By good fortune at least the most eminent of these buildings—by virtue of their incomparable beauty and because, by a coincidence in which their owner (I swear) played no part, they have served as setting for some of the most important if shameful events of our national history (I will mention only the officer’s plot against King Alexander Obrenović, which was hatched in Eudoxia before she belonged to me)—the most eminent of these buildings, I say, must come under the protection of the State. Nota bene, just before the war I presented a memorandum to this end to the appropriate ministries; but with a revolt beneath my windows, it would be unreasonable to hope that the State will take a sincere interest in houses, except to confiscate and destroy them. Originally I had planned, as is our custom, to leave my houses to Katarina. But as I’ve already pointed out, she has no affection for them; though as my heir she is in everything else a trustworthy person, she offered no guarantee of treating them well. And when I so recently discovered that she had conspired—it’s true, from the noblest of motives—with my lawyer Golovan in his miserable negligence, my desire to observe convention (which would surely have cost the life of my beloved possessions) lapsed entirely.
Therefore I have decided to leave my fortune to my nephew, Isidor Negovan, since in my opinion he is the only one of my blood relations who understands my houses, both as an architect and as a person, and who in the status of owner, may perfect that healthy relationship and at the same time—why not?—make it identical with my own.
Isidor J. Negovan is my nephew in the second branch and the fifth degree.
It is not the custom for a testator to justify his decisions, except of course if they go against the natural order of succession or deny someone their so-called rightful share. I nevertheless feel the need, for my own satisfaction, once again to go over the reasons which led to my choice.
First, Isidor loved and understood houses. More than that, Isidor was a builder, one of the most skilled in the business, and therefore the kind of person who, next to their owners, was closest to houses. Isidor was the only person with whom I could talk freely and openly about them. Isidor showed respect for my way of life, visited me regularly, and supplied me with books and especially information of vital importance for my work. Finally, he was alone: his father had left the country in 1944, driven out by the accusation of having built a building—a House of German Culture, or something—which was considered an act of national treachery; recently his sister had also left; and his mother was in an asylum with little hope of recovery. During the last few months Isidor had fallen into deep creative apathy, from which he would be roused only by busying himself with real buildings, instead of using his God-given talents on cemeteries, euphemistically called memorial architecture. Involvement in the possession of real, living houses could well encourage him to build them himself, and in this way he would gradually come back to his earlier grandiose plan to design the perfect city.
It was beyond all doubt that he was undergoing a crisis. It was a crisis that had come over him soon after he had accepted the government commission to build a monument on Banjica to perpetuate the National Triumph. At first he was full of enthusiasm, carried away by the same passion which defines my own relationship with my houses. But even then there was something unhealthy in his interpretation of the projected task. The sketches he brought to show me grew progressively more emaciated, and each time more mutually contradictory, so that the purpose of the building had been changed. Meanwhile Isidor became more and more depressed and ill-tempered. I interpreted his despair as the result of his exhausting struggle with a material which remained unresponsive. How wrong I was! I should have known that for a passionate enthusiast of his temperament, such resistance could only serve as stimulation, and that in his best works—I’ve seen them only in photographs—Isidor succeeded in breaking down the material’s resistance, and in forcing on it a form which at first seemed impossible. In short, I should have known that he was in the middle of something far deeper and more serious—that it involved a much greater alienation from his own art, or perhaps the greatest alienation of all: from life.
Our last conversation took place in my study last October. He had come to show me photographs of his monument before the official opening. Though I haven’t seen him since, several days after that I received a letter from him, apparently written right after our meeting:
Dear Uncle Arsénie,
I don’t think you’ll be surprised at my departure. Our last conversation at Kosančićev Venac will explain my action. Don’t take it badly that I didn’t come see you before leaving. I felt that we said good-by during our talk. Please pay my respects to Aunt Katarina. Very affectionately,
Isidor
Isidor had sat in the chair in which I am now writing this will. I was in my Chippendale armchair, at my lookout post by the half-open window. I felt cold even though Katarina had put a blanket around my knees. It was drizzling, and the rain and dampness covered the double glass wall through which, with the help of my binoculars, I was watching an empty building site in the New Township.
Isidor had spread the photographs of his monument across his brief case and was looking at them closely. From there, in the gray, cold, watery light, the pictures looked like celluloid X-ray plates, dark patches crisscrossed with a network of transparent canals. He had already shown me the first twelve. There were eight more.
I must say at once that the monument was truly magnificent. But—and I hope Isidor will forgive my honesty—there was scarcely anything human about it. Nor again was there anything divine. It was quite beyond my understanding—magnificent and incomprehensible. Possibly he was expressing some ancient forms.
I asked Isidor if he had had any news of his father recently.
“None.”
“And your mother, how is she?”
“The same as ever.”
“Not getting any better?”
“No.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“Keep waiting.”
