The Use of Man Read online

  ALEKSANDAR TIŠMA (1924–2003) was born in the Vojvodina, a former province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had been incorporated into the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the First World War. His father, a Serb, came from a peasant background; his mother was middle-class and Jewish. The family lived comfortably, and Tišma received a good education. In 1941, Hungary annexed Vojvodina; the next year—Tišma’s last in high school— the regime carried out a series of murderous pogroms, killing some 3,000 inhabitants, primarily Serbs and Jews, though the Tišmas were spared. After fighting for the Yugoslav partisans, Tišma studied philosophy at Belgrade University and went into journalism and in 1949 joined the editorial staff of a publishing house, where he remained until his retirement in 1980. Tišma published his first story, “Ibika’s House,” in 1951; it was followed by the novels Guilt and In Search of the Dark Girl and a collection of stories, Violence. In the 1970s and ’80s, he gained international recognition with the publication of his Novi Sad trilogy: The Book of Blam (1971), about a survivor of the Hungarian occupation of Novi Sad; The Use of Man (1976), which follows a group of friends through the Second World War and after; and Kapo (1987), the story of a Jew raised as a Catholic who becomes a guard in a German concentration camp. Tišma moved to France after the outbreak of war and collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but in 1995 he returned to Novi Sad, where he spent his last years.

  BERNARD JOHNSON (1933–2003) was affiliated with the Language Centre at the London School of Economics for many years. In 1970 he edited and translated the first anthology of modern Yugoslav literature, and throughout his career he distinguished himself as one of the most active translators of Serbo-Croatian poetry and prose working in English.

  CLAIRE MESSUD is the author of four novels and a book of novellas. Her novel The Emperor’s Children was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and was selected as one of the ten best books of 2006 by The New York Times. Her most recent novel is The Woman Upstairs. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  THE USE OF MAN

  ALEKSANDAR TIŠMA

  Translated from the Serbo-Croatian by

  BERNARD JOHNSON

  Introduction by

  CLAIRE MESSUD

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Published in 1980 in the Serbo-Croatian language by Nolit Belgrade

  Translation copyright © 1988 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Claire Messud

  All rights reserved.

  This translation first published in the United States in 1988 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reprinted here by special arrangement with the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  Cover image: Allan Kaprow, Hysteria, 1956; courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has catalogued a previous edition of this book as follows:

  Tišma, Aleksandar, 1924–2003.

  [Upotreba coveka. English]

  The use of man / Aleksandar Tisma ; translated by Bernard Johnson ; introduction by Claire Messud.

  pages cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-726-6 (pbk.)

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Yugoslavia—Fiction. 2. Teenagers—Fiction. 3. Political fiction. I. Johnson, Bernard, 1933–2003, translator. II. Messud, Claire, 1966—III. Title.

  PG1419.3.I8U613 2014

  891.8'2354—dc23

  2013048991

  ISBN 978-1-59017-733-4

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  INTRODUCTION

  What is literature? Potentially, everything; possibly, nothing at all.

  Aleksandar Tišma may have been more acutely aware of these stakes than most, on account of his talent and temperament, and also as a result of the accident of his birth. The son of a Serbian father and Jewish mother, he was born in 1924, and spent his childhood in Novi Sad, a city on the banks of the Danube, in what was then Yugoslavia. He grew up surrounded with memories of war, in the likely anticipation of war, and in the midst of war.

  The war brought particular confusion to Novi Sad, where Serbs, Croats, Hungarians, Germans, and Jews had long lived together and intermarried. Annexed by Hungary in 1941, the city was the site of an especially brutal massacre in January 1942, in which approximately 2,500 people were slaughtered, 800 of them Jews. In October 1944, Novi Sad was reclaimed by Communist partisans, becoming a part of Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia. Tišma lived through all these upheavals, and inevitably they determined his subject matter. He could be called the Bard of Novi Sad, petit-maître of a small canvas; though in a profound sense his fierce, often brutal stories of this provincial life are the central stories of the twentieth century. They resonate far beyond Novi Sad’s borders, forcing us to look again, to look more closely, at our frail humanity.

  Against mayhem and horror, what is there to say? Tišma’s ruthlessly unsentimental fictions would seem to assert the necessity not only of bearing witness but of bearing witness to all the shades of guilt with which atrocity taints its perpetrators and its victims. Tišma is careful neither to condemn nor to exonerate: rather, he insists upon the humanity of each of us, however heinous our acts. In the novel Kapo, for example, he explores the late-life reflections and recollections of Lamian, a Jew from Novi Sad who, denying his parents and heritage and assuming the identity of a dead man, survived in the camps—and who as a Kapo committed brutal crimes against his fellow men and, particularly, women. Since the war, Lamian has lived in hiding and fear, warped by guilt and by the terror of being unmasked. Ironically—or perhaps logically—he turns to one of his surviving victims, a Jewish woman of almost his own age, in hopes of redemption.

