The Book of Blam Read online

  “What are you driving at, Mr.. . .? I have no . . .”

  “I told you Funkenstein has nothing to do with it. And don’t try to run. I’ve got you where I want you. And you’re not so strong as you used to be, Kocsis. That is your name, is it not? Lajos Kocsis? . . .”

  “It is, but I refuse to . . .”

  “You cannot refuse anything once you are in the power of another. You’ve known that truth for a long time now. Since the day you joined the Arrow Cross. No, quiet! I think I hear something.”

  “Help!”

  “Shut up, you fool! One more sound out of you and I’ll twist your neck, not your arm! Can’t you see you’re trapped?”

  “No violence, please, Comrade Krstić!”

  “You keep quiet too, Funkenstein. Now would you look behind those bushes and see if Blam is coming? And hurry him along if he is.”

  “He’s coming.”

  “Good. This way, Blam, this way. I want you next to me, both of you. You will now join me in judging this bastard, who, as you can see, would do anything to get away from us.”

  “Mr. Blam!”

  “Mr. Kocsis. I’m sure I don’t know . . .”

  “Well, I’m sure you will as soon as the trial begins. Lajos Kocsis, you stand here. In the name of this citizen’s court I hereby accuse you of having denounced and defamed Blanka Blam and Vilim Blam, the parents of Miroslav Blam, here present, on 22 January 1942, as a result of which they were shot to death. You are therefore an accessory to their murder. I recommend that you be shot to death. Are there any questions?”

  “But that’s . . .”

  “Just a minute, Blam! I think we should give the floor to the accused first. Have you anything to say for yourself, Mr. Kocsis?”

  “This whole thing is a farce! I don’t know what you’re talking about! I never denounced anybody!”

  “Is that so? Then I’ll have to refresh your memory for you. Fact by fact. Tell me, do you deny that on 22 January 1942, the second day of the Novi Sad raid, you were in the residence of your mistress, Erzsébet Csokonay, number 7 Vojvoda Šupljikac Square?”

  “I do not.”

  “And do you deny that on the aforementioned day a patrol of gendarmes and soldiers entered the aforementioned house and carried out several searches?”

  “No.”

  “Do you deny that the patrol entered the Blam residence first?”

  “No.”

  “Do you deny that after searching the Blam residence, they entered the residence of Erzsébet Csokonay?”

  “No.”

  “Do you deny that the patrol leader asked your opinion of the Blam family.”

  “Yes! Yes, I do!”

  “Nonsense! You’re lying! Which is the clearest proof of your guilt! All the patrols questioned their countrymen about people of other nationalities. Now you tell us what you said about the Blams to the patrol leader, Kocsis, or else!”

  “I didn’t say a thing, not a thing! I swear! I said they were fine, upstanding citizens.”

  “You’re lying again, Kocsis! Which confirms our worst suspicions. Because if that was what you said, the Blams would be alive today. Alive, understand? Their death is proof of your crime.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You caused the death of two innocent people! You fanned national hatred, intolerance, blood lust, racial insanity; you sought revenge and booty; you aided fascism to cut down two of its opponents. In their name and the name of thousands of other raid victims I pronounce you guilty and sentence you to be shot to death. Here is a pistol, Blam. You will carry out the sentence.”

  “You must be crazy!”

  “Take the pistol, I tell you. Take it and shoot him. Don’t be afraid. Nobody will ever know.”

  “Have pity on me!”

  “Yes, Čutura! Let him go. Please let him go.”

  “It’s too late. We’ll end up in prison if we let him go now. Shoot him, I tell you!”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re the only one who can. And you must. You’re the only one free of guilt: Funkenstein and I lured him here under false pretenses. We could be arrested. So you’ve got to shoot. If only for our sake.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Look, Blam, I’m warning you. This is your last chance to be a man. Either you kill him, or I hand the pistol over to him and have him kill you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Is that your final word?”

  “It is.”

