The Book of Blam Read online

  Off they went on their rounds. Even before entering a house, Désberényi decided the fate of its inhabitants on the basis of information provided by his informer. He left the informer outside with the corporal from the reserves—who, besides standing guard, was now required to keep the execution list—went in with his gendarmes, and read the documents, not so much to check their veracity as to confirm the identity of the condemned, whom he then handed over to the men to be shot. They reached the Krstić household on the second afternoon. Désberényi had received a particularly detailed report on the Krstić family from their young neighbor: two brothers had been taken prisoner, and another, a recent graduate, had been killed in a skirmish with gendarmes. They entered the courtyard, and Désberényi ordered the family to line up in front of the house according to age: the mother, the two daughters, and the remaining son of fourteen. He took the documents from the elder Čutura sister, set aside the mother’s baptismal certificate and police registration, and read the names on the other documents aloud, waiting for each person to respond. That done, the gendarmes ordered the mother back into the house and took the three children to the far end of the courtyard. But the old woman, having heard shots all that day and the day before, guessed what was going on and instead of following orders rushed after her children. There was a scuffle, one gendarme striking her in the groin with his rifle butt, the other two hurling themselves at the children, who were trying to come to her aid. “Enough!” the lieutenant shouted and made it clear with a wave of the hand that the old woman was to be taken out with the others. One of the gendarmes picked her up, and they all walked through the courtyard to the garden fence, where the gendarmes lined them up as they had in front of the house. Then they moved back and took aim. Three shots rang out, and the boy and the younger girl fell to the ground; then another three shots, and Mrs. Krstić and her elder daughter, who had clasped her mother to her, fell together. The lieutenant went up to them and, turning all of them over on their backs with his foot, established that they were dead. Then he ordered that the bodies be taken to the gate so the roundup patrol could find them easily. He placed the old woman’s documents with the rest and handed them to the reservist so he could add the names to his list.

  The search patrol did not call on the Krkljuš family until the third day of the raid, a delay that saved all their lives but Slobodan’s. The gendarme captain in charge was a stocky, blue-eyed, Magyarized German with a droopy red mustache. He regarded the raid as a way of settling accounts with any member of the population who was neither German nor Hungarian, because he considered the existence of such people on the territory of the newly expanded Hungarian state contrary to nature. After checking the family’s papers and giving the apartment a superficial search, he ordered them to put on their coats, for “further investigation,” and sent them under escort to wait at the corner, because the truck assigned to his territory was unable to take care of all his suspects, given his single, ethnic criterion and the speed of his work. When the number of suspects grew to twenty or so, two armed soldiers prodded them into action and led them through the streets on foot. On the way they passed other patrols, trucks that other frightened suspects were climbing into, and, at various crossroads, piles of corpses in the snow. After crossing the center of town and a neighborhood of newly built houses, they turned down a newly paved road that went to the public beach on the Danube. The road was dark with crowds pressed together in rows of four, guarded by soldiers on either side and facing the river, which was blocked in the distance by a row of changing cabins as white as the snow around them. Once the small column the Krkljuš family was in joined this large one, the two soldiers from the roundup patrol reported to the commander of the escort patrol and returned to the center of town.

  After all the ominous scenes they had witnessed on the way, the Krkljušes were almost happy to have reached a destination, any destination, together and in one piece. Despite the guards’ strict injunction against talking, they expressed their relief by asking one another whether they were cold and lamenting that they had not dressed more warmly.

  Suddenly they heard shots and a burst of machine-gun fire down in front. Silence returned, but just as they began to recover, the column moved forward. When it came to a halt after ten or so steps, they strained their necks and asked the people in front what was going on. The responses were mixed, but a rumor spread through the column that, contrary to what they had been told, there was no “further investigation” at the beach, that people were being shot. Everyone was frightened. Mr. Krkljuš, gathering his courage and his knowledge of Hungarian, politely told the nearest guard that he had done an apprenticeship in Budapest and served in the Hungarian army and so was here by mistake. When ten or twelve others expressed similar concerns, the soldier, overwhelmed, stepped back, raised his gun, and threatened to fire into the column unless they shut their mouths that instant. Mrs. Krkljuš and her son Slobodan pulled Mr. Krkljuš back into the column, begging him to calm down or he would cause more harm than good. Again they heard shooting and machinegun fire, and again the column inched forward.

