Who knows if that’s what was really said!
Let’s suppose it was. Just as we accept without question everything else you remember. Yet at no other time had you felt called upon to intervene—even when he was talking about financial speculation. Why Arsénie? Why?
Well, there was truth in what N.N. was saying. Of course that business about our Czechoslovak brothers was all just street-corner rhetoric. But the part about our economic policy was true, primitively interpreted certainly, but the absolute truth just as I myself had preached it—and to which, incidentally, I’d dedicated my lecture to the Sisters of Serbia.
The lecture you never gave.
The lecture I never gave.
Suddenly you saw your chance, Arsénie, you still had the lecture in your head, as clearly as if it were before you in print, just as it had been before your canceled appearance at the Kolarac Institute. The audience was there in front of you, receptive and ready, like the Serbian Sisters had they been given the chance.
It was all about the collapse of the property system, the replacement of that real, human system by a new, unreal, inhuman one, the transformation of objects into symbols, things into numbers. And you abandoned caution, all civic dignity, you forgot the passage of time, the auction which would begin at any moment. You forgot your beloved Niké, you became the worst kind of paid agitator, in the middle of the street, and with no hat and a torn coat at that.
“Honored Lady President! Esteemed ladies! Gentlemen!”
Someone burst out laughing, but he was silenced by other citizens who had greater respect for the seriousness of the moment.
“I am speaking to you according to the program—”
“Long live the Communist Party program!”
“—As I said, to set out before you the economic life of Belgrade, I shall take in the economic factors of the whole country and indeed of the whole continent, tear off the mask from that incompetent and alien policy which at last, here and now, has brought us to disaster!”
“Down with the antinational government! Down with the gravediggers of Yugoslavia!”
You raise your hand to silence the audience. You need to concentrate. Interruptions disturb you.
“Esteemed ladies, gentlemen! The very last moment has arrived for us to speak without ambiguity or prevarication . . .”
“Better war than the Pact, better the grave than be a slave!”
“. . . and especially the existence of the ordre de propriétaire, that toiling breed of people who, like Antaeus on his powerful shoulders, have been carrying the weight of social progress!”
“Long live the working masses!”
“And we ask ourselves what could more worthily express a nation’s capacity for existence than the vitality of its ownership class, and we answer boldly at once: rien, rien du tout, absolument rien!”
“Louder!”
Now you must be very serious in what you remember, Arsénie; all at once the events have begun to mingle, as if emulsifying, as if they were sinking back into the anonymity of a general impression from which only your sharpest words can be distinguished. Over there to one side, no more than a few yards from you, a group of young men are laughing out loud.
Yes, those youths. Clear faces. An exceptionally favorable sign. The general mood is good, people are relaxing, and the anger is disappearing; it seems that at last, as they say, I’ve got them.
“What’s all this about, folks?”
“Never mind, hear him out!”
“He’s crazy!”
“Just you keep going, Grandpa!”
“Shut up over there—let him alone!”
“If we cast just a superficial glance at the state of our national economy, what do we see? An amazing picture of calamity: quarries shut down; speculation in timber; the synthetic cartel dictating prices to us in association with I. G. Farben; unfair increase in the cost of skilled building services; incompetent upstarts in our architectural design bureaus who are allowed to have their own way . . .”
“Enough! Enough!”
“. . . the complete absence of regulatory plans and any kind of urbanist ideas. On the other hand . . .”
“Go fuck yourself!”
“. . . with the helpless feelings of well-meaning owners, we see impoverished citizens unable to put roofs over the heads of their children, while the finest flats stand empty. For houses, esteemed ladies, are like human souls: if we don’t inhabit them, they are lost. And most of all, ladies and gentlemen . . .”
“Shit on your gentlemen!”
“. . . that the direct system of ownership is being replaced by the indirect . . .”
“Get rid of that idiot.”
“This is freedom! Anyone can talk!”
“What freedom? It’s a circus!”
“Listen to him!”