“Is there any hope?”
“A little.”
“Do you visit her?”
“Every day.”
“Does she recognize you?”
“Sometimes she seems to, but often she doesn’t. I also get the impression that she thinks it would harm me if she did.”
“Does she speak at all?”
“A few words.”
“What do you do with her?”
“I sit and wait for her to say something.”
He gathered the photographs together again and laid them out on the table as if dealing a game of patience, a game he was never going to finish. “I sit and wait for her to speak. And when at last she says something, I don’t understand her.”
“What does she say?”
“Hours pass and then she says, ‘table,’ ‘glass,’ ‘letter,’ ‘tree.’ As if she came from another world and is trying to learn our language.”
“Angelina used to be a great lady, Isidor.”
He stared at the photographs as if unable to recognize them. Again he gathered them together in a pile and laid them out in a new pattern.
“When did you say the opening is?”
“October twenty-sixth.”
“I’m sure there’ll be a lot of people. Katarina says they’re going to hold a military parade, and afterward fireworks and a national celebration. I’d like to be there, but I can’t stand crowds. Will His Majesty be coming?”
“Probably.”
“You’ve become famous, Isidor. I want you to know how happy that makes me, and how proud I am of you. The Negovans are a mighty breed, eh?”
“Indeed they are.” Then he asked, “Do you remember that Le Corbusier church, Uncle?”
“Which one? The one in Brittany?”
“Yes, the one in Brittany.”
How could I not remember it? It wasn’t distinguished by excessive piety. It looked like a home for the mentally ill.
“Why is it,” he asked, “that
his church looks completely different from each side? Other buildings have different aspects, but their façades proceed one from another; when we look at them from one point, we can easily predict what they’ll look like from another. Why is it that when you stand in front of the north face of the Le Corbusier church, you can’t describe the south side, or any side?”
“I told you the building is deranged. It’s like someone mentally ill whose actions you can’t foresee.”
“Her four faces represent four different artistic entities, don’t they? Each façade is planometric in nature, and not a part of the structure.”
“That church does not exist.”
“The church exists, but the building doesn’t. Only its appearance exists. You can go inside a hollow beech tree, but you don’t call it a building. Something unreal can’t produce something real. Those walls don’t exist as architectural elements, and no linking of them can give form to that internal space with which we identify architecture.”
“So?”
“Because that space isn’t there—in the architectural sense, of course, since in reality it does exist—there is no architecture either.”
“In the case of that church?”
“In all cases. Architecture does not exist.”
“Merde! That means my houses aren’t there either?”
“That’s right.”
“But they do exist! I love them! And I’ve always considered my houses first-class architectural works.”
“You are wrong. We are both wrong. Everything on the basis of which we call architecture artistic belongs to other more authentic arts.”
“All right, in the final analysis it doesn’t matter to me whether or not my houses are artistic works. They’re buildings. And what buildings! Architectural pearls!”
“But Uncle, buildings aren’t architecture. If what can be seen is art, then it isn’t architecture. And if what can’t be seen—emptiness, a system of hollow spaces and nothing more—if that again isn’t architecture, then architecture doesn’t exist, at least it doesn’t exist yet!”
Suddenly I was struck—horrified—by the thought that Isidor was passionately asserting that his work has been for nothing, or at best a mere illusion. I asked him frankly what he thought his work to date had encompassed. He answered dryly:
“Myself.”
“Yourself?”
“Yes, myself. I agreed to work on the monuments in the hope that I’d achieve true architecture. It was an experiment in the direction of art. But at the building site I at last grasped why I hadn’t succeeded yet and never would: I’d been working on myself! I hadn’t been looking for architecture, but for myself. I hadn’t built anything, I’d demolished myself. Here, look!”
He moved his armchair closer to mine and placed a photograph of his monument in such a position that the window softly and slantingly illuminated its surface; then he presented proofs taken from his own work to justify his shatteringly disappointing revelation. I have neither the strength nor the will power to repeat them here, all the more so since his “proofs” only in a roundabout way correspond with my recollections. As the photographs of the monument silently succeeded one another on the carpet, Isidor’s argument followed them right up to sunset, interrupted only twice: by Katarina’s return, and by the coffee she brought us.
After he had exhausted them all, he began to gather up the pictures from the desk and the floor. I asked him to leave copies for me, and he said that he would; they were of no further interest to him.
“Well, time to go.”
“What are you going to do?”
He stood in the doorway, his shoulder against the jamb, tall and dark like an elegant tree which had been uprooted. He smiled.
“The same as my father! I’m going away.”
