The Use of Man

  The town was his. He deposited his radio equipment in a barracks building outside town and set off to look for a place to sleep. He found it in the first house at whose door he knocked: in a town that had lived under the Germans, no one would refuse a Partisan liberator.

  And before long Sredoje was a Partisan with silver stripes. The relaxation of standards in the suddenly expanded army brought him the rank of sergeant and membership in the League of Young Communists. This meant new advantages and new responsibilities. The recognition filled him with pride—he had succeeded, he had not lagged behind others—but it came as no reward for his convictions. Rather, it now required him to have convictions. He had to profess a loyalty he did not feel, even impose that loyalty on others, and this put him in a foul mood. He went to the Party meetings with his stomach in knots, and returned home feeling as if he had been plunged in deep water and held down to the limit of endurance. There was no air to breathe. He found air where his mind could be emptied, and where there was even a demand for such emptying: in fornication.

  For a soldier, all of Celje was one great fornicating ground, as the instinct for survival strove to make up for wartime losses. And to whom could its treasures be opened more freely than to those who had by some miracle survived? In those days girls and women walked the streets like bitches in heat, trailing the scent of lust behind them; it was simply a matter of stopping them, asking them. Secretaries on their way home from work, peasant girls passing through, women waiting for their husbands to return from battle, young girls, and divorcées who had long ago renounced love to preserve their honor and their peace of mind—all now unhesitatingly stepped across the threshold of Sredoje’s room, in an apartment that belonged to a young mechanic with four children, and surrendered themselves, their hearts beating with the hope that in him they would find a man for the life that was beginning anew.

  He disappointed that hope, of course; he changed women constantly. At three o’clock, after lunch in the mess, he was capable of persuading an attractive woman walking by to go home with him, and then, after he had had his enjoyment and got rid of her, of going into town again in the early evening and finding another to waken his desire. Exhausted after a day of panting and sweating in bed, he would drag himself to the park in front of the railroad station and rest on a bench. There were always people there. Women with bundles would sit down on benches nearby, and again he would stir, ferret, introduce himself, boast of his sufferings, show his wounds, and into the bushes, instead of taking her back with him to his little room, which was permeated with the smell of sperm.

  The predictability of his encounters began to irritate him. He realized, also, that he was participating in something that had been arranged beforehand, arranged by the women themselves, that he was their instrument as much as they were his. He took them with anger, contempt, caused them pain, yet they rose from his bed with a smile of understanding, perhaps even finding excitement in the humiliation they suffered, and soon went on to the beds of others, driven by their own glands, their own needs. He disliked negotiating with them, disliked the wordless, impatient escortings to his room. He moved to a room nearer the park, in the house of a retired accountant on a street facing the station, but after five weeks looked for a third place, something that would vary the routine of these rendezvous.

  His attention was drawn to a cul-de-sac that crossed his own street, and a two-story house set back in a small but well-cared-for garden. Here, not far from the bustle of the station, a profound silence reigned. The silence of a trap, he thought. He lifted the latch on the iron gate; it swung open noiselessly. But the door of the house was locked. He rang the bell. A young woman with brown hair opened it, and he told her that he needed a room. She stepped aside, and he entered a cool hallway from which a staircase led up to the second floor.

  “Who lives here?” he asked.

  “Downstairs there’s only me,” said the woman, “and upstairs an elderly lady.”

  Sredoje stepped past her and took a look around. To the left, underneath the stairs, a door opened into a small room with a blind lowered over the window, so that he could just barely see a low bed, a wardrobe, a table, and chairs. To the right was a larger bedroom and, beyond it, a very clean, bright kitchen and bathroom. He took a minute to make up his mind, walking up and down in the hallway, on tiles that rattled faintly. Then he pointed to the room he had looked at first. “I’ll take this one.” When the woman nodded, he turned toward the entrance, said he was going to get his things, saluted, left. Intrigued not only by the room’s cavelike tranquillity in that cul-de-sac full of flowers, but also by the submissiveness of the young woman, he hurried to the room he currently occupied, threw what few personal possessions he had into his haversack, knocked on the kitchen door—the landlord and his wife always sat in the kitchen, so as not to dirty the rooms—told them he was leaving, and a few minutes later was back at the house nestled in the garden.

