The Book of Blam Page 3

  Chapter Three

  IF ČUTURA WERE still alive, the beautiful summer afternoon might well have lured him out to the square, thus making him a witness to Blam’s encounter with Funkenstein. Perceptive, enterprising witness that he had always been, he would have come within earshot and, after their abrupt leave-taking, pressed Blam into a conversation that might have run like this:

  “Who was that man?”

  “Forget him. His name is Funkenstein. He’s a real estate agent. A former real estate agent.”

  “You were talking about the house you used to live in, weren’t you?”

  “Right. I thought I’d take the opportunity to bring it up.”

  “And?”

  “You heard. He said he was sure my father had received the full sale price.”

  “And you never saw a penny of it.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, what happened? Or, more to the point, who took it?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “You don’t seem to have gone out of your way to find out, either.”

  “I couldn’t. I didn’t dare, if you really want to know. I didn’t dare inquire after my parents’ bodies to say nothing of their money. I was scared.”

  “Yes. At the time that made sense. But what about later? Have you ever tried to find out who robbed them?”

  “How would I do that?”

  “How! It seems perfectly simple to me! I mean, it could only have been an inside job. One of the tenants. You must have known that from the start. Remember the Hungarian who moved in with the woman renting the apartment in your yard? What was his name?”

  “Kocsis.”

  “That’s right, Kocsis. Well, I used to see him with an Arrow Cross in his lapel. Just the type to get rid of your parents and take over the house.”

  “How can you say such a thing!”

  “Because it’s absolutely clear he’s the one. He was there the day of the raid, wasn’t he? The militia must have asked him about your parents. They used Arrow Cross people all the time. They needed informers. He was perfect for them.”

  “You’re just guessing.”

  “I’m just being logical. You should have at least looked into the possibility. You didn’t do a thing.”

  “No.”

  “Which basically means you let those crooks get rid of your parents and grab everything they had. Where are they now?”

  “Who?”

  “Who! Kocsis and his mistress.”

  “How should I know?”

  “You mean you don’t even know that? Did they stay on in the house?”

  “I think so. For a while, at least. But then they moved to Budapest. At least that’s what I heard.”

  “So you did ask around! And did a little guessing of your own!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I had to go back to the house to collect what was left of my parents’ belongings. It was the new tenants who told me that Kocsis and the woman had moved to Budapest.”

  “But you didn’t find the money.”

  “No.”

  “Of course not. The money’s what got them to Budapest. They wouldn’t have been able to budge without it. But if it hadn’t been for the money and the part they played in your parents’ death, they wouldn’t have needed to move. Can’t you see that? They were afraid they’d get caught, so they beat it. They didn’t realize they were dealing with someone like you, who wouldn’t lift a finger to avenge the death of his parents. They could easily have stayed. They may even have come back. After they saw that nobody was going after them or making any claims and realized the dust had settled. In fact, I’m sure they’re back. How much could it have come to anyway? Ten thousand pengő? Fifteen thousand? That’s nothing for a bastard like Kocsis who can’t hold on to a thing. And when the money was gone and the fling was over, back they flew to the nest. Because I bet they left someone here when they went off on their ‘honeymoon.’ ”

  “I don’t think she had anybody. Just a daughter, and I’m sure she took her with them. But Kocsis was married, if I remember correctly, and had children.”

  “Well, then, it’s easy. All you have to do is track down the family and get them to tell you where Papa is.”

  “No, it’s not so easy. I never really knew them. I don’t know where they lived.”

  “The Bureau of Internal Affairs has all kinds of records. Might I ask the first name of this Kocsis character?”

  “Lajos. His name was Lajos Kocsis.”

  “I see. Well, it shouldn’t be too hard to look up every Lajos Kocsis in Novi Sad. Are you game?”

  “Game?”

  “To let me take over. I don’t share the compunctions you seem to have when it comes to the man. I think his crime cries out for revenge. The people who killed my family had my brothers to reckon with, and this Kocsis is getting off scot-free. I feel it’s my duty to do something about it, if only because of Estera, in her memory.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s the right way.”

  “We won’t know until we try. But you can’t have anything against my asking around.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good, it’s a deal. And you can be sure I’ll have something to report before long.”

  BUT ČUTURA IS no longer among the living, and Blam leaves the square for the former Jew Street, unencumbered by third parties, thinking his own thoughts. As he makes his way along the resplendent shopwindows lining both sides of the street, he feels a venal shudder of regret that Funkenstein would not let him turn and look at the adulterous couple caught in the act. Again he pictures the dark, nattily dressed man and the tall blond woman, her skirt pulled tight around her thighs, pictures them embracing, and realizes it is a goodbye embrace, the repetition of an embrace he witnessed long ago and experienced as a personal farewell.

