Houses

by Borislav Pekic

  “You call that walking in the fresh air?”

  “I’ve opened the windows. We’ll see about going out later on.”

  I never actually said that I wouldn’t leave the house until the war was over. I wasn’t in the mood, or it wasn’t the right moment. Sometimes I wasn’t feeling well, since the effects of my injuries were still with me. And lastly, I had at hand my most convincing reason, the only one in which there wasn’t even a suspicion of pretext: I had a lot of work to do. Each day I had to read Golovan’s summaries and various experts’ findings, sort out the rent receipts, approve the signing or termination of leases, documents for which the powers of attorney were insufficient, bring my correspondence up to date, file papers, check the ledgers, put the card index in order, study the photographs which had been coming in for some time, and in general occupy myself with my houses even more actively than when I had had them constantly before my eyes.

  Apart from all this—I note it for my own satisfaction—I now had time to complete my education in housing. I had read a great deal before, and knew more than many practicing architects and most city landlords, but it was never enough, always less than what any self-respecting property owner should know of his profession.

  Here I shall take advantage of a pause in my narrative.

  •

  Article 1. Fully conscious and in possession of all my mental faculties, I hereby express my wishes concerning each section of my personal library in the field of architecture, easily recognizable since all volumes are bound in dark red calf-skin. All these books are to be excepted from the total of my immovable assets at Kosančićev Venac, which I otherwise bequeath to my lawful spouse Katarina Negovan, née Turjaški. The books shall be entrusted as a separate bequest to my nephew Isidor Negovan, son of Jacob Negovan, architect of Krunska Street, No. 19a.

  (The list of books which makes up the legacy bequeathed to my nephew, Isidor J. Negovan, will be found with the other documents attached to my last will and testament in a white sealed envelope at the bottom of the top right-hand drawer of my desk. The key to this drawer is hanging from my belt with my other keys.)

  •

  But again, can I bid them farewell without a single good word for them? Of course I can’t say that those books about architecture made me fall in love with houses. They only explained to me why I love them. From them I was schooled in houses’ physiology, their circulatory system, their epidermic defensive envelope, even their stomachs, their sensitive stomachs, not to mention their life process. In addition to those features common to the majority of houses, I was particularly troubled by these secondary differences, I’ll call them differences of class and race, which despite the same materials that created them, distinguish the Morić Khan in Sarajevo from the Carleton Hotel in Cannes; Mansart’s Maison Lafitte from Eigtved’s twin palaces in Copenhagen; Hood’s Daily News Building in New York from Loos’s House of Commerce in Vienna; Perret’s building on Rue Franklin in Paris from Gaudi’s Casa Mila in Barcelona; or even my Daphina, designed by J. K. Negovan, from Wright’s Falling Water.

  Lastly, also bound in calfskin on my shelves, were the biographies of the great master builders which I had obtained through the kindness of Jacob Negovan, through Mr. Kon the bookseller, or in the course of my journeys abroad. From books, then, I had come to know the mysterious process of a house’s conception, initiated long before its violent birth on the building site.

  So as I have said, I had more than enough work, and an abundance of pretexts: my illness, business affairs, the war, the Occupation. In the final analysis, doesn’t everyone have the right to take a breather, to retire, to collect himself? When some famous person goes into a monastery, walls himself up suddenly in the stone box of a hermit’s cell, we show approval, but when a businessman takes brief refuge under the roof of his own house, he comes up against strident objections. Anyway, I went on repeating, I am, my friends, in excellent shape, you can expect to see me out again very soon. Yes, yes, out and about. When? That, unfortunately, I can’t say. In all probability, I’ll go out when the situation clarifies itself and I manage to find out what’s really going on outside. Incidentally, isn’t everything taking its normal course? I attend to my work, my professional interest in my houses hasn’t diminished. What’s more, it’s been strengthened through the action of an intermediary. (However much confidence I entertained toward Golovan—far better if I hadn’t!—my lawyer served me almost as an adding machine, a writing implement, or a tool which, while functioning irreproachably, had to be oiled regularly, supervised, and corrected.) We entertain as before; Katarina still has her Thursday sessions—true, because of work pressures I drop in on them less often, but we listen to the radio, subscribe to newspapers. In short, contact with the outside world is maintained in all respects.

  To be honest, all that about the radio and the newspapers was not exactly the truth. For some time we did indeed listen to the radio. Apart from my beloved music, especially if it could be visualized in material terms—I transposed Bach’s fugues into the soaring towers of Gothic cathedrals, Mozart’s concertos into transparent crystal-glass pavilions, and Schubert into family salons looking out onto a garden, but was incapable of making anything of Beethoven (I wasn’t fond of Beethoven, who seemed like a storm, always in unpredictable movement; I couldn’t find a form for him in any building)—apart from my beloved music we listened to the various communiqués from the fronts until, I can’t even remember in what year, the air raids on London began. It was not enough for those monsters to attack houses; now they had started to demolish them as well. I responded by refusing to listen, and then I ordered the radio taken out of the house. As for newspapers, here I was less threatened, for I could pick and choose what I read. They too became preoccupied with the war; when I read of how much damage the Allied bombing had caused to Berlin apartment houses, I gave up all my subscriptions and freed myself of the obligation to suffer because of the insanity in which I had no part.