  “All right, then. Let’s see what he wants to do. Here’s the pistol, Kocsis. It’s loaded. Shoot Blam.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s the only way you can stay alive. Shoot Blam. Good. Shoot him again. I can’t believe it. You killed him, and it only took you two bullets . . . You know, Kocsis, I’m beginning to respect you. I even think you’ve earned the right to live.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  BLAM IS LISTENING to music. He is leaning back in his seat in one of the middle rows of the Novi Sad synagogue, completely at ease, surrendering to the tones that enter and pervade his being like a second bloodstream. The melody caresses, quivers, thunders, evoking images that to Blam’s captivated mind appear random, even chaotic, but are in fact causally connected. He sees himself running bare-armed and bare-legged through a gently undulating meadow into an evening still sunny yet cool; he feels the tall, firm grasses lashing against his calves, while from a distance comes the ringing of bells, spurring him to run faster. It is the memory of a late summer spent in the mountains, when school had begun but he was convalescing after a bout with pneumonia. He encounters a hazy warm female whose face he cannot see but whose breath, sweet as anise, he can smell. He sinks into a raging torrent, leaps into towering, chalk-white waves, struggles, rises and falls, but never tires, merely fades into the roar tearing him apart. He is perfectly aware that these images are no more than the play of his senses, because his music-glutted senses continue to deliver—with less force, perhaps, though with equal clarity—information about his surroundings: the domed space high above, the rows of benches filled with hushed people, and on the altar, now a stage, the musicians with their instruments, the Novi Sad Chamber Orchestra, producing the notes and through them the images, emotions, and thoughts. He can even, should he so desire and without abandoning the play of notes he has succumbed to, follow the course of their making: the conductor waving his arms, the string players hunching over their violins and cellos, the wind players puffing their cheeks out and running their fingers over keys. He can pinpoint odd, amusing details: the trombonist assiduously licking the mouthpiece before putting his pursed lips to it in a kiss, or the long-armed, bald cellist carried away by the rhythm and swaying to and fro like a pendulum, or the conductor going up on his toes, spreading his arms wide and, when his tails fly open, revealing a tightly trousered backside. Ever the observer, Blam takes it all in, but, as always, from a distance, coldly, avoiding the standard reactions of laughter, anger, or malice— as he avoids them in everyday life, because he senses, knows, that this too is a game. Everything here is a game: the powerful tones, the musicians who create them, the audience, the space provided for the music, even the inner experiences triggered in him by the cumulative effect of the notes. None of it is, as in life, irrevocable, fated. For such is the collective covenant, the ancient, mythic, everlasting covenant: that the magic of a harmonious progression of notes should transport us into the world of our impulses and injuries, and that we are unafraid of being led astray by the former or trapped by the latter, like a dream made to order, a dream whose course we ourselves direct.

  THE STRING OF notes comes to an end with the end of the piece, and the magic is rent by silence. But then applause breaks out like a death rattle or like the wail of a newborn wrenched into the world and knowing instinctively that by gaining a full, independent life it is losing the warmth of its mother’s womb. The warmth fades: up on his podium the conductor turns to the rows of benches, bows, wipes the sweat from
his low forehead and fleshy cheeks with a handkerchief, then gives the orchestra the signal to rise and share in the honors. Here below, the people clap, leaning over to one another and exchanging impressions, or stand, impatient to leave the place of harmony destroyed. For they sense that what they are leaving behind is not the musicians but the music, their common cause, without which both performers and audience are superfluous.

  Blam applauds as well, then rises to go out for the intermission. His seat, only a few moments before a haven of secret meditation, is now just a space on a dark-brown wooden bench, angular, hard, coarse to the touch. Moving away from it, he inadvertently bumps into the people inching along ahead of him, and he finds that human contact as distasteful as the contact with the bench. Both are prisons. The people moving along the rows are no longer a faceless crowd drawn here by the rules of music; under the harsh light of the chandelier, their bodies take shape, their features become recognizable: they are now Dr. Such-and-Such and his wife, and that young man with the long hair, he is Professor Futoški’s son, and over there is a man whose shop Blam sometimes patronizes, and if Blam greets him, he will activate the workaday shopkeeper-customer relationship, and the man may well ask whether Blam was satisfied with his latest purchase of lemons or soap.

