Carried away by this power for enlightenment, I threw myself into the work and quickly prepared an outline of my lecture. Bearing in mind my inexperience as an orator, I thought it best to test my impact on some more experienced speaker. Not wanting to give my casual, so to speak, amateur soliloquy any prior publicity—for it was in some way to be a conversation with myself at which, quite fortuitously, the matrons of our town were to be present—I took it in typescript to Mr. Joakim Teodorović, through whom, as the initiator of the function, I normally communicated with the Circle. It would be unjust to complain that Mr. Teodorović didn’t show an immediate interest in my work—perhaps “interest” is too modest a synonym for the tense expression of his face while he literally raced over the text, in which the heavy Remington letters stood out in lines like grains of wheat, like the lead beads on the wires of a child’s abacus—or that he was miserly in his praise, although for my restrained taste they were a little overeffuse.
Despite this promising reception, I never appeared on the rostrum of the Kolarac Institute with my “completely original angle.” To this very day I am unaware as to why this came about, and why in my place Mr. Teodorović himself gave the lecture, meekly and unintelligently retracing all those weary errors by which this vast subject is devastated. In actual fact I presume he retraced them, for it goes without saying that I didn’t have the honor of being present at the lecture. But this was not important for me now, invidia virtutis (or as is said nowadays, comes—invidia virtutis comes; envy is the companion of virtue), as the Romans would have exclaimed; all this was but a pretext for me to recall something quite different. Actually, in putting together the sketch of the lecture that was not to be, I had noted down in the margin, just as they came to me, several concise definitions, paradigmatic notes which were really too exclusive to be included in the framework itself. These notes should have been read by that idiot Joakim Teodorović, for him to see what a “completely original angle” really meant, but they were indeed the barest essentials of what, in a more subtle version, I intended to elucidate for my Serbian Sisters of the Circle. As far as I remember, these notes could be reduced to a number of axioms:
1. I do not own houses, we, I and my houses, own each other mutually.
2. Other houses do not exist for me; they begin to exist for me when they become mine.
3. I take houses only when they take me; I appropriate them only when I am appropriated; I possess them only when I am possessed by them.
4. Between me and my possessions a relationship of reciprocal ownership operates; we are two sides of one being, the being of possession.
There were several others—probably they began to develop the above principles in individual areas of ownership—but, hesitating on the asphalt threshold of Pop-Lukina Street, looking at the pale-colored, unequally hewn-out gashes of the streets on the other side of the imaginary procession, I wasn’t capable of recalling them. It was, indeed, superfluous to try. The ones I could remember were sufficient to restore my faltering conviction about the decision which I had then taken. I had to get across. Such decisiveness, whatever may be said, came straight from my possessor’s heart and was therefore legitimate.
Here, of course, that ill-considered step which for many years shut me in my house cannot be hidden. Perhaps the mistake was made later. I don’t deny the possibility that I even foresaw something of the sort, that I got something confused while forcing my way through the mass, or even during the subsequent incident. I can allow this—I’m only at the beginning of my reconstruction—but without any doubt, at the intersection of Zadarska and Pop-Lukina Streets I couldn’t have acted in any other way than the way I did.
At that time my heart, my possessor’s heart, was worrying about the house which my cousin on my father’s side, Stefan Negovan, had built on Kosmajska Street, No. 41: “Stefan’s Folly” as the neighbors called the free, and certainly lighter and more intelligent, copy of Dietrich and Eizenhofer’s Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Its appearance, taken from a baroque, aristocratic hôtel particulier, with some of the aspects and forlorn contours of a Chinese pagoda, gave the impression of a dwarf-size castle in the middle of the town, with tin, butterflylike wings as roofs from whose arch a mildewed copper dome burgeoned like a festering boil, like a breast with a circular lantern around it, with a tympanum in the middle of the façade, a blind, three-cornered Cyclop’s eye from whose edge hung two pairs of (four in all) Corinthian columns like stalactite tears, with the three-sided hollow of a balcony between them and loggias to the left and right, with French windows and an ornately worked portal instead of an entrance door. Nor did the interior lag behind the façade: It was hung with expensive wall lamps, and the ceilings were of alabaster and the floors of lacquered oak, with spiral staircases and raised marble daises. Even discounting the unique furniture—in which, en route to a bearable compromise, the haphazard taste of Stefan’s wife Jelena had clashed with the patriarchal heritage of her hated mother-in-law—the house recalled a padded chest where precious souvenirs were collected. And now it had come about that Stefan’s Folly had cast its Cyclop’s eye on me.
