The Book of Blam Read online

  Here is where the former Jew Street came to an end. The section after number 12 on the even side and number 13 on the odd side was torn down after the war to make way for New Boulevard, which intersects the stump of the street with a broad, open, two-way thoroughfare sprinkled with traffic lights. But in the distance, beyond the thoroughfare, its severed extremity—the dot under the exclamation mark—is still visible: a tall, secluded synagogue with Moorish cupolas that is occasionally used for concerts by the Novi Sad Chamber Orchestra or visiting ensembles because of its famous acoustics and absence of a congregation.

  Chapter Four

  WHEN HOUSES WERE torn down to make way for New Boulevard, the part of Jew Street subjected to the sledgehammer and pickax provided unexpected opportunities for observation and thought. As the work proceeded and the buildings lost their roofs, the jagged walls jutted into the sky like scarecrows, then became shorter and shorter—melting away, losing their domestic, human face as doors and windows disappeared to expose undreamed-of twists and turns, mazes like coloring-book puzzles—until finally only the foundations remained, naked and floorless, with gaping chasms where cellar stairs had been and the last walls forming the backdrop for a drama of doom. Standing in parallel rows, shorn of crossbeams, these remaining walls gave the most poignant illustration of the temporary nature of human dwellings: from sky blue to pink and from pink to pale green, with brighter patches of various shapes and sizes representing the beds, pictures, wardrobes, chests of drawers that had stood in front of them, protecting them for years from soot and sun, with here and there a hook, nail, or brace sticking out of their otherwise smooth surfaces. The walls with stubborn magnanimity maintained the tastes and habits of the people who were no longer there; they demonstrated that each house, each room was distinctive, unique, providing each family, each individual with its own way of eating, sleeping, reading, cursing, making love, throwing a fit, and that these different ways of doing things coexisted in amazingly close proximity to one another as well as to what the buildings themselves had kept at bay—the world, the sky, the rain to which they were now pitilessly exposed—and with which they were now becoming one.

  BLAM COMES OUT into New Boulevard amid the cross-fire of traffic lights and directional signals and the smoke of exhaust pipes. His way is blocked by a light-brown car with a body like a tortoise. It wiggles slowly onto the curb and stops at the very end of the former Jew Street. Blam also stops, instinctively. The back door opens with a click, and out comes a pair of long, tan legs bent at bony knees and a dress hitched up to the thighs. The legs and narrow feet dangle for a few seconds, the changing traffic light reflected on the white sandals; then they alight on the yellow brick of the former Jew Street, knees together, feet apart, spreading spongelike under the weight of the body now rising, head first, out of the open car door. It is a slender body topped by an elongated head with flat features. Protuberant, glassy eyes and sun-bleached hair gathered carelessly in a bun give the face a lifeless quality, yet the woman moves in a lithe, self-confident manner. She stands straight, stretches, and makes a half turn, swishing her slightly wrinkled green dress—loose but belted at the waist—around her bony knees. At the wave of a hand that is as suntanned as her legs, a child’s feet in short white socks push out of the door, then the freckled face of a boy with watery goggle eyes appears in the sunlight, and eventually a whole little figure, slightly dazed and distrustful, staggers out into the street and up to the woman. She takes the boy by the hand, which he has automatically held up to her, and looks around. Her pale eyes fall on Blam, run up and down his diffident frame, then wander to the stands selling lottery tickets, books and records, cold drinks and ice cream. Now she motions to the car, completes her turn, and sets off down the street with the child, passing Blam. The other door of the car opens, and a broad-shouldered, thick-necked man wearing a yellowish-brown T-shirt stretched tightly across a hefty stomach twists his way out. He slams the door, thrusts his hands into the pockets of his floppy gray trousers, and walks around the car, examining it with great care. Then, bending all the way down, he takes one hand out of his pocket and feels a back tire (which is beyond Blam’s range of vision), pats the lock on the luggage compartment, and closes the back door. The woman and boy are now at the other end of the street, she slightly ahead of him. No longer holding hands, they are licking ice cream, which threatens to run down the cones onto their fingers. They come to a halt in front of the man but do not so much as glance at him, their attention riveted on the progress of their tongues along the smooth pink mounds. They lick the now-flattened top of the ice cream, then nibble on the soggy edge of the cone. At one point the woman mutters a few words and purses her lips in the boy’s direction, and he, following her glance, lowers his protuberant eyes to his stomach, where the hem of his white shirt has come out of his tight shorts; but, having found nothing out of the ordinary, he goes back to licking, nibbling, swallowing. Before long their hands are empty, and they stand there staring at their idle, sticky fingers. The woman says something to the man, and he takes his other hand out of his pocket along with a crumpled handkerchief, which he hands to the woman. She unfolds it, wipes her fingers, then bends down and wipes her son’s, tucking in his shirt while she is at it. She returns the handkerchief to the man, who examines it, folds it up, and stuffs it back into his pocket. All three lift their faces and squint at the sun, which, though not visible, sends its rays down between the gables to form a triangle on the gray dusty street, a gold-plated layer of dust. The man walks around the car, opens the front door, and slowly, rocking the car’s body with his bulk, squeezes behind the wheel. Then the woman opens the back door, picks the boy up under his arms, and, bending, swings him onto the seat. She watches him make himself comfortable in the corner, then turns toward Blam (that she sees him without seeing him is reflected in the harmony of her movements), and withdraws first her body and head, then her legs, knees together, into the car. The front door, then the back door clicks shut. The engine turns over and starts humming, and the car rolls slowly back off the curb and joins the stream of traffic moving along New Boulevard.

