Houses

by Borislav Pekic

  “What are you going to do this morning?” Katarina asked attentively.

  “I don’t really know. I’ll probably sort out some old leases. Perhaps I’ll finally get around to reading that Viollet-le-Duc History of Housing which Isidor gave me.”

  She bent over and touched my forehead with her lips. My forehead was cold and sweaty, with droplets of amber dew. It was always like that after a heart attack. I well knew the smell of that sweat. It was bitter, salty, and warm. With the years it had become more intense, but it hadn’t changed in essence. Nothing had really changed or worsened in me since that day at the cathedral doors when we were introduced to each other. Over Katarina’s bent shoulder, the mirror held me in that humbling certainty. The massive Roman nose between its two hollowed cheeks was still hooked. The narrow, pinkish line running across its root came from my pince-nez. Every day Katarina brushed and combed my gray hair and sprinkled it with lavender water; even now it was only thinning in places. The eyebrows were strangely dark, pitch-colored. I had a gray look about me. Mousy. The mustache was the color of wet ash, and drooped from my upper lip like tousled braiding. Yes, gray was my color, silver and gray.

  I watched her putting on her coat. She did it quickly, decisively, methodically, unlike anyone else. She would never take it by the collar, put one arm into one sleeve, the other into the other sleeve, and finish the whole operation with an adjusting wriggle which settled the coat comfortably around the body. On the contrary, she began the process where others finished it: she first threw the coat across her back, then pushed both arms into the sleeves simultaneously, and with a supple movement lifted it onto her shoulders with a single jerk. The whole of Katarina’s nature was evident in this detail, the manner in which she put on her coat: that commanding Turjaški nature, hers by birth, aggressive in a masculine mold, of that inveterate kind which must do everything at one go, immediately.

  Unexpectedly I felt pity—I can’t say remorse, but gentle commiseration—for her unenviable position in this house. I was afraid I had made a mistake in allowing Katarina to protect me, actually to believe she was protecting me in a way which is quite irrational for me, even monstrous in its finality and totality, and which has made me withered like this, helpless, dependent. Perhaps I would have acted more correctly if I had told them to let everything follow the course which God intended—as indeed, without my knowing it, her elder brother-in-law, the suffragan Bishop Emilian, had suggested. I knew, and that aroused my pity most of all, that she was torn by fear that some penetrating fact, some careless hint (just like the one that was going to take me out of the house the moment she was gone), some suspicious circumstance or unforeseen event, would break through and split open the protective shield they had forged for me with such great care. She feared that, completely unprepared, I would become a witness of reality, and that this reality, according to their limited reasoning, would bring about my annihilation. I knew also that, caught up in their agonizing game, they had to keep from me the enormity of the economic crisis which was raging outside and which, incidentally, could be deduced from the public works on the other side of the river. So great is their naiveté, they forget that my experienced eye could recognize the recession from minor and extraneous features: for example, the fact that my otherwise fastidious second cousin Maximilian has been going around in one and the same suit for several years; that, theoretically, in accordance with my desire for economy, we long ago dispensed with the aid of a servant; that, because of my condition, we haven’t celebrated Saint George’s day for quite some time; and most of all, that my tenants, with the inexplicable exception of the Mihajlovići, have been in such difficult circumstances that I have extended to them all that once exceptional principle whereby those who contribute to the upkeep of their apartments temporarily do not pay us rent.

  “All right, Arsénie, I’m going now,” said Katarina. “I’ll see to it that I’m back by three.”

  “You don’t have to hurry on my account.”

  “The shops are only open until three and I have to pack.”

  Before she shut the door, I straightened myself up in my chair and asked her if she planned to stop by Simonida. She paused. In the bright doorway she looked like a child’s figure made out of clay.

  “I wasn’t intending to.”

  Carried away by my own daring, I said, casually, stretching myself, that I had only suggested it because it was a long time since I had heard anything about Simonida. “You haven’t been there for a long time, Katarina—not since last winter.”