  To escape that danger, Blam bends his head and gazes down at the feet of his fellow citizens, which he is less likely to recognize than their faces, and hopes that he is less likely to be recognized. But just as he is about to leave the row, what should appear before his lowered eyes like a fish from turbid waters but a beaming, round, shiny face, its eyes wide in joyful recognition. Funkenstein! Is it possible?

  Yes, it is none other than Leon Funkenstein dressed in black from head to foot, standing there waiting for him, hands in pockets, stocky short legs spread wide, firmly planted in the aisle that most of the people are taking to get to the vestibule. There is no trace of the amnesia Blam met with in the Main Square that summer. Funkenstein is festive in his stiff black suit with its somewhat overbold white stripes and white, bannerlike, breast-pocket handkerchief.

  “I kept wondering if it was you,” he says, holding out a warm, fleshy hand. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you at a concert before. Are you a music lover? Are you by yourself?”

  Blam answers in the affirmative, though vaguely, because he is not certain exactly what he is agreeing to in Funkenstein’s outpouring, and Funkenstein takes a ceremonious step back and bows ever so slightly but purposefully, to make room for Blam rather than to let him pass.

  “I adore music!” he announces too loudly, lifting his face to the glittering chandelier, the gilt drapes gracing the walls, the colorful windows reflecting the artificial light against the dark of the night. “I’ve loved it since I was a child. We were poor, you know. My father was a feather merchant, and there were six of us. But we each had a hobby. Mine was music. Our religion teacher—Jolander was his name, you wouldn’t remember him—played the violin, and I decided I would too.” He clicks his tongue in fond remembrance.

  They have passed into the vestibule with its four white marble pillars supporting the choir loft. Funkenstein looks around cheerfully and says, “I think we can smoke here.” He takes a flat silver cigarette case out of his breast pocket, obviously placed there for this occasion. When he opens it, Blam sees that the inside is tarnished and the rubber bands holding together several spindly cigarettes amid much loose tobacco have lost their elasticity.

  “Cigarette?” he asks, and when Blam declines and takes out a pack of his own, he lights Blam’s cigarette and one for himself with a lighter that has suddenly materialized in his hand. “We have time for a stroll,” he says, setting off at a brisk clip through the clusters of people, as if Blam’s acquiescence were a foregone conclusion.

  Blam can do nothing but follow. Funkenstein stands out among the quiet people around them. Blam is put off by the man’s raucous voice and finds his offhanded, pushy manner vulgar and unsuited to the ambience of a place of worship, which, though converted into a concert hall, has retained something of the sanctuary. Can he have adopted such a manner to show that he alone here is not an interloper? Blam senses that that is the case, and it only makes him more uncomfortable. It is as if the two of them have come to the synagogue with the express intention of demonstrating that it belongs to them, the survivors, as a disinherited landowner might visit a castle as part of a tourist group and at a certain point beam confidently and say, “Right! You’ve guessed it. This castle was once mine.” It is as if they have come as a warning or even rebuke: “We aren’t dead. Not all of us. Don’t believe everything you hear. This is our temple. We feel at home here.” Blam does not see how their presence as “former owners” can possibly go unnoticed. He has the impression that when the people around him lean over to one another, they are pointing out the two Jews huddled together, birds of a feather, a living reproach, a memento. He feels he has accidentally joined a crowd chanting a slogan he has no desire to chant and waving a banner—that defiant white banner of a handkerchief fluttering above Funkenstein’s breast pocket with his every step—he has no desire to wave.

  Funkenstein seems to be doing everything to confirm Blam’s impression.

  “That house of yours,” he says for all to hear. “Where did you say it was? Masaryk Square?”

  “No, no,” Blam answers reproachfully. “Vojvoda Šupljikac Square. But that’s over and done with.”

  “Why?” Funkenstein asks, stopping in his tracks and thereby making Blam stop with him. “Tell me. Why?” He starts walking again, mindlessly flicking the ashes of his cigarette on the mosaic floor. “Didn’t you say last time that you had been forced to sell it during the war? Because of the Jewish laws or some such thing.”

  Blam blushes. He knows where the misunderstanding lies, but hasn’t got it in him to straighten the man out. All he says is “No, we weren’t forced into it at all. I only wondered whether my father was paid the money for the house.”

