The Book of Blam Read online

  “How did you get through the war, Mr. Funkenstein?” he asks on impulse, sympathetically.

  “How?” Funkenstein shrugs, not surprised by the question. “It was owing to what we’ve just been hearing, actually: music. My whole family, all seventeen of us, were sent to Bergen-Belsen in 1944. The head of the camp was known for his love of music. At roll call he asked who played a musical instrument, and I stepped forward. I was the only one who survived.”

  He gives Blam a penetrating glance, as if Blam, not he, made the statement.

  “You know what my job was? I played for prisoners on their way to the firing squad. They would be loaded into a cart, always the same one, a children’s wagon, a few boards on four small iron wheels pulled by prisoners. The condemned man would stand in the cart, bound hand and foot, and we’d walk behind him and play, me on the violin, Kohan on the trumpet, Eisler on the drum, though Eisler died early on and a youngster by the name of Gogo took his place. We kept it up for nearly a year, got better rations for it, and survived.”

  He pauses. But just then something squeaks. At first Blam thinks it is an instrument at the top of its register, then realizes it is a bell in the ceiling announcing the end of intermission. They turn back. Funkenstein flicks his half-smoked cigarette to the ground and steps on it with the nonchalance of a street-corner loafer. What opens before them, obstructed by the backs of the men and women returning to their seats, is the temple’s elongated hemisphere, magnificently lit and dazzling in its gilt ornamentation, symbolic of the infinite vault of heaven or perhaps merely of the wealth of its former congregation or the desire for wealth on the part of those who conceived or commissioned it. Funkenstein looks puny and old under the vault. Blam pities him. The way he stamped out the unfinished, unnecessary cigarette makes Blam aware of how weak, half-formed, and unfulfilled Funkenstein is, the product of a small mind with large dreams.

  “I’ll let you know about the house as soon as I make up my mind,” he says apologetically as they go off in different directions to their places.

  BACK IN HIS seat, Blam tries to forget the whole incident. He settles in, crossing his legs and positioning his elbows on the armrests. The curtain parts, revealing the gold door behind the altar, and the first musician, a violinist, emerges, followed by the rest of the strings in single file. They are greeted by a muted, diffuse applause that increases when the energetic conductor, all smiles, makes his appearance. He mounts the podium, bows, and raises his baton for silence. Then with a subtle wave of the hand he calls forth, out of nothing, out of the void above the heads of the audience, a slow melody. Like many around him, Blam lowers his eyes to the program in his lap, recalling what he knew, namely, that he is listening to Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings.

  It begins dreamily, cajoling the emotions, pulling them into its wake. Blam follows its course, trying to submit to the flow like a swimmer leaving the shallows for the main current. But the melodic current eludes him: he is too aware, breaking it down into its components, its themes, and listening for individual instruments. He shuts his eyes, hoping to enjoy the music more, but even in the darkness under his eyelids he can see the musicians contributing their particular strands to the melody, the conductor signaling how and when to come in, the audience attentively following the torrent of their combined efforts, and himself among the audience, tense and overly sober, though seemingly in rapture. Yes, he sees himself clearly. It is as if another eye, a third eye, has opened within him or off to the side and is observing everything, independent of his will and the will of those around him. For a moment he thinks he has located the point from which the eye is observing, and since that point is more or less an extension of the bench he is sitting on, the bench he left at the intermission in the vain hope of remaining unnoticed, he has the feeling it is Funkenstein watching him. He opens his eyes and turns his head to the end of the row, expecting to find the pudgy old man in the black pin-striped suit and white breast-pocket handkerchief observing him. He sees no one. The bench is nothing but a row of heads facing forward, and beyond it there is nothing but the empty aisle and the wall rising rigid and solitary despite its golden scrolls and swirls. Then who is doing the observing?

  The perplexity is unnerving. Blam feels certain he is being watched. He casts furtive glances to the right and to the left, but meets no eyes: all faces are looking forward, trained on the source of the music. Their concentration strikes him as curious, the concentration both of those sitting in the audience listening and of those sitting on the stage and pushing and pulling at their instruments to produce the desired sounds. And for what? For a bit of harmony, for the pleasure of it, for mutually agreed-upon oblivion, for the resurrection of images from the past or the unconscious. He cannot help thinking of the music Funkenstein has just told him about, the music that accompanied prisoners on their way to be hanged or shot. Was it to be hanged or to be shot? He did not ask Funkenstein, and that bothers him. The picture he has is incomplete; it breaks off at the most important point. Though he can follow it to that point. Funkenstein’s story enables him to form a picture of the cart “like a children’s wagon, a few boards on four small iron wheels” creaking sadly through a huge, barren courtyard ringed by barbed wire; of the men harnessed to it, practically skeletons, pale and emaciated, heads shaven, necks straining to move that vehicle of death, the guarantee of their survival to the next moment or next hour or next day; and of the bound man being sent to death for reasons unknown to him, swaying, staring at the ground or at the sky, the wire, at the feelings and memories evoked by the music. But what were they playing? Why didn’t he ask? Maybe it was the slow movement of the Dvořák he is hearing now. Or Chopin’s Funeral March. Or the funeral march from the Eroica. Though it could have been a cheerful, dancelike tune, because they were playing for the head of the camp after all, and he took pleasure in the executions.

