Houses
Page 6
I hesitated before the pictorial map like a worried general before a plan of his positions under attack, before the map which resembled my brother George’s headquarters sections, those useless copies of wars. Only on this map it was not phantom tank columns which were moving forward, nor phantom companies which joined battle, nor phantom bombers which razed towns to the ground. There was no record of ruin and destruction on this map, but only of building and preservation of what was already built. It was a picture of creation and not of destruction, and I stood before this model of my threatened possessions gripped by the fear that I might arrive too late, that during the time I had spent as a hermit, isolated from evil, irremediable misfortune had already befallen Sophia, Eugénie, Christina, Emilia, Serafina, Katarina, Natalia, Agatha, Barbara, Daphne, Anastasia, Juliana, Theodora, Irina, Xenia, Eudoxia, Angelina, and on their whole breed, as had now happened to the most beautiful of them all, my good Simonida.
Here in front of an ordinary drawing, a street plan in a bamboo frame, as if in front of some family altar, I felt remorse that I had abandoned everything I’d lived for to the care of others—even though at that time there had been strong reasons for my decision: the riots which had almost cost me my life. I felt remorse that in a cowardly way I had believed that I could keep myself from danger by cunningly dropping out of sight as if dead, instead of taking the bull by the horns as all true, stubborn Negovans would have done, resisting, fighting, retreating in order to advance again, until victorious or slain in battle.
Fortunately, I now again felt young and determined, just as when I had gone out into the town to contract the work for my first house with the builders. I turned back the page on the church calendar—it was June 1968—and without bestowing a further glance upon the room in which the open shoe boxes lay stranded like stricken ships, I went out.
•
And once again, by the gong at the front door of the house, I found myself in one of those distressing moments of my past.
Here come the first bombs. They’re falling slantwise. They seem to come from nowhere, swarming down magically out of the white honeycomb of the sky. Black holes open in the cloudless air. The aircraft can’t be seen. Not even their silver trails, ribbons of silver paper like the tail of a kite floating behind. They must be hidden by the upper arch of the east window, through which I’m leaning. The explosions are soundless. I pay no attention to them. I leave them to George. I’m certain that, shielded by the eaves above the balcony in Lamartine Street as by some stone umbrella, my brother, with the same binoculars—provided, of course, that Mlle. Foucault hasn’t yet dragged him away to the shelter—is watching the Allied squadrons and subjecting to withering criticism their frivolous formations, their badly chosen bombing runs, their ineffectiveness.
I myself, on the other hand, am attracted by the bombs. The round, moving, shaking azure veil in the binoculars is crisscrossed with projectiles like flying dots, like the wayward petals of a giant iron flower which has fallen apart high above the roofs, and is now scattering itself over the earth in slow, hesitant fragmentation, casting its seeds over the thick, powder-dry, smoke-filled furrows. Katarina pulls me away from the window—“You must go down into the cellar, Arsénie”—but I won’t give in, I cannot leave my houses. I go on trying to guess in what area the bombs will fall, which of my houses is in danger. This is difficult, all the more so because my wife is at me to come away from the window. At first I think that the raid is over the Third and Fourth Wards, above the heads of Agatha, Juliana, and Barbara; then, carried by the wind, it’s all falling on Sophia, Christina, and Simonida; then from the right, from the direction of the railway station, comes a crash like the tearing of gigantic dry tree trunks, which I can hardly make out. Now, with Katarina trying to get me to go down into the cellar, I’m leaning across the sill of the west window, from which I can catch a glimpse of the balustrade railings on Angelina’s roof. Luckily, Angelina is unscathed, wreathed in a fiery mist but apparently undamaged. Unfortunately, from this distance one can’t tell if she’s been hit in the back. Behind her the detonations move on, lightninglike, downriver; it’s as if along the shore, between the blades of the railway line, some invisible beast whose red paws are raising clouds of soot-colored dust is moving forward in convulsive bounds. The giant grows weak before reaching the top of Senjak hill. Calmer now, I have time to explain to Katarina why I can’t go down into the shelter while my houses are in danger, why I have to stay where I can give them courage even if I can no longer save them, but that I have no objection to her going down, and promise that I’ll follow immediately. In the meantime a second invisible giant with a roar follows in the smoke-filled track of the first, directly onto Senjak ridge, where Eugénie stands alone and unprotected. A third rumbles away to the right, its heavy footsteps stamping across the river, and buries itself in the Sava embankment.
