Houses

by Borislav Pekic

  I could foresee that very soon I would no longer be able to contain my impatience at Katarina’s continual postponement of her departure: first one of her cotton gloves was missing, then she wanted advice about which brooch to pin on the ribbed pleat of her blouse, then she kept wandering about in search of her baskets, then again she had trouble making up her mind among her various hats, which apart from such rare sorties aren’t worth fussing over. Although I was sure that they were all used to my sullenness, I was afraid lest my rudeness toward our guest be interpreted as resulting from my illness, officially diagnosed as heart trouble. And so, with a sigh of resignation, I put the Mayer on the shelf with the other binoculars and asked Mélanie the question which she had evidently been expecting, since she had the answer ready and waiting.

  “Eh bien, Mademoiselle Foucault, how is my brother George today?”

  Mercilessly rolling her r’s in her throat and catching them with the tip of her tongue, the spinster answered hesitatingly that, thanks to God’s mercy, it could be said that Général Negovan was on the whole well, very well in fact, that he hadn’t been constipated recently or suffered those many and painful disorders of his digestion about which she normally informed me whenever she visited us.

  All this time she was looking somewhere past me, and with an ardor worthy of an angler, fishing the needles out of the bowl and holding them up before that empty gaze. In the gray depths of the room, they glistened like precious stones fashioned in the shape of miniature lances. Then she plunged them back into the boiling water.

  Listening to this familiar and monotonous lamentation—which frankly irritated me rather than aroused my sympathy, for I knew how little patience my brother had with it all—I asked Mélanie why she looked somewhere past the person she was talking to whenever the conversation came around to George, as if the general were spying on her with some internal magic eye which took in everything concerning him and that only she, thanks to some mysterious sense akin to a keyhole, could see and understand. This might explain her wandering gaze, which had to be brought into direct focus with whatever the woebegone George was really feeling at the time. So I added peevishly:

  “Well, I suppose it’s because he doesn’t get about enough, he’s holed up between those four walls and doesn’t budge.”

  It was a pitiless game with the old nurse’s loyalty, but I had no choice. If I wanted her to go away quickly, I had to put her spaniel-like attachment to my brother—which, I was certain, was mixed in the final analysis with doubtful and almost certainly unrequited tenderness—to the test.

  “It really strikes me as quite unhealthy—absolument malsain—for him to spend his days in that box. It’s particularly unhealthy for a royal general who counts upon going down in history books.”

  As I had foreseen, Mlle. Foucault became agitated. The syringe shook with the rhythm of the old maid’s anger as it was filled with the oily yellow medication.

  “And you, why don’t you ever go out of this house, Monsieur Negovan?”

  “I’m an owner of property, a renter of houses, mademoiselle.” Whenever possible, I avoided comparisons with commerce. “Je ne suis pas un soldat! My affairs can very well be carried on from here. Indeed, I would say that they can be carried on better from here. The further removed one is from one’s place of business, the better. But wars, Mademoiselle Foucault, wars cannot be waged from behind a desk. I’m not saying they can’t be planned from behind a desk, but wars are waged on a battlefield. Au champ de bataille. And, I imagine, usually waged instead of planned.”

  Under the stress of her intense feelings, Mlle. Foucault answered in her own language. “Mais on ne fait pas la guerre, monsieur! Thank God, we’re not at war.”

  “Really,” I said passively, “I don’t know anything about that, I don’t read the newspapers or listen to the radio. I’ve no idea what wars are going on at the moment, or whether there are any at all. I don’t build up my beautiful houses, Mademoiselle Foucault, so that some blockheads of generals—with due respect to my martial brother—can try their stone-breaking machines out on them, but if there is a war going on somewhere, I’m sure that he’s participating in it, moving little celluloid flags over the map and pushing cardboard tanks over plaster molds of the terrain. Now tell me how does the general plan to win further promotion in the service?”

  “Monsieur le général cannot be promoted any higher,” she said sternly. “He is . . . well, retired.”

  “Nous y voilà!” I exclaimed, still trying to draw Mélanie’s bypassing gaze.

  Of course a promotion was impossible. Not because he was retired, but because he was dead. He’s been buried these twenty years, for two decades, in the family vault at the New Cemetery (Concession No. 17), where I, who am so different from the other Negovans, will certainly not allow myself to be buried.

  Indeed, it was quite incomprehensible to me that they should have surrounded me for the last twenty-seven years and with the best of intentions with a kind of barbed-wire fence. All of them: Katarina; this penniless Auvergnate who is a kind of memorial to Franco-Serbian brotherhood-in-arms, the friends and relations who come to visit me; that harebrained but useful lawyer; even Isidor, Isidor hardly ever comes now—all of them really imagine that, thanks to their naive conspiracy of silence, I know nothing of what’s going on outside; that I don’t know of my brother’s funeral; that because I don’t go out of the house—not so much because of the threat to my health, but more from mistrust of the future—I’m prevented from knowing about anything or anyone of them, from participating, from taking any action, even from living.

