The Use of Man Read online

  The next day, she went to look for a room to rent, and took one on the outskirts of town—prices there were more reasonable—in a one-story house that had a well, a pump, and a clapboard privy. This town was to be the center of her existence to the end, as well as the cause of her dissatisfaction, headaches, and loss of appetite. In this setting of sand and sticky black earth, thoughts of her wine-growing Zagorje, with its gravelly soil and swift, clear waters, would always make her homesick, and her eyes would search in vain for the promised rosy hues on gray sidewalks—sidewalks burning hot in summer and at all other seasons covered with mud—or in the unbridled growth of the gardens, or in the wind-torn milky sky. The food she was able to obtain tasted of the sand that was driven through the streets and deposited in handfuls under the cracks beneath doors and around windows. The neighbors, sluggish and cunning, watched her, trying to fathom the secret of why she had come to live among them. Her defense was to recall her healthy childhood, her worthy father, who had not gone to pieces after he was faithlessly abandoned with young children, but had stubbornly gone on, dragging his lame leg from the house to the market, from the market to the house, from the room to the workshop, from the workshop to the room, and to the church and the Town Hall, protecting his two girls, standing in front of them with his head held high and his chest stuck out like a fortress of righteousness. Now she herself was that fortress, of necessity refortified, so that nothing could crush it.

  She was courteous to the people around her, but kept the distance nurtured by her different upbringing. She looked for work, which she found through the advertisements in the local newspapers, usually as a governess for the children of the well-to-do, to take the place of their spoiled mothers. But she continued to dream of giving lessons in the privacy of a garden, like the one in Mrs. Tkalec’s stories, and for the strident and piercing notes of the trumpet and the violin, she would substitute the harmonious sounds of her mother tongue. It was now her turn to place an advertisement in the paper, and as soon as the first pupils appeared, she gave up her positions as Kinderfräulein and from then on became simply Fräulein.

  Giving lessons obliged her to move into her own apartment—cheap though it was and in the same poor area—and to buy furniture, if only secondhand and on credit. At the same time, the abundant, home-cooked food she had enjoyed while looking after children was no longer to be had. Most often now she ate only bread, and drank, since her stomach was already beginning to trouble her, camomile tea—prudently gathering the flowers late in the summer, in the wild meadows outside town, and drying them in her section of the attic. Sometimes she would be sick with hunger, but always, when she was on the point of despairing, a neighbor or the mother of one of her pupils would invite her for supper, or send over cakes for her to sample. As time went on, her conscientiousness, the progress made by her pupils, and her modest fee became widely known in town among parents who cared for their children’s future. Besides, the rise in importance of the power that she unintentionally represented by her spoken language contributed to the growth of her reputation. In a professional sense, she began to stand on her own feet.

  It was at this time that Janez Drentvenšek turned up on her doorstep, gaunt, his mustache scraggly and drooping, wearing a threadbare suit and coat and sporting a greasy green hunting hat. He had just been released from prison, where he had been sent for fraud. He begged Fräulein’s forgiveness, promised to behave irreproachably, to find work, and she, however disillusioned, could not refuse him. For two or three days he was polite and submissive, taking long walks during her lessons and greeting the neighbors with a ceremonious sweep of his hat. Then he began to ask her for money for cigarettes and newspapers, and finally for the tavern, since one could not find work, as he put it, without getting to know the right people. In time he allegedly became acquainted with such people, and obtained any number of useful ideas from them—though each idea required a certain cash investment. The old quarrels and anxieties revived, with the difference that Fräulein could no longer be taken in. Having to work six, seven, or eight hours a day giving lessons caused her nerves to give way, she stopped eating, and she began to vomit bile. At the same time, her landlords informed her that they had no wish to listen to heated arguing all night long.

  Fräulein told her husband he must leave, and he agreed, provided she give him enough money for traveling expenses and to begin a new life elsewhere. Once again she had to borrow. She was forever paying back or saving for something, and she always managed to keep doing so by her own hard work, except that this thriftiness, both with money and with herself, ate away at her enjoyment of life. More and more often she was ill, and her illnesses made ever more remote her secret longing for Mrs. Tkalec’s rose-tinted fantasies and for that masculine voice murmuring in the garden, which she ascribed now to one man, now to another, among her acquaintances and admirers. At last she came to understand that having achieved her independence, she was going to be left too independent, in fact, completely alone, and that she was not up to such solitude. With no one in Novi Sad, that rancid, hostile city, to confide in, she began to keep a diary.

  4

  The presence of a German teacher in Novi Sad provided Nemanja Lazukić with the means of employing an ancient ruse—infiltrating the enemy’s camp with a Trojan horse. The Germans were the enemy of his people, and therefore his own. With the backing of the newly powerful Third Reich, German immigrants had usurped the most fertile land in the Vojvodina from the Serbs and on it built huge houses, which they filled with their own progeny—a seemingly anemic and puny brood, but doggedly determined when it came to work and advancement.

