I immediately told myself that my worry could not have been occasioned by the crowds I had encountered after stepping out of an empty street. Those people were quietly going about their business; indeed, most of them could have lived in my apartments without my losing self-respect. But I was no longer among them, among my own clientele, for suddenly I found myself in the midst of quite different people: again for the nth time and who knows at what cost, it was March 27, 1941; once again I was hurrying to Stefan’s auction and once again I came upon an unruly mob.
People were milling about in all directions, banging into one another, pushing each other aside like badly directed billiard balls. I had to get out of their way for most of them seemed not to heed where they were going, but on bumping into one another changed their course and with the same surefootedness set off in a new direction determined by the chance collision. It was as if they were bumping against muscular rubber mattresses from which they were flung back still more wildly, and then whirled around bemused in an elastic cage composed of invisible springs. But all of them, densely packed and growing denser as more arrived, were moving down toward Brankova Street and the concrete apron in front of the King Alexander Bridge, where a three-deep cordon of police was waiting for them. Not even those rioters whom the volcanic pressure at the center had driven into my street as into an empty sleeve, were by all appearances grateful at being squeezed out of this frightful mill whose grinding stones, turned by the mill wheel of hate, crushed, pounded, and ground them. No, with visionary blindness they again hurled themselves into it, pushing into the moving current of flesh as into plastic clay, and again merged with it in a ritual ecstasy which deprived them of control over their limbs. There could be no question of any individuality or reasoned initiative here: thus assimilated, faceless, depersonalized, they rushed on toward the bridge, deprived of any individual movement or personal choice of the direction which the demonstration was taking. It was as if all the separate strength of their previously independent bodies had been gathered together by a single all-absorbing superbody or omnibody which, freed from individual cares and restraints, was smashing and destroying everything in their now unburdened name.
Loyally subordinating themselves to this unifying force, they linked arms in a solid trellis of fists and pushed forward as if boiling over from a white-hot cauldron of discontent and despair. The participants in these demoniacal rounds were constantly replaced by others; sidelong tremors broke apart their single-line chains, tore at their links, replaced them with more resistant, firmer ones. Those who were pushed aside, after having been battered for a time by the oncoming ranks, would grab on to other lines, for which it appeared a lesser strength was sufficient, for they were out of direct range of the constraining blockage, lower down at the approaches to the bridge.
Stretched up over the mob were poles bearing the Yugoslav and Serbian flags. (One of them was red, yes, completely red like newly shed blood.) They were carried between two masts and looked like a bloodied bandage which had just been unwound from a giant’s forehead. I felt myself once again in the outskirts of Voronezh, in the midst of an evil mob of rioters, their ranks like rows of coal-black, sodden hovels. It was 1919, the White General Marmontov had already retreated across the Don, and under the protection of the riflemen of Budyony’s Sixth Cavalry—who, clustered together into smallish, perhaps even fortuitous groups, looked down from their horses with soldierlike indifference, half-dozing—the mob was dragging frightened, stunned people out of porchways: people in dressing gowns, kaftans, fur coats, cloth cloaks, field overcoats, waterproof capes, and coats with sable collars—from their appearance, respectable middle-class folk and even, I fear, property owners who, as was later explained to me, were counterrevolutionaries, Denikinites, Black Hundreds, and black marketeers. They were beating them with staves and forcing them to crawl in the gutter before their own houses, which they did quite earnestly, even so to speak committedly, while they were battered in the clinging autumn mud with the same staves, pickaxes and hammers. Then the crowd moved toward other houses where the wailing, like that of a forlorn and abandoned dog, awaited them.
Now, today, I beheld placards of brown paper, cardboard, and cloth on which slogans were inscribed in black and red oil:
DOWN WITH THE ANTIPEOPLE PACT!
LONG LIVE THE ARMY!
DOWN WITH THE GOVERNMENT OF TRAITORS!
DOWN WITH FASCISM!
DEATH TO THE GERMAN HIRELINGS!
BETTER THE GRAVE THAN BE A SLAVE!
BETTER WAR THAN THE PACT!
All this I could understand (though not of course approve), since in those conceited sentiments there was much more of a national, Slav, Kosovo, Salonika-front spirit than of revolutionary intent. But among the protests, and especially among the demands, were some which by their radical Bolshevik line took me back to Voronezh and that macabre railway halt of Solovkino. The troublemakers—undoubtedly Moscow stooges—were brandishing placards on which I made out with amazement:
DOWN WITH THE CORRUPT BOURGEOISIE!
WE DEMAND A POPULAR FRONT!
DEMOCRATIC FREEDOM FOR THE MASSES!
LONG LIVE OUR RUSSIAN BRETHREN!
WORKERS, UNITE SOLIDLY IN THE STRUGGLE FOR OUR COMMON CAUSE!
UNION WITH THE USSR!
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
Which was only a more cunning way of saying: all power to the Soviets, all possessions to the nonworker rabble!