  The cold was now making itself felt. The soldiers stamped their feet in the snow, slapped their sides under their armpits, paced back and forth, but the people in the column could do nothing but stand or, when a gap opened up between them and the row in front, move forward. From time to time the machine gun up ahead—closer now, and clearer and louder—fired its hurried bursts, or a single shot rang out, but then whole minutes passed when only the murmur of the crowd was audible, though interrupted now and then by a child crying when its mother grew too tired to hold it and passed it on to another pair of arms. People stared at one another in horror, wondering whether what awaited them was actually possible. They could not accept it: there had to be some kind of further investigation, and they would pass muster, their documents were in order, though they were puzzled why no one seemed to be coming back from the investigation, not this way at least. Maybe some other way.

  With the next round of machine-gun fire they heard—for the first time, because they were close enough now—a scream, a single scream coming from the same direction. Their eyes filled with terror as they instinctively sought one another, joining arms, pressing closer together to fend off the shivering that came of cold and fear. Step by step they approached the entrance to the beach. Part of the column ahead of them had been checked; behind them the column kept growing, like a human conveyor belt, like grain walking to the mill.

  A little girl who felt sick was taken by her mother to the side of the road to vomit, but a guard ran up immediately and chased them back. The stream from the girl’s mouth spattered the shoes of the people closest to her. Then an old man lost his balance and fell facedown in the snow, his black hat rolling from his gray head. The same guard ran up and ordered him to stand, poking him with his boot. Slobodan Krkljuš bent down and slipped his hands under the man’s arms to pick him up, but the guard yelled at him to get back in line. Either Slobodan did not understand or the impulse to help was too great, because he stayed with the old man, finally managing to lift him out of the snow. The soldier tore the rifle from his shoulder, took aim, and fired twice in succession. Slobodan collapsed on top of the old man, and the two of them lay motionless. Mrs. Krkljuš tried to throw herself on her son, but at the sound of the shots a group of soldiers came running and formed a circle around the bodies, threatening to shoot anyone who came near, and Mr. Krkljuš and Aca caught her and held her back from certain death. The column moved forward, closing ranks around the corpses and rendering them invisible. Mr. Krkljuš and Aca propped up the sobbing, semiconscious woman and led her forward, step by step. They were numb now and cured of all illusion: they were being thrust into an abyss of pure horror; they no longer noticed what was going on around them.

  The roar of a motor approached, and a car full of officers sped past the column, raising great clouds of snow. It pulled up in front of the changing sheds. A few people in the column stood on
their toes to get a better view. Soon everyone, prompted by the excited whisperings of the few, followed suit and saw the officers jumping out of the car and going up to the patrol commander, who gave a stiff, nearly trembling salute. The officers exchanged some words with him, and he turned in the direction of the beach and disappeared in double time behind the white cabins. The people in the column failed to grasp or dared not hope what the commander’s disappearance might mean until they heard “Left turn!” and the order to return to town.

  They ran. They ran and pushed and shoved and sobbed—old men, old women, women with children in their arms. They ran, leaving the now silent beach behind, avoiding the corpses strewn along the roadside. Mrs. Krkljuš tore out of the crowd and flung herself on Slobodan, who was lying on his back at the edge of a ditch next to the old man, whose hat was now resting on his chest, courtesy of one of the soldiers, but the column forced them on, and the guards shouted threats, and Mr. Krkljuš and Aca again grabbed her and rejoined the running crowd.

  They ran until they reached the Cultural Center building, where the soldiers tried to reassemble them. But the people bounded up the steps, stormed the door, and crowded in to where it was warm, human, familiar, dropping to the marble floor as if it were soft and comfortable. Soon loudspeakers above their heads began to buzz, and someone made a deliberate, formal statement to the effect that the raid was over, many dangerous elements had been uncovered and duly punished, and the citizens present there had been found innocent and would therefore continue to enjoy their constitutional rights and were free to go home.