  Blam sets off in the same direction—here the sidewalk is nearly level with the boulevard’s asphalt surface—past the rear walls of the houses left along the former Jew Street. On one side he is whipped by the wind of the speeding cars and on the other soothed by the peeling plaster and pink-and-yellow bricks. The memory of the family that emerged from the car to act out a scene of their life for him is still fresh in his mind; he goes over the way they moved and gestured. But the houses he is passing also claim him—their proportions and materials, their stains and scratches so long familiar. One side of the street is the past, the other the present. He can’t get at the present, he knows he can’t, though he feels it, feels it bodily, on his skin, like the sporadic gusts of air from the boulevard that lash him and move on, carrying off group after group of people like those he has just seen. He knows he will never sit behind the wheel of a car he is both owner and master of and give himself up to the wind, the speed, taking along Janja and the Little One, who would have no trouble adapting to and merging with a strange city, a strange country. He lacks the self-confidence or the energy for it; nor does he feel the need. His will dooms him to return to the same old roads and streets, to remain their intent yet listless and melancholy observer.

  New Boulevard forms a kind of bow arching through the remains of a once-lively community. The sidewalk narrows at the corner of a garden wall forgotten during the demolition process, then branches away from the houses to a side street. Blam passes the wall, enters a narrow alley, and, proceeding to its end, comes out into Vojvoda Šupljikac Square.

  The square looks as it has always looked, its houses silently embracing the small park. There is no motion but the gentle sway of the spreading hawthorns. There are no pedestrians. In front of a gate two houses down from Blam’s former house, an old woman sits on a low stool, her gnarled hands crossed in her lap, her jaw moving. At fi
rst Blam thinks she is chewing, but as he gets closer, he realizes it is an illusion, her jaw is moving for no reason or else out of boredom or pain. The bowl full of peaches in front of her is untouched. She is selling them here in the empty square, having picked them in her garden, a cramped space behind her modest house, or in her daughter’s garden, or in the garden of a neighbor who does not care to expose herself to the street’s prying eyes. The old woman is patiently offering the peaches at a price below what the market is charging, in the hope of making a little extra money.