Beside me stands Major Helgar, Bruno Helgar from the ground floor. “Um Gottes Willen, Herr Negovan, das ist ein Wahnsinn! Hören Sie nicht den Luftalarm? Man muss in den Keller hinabsteigen!” “It’s very easy to go down into the cellar, but why don’t you stop them?” I shout. “They’ll destroy my houses! Haven’t you got some way of making them stop this bloodletting?” “Our antiaircraft defenses are in action, Herr Negovan. We are doing everything we can.”
With Katarina’s gentle support, Helgar drags me away from the window. “Don’t be foolish, Herr Negovan, you can’t help your houses. You’ll only get hurt yourself.” “Am I important?” “And who’ll be left to take care of the survivors?” asks Katarina. “Who’ll repair those that are damaged?” There’s some sense in that, lato sensu, and I’m obliged to accept it. I let myself be led down the stairs, which are shaking as if a powerful motor is buried beneath the stone—a furious dynamo which keeps grinding to a halt with a muffled explosion, then continues its pounding with redoubled force—and I am taken into the laundry room, away from the vaulted edge of the concrete trough which is faintly lit by a dimmed oil lamp. Seated on an upturned linen chest, I suddenly feel as if the maddened machine is all around us, around the mildewed walls which are shaking off plaster and cement, and which tremble as if in the grip of a fever. Major Helgar takes a slim metal flask from his pocket. The raid had caught him in the bathroom: his officer’s jacket is thrown over his pink torso, overgrown with curly bristle the color of corn, and his cheeks are covered with a white, dried layer of shaving soap, like a clown interrupted while making up. He offers me the brandy, confessing that for such occasions—für diese besondere Gelegenheiten—he has prepared a dozen such containers (empties from some army medicine for rheumatism) which are both solid and light.
I decline his offer.
“My husband doesn’t drink, Major,” explains Katarina. She wraps me in a blanket which she had been carrying when we were still arguing, when she still wasn’t certain whether I’d agree to come down, and when I was still certain that I wouldn’t move from the observation post until the air raid was over and all my houses safe.
“I won’t drink with you, Major.”
“Why?”
“You can guess.” The motor around us slows down, then starts rumbling again.
“Because I’m a member of the occupying forces, I suppose. Ein einfacher Eroberer, nicht wahr?”
“No. It’s because you’re a soldier. Because of your war and not because of your occupation, Major.”
“Well, the war is as much yours as mine, Herr Negovan! We’re only two sides of the same bitch of a war.”
“You’re mistaken,” I counter emphatically. “This war is not mine!” I’m shouting above the detonations which now merge into a single incessant rumbling. “A man who builds houses or owns them cannot be party to a war. For him all wars are alien.”
My tenant’s lips open and shut in short jerks. He is talking, not to me but to Katarina, whom he is urging to get away from the outer wall and take shelter beneath the concrete trough. In that continuous torrent of noise, I’m striving to p
ick out from the single impervious mass of sound, from the middle of the acoustic cube in which I’m imprisoned, the scream with which my houses collapse—to distinguish the death rattle of Theodora at Dedinje from the agony of Alexandra at Vračar.
I ask Major Helgar—as a soldier, invader, and destroyer he ought to know—if every house dies as it lives, or if, like people, in death they cease to be distinguishable from one another. Instead of answering, without the slightest respect he pushes me rudely under the trough, and then he too squeezes in sideways.