  Entering quietly, he walked down the hallway and found the doors to both rooms wide open. In the room he had chosen, in front of the open wardrobe, the young woman stood with ironed white sheets in her arms. Surprised by his rapid return, she froze and stared at him wide-eyed. He set the haversack on the table, took his belongings out, and turned to put them in the wardrobe. But the woman’s sudden stiffness and her gaze, which was drawn despite herself from him to the shelves, made him look more closely inside. Behind the white stacks of linen he spotted something silver; bending down, he saw a German officer’s cap, with silver braid around its shiny visor, on top of a carefully folded green uniform.

  Sredoje straightened and looked at the woman; she looked back at him with large pleading eyes. He threw his things on an empty shelf, turned, and left. But he did not go to the park to find a woman with whom to try out the attractions of his new room; he was too taken with the recent discovery and the woman’s eyes, which promised much more than a surrender achieved through negotiation and persuasion. He went to the center of town and wandered, waiting for evening. At the mess he had supper, then stayed to watch a chess match played by two NCOs after the tables were cleared. He was delaying his return to the house, as a gourmet postpones a meal to whet his appetite.

  When the clock on the wall struck nine, Sredoje got up and left. The little street was lit by a flickering street lamp; the house in the garden was quiet and dark. He pushed the latch on the gate; it opened, but when he shut it behind him, his fingers touched a key left in the lock. He locked the gate. It was the same with the door, and he locked the door also. In his room he switched on the light and found the bed made with clean sheets. He went to the wardrobe: the uniform and the cap were gone. He undressed quickly, went to the bathroom and washed, but on the way back, instead of going to his own room, he entered the room opposite. Its door was unlocked. In the bed by the window, in the faint light from the street lamp through the cracks in the blind, the woman lay with her eyes open. He got in beside her and spent the night with her.

  He did this every evening, in the same silent way. Only gradually did he find out things about her: that her name was Dominika, that she was from a neighboring village, that she was twenty-one (his age), and that she worked in the town’s land registry, which was where the Liberation found her. He never brought up the German officer’s uniform, not wanting to dispel the secret that chained her to him, and she volunteered nothing about the man (a lover? a relative?), perhaps because she no longer wished to break that chain. They lived side by side with the secret between them. He left the house in the morning (as she did), ate in the mess, had his laundry done, and only at night, like a stranger, went into her room to perform the ritual of love.

  Winter came, bringing winds and blizzards; the streets were deserted. Sredoje spent his free time in the mess, reading the newspapers or watching the chess players. With the arrival of spring and warm weather, promiscuity did not return to the streets with the walkers and idlers: lust had quieted down; young men and women chose more constant partners
or else withdrew into their former shells. Nor did Sredoje feel his previous hunger for novelty in love. He still occasionally struck up a quick acquaintance and continued it in the afternoon in his room. But across the hallway was the silent Dominika, and he sensed her presence even as he embraced the other woman. It made him feel, somehow, less the predator, which detracted from his pleasure. He thought about moving again, but then he realized that he would be leaving the very thing that he had been searching for: a lair with his victim assured. He stayed. But he was not satisfied. The monotony ate at him. He had the feeling that his life was over and that there was nothing to look forward to but repetition.

  The barracks, where he had to go every day, lay outside the town on the main road; the gray buildings, large and cold, were separated by empty paved courtyards. His duties were the classroom instruction of the first postwar recruits—at the end of their basic training in the surrounding hills in all weather—in the handling of radio equipment, which was relatively easy for him. But the instruction included political lectures and meetings—for Communists, for non-Communists—all of which he had to attend, and they were geared to the low level of understanding of the majority. Moreover, the commissars and secretaries, who had come of age during the war, were not much better educated than the recruits newly arrived from the villages.

