The Use of Man

by Aleksandar Tisma

  Hungry, they set out to look for food, but could not get near the inns, all besieged by crowds. They saw people carrying bread, and following the trail of this shining brown burden under so many arms, they found a bakery, which by some miracle was ignoring the war. In front of it, a mob pushing and fighting. While Rastko took care of the suitcases, sitting on them with his head bowed, Nemanja and Sredoje plunged into the battle for bread. They were the last to be served, and emerged with two loaves. They devoured them right there on the street, quenching their thirst with water from a fountain in a deserted marketplace, then picked up their suitcases and continued on their way. They came to a field not far from the town and paused to regain their breath. Nearby was a peasant cart with horses harnessed to it, and next to it a fire crackled; a mustachioed NCO was burning papers that two soldiers handed him from a chest.

  Nemanja Lazukić walked over and started a conversation. The NCO, the orderly of a battalion in retreat, had just been told to destroy all confidential papers and was burning what he could before moving on. Lazukić asked if he could load their suitcases on the cart; the NCO hesitated but finally agreed. The cart rolled onto the road, and Lazukić and his sons walked in step behind it, staring at their suitcases; they identified now with the soldiers who the day before had glared at them as they sat uneasily in Jovan’s taxi. Now they, too, were preoccupied with the road on which they trod, its bumps, holes, dust, and piles of horse droppings.

  They were tired; Rastko began to limp. Stopping at the side of the road, they hurriedly removed his left shoe and sock and found that he had a large red blister on his heel. The father scolded his son for carelessness in the choice of shoes, mentioned the mother’s negligence and the family’s failure to understand the harsh realities of war. But Rastko limped no less after these reproaches than before and began to drop behind. Lazukić was obliged to negotiate once again with the NCO, who glanced at the youngster and motioned to him indifferently to climb onto the cart. Now Rastko’s legs dangled over the side, between the slats, his eyes penitently glued to the road.

  There was a rumbling of engines in the air, and as heads turned up to look for the source of the noise, aircraft appeared in the cloudless sky like huge birds and cast their shadows across the road. A rain of bullets ripped into things and people. The column scattered into the fields on either side of the road; the horses, frightened, began to trot. Sredoje jumped over a ditch into a plowed field and ran, and when the roaring of the planes grew louder, he lay on his stomach pressing against the warm, soft, freshly turned earth. In dismay he watched as the bullets approached; he was sure they were coming straight for him, and his heart missed a beat, but the shooting quickly subsided and he was unhurt. He raised his head and saw the road empty all the way to the next bend, where a white horse, free of its harness, was dragging behind it a purplish braid suspended from its torn belly.

  A second wave of planes came over, a third; then there was silence. Not at all sure that the danger had passed, people rose from the field slowly, hesitantly, like animals awakening. Sredoje, too, got to his feet, listened for a while, heard nothing, and walked back to the road. He saw his father emerging from the ditch, looking at his feet. “Are you all right?” Sredoje asked. “Yes, I think so,” answered the lawyer, “but my feet are wet through.” He climbed onto the road, took several steps—with each step water squished from his low shoes—then sat on a milestone, unlaced his shoes, removed them, peeled off his socks, and wriggled his white toes. “Where are the suitcases?” But the road was deserted, the cart with the suitcases and Rastko long since gone. Lazukić thought for a moment, then felt in his pockets, took one white handkerchief from his coat and another from his trousers, wrapped them around his feet, turned his shoes upside down to drain the water out, and put them on again. “Like socks!” he said, almost with satisfaction, and walked, at first with an uncertain step, then more confidently, his calves bared and the white handkerchiefs flapping, their corners dragging on the ground and rapidly turning gray. “Hurry! We must catch up with Rastko.”

  They continued along the road, and only there, from a higher vantage point, noticed the destruction that the machine guns had left behind. At the edge of the road, next to a knapsack, an officer in an overcoat, bareheaded, was lying on his back, his arms and legs spread out as if he were asleep. Farther down the road, a white horse was dying, rolled to one side, its head jerking convulsively, its powerful hindquarters, caught in the coils of its entrails, kicking. A cart with a field kitchen was on fire; behind it two soldiers were kneeling, bent over a third, who lay groaning on the ground.

