The Book of Blam Read online

  I don’t even ask if the others are alive and well. Uncle Vilim. Aunt Blanka. Estera (who is no longer a little girl, I’m sure). I’m selfish, I know. I think only of you. I love you so much.

  Come, come at once! Or at least let me hear from you! Send a telegram if you can!

  Hugs and kisses from your impatient

  Lili

  Tivoli near Rome, 26 December 1944

  Dearest,

  I can’t tell you how crushed I am: the letter I sent you two months ago came back the day before yesterday. What can that mean? That you’re out of town? That you’ve been deported and haven’t returned? That you’ve moved? I don’t dare think of all the awful things likely to keep me from finding you. I will simply keep looking tirelessly, undaunted, until I succeed. I’ve been told I can send this letter via the Red Cross and that the American forces are helping people to locate lost relatives. You can be sure I will try everything. But if you receive my letter first (because things may have changed in the meantime), let me hear from you at once.

  Yours,

  Lili

  Biel, 23 March 1946

  Dear Mirko,

  It’s been raining for days, and I sit here in despair. Perhaps I have no right to despair, perhaps I’ll suddenly find some trace of you, but when, I wonder, when? I keep thinking of the past, the irretrievable past. I think of my dear mother, who died so young and full of life. I think of you, who filled my life with love for one brief interval and whom I left behind. Why did I leave you? Why must I leave everyone I love? Why does my hunger for life, for survival, keep me from happiness, which, brief as it may be, is possibly worth more than the life now facing me?

  I fear the life now facing me. It is a cold life and will grow colder. Perhaps the cold comes from Switzerland with its mountains covering the sky, its endless winter rains, its dull, sober people who know nothing of warmth, desire, and love. Every other week we are visited by an immigration office official who gives us forms to complete, the same forms each time. Where and when were you born? Why have you entered the country? How do you make your living? Do you plan to stay? If not, when do you plan to leave? Do I plan? What do I plan? The only thing they don’t ask is whether I plan to kill myself and if so when and in what manner?

  Forgive me for writing you my dark and jumbled thoughts, darling. It’s not so bad. We’re fine. Papa has a job in a local sewing machine factory. He is well paid and well respected, and we have everything we need. We’ve taken a beautiful apartment, and soon we’re going to buy a car (a used car for now), which means we’ll be able to wander to our hearts’ content.

  Spring is in the air, I can feel it in my bones, and maybe the reason I’m so out of sorts is that it refuses to come. I do so need sun and motion! And I need you, my darling! You have no idea how much I think of you, how often I dream of you, dream of you coming to me—sometimes with a slightly ironic smile because I’m so impatient—and embracing me as you once did. But then I wake up and I’m alone, you are not next to me, and I realize I don’t even know where you are and am haunted by thoughts of the most terrifying possibilities. Forgive me, but what can I do? The letters I sent you from Italy (you still don’t know where we were when the war ended) were returned to me, and all my inquiries through the Red Cross and the embassy have been in vain. Still, I will never, can never believe that the end has come. No, you are too much a part of me, we are two halves of a single body, and one part cannot be separated from the other without the other’s knowing it, feeling it. You’re alive, aren’t you? You’ll let me hear from you at once. You will, won’t you?

  I haven’t the courage to finish and send off this letter. It’s been sitting on my desk for three days now. Do you see what I’m afraid of?

  The weather is nice. There is dew shining on the grass when I walk Papa to the factory in the morning. Each time I come home, I think I’m going to find you in my room, just sitting there and smiling. I’m writing these last lines in a café, and I’ll rush home as soon as I send off the letter. But even if I don’t find you there and even if this letter too comes back, I’ll write you another and another and I won’t stop until I’ve found you. I want you to know that, if you receive these lines. Ever, anywhere. I shall always wait for you. Write me at once.

  Yours,

  Lili

  Hamburg, 7 June 1949

  Dearest Mirko,

  I’ve decided to write to you immediately because I’m happy, and superstitious enough to hope that one happy event will lead to another. I arrived here yesterday from Biel, and right after breakfast—because I had a nine-o’clock appointment—I went off to the Grammophongesellschaft, where I had a personal interview with the head of production. Papa has invented a kind of filing cabinet for records. I don’t know how it is in Yugoslavia, but here record collecting is all the rage and people are making record libraries the way they used to make book libraries. Anyway, Papa has come up with a system of shelves that allows you to choose the record you want to play by pushing a button. It took a lot of work (and money) to perfect it and put together a prototype in a factory in Bern. But now we’re out of the woods! The man I spoke to has expressed interest in manufacturing and marketing the “Ehrlich cabinet” and is drawing up a contract that will give us 1.5% of the profits. (Papa isn’t feeling well, which is why I’m here on my own, but I’m sure that as usual it comes from his working too hard and that the good news will put him back on his feet.)