  In that region of mixed population, Lazukić, too, was a newcomer, but from Serbia. Not only did he not understand German, but he could not conceive that that harshly guttural language (which he had first heard as a young soldier in the trenches, over the sights of a rifle) could be pronounced without shame. And, indeed, from the moment he arrived in Novi Sad, referred to sometimes as “the Serbian Athens,” he had been astonished that a civilized person, one apparently normal and human-looking, could speak like that, and actually within earshot. (Lazukić was also irritated by Hungarian, a more widely used language there, but felt no danger from that quarter. “We’ll eat the Hungarians for breakfast,” he would say.) With undisguised hatred he watched everything the Germans did, publicly and privately; he watched them getting rich, strengthening their position through patriotic organizations, spreading their ideas of conquest, their pictures, emblems, banners. They were doing everything that the Serbs should have done in that borderland, a land won by the sword and with his own—Lazukić’s—participation and sacrifice. But alas, the Serbs had not done, nor were capable of doing, what was needed. And, most painful of all, he himself proved incapable of it.

  He had arrived in Novi Sad after finishing his studies, which were protracted because of the war, on a private mission to Serbianize the city. Nevertheless, he accepted, and for a long time remained in, the position of clerk to Dr. Matković, a lawyer who was a Catholic from Croatia and who openly mourned the passing of civilized Austria-Hungary. For the most part Dr. Matković represented Germans and Jews, because they were the most prosperous citizens. In addition to Lazukić’s wages, Dr. Matković provided him with his accommodations, a room furnished with a soft couch and heavy green baize curtains, which kept out the morning light and noise of the street. In the half-light of this room and the shady courtyard onto which it opened, the lawyer’s daughter, Klara—past thirty, pale, fragile—seemed to him a vision of purity, and he allowed himself to be drawn into the marital web which her parents, despairing over their only daughter, spun around him.

  Lazukić counted on her old Herzegovinian blood combining with the fresher, younger fire of his own to produce a flood of offspring. He intended to have three sons by her, three heirs to his name, and as many daughters as necessary until that goal was reached. But after the second son, his wife was taken ill, and an operation on her womb, carr
ied out in Zagreb, put an end to his hopes. It was then that he openly turned against the Germans, like a knight whose shield has been knocked from his hand and whose only remaining option is attack. He left his father-in-law’s firm and addressed himself to a different clientele: Serbs, Serbian companies, Serbian politicians. Successful in a number of important cases, he built—on credit—a villa outside the town, near the Danube, where the new ruling class was settling. But above and beyond his own well-being, he cared about the destiny of his nation, and enthusiastically joined the small government-supported Nationalist Party, writing in the pages of its newspaper scathing attacks on German baseness and worthlessness.

  These articles had no real effect, for instead of being supported by concrete facts, which their scanty readership expected, they were no more than incoherent cries of anguish and empty posturing. When he asked himself why this was so, Lazukić was forced to admit that unfortunately he knew very little about the enemy that he hated so fiercely. Realizing that it was too late to remedy this deficiency in himself and his elder son, Rastko—who had turned out, like his mother, puny in body and morose in spirit—he decided to equip the younger son, Sredoje, for hand-to-hand combat. Headstrong, dark-skinned, obstinate, Sredoje was his true heir. As a first step, Lazukić sent him to Fräulein to learn German.

  Similarly, though for opposite reasons, Robert Kroner sent his daughter, Vera, to Fräulein—he could not persuade his son to go—because German, or, rather, the local Austrian dialect, was his children’s mother tongue, just as Yiddish, a dialect of German, had been his own. But both dialects were corrupted, in his eyes, by unacceptable contractions and distortions—divergences from the rules, from what was correct—just as he felt his whole life had been.

  Portents of disaster crept around Kroner’s house like rodents. His mother, her shaven head covered, silent, in the dark cubbyhole of her room gave herself over to prayers, fasting, and the ritual lighting of candles, as if by exaggerated zeal she could atone for the sins of her son and grandchildren, dishonored by the blood and proximity of a Gentile daughter-in-law, who had been not only a maid but a whore. And that daughter-in-law, uneducated and with an unclean past, her white body drained by hundreds of sweating nights, exhausted by countless couplings, smelling of the smoke of endless cigarettes, was useless for anything except sex—and yet no longer possible for Kroner to use for that purpose. At home, he was both prosecutor and criminal. Both there and in the office of his wholesale business next door, he experienced his divergence from the norm as a wild race of frenzied wheels under the foundations, wheels that would carry him wildly, uncontrollably to a shameful catastrophe. He closed his eyes. All the more painful to him now was the faulty speech, shrill and garish, of his children, of his wife, of his mother. The monstrousness of their verbalizing both personified and emphasized for him the underlying disorder of their behavior.

  After finishing business school, Robert Kroner had spent four years in Vienna, to which he had been sent by his farseeing and generous father to be a trainee and then bookkeeper with a firm of his father’s acquaintance, Adelstädter and Son. On Saturdays, his day off, at the Burgtheater, and on weekday evenings at lectures at the Junior Chamber of Commerce, he had the opportunity to learn correct, literary German. He was quick to make use of his improved pronunciation and vocabulary whenever he went to visit his employer’s home on Sunday afternoons, chatting with the two grown daughters and young son, all seated at a little table in the living room. Behind the table stood a large bookcase containing the works of writers whose names were printed in gold letters on the spines: Körner, Goethe, Herder, Schiller. He would borrow these books to peruse during the week. Although unable to understand much of their contents—he read aloud to himself in bed before going to sleep, as if reciting a prayer learned from his mother—the disciplined succession of printed angular Gothic letters transported him into a state of profound tranquillity.

