The Book of Blam Page 13

  ON THE DAY she died, Estera Blam went to school as usual and spent the early morning hours in class. During the third period—mathematics with nearsighted Mrs. Bajčetić—a folded piece of paper fell onto her exercise book from behind. She opened it and read the following block-letter text: “They are coming to arrest you. Go to Mara’s immediately for further instructions.” It must have been smuggled in. She turned instinctively to see where it had come from, but Mrs. Bajčetić noticed a disturbance at the door and the fuss in Estera’s vicinity, banged her ruler on her desk, and called the class to order. Estera hunched forward and read the message a few more times, then folded it, ripped it into tiny pieces, and dropped them into the ink bottle on her desk. Slowly, noiselessly she slipped her books into her bag, then raised her hand and asked Mrs. Bajčetić for permission to leave the room. The teacher granted it reluctantly, and Estera reached for her bag, but suddenly realized that she had no reason to take it with her, so she shoved it back into the desk and went out into the corridor. There she looked both ways, hoping to find the messenger, but seeing no one, she simply took her coat out of the cloakroom and left.

  The house where Andja Šovljanski, alias Mara, lived was located on the outskirts of town, approximately a kilometer and a half from Estera’s school. Estera reached it at about eleven o’clock. By that time her class and the entire school had been searched by three agents. Angry at having found nothing and having received no explanation from the school’s administration or her fellow students for her disappearance, they phoned Counterintelligence from the headmistress’s office and asked for additional manpower. One of the agents remained behind at the school just in case; the other two set off for Estera’s house, where they hoped to find her or set an ambush for her.

  In the meantime, Andja Šovljanski, Estera’s comrade from the Yugoslav Communist Youth League, had received word that her cell had been exposed and that she was to wait for Estera Blam and go with her to the village of Klisa, where the two could hide with an old woman by the name of Dara Aćimov. Andja knew the house, because she had spent the night there once after a field-burning session. The only trouble was that Andja’s message had arrived early in the morning and made no reference to the fact that Estera might not receive hers until quite a bit later. Andja dressed immediately and distributed the weapons she had been given for safekeeping—three hand grenades and a small-caliber pistol—among the pockets of her winter coat. Then the feverish wait began. She was alone with her grandfather; her father, a tinsmith, was at work, she had no mother, and her brothers were married and lived away from home. After sitting for hours in her coat weighed down with weapons, she started wondering whether she wasn’t wasting valuable time: maybe the instructions were wrong or she hadn’t understood them correctly, or maybe something had happened since they were written, something she didn’t know about, maybe more people had been arrested, Estera maybe, and here she was, sitting in a trap. By the time ten o’clock came and went, impatience got the better of discipline, and she decided to find out what was going on. She told her grandfather that she’d be back soon, that a friend might come looking for her, and that the friend should wait here for her. With that she left the house.

  Estera found the door to Andja’s house locked and had to knock. Andja’s grandfather came to the door wearing a fur hat and a sheepskin coat and let her in when she told him who she was. They walked through the courtyard, which was bare of foliage (it was late autumn), and went into the kitchen, where a fire smoldered in the stove. Andja’s grandfather said Andja would be back soon. He laid more wood on the fire and rolled a cigarette with some tobacco from a tin box, and while he smoked, coughed, spat on the floor, and rubbed the spittle into the dirt floor with the rubber sole of his shoe, Estera stood at the window in her navy-blue coat and watched for Andja.