  In all honesty, I heard about George’s demise quite by chance. I could barely make out the words. They were broken, hardly penetrating the bedroom (Katarina’s indisputable kingdom), and they were not intended for me even though they concerned me in the highest degree, since they were about my brother’s wretched and quite unbefitting end. They further demonstrated the family accord never to tell me anything, an agreement which I had mutely legalized and in fact required of them. From the conversation I concluded that the general had perished as a result of a still unexplained but fateful misunderstanding in connection with his passion (oh, those tormenting Negovan passions!) for General Staff games. Afterward I in no way let on that I knew about the general’s inglorious fate, but as a result of that otherwise welcome misunderstanding I sometimes got myself into that situation in which I now found myself: of asking after my dead brother, which I did with the same unswerving sternness and careless sarcasm as when my brother was alive, and on this occasion spurred on by the desire to get rid of Mlle. Foucault as quickly as possible.

  In any case I felt no particular commiseration. On the contrary, all I felt was bitterness. When I thought about my brother, no endearing images of childhood sprang before my eyes, and those real ones, the daguerreotypes in the album with its silver, flower-shaped binding, I had thrown out to make space on the shelves for my account books. However much I tried, I couldn’t conjure up from memory a single touching moment of brotherly solidarity, yet it would be inadmissible to say that I was indifferent to George’s fate. So as usual I said without dissimulation that my brother, who had chosen a career which no one in the family had pushed him into—on the contrary, we had all tried to deter him from it—ipso facto had chosen a heroic death as its inseparable, natural, and so to speak crowning act, and that a military career without a warlike death is a good beginning without a fitting end, a meal without spice, a trick, an illusion, une tromperie, une tricherie.

  “So you tell me he’s gone into retirement?”

  “You know very well he has!” answered Mlle. Foucault, holding a tuft of cotton in her bony fingers, and pushing it sharply into the neck of the alcohol bottle.

  “He isn’t dead?”

  “Non, monsieur!”

  “Vous voyez, if he is retired, then how does my respected brother hope to die a martial death?”

  Since Mélanie was at the limits of her patience,
I knew that however much she had prepared herself for this visit, my provocation would get through to her sufficiently for her to throw in my face that her untouchable, son bien-aimé et courageux général, whatever else I might think about him, had died a warlike death—without a weapon in his hand, it’s true, but still laid low like any other soldier by shots from a rifle, at the door of his house, exactly as if on the exposed earthworks of the trenches, and in defense of something the poor wretch considered the hallowed essence of his warrior’s profession. Moreover, spurred on by my malice, which such duels only inflamed further, she would tell me all the rest that she kept to herself—all that in theory for my own good had been kept silent—so as to demolish me once and for all. Yet she had promised Katarina to respect “Arsénie’s special condition,” so now she could only go on torturing herself, or get up and leave. But she seemed to be stuck to the chair. She just went on squeezing the piece of cotton, and the sharp smell of alcohol filled the room. To hide my agitation, I selected a Graetz from the collection of single-barreled binoculars which I used in strong summer sunlight because of its blue-tinted eyepiece, and set about wiping the lens with a chamois cloth.

  “You ought to get ready now,” she said with the unimpassioned tone of an executioner.

  Although she had been giving me injections for a long time—very skillfully, I must admit, and without excessive pain—I still felt humiliated after each session. I was not ashamed to bare myself before a stranger; I was too old to be shy, and anyway I did it cleverly, turning onto my side and using both hands at once so that I exposed only a very limited area of skin, hardly big enough for a thorn. No, it was that intolerable feeling of dependence which sometimes also gave my relationship with Katarina the form of open hostility. And so, taking up the required position with as little movement as possible—with my knees on the seat, my chin on the back of the chair, and my hands behind my back firmly gripping my infinitesimally lowered trousers—I expressed the hope that she would be careful and forget about our passing misunderstanding while giving the injection.

  I couldn’t hear her. The rubber soles of her old-fashioned lace-up shoes were noiseless. But I sensed her standing behind me.

  “At Salonika I used to give injections to Field Marshal Franchet d’Esperey, in his behind, Monsieur Negovan, and he never accused me of clumsiness.”

  “I’m not complaining either,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “I’m no worse than your puffed-up generals!”

  Generals who go into retirement, generals who get demobilized, who allow themselves to die, to be buried as civilians, and who never earned a single dinar that was spent on them. But when they come, there will be nobody to defend us. I shall have to kneel then, too, and not in a Chippendale armchair, but in the gutter in front of the house—and it won’t be Mlle. Foucault standing behind me, but some gangster with an automatic.

  A feeling of coolness passed through the skin of my back; I hadn’t even felt the needle.

  “I saw them in Russia, Mademoiselle Foucault, all those generals, those overpaid Czarist peacocks. I saw the red rabble ruffling their scented feathers, wiping their behinds with their medals, now that we’ve got down to behinds.” The life-giving liquid was coursing through my body. “Or perhaps my brother thinks he can hold them back with cardboard tanks and tin fortifications?”

