The Use of Man Read online

  6

  For his physical pleasures Robert Kroner went to the house of Olga Herzfeld’s girls. It was not far from his own, on a busy street behind the Baptist church. The house was solid, tall, jutting out on the corner with an entrance now bricked up: it was once the jeweler’s shop belonging to the late Philip Herzfeld, Olga’s husband. Even when he had no intention of going there, Kroner’s thoughts would stray to that corner, behind whose bricked-up wall his amorous assignations were kept. These visits were arranged beforehand, usually for an evening when, obscured by the gathering dusk, he could get away on the pretext of a walk before supper. When he got to Olga’s house, a girl would be waiting for him, one of the three or four of her “boarders,” who would stay with her for several weeks or months before ceding their place to others, or a girl or woman from the town whom Olga had persuaded to sell her charms. These “chance acquaintances”—women he had never seen before, to whom he was not introduced until they went to bed with him—were the ones he liked best; they gave him the thrill of the unknown, of surprise, providing the fulfillment or disappointment of an anticipation stretched to the limits of possibility. An anticipation including even love, for Kroner was prepared each and every time to find love, constancy, fidelity, with any woman who responded to his inner need, to his hunger for a missing feeling, a feeling that for a brief moment would flare up in him at the touch of a woman, only to fade away just as quickly each time.

  Such a chance meeting had deceived him with an illusion of permanence when, in a similar fashion, in a similar brothel in the tavern opposite the Vrbas Railway Station, he had found his wife-to-be. He caught sight of her upon entering the vast, smoke-filled, noisy tavern, carrying his suitcase, intending to take a train. Her figure was fuller then, her face white with pouty red lips, to which she pressed the rim of a wine-filled glass that clinked audibly against her large white teeth before the pungent, fiery liquid plunged down the curve of her throat. He whispered the name, Reza, not daring to believe that it was really she, the German servant girl with whom he used to have pillow fights in the back room of their shop, and who used to lie down fully clothed next to him, her red plaits stretched out over the white pillow, to allay his fear of the dark until his parents came back from Sombor or Senta on market days. At the time, Reza, nimble and sturdy, looked like a tomboy compared with him, an undersized schoolboy dressed for bed in a long white nightshirt. When they had a fight, though, and he became angry, he was surprised at how easy it was to throw her down, helpless with laughter, onto her skinny shoulder bones. She had almost no breasts then, only small twin hummocks on the flat chest against which he lay, victorious, pinning her arms to the floor with his own, his legs pressing her thin, sinewy calves into the carpet to keep her from squirming free and throwing him off.

  But there in the tavern, she was amply rounded, her white breasts bulging out of the open neck of her yellow silk blouse, her white teeth evenly set between her taut lips. When she got into bed with him in the room behind the kitchen, where she had led him as soon as the price had been agreed upon and the owner was paid, she gave herself to him with all the voluptuousness of a fully grown woman. Telling his mother that his frequent journeys to Vrbas were for the payment of bills, he went on visiting Reza in the station tavern, enjoying her debauchery and shamelessness, until finally he married her—after vacillating between moments of disgust, when he swore to break with her, and bouts of exaltation at her childlike tenderness, which brought back to him those nights when they were left alone in the Jewish merchant’s house, where a little German girl, a Christian, a Gentile, was never anything more than a servant, a being of a lower order, but still enigmatically dangerous and therefore kept at a distance.

  For Robert Kroner, thin and morose, Reza was the only thing that stimulated him to play, to self-forgetfulness—before, during his childhood, and now that he was grown and seeking play and self-forgetfulness in the creation of new lives. He could not imagine having children with anyone else, even though, filled with remorse, he knew that that was something he should undertake with a woman of his own religion. But all the Jewish girls he met or who were set in his way by the schemings of his anxious mother only served to freeze in him any inclination to play, to go to bed, to procreate. It was as if all of them were older relatives with whom he would be committing incest. With the vision of their menacing, crooked smiles in his head, he continued traveling to Vrbas, to the station tavern, and taking Reza, slightly drunk on wine, to bed, a bed that was dirty and shameful but where she spread wide for him the red warmth of her hair and offered her tongue and her belly. But after he married her—bringing shame on himself and his mother, obliging the latter to move into the servants’ quarters so as not to be under the same roof, although even that could not keep her from being a neighbor of her former maid, whom she had once dismissed for some minor misdemeanor and by so doing had, so to speak, driven the girl down the wrong path, into immorality, and now, as punishment, got her back as her daughter-in-law—after he married Reza, Kroner no longer found in her his earlier playful companion.

  By becoming a member of his family, it was as if she had lost all the freedom and capriciousness that play demands, as if she, too, had assumed the responsibility that weighed down those people whose main concern was survival. She took her pregnancy seriously, as a kind of duty: in bed with Kroner, she kept her eyes fixedly on the darkness above her, avoided abrupt movements, and remained unresponsive to his embraces, as if she had to account to someone else for her behavior. And that was indeed the case; that someone was her son, her first-born, Gerhard Kroner, a tyrant from the moment he was born, summoning her with his loud crying at those very times Kroner most wanted to be with her.

