The Book of Blam Page 15

  But when the restaurant door actually opens and Janja emerges in her fitted gray coat, gray hat, and sturdy shoes, she stands at the threshold on her sturdy straight legs surveying the square until her eyes light on Blam. Then she crosses the square, her freshly made-up lips opening in a quick, confident smile.

  “Waiting long?”

  Blam looks up at her, suspicious, not so much of her as of himself, of his release, his excitement. It is bitter, the meaning he has found yet knows to be momentary, fleeting, on the point of melting, like a current of mild air on a cold day, into droplets of wrath and dissension.

  “Oh, I don’t mind. Where are we going?”

  “You mean you’ve forgotten?” she says, staring at his face the way he knew she would, as if he were a gadget that refuses to do what it’s supposed to do. “First stop is the quilt maker.”

  Chapter Eleven

  LOOK AT THE map of Novi Sad, and you will see a kind of spider’s web intersecting on one side with a broad ribbon in the form of a half circle but extending evenly in all other directions. The ribbon, usually colored blue, is the Danube, the city’s permanent eastern boundary and also its womb. For here, near its once marshy banks, the mud and fumes received the first seeds of settlement: the huts and cabins of the artisans and traders in wine and foods who from this filthy, humid lowland supplied the dry, stately military fortress of Petrovaradin, otherwise off limits to them, on the rocky shore opposite. Those early settlers brought the provisions they sold and the raw materials for their crafts from the rich hinterland plains. They built long, straight roads through those plains, roads lined with the houses of market gardeners and draymen and forming a network that grew wherever geography did not interfere. The oldest settlements, which took root along the banks between tributaries and swamps, are still designated on maps with squiggly lines that abruptly, capriciously become circles, that is, marketplaces. Today they are the business centers, the shops, restaurants, churches, and offices. They are home to the Avala and, diagonally opposite, the Mercury. The newer settlements, which sprang up along the roads, stretch deep into the hinterland and are connected by a network of transverse byways only to lose track of them and peter out finally in long, individual streets among fields, like the taut outermost strands of a spider’s web invisibly attached to the center.

  SUCH WAS THE map that two high-ranking Hungarian officers (a major in the gendarmerie and a colonel in the police force) had before them on the evening of 20 January 1942, as they worked out the plan for the raid they were to oversee the next morning by order of Regional Headquarters. Well-trained strategists that they were, they divided the spiderweb of the city’s streets into several hundred smaller webs, assigning patrols to each from the lists of men they had been given. Each web would have a search patrol, whose job was to go through private dwellings; a roundup patrol, which was to collect all suspicious elements; and an escort patrol, which would take them to an identity check and/or execution. The task set before the two strategists was, therefore, almost abstract, consisting of a list of names and ranks, on the one hand, and a grid overlying a city, on the other. Yet behind those abstractions stood individuals with different features and different problems, and the pencil marks made by the two officers as the city was getting ready for bed determined the fate of each one of the one thousand and four hundred individuals who would perish in the course of the next three days and the fate of each of the tens of thousands of individuals who would be allowed to survive. For even though the raid had a single official goal, that of decimating the Slavic and Jewish population, and even though each patrol leader was told to be utterly ruthless, it was still up to the individual to determine, given the circumstances, the degree to which he belonged to those who were being decimated, on the one hand, and those who were doing the decimating, on the other. Or to demonstrate rather than to determine, because the degree to which each individual belonged to one or another category was largely predetermined, by birth, appearance, language, emotional and intellectual makeup, and the pencil marks of the two high-ranking officers merely combined thousands of individual characteristics into that interdependent mesh that in the next three days would—for each of them, many times over—mean life or death, sparing or killing.

  THE SEARCH PATROL assigned to the Blam household was made up of two young soldiers from Hungary, two gendarmes brought in from the village of Čurug after the raid there, and Lieutenant Géczy, its twenty-eight-year-old sloping-shouldered, puffy-eyed leader. Géczy, who had been in Novi Sad since the beginning of the Occupation, had finally managed to move his young bride there until ten days before, so on the morning of the raid he arose from a warm conjugal bed. It was still dark when he slid through the icy streets in his new combat boots to the meeting place, the artillery barracks, picked up his instructions and the men detailed to him, and proceeded to the spot on the map marked in red. He was determined to be strict but fair, to accept only authentic documents, and to make thorough searches of each dwelling. By following these rules and making his charges follow them, he managed—on the first day of the raid, with only one break, at noon, when a hot meal was delivered to the men in a covered army truck—to search twenty-one dwellings along Aleksa Nenadović Street in the vicinity of Vojvoda Šupljikac Square and hand over to the roundup patrol two suspicious young men, Serbs, who had come from a nearby village to celebrate a friend’s patron-saint day without proper identity papers.