  Blam knows none of this; he had failed to ask. He had failed to ask not only Funkenstein this evening but also other survivors, eyewitnesses, books, just as he had failed to experience it himself! He had failed to face the rifle barrels like his father and mother, the search patrols like his sister, Estera; he has failed to go down to the Danube like Slobodan Krkljuš and bend over an old man on the ground, deaf to all warnings and moved only by the thought of the moment, the thought of assistance. He had seen nothing, learned nothing. And now he is turning to see whether an impetuous old real-estate agent is watching him. Because Funkenstein had experienced it. For an entire year he had played for bound prisoners going to their death, his violin under his chin, bowing carefully, making no mistakes, for his life depended on it. True, he survived, returned, he alone of a family of seventeen, but only after taking the risk, facing the truth, seeing, suffering.

  Blam feels the invisible eye on him again. A reproachful eye. Can little Funkenstein, perched on a seat somewhere behind him, be concentrating on Blam telepathically? Funkenstein, who played for prisoners bound and condemned to death in a far-off camp, following their cart to the scaffold, and who now sits small and unnoticed in one of the last rows of his former temple, listening to the Novi Sad Chamber Orchestra because he “adores music”? Where does he find the strength? How can he sit calmly amid a rapt audience that, spurred by the music, spin the insignificant, selfish feelings they bring with them from safe homes and the bosom of secure families? How is it he does not cry out his truth? Blam pricks up his ears, but all he hears is the beautiful music. He lifts his head and scans the mighty walls, marveling at how high they rise over the benches, and at how small, how tiny the cluster of benches and the people on them are in comparison with the dimensions of the building. He wonders if the benches were made smaller during the remodeling to adapt them to the more intimate requirements of the concerts that would be replacing the more motley, less culturally diverse religious congregation. He cannot remember, he can only speculate. But the walls have remained as they were, that he can see—they account for the excellent acoustics—and they have retained
their oriental swirls, tokens of a past with no continuity. The elongated Moorish cupola reaching to the heavens has remained as it was, the mark of a history of banishment and wandering; and yes, above the altar the two white marble tablets remain, the tablets on which in bulbous Hebrew script Moses received the Ten Commandments. How is it they were left there? For decorative purposes, most likely.

  Now the remodeling, the compromise, looks inane to him or, rather, unreal, ghostlike. It makes him want to protest publicly, to shout out loud, perhaps, the way he expected to hear Funkenstein shouting from the last rows. He knows perfectly well that his religious feelings have not been offended: he has none. On the contrary, he senses from the nature of his anxiety that what bothers him are in fact the remainders of the religion. He is wounded by the past because he long ago rejected it, or wanted to. Childhood scenes, images he wishes to forget: his hand in the cold, firm hand of his grandmother taking him to this very temple for a holiday service; the wail of Levantine song coming from the cantor with the black beard and inflamed eyelids and wrapped in a thin linen prayer shawl; the buzz of prayer coming from benches crowded with the stiff black coats and hats of merchants, artisans, and middlemen; and upstairs in the balcony, where his grandmother disappeared after letting go of his hand, the busts of the long row of women hovering as if in a cloud, eyes troubled and shining, cheeks powdered white. Even then he felt a stranger to these displays of devotion and passion, because he sensed (prophetically) that on foreign soil, in a foreign world, this attachment to an ancient tradition with its Levantine songs and speech, feverish rituals, and a scintillating life of the mind made possible by distance and otherness could not survive, that it was doomed, condemned to hatred and destruction. Even then the dark, stifling atmosphere of bobbing bodies sheathed in stiff black cloth made him feel the need to break loose, to rend limb from limb, to spill blood, to flee. And flee he did, grateful for the enlightened atheism of his father, Vilim Blam, who himself gave the temple a wide berth, preferring the cosmopolitan smoke of the coffeehouse. But that too was self-deception, because for all his cosmopolitanism Vilim Blam ended up like the believers, his cosmopolitanism being in fact an integral part of their passion, their eccentricity, the eccentricity Blam so perceptively discerned in Lili, who was likewise forced to vanish from the stage.