  They were alone on the road as far as the eye could see, but when they turned around, they saw groups of soldiers and civilians moving away from the road and scattering in the direction of peasant houses. Again they heard the roar of engines and, without a word to each other, threw themselves into the field. Instinctively they ran toward the nearest house, but when they approached it, they saw men and women rushing out, taking cover in the bushes. “Over there!” Lazukić shouted to his son, running to a barn perched on posts, to the shelter of the knee-high space beneath it. In an instant they slid inside, and from there, panting, watched the road.

  The noise came from beyond the hill in the road; then, at the top, something huge stood silhouetted against the sky, and when it came rolling down, they saw it was a tank, its front covered by a red flag bearing a crooked black cross. As they stared at that fluttering, miraculously clean red-and-black fabric, the tank slowly and steadily came so close that they could make out the face of the helmeted soldier standing in the turret. Another, smaller, vehicle appeared at the top of the hill, a motorcycle, its driver sitting tall in his seat, and next to him a second soldier, almost prone in the sidecar, his finger on the trigger of his machine gun. The tank rumbled ponderously along the road, followed by the motorcycle. “God, it’s the Germans!” a high-pitched woman’s voice cried out, and then a man’s voice said, as if in answer, “Yugoslavia’s done for.”

  They crawled out from under the barn, shook the dust off their clothing, and walked over to the peasant house, which drew those same people who had minutes earlier abandoned it. A woman, probably the one whom Lazukić and his son had heard, sank on a bench by the wall and covered her face with her hands; a group of peasants and two soldiers gathered in front of her, watched her with curiosity. “What’ll we do with these?” One of the soldiers picked a rifle off the ground and held it by the barrel like a staff. The other continued to stare at the woman. The first soldier now turned to the peasants: “Is this your house? Can we bury the rifles here?” The second soldier gave a start. “Shut up, you fool!” he said, grabbed the rifle from his comrade, picked up his own, and carried them off behind the house. He disappeared among the fruit trees there, and when he returned, he no longer had the guns. “Come on,” he said to his comrade, tugging at his sleeve, and they were off, past the back yard and into the field, walking briskly, heads forward. They disappeared from sight at the first dip in the ground.

  Lazukić and Sredoje also decided to leave. But as soon as they started walking, they found themselves at a loss as to which direction to take: trudging through the fields along unfamiliar paths made no sense to them, and going back on the road seemed too dangerous. They felt hungry and tired, and at the same time realized, to their surprise, that it was growing dark. They looked at their watches: it was almost six. The day had seemed endlessly long, yet was over quickly. They decided not to journey at night and returned to the yard in front of the house. They discovered that the peasants gathered there were also refugees and that the owner was hiding inside. They knocked on the door, went in, and found an elderly peasant with a large red mole on his cheek, who was lighting a fire. The smoke sharpened their hunger and they asked for food.

  The peasant, turning his eyes away as if to protect them from the smoke, was silent for a moment, then said, “All I have is eggs, but they’re two dinars each now.” After Lazukić agreed to that aston
ishing price, the old man let them sit at the table and called in a woman. She was much younger, perhaps his daughter or servant, and silently prepared scrambled eggs and then cut two large slices of bread on the rough, bare table. Immediately after supper the peasant took them to a barn in back of the house, with barrels stored in one corner; he put down some clean straw for them and spread two worn blankets over it. They asked for water to wash their faces and feet. Lazukić hung his socks to dry by the window. Groaning, the two of them stretched out on the straw and covered themselves. They felt like kings: a fresh breeze drifted in through an open window; their numbed legs were at rest; from the road came the rumble of threatening vehicles, but here, within the walls of the barn, they felt temporarily safe. “Where is Rastko now?” Sredoje wondered out loud, drifting off to sleep. “In German-occupied territory,” his father answered. “You see how fast those devils move. We’ll find him tomorrow.” They fell asleep.