  “Golovan has been there.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, gazing into the framed opening between the wooden wings, which grew imperceptibly narrower. “He didn’t say anything to me. I only thought you might drop by if you were going that way.”

  “All right. I’ll go if I have time.”

  Then she shut the door and, in her quick, decided, methodical way, turned the key twice.

  •

  Listening to Katarina’s departing steps accompanied by the iron tap of her walking stick, I wondered if I hadn’t been guilty of imprudence. Katarina might guess that I had sensed something concerning Simonida’s future, perhaps suspected that things weren’t going well with my ward; in that case she would come back worried about my condition, for such a deterioration often brought on heart attacks. I have no idea what made me speak of Simonida. Perhaps I wanted to let Katarina know that I’m not dependent exclusively on her, even though I’d turned over my property affairs to her; but perhaps I’d just been too hasty, not having considered the effects. And now, instead of proceeding without hesitation to put my carefully conceived plan into action, I had to wait and listen. If she were to return, she would find me busy in a manner that would require a great deal of explanation.

  Nevertheless, the enforced delay allowed me to pull myself together. Of course I thought about Simonida, for what could arouse me to action more than the misfortune which threatened that noble and gentle being? Of the danger itself I had heard quite by chance, from a conversation in whispers between Golovan and Katarina behind the door of my wife’s room. They had forgotten to close it and I heard them mention Simonida with apprehension, foreboding nothing good, and this ominousness was further confirmed by my wife’s request: “Don’t say a thing to Arsénie about all this.” In the hope of learning more details, I had carefully pulled myself toward the door and pressed my ear to the keyhole as if to an earpiece, ready to move hastily and be found once again near the window, armed with my binoculars, should the two of them suddenly come out. Thus I learned with fear, despair, and fury that my Simonida was to be demolished and most probably replaced, and that the decision had already been signed by the responsible authority.

  My last-born, the lovely Greek Simonida with her fine, dark countenance, her milky complexion beneath deep blue eyelids, and her full-blooded lips pierced by a bronze chain, African style. Simonida with her old-fashioned perfumes, penetrating, heavy, moist like musk, hung about with the ornaments given her by her spiritual father, the War Ministry engineer and architect Danilo Vladisavljević, and with those whitish streaks across her body characteristic of both convalescents from kidney disease and old houses. In 1925 she was without exaggeration the finest-looking building in the vicinity of Kalemegdan Park, a real family dwelling with large, comfortable, dark, warm, wonderfully unpredictable spaces inside, with secret rooms, and not in the least resembling today’s termitelike architecture, those cell-like stone beehives which I could observe from the window. Simonida was especially dear to me, for it was she who had taught me that between possessor and possessed there is possible a deeper and at the same time nobler relationship than the purely financial one. It is to Simonida’s credit that I ceased to be a landlord in the accepted and hated sense of the word, and that, instead of a seignorial, enslaving, and gangsterlike attitude, I created toward my houses a mutually possessive relationship, something more akin to polygamy.

  It was with Simonida that I began
to give the houses names. First just ordinary names, then personal ones. They had to be distinguished, just as living beings are distinguished, by real characteristics, and not by the names of the streets where they were built (even though I picked their company for them), or by the tenants who occupied them (even though I tried just as carefully to give them the inhabitants they merited), or by the level of the rents which were paid for them. But I always chose feminine names. I didn’t do this because, in our language, the words house, block, palace, villa, residence, even log cabin, hut, shack, are all of feminine gender, whereas building, country-house, and flat are masculine, but rather because I couldn’t have entertained toward them any tenderness, not to mention lover’s intimacy, if by any chance they had borne coarse masculine names. While still looking at the drawings, I found appropriate names for the constructions I financed, although I often changed them when the buildings were finished.

  When I bought houses already built, I would go into a careful analysis of their peculiarities, but in a quite different and much more fertile way than my professional colleagues, which earned me much criticism and mockery. The houses would be christened even before I had paid for them, then registered in the name of Negovan and entered on the property owner’s map hanging on my office wall. This meant that I had definitely decided to buy them. I had recognized something personal, individual, exceptional in the houses offered for sale, something without which they would have had no value for me. This way I could look at them, busy myself with them, and communicate with them as if they were alive, which in fact they were. In the course of time they would be transformed by extensions or conversions, their defects would be remedied or their advantages added to, and they would change with aging as I did myself. In a certain way, I think, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, they were a chronicle of my life, my sole authentic history.