I might easily never have recalled that barrage of noise. In fact the very next day after the Easter raid in 1941, when I was brought an exhaustive account of the damage—which, thank God, was far less than my panic-stricken estimates—I began to exclude that ill-favored raid from my conscious memory; or rather, I compressed it into a relatively ill-defined area of my memory, a cocoon which only under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances could be broken open. Thus of all the raids, there remained only a condensed impression in which an indefinite feeling of horror predominated over the most impressive scenes, and I would never have relived it in such frightening detail had I not again come down the same steps, and had that disintegrating pressure not at last been exerted. This time, of course, I didn’t continue down into the cellar but went out into the street, reflecting on the creaking gate which needed oiling.
The ground floor shutters were flung wide open; I had to move off quickly to avoid the kind Mr. Mihajlović, whom I hoped I had left in the certainty that I was resting in bed. I rounded the corner of Srebrnička Street, from where, stealthy but unhindered, I could take a good look at the house in which I lived, and which from the window I could only see at an angle. Near it a gas station had been installed. On both sides of a prefabricated hut, in which all sorts of brightly colored cans with strange labels were displayed, stood four squat blue-and-white gas pumps with thick hoses twined around them.
Even now I probably can’t explain why I never felt the need to give 17 Kosančićev Venac a name. Viewed from the street, the house had no special qualities. On a fine-grained brown plane, consisting of three vertical fields above a raised plinth which was pierced by three horizontal cellar windows, rose the ground floor and the second story, separated by two medallions in the shape of stone insignias in relief. On the third level a wooden door bound with forged iron opened onto a semicircular patio, while the whole building was topped by an almost flat roof, bordered by a balustrade with closely set railings in the form of stone skittles. It was natural that my own habitation should not inspire me in the same way as Simonida or the uninhibited, not to say lascivious, Theodora. Nevertheless, despite her lack of visual appeal, she possessed something unique. Since this was not visible from the outside, you had to go around and down onto the embankment, and look at her from the river, to see what it was that set her off: she possessed the finest orientation on the plateau of Kosančićev Venac, and her windows, facing west and overgrown with ivy, offered an unequaled view over the Srem plain.
From the window everything seemed new, different. But with the exception of the gas station, nothing on Srebrnička Street had actually changed. Not even the Turkish cobblestones had been replaced by macadam—something I had tried to get done before the war. Whenever I’d thought about this sortie, I’d always envisaged myself on some unfamiliar corner, groping about helplessly like a blind man who taps the objects around him with his white walking stick, searching for traces of the past from which to orient himself. There was, I will admit, something childish in my behavior in those imagined surroundings; a grown man shouldn’t have suffered the kind of agony I brought on myself. What’s more natural than a town being transformed from year to year, built up and demolished. Had I not myself contributed to its metamorphosis, had I not myself pulled down single-story cottages to build my houses in their place? Still, whenever I had tried to apply this reasoning to my imagined outing, after wandering for some time unimpeded through the transformed but still recognizable streets, I’d always end up at that inevitable and fateful corner (it was built of reddish brick, faced with whitened edges; the angle of the pavement at the corner was railed off with an iron chain of heavy, rusty links, whereas on the opposite side, which always remained incomplete for me, there was a square with an elliptical asphalt promenade)—that fateful corner on which everything suddenly became unknown, strange, hostile.
I can’t say that the fear of that brutal corner disappeared after I’d taken a few steps, but that fear was put into perspective. I convinced myself that even if I did stumble upon that corner, the actual experience would be far less shattering than the imagined one. To develop some defense mechanism, I had to pay special attention to everything that differed in the slightest from the picture of the town I had carried with me when I had irreversibly withdrawn from public life, to everything which during my absence had been built, added to, set up, changed, removed. And of course not only to houses, although they obviously dominated my interest, but to companies, advertisements, traffic signs, kiosks, shops, cars, and perhaps (why not?) even people.
And so, entering Zadarska Street, I stopped to read on the decrepit sloping roof of a battered old house, in crooked, chalked letters: “Reconnaissance Detachment Toza Dragović.” I took this simply as a novelty and not, as might have been expected, a reason to feel disturbed, in that so many years after the war this puerile visiting card of some reconnaissance company of the Royal Army had not been erased, but remained to deface the house.
