The Use of Man Read online

  In fact, it was this inscription that persuaded Sredoje Lazukić to take possession of the diary when, quite by chance, he came upon it four years later as a soldier of the Partisan army. His group had marched through the streets of the town that had once been his own, through the triumphal arch that displayed greeting to its liberators—and he was a liberator, accepting chaste kisses on the cheek from the beautiful buxom girls who rushed off the sidewalks to shower the soldiers with flowers and then vanished as quickly as they had appeared. He had merged with a crowd in the main square, to listen to a speech by an unknown officer wearing the three-cornererd hat of the Spanish Civil War veteran. That evening, he settled into the barracks and later went to a dance to try to make time with Nurse Valerie, from Slavonia, until her girlfriend spirited her off to a small room next door, where the officers—the brigade commander at their head—were making merry. Through the half-open door he caught sight of the commander flailing his arms as he danced on a table covered with a white cloth. Sredoje sensed vaguely that a horde of uninvited guests, himself included, was trampling on something that was his, and the feeling did not leave him the next day, when, while waiting to be transferred to the front, he wandered through the streets of Novi Sad.

  Everywhere there was filth, burned-out ruins, bedraggled bunting from the celebrations, noise. He went, in spite of himself, as if to a cemetery, to the house that had once been his, a house standing like a lone tower, with a dome that his father had been much taken with when it was being built. He looked at it furtively, from around a corner. Then he rang the doorbell and realized with relief, once faced with an unfamiliar young woman with a child in her arms (to protect herself, it seemed), how much he had been afraid of finding one of his old neighbors settled there, someone who remembered how his mother had been led away to be shot—who perhaps had even been involved. It was easy to tell the young woman who he was, and natural to accept her frightened invitation to come in. He proceeded to walk around the rooms as if carrying out an inspection, his eyes passing quickly over the belongings of others, noting how entirely they changed the space that had once belonged to him. He passed through the house to the garden, now stripped of everything but the three pine trees that his father had planted, one for each of his sons. Then he turned on his heel and left.

  This excursion into the past drew him ever deeper into the past’s entangling coils, however, and instead of going back to the barracks or to the square to enjoy himself, he set off toward other familiar places, in whatever order he happened upon them: the Swan pastry shop, the park, the cathedral, the high school. He dropped in at Milinko Božić’s house and from Milinko’s mother learned that his old classmate had recently become a soldier. He peered through the windows of Fräulein’s old room and finally arrived at Vera Kroner’s house. He had never been inside it before the war (though he had very much wanted to be), so he paused, undecided, at the gate. But the disorder in the yard and the wide-open front door convinced him that the house had been abandoned and that he was free to enter it, only to find furniture strewn about haphazardly, carpetless scuffed floors, the remains of smashed crockery. Silently he walked through the debris, searching for Vera’s old room. He recognized it at once, though he had never seen it before, by the white furniture and a scrap of white curtain, caught on the latch of the open window, that fluttered there like a tiny flag of surrender. He opened the wardrobe and found that it had been looted. He pulled open two drawers, and they, too, were empty. His eyes fell on the small cabinet high on the wall, its white doors hanging open, and behind them textbooks in orderly rows on the shelves. No one had touched them, of course, he observed with a wry smile, but when he looked closer, he was suddenly moved by the narrow letters printed on their spines—the very same books he himself had had to toil his way through! Rummaging among them, he spotted a small volume with an unusual red cover, opened it, and was surprised to find it written in German. He was unable to recognize the hand, although it seemed familiar, until he reached the last page, where the change in script was at once recognizable as Vera’s. “Anna Drentvenšek died December 19,1940, after a gallbladder operation.”

