarters. He remained on duty day and night, telephoning his family only once, to announce that the Yugoslav army had advanced deep into Bulgaria. Yet the town streets were filling up with retreating troops; hungry and tired, they sat on the sidewalks and knocked on doors asking for water. It was through their disordered ranks that he finally reached home, almost as crushed as they were. “Treason,” he said. “We have to get away. Only temporarily, of course, for we’ll win in the end, just as we did in the last war.” He went into the spare room and took the suitcases from the closet, and asked his wife to pack everything he and his sons would need for a long trip. “You, my dear, will have to stay,” he told her, placing his hand on her shoulder and looking her straight in the eye. “You’ll take care of the house until our return, which won’t be long.” He went into town to look for transportation, and after many hours finally came back with Jovan, the elderly, broad-shouldered taxi driver who used to drive him to hearings in the neighboring towns, and, pointing to the suitcases lined up in the entrance hall, went to his room to change. His sons were already sitting in the low-slung blue car, and his wife stood by the windshield, wiping the tears from her eyes, when he appeared in the sports suit—plus fours and woolen knee socks—he wore for country outings. “Let’s go.” He gave the sign, then kissed his wife on both cheeks. “Don’t you be afraid! You’re a woman, so no one will do you any harm.” Klara Lazukić stammered, “But where are you going, where are you taking my children?” Seated next to the driver, he stuck his head out of the window and said in a low voice, “Perhaps to Albania, perhaps farther. Until the fortunes of war bring us back to you.” The taxi moved off.

  At the first corner it had to slow down for the soldiers, who, pouring in from all directions, jammed the streets. The taxi edged its way through the ragged army lines and advanced along with them at a walking pace as far as the bridge across the Danube. Lazukić and his sons sat in soft, well-padded seats; through the glass they saw the faces of the grimy soldiers and felt like averting their eyes. “Fight on, you brave fellows!” Lazukić mumbled, unheard by the objects of his encouragement. Then he grew preoccupied with the car’s slow progress and, leaning forward, urged Jovan to speed up. Jovan was silent, morose, uncomfortable with the assignment he had taken on. At the bridge they had to come to a stop before they could get their wheels aligned on the narrow causeway. The blue of the river stretched to the left and to the right and far into the distance. They turned to look back at the houses of Novi Sad, which stood still, as if expecting something.

  On the main road they were swallowed up by the traffic. Columns of soldiers, horse-drawn guns on carriages, an occasional truck, field kitchens on high wheels, wagons carrying ammunition bumped against each other, all in a rush but powerless to widen the asphalt highway, on either side of which, in the ditches, lay burned overturned vehicles and equipment. They crept along, to the shouts and curses of the officers desperately urging on the soldiers and horses. Jovan clenched the steering wheel and changed gear constantly, while Nemanja Lazukić fidgeted in his seat and offered pointless advice. Rastko withdrew into his own thoughts, and Sredoje observed the scene with a mixture of shame and curiosity, as an unwelcome but exciting novelty.

  At dusk they reached Indjija. Although Lazukić swore to God that the troops would stop there—he was reliably informed that a defensive front would be established on the slopes of Fruška Gora—the column continued to move in a dense, nervous mass. It was well into the night when they arrived at Stara Pazova. Worn out, they turned into a side street and stopped. Lazukić went off on foot to look for a place to stay. He was unsuccessful but decided to drive no farther; they would make do with the courtyard of a nearby inn, which could provide, if no room, at least the comfort of a hot meal. They took out their luggage, relieved their swollen bladders, washed their hands at a well, and, by the light of a kerosene lamp—for some reason there was no electricity—sat down at a round table in the downstairs room to a supper of goulash and pickled peppers. Lazukić engaged the innkeeper in conversation, told him what they had seen on the way, evaluated with him the chances for defense, and examined the possibility of asking a Slovak woman, who lived nearby but worked at the inn, for a room. Following the innkeeper, or, rather, his barely visible outline in the darkness, which echoed with the rumble of vehicles and the shouts of men from the main road, they walked through a garden, opened a creaking gate in a plank fence, woke sleeping dogs, listened to a hushed conversation, and heard a door bang open. Finally they were let into a large room with a low ceiling, rag rugs, and two immense beds pushed against the far wall. A buxom peasant woman wearing a head scarf and wide skirts prepared the beds for them, unfolded layer after layer of quilts, gave them a candle, accepted a tip, and left. They, in turn, undressed, climbed into the beds, covered themselves with the quilts, and, muttering about the cramped space and lack of air, fell asleep and slept through their first night as refugees.