In the triangle between Srebrnička and Zadarska streets there was a bench which had been squeezed between the wall and a gnarled chestnut tree with such force that its slats, studded with large-headed nails, seemed to have grown right into the tree trunk. It looked as if, because it had served as a seat for so long, one end had reverted to its original form; or as if, by some strange quirk of reversed metabolism, the tree had put forth worm-eaten, flattened branches which parodied human handiwork. I was familiar with that deformed bench, too, only previously it had been surrounded by a small garden which now, still defending inch by inch the approach to the house, was being gradually pushed back by the street.
But the house itself held evil memories for me, not in its outward appearance, which was still fairly well preserved and solid, unmarred by any foreboding cracks, but because of a fullness which is characteristic of T.B. victims, people rotting away under a deceptively healthy exterior; it reminded me of the tragedy of Agatha. What had brought a serious crisis upon Agatha were my relations with Major Bruno Helgar, the only German whom, since he lived in the requisitioned flat downstairs, I had been forced to see with any regularity. Given the hostile attitude to the Occupation, my own forebearance couldn’t be understood, still less approved of, without the knowledge that the entry of the Germans into Belgrade—in other respects a cause for lamentation—didn’t affect me materially. I was sorry, of course, that it had come to this (despite the fact that I had criticized the government for their adverse attitude, and especially because of the provocative street riots which led me so irrevocably to seek a safe asylum in my home), and I of course shared the general unease with which one awaits an administration whose legal mechanism is unknown and whose measures of government cannot be foreseen. But with the exception of the cessation of building activity (I had already on my own largely given up the buying and building of houses), and the requisitioning of accommodations (which also in no way troubled me, for the Germans, in moving out the former inhabitants, took care of my possessions with truly Teutonic scrupulousness; given such an attitude to my houses, the question of financial compensation, although important, was never decisive for me)—with these exceptions, then, the only conflict between us arose as a result of the raid of April 6, 1941, in which the poor, blameless Agatha suffered. The other houses came out of it with minor damage—some were untouched—but Agatha perished, even though her position was not prominent, nor was there any tempting military object nearby.
However
, that part of her fate which was the most unusual (when shall I ever stop mourning her?), and which made her a precursor of that solid house on Srebrnička Street, was that the mortal wound she had suffered that April went unnoticed. In the obvious sense of the word, there was no wound; nevertheless, for three full years thereafter, Agatha was in fact dying as she looked the very picture of health. She was expiring silently without any signs of weakness, without a single cry, without that cracking, grinding, and splitting which betray decaying buildings, until at Easter 1944 she gave way and, untouched by any bomb, collapsed of her own accord like a tower of cards. Seven tenants were crushed under her ruins, and the inquiry which was opened on a petition against me by their relatives took as its starting point the ignorant, base, and of course quite erroneous premise that property owners in their pursuit of profit rent houses which are dilapidated and liable to fall down. The inquiry categorically cleared me of that repulsive suspicion. Experts affirmed that Agatha, up to that time a perfectly sound and well-preserved building, had been seriously but unnoticeably damaged internally in the first German bombing—something like a human visceral hemorrhage—so that before she suddenly collapsed she was undermined from inside, decomposed, shattered; they affirmed that the owner had absolutely no way of knowing this and that in that year, 1944, a single distant shock had been sufficient to demolish her. There was no doubt that the house in front of which I was now standing would end up in the same way. And having made this observation, I was ready to proceed along Zadarska Street toward Topličin Venac.
At the line where the cobblestones gave way to a radical band of asphalt and I came out of the shade into the sun, I had the disturbing impression of leaving behind a forsaken region where eternal stillness reigned, broken only rarely by a sound of unknown origin, by some indistinct voice, the dense noise of the wings of a startled bird, the muffled squeak of a gate at the mercy of the wind, or a ship’s siren. I had the impression that the area which I had passed through so far was nothing more than an annex, an unusual continuation of my room; that the sidestreet with its close-set walls was only the corridor leading out of my house; and that the sunlit opening at its end, marked by a square metal sign warning me that I was entering the blue parking zone, was the door through which I would leave. It was as if I had still to take the first step toward Simonida.