  Sredoje’s whole past swept back into him like an underground river. He tucked the notebook into his uniform jacket and returned to his barracks. But when he read it there, he was disappointed. Fräulein, whom he had known as self-assured to the point of obduracy, was suddenly revealed to be fragile to the point of helplessness in the face of life. Nevertheless, he held on to the diary, as if it were the sole belonging saved from a fire, and burned it only five years later, at the insistence and with the agreement of one other person, for whom it also had some meaning. He was not to know that there was yet another person still alive who was invisibly involved in the circle of the diary’s existence.

  That person was Milinko Božić, a patient in the veterans hospital in Sauerkammermunde. Armless, legless, eyeless, his eardrums and vocal cords shattered, Milinko lay covered up to his neck with a blanket, from beneath which a rubber tube led to a receptacle on the floor. At intervals he was unable to determine, someone attended to him, let in fresh air (which sometimes stung his face with cold), and the smell of its freshness was mixed with the scent of that person—an odor of sweat, soap, and skin which Milinko recognized to be that of a woman. The woman lowered the blanket and removed the tube from his penis; a sponge filled with warm water moved over his face, neck, chest, and torso, to be followed by the touch of hands, sometimes soft and warm, sometimes hard and chilling, which took hold of him and rolled him onto his stomach, passed the sponge over his back and buttocks, rolled him back over, replaced the tub, and pulled the blanket up over his body. Then another tube was put in his mouth, and soon, as he sucked, he began to receive, drop by drop, warm nourishment, at once sweet and salty. He had no way of indicating when he had had enough, but he had the impression that someone else could judge, since the food usually stopped flowing through the tube as soon as his hunger was satisfied, to be followed by water. Then everything came to a halt till the next visit, when again he would sense the familiar wave of scent slowly ebbing and flowing around him and try to guess what kind of woman it belonged to—fragile and dark? plump and mousy-haired?

  Occasionally he felt that the woman tending to his needs was a redhead, and, remembering Vera, would let out a silent scream, painful and protracted. He could not go beyond that scream, for he knew nothing else: where he was, how he had got there, or why he was anywhere in the first place. As for Anna Drentvenšek’s diary, he remembered only that once (but what did “once” mean?), somewhere (but what did “somewhere” mean?), it had been mentioned in the street, when he could still use his legs (if he had ever had legs), by a girl (if she ever existed), who spoke to him about a diary (but he no longer knew what speech was). And then he would scream again, the scream being the only response of which he was capable.

  2

  Habitations. First, the Lazukić house, with its dome, set on concrete pillars in the fine, restless Danube sand, sand forever shifted by the winds. The façade, with its three semicircular bays of casement windows. A wrought-iron fence facing the street, with a gate that shuts with a clang. On the courtyard side, a terrace with twin flights of steps leading left and right into the garden, onto a lawn with three pines planted in a triangle. The air full of the smell of water and rust. Above the roof, a white gull’s flight and its near-human cry and laughter. Cleanliness, the rooms too well aired and drafty even in summer, and in winter warm only near the tiled stove, which go cold by dawn. Spare new furniture, polished to a high gloss. People calling to each other from room to room, echoes that deceive. Misunderstandings, weariness.

  The Kroners’ house in the old center of Novi Sad, in a short, narrow cul-de-sac behind the Baptist church, where sewer and water pipes made their appearance later than in the suburbs. A solid, rectilinear frontage, unequally split by a wide, vaulted gateway, always open, that leads into an asphalt courtyard strewn with casks, crates, bits of carob pods
, and, in winter, orange peels. Large rooms on both sides of the house, gloomy because of their narrow windows and cluttered with worm-eaten old furniture alongside expensive new pieces, all jumbled together. Vast, cold kitchens, larders with mounds of empty bottles and jars; a bathroom where towels are left hanging anywhere and more often than not end up on the floor. At the back of the courtyard, a detached, sorry-looking storeroom with dusty, many-eyed windows, a line of concrete blocks like an apron around its waist, and a wooden lean-to office.