  I know few—if any—novels as blisteringly powerful as Kapo. It provokes continual discomfort and is genuinely, deeply shocking. Above all, it shocks by implicating the reader—Baudelaire’s hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère—in its story of violence to others and to self. We are forced to acknowledge that this, too, is our human condition. Much as we seek to separate ourselves from the unsavory Lamian, who can say with certainty that we could not have ended up like him?

  Lamian has become a monster as a result of his own choices, you might say; but what were they? Condemned by a German soldier to stand at length outside in winter in a drenched coat, he was effectively given the choice either to become a Kapo or to die.

  The power of the club, though he obediently used it, could not make him exult, because he did not wield it with desire—because he had become Kapo Furfa by freezing beneath the coat of ice which Corporal Sommer had put on him, but beneath that ice, beneath the Kapo’s insignia and red triangle, he was really Lamian, a Jew with no yellow star sewn on him, whose heart quaked in fear and horror as he beat those to whom he secr
etly belonged.

  Over the course of the war, Lamian was forced to choose, and choose again, simply to live—and with each choice came greater crimes and more profound self-loathing.

  The Book of Blam is about a different kind of survivor and a different kind of guilt. In it, Miroslav Blam, a Jew married to a Christian and thus spared deportation and execution, recalls the years of his youth. Unlike Lamian, Blam is not guilty of heinous crimes. But he, too, has been mutilated by his survival, in his case by his careful, timorous passivity. He has lost his parents and closest friends to the war; repeatedly cuckolded by his indifferent wife, he has raised as his own a child fathered by a collaborator. In the years after the war he has seen Novi Sad transformed almost beyond recognition, into what appears to be a thriving, untroubled modern city. He wanders in a lost geography, the city of his memories, full of regrets and resentments. Lamian chose to survive; Blam just survived. The legacy, for him, is very different from Lamian’s, but no less painful.

  From that time, from that place, as Tišma’s novels make horridly clear, barely a soul emerged undisgraced or uncompromised. To survive was to compromise. The only clean souls were dead souls. (This is a truth known to most Europeans of a certain age.) Tišma does not exempt his characters from moral accountability, but he sees, detachedly and with austere compassion, the tremendous costs of life.

  Nowhere are these more apparent than in The Use of Man, Tišma’s masterpiece. At the heart of the novel is a book—a modest diary, one of several books that play important roles in the novel. Curiously, they are at once central to the plot (the diary in particular) and ineffectual, motivators and bystanders, rather like people themselves. What are books good for? One of the novel’s characters, a thoughtful and retiring middle-aged Jewish patriarch named Robert Kroner says, to his daughter’s boyfriend, about Goethe: “We have no men and writers like that today. Mysticism now rules the world, the cult of blood and violence, darkness, the longing for the past, nationalism. Do you think that anything great and noble, like this book, can come out of such chaos? No; you’ll see, our time will be remembered for its barbarity and barrenness.”

  After Kroner’s library is ransacked by the police, who are searching for his dissident son, Gerhard, Tišma records,

  The books the policemen had scattered during their search were put back on the shelves, and no one took them down again. What had happened during those last few months refuted them entirely, and they became what they were when not opened and interpreted with trust: objects of paper. With their fine bindings and titles, they looked out blankly at the people who still moved beneath them, who soon would be, under that blank gaze, taken away, torn from their resting place, and turned upside down, just as the books had been, but permanently.

  All the world’s wisdom, Tišma seems to say, avails us nothing. And there is, in the equation of the books’ disruption with their owners’ disruption, a reminder that we are like the books: as they can be reduced, by our inattention, to mere “objects of paper,” so we can be reduced to “objects of flesh”—we can be stripped of, or denied, all that is within us, the particularity of our experience and our souls. The books, with their “blank gaze,” become almost culpable in their passivity: Observing everything, they do nothing.

  In this case at least, Tišma reminds us, the scattering of the books has been temporary; the upheaval of lives—of bodies—is permanent. Death entails the total annihilation of the contents of a mind, while printed books—the recorded traces of long-gone thoughts and experiences—may always, eventually, be read again. In this way, the books will endure; but what if they endure without significance or with an altered significance? What is the meaning, Tišma seems obliquely to ask, of creating works of art or philosophy at all?

  Against this despair, The Use of Man stands, in its strangeness and darkness, as a small bulwark, the record of humanity in a time of “barbarity and barrenness,” of the small, flickering, sometimes questionable, sometimes uninterpretable light that continues.

  And Fräulein Anna Drentvenšek’s diary, the frame for the novel, proves to be just this. The novel opens with a description of the diary itself: “small and oblong, with a coarse-grained red binding of imitation snakeskin, and in the top right-hand corner was the inscription `Poésie’ in embossed gold letters.” This manifestly insignificant object—its banal contents so far from the poetry promised on the cover—will nevertheless prove the catalyst for the novel’s central action.