  The next morning the cold roused them early, but their hosts were already up and about. They had breakfast, scrambled eggs again, and set off at once. The road was full, crowded with people moving in both directions: refugees and soldiers with no rifles. Abandoned cartridge belts lay in large piles on the roadside. Lazukić and Sredoje paused to get their bearings. “We must continue in the direction we were heading yesterday,” Lazukić said, “until we find Rastko and hear what’s going on in Belgrade.”

  They had to pick their way through a mass of objects left lying on the road after the attack of the day before: crates, sacks, overturned carts, and here and there the corpse of a soldier pulled to one side, hands crossed on his chest. From the winding ribbed tracks, it was clear that the tanks, too, had circled the debris. Now the tanks were nowhere to be seen; it was as if they had simply traveled through and disappeared into the distance, but motorcycles spluttered by every few minutes, always with a sidecar and a crew of two Germans. The drivers no longer wore helmets, but tight, lightweight caps, and they passed the refugees and unarmed soldiers without so much as looking at them, focused instead on a task that had evidently been assigned them. The people on the road moved warily out of their way, lowered their voices, squinted at them uncertainly, and now and then a hand waved abashedly, an expression of gratitude and relief that no one was being harmed. The nearer Lazukić and Sredoje got to a town, the more Germans there were, and on the outskirts of Ub a whole column of German trucks was lined up along the edge of the road. Their crews, sprawled on the grass, eyes half-closed against the sun, were breakfasting on canned food and beer. The people passing looked in amazement at these enemies comfortably installed and enjoying themselves, as if disbelieving this evidence of their humanity; a crowd of children stood staring at them, sucking their thumbs. Lazukić looked at them too and remarked, “They don’t go hungry, like our men.”

  The town of Ub seethed with people; now that the danger was over and they were out of hiding, everyone was eager to stretch his legs and size up the new situation. The shops were closed. The first inn Lazukić and Sredoje came across was full to bursting. Lazukić fought his way to the counter behind which the hefty, bare-chested proprietor, with eyebrows thick as mustaches, was serving slivovitz.

  “Good morning,” Lazukić shouted above the noise of the customers. “I’m looking for my son. A student. He must have passed through here yesterday afternoon.”

  The proprietor put down the bottle of slivovitz. “Where are you from?”

  “Novi Sad. We were separated from my elder son en route.”

  “A student, you say?”

  “Yes, a student.”

  “They say there’s a student lying in the church. A schoolboy, more like.”

  “How do you mean, lying in the church?” Lazukić stammered, clutching the counter, because his legs were giving way.

  “How? The planes killed him, the soldiers carried him into the church.”

  Lazukić stared with a completely blank expression, then turned and, without looking left or right, rushed out. Sredoje, who had only half heard the proprietor’s answer amid the clamor, followed. But he couldn’t catch up with his father in the crowded street. He bumped into people just as his father did a few steps ahead, lost sight of him, spotted him talking to someone; then his father disappeared again, diving headlong into the crowd. Sredoje reached a square and saw the broad façade of a freshly whitewashed church and, in front, his father alone, arms spread wide, rushing in through the open doorway.

  No longer hurrying, a premonition of disaster making his step heavy and hesitant, Sredoje went in, too. After the bright sun, in the dark interior of the church, he could not at once make out his father. He went past a row of lighted candles, headed toward the pulpit, before which, on trestles, stood a freshly constructed, unpainted coffin, and inside it a sharp, thin face propped up on a cushion. It was not until he looked closely that he recognized his brother. Without glasses, Rastko looked younger, childlike. Then Sredoje felt a shapeless mass of clothing and limbs at his feet. He bent down to look: it was, indeed, his father. From the depths of the church, people came forward, a hand sprinkled water from an earthenware vessel over his father’s face. His father opened his eyes, groaned, tried to get up, and again collapsed, sobbing, on the floor. Sredoje tried to catch him under the arms; other hands helped; and as they got his father back on his feet, a dark-skinned priest with a short trimmed beard hurried up to them and beckoned them to a side door. They took Lazukić out into the open air, through a porch entrance to the priest’s lodging next door, and sat him on a couch.

