Before crossing over to Simonida, I opened the notebook and immediately below the note about Niké (as if the narrow white space beneath didn’t signify an absence of twenty-seven years), I wrote clearly: June 3, 1968, Simonida.
“That’s it,” I said. “Now we can get down to work.”
To get to the house, we had to go around the crane, which had dug itself in like a wooden catapult in the middle of Simonida’s weed-infested garden. It was rusted, broken in pieces, and full of dust, but from its greedy, protruding iron head hung a hook with a weight. The iron ball hung there peaceably, as if gathering strength to launch itself upon my last-born’s tender walls. I went up to the machine and noticed with pleasure that it was itself quite damaged by the blows it had inflicted on houses. Still, the foul and ugly machine was awaiting its moment, not knowing that it would never come. For I had already thought of a plan by which Simonida could defend herself from demolition.
“Maestro Toma, that garage must be removed and the barrier fence restored as soon as possible.”
“Remove garage,” said the concierge as he wrote. “Restore barrier fence.”
“Fill in the façade, wash it, and spray it with paint.”
“Wash, fill, and spray façade.”
“I’ll decide on the color later, but I think it’s going to be pearl.”
“And what about the pointing, esteemed Mr. Arsen?”
“Scrape out the pointing neatly, scrape the grills on the cellar windows, the courtyard wall, and the balcony with a wire brush. Coat with red lead and paint in black.”
While I fingered the oak front door, tapping like a doctor on the peeling outer layer of its surfaces, I heard Maestro Toma explaining my presence to the neighbors.
“That méltóságos úr Arsen, he will not allow his house to be pulled down.”
“Maestro Toma, note down: restain the front door and varnish it. What state are the other doors in?”
But we were already inside Simonida. From the athletic hallway one might think that the bulk of the house lies to the left. But no, there she quickly ends in a side wall; only on the right can one move forward into attractive perspectives. If you open one of those doors, you find yourself in a totally unexpected gallery lined with elegant carved woodwork reminiscent of the icons of a Mount Athos altar screen. Where you think you’ll find a palatial room, you’ll encounter a warm, dark chamber. Your view will break out into open space just where you expected a wall. The walls are not subordinated to any known geometrical system; the ceilings change heights with disturbing agility. For this unusual house there are no valid laws, no rules. At first you feel deceived, humiliated, perhaps angry. Then, just as you’re on the verge of losing patience, you realize that you cannot rest without penetrating her secret, and so you go around her again, taking the same route. But now the rooms are entirely different. You know no more of her than before, but whatever the rent, you accept her. That was what my Simonida was like: unexpected, mysterious, inconstant, magical—a conjuror’s box whose gifts never end.
“The key is her unexpectedness,” I said, “but that key is lost.”
“Pair of new keys,” wrote the concierge.
“Do you know why?”
“Nem tudom, esteemed Mr. Arsen.”
“Because right up to the quattrocento, architects thought themselves masters of their buildings. And owners of houses, too, of course. And why, Mr. Tomaž, why did they believe that?”
“Nem tudom, esteemed Mr. Arsen.”
“Because for centuries—ever since the dolmens and menhirs—it was thought that buildings were ordinary manufactured articles, inheriting the inanimate nature of their materials. It was thought that a stone in a wall was as dead as a stone in a field, that a beam differed from its oak ancestor only in the form it was shaped by the carpenter. What a mistake, what an unforgivable error!”
The time had come for me to leave Simonida. Although there was no threat that my sortie would be discovered—Katarina had not planned to return from town until the afternoon—it was essential for me to rest and gather my strength for the delicate conversation which I intended to have with her. Before going, I wanted to draw Šomodjija’s attention to several additional repairs. In that connection, I experienced so pleasant a surprise that here I must break off my confession for a moment.
•
Article 7. As a special legacy, to Mr. Tomaž Šomodjija, the caretaker of my house on Paris Street, I leave for his lasting ownership the basement of my three-story house on Rigas de Feras (No. 24), and a cash sum totaling the twenty-three years of caretaker’s wages of which, through no fault of mine, he was deprived.
•
Before I had made a single one of my additional observations, Maestro Tomaž said:
“If the esteemed Mr. Arsen will allow, I will show him a list of repairs.”
From his account book he took out a long list which he began to read from; it left out neither the replacement of the broken guttering and the worn stair treads (seven in number) nor anything else. In view of all that, how could I have not written in a legacy for him?
After I had promised to return the next day, I gave Maestro Toma one last instruction of which I wish to leave no record. I’ll only say that it concerned the crane in Simonida’s garden.
“Becsulet szavamra?” I asked.
“Becsulet szavamra!” promised Simonida’s caretaker.
As I walked away to the streetcar stop, I heard Maestro Toma’s excited voice behind me: “That méltóságos úr Arsen, he will not let his house be pulled down!”
I got on a Number Two, certain that when I returned the next day, the crane wouldn’t be lying in wait for me in Simonida’s courtyard.