The crowd was exhilarated and I had to keep going at all costs. “Whereas once possession was a means of setting up a mutually corrective relationship between material and its produced forms, in the sense that work on material was carried out by the mind” (laughter), “even so it used to be balanced by the reciprocal work which material carried out on the mind” (laughter), “so that we continually had the identification of roles between mind and matter” (loud laughter). “But today the dividing lines have disappeared” (wild laughter, applause), “so that all relationship between owner and what is owned has been lost, and there are people—tycoons who call themselves owners, but don’t in fact know what they own! Bremmer, Brevit, Brickhouse, British Aluminum, British Cotton, British Termo, Broom, Wade, Cable Covers, Allied Brick, Allied Insulators, Allied Textile—what can their owners know of their possessions from the interest rates and fractions which the stock exchange index shows them, or from the mathematical symbols in which the banks have drowned our assets?”
To your horror, the painted idol beneath the red sky is leaning forward as if he wants to crawl over the heads toward you. He’s shouting:
“Get rid of that madman!”
You are offended. You protest in the name of ordinary decency. You resist.
“Get rid of him—get him down!”
In such a situation the best thing is to act as if that shameless interruption in no way concerned you, to remain aloof.
“Gentlemen! If the French client could have seen with his own eyes . . .”
“Aaaahh, down with the speaker!”
“. . . I repeat, if he could have seen that Louisiana on the basis of whose fatal natural riches Mr. Low from Highland Scotland” (laughter, applause, whistles) “issued his assignats, would any one of them have been deceived or gone bankrupt?”
“He doesn’t even know how to speak Serbian!”
“Down with the imperialist agents!”
“I will pass over the unworthy invective from the gentlemen over there, and as a proof of good faith I will give as a personal example the property owner in personam. I don’t know my Christina or Stephanie through brokers’ valuations, I know them in my heart. And Niké . . .” (Indignation, acclamation, laughter, whistling.) “I withdraw, I demonstratively withdraw from the platform, I request to be put down!”
“Knock him down!”
“I’ve lost my Borsalino with the black ribbon—first give me back my hat!”
“Fuck your burzalino, fuck your whore of a mother, and fuck you, too!”
That is the last observation which I am reasonably certain was directed at me. Controlling myself, I ask with whom I have the honor, then everything becomes mixed up, troubled, disintegrating in a seething emulsion of colors, movement, and shouting.
“Long live the Communist Party! Down with the Bolsheviks! Slavs, unite! Moscow-Belgrade! God and Justice! Citizens! Comrades! Cattle! Long live the young King! Down with Hitler! Down with Stalin! What a crock of shit! Kill the traitors! Wretched of the world, arise! Moscow ass lickers! Get him! Police, police! Here comes the cavalry!”
Twenty-seven years later, here I am on that same corner, but not flat on t
he ground. I am standing, as if I had just got up, as if I had spent that unknown time—time deep as a well—in the shallow dusty gutter. I suddenly felt a jerking of my facial muscle, I was seized by Pareze facialis dextri (whenever I woke up that muscle began to quiver), so that at the threshold of Kosmajska Street I had to turn my back on the road and, facing the shining window of the clinic, take the muscle between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand and gently but firmly massage its pliable rubber mass until it calmed down. Only after that internal shuddering had subsided did I venture to look about.
On a dark blue plaque fixed to the lined façade of the clinic, just above eye level, there was written in large white enameled letters: MARSHAL BIRYUZOV STREET.
So they had renamed Kosmajska Street. But who was this Biryuzov? A Russian Czarist officer had once been commander in chief of the Serbian Army, but that was during the reign of Prince Milan Obrenović, and his name was Chernyaev, not Biryuzov; Mikhail Grigoryevich Chernyaev. Moreover, he hadn’t been a marshal but a general, like George. I could recall only one other general. (Budyonny too, of course, came to mind, although it was inconceivable that a royal street could bear the name of that regicide.) That general who had defended Port Arthur against the Japanese—his name was Kuroglatkin—or was it Kurosatkin?