  “For God’s sake, Arsénie!” said Katarina, coming in. At last she was dressed to go out. “Just for once, leave Mademoiselle Foucault alone.”

  “She passed on a greeting from George,” I said, counting on this to explain my coarse behavior. The realization that the two women were finally going to leave me alone and that I could put my plan into action—the plan which for the second time in twenty-seven years was to change my life radically, almost turn it upside down—excited me. Hurriedly I pulled up my trousers and reverted to my original position in the armchair.

  “He’s got those pains in his stomach again,” said Mlle. Foucault. “I suggested to him that he get more exercise. There’s no likelihood of his getting better if he goes on lolling about within four walls.”

  Mlle. Foucault got up. She could no longer stand listening to her adored general being spoken of as if he were alive. She angrily bundled the instruments into her tin box.

  “I’ll wait for you on the porch, Madame Negovan.” She went outside without even looking at me.

  “You were talking to her about Russia and the Bolsheviks again,” said Katarina reproachfully.

  She put the little boxes of drops and pills (which I was to use in her absence if I felt ill) on a one-legged table with a striped top of black and white onyx flecked with streaks of dried coffee. The room, covered with flowered wallpaper with gold stems, was heavy from the smell of medicines, Katarina’s oriental tobacco, varnished walnut, and parched paper. The atmosphere was thick, motionless, and gray, lending the triumphant face of Saint George and the scaly dragon a sickly appearance and the color of smoke. She pulled the coffee table up to my armchair, so I could reach it in case of need.

  “She has to get used to it.”

  “We’re used to it already. You’ve talked so much about Russia that I’ve lived through a whole revolution.”

  “You haven’t lived through anything yet. You should have been in the Ukraine in 1919 to live through something!”

  I glanced at the mirror. She was putting on her black hat like a flat English tin helmet. Instead of the scaly shell of enamel on the mirror’s smoky back, flaming provinces flashed through it filled with frenzied mobs rushing toward me.

  “They’ll be here too if things go on like this! They are here, everywhere, all around us.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “They’re only waiting for a secret sign from Moscow to crawl out of their underground lairs. They’re ragged, filthy, bearded, and enraged—yes, enraged! In their bloodstained hands they’ll be carrying scythes, hammers, red banners, and placards with demands written in red Russian letters to take away everything from us!”

  Power, I thought, security, honor, hope, and our houses, my beautiful houses.

  “And they’ll speak Russian! Katarina, Russian! They’ll sing Russian songs and they’ll kill in the Russian way with a bullet in the back of the head. And they’ll give us affectionate Russian names: you’ll be called Katya, Katyusha, and I’ll be called heaven knows what.”

  I felt a slight pressure beneath my rib cage, and put my hand there to find the source of the pain. While I was searching for it, Katarina was already fumbling with the medicines.

  “They’ll call me Arsen . . . Arseny . . . Arsenyushka . . .”

  “Why are you always thinking about them? You know it undermines your health!”

  Deftly she unwrapped a pill from its cellophane covering. I put it under my tongue and gently pressed it against my palate. My mouth was filled with a bitter taste. I managed to stay motionless. I was covered with sweat and breathing unevenly, but the pain had stopped because I had put the pill under my tongue. With that pill under my tongue I had nothing to fear.

  Exhausted by the sudden feeling of helplessness, I eased my back into the padded depths of the armchair and sank into its warm softness, thinking how cruel it would be if something happened now, with such important work awaiting me. I glanced carefully at Katarina, who was bending anxiously over my helpless shoulder. I waited to hear what I had feared all day, something I myself had provoked by my careless behavior.

  “Arsénie, shall I put off my trip?”

  “I’m all right now.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if I stayed home? I’ll go down and tell Mélanie.”

  I repeated that I was all right.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve never felt better.”

  “You look tired.”

  “It’s the weather. You just go on out.”

  “As you say. But I’ll stop off at the Mihajlovići downstairs. I’ll ask one of them to come up.”

  I searched hastily for a good reason t
o prevent that. “No, please don’t! They’ll complain again about their rent being too high, and they’ll ask for repairs.”

  “But they’ve never done that.”

  “All tenants are the same.”

  If I had thought sensibly—as I hadn’t had time to do—it was an excellent reason for any landlord but me. Having once become involved in property ownership, I understood and exercised it as a branch of the architect’s profession. How else would all those wonderful architectural ideas have been realized, if I hadn’t financed them? Money in itself never meant anything to me. It was a tangible recognition that a house for which rent was paid was of a corresponding value—though in reality, its value was often greater. But money in my affairs was more a mental than an economic category. Particularly in recent years, which were heavily beset by that crisis of which Katarina and Golovan informed me with unnecessary meticulousness, it was not unusual for me to forgo the rent from impoverished tenants, when I could be sure—again through Katarina and Golovan, acting as my representatives—that the tenants were making faithful efforts toward the upkeep of the leased houses, and had treated them with due respect over a long period. I had not really waived the rent—I was not by any means rich enough for that—but had simply allowed its payment to be postponed.