Not at once, of course, not the very moment it was built. When I first caught sight of it—I’d been abroad at the time it was completed—I was amazed, and that’s no exaggeration; I was in fact appalled. In the humble, simple, architecturally modest surroundings of Kosmajska Street of that time—where two plots away, at No. 45, stood my Aspasia, up to then the bravest of houses, and across the way, Kleont Negovan’s bungalow, the somber face of which was smooth as a serpent—in these surroundings, Stefan’s palace produced a truly disturbing effect, irritatingly perverse and pretentious, like an erratum, a coarse printing error in the elegant context of the street; or, to keep closer to its essential character, like a fit of madness which had suddenly taken hold of deranged, frustrated stone and which, with hysterical joy produced its own malignant currents like cancer, its swellings, lumps, tumors, lesions, humps, ganglions, haemotomes, and all that metastasis of distorted stone forms. I could go on listing comparisons indefinitely, and still only begin to give the displeasing impression which Stefan’s new house left on me at first sight.
Right from the beginning, at the moment of my first astounded repulsion, the seed of my later admiration was sown. I and Stefan’s house—I’m now loath to consider it Stefan’s—were like two beings at first sight divided by antipathy, but who began secretly to draw closer long before that antipathy was overcome and repudiated; moreover, quite unquestionably the initiative belonged to the house, or rather to its irresistibly extraordinary quality. I remember that, on returning to Kosančićev Venac a second time—Stefan hadn’t moved in yet—I was furious. (Why that anger, when the house wasn’t mine and had no reason to concern me? That a Negovan should make himself ridiculous before everyone could affect me personally only insofar as the uninformed might confuse the two of us.)
I shouted at Katarina that that irresponsible Stefan had built himself a monstrosity cheek by jowl with Aspasia—an unseemly stone aberration, une sépulture presumptueuse des pharaons, nécropole dans la petite version primitive balkanique, never mind what his original intentions had been; for certain, that gilded Georgian pumpkin had stuck her poisonous oar in; certainly it was far from responsible or considerate, not to mention cousinly, to contaminate the street with such a house and spoil—what am I saying, completely desolate—a whole area as if Belgrade were his patrimony, dowry, feudal domain, and not a public treasure subject to recognized laws, not to mention urban principles. “What’s more,” I said, “he must have greased someone’s palm generously to have been allowed to indulge in such madness, with no concern at all that there are still houses being rented on Kosmajska Street. Now, of course, with Stefan’s scarecrow alongside them, the question is whether they can be rented at all, never mind if there’ll be any rent out of them!”
“I thought that a palace like Stefan’s would raise the value of any street,” said Katarina.
&n
bsp; “And when have I cared about the money?”
She could see how angered I was by the mere suggestion that I would agree to put my pocket before my devotion to building, my only true activity, for which property ownership was simply a kind of civic alibi: that exciting and intoxicating feeling that I, with my own hands (for in the final issue, it is I who guarantee the means) take from nature as from some usurious possessor earth and ore, stone and wood, and give form to that rough clay, to that stone and wood; the feeling that with my own hands (for here too, don’t I guarantee the means?) I transform them at my designers’ drawing boards into magnificent visions, build them up finally into people’s possessions, possessions which only by name and for a short time are mine. Seeing therefore that she had wounded me deeply, my wife conciliatingly exclaimed that it wasn’t revenue she had in mind at all, nor wealth either, but standing, prestige; la renommée bourgeoise was what she was concerned with, in mentioning which—la renommée bourgeoise—she was really only repeating rather clumsily my own aired opinion that a house’s standing and that of its occupants were in a reciprocal relationship, like a mirror and the face reflected in it: the inhabitants of a house heighten its reputation and the importance of its location, just as a house, by its position, its location, guarantees the importance of its tenants.
