The Use of Man

by Aleksandar Tisma

  Another problem arose: once the teacher and his wife got over the surprise of Sredoje’s arrival, they became unpleasant, and one day the old man confronted Dominika when she returned from work and threatened legal action unless her lover—an unauthorized lodger— moved out. They thought about what to do. Dominika was ready to risk going to court, but Sredoje found that he did not want the circumstances under which he had come to live with her to be held up to public scrutiny. He decided to move to a rented room nearby, from which he could easily come to see her. She agreed, but it quickly became apparent that she could not afford to pay for two lodgings. He promised to look for work. But he could not look for work any more than he could go to court, and for the same reason: it would require him to give an account of his past, of his ridiculous disgrace, to strangers. Time passed, the deadline set for them drew near. Then both came up with a solution that each had been thinking of in secret: to get married.

  The necessary documents were assembled, and Dominika arranged for the registry office to make it official without delay, so she could show the teacher the marriage certificate, which would keep him quiet. But the legal bond left them, apart from a sense of relief, with a bitter taste in their mouths. Sredoje suspected that he had been lured into a trap, while Dominika was disappointed that he, as soon as their difficulty was resolved, dropped the idea of looking for work. She let him know, at first in a roundabout way, then openly, that she had no intention of supporting him all his life; he, infuriated by her nagging, mentioned the German officer, whom she had certainly put up with. The spell of their mutual secret, broken, no longer restrained them. They quarreled, looking at each other with hatred, their faces distorted, amazed that they could ever have thought of spending their lives together.

  Now they avoided each other. The minute Dominika got home from work, Sredoje would leave the house, returning late in the evening, when there was little time left for arguing. But it was winter, he had no money, and the streets of Celje, through which he sloshed in low shoes and the coat Dominika had bought him when he first arrived, were far from hospitable. He frequented small taverns, and if he had a dinar or two—extracted from Dominika in their less strained moments—he would order a glass of wine and sit over it for hours. If his pockets were empty, he would hide in a corner, preferably at an already occupied table, where the waiters would not notice him for a while. He felt that he was rapidly going downhill; his clothes, which he never changed, were crumpled and worn thin; his face and hands had grown furtive, coarse.

  But the thought of looking for work, of explaining to personnel officers why he had been in prison, was unendurable and he pushed it aside. He considered an earlier idea: to return to school. A diploma, a profession, a new life free of the past. He began to read the announcements of the different universities in the newspapers, wondering which one would suit him best. But what was the use of selecting a school? To study, he needed money—enough, at least, to begin with, for traveling to Ljubljana or Zagreb and renting a place. His plans, wreathed in tobacco smoke and alcoholic vapors, moved into the purely financial realm. He thought, in turn, of a well-organized robbery, of buying a lottery ticket, of asking for a substantial loan from simple-minded people who would be moved by his story, of an unexpected inheritance.

  At inheritance, he stopped. His parents’ house in Novi Sad probably belonged to him legally. It was worth going there and filing a claim of ownership; if his ownership was recognized, he could sell the house and with the money go back to school. The prospect woke him from his lethargy; once again he felt young, capable. He unfolded his plan to Dominika, who agreed with it only as far as the house was concerned. His going back to school was out, she said, because she had married a grown-up man and—here her lips twisted unpleasantly—she was pregnant now and needed a breadwinner around, not a student. Feeling his life closing in on him, he promised Dominika that as soon as the inheritance business was over, he would look for work, but when he packed, he packed all his personal belongings. In April 1950, Sredoje left for Novi Sad.

  The town spread out before him, gray with dust, resigned, the walls of its old houses marbled with moisture. Creaking and groaning, a streetcar took him to the center. Opposite the stop was the Queen Mary Hotel, now called the Vojvodina, and he took a room there. The porter, drawling in a way Sredoje had long lost the habit of, asked how many days he was staying. Sredoje didn’t know. The porter told him that he could not stay more than five days—that was the regulation. The town, which Sredoje had once considered lively, and in the rush of the Liberation wild, now seemed abandoned, sleepy. He went to his parents’ house. It had, again, new occupants, who were scornfully indifferent to his announcement that he intended to reclaim his right of ownership. He went to the Town Hall. The official he had to see was not there.

  He made several trips with the same lack of success. When he grew angry and began to shout, an aged clerk, looking at him over his spectacles, outlined in vengeful detail the kind of petition that had to be submitted. All this Sredoje did, but no one could tell him how long it would be before he received an answer. His time in the hotel had run out and his money was rapidly dwindling; he had to look for accommodations. Subconsciously his steps led him to the places he had frequented in his youth, and soon he found himself in front of the house of Milinko Božić. He went in, but was told that his friend had not returned from the war and that Mrs. Božić had remarried and not long ago moved away.