  Andja had gone to see Sofija Kerešević, the cell comrade who lived closest to her. Proceeding warily along a treelined path and through mostly deserted streets, she paused at the slightest noise and ducked behind a tree whenever anyone walked past, remaining there until she was certain that it was merely a local resident on a peaceful errand. At last she reached the Kerešević house, which like hers was set back from the street and fenced off. She observed it for a long time. Nothing seemed to be moving inside, but she was still extremely cautious. She went back to the corner, turned, then turned again into the street that ran parallel to the street the Kereševićs lived on. She tried several gates, and when one yielded to the pressure of her hand, she went into the courtyard. There she found an old woman tossing her chickens corn kernels from a deep white plate. She asked the woman permission to cross her garden and, without waiting for an answer, set off through the withered plants, patches of grass, and half-bare fruit trees. She recognized the Kerešević house beyond the barbed-wire fence at the back of the property. She thought she saw something black moving in the courtyard, but couldn’t tell whether it was a person or an animal. She stood there, holding her breath, but when nothing seemed to move again and nothing made any noise, she slowly crawled under the fence and jumped into a ditch. The Kerešević courtyard now lay before her.

  She saw no one, just the smoke coming peacefully out of the chimney in light white puffs. She straightened and climbed into the courtyard. Suddenly she caught another glimpse of the black thing. It was behind a fruit tree. She ducked just as it emerged in the shape of a human figure and started walking in her direction.

  She spun around and retraced her steps, racing along the ditch and crawling back under the fence. A shout and then a shot rang out, but she did not stop. She heard a curse and saw out of the corner of her eye that the black figure was caught on the barbed wire. She ran past the startled woman with the plate of chicken feed and out into the street.

  She could have kept running, out of town, through the fields, all the way to Klisa, where she would perhaps have found safety in the double attic of Grandma Dara’s barn, but she suddenly remembered that her instructions were to take Estera Blam to Grandma Dara’s, and she realized how wrong she had been to disobey them. So instead of running into the fields, she ran home. She heard shots, footsteps, barking, and whistling behind her, and through a fence with missing boards she saw several figures running from the neighboring street into hers, yet on she ran. When she got to her house, she slipped through the fence at a point where a board her father had not had time to reattach was lying on the ground; she even had the presence of mind to put it back so it looked as if it were firmly in place. Then she raced into the kitchen, where she found her grandfather sitting and Estera standing next to him, nervous from the echoes of the chase she had heard.

  “Quick!” Andja cried and ran back out. “Let’s go!”

  Estera followed. They ran through Andja’s garden and leaped into the neighbor’s, but in front of the house they had hoped to reach they saw two gendarmes, their rifles ready. At the same time they heard the heavy pounding of a rifle butt on the door to Andja’s house and the crack of wood from the blow. Another shot rang out.

  About twenty steps away stood a small, neatly white-washed structure, the neighbors’ summer kitchen. They made for it instinctively. Andja got there first and flung open the door. They both flew in and slammed the door shut. There was nobody inside. It was cool and quiet. Andja managed to slide the bar into the socket and bolt the door. Then she reached into her pockets, pulled out two hand grenades, and laid them on the clean empty stove.

  “Take those two grenades. And make sure you don’t miss.”

  She took the third grenade in her left hand and the pistol in her right. They then moved back to the wall and waited.

  As the footsteps and whistling came closer, they could make out the voices and shouts of the men surrounding the garden. Then a shadow fell on the curtain covering the door window, and someone pressed the handle.

  Andja pulled the trigger once, twice, but the gun did not fire: there were no bullets in the cartridge. She was stunned. At that moment the panes in th
e door window shattered, covering the kitchen floor with glass, and a rifle barrel topped by a fierce, mustached face rammed through the opening and past the curtain. The rifle went off. Andja grabbed her chest and fell to the floor with a scream. Estera jumped to the side, into the far corner, escaping the bullet intended for her. Crouching there, she realized she was still holding the grenades. She looked down at them, put them both in her left hand, and pulled the pin on one, as she had learned to do that summer in military practice. Then she threw it at the gendarme who had tried to shoot her, but it hit the crossbar between the broken panes in the door window and fell to the kitchen floor. She leaped to her feet, pulled the pin on the other grenade and this time managed to throw it through the opening in the door. At that moment the first grenade exploded on the floor, sending pieces of metal into her head and chest and thrusting her against the wall. She too fell. Immediately thereafter the other grenade exploded outside the door, wounding two gendarmes, one in the face and shoulder, the other—the one who had shot through the window—in the stomach and leg. Then all was quiet. Not until the gendarmes from the second squad had finished breaking down the door to Andja’s house and reached the summer kitchen did the shouts and curses start up again. There they found Andja and Estera lying dead on the floor, in puddles of blood slowly merging into one dark pool.