  The priest’s wife ran up, dark, pretty, with down above her upper lip, in a black dress that had grown too tight for her and molded her small, protruding stomach. She bustled about, opened a cupboard the width of a whole wall, and took out a bottle of brandy. Together they forced several drops of the liquid between Lazukić’s lips. He sucked the brandy in, came to his senses, and looked around. “Out, everybody, out,” the priest urged them all impatiently, and one by one, though reluctantly, Sredoje’s helpers left.

  “Are you with him?” asked the priest, looking sharply at Sredoje, who had not left.

  “Yes. I’m the brother—I mean, his other son.”

  The priest nodded. “My condolences. I’ve made arrangements to bury the boy today.” He stood there as if expecting an answer, but since Sredoje said nothing, he left the room.

  Sredoje was now alone with his father, who fell into a half-sleep from which he occasionally started with a sob. Outside, the sun emerged from the clouds, brightening the room; a yellow ray illuminated the bottom corner of the couch and Lazukić’s feet in their mud-encrusted shoes. A rhythmic banging was heard, and Sredoje realized that someone was nailing down the coffin.

  His brother’s death, because it was so unexpected, was a shock to him. He recalled exactly the details that led up to it, starting with the blister on Rastko’s foot and his father asking the NCO to find a place for Rastko on the cart. What would have happened if it had been he, Sredoje, and not Rastko, who got the blister and was put on the cart? In that case, the cart would have bolted with him, the bullets would have torn into him, and he would now be lying in the coffin dead, with no more blood in his body, oblivious of the warm day, of the morose priest and his pretty, energetic wife. That not only could have happened, but that would have happened, and the thought sent a shudder of the unknown through Sredoje.

  Impatient, tired of staying where nothing was going on, he went out to the porch. There, the people who had helped him carry his father into the priest’s house were standing in a circle. They must have known by now who Sredoje was, because they fell silent when he appeared and stared at his face. He felt uncomfortable that in that face they did not find the despair they were expecting; in self-defense he went up to them and asked the first thing that came to mind: “Where is the priest?” No one answered; they went on looking at him with intense curiosity. Then the priest appeared and shouted, as if giving an order, “Let’s go!” He went into the room, and Sredoj
e followed. Lazukić was sitting on the edge of the couch, head in his hands. The priest donned his vestments and approached them. “What was the young man’s name?”

  Sredoje looked at his father and saw that his chin was trembling. “Rastko Lazukić,” Sredoje answered.

  “Profession?”

  “Law student.”

  At that, Nemanja Lazukić raised his weary face. “My son! My firstborn!” And he began to weep uncontrollably.

  Sredoje sat down beside him and put an arm around his shoulders, surprised at how small and frail his father’s body had become. He said, “You stay here. I’ll go alone.”

  His father shuddered at the suggestion, jumped to his feet in fear, swaying slightly. “No, no. How could you think of it? I’m coming!”

  They walked out arm in arm. On the porch the funeral procession was already lined up: the coffin, nailed down, covered with black cloth, stood on a cart, followed by the priest and the same cluster of people, though now fewer in number. Sredoje cast a glance at the house, hoping that the priest’s wife would put in an appearance, perhaps even join the procession, but she didn’t even peep through the door. Two men from the group pulled the cart, and the procession moved from the porch, down a passageway behind the church, and into a narrow, crooked street. Supporting his stumbling father, Sredoje looked at the houses and the men and women lined up in front, their eyes fixed on the procession; he still felt uncomfortable because he was not properly devastated by his loss, though less so as he grew used to it. Slowly, very slowly, they wound their way out of the town between run-down houses with gypsies perched in front, reached the cemetery, crisscrossed with bushes and trees, and stopped next to an open grave, where two men in worn, ragged clothes were sitting on a heap of fresh earth.