  At these interminable lectures and meetings, where words were mispronounced and professions of faith were made without substantiation, Sredoje alternated between acute boredom and the urge to shout out, to challenge what was being said. But even his hypocritical silence, he realized, was not worth the effort, since he could not hope for further promotion on account of his dubious past. He began to think of leaving the army, of beginning a new life, perhaps as a student, though he felt that he had lost the habit of intellectual effort.

  In the spring of 1947, he put in his application to be demobilized, but it was refused, after a delay of four long months, on the grounds that he was irreplaceable. He decided, in revenge, to stop being irreplaceable. He withdrew into himself, changed from a comrade in arms to a cynical soldier: his instruction became half-hearted, openly ill-humored; he avoided political meetings by vanishing after the roll was called, on the excuse that he had to repair something, or with no excuse at all.

  Soon, drawn by his boldness, a group of malcontents began to form around him: Master Sergeant Vukajlović, who for three years now had an unhealed wound on his leg and who had also not been granted a release from the army; Corporal Saboš, from Srem, with the thumb of his right hand missing, many times wounded and decorated, but with poor promotion prospects because of his quick temper and sharp tongue; Junior Sergeant Perišić, big and handsome, homesick for his native mountains; Sergeant Simović, whose older brother had been shot by the Partisans as a Chetnik. Their meeting place was the NCOs’ mess, a converted tavern in the center of Celje. There, with wine brought in from next door (alcohol was not served in the mess), surrounded by cigarette smoke, they discussed the brigade, inveighing against their fellow NCOs and their superiors as oafs, imbeciles, toadies. Each recounted the unpleasantnesses accumulated in the course of the day, and the others waved their arms and muttered in indignation and sympathy. But from this daily airing of grievances, spurred by alcohol, they proceeded to criticize the army and the country itself, where it was no longer courage and ability that were valued but blind obedience and careerism.

  Sredoje participated in these discussions, but with only an occasional remark or amusing anecdote, because injustices that did not affect him personally did not interest him, and more and more the subject tended to be not their small circle, but the general situation, all of Yugoslavia. At the same time, as if in counterattack, newspaper editorials and speeches delivered in town squares trumpeted the justification of every decision, every position, and this wave of unanimity, driven by invisible hands, entered the barracks, too. Political meetings became more frequent; many young Communists were accepted into the Party without the usual lengthy procedure—among them Sredoje, despite his obvious indifference.

  At last the reason for all this noise and haste became apparent. At a Party meeting, after a short word of welcome to the initiates, the secretary, Major Vukoje, in a hoarse voice, sweating, read out the Cominform resolution signed by Stalin and Molotov and called upon the membership to respond to the accusations leveled at the Yugoslav Party. Several speakers came forward immediately, clearly old-timers; prepared in advance, they refuted, article by article, the lengthy, convoluted indictment, and the meeting concluded, late at night, with a unanimous rejection. But now, those who before had hesitantly asked questions or else suppressed their qualms of conscience were being told, by this, that it was possible and perhaps even necessary to argue. In the mess, instead of half-joking and complaining as usual, Vukajlović and Simović quoted the resolution from memory, Perišić attacked it, and Saboš, almost permanently drunk, stared at the coat of arms on the far wall above the clock and mumbled that perhaps tomorrow they would have to trample what today was sacred.

  At first Sredoje found this new intensity entertaining, and he encouraged them, but before long he found his friends’ rigid opinions, their inability to go beyond the level of faith and loyalty, disgusting, tedious. He sat at the malcontents’ table now only out of friendship, but the moment tempers flared, he would take his glass and move to the table of the chess players.