  Wandering around uncertainly, Sredoje arrived at Fräulein’s lodgings, passed them, and in a decrepit little back street not far away caught sight of a handwritten sign: “Subtenant wanted.” He went in and, since a month’s rent was less than three nights in the hotel, took a furnished room. The landlord was a peasant with a mustache and a potbelly, who had sold his land and bought this house in order to send his two sons to school in the town and avoid paying taxes; he worked as a night watchman in a factory. Sredoje spent his days in the courtyard in front of his unheated room (to save money) and ate cold food, which he bought from the shop next door. With nothing to do, and almost against his will, he observed the life of the small community: the tiny but wiry lady of the house, old before her time; who cooked and kneaded in the kitchen; her scrawny sons, one ten and the other twelve, reluctantly doing their homework under the trellis; the two subtenants and the landlord, who came home from work at different times, ate, slept, then went back to work again, they in the morning, he in the evening.

  Out of boredom, Sredoje would occasionally correct the children as they read aloud and recited uncomprehendingly; he would explain to them or drill them. The landlord, at his wife’s prodding, came to him one afternoon and asked if Sredoje would coach the children regularly until the end of the school year, and in return offered to put him up rent-free. Sredoje at once accepted. But he had no money now to buy food; so he wrote to Dominika and meanwhile borrowed some cash from the landlord. Dominika sent him money and a letter in which she asked him to return immediately and find work; he could no longer count on her assistance because she was soon to give birth.

  Instead of answering her letter, he went to the Town Hall again. This time he found a helpful official, an educated young shopkeeper-turned-clerk, who, after patiently rummaging through the papers on his desk and in a file cabinet, found a document he was looking for, read it, his two plump hands clutching his forehead, and finally said that Sredoje needed to support his claim by the affidavits of two witnesses. Sredoje went in search of people who had known his parents. Most of them were no longer around—they either had left the town or were dead—and the only ones he could come up with, a retired civil servant and the widow of a prewar officer, refused to appear as witnesses for fear their testimony would be viewed as an attack on property that was now state owned.

  On the horns of this dilemma, Sredoje decided to seek the aid of a lawyer. He remembered a name, Dr. Karakašević, learned from the telephone directory that he was still practicing, and went to see him. The small, bald
ing old man, whom he had never seen before, received him far more cordially than anyone else had done, but when Sredoje finished explaining, he shook his head: “No, young man. I would never take up a cause that is already lost. This state gives nothing back.” Sredoje left the lawyer, dejected, and abandoned his claim.

  But he did not return to Celje. He continued to work with his two charges and waited, as if spellbound by indecision and the sudden onset of the hot, oppressive summer of the plain. As a result of Sredoje’s efforts, the landlord’s younger son passed all his final exams and the older son improved several poor grades, failing only his exam in history. Sredoje went on coaching him, and parents from the neighborhood, unschooled, unfamiliar with book learning, and worried by their children’s lack of success in competition with the children of the old middle class, started to bring their own confused sons and daughters to him for instruction. Sredoje began to support himself.

  In August, just before the school placement exam, a telegram arrived for him: Dominika had had a daughter and was asking him to come home. He put off the decision until the exams were over, and then, since he had remained silent for so long, could not decide to break his silence. (Several years later, he would receive another letter from Dominika, with a photograph of a round child’s head and a message: “To Daddy on my fourth birthday—Vali.” He would often look at the photograph when he was drunk.) In the autumn he continued to coach the pupils whom he had helped through the placement exams, along with a few new pupils. Every day he spent seven or eight hours over their untidy notebooks. In his free time he rested in his room, or went out for walks, though rarely. On one such walk, his eyes were drawn to the silhouette of a woman ahead of him. Her slightly stooping gait seemed familiar. Then, seeing the red cascade of her hair, he knew that it was Vera Kroner. He ran up to her and took her in his arms.

  23

  On his first visit to Vera, Sredoje presented her with Fräulein’s diary. She was thrilled; she grabbed the little red book, opened it, pressed it against her chest, but Sredoje retrieved it from her for long enough to show her the place that had caused him to take it and keep it: Vera’s own entry, with the date and circumstances of Fräulein’s death. Vera looked at it, said that the handwriting, although she didn’t deny it was hers—she remembered well that she had written it—was strange, completely unlike her present style. She wanted to show him. She looked around for a piece of paper, asked him for a pencil, and sat down to write. Leaning over her as she wrote, he insisted that she was wrong, that the two scripts were the same. They fought over the piece of paper—he trying to take it, she not letting him—until they almost tore it in half. They laughed, they were like children, teasing and chasing around the table, and when they caught each other, they forgot what they intended to do, lost their breath, fell on the couch, on the floor, with their arms entwined, and kissed.

  They kissed for hours. Sredoje pressed a thousand slow kisses on Vera’s hair, shoulders, arms, and, with special tenderness, the indelible black letters on her breast, which Vera for the first time made no attempt to hide. Lowering her rust-colored eyelashes and with a lost look, her face pale, she accepted and counted silently those thousand kisses, each the same, each different. Her blood did not quicken, nor did his; rather, it was as if, thirsty, they were drinking of some bottomless cool liquid, which left them with a greater thirst. Their chasteness amazed them, and again they laughed like children as they lay in each other’s arms for hours, kissing without desiring, without demanding that their embrace culminate in the way they had both long ago mastered.