  “No good!” said the general with a shake of the head when he heard Géczy’s report late that evening in the cold corridor of the artillery barracks, where the patrol leaders had gathered and stood in formation for an entire hour, tired, hungry, freezing, and longing to be released and find a warm spot for themselves, the lieutenant longing to be in his bed, with his wife, whose safety in these days of armed revenge gave him cause for concern. “No good at all!” And when the lieutenant tried to explain that the houses assigned to him were particularly difficult to search because they had large courtyards filled with apartments, the general turned bright red and screamed so loud that his voice echoed up and down the corridor: “I’m not talking about houses, you idiot! I’m talking about people! Criminals! Tomorrow you give me a list of a hundred criminals. A hundred, understand? How you find them I don’t care! Next!”

  Like the others, Géczy was not allowed to go home; he was given a bed in the barracks to share with a thickset, hairy lieutenant colonel who took off nothing but his boots, pulled virtually the whole blanket over himself, and fell to snoring immediately. Géczy could not get to sleep. His shoulders and feet were freezing. He felt like waking the large, noisy body sprawled next to him to ask how the general expected him to round up a hundred criminals in an ordinary city, though he knew perfectly well how the general expected him to do it and that do it he must. This conclusion only increased the anxiety he felt at hearing the wind howl and the snow beat against the windows and at thinking, helplessly now, of his wife alone in a strange place, with no friends, of the terrible things that could happen to her amid the general chaos.

  He awoke at dawn, dazed, chilled to the bone, and angry. The lieutenant colonel and the others had all dressed. Géczy too got up, dressed, and had breakfast. He then went out into the courtyard and found his men standing in a circle and passing a canteen from hand to hand.

  “What is it?” he asked the older gendarme.

  “Rum, sir. They’re giving it out in the kitchen. Have some.”

  The lieutenant was about to refuse—he thought the gendarme out of line—but the night frost, the darkness, and the difficulties of the day ahead broke down his resistance, and he took a swig from the canteen.

  “We’ll be doing things differently today,” he said to the gendarme confidentially, feeling the alcohol taking effect.

  “Whatever you say, sir,” said the gendarme, clicking his heels and looking the lieutenant straight in the eye, clearly half drunk.

  They set out for the house where they had left off the day before, j
ust as the darkness began to dissipate over the ice-covered snow and a truck rumbled up to the corner and let out a roundup patrol.

  “I want you to keep your mouths shut,” the lieutenant said, turning to his men. “Just watch for my sign. Then out with the ones I point to.”

  But as luck would have it, all the houses along Aleksa Nenadović Street turned out to be inhabited by people with valid identity papers and a disproportional number of Hungarians and Germans, and whenever he tried to make insinuations about people in the neighborhood, the only response he got was a frightened “We don’t know anything bad about them.”

  At about nine o’clock they heard a few shots, followed by a volley of fire. Géczy went out and saw that both truck and patrol had disappeared. He called over the younger gendarme—the older one’s eyes were all bloodshot—and ordered him to find out where the truck had gone and where the shooting was and why, then he went on with the searches, though thinking more about the shooting, which did not let up, than about the documents and people.

  “The truck’s two hundred meters from here,” said the gendarme, running up to him. “It’s in the square around the corner. And the soldiers are doing the shooting.”

  “In the street?”

  “Yes, in the street.”

  The lieutenant took the men to the next house, but what he really was concerned about was what was going on in the square. Not because he was eager to see blood but because he had a feeling that what he would see would solve his problem. And what he saw after searching the house at the very end of Aleksa Nenadović Street and turning into Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, what he saw through the bare trees of the small, snow-covered park was the large, dark shape of the truck surrounded by small, randomly placed groups of men in olive uniforms or gray civilian clothes. Shots were still being fired, loud and clear now that there was nothing to block the sound, and a chorus of wailing voices rose in response. He saw several civilians trip and fall and men in uniform bend over them, their guns spitting fire at the earth. Two contradictory thoughts flashed through the lieutenant’s overwrought mind: “Everything is settled” and “Everything is lost.” Then the two merged into determination and confidence.

  “Follow me!” he ordered. From the first house—Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, number 11—he hauled out a young Serbian woman living in the courtyard who was unable to show how she earned her keep; from the next, a family of seven headed by a Slovak watchmaker who pleaded with him in broken Hungarian, acquired, as he kept saying, in the Austro-Hungarian army. “Take them over there, all of them,” he ordered the two men he had designated as guards, pointing impatiently to the far end of the square.

  His confidence reached new heights when he got to the Blams: their papers showed them to be Jews. He gave their frightened and what he judged to be cowardly faces a stern look and said, “Get your coats on!”

  “But our papers are in order, sir,” said Blam, playing for time.

  “Silence!” Géczy shouted in the voice the general had used on him the night before. “I don’t need instructions from you, understand?”

  He left the two guards to watch the couple putting their coats on and took the two gendarmes with him to the widow Csokonay’s. There he learned that her subtenant had a work permit but no police registration papers. He told him off—a Hungarian and failing to comply with the regulations!—then drew him aside and asked about the people in the main house. At first the man tried to wheedle out of it, but he finally gave in to the lieutenant’s frown.

  “You know the type. Rolling in money. Don’t care much for us Hungarians. Lost their daughter not too long ago gunning down some gendarmes.”