  It was during this time that he decided to stay forever in dignified, orderly Vienna, even if he had to spend his whole life as a minor clerk rather than as a boss in marshy, indolent Novi Sad. Even now it seemed far away, its squat houses engulfed in mist and bulrushes like an oppressive dream. But his father fell ill, died, and after the funeral his mother held on to him, sobbing on his shoulder, and between her tears issued directions on how to conduct the business, which his father had left him in his will.

  His ability to resist was broken. Now he was in despair at the backwardness into which his life had fallen, at his hopelessly bad marriage, which was perhaps the result of that despair, and finally at the muddled babble of speech into which the marriage had plunged him. By sending his daughter to this new teacher, he was extending a hand, belatedly, to the life that had eluded him.

  5

  Evening separation. Only Milinko Božić and his mother, Slavica, were spared that painful division of individuality. They were together in the evenings—indeed, only then were they truly together. Although from the time of his adolescence the son had been sleeping in the bedroom and the mother on a couch in the kitchen, the minute they were in bed they got going—loud enough to hear each other but not so loud the neighbors could hear—on the conversation they had not had time for during the day. “Do you have gym tomorrow?” “Do I have to get bread in the morning?” “You did less homework today than yesterday.” It was not only the words that joined them. After the words, their unspoken thoughts came together like roads that intersect, like fingers that intertwine.

  At the Lazukić home, the parents were completely absorbed in each other. Klara Lazukić—straight calves, ankles swollen with age, pale puffy lids above bulging eyes, hollow cheeks, and sagging breasts—was still enthralled by having been saved from spinsterhood and by her serious, heroic savior; while Nemanja, though his wife had not fulfilled his hopes of an abundant family, could see, as in a nimbus above her head, the blessings of wealth and luxury. They lay together in bed every night and caressed each other, slowly, patiently, gently, as if the other might break, with whispered apologies, and an almost tearful parting before falling asleep. But their ministrations were more audible than they knew. For all their care, the bed sighed and moaned for a whole hour, and the parquet floor creaked at the step of the first one, then the other, as they felt their way, without switching on the light, to the bathroom, from which issued at length the splashing and hissing of water in both toilet bowl and bath. Their sons, accustomed to these noises since early childhood, had long ago arrived at the correct interpretation of their meaning. They had become simply a disturbance. Rastko, always into some novel or other, or a history of an exotic country, or news reports on wars and revolutions, scowled because they broke his concentration. Sredoje—who immediately put out his light to give himself over to dreaming—having failed to force his imagination into an almost tangible form, would burst into laughter.

  Fräulein was truly alone. She listened to every noise in the darkness, thinking she could hear a mouse gnawing in the corner of the room or a cat (or perhaps burglars) creeping around in the courtyard, under the window. She thought of her father, of the people she had run into during the day (occasionally a man), and of the day to follow, with its succession of lessons. All the words she had to utter seemed to loom insurmountably high, like a soft, crumbling mountain that would collapse and bury her.

  At the Kroners’, only the grandmother was alone, in her own part of the house, separated from her son’s by the vaulted gateway. She still felt herself to be living in the master’s quarters, not in this servant’s room, to which she had relegated herself of her own free will when her son announced that he was marrying and whom. Her thoughts were there, not here, her imagination stronger than her senses. She could see the daughter-in-law sprawled on the bed, legs thrown wide and hanging over the edge, the bush of red hair between them giving off the stench of the poison perfume that was choking, withering, dissolving her son (whom she could visualize only as a line of pain). Her grandson, Gerhard, who spent his
days hanging around with other boys on the street, fell asleep as soon as his battered head touched a pillow.

  Apart in her white room, Vera compared—like two pages of a book—the street scenes, the neighbors’ faces, the teachers’ reprimands, the children’s shouts, with the faces and behavior of the members of her own household and came to the painful conclusion that an abyss lay between the two. What should she do for it to be bridged, to be filled in? She sensed that something vague, something hidden would never allow that to take place, that making of peace.

  Meanwhile, Vera’s mother slept. She had seen that Gerd, her son, had what he wanted; her room was warm, the bed soft, no one would wake her; tomorrow she could get up later than her husband. In his study, into which he had had his couch moved (ostensibly to have his books close at hand when he felt the need for them late at night), Kroner tossed and turned in the exasperated knowledge that she was sleeping peacefully, that she was not waiting for him, did not want him. Did she want anyone, in her daydreams or her sleep? He didn’t think so. He knew her for what she was: content as long as she was close to her son and enveloped by security. But that security was in the process of being destroyed, and her son was beginning to distance himself (he could see this already). Once those pillars of support were gone, he knew that she would wriggle away, slippery as a fish, just as she had wriggled free of her previous life and into his.