One might think that for my own peace of mind I would have chosen a roundabout route for my visit to Simonida, a detour which would lead me away from that howling procession of hysterical fiends gathered from all sides on the afternoon of March 27, 1941, on Pop-Lukina Street, and still surging down it right up to the present day as if awaiting me, as if again blocking the road in front of me. I had been afraid only of that single corner in my dream, yet here I was now stopped by a familiar stone angle with a passageway, into which I had retreated to avoid being trampled down. Could I have reached Simonida by the more accessible Paris Street? I must say at once that it would have been impossible, just as it had been impossible at that first, real encounter. I had done all I could do to get away from them! I had gone around the corners on the vertical line which joined Kalemegdan Park to Nemanja Prospect. Yet each time I came up against the procession I tried to outflank it, keeping to streets which were parallel. No good! It flowed along densely in an all-blanketing layer which settled upon pavements and houses, just like vacuoles and minute bubbles of protoplasm which feed through their skin, consuming open space. And every minute I was in danger from that jellylike, voracious mass, one of whose extruded sleeves, having penetrated into the sidestreets, might suck me in like a stream of gelatine that in sliding down a glass absorbs sprinkled droplets from all sides.
That, then, was the reason why even now it made no sense to look for another route to Simonida. Between me and my threatened house serried ranks of riffraff, whom nothing could disperse, were still passing; in fact they were there only in my irritating memory, and their phantom procession was no longer under the control of the real laws of pressure and compression, but of some kind of laissez faire, protected by memory, over which only I had a certain influence. Only I, therefore, could eliminate them, although the term “eliminate” could in no way be taken literally, for it was not my aim to erase my events from my memory; I could have done that only by eliminating their living results! Rather I desired to reconstruct them in the transforming light of new consciousness, bearing in mind the forthcoming meeting with Simonida, over whose uncertain position they perhaps had a fateful power—to reconstruct them unhurriedly, objectively, as it were outside my own self, and to show myself that my decision to withdraw from society had been at the very least premature, irrational, unfounded, in short mistaken, and that but for that decision I would today have been free of the need to defend my embattled domain.
I believe, however, that it would be useful to look back a little and explain why I hadn’t returne
d home immediately on coming face to face with the demonstration. I can safely assert that among the property owners there was not one (and I knew them all well, and had maintained professional relations with the most eminent of them) for whom the safety of his own skin wouldn’t have been more vital than his work—work in that higher sense which doesn’t depend on the size of income or the index of growth, but on the character, capacity, and depth of feeling which together are put into it.
Such men increased their possessions either through inertia, to be secure in old age, or simply to strengthen and solidify their personal or social integrity. They didn’t do it to augment their property as such, or in any way to become identified with the things which belonged to them, so that they should merge with these objects of commercial control into an indivisible whole, be absorbed into a mutual lymphatic system for the flow and flood of capital, feeling, will, rent, ideas, instinct, profit, hope, beauty, revenue, passion, and the remaining forms of living—a unity of two otherwise opposite beings in which, as in ideal love, it would no longer be possible to distinguish possessor and possessed, owner and owned, and where the very act of possession would be so completely reciprocal that sometime, perhaps in some perfect world, it would become one with the act of self-perception.
It goes without saying that my professional friends were far from the ideal concept of property ownership. The exception, although in a completely different sphere, was perhaps Theodore, the deceased Theodore X., Negovan’s adopted son, the one who had studied at the Jewelers’ School in Amsterdam. Every diadem, necklace, bracelet, stud, earring—each individual piece of jewelry in his shop possessed him to the same degree as he, Theodore, was its possessor. Even more so, for Theodore was capable, in his otherwise voluntarily subordinate position, of manifesting scrupulous effort, fatherlike care, tender love, and even adoration of the particular article of adornment he owned (compare this with my attitude toward my houses), while the jewels (again akin to my houses) could only return all this devotion with an unimpassioned shine which sparkled, in all its colors, from behind the thick crystal pane of a display cabinet, with its comfortable bed of purple and dark blue satin.
Certainly those other possessors would not be capable of such things. Indeed, can I call them by that honorable name? They have become so alienated from their own possessions that, since no direct or personal link binds them, they no longer possess at all in the popular sense of the word, nor does the possessed have any right over them. These men no longer operate in real objects belonging to them, but in their vague, alien, shadowy affairs, such as acquisitions on the stock market whereby industrial and agricultural products, immovable assets, land, mineral wealth, ores—in a word, all the wealth of this planet—are transformed into paper values, barely perceivable in concepts of rent, dividends, shares, loan extensions, cash and terms of work, or agreed-upon deferred payments (just as nothing at all could be found out about my houses—about their appearance and soul, or our mutual relations—from the concept of rent). Inevitably, that abandoned trace of reality is finally lost by its owner. Yet it’s quite inappropriate to call them owners, for they have acquired only echoes of those shadows—in fact, their formless movements up and down, movements defined by the stock exchange index, by the possessor who, speculating à la hausse, on the rise of shares, or à la baisse, on their fall, in fact possesses only disembodied differences between changeable and similarly disembodied sums, nuances which themselves are exceptionally inconstant and changeable.