At that, I rather skillfully drew her attention to the fact that it was indeed my houses which built up all those suburban districts before what she understood by address became important, and that the opposite was not, or only very rarely, the case. Despite the unquestionably favorable status of those districts—and in no case would I underestimate or deny its real effect on the continuous rise in the value of my properties—if it hadn’t been for me and entrepreneurs like me, and our enterprise, sincerity, professional talents, persistence, farsightedness, and even diplomatic skill (first intelligence and then money, of course, for what can intelligence alone achieve, what good is intelligence without means?), there wouldn’t have been any addresses on the hill at all, and certainly not those worth making any kind of fuss about. Instead, there would have been the garrison’s stables and gun emplacements; they would still be breeding geese on the open fields of Dedinje and Topčider; and the village yokels would still be lightheartedly relieving themselves against the gates of the few carelessly thrown together weekend houses.
“That’s just what I’m saying, Arsénie. If your houses built up Dedinje, why shouldn’t Stefan’s help build up Kosmajska Street.”
“Because there’s no need for anyone to raise Arsénie’s already solid values, and certainly not that lout Stefan with his oafish house!”
“Well, like it or not, you’ll have to raise Aspasia’s rent now.”
“I know. Only then I’ll have to renew her façade and have her painted, and perhaps even install central heating.”
“Well, at least you don’t mind spending the money.”
“Of course I don’t mind!”
Even without the new rental, I had intended to refurbish Aspasia. Clearly I would have spared neither money nor effort in putting her back into shape, but I didn’t want to waste money on making her stand out in the neighborhood. Renovation was necessary for Aspasia, not for my landlord’s pride, and she certainly didn’t need to be surrounded by gypsy shacks.
“I don’t care about money, Katarina, but I do need it for new construction.”
“Always new construction,” she said dispiritedly.
“Yes,” I said without bitterness. “Always new construction.”
There was no point in harsh words. She, poor child, just didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand that possession, like any other living thing—like love, for example, love or fame, power or capability, vice or virtue—must be fed, must grow, become fruitful and multiply, if it wishes to go on.
At this, I somewhat conceitedly set about explaining to her the beneficial significance of the reproductive urge for the industrial and social prosperity of the nation, referring continually to nature, and seeking out its already well-trodden paths, when suddenly she burst into tears. Seeing her distress, I abandoned my exposition. (Our personal contribution to this universal urge for reproduction was at that time, due to the ramifications of my landlord’s affairs, relatively lacking, and the fate of our only son, then not yet born, would later demonstrate that it was better to put a stop to such negligence.)
“For God’s sake, Arsénie, can’t you forget that house just for once?”
That evening we were awake for a long time, both because of the heat, which the proximity of our overheated bodies in the marriage bed increased unbearably, and from worry.
“How can I forget it when he’s ruined a whole street?”
“Sometimes I feel like setting it on fire!”
“And how do you think I feel about it?”
“It and all your own cursed houses!”
“He’s loused up the whole street!”
“The whole filthy town!”
“The whole street, I tell you!”
Indeed, as regards Stefan’s respect for conventions such as the unity of the object with urban space and its character, he could have put up a Chinese junk or some mammoth Polynesian idol at No. 41, had he wished to, and produced the same unseemly effect.
“What can you do now? It’s there.”