  He experiences it once more, with a bittersweet feeling of loss and withdrawal, though of liberation as well. The memory belongs to memories of the shops now catching his eye. The reality is that the shops have been remodeled, their entrances widened, the cracked wood of the window frames replaced with shiny metal, the merchandise in the windows transformed from aggressive jumbles into neat and expertly arranged displays, the exotic names of owners on the signs supplanted by staid generic terms, the staff supplemented by the young and apathetic ranks of the bureaucracy. It is all quite soothing, a step in the direction of impersonality. It relieves him of the conflict he used to feel when confronted with the dark, tense faces, the rolling eyes, the guttural voices fulsomely praising their wares and humiliating him with reminders of his background. Now the shops, purged of their past, have become for him too places of straightforward buying and selling. I’d like this and that. How much is it? I’ll take it or no thank you. Yet he could not help missing the more enterprising tribe to which, even if reluctantly, he had belonged.

  The goodbye embrace was similar to—yet in a way the opposite of—the farewell scene he had accidentally witnessed from a tram many years before. Accidentally, because on that day Ferenci, the head of the Úti Travel Agency which had just hired him, asked him for the first and last time to leave his desk and deliver a packet of documents to customs. It was a cold November morning in the first year of the war, and Blam sank against the wooden back of a corner window seat as the tram made its wobbly way toward the customs office. The streets were nearly empty, the morning rush to jobs and the shops being over by then, and all that Blam’s absent gaze met as he looked out of the window were a dawdling old man, a housewife rushing home late from the market with her net bag, a postman, an apprentice toting a basket on his back. Then, just before the customs office, where a few small houses huddled together, the tram came upon a couple embracing: a dark man in a gray overcoat and a blond woman in a blue suit. They were standing near the curb, between the tram tracks and the houses, on their own, free, with no one to bother them, leaning blissfully against each other, his swarthy hand resting on her tightly sheathed thigh, her arm over his shou
lder, her head and blond hair covering his face. Yet Blam had no trouble recognizing the couple as his wife, Janja, and Predrag Popadić. The realization that she was deceiving him with that man was like a knife in the gut, it took his breath away, it nearly made him faint, yet he did not scream, did not leap up and rush off the tram; he stayed put, leaning against the wooden seat, turning his head to follow them as the tram tottered past. The sight of their embrace on the deserted street filled him, despite his horror, with reluctant admiration; he was almost moved. It was the last embrace of the tryst—he could tell from the way they stood there, from the serenity, the blissful ease of their bodies—an embrace reflecting pleasure and a oneness that came from shared memories of recent intimacy. Joy radiated from them, the joy of oblivion, of having satisfied a natural instinct that, though now abated, still suffused their bodies, the joy of ignoring the world around them, the cold, gray day, the prosaic city with its trams and their troubled passengers. Their joy so vividly contrasted with his grief that for all the pain it caused him he could set it apart and display it like an exquisite object unfathomable in its harmony and forever beyond his reach. He knew then that Janja as she was at that moment, the Janja he had longed for when he was courting her, would never be his, yet the anguish of this knowledge was tempered by relief. By embracing the man out in the open, in the street, she was in a sense taking leave of him, achieving an ideal (even if many years later and with someone else), an ideal that Blam too had yearned for yet never understood and that now proved to be a gentle, sisterly parting, a farewell to a person completely unlike her, alien to her, which would resolve the strain and tension that had always weighed on their relationship, in much the way that the shame and danger of identification with the Jew Street shopkeepers had weighed on him, until they disappeared for good.

  BEFORE THE WAR number 1 Jew Street was occupied by a leather goods manufacturing company called Levi and Son. It was run by Levi the son because Levi the father, the firm’s founder, was racked by disease and spent all his time in the upstairs apartment with a black silk yarmulke on his head and a tartan traveling rug over his knees. (Levi the grandson was studying to be a pharmacist in Belgrade.) When the Hungarians marched into Novi Sad, they declared Levi the father’s leather goods essential to the war effort and carted them away in military vehicles. The empty shop was taken over by Julius Mehlbach, the Levis’ longtime apprentice, who turned it into a shop specializing in leather bags and accessories. Levi the son, however, had managed to hide quite a bit of leather in the upstairs apartment, and he offered it to Mehlbach on the condition that they share the profit from the bags made of it. Mehlbach agreed, accepted the leather, and reported Levi the son for concealing goods essential to the war effort. Levi the son was arrested and beaten so badly that his kidneys bled. He was released, but died before the week was up. On his deathbed he summoned Mehlbach and made him swear to care for his all-but-immobile father, promising him a gold coin a week to cover the costs. Mehlbach fulfilled his duty until the spring of 1944, when the old man was deported to a camp in Germany with the rest of the Novi Sad Jews. He never returned. (Nor did Levi the grandson or Levi the grandson’s mother, who happened to be with him in Belgrade when the war broke out.) Mehlbach searched the upstairs apartment for the rest of the coins, prying up floorboards and digging behind walls, but never found them, and in the autumn of the same year he was forced to flee the advancing partisans and Soviet Army and thus to abandon the shop and the house.