  One evening, Vukajlović, Simović, and Saboš failed to appear in the mess. Sredoje asked Perišić, who was gloomily draining his glass, but Perišić didn’t know where they were, so Sredoje went to watch the chess players. The next morning, the duty officer at the barracks gate informed him of the battalion commander’s order that he take over the instruction of Vukajlović’s section, but, inexplicably curt, refused to explain why. In the evening, when Sredoje returned home from the mess (and now Perišić was not there) and switched on the light in the hallway, four men jumped out, two from his room, two from Dominika’s, and put handcuffs on him. They drove him to the local Celje prison and locked him in a cell alone. In the morning, he was taken before the investigating officer, a red-faced young Slovene civilian, who questioned him about his past, particularly his wartime service in the Belgrade police, and then about his participation, as the Slovene put it, in the plot with his fellow conspirators from the mess. Sredoje denied the latter allegation and signed a statement. In the afternoon, he went before a second investigator, a Montenegrin captain, who demanded details about the leaflets he, Sredoje, had received from Simović and distributed. Sredoje denied this allegation, too, at which the investigator, apparently with the aim of confounding him, described a series of incriminating conversations in the mess with great accuracy, though misrepresenting the remarks Sredoje had made, and especially Sredoje’s failure to reject Saboš’s suggestion that the national coat of arms be taken down and trampled.

  The captain summoned Sredoje several times a day: first he waved the confessions of others before his eyes, though he never allowed him to read them; then he threatened to widen the inquiry to include Sredoje’s treachery during the Occupation. After three weeks, worn out and fearing worse, Sredoje gave in and made a full confession of his participation in the plot against the people and the state—with the exception of the leaflet episode, about which he indeed knew nothing. The inquiry was now reduced to the rounding out of his statements; he could breathe again.

  One December morning he was shaved, given a fresh shirt and a jacket without stripes of rank, and driven to the military court, where he saw Perišić, Vukajlović, Simović, and Saboš for the first time, their faces pale and lined, as was his own, though he was not aware of it. The accused were escorted into the courtroom: at the far wall, the captain awaited them, and two majors and a lieutenant colonel sat at a raised table. One of the majors read out the charges. The main charge against Sredoje was based on his irreverent statements in the mess; only Simović and Vukajlović were charged with distributing the leaflets. Simović and Vukajlov
ić were sentenced to five years in prison, Sredoje to one, Saboš to eight months, and Perišić to only three, the duration of the inquiry. They were taken back to prison together but then separated, and Sredoje never saw any of them again.

  After ten days, he was transported by truck to Lepoglava. There he spent the winter in a cell with sixteen other prisoners, freezing and eating poor food. At the beginning of April 1949, he was taken by train, with one other prisoner, a gold smuggler, to Sremska Mitrovica. There they were given sufficient food and sent to work in the fields, and Sredoje quickly recovered. At last, on October 12, he was released and given a train ticket to Celje. At nine in the evening, he arrived at the house in the cul-de-sac. Dominika was not there. The housing authority had moved her out a few days after his arrest, but the new occupants, a large family, knew her address and gave it to him, staring with curiosity. Sredoje found her on the outskirts of town, in a small house that belonged to a retired teacher and his wife. Dominika had been allocated a room on the ground floor. She was already in bed, asleep; she came out drowsy, in her nightgown, but showed no hesitation about taking him in. So he began to live with her again.

  Early in the morning, she would go off to work, while he stayed in bed. He would get up much later, eat what she had left for him, read the newspapers, smoke, listen to music on the small old radio. When Dominika came home, they would eat a meal together; then she would do the housework, which made him feel out of place in her single room. After the housework, Dominika cleaned herself, combed her hair, applied creams to her skin, washed her underclothes. He didn’t like watching all these activities having to do with her body, which he was accustomed to possess at night in all its naked simplicity. And it annoyed him that her personality extended beyond that body, a personality he was only just discovering: her neatness, thriftiness, the way she examined every object with a prudent, careful eye, as if she were near-sighted, even every mouthful of food, before accepting it and using it. Impatient, he wanted to shout at her, but restrained himself, believing that it was not she who upset him but the claustrophobic memory of his stay in prison, from which he had not completely recovered.