  Chapter Ten

  IN THE Naše novine Christmas issue for 1941, the first year of the Occupation, the paper’s cub reporter, Tihomir Savić, published a full-page feature entitled “The Life and Times of Our Editorial Board.” It is written in a jocular tone, as befits both occasion and subject matter, and illustrated by five portraits (four men and one woman) from the pen of an anonymous artist with a fluent, cartoonlike hand. The article begins with a description of the office: three rooms crammed with desks and piles of newspapers, proofs, and printing plates and populated by a small army of newspapermen scribbling, dictating, talking over the phone to correspondents, assigning articles, accepting advertisements. The article goes on to introduce the members of the team separately—sketch and text, sketch and text, and so on, down the line. First comes Predrag Popadić, who is characterized as invariably well-groomed (his sketch shows him with an arrow-straight mustache over a sarcastic smile, shiny, wavy hair, and a tie perfectly tied) and coolheaded, never losing his equilibrium, not even if he is short of material for the next issue, in which case he sends a cub reporter—Tihomir Savić, say—to some “scene of the crime” or other, knowing Savić will not dare to show his face without a scoop. The subject of the second sketch, a large-nosed profile with hair sticking out behind the ear, is the chief political commentator; he is described as morose and laconic, always off in his dream world. The next, who has a round, bald head, a double chin, and two dots for a nose, is the editor for national news. He is known for injecting a note of levity into the tensions of life at the paper. Then comes a good-natured, bovine face with eyes slanting downward and a bow tie under a wiry neck. It belongs to the editor of the games and children’s page, who is in fact a confirmed bachelor with no hearth or home, a connoisseur of cafés and streets after dark. The only woman—who is pictured with heart-shaped lips, long eyelashes, and a turned-up nose—is said to be not only the fastest typist in Novi Sad but also capable of brewing the most divine coffee and winding the most ornery customer around her little finger. And finally the boyish face, all eyeglasses and flowing hair, belongs to Tihomir Savić himself, who is so young that he still believes in the beauty of life: in addition to the articles that put food on his table, he writes poetry in the wee hours of the night.

  Notwithstanding the superficiality of the texts and accompanying drawings, they give a recognizable if one-sided picture of their subjects, but, then, Naše novine looks at everything one-sidedly. The other side is lies and coverups, a willingness to whitewash reality—to preserve a little place sheltered from reality—with a non-existent harmony and meaning. The editors will eventually pay for that other side: the editor-in-chief, the chief political commentator, and the national news editor will be shot for collaborating with the enemy; the editor of the games and children’s page will be sentenced to hard labor and die in prison; and the sweet young typist and reporter poet, who marry the following year, will escape with the retreating German troops and end up running a bed and breakfast in Australia.

  Nothing Savić’s article describes is left in Novi Sad today but the premises he evokes in the opening passage: the three rooms above the Avala overlooking the courtyard, then as now bustling with filmgoers before the matinees and evening shows. Immediately after the war came to an end and Naše novine closed up shop, the space was occupied by a young partisan officer and commissar who used it to entertain transient Comrades and local girls, but he was soon replaced by a higher ranking officer and his family. Next, the entire floor—the entire building, in fact—came under the management of the cinema, which was ordered by the local command to find the officer another apartment. From then on, Naše novine’s former premises resounded once more with ringing phones and clacking typewriters, though the staff was of course different: two young women—one newly married, the other, a cashier with a trace of a mustache and newly divorced—and a middle-aged family man, a former gymnast with a stiff, dignified way about him. But if a current-day reporter decided to do a feature on them, he might well come up with similar portraits; indeed, even the side of their characters omitted from the feature—their tendency to lie, though now in the more innocent guise of providing fantasies on the silver screen—could be seen as unchanged. Which confirms both the stability of the human condition and the futility of the word as a means of exposing it.