  A murmur of disbelief soon turned into cheers and applause. People hugged one another, kissed one another, wept, dispersing slowly at first, then with greater urgency. The Krkljuš family wanted to find an official with whom to lodge a complaint about their grievous loss, but, swept along by the crowd, they were unable to stop until the exit, where a soldier was trying to keep order. The soldier refused to listen to them and even threatened to shoot if they did not leave immediately. And in fact sporadic shots could still be heard. Mr. Krkljuš and Aca looked at each other, then took Mrs. Krkljuš under the arms again and led her down the stairs, promising that the moment the shooting stopped, they would go and find Slobodan’s body. The promise could not be kept, however, because that very night the army collected all the corpses in the city, including those on the road to the beach, and either buried them or threw them into the Danube. All that remained were the bloodstains, and they only until the next snow.

  The Mercury, like all buildings on the side of Old Boulevard with odd numbers, fell under jurisdiction of a search patrol led by Police Lieutenant Nándor Varga, the tall, young, blue-eyed scion of a landowning family. A gambler and drinker and man of limited intelligence but strong convictions, Varga scorned the plebeian awakening of his people under German patronage and resisted it with lordly arrogance. Throughout the raid he strictly followed the regulations he had sworn to uphold and therefore sent for further investigation only those civilians whose papers and oral statements failed to satisfy those regulations. The general’s reproaches, which Varga’s meager reports gave rise to every evening, he heard out at attention and in silence but drew no moral from them, convinced that they did nothing to preserve order. He had sent none of the hundred or so motley residents of the Mercury for further investigation, but that had been partly the doing of Predrag Popadić.

  What happened was that on the morning of 21 January, when news of the curfew spread among the residents, two early risers, Doselić the pharmacist and Kreuzhaber the furrier, ran into each other in the corridor and, having exchanged a few words of alarm, decided to turn to Popadić on the third floor for an explanation and for protection: he was close to the regime yet a Serb and a gentleman. They had to ring his doorbell a long time: Popadić had been up until dawn at a patron saint’s day celebration (Saint John). Nor was he alone but with the young grass widow of a restaurant owner, a Serb conscripted to a labor battalion. Popadić had been caught unawares by the news of the raid, but no sooner did he learn of it from Doselić and Kreuzhaber in his entrance hall than he grasped its scope and significance, remembering the talk of reprisals that had been bandied about in official circles during the previous few days. He also foresaw the unfortunate consequences that could result should the woman in his apartment be discovered and her presence there wrongly interpreted. He assured Doselić and Kreuzhaber that he would put in a good word for them, sent them on their way, woke the young woman and told her to get into her clothes, shaved and dressed in haste, and went downstairs to see the custodian, who along with his large family (a wife, two sons, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson) were also up and about. He drank the black coffee offered him (the custodians all loved him, big tipper that he was), smoked a cigarette, and shared a few comforting words with some tenants who had come to find out what was going on. The custodian’s younger son, who had been sent to keep watch in the corridor, ran in to report that the police were at the door.

  Popadić threw on his coat and hat and thus appeared in impeccable civilian attire before Nándor Varga as the custodian let the policeman in. He bowed, raised his hat, introduced himself in fluent if somewhat rough Hungarian—which Hungarians from the mother country, in Varga’s case at least, smiled upon as the attempt by a savage to acquire the rudiments of civilization—and begged Varga’s kind permission to present some documents of a rather confidential nature that might facilitate the delicate operation Varga and his men were about to perform. The lieutenant gave an impassive nod and agreed to leave his men in the corridor and enter the custodian’s parlor. There Popadić took the following documents from his pocket and one by one handed them to the lieutenant: a letter from the commander of the gendarmerie authorizing the publication of Naše novine under his, Popadić’s editorship; a pass granting Popadić free movement throughout the occupied southern territory; and finally—what really won Varga over—membership cards for two closed societies: the Catholic Circle and the Association of Christian Merchants. Taking advantage of the impression he saw he had made, Popadić requested permission to say a few words about the Mercury’s residents. They were all, he was firmly convinced, the most loyal and devoted of citizens; he was willing to vouch for each of them personally. The lieutenant smiled, raised his fine eyebrows, handed him back the papers, and coolly invited him, if he so desired, to accompany the patrol and make certain it did its work correctly. Thus Popadić became a participant in the raid (which, as some wicked tongues later had it, made him a traitor), though in the unconventional role of protector.