•
I got on the streetcar—which I calculated would carry me as far as the underpass named after the Blessed Late King Alexander. There, I would be but a few steps from home. I never dreamed that this restful ride wouldn’t bring my outing to an end, and that in its unplanned but voluntary prolongation the most unusual events still awaited me. Compared with these events, everything that had taken place that morning was only a gradual introduction, a restrained prelude before the furious scherzo that was to threaten both me and my houses. But everything in its turn.
And so the Number Two moved off along Paris Street and came out on the bend jutting out toward the delta, from where the view was so familiar that I could count the buildings from memory and describe in detail every human trace within the wide sweep of my binoculars.
As a result, suddenly I felt at home again, as if I’d returned from some foreign city. This nostalgic feeling of the returned wanderer would doubtless only have increased with the approach to Kosančićev Venac, had not the New Township made its appearance out of the sunlit haze in the west. Of course it was as familiar to me as all the rest, but for the first time my view of it was linked to the possibility, if I was so disposed, of actually going around it, touching it, smelling it, of understanding it from a spiritual angle. And so, while the streetcar accelerated downhill along Karageorge Street toward the King Alexander Bridge, it was clear to me that my pilgrimage hadn’t yet come to an end, that I would rapidly find myself en route to the New Township, and that nothing I could do now would stop it. For my motivation was no longer fear of growing old, which I could overcome by gathering my strength, but fear of spiritual death, of becoming outmoded, of succumbing to what in architecture is known as obsolescence.
I got off the streetcar, and, breathing rapidly, walked over the bridge. This was most unusual, for I had never held any esteem for the Township, and certainly no liking. It could more truthfully be said that from the very moment when the foundations had been laid, I had been in dispute with the invisible designers of those termitelike buildings. Now I was hurrying to meet them, paying scarcely any attention to the white carcasses of reinforced concrete which, like some dissected giant caterpillar, were scattered along the main road; or to the auto repair shops behind their wire fences; or to th
e abandoned building sites with heaps of ballast, pebbles, and sand; or to the billboards, traffic, passers-by. Having relinquished my neutral position at the window, I had shaken off old prejudices and was approaching the new constructions like a modern and fully operative property owner.
Five hundred apartments, I thought, covering a site of 25,600 meters, with four sides 160 meters in length as against 500 family houses with foundations and Lilliputian gardens, which as a result of the insatiable horizontal spread would take up dead ground of 202,500 precious square meters, with four frontages of 450 meters each. In the former case the electrical conduits and the water and gas mains would come to barely five kilometers; in the second, to at least fifty-six. The apartments would need four structural units: a floor and three walls; each family house would require six, and those six the most complex ones. The floor and walls had to be built into expensive foundations and cellars, while the roof structures would be more expensive still. Five hundred roofs! Five hundred foundations! But the apartments had common foundations and a common roof. What a financial saving!
Finally I would have to think most seriously—and without old-fashioned prejudices—about those hanging façades. And about prefabricated ceilings, too. Expensive, unreliable, time-consuming tradesmen’s crafts would undoubtedly be replaced by industrial work in the factories. For cost and speed of erection, there could be no competition for that kind of construction. But would those factory-built houses devalue the space they dominated, depersonalize it, take away its soul? No, because my houses wouldn’t look like upturned car bodies or armored tanks. Though machine-made, their faces would still be varied, personal, unexpected. And the benefits of garden cities would be preserved: every apartment would have its hanging garden, its compact flower plot à la Semiramis. But of course no one would be able to peer into it; my buildings would defend their tenants’ privacy. And the insulation would be such that they wouldn’t be subjected to noise of others. Free of soot, smoke, and dust, the air which my tenants breathed would not originate in other people’s lungs; the view they rented could not be stolen from them; and even the sun would be brought nearer to them, and while it warmed them it would belong to them alone. With the keys of their home, my tenants would also receive the keys to their own lives, which they had almost forgotten about—keys whose duplicates would belong only to me.
Such gigantic dwellings, particularly if concentrated in the Arsénie Negovan Housing Development, would be placed under complete owner control. Arsénieville would be safe, stable, unchanging, and when in time the buildings were combined into a single mass, into a symmetrical Chauvin-Mazet-like block, they would be as eternal as the tombs of the Pharaohs! Such constructions would no longer have to adapt to anything; everything would have to adapt to them. Hermetically sealed, impenetrable, indestructible, they would thwart forever all hysterical attempts to reconstruct our cities or our lives. There would be no place for subversive dreams of dynamic cities, behind which lurk Bolshevik yearnings for a change of regime.
•
I was just concluding my revolutionary concept when on all sides I noticed an unusual excited movement. I would have noticed it earlier had I not been so preoccupied with my calculations. The people were all hurrying toward the railroad embankment. And the roadway was jammed full of red fire engines and military trucks with rubberized green canvas tops. I had no particular urge to join that animated movement, and certainly not to let it carry me along as a current carries a splinter of wood. I stopped an agitated passer-by who seemed, despite the camera slung around his neck, a reasonable-looking man, and asked him: “Excuse me, sir, can you tell me what’s happening on the other side of the embankment?”