Standing underneath the plaque which shone slantwise in the sun, I tried to think who that marshal could be. Finally I concluded that most probably he was one of those military brains whose operations George considered “infantile” maneuvers based on still more infantile premises, George being convinced that the front lines on both sides were commanded by complete idiots. There was a certain injustice in the fact that all sorts of Biryuzovs were honored in the names of the most eminent streets in the capital, whereas the man who had criticized them could only achieve a gilt inscription on a cemetery cross. And there were the most serious reasons for upbraiding the Town Council in that, on renaming the street, they hadn’t consulted the citizens of the town, not to mention its home owners. On my way to Niké, I concluded that the restoration of the street’s old name was one of the questions I would take up as soon as I had begun to sort out my business affairs.
As I approached No. 41, which was still hidden by the projecting fronts of the houses this side of it, my excitement grew. My reflections on Kleont and his house avec le caractère de Cléont, were only, of course, an excuse for keeping my thoughts away from the forthcoming meeting with Niké, a meeting which without doubt would resemble the sobering encounter of two lovers who, after years without contact, approach each other apprehensively, wondering whether their former passion—which they wish to make eternal—will have withstood the changes both have suffered. Thus I was approaching Niké with a gnawing pain inside me. It wasn’t my fault I hadn’t arrived at the auction, but then again it was, since I’d made that unfortunate speech.
I was so agitated that I again had to stop to calm my facial muscle, that wound-up monster beneath my right cheek whose hot and cold quiverings announced that it was again about to be seized by a convulsive spasm. When I had managed to massage it back into its den, and my lips were no longer jerking as if tied to my forehead with strings, I took the last step. I crossed over the street toward Kleont’s house—to the spot where I would be able to take in Niké at a single glance.
It is impossible for me to describe at one and the same time what I saw and felt at that moment. It seemed to me that in reality I could see nothing at all, that I was inventing everything, so that I should see my Niké just as I had left her, leaning out over her conservatories and balconies, following me with her eyes filled with the violet glow of the sun. But now I couldn’t see her—probably the effect of my self-inflicted punishment was still at work—for over her leveled foundations as over an abandoned grave overgrown with brambles, weeds, and briars, stretched a rectangular square with three internal walls built of stone anthills like the walls of a casemate, a square with paved paths crossing in the form of an X. Nearby were placed groups of two red and two green freshly painted benches. The houses at the rear of the square were blurred, as if, in the same band of colorless horizon, an unsteady camera had taken several pictures of buildings, one on top of the other.
Niké no longer existed. My enchanting Niké was dead, dead and buried beneath an offensively ugly stele in the shape of a public promenade. Not only she but her closest family had been brutally rooted out—probably according to some inhuman principle of co-participation in misfortune. Everything that was there in her place seemed so unreal that, completely unhinged by this somnambulist vision, I thought—what am I saying, I hoped—that I had lost my way (this isn’t Kosmajska Street, it’s the street of some Biryuzov!), and that as soon as I pulled myself together I’d find the right one, where Niké would be waiting for me. But the awareness that I was leaning on Kleont Negovan’s house, and that my disappointed gaze could turn to Aspasia whenever it wanted, brought me harshly back to the fact that Niké was no more, that if I wished, I could walk around her tomb.
And you, Arsénie, you were so certain that you knew everything about the outside world simply because you found out about your brother’s death? There are other things too which have ceased to exist in the meantime—your Niké, for example—and who knows what else. Of course, they would have stayed alive if you hadn’t seen them dead.