  The Fräulein is a middle-aged German tutor living in Novi Sad on the eve of war. Her diary is vital to her—so important that when she is hospitalized for an operation and has the (accurate) premonition that she might die, she asks one of her pupils, Vera Kroner, to retrieve and destroy it. This Vera cannot do:

  Vera had the feeling that the diary contained a whole human being—someone unknown to her until now, or known in a completely different way—and that if she destroyed it, she would never again have the chance . . . to know that human being more clearly. She was seized by a fear she had not felt at the funeral: Was it possible for the content of a whole long life to vanish so easily, so abruptly?

  This is a momentous revelation for a young girl, and all the more freighted for the reader, who knows, as Vera in that moment does not yet, that the war will soon descend upon Novi Sad, obliterating innumerable lives and all that has comprised them.

  One of three pupils of Fräulein Drentvenšek, Vera studies alongside her boyfriend, Milinko Božić, and his schoolmate and friend Sredoje Lazukić, the son of a Serbian nationalist. These three young people reflect the curious hybridity of Novi Sad in different ways. They are also representative of the mingling of strengths and weaknesses in each of us—traits which in peacetime might have one set of consequences, but which in wartime will lead to other fates.

  Vera is the younger child of Robert Kroner, the admirer of Goethe; her mother, Tereza, is a Catholic of German peasant stock, who was the family servant to the Kroners when Robert was a boy. She left their service, but he later encountered her at a brothel. Known as Reza, she is anathema to her devout Jewish mother-in-law; while she in turn rejects her husband sexually, so that, as in his youth, he must once again take his pleasures in the local bordello. Vera’s older brother, Gerhard, the apple of his mother’s eye, is spoiled, arrogant, and bellicose. He will join the Partisans and will pay, early in the war, with his life.

  Vera, not unlike her gentle father, is “Afraid of peculiarities of any kind . . . She thought religious customs, dress, and conventions outdated and silly, but at the same time dangerous, because they invariably classified people whether they liked it or not.” Able to glimpse the impending disaster the war’s arrival will bring to Jews like themselves, she tries—and fails—to leave. Afterwards, damaged and painfully marked by her wartime abuse, bereft of all her family, she returns to her birthplace: “It was her destiny, she decided, to return from the camp to her own town, her own because she had failed, before, to break free of it.”

  Vera’s boyfriend, Milinko, may be the closest thing to a hero in the novel. Honest, forthright, hardworking, ambitious, he is the only child of a working-class household. His vicious father committed suicide, leaving Milinko and his noble, humble mother to forge their lives together. In spite of this, Milinko has a near-American belief in possibility: “He felt himself to be the master of time and therefore the master of knowledge, and since he believed that knowledge opened the door to all ambitions, he felt himself to be the master of his destiny as well.” In love with Vera, he also believes in the stability of their relationship, even though we, privy to Vera’s more complicated nature, may have our doubts. For this singularly brave and virtuous soul, history will hold the most unspeakable future.

  Milinko’s prosperous but barbaric Serbian friend Sredoje will survive, and survive with a vengeance. A resourceful chameleon, a cunning betrayer, he fights on practically every side in the war, while also terrorizing countless young prostitutes along the way: “Their very
submissiveness was exciting, their trembling setting of limits.” He, like Vera, will eventually return to Novi Sad, where he will find the Fräulein’s diary, hidden on a shelf in Vera’s old home, containing Vera’s notation of the Fräulein’s death.

  The accidental rediscovery of the diary—and in some inexpressible way, of its contents—reunites Vera and Sredoje, affording us the single narrative strand that might approach redemption, however slight. It’s as if the ghosts of these characters’ innocent prewar selves are clinging, attached invisibly, to the document itself, anticipating a now-canceled and impossible future.

  This is true also of the Fräulein: The implication seems to be that war intensifies and clarifies what is, in any event, the inevitable human trajectory—the attempt, largely futile, to make meaning amid the world’s unsignifying sound and fury. After we die, our diaries, once so crucial to us, will seem to others trivial and pointless. In The Use of Man, the chance survival of a diary, and the way it brings together two damaged survivors, can be seen as a bitter joke, or alternatively as evidence that in spite of all, life survives: What unexpected meaning the (meaningless) diary will make! It is, like literature itself, at once nothing and everything.

  Tišma is a writer of deceptive structural idiosyncrasy. Not immediately identifiable as an innovator, he nevertheless makes intriguing—often apparently blunt, almost clumsy—choices, with fascinating ramifications. To an extent, he eschews linear narrative; or, rather, he alters it. The novel’s first chapter tells the history of the Fräulein’s diary and reveals, in brief and obliquely, the fates of the principal characters. The second chapter begins with the word “Habitations”; it then proceeds, almost like notes for a novel, to situate Tišma’s characters within the city, within their dwellings. Later chapters will provide similar listings of how an evening is spent; of where the men find their sexual pleasure; and, magnificently, of the individual characters’ bodies. Tišma writes of Vera, almost in note form: “The finely slanted slits of her dark-blue, almost violet eyes, her red mouth with its long pink tongue, the pinkish nostrils, the shells of her ears. Long limbs, hesitant roundnesses.” He gives us an entire, memorable, and apparently irrelevant chapter of “street scenes” in Novi Sad, not simply in wartime but through much of the postwar century.