  WHILE TIHOMIR SAVIĆ was hard at work on his Christmas feature, Blam spent a good deal of time just below Savić’s windows in the courtyard of the Avala. These were the weeks immediately following Blam’s marriage and Estera’s death, a time when his summer fever of rebellious expectation, fear, and hope gave way to shock. It was in a state of shock that he made the daily but brief, tongue-tied visits to his mother and father, trying to comfort them but knowing he could be of no help, not even by reminding them of his existence as a son, a druglike substitute for the object of their attention. In addition to the state of shock, which he fought, he had a numb drunken feeling, which he embraced. He saw Estera’s death—so sudden, dramatic, and out of character with the person he knew, yet so inexorably real—as the end of a period of wanderings, false hopes, and vain psychological schemes. Death was something Blam now found everywhere, in every word, movement, and newspaper report, in the patrols in the streets, the flags flying, the guards and weapons making their appearance everywhere. Anything outside those clear signs of destruction—the visits he paid to his parents, for instance—was merely an opiate, a means of putting death out of his mind for a while and thus letting it come more quickly, easily, painlessly.

  The most effective opiate was his work at the travel agency: it was so hopelessly dull that during the eight hours it lasted, it precluded all thoughts of the existence of the other, absolute hopelessness. The moment he set off for home, however, the effect wore off like that of a bad medicine. At home he would find Janja waiting for him, but not the Janja of the summer vision, not Janja at the pump, hot and unkempt, who could have whipped up the frenzy he so longed for. Instead, he found the Janja he later observed from the tram, the hard and self-assured Janja who had whipped up her own frenzy with no thought of him, with her own life, her own apartment, her own job, her own lover, and everything that went with them, a Janja who, without ever having opened up to him, or softened, or brought to life the picture of her he carried with him, had taken leave of him every bit as inexorably as he had taken his leave of life.

  This double image of the end proved too much for him: it drove him out of the house, into the streets, and not in search of hints or clues, as in the summer, because by now the guessing game had become a disease, a preparation for death. No, now he wandered aimlessly, looking neither left nor ri
ght, not thinking, or trying not to think, using all the strength of his legs and the warmth of his insides to push on through the cold and the sleet. He avoided human contact, especially friends, because the sight of a familiar face only called forth new visions of destruction. And yet, or perhaps as a consequence, he tended to choose the busiest parts of town for his wandering, places where people were crowds rather than individuals, impersonal, purely physical, and their moving, surging, pushing brought the fatigue he desired, like the wet snow and fierce wind. And so every day he made his way to the Avala. And one day he ran into Čutura again.

  It was evening. He had just paid his visit to the house in Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, and a cold, disconsolate visit it had been, like sitting by the bed of a corpse. Yearning for contact with the crowd, he circled Main Square and had just reached the Avala and the pillars supporting the editorial offices of Naše novine, when he felt something brush his elbow. It was different from the listless, unconscious pressure of the crowd that kept his body steady as he made his way forward; it was a cautious yet deliberate prod. He turned, frightened. In the shadow of a pillar he made out a figure in a broad-brimmed hat and a heavy winter coat with a turned-up collar. Only the angular line of the chin, lit up by a patch of light from the lobby, told him it was Čutura.

  Čutura’s disguise as a vagrant or day laborer made it immediately clear to Blam that he was in hiding and that it was dangerous to be seen with him. But numbed by his solitary wandering and anxious thoughts, Blam responded to Čutura’s wordless request and stopped. Čutura took a step back, to hide his face in the dark.

  “I need to spend the night at your place,” a tense whisper reached Blam from the darkness. “Cross the courtyard slowly. I’ll follow.”