  Number 4 was occupied by a tailor named Elias Elzmann, a refugee from Galicia who had moved first to Germany, then to Austria, and finally to Yugoslavia. His knowledge of Polish enabled him to communicate with his customers, while his wife and grown-up children (who like their father were of heavy build, with oxlike eyes and big noses) spoke only German. For that reason his family—a wife, two sons, and two daughters—did the sewing while he rushed from one customer to the next in a constant sweat, taking measurements, making alterations, bowing and scraping, and lisping all the while in his Slavic mishmash. The Gestapo had the Elzmanns down as German citizens and required the Hungarian authorities to hand them over. They were sent to Serbia, where they perished in the gas chambers. When the Hungarian soldiers went to Jew Street to round them up, they amused themselves by making the Elzmann daughters dance naked in front of their parents and brothers, who had to sing foxtrots and waltzes and clap in rhythm.

  Number 3 was the workshop of a small, hunchbacked watchmaker named Aaron Grün. He was commandeered to help clear the rubble from the Novi Sad Airport, had a heart attack, and died in June 1941. His elder son, also a watchmaker, was mobilized in the same year and sent to forced labor in the Ukraine, where he froze to death during the fighting at Voronezh. Grün’s younger son, who was still in school and remained at home, was executed together with his mother in the January 1942 raid.

  The upper story of number 6 housed the law office of Sándor Vértes. Vértes was a morphine addict, and his wife had tuberculosis. They were childless. Detained as a Communist, he was interrogated and beaten for two days, but was released when he was discovered to be the wrong Vértes. He went home and immediately asphyxiated himself and his wife in the kitchen.

  In number 5 a family of well-to-do Zagreb booksellers had opened a secondhand bookshop for their poor hatter brother, Leon Mordechai. After the Hungarian occupation, Mordechai and his family were deported to Croatia, where they ended up in an Ustasha camp. Mordechai’s wife and daughter died there of dysentery, but thanks to an early apprenticeship as a tailor, Mordechai survived. Having no reason to return home after his release, he went to Zagreb, where he waited a year for members of his large family to show up or give some sign of life. When none did, he moved back to Novi Sad and joined a hat-making cooperative, where he worked until retirement. He never remarried.

  Number 8 was the home of a cross-eyed woman who made bathing suits and girdles. Her name was Elsa Baumann, and she was the widow of a surveyor who died young of neuritis contracted during the First World War. She had one son, a student at the vocational school, who was thin, wore glasses, and had thick, constantly chapped lips. Mother and son were both killed in the 1942 raid.

  Number 9 was Ernst Mahrer’s laundry. Mahrer had learned his trade in Vienna and was the first to introduce dry cleaning and home delivery to Novi Sad. The van he used had a sun painted on it, with eyes, cheeks, and a smiling mouth. When the van was requisitioned by the Hungarian occupation forces, Mahrer drove it to the artillery barracks himself, parked it in the courtyard, and got out to wait while the papers were drawn up. When the officer in charge saw the smiling sun and the firm’s name, he reprimanded Mahrer for not having painted them over. Mahrer responded that that was the least the recipients of the free van could do. Furious, the officer snatched the rifle from the shoulder of a guard, pounded Mahrer with the butt until he fell unconscious, then jumped into the van, whose motor was still running, and ran over him. Word of the incident got around, and the officer was transferred and Mahrer’s widow and children ordered to leave Novi Sad forthwith. They received official permission to move to Budapest. In 1943 the son was sent to forced labor in the Bor mines, but escaped and joined the Yugoslav partisans. After the war he remained an officer in the Yugoslav army. Mahrer’s widow and daughter were killed during an Arrow Cross show of strength in the Budapest ghetto.

  The owner of the shoe shop at number 10 was a methodical, meticulous man named Armin Weiss. A lover of things beautiful and costly—more aesthete than merchant—he was known as far as Budapest for his expertise. Immediately after the occupation a Budapest company offered to make his shop a branch of theirs and let him stay on as an employee. Armed with papers documenting this all-but-governmental commission, he escaped forced labor, which the military authorities prescribed for all Jews; he also survived the raid several months later. But when the Arrow Cross came to power early in 1944, Weiss was deported to Germany with his wife, two daughters, and mother-in-law. None of them returned.

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bsp; Number 11 was shared by a lamp merchant, Eduard Fiker, and a stove fitter, Jakob Mentele. Fiker and his family were killed in the raid, while Mentele, a bachelor, managed to survive. He then left Novi Sad for Budapest, where he acquired false documents and lived out the war. After the war he remained in Budapest and died of cancer several years later.

  Number 13 housed Arthur Spitzer’s grocery and delicatessen. Spitzer played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends. Having married a Hungarian and converted before the war, he was spared persecution. He had no children of his own, but his sister sent him her six-year-old daughter from the Independent State of Croatia, where Jews had an even harder time of it. Spitzer held on to his business until the Arrow Cross came to power, and for a while his baptismal certificate, Christian wife, and soccer friends protected him. On the day his young Jewish niece was to be deported, Spitzer and his wife went to the station with her, hoping to save her with their papers and connections. They were all crammed into a train for Auschwitz. There Spitzer was separated from his wife and niece. They all died.