  The tenement containing Milinko and Slavica Božić’s apartment, behind the cavalry barracks. The roadway here graveled, bordered by ditches full of mud and rubbish, and in summer, choked with grass like the hair growing out of an old man’s ears. A low building at the back of the courtyard next to clapboard sheds and communal toilets. Swarms of flies and bees; pigeons on the roofs. At the entrance to the apartment, a kitchen with a shiny scoured stove, a sewing machine, and a sink that is repainted white every year. Beyond the kitchen, the main room, with twin beds; in the center, a table and straight-backed chairs; a dresser with rows of jars containing fruit and paprika preserves, each with a label giving the year.

  Two streets farther on, in a small, low house, Anna Drentvenšek’s tiny apartment. One room and a kitchen. An old bed, a wardrobe, a table covered with green baize, a shelf of books—mainly textbooks and dictionaries falling apart from long use, but also an occasional novel and an anthology of German sayings, Geflügelte Worte. On the wall, a landscape in oils bought from the painter himself, a young man who sold his work from door to door one winter. In the kitchen, a half-rusted iron stove, a cabinet, table and stools, a hot plate on which Fräulein does most of her cooking—hastily, impatiently, because the room is permanently cold.

  In Belgrade, a bachelor apartment on the third floor of a large four-story building with entrances on two streets. Massive, heavy objects, a clock with a chime, a dozen icons on the walls, an atmosphere of neglect impregnated with cigarette smoke.

  Taverns in Novi Sad and Belgrade, established in low houses whose once-spacious courtyards have gradually been filled with summer kitchens, sheds, laundry rooms, rooms for assignations, courtyards where refuse has choked the grass, weeds, and the last unpruned fruit tree.

  The hospital at Sauerkammermunde on a hilltop, 1,636 feet high, with an asphalt driveway ending at its gate. A high brick wall, behind which stand four square buildings, identical and equidistant, like the four spots on a die; each two-story building containing thirty-two rooms, of which one is the doctors’ office and another a small medicine storeroom. Behind the buildings, through a doorway in the brick wall, surrounded by trees—the forest yields to their advance—mounds with nameless wooden crosses.

  The concentration camp at Auschwitz, near Cracow. Acres of flat land encircled by a high barbed-wire fence and heavily built up with long squat huts; an administration building with an upper floor, grimy workshops, a low whitewashed brothel, a hospital, a prison with torture chambers in its cellars and walls suitable for shootings and hangings—all overshadowed by slender observation towers and the round chimney of the cremation oven, the crematorium.

  3

  Fräulein’s arrival in Novi Sad: a shipwrecked sailor arriving on dry land. But this dry land was modest, a place of cart drivers and bricklayers, day laborers who worked too long and for too little money to be able even to give themselves over totally to vice. Every Saturday they washed in a tub in the kitchen, which their wives filled with hot water; then they changed into clean clothes and went to the taverns, returning drunk to beat their wives and make them pregnant. The downtrodden remainder carried within themselves the poison of their frustration: they were striving toward something. They read the Sunday picture magazines and dreamed of becoming millionaires, or, at least, police inspectors, so they could set themselves up with fabulous brothels, or else prevent others from doing just that.