In short, between the other owners’ and my own understanding of possessions there had come about—gradually, of course—a complete difference of opinion which could, for the sake of expressiveness, be compared with the essential difference between the theological representation of God as an impersonal concept of omnipotence, and the real, incarnate God which believers experience in their very soul. This opposition had led me to suspect that all my apparent “professional friends,” if by some mischance they had found themselves in my position, would have retreated before that street of rioters, probably because everything which made it necessary to pass through that pandemonium, through that molten hell as over an enemy redoubt, could be postponed to some more favorable occasion; or if it couldn’t—if it really were a question of that unique chance by which it is sometimes possible to surprise the market—they would nevertheless have preferred to renounce the profit involved than to risk their own life.
(My exclusive aim in pausing at this to some extent historic spot was not to reconstruct my feelings at that time, in the context of conditions and their meanings for me then—that would have been a real and useless feeling, like that which against my will had once again drawn me back to the funeral of Constantine Negovan or to the laundry room under the stone trough—but rather to subject them to a critical assessment from the considerably altered present-day viewpoint. To disclose the errors of my behavior which had almost brought about my demise, I had to comment on them, so as to be able to argue with those earlier feelings as if they hadn’t belonged to Arsénie Negovan, but to some other person, quite indifferent to him.)
Although I wasn’t stubborn in the usual sense of the word, I was embellished—if indeed it is an embellishment, and I believe it had to be so, Katarina’s views to the contrary—I was embellished, I repeat, by that conqueror’s nomad’s, and traveling merchant’s constancy of purpose which brought my ancestors, still bearing the Graeco-Tsintsarski name of Nago, from the backwoods of Aegean Macedonia, out of dreary anonymity, to attain first of all a separate identity, and later our enviable present-day power in society.
I would never have written all this down, of course—I was already making spontaneous use of it, living it in fact—had I not been asked to give a lecture at the Jubilee of the Circle of the Sisters of Serbia. The ladies of the organizing committee intended this to be a series of lectures about the multiple aspects of urban life under the general title “The Different Faces of Belgrade,” which was to take place once a week in the large hall of the Kolarac Institute. B.P., Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Belgrade, was enlisted to say a few words to those eminent ladies, so desirous of knowledge, about the artistic realities of the capital. (To this day I’m not clear why he thought it appropriate to deliver, in his otherwise incomparable manner, something on “The Eighteenth-Century Frenchwoman.”) N.N., an experienced Treasury architect, was to summarize the architectural content of the general theme, following which the biggest names were engaged according to their own special interests. And so, as secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, I was chosen to inform my ambitious listeners about that less romantic aspect of Belgrade life, the mechanism of its economic development; in this way, apparently the part of the general title of the series promising an insight into the unknown side of the town would be fulfilled. So I had to talk about the monetary system, stock exchange speculations, exports and imports, industrial perspectives, trade and the market; about goods, clearing, rent, stocks, shares, bills of exchange, bankruptcy (both real and fictional), imposition of taxes, accumulation, profits, and wages (I remember that under wages it was suggested that in passing, in nuce, I should dispose of the Problem of the Workers). But all this, of course, in a way which would be both entertaining and accessible to the ladies.
I must immediately make it clear that before this offer I had never appeared at public gatherings; with the evident exception of meetings of the Chamber, auctions, and professional conferences, this particular art was for me something completely new. Without any doubt, I would have refused to take part—however flattering it was—had I not had in mind the benefit to my own business affairs which could accrue from this close and essentially intellectual contact with the wives of our most important and influential industrialists, merchants, bankers, capitalists, statesmen, and politicians. Above all, I didn’t have a very able tongue, although—here I’m giving passively the opinion of others—I knew how to rise to heights of poetic inspiration whenever I talked about m
y own houses or something directly related to them. On this occasion, however, there was to be nothing about houses, or at least about mine, though property ownership did come within the scope of the lecture. I was to talk about such great matters as the mechanism of economic developments which, it was naively believed, would lay the foundations for the prosperity of our flea-ridden, Levantine community. Most lamentably of all, in my statement of the essentials of the banker’s profession, for example, I was expected to praise that very type of possession which is the true antithesis of real possession, and to turn real possession’s living forms into a vampirelike roundabout of soulless and faceless figures on the current stock exchange index!
Arsénie Negovan could not agree to such blasphemy! I decided to make use of the occasion for myself—and, in a somewhat indirect way, for my listeners’ husbands—to outline my own ideas about the subject, mainly my views about the essential difference between the erroneously favored single-phase ownership and the benefits of the equal, reciprocal dual-phase type. This was my own terminology to illustrate the fact that true ownership can only be one in which the subject and the object share possession mutually, in consequence of which all differences between them are erased, so that the Possessor becomes the Possessed without losing any of the traditional function of Possession, and the Possessed becomes the Possessor, without in any way losing its characteristics of the Possessed. In short, I would explain my philosophy of Possession.
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