  Blam has to stop; his legs force him to, as if he too were old, ailing, and exhausted from long waiting and hope. Gravity pulls him down, down to his knees, to touch the ground with his head and weep, not for the old woman’s fate, for her thankless, hapless undertaking, her sacrifice; no, for her faith, which keeps her here by the gate, by the bowl of fruit. Blam sees her faith as the faith of a world now gone, a world of which he too is a remnant. That faith has proved pitiful, futile, because the people who lived by it have all been murdered and forgotten, erased by time and asphalt roads, and he is its last witness, the only person able to appreciate and interpret it, but only for himself. The old woman cannot, though she has survived and preserved that faith. She may even belong to those who did the killing or who looked on in silence while the killing went on or who thought the killing justified. But at this moment she personifies for Blam the now defunct world of ardent faith, and through her he returns to it, to the faces of the departed tradesmen and brokers of the former Jew Street, the faces of his parents and sister and other relatives, the faces of friends who sinned against him and friends whom he sinned against.

  *

  “Come with us!” Lili said or, rather, “Komm mit” in her guttural, voluble German, because she never learned Serbian or cared to, which infuriated Blam. Nearly everything about her infuriated him: her garish way of dressing and behaving, the sarcastic look in her multicolored eyes, the panache with which she paraded around provincial, patriarchal Novi Sad, swishing her willowy dresses and addressing everyone in loud German as though it were perfectly natural for them to speak her language rather than for her to speak theirs. “Eccentric” was the way he thought of her, not realizing he had taken the word over from his mother, and after possessing her physically and thus emotionally and intellectually, and feeling a need to correct and torture her, he used it openly with her: “You’re an eccentric. No one can live life the way you picture it.” But she would just open her greenish-brown eyes wide with amazement and turn the ends of her mouth down into a pout or up into a sneer, which then spread to the dimples in her cheeks and to the smooth expanse of her forehead. While she never protested, she never seemed to grasp the point of his reproaches; she simply waited until he got them out of his system so she could snuggle up to him with one of her “eccentric” demands: “Kiss me quick!” “What I wouldn’t do for some chocolate!” “I want to go dancing!” “How about a film tonight?” And “Come with us!” He would say no, routinely, more out of spite than conviction.

  The only thing he always agreed to was meeting her in their hideaway, a room he had sublet in remote Dositej Street at her instigation, though what Lili offered him was a mixed blessing and even cause for regret. To begin with, the widow he sublet the room from made him uneasy. She was a tired, lifeless woman who may have believed what he said when she rented him the room facing the courtyard with a separate entrance—namely, that he was a student from the countryside—but was then doubtless shocked to find the room locked day and night and to see the young man only on hot afternoons and always with a thin young woman whose arms, legs, and skirt were in constant motion and who never stopped chattering in her strange, incomprehensible language, not even after her green lover let her into the room. He suspected the widow would have thrown him out if she had been less worried about the expense involved in running another advertisement and the energy involved in showing the place again, and as a result he was full of remorse for living a lie and getting away with it, and that remorse poisoned his feelings for Lili. He upbraided her for flaunting their mutual lie the way she flaunted her loud dresses, loud laugh, foreign language, and even more foreign origins.

  Shame and spite made him reluctant to follow her on the next leg of her journey, her migration through Europe, this time to Italy, where her father was to sell an invention of his. Ephraim Ehrlich was always bragging; for him, reality and bragging were indistinguishable. Here too, in Novi Sad, he made his living—feeding and clothing himself and his daughter and renting an expensive furnished apartment—more by blowing his own horn than by applying whatever technical knowledge he might have had. He carried on lengthy secret negotiations with greedy, gullible Jews about the advances he needed to develop and perfect the inventions that would bring them millions. “He’s a sharp one, that Ephi,” Vilim Blam would say approvingly, lounging in his armchair and clenching a cigar in the strong, white teeth he was always quick to flash. An Ehrlich on his mother’s side, Blam’s father liked to think of himself as cast in the same spirited mold, as “a sharp one.” He was in favor of Miroslav’s going with his relatives, not because he saw the danger of persecution and extinction drawing closer to Novi Sad (his faith in people and in his own good fortune precluded all possibility of danger) but because he felt that moving away, a change of scene, would provide his son with greater opportunities in life. “Oh, to be young again!” he would sigh, throwing his head back on the antimacassar, patting his stomach with a soft, fleshy hand, and puffing white smoke rings that filled the dining room and said that he did not in the least wish to be young again, that he was perfectly content as he was, with a well-fed body and a cigar between his teeth. “I’d grab the opportunity,” he would say, making a fist, as if he had the opportunity right there in his hand.