  But Fräulein did not share their views on class distinctions, even though she lived in cheap rented rooms in Novi Sad, right in the midst of the innocent working class. The world she came from was another, far different, one: the wine-growing hillsides of the Zagorje, the farthest slopes of snow-white mountains, a small town with clean streets, and a house with green shutters, a house obsessively aired. A town where on Sundays people discussed with the parish priest the indestructibility of the faith and their children’s progress at school. A German woman surrounded by Slovenes and Croats, she was the daughter of a lame watchmaker, whose wife had abandoned him when Fräulein and her sister were five and seven, respectively. She was extraordinarily careful of her behavior and of the way she spoke, and insisted on having what was hers, asserting herself despite her isolation and the moral shadow hovering over her. Because of this self-assurance, which he perhaps took as a telltale indication that she was well off, the eye of a solicitor’s assistant clerk fell upon her: he was a Slovene, tall and angular, with a deep tan and a hooked nose protruding above a wayward ash-blond mustache. As soon as they were married, he persuaded her (he was most resourceful in bed) to ask that her part of her father’s inheritance be added to her dowry, which had proved inadequate, so they could move to Zagreb and set up an independent business. The “independent business” was to be a kind of lawyer’s office—or, rather, an advice bureau, for Janez Drentvenšek had no law degree, but simply a liking for the field. The office turned out to be a basement in a side street of the Old Town in Zagreb, with a sign in gaudy colors over the entrance at sidewalk level: “Legal Aid! The solution to your problems lies behind this door.” This Drentvenšek had copied from an article on American business practice. But no one brought his troubles down the creaking steps of that long-empty former cobbler’s workshop, despite the new and alluring sign, and the only financial transaction made there was the payment of the rent. Still more rent was required for a furnished room, which the newly-weds took not far from the “office.” Anna Drentvenšek cooked barley and fried groats and frankfurters on an old iron stove refurbished with silver paint. She had learned from her aunt, who had brought up the two sisters in their runaway mother’s absence, that although cheap, this was “hearty food,” which men enjoyed. But Drentvenšek was not so Spartan; he like luxury, Wiener schnitzel, and beer, bright and warm rooms where music played, and he avoided coming home, pleading the press of business. In fact, he spent his time looking at the window displays on Ilica, the main street, and dined in taverns.

  In one of them, he got to know a cloakroom attendant, a woman in her thirties with big breasts and hairy lips, and took up with her, mainly because it gave him the right to sit around until closing time, waiting for her in the smoke and animation of the tavern rather than being cooped up at home, bored. In their furnished, room Anna languished, tearful, for he no longer even came to her bed, though she waited up for him all night, the groats on the still-burning stove slowly charring to cinders.

  In the daytime, when she emerged from her lonely room, she found solace in the company of her landlady, the widow Tkalec, who also was German and also had been deceived in marriage. Her husband had been a talented musician and something of a composer, but had contracted a disease of the lungs and died without leaving her any offspring, having first driven her to distraction with his cantankerousness. The only bright spot in the landlady’s recollection of married life was at its very beginning, when, just married to the trumpet major Tkalec, their honeymoon was spent traveling by boat, in a cabin, all the way from Vienna to his first place of employment, Novi Sad, far to the east, but still on the Danube. At Novi Sad, as in Vienna, German was widely used, and there was a large military compound opposite the town. It seemed to her that everything in Novi Sad swam in rosy reflections, as if bathed in eau de Cologne. The Danube was rosy at dusk, the air rose-tinged early in the morning, the orchard blossoms roseate in spring, and her husband’s voice floated from a rose-filled garden, where he taught violin and trumpet to youngsters whose parents had to queue to pay for their lessons.

  T
hese colorful memories wove inexhaustible patterns through Anna Drentvenšek’s lonely days, and unexpectedly transformed themselves into a way out for her when Janez disappeared altogether, surreptitiously taking his personal belongings in their jointly owned suitcase. Previously he had sold all the furniture from the office, which, as it turned out, had two months’ rent still owing. His young wife was left without any means of support in a town where she had been subjected only to humiliation. Although her own small town was not far off, she could not possibly return to it. It seemed more natural, more necessary to get farther away. As far as possible. To a place where people were still uncomplicated, where prosperity and generosity still prevailed. Weeping, she got ready for the journey; weeping, her landlady gave her her blessing, envying her the youth which would bloom once again in that gentle and beautiful place. But when Anna arrived in Novi Sad (by train), a summer rainstorm had turned the unpaved station yard to mud, and she sloshed through it on high heels to the nearest inn, which was full of peasants and salesmen. From her room on the second floor, she listened until dawn to the wailing of a singer in the room below, and to the laughter of waitresses bringing guests upstairs.