Perhaps I could have forced something through the Town Council. I would have received support from the property owners of Kosmajska Street: something of the sort was hinted at (with due respect for my family ties with Stefan) by Mr. Martinović, the wholesale grain merchant at the corner of Kosmaj and Topličin Venac, with whom I had the doubtful pleasure of making my first visit to the monstrosity. But the affair could never get as far as pulling it down, which would have been the only just and logical decision. God knows what kind of administrative circus we would have had to embark on—evidence and counterevidence, committees and subcommittees, complaints and petitions, applications, specialists’ reports, delays and postponements—without any real administrative outcome other than to provoke a dispute with Stefan and to offer the Negovan-Turjaškis yet another chance to accuse me of the Oriental sin of disloyalty to the family.
“I’d end up being called disloyal, and envious into the bargain, but still not achieve what I wanted.”
“I think I’ll go to sleep now,” said Katarina.
“You don’t understand it at all.”
“No, I don’t.”
“That monstrosity of Stefan’s would stay where it is, but I don’t say that nothing at all would be achieved. At least we could make certain that such abominations were stopped in the future, perhaps on the basis of some committee to keep watch over the town, since we still don’t even have an advisory body to defend our town by law from the whims of dilettantes and the nouveaux riches. We want to build a skyscraper—the only reinforced concrete skyscraper in Europe, and so forth—but when you get caught short in the street as I did recently, while tying yourself in knots you have to rush around to a friend’s—if you’re lucky enough to have one—and even then you can’t rush off straight from the door. You have to kiss your hostess’s hand before you can work around to your emergency. Otherwise you’re left only with some statue in the park, or a telegraph post like any little dog. He has to lord it over us, doesn’t he, with his Viennese secessionist horns for architectural candles. He probably thought that Kosmajska Street’s deadly provincialism needed jolting, as if streets were plum trees that have to be shaken, and as if Aspasia, say, wasn’t exciting enough. Some of our buildings are depressing, no question about it. But that my Aspasia with her faced stone and restrained decoration is old-fashioned, as he’s been saying, and rather impoverished-looking, we’ll have all that out in the open and soon, too. And if Stefan imagines that by building his monstrosity he’s found the most effective way of reviving the street, that just shows his own obscene sense of life.”
Unfortunately, that evening my reflections found no support in Katarina; on other e
venings she was generally less vague, more receptive. She had been asleep, I suspect, for quite some time. She was sleeping soundly as if nothing at all unpleasant had happened, and attentive as I am, I didn’t have the heart to wake her and go over my decision with her. But later, whenever mention was made of Stefan’s house, Katarina expressed a harsh, irrational hostility toward it for which I was never able to find a sound basis.
A day after I had ceremoniously pronounced that I was going to ignore the monstrosity, I stood before it again. Every day, Sundays and holidays excepted, according to an established schedule, I paid a visit to one of the rented houses, and on the following day I went to see Aspasia. Once en route, I was ashamedly aware of where I was really going. Stephanie of Vračar was on the list, and there was no legitimate reason for me to change the route of my inspection. And of course, when I found myself there, I couldn’t, and most probably didn’t want to, overcome the temptation. And so, furious at my own irresolution, I walked a few paces farther and once again found myself in front of Stefan’s house.
Hardened by the first appalling impression, I was now able to look at the house in its own light, resisting the temptation to pass judgment on it because of the imagined unpleasantness it would cause Aspasia. I could cope with the unpleasantness later; for the moment, it was the house itself that troubled me. With quiet deliberation I plunged into her luxuriant forms, her butterfly-shaped roof with the upturned edges beneath which tin was curved up into the gutterings. The copper dome for some strange reason no longer reminded me of a boil but rather of a full breast straining skyward. As for that tympanum, supported on columns of Corinthian slimness, it would indeed have looked much worse if the designer had filled the simple field between the architrave and the main arch with figures of famous warriors or gods, half-gods, and quarter-gods in some farcical action such as the slaying of bulls.
Houses Page 8