  Ehrlich would sit opposite Vilim Blam with his hands folded on the table—he did not smoke—and nod approval. He tended to be serious, formal. His narrow face and strong features made him look more like a pastor than an inventor, and his bright blue eyes and thin lips made him look utterly different from Lili, whom he adored, perhaps for that very reason, as she adored him. His speech was slow, monotonous, and dry but so effective that one felt compelled to listen. He maintained that the Jews of Novi Sad, Blam included, were making a big mistake by ignoring the experience of those already threatened and destroyed. He cited the example of friends from Vienna who had sat twiddling their thumbs until the Nazis threw them out of their factories, shops, and apartments, and then, after robbing them of their money and connections, sent them off to camps and starved them to death. “ ‘What are you waiting for?’ I said to them. But they stayed put. They didn’t listen. And you know why? Because they had no faith in themselves, because they thought they couldn’t live without their Persian rugs and crystal chandeliers.” Then Ehrlich would give detailed descriptions of the contents of vacant Jewish houses and the plundering of the valuables, and Blanka Blam, who was fanatically devoted to hearth and home, trembled with horror and threw her husband desperate glances begging him to restrain his relative, for Ehrlich was very much his side of the family, and she secretly believed that her much stricter clan could never have produced so merciless an observer, though how could the man be otherwise with no real profession, no real home, how could a man widowed at such an early age fail to marry again, how could he bring up that child, that Lili, on his own, letting her do whatever she pleased, letting her seduce the boy in front of everybody?

  Lili did in fact seduce Miroslav. To persuade him to leave, she did not use her father’s tactics of referring to horrors suffered and witnessed; instead she flattered him, yet gave him reasons much like his father’s. “What’s a man like you going to do in this dead end of a town?” she would ask, looking at the nearly deserted streets of Novi Sad, though she seemed to be having the time of her life there. “A smart, handsome, capable man like you? Why, you’re made for the world!”

  Blam was embarrassed by her praise, but it made h
im feel capable in her presence, even handsome. It made him wiser and deeper. He parried Lili’s arguments with bitter, proud sobriety: Yes, he realized he could expect a vain, futile existence here, even degradation and death, but he saw no reason to try and escape his fate. “Life has no meaning anyway,” he would say. And, “Life is pure illusion.”

  If Blam himself was surprised at the bleak maturity of his pronouncements, Lili was enchanted by them, and much as she protested in fact, they were precisely what she wanted. Though the same age as Blam—and therefore, as a woman, considerably more mature than he—she was certain he knew more about love. Once, when they were still getting to know each other, she spun around and, peering up at him to see how he would react, came out with “I have a fiancé in Vienna, but I don’t know if he’s alive.” Which set Blam off on a jealous disquisition about how senseless it was to keep a relationship going after the bonds of attachment had come undone: she was like a child holding a broken kite string. “Oh, how right you are!” she cried contritely and threw her arms around his neck. They were in Vojvoda Šupljikac Square (whose name she always replaced with a laugh, never able to pronounce it) after one of Blanka Blam’s abundant meals, having left the grown-ups and lazy Estera to digestion and serious talk. “Kiss me!” Lili said for the first time, standing on her toes and pressing her small, firm breasts into his body. “Somebody might see us!” Blam replied, flustered yet managing to sound prudent and reasonable, so that Lili had to say, “But there’s nobody here!” the truth of which Blam confirmed with a cautious glance. “All right, then,” he said and lowered his mouth to her thin, burning lips, which quickly sucked it in. Her whole body trembled, twisted, and in the end she burst into tears. “I can’t betray Hans. He’s in a camp, and at this very moment they may be torturing or killing him!”