  I was so excited and happy when I left the Grammophongesellschaft office that I had the sudden feeling I was going to find you, so I made for the nearest café to write to you again. I simply can’t imagine that this letter will fail to reach you now that after all these years of deprivation we have finally latched on to something solid. Actually we made a big mistake by not coming straight to Germany after the war. We both knew it, we even talked it over, but whenever it came time to take the final step, one of us would find some “but,” which as you can guess always boiled down to the fact that we had suffered so from Germany and the Germans. Now that I’m here, though, I see it’s the only place for us. There’s nothing to remind us of the old hatreds. The people I meet on the train, in the street, the Grammophongesellschaft—they’re all so open and optimistic and full of energy, and even though there’s rubble everywhere, there’s also building everywhere, the streets are full of life, the shopwindows full of goods, the service in taxis, on the phone, and in cafés is excellent. And the language! After all that murky Swiss dialect I am finally hearing the pure, flowing German my dear departed mother taught me. I feel revitalized, reborn.

  You must be laughing at me, darling, because you know I’m over the hill, getting on to thirty like you. Our age is one of the many things we have in common. But the love that binds me to you is as strong as it ever was, perhaps because it has gone unused, unconsumed for so many years and therefore remains as tender and young as we were then. Now I’ll be able to love you full strength, so to speak. Now that we’re mature and have been through so much.

  But here I am sad again, ready to burst into tears. I think of you as my child, to clutch to my breast, to warm and nourish, but I have no child, my child was lost to the world, torn out of me, torn out of me by these very people, maybe by the waiter over there with the scar on his forehead, the one watching me out of the corner of his eye. Where are you, darling? Am I ever going to find you? If Papa and I move here—and we’ve got to, it’s the chance of a lifetime—years and years will go by before we get German citizenship and I have the right to travel freely and look for you. Or will God have mercy and will you answer this letter? My heart is pounding like a hammer at the thought. I can just picture you receiving it, coming home and picking it up, opening it, smiling, nodding, and ten days later I have your answer. Don’t worry, even if we leave Biel for good, I’ll leave a forwarding address with the landlord. He’s very trustworthy. Your letter will find me. I’ll tell everybody and leave the address at the post office too. All you have to do is write! Then
we can talk it all through. There must be a way to bring you here. Don’t worry. I’ll see to everything myself, because my only desire is to have you here by my side, for good, till the end, till death, my only love, my husband, brother, and son. You are everything to your loving

  Lili

  P.S. Write at once. Even if your life has changed and my outpourings sound odd to you. Just let me know you’re alive. I leave for Biel in an hour and a half to give Papa the good news and wind things up there.

  West Berlin, 25 June 1951

  Dearest,

  I met a Yugoslav here today, a nice person with a lot of go, a businessman who has come to set up a diplomatic mission. Naturally I was thrilled to learn where he came from, and I took the first opportunity to tell him about you and about my unsuccessful attempts to establish your whereabouts. He gave his word first, to pressure your diplomatic representatives, with whom he has close ties, into moving the search forward, and then, when he gets home (in seven weeks), to mobilize his friends in Novi Sad and let me know the moment he finds out anything about you. You can imagine how excited I am. No matter what channels I try—diplomatic, commercial, military—all I get are promises. Maybe personal contact will break through the wall of indifference. The moment this ray of hope appeared, I just had to sit down and write to you, as I have so often before and as I would do much more often were it not for the fear of failure, which unfortunately so far seems justified. In any case, here is my address, and the moment you receive this letter (if you receive it), let me know. And of course let me know if Herr Momir Stoikovitsch—that’s the name of the nice businessman—finds you seven endless weeks from now. I’ve loved you and waited so long! I have no one but you. Papa died last year of a heart attack. I’m all alone in the world. I’m in Berlin now. I run a small jewelry shop. I don’t own it, but I make enough to live on. Enough for us to live on, at least for a while. But what does that matter. Just let me know you’re alive.

  Love,

  Lili

  Chapter Thirteen

  I WISH I’D put my galoshes on,” Blam thinks under his umbrella, watching the raindrops sparkle on the semicircular tops of his black shoes. He wriggles his toes and feels the moisture seeping through the shiny patent leather and into the loosely woven fabric of his socks. He meditates on the futility of the layers in which man chooses to wrap himself, on how poorly and provisorily they protect him from the wet, the cold or heat, and the wind: all they need is a slight detail of the unforeseen—like having to stand in the rain at a burial service—and they fall apart and leave him in the hands of the enemy. He twists his head and, peering under the rims of umbrellas crowded together like bats, finds the coffin, now nailed shut and covered by a black pall embroidered with a silver cross, on its bier in front of the chapel. The body of Aca Krkljuš, lying in it motionless, washed clean (Blam saw his face in the chapel; it was free of blemish), would soon, the moment it was deposited in the moist earth, begin to unite—through the invisible pores in the wood and the glue, through the holes made by the nails, through Krkljuš’s clothes and the entire fabric of his body—with the cold, black, slimy juices of nature, eaten away by them and eating away at them.