  And so it became the custom not to talk about the war, out of respect for the owner of the house. This deterred George from dropping in, as my brother could think of nothing more useful than battles. Since not even politics, the cause of this destruction, were mentioned, other family friends stayed away who held forth on nothing else.

  At first, because of their carelessness, certain events broke through the deadening layer of cork with which I’d lined my study at Kosančićev Venac. Thus I was made aware of food rationing. I learned also about the curfew, though it had little bearing on us except that Katarina had to arrange her Thursday soirée for the early hours of the afternoon. I knew of course that the Croats had proclaimed some sort of independence and liquidated their Serbs, Ličani, and Bosnian Moslems—always unreliable builders, by the way—whose bodies, it was said, were floating down the Sava as far as the piers of the railway bridge. I couldn’t make out a single one with my strongest binoculars, to confirm whether such refugees’ tales were exaggerated. Much was made also of a certain Mihailović (no relation to the gentleman from the basement flat), an infantry officer of the General Staff, who at the head of volunteer peasants was fighting against the Communist rabble which had committed that infamous outrage against me at the junction of Kosmajska and Pop-Lukina Street. By all accounts the Russians had begun to reconquer Russia. And when, on my own misplaced initiative, I learned from Major Helgar that on January 25, 1943, they had entered Voronezh, the vision of merchants thrown on their knees in the mud—the vision which has haunted my footsteps for the last fifty years—was sufficient to confine me to my bed, from where I categorically forbade them to tell me anything more about the war.

  This continued right up to the autumn of 1944—with the exception of the comforting news that the Russian onslaught on the Danube had finally been stopped, and the further news that by rapid advances through Italy and Greece the English and Americans were tightening a double pincer around the Balkans. In 1944, with the end drawing near, I couldn’t hold it against Kat
arina when she informed me that Allied and Yugoslav troops were at the approaches to Belgrade (fortunately nothing more was said of the Bolsheviks); that, judging by the gunfire, their entry into the town could be expected any day, as I observed for myself with my binoculars trained on the street fighting down by the King Alexander Bridge.

  It had been said that I had had more good fortune with the Occupation authorities and their civil representatives than other property owners due to my reputation, the name Negovan, and my maintaining relations with them only through my attorney Golovan, who (I must give him his due for that period) had been a forceful representative and faithful interpreter of my owner’s rights. My rigorous retirement, I believe, had saved me from those unpleasantnesses to which even our nearest neighbors on Kosančićev Venac were exposed. Even so, I’m in no way ashamed to declare how elated I was to see the backs of the Germans—and the shuddering rears of their tanks like a praying mantis—crawling over the bridge to the west. My good Katarina was crying—from happiness, of course—and that was the first and last time I ever saw her cry. She was trying hard to get me away from the window, from which, quite forgetting myself, I was loudly encouraging our valiant liberators. Even more, I had completely ignored the danger to which, in the street fighting, they were quite involuntarily subjecting my houses, those same defenseless buildings for which I had so ardently prayed to God during the air raids. And so, close to the window, I wouldn’t give in to Katarina, until I realized that such childish behavior didn’t accord with my dignity, never mind my years, and what’s more could be fatal, because the west window dominated the river, the bridge, and the Sava quays, and could be taken for a command post.

  I should make it clear at once that I didn’t follow my father Cyrill or my brother George in their monarchist convictions, even though, of all art forms, architecture had been the most favored by the monarchy. But that day, October 20, whose dawn on the greenish, shaken walls I greeted with all my heart, was not an ordinary one; for me it signified the explosive return to their God-given place of things violently overturned; the restoration of the lawful regime; the re-establishment of security.

  With such encouraging prospects in view, I could already begin to think of going out of the house. Not at once, of course. Things had to be given time to settle down. My unhappy experience after the first war prompted me toward caution: for quite a few years after the Armistice conditions had been highly irregular. I remember the efforts I had had to make to obtain even the simplest building material, to achieve priority in litigation over building lots in the center of town, and to get bank credits. But in the Twenties I had been young and in a hurry, whereas now I had time to wait and see how the new turnabout would work. After the Unification I hadn’t possessed a single house except the two I had inherited, and they were shared with my brothers George and Emilian (his religious name); after the Liberation I had forty-nine, not counting building plots already purchased, land under option, and sites where work in various stages had been stopped to await better times. Clearly I had no cause to be rash or overbold in going out into town again.

  Katarina agreed to this new postponement, although it continued to place on her shoulders the responsibility which we had originally agreed would be only temporary. But in fact, on her initiative, I now began to think of prolonging the status quo for an indefinite period, especially when she picturesquely described to me the pitiful state of the town: “You, Arsénie,” she said, “you simply couldn’t bear all those ruined buildings!” Yet eventually I would have gone into town if Katarina hadn’t behaved quite as uncompromisingly as on the occasion of my first decision not to go out. She now deterred me from it with the same Turjaški stubbornness she had once used to urge me to go out, and I was thankful that she had at last understood my decision to retire. The change in Katarina’s attitude was probably influenced by the unexpected visit of Dr. Simeonović, according to whom the condition of my heart had sharply deteriorated, so that any kind of movement was precluded. And so, when I asked for newspapers, I was told that the war was still going on, and when Germany capitulated, that the newspapers were still filled with war news, so that it seemed it had never ended. “You can’t find a single page,” said Katarina, “on which there isn’t a photograph of some ruin.”