  They all vanished, thereby proving his prophecy, his premonition, his will. Yes, his will, because he had wished them to disappear, knowing it was inevitable and finding the wait for the inevitable to be excruciating. And so he had sought oblivion, an opiate to cut the wait short, as when he wandered the streets—visiting his parents and taking leave of his love for Janja—in the weeks before the raid, eager for death. Death was his goal as he roamed in search of something impersonal to mask his shame; death was what he sought here in the “acoustics,” in merging with the crowd, losing his individuality and what was left of tradition and memory in the intoxication of the music.

  But the music stops. There is a lull. The first movement is over. The conductor lowers his baton, takes the handkerchief out of his pocket, and wipes his neck and face. The musicians fidget. Then the conductor puts the handkerchief back in his pocket, raps the baton against the stand, and lifts it to begin a new melody in three-four time, polkalike or at least dancelike. Music for the head of the camp? Blam turns his head, almost expecting the new, livelier rhythm to move the people around him to something unusual, untoward, to release a drive that makes them leap from their seats and join hands in a ring or slit one another’s throats. But nothing happens; they all remain seated, eyes riveted on the musicians. Their heads and nerves may be suffused with a desire for action and conquest and violence, but this is the wrong setting. A former place of worship lacking a congregation and possible victims is the wrong setting. All it is right for is rapture, hidden desire, and lies, a life of lies and half lies, the kind he himself leads. The pretense of life he has assumed after dodging death and saving himself, after pushing away all those hands stretched out to pull him with them—after pushing them into death. But the premonition, dodging, and flight have consumed him and robbed his life of meaning, leaving only stagnation and lies, a daze this side of death, but that side of life.

  HE IS DEPRESSED. He has lost the need to rebel, shout, and show that there is no connection whatever. He has lost the third eye. The scene has returned to normal: an impressive hall with Levantine religious motifs, a stage where an orchestra plays, benches where an audience listens and enjoys inner experiences. Nothing more. A beautiful hollow space, an empty palace with a new purpose. The blood of the massacred has been wiped clean. Everything is clean, everything beautifully lit. There is nothing for him here.

  Trained not to interrupt, he waits until the end of the second movement to take advantage of the short pause, rise—the noise he makes blends into the general murmur—and move toward the aisle. The people in his row make room for him, surprised; several stand, looking after him and whispering, but he is unperturbed, certain he will never again appear like this among them. From the aisle he heads for the exit, alone but accompanied by the music, whose lilting harmonies once more fill the void. The farther he goes, the softer it becomes; it is like an escort, like a pair of eyes resting on his back. Funkenstein’s? He did not notice Funkenstein on his way out, but Funkenstein may well have noticed him, and he would have been as puzzled as the others. Though maybe not, if he had the same thoughts as Blam, if he knew what was going through Blam’s head.

  Out in the vestibule, at the makeshift cloakroom, Blam puts on his coat, half expecting Funkenstein to follow, to leave the hall and join him, though Blam does not want him to. He turns. No one in sight. Nothing but the glorious gilt-trimmed walls tapering into vaults around the cupola, and the music softly playing. Well then, he thinks with a mixture of relief and understanding, Funkenstein has stayed behind, the victim of his “adoration.”

  He passes through the wide-open door of the synagogue into the dark. It is cold, the wind is blowing, the streets are virtually empty. He heads for home, crossing New Boulevard at the blinking light and turning into what is left of Jew Street. Here there are a few strollers, couples, looking at shopwindows and clutching their coats and hats against the wind.

  Main Square lies before him like a dark stage, the Mercury and the cathedral rising opposite each other in the background like a set. Lit only by the street lamps, they blend into the night sky, except for an occasional bright dot of a window. It is as though their tops had been destroyed, as though the terrible heat of a weapon had melted them and, upon cooling, they had taken on a new asymmetrical, ungainly shape, the shape of ruins. It is a scene from the coming war, the site of his future summons. “Miroslav Blam,” they will say up in the mansard or down in front of the building or out in the square. Or they will call out a number they have given him. He will step forward and put his neck in the noose or take his place before the firing squad. He will not dodge death this time; he will close the circle he left open; he will enable a death to happen that must happen; he will reveal another murder, another murderer, another victim—in a man in whom they would not have been revealed, a man who might not even have seen them in himself—as all his people had done before him, thus committing, as he now realizes, an act of the most profound truth.