  Blam shudders, but at his own frailty, not his friend’s. He cannot grasp Krkljuš’s frailty, whose death he still perceives as an external matter: an unexpected turn of events, or the dive of an acrobat that is cause more for amazement or admiration than for horror. He feels the need to join the funeral procession, to tug at somebody’s sleeve and mention a fact that may finally make sense of the acrobatic feat. “I saw him only a month ago. He was in perfect health, full of plans . . .” But he senses that it would sound like a cliché, and besides it is all wrong, because what was unusual about Krkljuš’s fate was not so much the short transition between health and death as the transition itself, the complete surprise of it. When he hears the word “hospital” in the whispering of two former schoolmates (his and Aca’s) in the row in front of him, he moves closer to their wet coats.

  “It was his liver,” the thin, stringy-necked Tima Spasojević says in his bass voice, leaning over the curve in his umbrella handle to Dragan Jović, who is shorter than he.

  “No, jaundice,” Dragan counters immediately. “I have it firsthand. My brother-in-law’s a doctor. There’s been a regular epidemic lately, he says. Krkljuš didn’t have a chance. Two weeks, and he was done for.”

  A murmur runs through the front rows of the crowd, where people are most closely packed. Through the swaying umbrellas Blam can make out the pale, redheaded priest appearing on the threshold of the chapel, followed by the unshaven sacristan holding an umbrella over his head. The procession moves forward. The priest throws back his head until his sparse, reddish beard sticks out horizontally. He rounds his lips, puffs out his chest, and releases a solemn, stately chant that the gap-toothed sacristan joins and doubles in a bleating voice. The murmur dies down at once, and several thin, wailing women’s voices come to the fore. From the archaic but clearly enunciated words of the chant, though even more from the sobs that it calls forth, Blam concludes that the priest is bidding farewell to the deceased in the name of the mourners. Although he too is deeply moved by the terrible finality of the farewell, he is overcome by embarrassment when he notices people all around him crossing themselves. Blam looks at them furtively and wonders what to do: if he joins them, they may think he is a hypocrite showing off his last-minute conversion; if he does nothing, he will seem to be demonstrating an obstinate fidelity to his former and very different faith. Yet there is nothing of either faith—former or new—in him: apart from a general superstitious fear of death he cannot recall a single detail of either of them, a single detail of the ritual. The last time he was at a funeral was when his grandmother died and he was only a child. All his other relatives disappeared at the same time and there were no funerals.

  He suddenly wonders—he has never thought about it before—whether a funeral has any meaning, that is, whether there is any real difference between being buried or not being buried, between being tossed nameless and alone into the mute maw of nature and this group farewell with chanting and wailing, so solemn, so formal, a combination of invoking the deceased, taking leave of him, and perhaps even longing to join him. Of course, symbols have a calming effect on both the dying and those who mourn them, but Blam is not interested in psychology; he is interested in the existence or nonexistence of an essential difference. Would he feel different about his parents, about Estera, about other relatives, or friends, like Aca’s brother, Slobodan, if they were buried here, in a cemetery, rather than having been tossed into a pit somewhere? Nor is he interested in the comfort that comes of a place you can go to once or twice a year or every month and mumble a few prayers—or not, if you are atheist, as he is. No, he is after something deeper. Would they seem more real to him if he knew where they lay? No, not seem, because that would mean going back to illusion and deceit. Would they be more real? Would he be able to derive strength from them, or would that strength be self-deception? Illusion, illusion everywhere, even in this painful question! He tries to picture their graves—stone after stone, all in a row and surrounded by grass—and himself standing and facing them, but it gives him no insight. They are silent now, like Aca Krkljuš, though it happened long ago and long before their natural time, though what is natural time, if Aca reached his because of a congenital disease or drinking too much? Death could easily have come to him earlier, if instead of his deaf brother he was the one to kneel by the old man who fainted, or if his section of the column had simply reached the Danube before the order to stop was given. He would have been just as dead as he is now, but an older corpse, eaten away by the water, the slime, the fish, while today he is being turned over to the descendants of those fish who were deprived of his body then. Or, rather, to those worms. Fish or worms—is that the only difference?

  The umbrellas in front begin to sway again, breaking the raindrops’ monotonous fall, scattering them this way and tha
t; the coffin under the black cloth bobs a little in the hands and then on the shoulders of the four pallbearers, floating in the air under the crowns of trees whose green merges with the white, gray, and pink rocks of the woods ahead. The people are confused when the procession makes a turn, but the priest rallies them, showing them the way, and moves on with the sacristan in a slow, dignified pace behind the coffin. They are followed by two hunched women in black, Mrs. Krkljuš and a relative (or a neighbor, if she has no relatives), and two men in black coats supporting them under their elbows, then two more men and two women. Old Mr. Krkljuš is not among them; he is at home, Blam assumes, too weak to move. Blam pictures him slouching listless in his chair, his head sunken on his chest, his eyes fixed on the floor, eyes that think rather than see, think of what is happening to his son, though the old man may have made his peace by now with not seeing the reality of his son in the hospital bed, ill and dying. Aca was simply taken from him one day, and now Mr. Krkljuš no longer has him; Aca went almost as fast as Slobodan all those years ago. Mr. Krkljuš has never seen Slobodan’s grave, and he will never see Aca’s; he seems condemned to his chair forever. So the murdered and the dead by disease can end up very much alike.