  “Money, money,” says Funkenstein dismissively, completely abandoning the brash attitude he struck in the earlier part of the conversation. “How often we let it buy our silence,” he laments, stressing the “we” to show he takes their common fate for granted. “But there are things money can’t buy. We accept money as reparation for our suffering in the camps; we accept money for our families killed, for the experiments performed on us like guinea pigs. We’re willing to turn anything into money. Even this temple.” He turns on his heels, blowing a thick cloud of smoke up toward the vault, where colorful rosettes in round windows, blinded by the electric light, stare down on them. “We agreed to sell it. And who did we sell it to? An abstract municipal entity that put the money into remodeling and didn’t pay us a blessed thing!”

  “But there are so few of us left we couldn’t possibly have kept it up on our own,” says Blam, using the argument he heard while negotiations were still in progress. “Besides, it has wonderful acoustics, and now at least there’s a place for us to hear music.”

  “Acoustics, acoustics!” Funkenstein waves what is left of his cigarette in the air. “What about the Youth Hall of the Board of Commerce where we had concerts before the war? It had acoustics, didn’t it? And if the town fathers think a magnificent hall is so important, why don’t they build one themselves? Because they haven’t got the money, that’s why. And you know why they haven’t got the money? Because they haven’t got the Jews to earn it for them!”

  “Really, Mr. Funkenstein!” Blam admonishes. “You’re going too far!”

  Funkenstein frowns, then bursts out laughing like a child who has been found out. “You mean you don’t agree?” And grinding his cigarette butt into the floor with his heavy shoe, he changes the subject. “So we’re in business? We’re going to do something about your house?”

  “I really think it’s too late. How can I prove my father didn’t get the entire sum when I’m not even sure myself? And even if I could, what good would it do? The money is worth twenty time
s less today than it was then.”

  “You could have the house reevaluated,” the ever practical Funkenstein points out. “You could claim the contract was broken and demand the property be returned to you. If you pay back the amount he received, you can resell it. Why not give it a try?” He pauses, then adds a provocative “You don’t need capital, do you?”

  “No, I don’t really,” says Blam with a smile, glad they have come the heart of the matter. “Here? Now?”

  “The here and now means nothing to us,” says Funkenstein, suddenly serious again. “We are here today and gone tomorrow.” Again he puts a conspiratorial stress on the “we,” lowering his voice and almost winking. “Who knows? Maybe you could get foreign currency for it. Maybe you could sell it abroad, in Israel, say. Do you ever think of emigrating?”

  “Me? No.”

  “Well, I do. I’m seventy-three and have nobody left. I think about it all the time. But I’m accumulating my capital in goods, in books. That’s right. Surprised? Well, I buy books, books people want to read—novels, stories, history, memoirs, mostly memoirs, the things our people abroad want to know about. Because if anyone starts coming after us again, I’m getting out, I’m going to Israel. If I can’t die here, where I was born, I want to die in Israel—and books are something you can always take with you. They’re not gold, they’re not jewels, you don’t need to declare them, and the moment I get there, I’ll open a lending library for Yugoslav Jews. It’s a going concern in Israel, did you know?”

  In the heat of the conversation they have reached the entrance, its huge, dark doors open wide to the invisible night. They are the only ones there. Funkenstein takes out his cigarette case and lights up again. He tries the lighter three times before he can get a flame to last long enough—a brisk wind is blowing in from outside—but he scarcely notices.

  “We’re all so naive,” he says with a sigh of resignation and expels another cloud of smoke. He has suddenly shrunk into a little old man, or that is how Blam sees him now that they are alone. Blam feels sorry for him, repentant now instead of shocked and resistant. Something in Funkenstein’s words has touched him, something warm, intimate, a tone he has not heard in years, a long-forgotten spirit, a long-absent excitement, and suddenly a multitude of faces from the past floods his mind: his father sporting a mustache twisted upward, the calm and collected Ephraim Ehrlich, Lili. Lili is especially clear with her importunate “Come with us!” No one has invited him anywhere for a long time, and although he has no particular desire to go anywhere, his world is the poorer for want of invitation.