I directed my steps toward the square as if approaching a deathbed, a deathbed without a corpse, a concrete and grassy catafalque from which the coffin had long ago been removed. Where a luxurious fireplace with Moses’ hybrid face had once stood, there were now red and green benches. Dry, dusty grass grew from the vestibule; on the first step of that portal which had caused me so much irritation, there now stood a rusty hydrant; in the middle of the salon where I had imagined the gathered buyers, was a wrought-iron tube with flowers; and over it all rose the empty stories of the burning June air. Nothing was left of Niké. Not even the cadaverous breath of a cemetery. Even the most insignificant carrion leaves a skeleton behind under the sky’s mantle; our own dead give off incomprehensible phosphorous signs from under the earth; ruined buildings resist destruction and withdraw deep underground, keeping their own remembrance in the scarcely discernible shape of their former foundations; shattered stars are scattering particles even now. But of Niké there was no trace—only a cross-shaped pathway stamped on the barren earth like a brand. And the picture of Niké in the Chinese embossed ivory frame on my desk.
Nothing held me here now. I walked on toward Aspasia, but with the feeling that I owed something to Niké’s memory. It would have been heartless to leave without making an attempt to find out under what circumstances she had been destroyed. The most natural thing, of course, would have been to call on Kleont. But that would have required an explanation for which, at the moment of mourning, I was least of all disposed.
As I approached Aspasia I noticed a sign: a clumsily drawn shoe, and next to it white as chalk: SHOEMAKER—SOFRONIJE ŽIVIĆ—COURTYARD: TURN RIGHT. Sofronije Živić, shoemaker? No, there was no one with that name among my tenants. Nor had Golovan told me of a shoemaker in Aspasia. But it was quite clear why he had remained silent. He knew well that I didn’t allow workshops in my houses, still less crude signs hung over their doorways. There could be no further doubt that my lawyer had been lying to me about many details concerning my houses. In this light, his obliging behavior became understandable and his exaggerated conscientiousness took on a different meaning. Standing beneath that chalklike shoe, I remembered another illuminating incident. I had asked that the business records be brought to me for inspection. The weather was bad, the temperature ten degrees below zero. Golovan had come personally, by car in fact, to hand over the books. Feeling guilty about disturbing him, I had asked him why in God’s name he hadn’t sent the books with one of his clerks. He replied that he had prepared them personally in order to provide me with supplementary information. This explanation had seemed reasonable, and it gratified me to see in it that professional pr
ide which had disappeared from commercial affairs. But in actual fact Golovan had feared lest I question his subordinates and so find out everything he had been concealing from me. I decided that a clarification of this puzzling situation would be my first concern on returning to Kosančićev Venac.
As I feared, the shoemaker Sofronije Živić worked on his loathsome shoes in a workshop of unbaked bricks which, parasitelike, clung to Aspasia’s defenseless back. A workshop resembling a disgusting tick which sucked out of the parent house’s body all the strength it possessed. And of course, under such conditions Aspasia’s garden was no longer a picture-book rosary but an abandoned polygon paved with bricks, halfway between a cesspool and a stockyard.
From the shoemaker, in his apron of shiny brown leather—to whom, incidentally, my name meant nothing—I managed to learn very little, except that he had settled there in 1950, that he took in footwear of all European types from boots and sandals to dress shoes and slippers, that the area had been heavily bombed, and that before he moved here, the ruins had been removed and the little park built in its place.
What could I do? I thanked the shoemaker and left. Only when I had gone halfway along Carica Milica Street did I remember that I hadn’t even looked at Aspasia.
My bookkeeping had always been irreproachably accurate; there were no inexplicable gaps or ambiguities. Subsequent alterations, falsifications, and deletions were unthinkable in the affairs of Arsénie Negovan. Every entry was written down punctually and precisely in the appropriate column. More than that, for each individual house I had kept in detail a kind of running record or diary in which, just as a proud father notes down important dates in the margins of the family Bible, I recorded important moments in the life of my houses: all the stages of their development on paper and their burgeoning growth on the building site; their short childhood, that carefree time in which they were not inhabited; their marriages, as I called their transitory associations with their tenants; and their temporary illnesses or misfortunes, followed by old age and death. Even those which for various reasons I disposed of—unwillingly, always with a sense of shame—were still entered in that account book as if they were mine, as if I were still caring for them, which in fact I secretly was: I established a discreet surveillance over them and in an indirect way I influenced their destinies, though to all appearances they were in the hands of others.
Houses Page 12