  The following morning, after breakfast at the inn, which took longer than they had intended, their plan to continue the journey was unexpectedly threatened by their driver’s decision to return home at once. Lazukić pleaded with Jovan, reminded him of the many lucrative trips they had taken together, though he could not deny that he had hired the taxi for one day only; one day, he had thought, would be enough for them to reach Belgrade. The innkeeper, who was listening to the dispute with considerable interest, now interrupted to say that, according to what he heard that morning from a soldier, it was impossible to get to Belgrade now, because the bridges had been destroyed and the troops were moving in the direction of Obrenovac. This information silenced them for a moment, then served as a basis for new negotiation. Lazukić offered Jovan more money, for which Jovan agreed to take them to the ferry on the Sava right across from Obrenovac, but, as he said, not a step farther. They got into the taxi and pulled out onto the main road.

  The column was still inching along in the same thick confusion of people and objects. Jovan had to wait for an opening in the stream, and as a horse harnessed to a cart lost its footing, he quickly moved in among the pedestrians and the vehicles. But they went even more slowly than the day before, because exasperation had made the men irritable, stubborn, and no one would give way to anyone else. The faces that peered in the car windows were no longer indifferent or curious, but hostile; their eyes, narrowed from lack of sleep, glared at the passengers with suspicion and hatred. Oppressed by this hatred, they drove on, almost holding their breath, and passed through occasional villages until dusk, when they finally reached the embankment, which teemed like a fairground with unharnessed, agitated horses, loaded carts, and milling hordes of people in
uniform and in civilian clothes. As soon as he was paid, Jovan took his leave curtly, unpleasantly; restarting the engine, he turned the taxi around and disappeared in the dust made rosy by the twilight.

  The three Lazukić men picked up their suitcases and clambered onto the embankment. In front of them were woods swarming with human figures, and beyond, wide and dark, the glistening surface of the river. They walked down the embankment and through the woods, stumbling over roots and the legs of people stretched out on the ground, and emerged at the water’s edge, where they stopped to wait. On the other side of the gently flowing river, the far bank could be made out, black with vegetation under the pink vault of the sky. Nemanja Lazukić turned to the man next to him and asked about the ferry. With a listless hand the man pointed to a small dark shape that was in the process of detaching itself from the opposite shore. As if responding to a signal, the people around them got to their feet and, jostling for position, moved. Carried by this human current, Lazukić and his sons came up against an impenetrable wall of backs. Anxiously they watched the ferry approach slowly and finally, fifty paces to the right, touch ground. The crowd swung forward, which brought them ten paces closer to the place of embarkation. But the forty remaining paces were an impassable barrier. Worn out, they put down their suitcases and sat on them.

  It took six crossings—three quarters of an hour each—before they reached the wooden landing, where with great effort they managed to elbow their way up the gangplank and onto the ferry. Greatly relieved, as if they had escaped a fire, they glided over the water, propelled by the boatman’s long oars, to the Serbian side. There they found no smaller a crowd; pushed, shoved, and cursed at, tripping in the darkness, they proceeded slowly along a muddy road until they reached the town. They had hoped to find a place to stay the night, but everyone else had the same idea, and at the few lighted houses there was a departing stream of people who had already been turned away. Only the spacious railroad station was open to them, and there they collapsed, keeping close together, on the stone floor of the waiting room. Through the night they were wakened by newcomers, who stepped on them and pushed them closer to the wall. They dozed fitfully until the cold April dawn.