  The lieutenant nodded curtly and went outside with his men. The Blams were standing in front of the glassed-in veranda wearing hats, thick winter coats, and high rubber snow boots. The soldiers guarding them had to stamp their feet to keep warm.

  “That’s it for here,” the lieutenant called out. “Lock up the house. We can go.”

  He waited for the command to be carried out, then went out into the street with his two gendarmes, pausing for a moment to watch the four figures—two in formal black, two in uniform—moving across the square. He was impatient—they seemed to be moving inexcusably slowly—but at last they reached the truck and disappeared among the olive uniforms. Two shots rang out. Géczy waited for his men to emerge from the crowd, and when they saw him waiting, they started running. He made a sign for the others to follow and knocked on the door of the next house to be searched.

  The house in Edouard Herriot Street, where Janja’s family lived, was also in line for an identity check and search on the first day of the raid. The patrol in their part of town was led by Police Lieutenant Aladár Szalma, two well-trained policemen, and two members of the reserve forces: a shop assistant from Budapest and a strapping young peasant from northern Hungary. Szalma was a lawyer with a checkered past. Unable to find employment in his field because of the Depression, he had spent most of the thirties moving from one small town to the next as a private tutor to the children of shopowners and landowners and learning to drink on the sly and seduce the more attractive of his charges. When the borders of Hungary were expanded to include Slovakia, he began working for the police. When the borders came to include a part of Romania, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Though calm and collected on the surface, he was in fact quite depraved. Still, he realized at once that the instructions “more a purge than a routine identity check” would end in a massacre, and his besotted but penetrating brain told him that he might one day be called to account for his part in it. As a result, he decided to place as great a distance as possible between himself and the dirty mission at hand and, insofar as he could, to keep his two men from it. As always when they were on a field mission, he instructed them to keep both canteens full and to take over the inspection of the citizens’ documents—his eyes had a tendency to blur, he told them—though he assumed the documents would be in order. He left the searching to the older of the reservists, the Budapest shop assistant, whose overeager, doglike enthusiasm and crazed impatience for the raid to begin showed him to be mentally unbalanced. Thus Szalma devised a double plan: the identity check run by himself and having virtually no consequences and the shop assistant’s hysterical search through every nook and cranny of every house and resulting in either nothing suspicious or in the discovery that under a bed or wardrobe, or in an attic behind some old furniture, there was a pistol or rifle or a whole cache of weapons. The moment the shop assistant deduced from Szalma’s conspicuous laxity that all decisions about guilt would be his and his alone, he began seeing himself as a champion of the truth. Having served one master or another since his youth, he seized this long-awaited opportunity to get even with the high and mighty. He also took revenge as a spurned suitor, separating or destroying young couples still basking in the warmth of conjugal bliss or exacting their gratitude for pardoning them on account of their newlywed status, depending on whether he felt they had had enough of each other or were still desirous of pleasure and possession. And so it happened that the owners of the house where Janja’s family lived, a well-to-do, flamboyantly mustached farmer and his rosy-cheeked, buxom wife—as well as the lame carpenter and his wife and child from the courtyard—were hauled off, while Janja’s mother, brother, and younger sister were spared. But when the patrol reached the neighboring Margetić Street the following evening, Janja’s elder sister and her twenty-year-old electrician husband were accused of harboring weapons and sent to the roundup patrol, and the roundup patrol took them to the cemetery with hundreds of others and executed them.

  Karadjordje Street, which ran from the center of town to its outermost limits, was divided by the raid’s strategists into two sections; the outer section, which included the house where Čutura’s family lived, was assigned to Lieutenant Désberényi of the gendarmerie. Tall, dark, and handsome, a career officer and, at twenty-six, the first in his class to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant, Désber
ényi had had experience dealing with recalcitrant populations in both Slovakia and Romania. Moreover, he had had the luck to be assigned three gendarmes, one of whom was a sergeant and two of whom had served in the newly acquired territories for years. Only the patrol’s fifth member, a corporal from the reserves, was a rookie and recently transferred to the Bačka. Désberényi immediately gave him the job of standing watch outside the houses being searched.

  Realizing that he would be unable to proceed effectively without a handle on the situation, the lieutenant moved into the courtyard kitchen of a house belonging to a Hungarian and ordered the sergeant to find him an informer. The man came up with a grubby, light-haired nineteen-year-old from the neighborhood, a half German, who had been convicted several times of theft before the Occupation. Désberényi sat him down in the kitchen and gave him to understand that he was aware of his past and in the current reign of law and order he could have him put to death without anyone’s being the wiser. However, he also offered the deathly pale youth the path to redemption: join the patrol and supply it with information about the inhabitants of each house before they were questioned. The young man shrugged and consented.

  The first thing Désberényi learned from the sergeant when the patrol went out into the morning frost was the unpleasant fact that it was impossible to establish contact with the roundup patrol, because as the result of a foulup only one had been assigned to the entire stretch of Karadjordje Street and it had been posted closer to the center of town. He considered asking headquarters to intervene but decided against it: it would only drag things out. Instead, he would take the liquidation of suspicious elements upon himself and present the execution list to the roundup patrol after the fact, thereby giving further proof of his gift for leadership.