  Then came the crisis which I have already described: the chance discovery that my Simonida was to be torn down; doubts about Golovan, Katarina, and their professional reports; the fear that something was happening to my other houses as well.

  That very morning, June 3, convinced that it was still not too late, I had impatiently waited for Katarina and Mlle. Foucault to leave.

  I was actually going out!

  With a feeling of relief and adventurous pride I got up from the bench and, as much as my years would allow, hurried off toward Simonida, where I hoped the professional rebirth of Arsénie Negovan, property owner, would begin.

  How best to approach the house in these unusual circumstances?

  It was important to re-establish our onetime personal relationship, maintained during my hermitlike seclusion by means of photographs and Golovan’s suspect submissions. I cannot but admit that everything I had undertaken since going out of the house was more like the pilgrimage of a dispirited old man, searching for the past in unfamiliar places where he had erected its landmarks as memorials, than the march of the architect forging his future plans. Simonida was my last chance to end this futile wandering, to spend the rest of the day usefully for both myself and my possessions.

  My pride in my house was, alas, rudely shaken when, en route, I found myself quite by chance in front of the most insignificant of them: the only house which, thanks to the builder’s pigheadedness and my unforgivable negligence (I had been away on a journey) enjoyed that life in an evil way, an adequate, but truly evil way and the only one that I shall speak of without respect or love. I would very gladly leave her out, but everything that is written down here on receipts and rent accounts is nevertheless my legal testament, and in such a loan from death there is no point in lying.

  This “house”—which I must summon up all my courage to call mine—did not have a name. Even her model, built as a result of Katarina’s forgetfulness or carelessness of my own, was chopped up with an ax and burned the very day its illegitimate creator brought it from the office. In short, she was expelled as a monstrosity from the tribe of my houses, and the fact that she hadn’t been sold was due partly to the war, partly to the fall in market prices, and partly to Golovan’s negligence. Finally, to round it all off, this house was truly ugly with her blind, prisonlike walls, clumsily bared, with bilious yellow ceramic moldings on the parapets, and bands of flowery white natural cement in horizontal spurts, with windows like gun emplacements, with a gate which called to mind the sooty doors of a baker’s oven. Despite this, I shall proceed with it in the following manner:

  •

  Article 2. It is my unalterable wish that my house (three stories and a high basement) at Gračanička Street, No. 18, should be given for his lifetime’s enjoyment to Mr. Jovan Martinović, formerly a wholesale grain dealer of Topličin Venac, No. 11, with the proviso that after his death the house should revert to the permanent ownership of my universal heir, designated in these documents; but under no circumstances should any member of Mr. Martinović’s family (most particularly his widow) have any right to the house by any word or intention of this testament.

  •

  The next building which lay in my path was the Renaissance palace belonging to the National Bank, which for numerous reasons I should have given a wide berth. Primarily because of its purpose: I had no time to idle away on structures not meant for accommodation. Nevertheless, I stopped in front of it long enough to show respect to the memory of its builder, the deceased architect Constantine Jovanović. Not at all, of course, because of this ponderous uninspired, truly masculine building, but because of our personal relations. When in 1882 the Tajsić fields had been divided up into building lots, Con
stantine, on the instructions of the colonial importer K.S., drew up plans for a family house at Vračar; a rare feminine house among his forceful and muscular works, which I later bought and christened Irina, having registered her on Saint Irina’s Day. He also began the plans for Athenaida in Senjak, but died before he could finish her.

  Since I have mentioned the first of my architects, it would clearly be unjust to remain silent about the others. I was very close to some of them: we planned and built houses which I still own today. Others designed houses which I bought and quickly resold—houses that merely passed through my hands, whose efficient fingers were ever ready to grasp anything successful, unusual, elegant, and comfortable, but let slip anything which fell below my passion for perfection. In almost every case, however, the architects’ commercial interests—so incompatible with my own concerns—became a source of constant misunderstanding between us. For what builder can understand why his house is sold and not someone else’s, or why, instead of his house, a competitor’s is bought? Consequently, I can say that my friendship with my architects usually lasted just as long as my ownership over their respective houses. But eventually, exasperated by their hysterical irritability, I was forced to rely almost entirely on my uncle Constantine (despite his advanced years) and his son, the architectural engineer Jacob Negovan (even though Jacob’s capabilities were limited) to carry out the work. This is not to say that Jacob was a nonentity, for that would be doing him an injustice, which I would like to avoid because of Isidor. But even if he had been as clever as his son, he could scarcely have kept up with all those brilliant architects whom I had had to reject because of their unsufferable temperaments. In any case I was building less by then, as most of Europe was at war; my fear for my noble houses, at the thought of what had happened to Rotterdam and Warsaw, gradually led me to my spiritual and professional paralysis.