The man looked at me pleasantly, but without understanding. “Je m’excuse. Je regrette bien. Je ne parle pas serbe.”
“Oh, excusez-moi, je voulais seulement demander ce qui se passe la-bàs derrière la digue.”
“Une révolte, monsieur,” the man said enthusiastically. “Une révolte!”
“Quelle révolte?”
“Une révolte magnifique!”
Was it really happening again? At first I couldn’t believe it. Being a foreigner, the man could easily have misinterpreted the disturbance. It must be a huge fire menacing the town, and now the soldiers and firemen were on their way to control it.
But I too was hurrying toward the embankment. Fortunately, none of my houses lay on the Zemun side. Since I wasn’t personally threatened by the fire, and furthermore was incapable of looking on helplessly while houses were being destroyed, I would have returned home if I hadn’t known how unpredictable the whims of fire are. I considered it opportune—and all the more so since I was once again committed to my business affairs—to take a closer look, and to undertake my own defensive measures should the blaze be spreading toward my houses.
“Is the fire a big one, young man?”
“What fire? It’s a riot, old man, a riot!”
I was astounded. “Are you saying things are out of hand down there?”
“What’s the matter with you? They’re marching on Belgrade!”
Still hoping to clear up the misunderstanding, I addressed another onlooker who was limping toward the embankment.
“In heaven’s name, sir, somebody just told me that a mob is trying to force its way into town. Is it true?”
“It’s true,” he said without stopping. “But they won’t make it, the bastards!”
I fell in beside him. “No one could be happier than I about that. But how do you know they won’t?”
“I used to be in the army.”
“My late brother was in the army, too. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? General George Negovan? I’m Arsénie K. Negovan and my business is houses.”
“I was a colonel. I was in command of a battery.”
I knew nothing about military units, but despite his unduly direct speech and behavior, which I put down to barrack-room upbringing, the colonel inspired me with confidence. I kept as close to him as I could, all the more so since he shared my disgust at what was happening on the Zemun side of the embankment.
The citizens from behind were pushing me toward the underpass, on whose arch was written: BOAC LINKS ALMOST ALL THE COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD. As I began to be drawn up the slope, I made up my mind to see with my own eyes what heights of incompetence the royal government had attained in their defense of owners’ interests—an incompetence which I had described in my talk about banks and bankocracy. For a property owner on the threshold of a large-scale building operation such as I had conceived during the journey to the New Township, it was of the greatest importance not to have to worry about the future of financial investments.
Even so, it’s difficult to believe that this was the real reason for my ill-considered approach. The direction I took must have been influenced by a secret hope that there along the railway embankment I would obtain satisfaction for the mob’s malicious attack on me on March 27, 1941, that here at last I would be revenged.
The railroad tracks crossed a sandy stretch and descended toward a dusty field covered with thistles, on which lay rolls of rusty metal fencing, concrete pipes, torn sacks of cement, and broken bricks, as if on some abandoned building site. Along the tracks and in the curve of the underpass the army, in steel helmets and standing three deep, had formed a cordon to block off the approach to the town.
“That’s not the way to do it,” said the colonel. “They ought to block the road with trucks, set up road blocks.”
I took my binoculars out of their canvas case and trained them on Zemun. At first I could see nothing. Adjusted to a different range, the lens was blurred and opaque. As I turned the regulating knob, from out of the thick winter fog in front of me they swam into view; at their head was a standard-bearer waving a red flag, and it seemed as if I was drawing them toward me, luring them forward out of that fog, and not at all as if they were moving forward of their own murderous volition, gathering speed from way back in ’41 when they came d
own Pop-Lukina Street. With a sharp twist of the knob, I sent them hurrying back into anonymity. The strength of my index finger and thumb, between which I held the tiny wheel that adjusted the lens, was for an instant greater than all the soldiers waiting there beneath the embankment.
Nothing was moving out there where I’d seen them a little earlier. Then they reappeared with the flag-bearer at their head, swarming forward of their own accord, although I was careful not to move the knob of the binoculars again. Clearly I hadn’t removed them far enough—only a few steps back into the fog, out of which they now surged toward me again. I spun the wheel sharply: they disappeared. But this time a shorter period elapsed before, unaided by me, the red flag appeared out of the fog into which I had banished it. I knew that the intervals would get shorter and shorter, that my binoculars wouldn’t halt them, so I stopped adjusting them. I stood on the embankment as if in a theater gallery, and waited.
Soon they appeared. They dispersed the powerless mist of the lens and came on. There were more and more of them. It was as if the diseased, cataractlike fog from which they kept soundlessly appearing would never stop producing them. They were carrying their red flags, of course, and Yugoslav flags, but with the Jewish-Bolshevik red star, as if they had already seized power and were giving it a visible symbol. They were also carrying some sort of pictures, and placards which I couldn’t make out because they were too far away. And I had no need to, for I knew in advance what was written on them. They always demanded the same thing. They wanted my houses. They had wanted them in March 1941 and They wanted them now in June of 1968!
Houses Page 18