  Before each door, Popadić managed to find something positive to whisper to the lieutenant about the tenants, in the vein of the human-interest story, which he had long ceased to write but which his optimistic nature continued to inspire. Then he would retire to the far end of the corridor or terrace so as not to disturb the men in the performance of their duty or to overstep the bounds of decorum. He reentered the conversation only if a problem arose: a document wanting, an inappropriate answer because of inadequate linguistic knowledge. Blam—who answered the doorbell, deathly pale, together with a wide-eyed, incredulous Janja—Popadić described to the lieutenant as the offspring of an honest family he had known well before the war, “one of those young Jews able to adapt: witness his choice of a Christian spouse.” When they came to the third floor, Popadić unlocked the door to his own apartment and urged the lieutenant—though by then they were not only colleagues but, he hoped, friends as well—to go ahead, to do his duty. The lieutenant thanked him, walked into the entrance hall, gave it a perfunctory glance, and came out with a smile, saying that unfortunately he hadn’t time for a proper visit, but once his tiresome obligations were over, he would definitely give him a ring. (He was in fact true to his word.) Popadić bowed and moved on with him. After seeing the lieutenant and his men to the main door, which the custodian, crossing himself, locked after them, Popadić returned to his apartment, where he found his sweetheart perched on the edge of
the bathtub in her coat and scarf, pressing her black patent-leather handbag to her breast.

  Chapter Twelve

  LILI EHRLICH SENT a number of letters to Blam after the war, but since she addressed them to Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, where other people were living by that time, and because she wrote the name of the addressee in its German form, Blahm (the letters were in German), none of them were delivered; they all went back to the sender marked Unknown/Inconnu.

  The following are Lili’s letters, in translation:

   Tivoli near Rome, 1 November 1944

  I am writing this letter, darling, in the hope it will reach you, which will mean that you have come out of these awful years alive. How could it be otherwise? You’ll let me know at once that my intuition hasn’t deceived me. You will, won’t you?

  I can’t believe that it’s over, that I can move about, breathe freely, that I’m no longer threatened with death or persecution. We’ve had an exceptionally beautiful autumn here. It’s not the slightest bit cold. The leaves in the many parks are just beginning to turn. Papa and I walk for hours through the hills surrounding the town. Yes, I need motion and freedom: we spent the last four months in a camp. We didn’t have too bad a time of it, but barbed wire everywhere you looked—that I will never forget. Now we have private accommodations, but Papa still brings home food from the camp, where he gives English lessons. You know how capable he is. He gets so much food, we can give some to our landlords, an elderly couple that might otherwise starve to death. Try to picture them: he a retired professor of literature who has been totally blind for eight years, she reading him his favorite authors, Dante and Tasso, every night by the oil lamp (we have no electricity). I often sit and listen, and though I don’t understand a thing, I enjoy the melody of the marvelous language.

  Write back the minute you receive this, darling, and pack your belongings. I don’t know whether you were wrong not to come with us four years ago. Maybe you were spared many of the trials we’ve gone through, but don’t think twice now. We’re free here, and I await you with open arms. I long for you as I never have before, though I’ve done nothing else these four years. I will never, can never forget the days we spent together, and although we were on the run, Papa and I, and in danger, those were the most beautiful days of my life, and all thanks to you, darling, to your warm eyes, your quiet smile, your restless hands. I long to have you by my side, I long to touch you, hold you. Come!