  Sredoje said this was because of the strength of their love, which, he had read somewhere, could dull or completely eliminate lust. Vera didn’t like his explanation, not because she did not believe it, but because his talk of love and lust made her uneasy. She wanted only to play, not to think or analyze, pretending she had gone back ten years or more. She was even unwilling to hear Sredoje’s dreamy memories of the attraction they had felt for each other years before. Better for their love to have no past and be all in the present. And when Sredoje made her recall the snowball fight, how he had saved her from her attackers and then kissed her, she refused to believe it. No, boys had never attacked her with snowballs, and he hadn’t kissed her, and at parties she had danced with Milinko, her boyfriend, and with no one else. That was their first disagreement.

  The second was about the diary. After they had touched and caressed it as an object precious to them both, and opened it at random to a familiar word, a familiar sentence, one afternoon they sat down to read it together from beginning to end. They were surprised—first, by how short it was. And, read aloud, word by word, many passages were unclear, confusing, something they had never noticed when they read the diary to themselves.

  They wondered who Kleinchen was, Fräulein’s great love. The man Sredoje had seen once when he arrived for his lesson, who sat at a distance from the table with his hat in his lap? But the stranger had seemed awkward and old, unkempt, possibly even unshaven. When Sredoje saw him, he felt that he had intruded on something extremely private. Or was Kleinchen one of the people around her to whom they never paid attention, but whom they had seen show up at her funeral? And what did the word mean? Was it a diminutive of the surname Klein, as Vera thought, or a term of endearment, “little one”?

  Klein was as a rule a Jewish name, Sredoje observed. Had Vera noticed the anti-Semitism in the diary? Vera denied that. Sredoje picked up the notebook and leafed through it until he found and read to her the entry for May 4, 1936: “I don’t like his kind. Especially Jews.” Vera retorted that he hadn’t understood it properly: Fräulein didn’t like men who told lies, particularly if they were of a different origin, not because they were of a different origin. Besides, Klara, whom Fräulein visited, most probably her landlord’s daughter (who was a Klara, Vera remembered), was also Jewish, as was Böske, whose wedding Fräulein attended. Then there were the lectures she went to at the Novi Sad Cultural Club, which had Jewish patrons.

  Sredoje ascribed that to a snobbish inconsistency on Fräulein’s part. He cited her liking for “The Merry Widow” and “Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld,” a film he remembered as highly nationalist, and which had drawn from Fräulein the exclamation, “The people, nature, loving eyes!” Vera insisted that that meant nothing. Anyway, the Jews did have some unpleasant traits. She, a Jewess, knew that better than anyone. But to criticize them for these traits did not mean anti-Semitism.

  In this way the war crept into their conversation, and it was inevitable that they should share with each other their experiences of it. Sredoje told of his life as a soldier, the circumstances surrounding the deaths of his parents, and Vera told of Gerhard’s suffering in prison and how her father, her grandmother, and she were taken to the camp. They became exceptionally attentive to each other: Vera met Sredoje halfway when it was time for him to visit, and he brought her small gifts—candies, or pretty buttons, which he searched for in the shops (he noticed that she changed them often on her dresses), or a pack of cigarettes.

  When winter arrived, each tried to soften it for the other. Since Sredoje’s room was chilly (he told her this; he never took her there), they agreed that after the lessons with his pupils, he should spend his free time in her room. Vera made sure to light the fire early to warm the room; she found an old woolen plaid scarf and gave it to him carefully washed and ironed. Sredoje drank less. Through the father of one of his pupils he even managed to get some coal for her. In the evening, it was their custom not to light the lamp, but to watch, their arms around each other, the red glow of the fire through the small cracks in the door of the stove. They said little. Their whole effort now was to combat the winter, which seemed to them an angry giant, for it was the first time in their lives that no other danger threatened them, the first time they had someone to care for. They covered each other, warmed each other with their breath and the palms of their hands. “Are you cold?” they would ask. “Are you comfortable? Do you need anythi
ng?” And when they parted, they exchanged advice on how to keep from catching cold.

  Suddenly it was spring, with a sun not strong enough for them to do without heating but bright enough to make the closed-in room oppressive. They opened the windows wide to let out the smoke from the stove and the cigarettes, which burned their throats. They paused at a window and, hugging each other, watched the passers-by. But they avoided going out together, by unspoken agreement, reluctant to show themselves in public places after the humiliations they had suffered.

  The streets were full of bustle that spring: people venturing out, paying more attention to their clothes. Brightly colored fabrics fluttered in the wind as motorcycles went by, and occasionally these were overtaken by a shiny new car. This modest burst of ostentation, of luxury, distressed Vera and Sredoje; they felt that they were being left behind, they felt the need to keep in step with life. Sredoje spoke of going back to school, Vera of finding work again. But they were afraid to put these words into action, afraid of losing what they had so unexpectedly gained, this companionship that scorned the world, this peace unassailable from outside. So they fell silent, but there was reproach in their silence. Sredoje looked at Vera out of the corner of his eye, at the object of his love, which separated him from his future, and he saw someone dear to him but not her worth.