And he left. In front of me are the photographs of the monument, alongside the enlargements of my houses. I can sense a certain kinship between them, but I don’t know yet where it lurks. I hadn’t thought of it earlier, but now I’ll take some account of it. I must do my very best for my houses and also take care of Isidor, in the reasoned hope that both will profit: the houses will acquire a most reliable defender, while Isidor will find in them his life’s causa finalis. With this in mind:
•
Article 10. I incontestably determine that after my death Mr. Isidor J. Negovan, an architectural engineer of Krunska Street, shall be given the lasting ownership of all houses belonging to me except for those disposed of in individual legacies, and except for the house in Kosančićev Venac, which I bequeath to my wife as set forth later. In addition to my library the bequest includes everything in any way associated with the houses: records, photographs, dossiers, account books, correspondence, and models.
•
Article 11. The testator of course hopes that what now seems certain to him will not come to pass, and that no hindrance will impede this testament, or any conditions attached to it. But in causa, if in fact this testament cannot be carried out in any way, then I ask Mr. Isidor Negovan to use all the means in his power to keep in his possession the photographs, models, and documents of my houses, and if he be allowed the opportunity, to care for those houses as if they were his own kin. And further, if things do in fact turn out badly, I leave to him the charge of remembering in his blackest hour that once before, under the name of Nago, the Negovans lost all their possessions and were scattered to the four corners of the earth; that they started once again from nothing and by their stubbornness and ability again attained the uppermost heights of commercial, social, and political life; that although more than two hundred years have elapsed from that first downward plunge of our breed, and although it has twice more to date been repeated, we are now once again in a position from which many people have tried to dislodge us.
After all this, and despite the fatherly sentiments that I feel toward my nephew, I cannot shake off the conviction that this last instruction would have much greater sense if I could leave it to the conscience of my own son. But I don’t have a son. I did once, but that will be the only episode of this story which, long buried, I will not disturb.
And so, instead of speaking of my son, I shall offer my adopted son the last explanation I owe him, concerning Fedor’s insinuations that I was the cause of his uncle Constantine’s accident. But first I shall relate the spectacle which Constantine’s funeral degenerated into.
Coming to the end of his oration, the Vice-President of the Builders Association, Mr. Arsenijević, gave up his place on the rostrum as planned. The very fact that Constantine’s family had no objections to me, the employer of the deceased, showing my respect for him, is evidence enough of the groundlessness of Fedor’s incriminations. But more of this later.
I don’t believe that Mr. Arsenijević provoked the misunderstanding on purpose; probably he was carried away by his subject. Even so, in conjunction with Fedor’s incessant mutterings and interruptions, Arsenijević’s lapse initiated the scandalous scene beside the open grave. Enumerating Constantine’s virtues as a builder, Arsenijević, himself a builder, ventured to say that the artistic abilities of the greatly mourned deceased would have attained still greater expression, had he not been frustrated and fettered by the miserly small-mindedness of the property owner for whom he had built his houses.
Such an injustice I could not overlook. It was well known that during the two building seasons prior to his death, Constantine had worked almost exclusively for me. Proceeding in my turn to the rostrum, I declared first that I couldn’t compete with the esteemed previous speaker in honoring the deceased, since my posthumous respect as his business partner was of a different, less conventional nature. That respect, I said, by force of unpleasant circumstances for which I was not in the least responsible, had to be supplemented by an explanation which, superficially, was perhaps not very flattering to the deceased, but which was nonetheless necessary to preserve his illustrious memory. That explanation, I said, must refer to another vocation without which the bui
lder’s reputation could not have been merited: the vocation of property owner. For if this vocation is unworthy—and a moment earlier I had heard something to this effect—how could the vocation of builder be worthy, a vocation that only serves it and is subordinate to it? To defend the vocation of property owner was in effect to defend the building trade, and therefore our own dear deceased and departed, from accusations that they served usury, cupidity, and the selfish interests of an antisocial coterie.
Complete silence reigned over the mound; only the raindrops sprinkled like glass on the silk bellies of the umbrellas. Looking back, I recognize in it the silence of amazement, but at the time I took it for attention to my words, which gave me still greater encouragement.
“Ladies and gentlemen, is there a single person among you who thinks that I’ve built my houses haphazardly, or that in doing so I’ve frustrated and fettered the builder’s capabilities? Always I’ve known what and for whom I was building! I carried out complete scientific surveys, took every factor into consideration: the future tenants, the dimensions of the human living space, the parameters of heating, the effect of color . . .!”
Probably it was Fedor who shouted out: “Who are we mourning here—Arsénie or Constantine?” But I didn’t let myself be interrupted.
“And I had to calculate all those factors myself, gentlemen. Who could I have learned from? Could I have copied the Turkish Beys’ houses, or the three-room Serbian ones? Only in 1892 did we bring in piped water, and electricity barely a year later! And our streets were first macadamized only in 1886!”
Someone from behind tugged sharply at my sleeve. The umbrella, which up to then had been held over my head, was removed abruptly, so that rain began to soak my hat. But my allotted time wasn’t up yet, so I proceeded to sum up what I had to say about the late Constantine.
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