  And now they wanted to pull one of them down, Simonida, and in her place, at the junction of Paris and Prince Mihajlova Streets, they intended to put up one of their tin garbage cans.

  Yes, I thought, they’re quite capable of it. It’s as if they were Bolsheviks. Perhaps they are secret Bolsheviks waiting for a sign from the Kremlin to rush in and pillage. If I don’t do something they’ll raise their hands against my Simonida. I haven’t the slightest doubt on that score. They tried to pull that sort of trick back in 1931. Lamartine Street at Kotež Neimar had to be straightened. George was living at No. 7a. Several houses which jutted out were threatened, among them the one I had named Katarina. It was named for Katarina because certain features of that thin, narrow house, as well as its simplicity and rationality, coincided with the character of my wife. What I undertook on that occasion I would have done for any house belonging to me. Not just for Katarina. I went to the Town Hall and demanded an annulment of the demolition order. Another street was designated for widening and other houses were pulled down, but my Katarina has remained in its place right down to the present day.

  They’re clearly assuming that I’ve lost all interest in my affairs since I ceased to control them personally. But they’re mistaken! Arsénie Negovan isn’t going to stand by with his arms folded and watch them tear down his beautiful houses. No, sir. I still have some influence. It’s true that I seldom use it, but I still have it. In this town they can’t treat a Negovan as if he were a nobody, a peasant who’s just come down from the hills! Particularly if one takes into account that in my own way I’m one of the builders of Belgrade, one of those people who in civilized countries have streets named after them. No, I thought, they won’t be able to harm my Simonida; I’ll find a means of curbing them, I’ll direct their destructive eye onto some other building which doesn’t deserve to live.

  First of all I’ll go to Paris Street. I’ll find out what’s happening there. Judging from the conversation between Katarina and Golovan, the demolition hasn’t started yet, but it will start soon. Very soon. They’ll have to use the dry weather to get the lid on their tin garbage can. I know how these things are done. There isn’t a single man in the building business who could put one over on me. Not the insatiable architects, nor the dishonest contractors, not even the slippery construction workers from Trsnotrava, to say nothing of pompous little civil servants. I decided, therefore, to go to the responsible authority once I had made sure that there was no simpler way to save Simonida. From the authorities I expected no problems at all. I knew people at the Town Hall. They would remember me from the times when I used to go to them to get the seal for my contracts. Nor had I anything to fear from higher authorities; there, my name was sufficient. Unfortunately, the difficulties didn’t come from that direction. And it was a question not only of Simonida. But so as not to confuse the issue, I’d take things one by one.

  I straightened myself up slowly, in stages. The sharp pain beneath my rib cage had long since passed, but it had left a weakness in my muscles which had to be overcome by movement. It was as if I were lifting a heavy sack of sand onto my shoulders. Yet when at last I had stretched myself out, the weight seemed to have disappeared. I felt quite sound, and if it hadn’t been for a certain stiffness in the joints caused by my lengthy immobility, I’d even say that I felt a certain exhilaration, a renewed youthful élan. This pleased me, for the adventure—that’s the only word for all that I intended to do—required a stronger physical condition than is allotted to a seventy-seven-year-old ravaged by a stormy life.

  First I checked if the outer door was properly locked, and as a further precaution I latched the chain. Then I went into the bedroom to choose the suit in which to go out. Opening the creaking doors of the oiled walnut wardrobe, I expected to see before me the dim contours of seventeen once powerful Arsénie Negovans hanging on an iron rod. Their smooth, crumpled shoulders would be drooping down dejectedly so that the hard skeletons of the coat hangers could be made out beneath, glistening with the transparent crystals of naphthalene, soft as hoarfrost. The sharp smell would sting my nostrils; coughing, I would fan the wardrobe doors back and forth several times to disperse the smell, though this would achieve nothing, since the smell certainly penetrated the wood. The ghostly ranks of cloth would tremble with the sharp swinging of the doors, and quite clearly I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to touch them since inevitably, if I put one of the suits on, it would look unreal, like a dried human skin from which the flesh had been shaken. It would remind me again of the photograph in George’s war album: a single gibbet, erected out of iron tubing in the shape of an enormous Greek letter π, from whose crosspiece the Austro-Hungarian soldiers had hanged Serbian peasants. The hanging bodies were crumpled like the suits on the hangers. I recalled another sight, too, that hadn’t particularly moved me at the time: at some abandoned Ukrainian station (was it called Solovkino?), I’d seen a grapelike cluster of five people who, evidently for the sake of economy, had been hanged on one rope with five separate wire nooses around their necks.

  Now I’d feel that I had to choose between seventeen dead doubles, each of which was the coffin for one section of my life. For some I could still tell which year of the seventy-seven was buried there; the majority, though, would bring nothing to mind. I couldn’t even say where and when I had had them made. Of course the color and the texture of the material would remind me of the season of the year; but whether I was married in those tails darting out of the cavern of the wardrobe like a snake’s forked tongue, or in the morning coat with the lizardlike back, I simply couldn’t remember. The morning suit I used for official morning visits; it would be too serious for this sort of private stroll. But I didn’t want to put on just anything. This was to be my first time out in twenty-seven years. I was going to visit Simonida, I had to take account of my appearance. As far as the weather was concerned, I could dispense with an overcoat and put on the double-breasted blue with the white pin-stripe, although the light brown Ulster would be less conspicuous. I was afraid that the trench coat would hang too low: I had shrunk considerably since my heart trouble.

  But in fact I w
as given no choice: when I unlocked the wardrobe only a single suit was hanging from the rod, wrapped in a cloth cover and sprinkled with naphthalene—the black one which I wore for funerals and, not without superstitious prejudice, avoided for all other ceremonial occasions. I had no time to imagine what Katarina had done with the sixteen others; perhaps she had sent them out to be cleaned. I put on the thin summer trousers, the black vest, and the black jacket with the buttons covered in dark silk. I could, it is true, have worn one of the only two which I used with my house jacket and kept in the wardrobe with the registers, but they were too ordinary for this occasion. And I could hardly hold it against Katarina that she had left me without a suit; she didn’t know I was going out, and those two were quite enough to wear in the house. Moreover, she took good care of the older, abandoned ones: in spring and autumn she aired them at the window, brushed them, and sprinkled them with snowy naphthalene powder, then put them back in the wardrobe with a certain veneration, almost as if she were putting them in a tomb. And now she had sent them to the cleaners. My good Katarina! Even though her meticulousness condemned me to go to Simonida in a suit which boded evil, I was thankful to her for that unspoken certitude that one day I would go out of the house again.

  From the drawer I took a white poplin shirt with mauve stripes, and a hard shiny rubber collar and cuffs. Then I expertly knotted an ash-gray silk tie and attached it to my shirt with a gold pin, its head dark as night with a precious alexandrite diamond. From Katarina’s jewel case I took a pair of hollow gold cuff links like filigree tennis balls. Several more of my valuables were scattered about the box, but there were none of Katarina’s jewels. Suddenly I was seized with a terrible premonition. Ignoring it, I hoped that for greater safety she had transferred the jewels to the wall safe under the icon of Saint George. But they were not there either. Nor could I find them in her desk. I had nothing more to hope for; quite clearly Katarina had deposited her jewelry in the bank. Despite my resentment toward banks and their thieving activities—and she must have known of my attitude from my open feuds with all the eminent bankers of the kingdom—she had probably, from an irrational female fear of loss, entrusted her jewels, our jewels, our valuable possessions, the possessions of Arsénie Negovan, to people to whom I wouldn’t even have entrusted my excrement! So that’s it, I thought angrily: we’ll have something to talk about when she comes back from town.