  She would push Kroner away from her and run without thinking to her son, and Kroner would be left standing by the bed, pensive, listening to her loving cooing in the next room, the gurgling laughter into which the infant’s cries and her anxious response dissolved as soon as they were together and she clasped him to her breast. Kroner would stand waiting for a long time while she cradled her son in her arms, rocking him to sleep, and waited in vain, for she often fell asleep, kneeling by her son’s cot with her head on the edge of the blanket, her arms beneath it around the child and his pillow, her red hair spread out across his cheek, which trembled blissfully at its touch. Kroner would beg her to come back to the warm bed, or sometimes cover her from her shoulders to her bare feet with a blanket, so that she could stay like that, in the position of an Indian fakir, which for her was wonderfully comfortable, her face and that of the child creased where they were pressed together.

  He was losing her, and for him that process of loss was both a cause for despair and a cause for perverse pleasure, for perhaps, he thought superstitiously, it absolved him of the guilt of having married a woman unworthy of him. Sometimes he would get angry and, to remind her of her marital obligations, would force her to stay with him while the child in the next room cried—it was as if he sensed exactly when to start, anticipating the moment she would become unfaithful to him—but a few such episodes sufficed to estrange her from him completely, his embraces became repulsive to her, and she avoided them even when the child gave no cause for her to do so. Kroner understood that he no longer had a wife. The woman for whom he had paid the price of his humiliation, of his fall, was abandoning him. Now, to atone for his actions, he slipped even further down the same slope on which he had found her—by becoming a regular visitor to Olga Herzfeld’s “establishment.”

  Olga Herzfeld was a Jewess, but an emancipated Jewess. Her husband, a freethinker and Esperantist, much older than she, had left her childless and accustomed to an independent life. In place of motherhood she developed a penchant for organizing and facilitating amorous trysts. For this she felt herself a benefactress, as if she were not being paid for her services. Consequently she was upset by any departures from the standards of behavior she expected from those who made use of her good offices. Every girl she took into
her double-fronted residence and gave one of its large, gloomy, chilly rooms was obliged to play the role of wife-mistress to the hilt: to be a good cook and housewife but, whenever it was demanded of her, to show brazen proof of her femininity and passion.

  Madame Herzfeld hoped that her temporary boarders would make miraculous conquests of their gentlemen callers, who in gratitude would then shower her, Olga, with presents and attention. Instead, her boarders were lazy, slovenly, and often, when she asked one of them to leave, she discovered that the woman had been stealing from her for some time. They promised everything when they came to her, usually needing money urgently—for an abortion, say, or to repaint their apartment—but as soon as they saw that it was not possible to earn large sums quickly, or as soon as they had taken care of their immediate needs, they left her in the lurch, exactly as their clients, who proved generous only before taking their pleasure, did to them.

  Such was the gist of the complaints Olga presented at length to Kroner, her honorable and proper compatriot, while waiting in the semidarkness for an assignation with one of the unfamiliar ladies from town who was late, or shortly following an assignation and during the arrangement of the next, which put them in each other’s company, contented, and with time on their hands.

  They did not notice the shadows lengthening around them, for their conversation grew more profound than the shadows. Indeed, they went into the most intimate details. Kroner quite openly pointed out the women who especially pleased him, describing the exact physical qualities that made them attractive to him; and she, in turn, told him of her early marriage to the elderly Herzfeld, who, preoccupied with his humanitarian principles, had failed to satisfy her either as a wife or as a young woman of poor background desirous of moving up in the world. The two understood one another—not needing to speak in complete sentences, for often a facial expression, a gesture, or a potent word in Yiddish sufficed to convey a whole scene, a situation. These tête-à-têtes gave voice to a vaguely common past that both separated them from the rest of the world and brought them closer to one another.

  Sometimes during the course of the conversation there was even physical contact between them. Madame Herzfeld, short and fleshy, with thinning, straw-colored hair and a small pointed nose, would lean forward in her armchair, and her plump warm hand would take hold of Kroner’s, which lay on his knee. Then the rest of her would follow, pulling him down onto her, onto the floor and between her heavy breasts, across which her housecoat would suddenly, miraculously open wide. After they coupled rapidly, they got up, went one at a time to the bathroom to wash themselves, then came back and, lighting cigarettes, resumed their conversation as if nothing had interrupted it. This short-lived joining of bodies in no way interfered with their friendship; on the contrary, it seemed to strengthen it. Kroner carried on with his descriptions of the charms of other women, and Madame Herzfeld continued to recommend certain partners and dissuade him from others as if only these intimacies gave her the insight into the finer details of his desires.

  7

  Once, just before the war, Sredoje Lazukić, too, found his way to Madame Herzfeld’s house, which in Novi Sad marked the high point of his achievement among the tortuous ways of love for money. Indeed, in that sphere of activity, the house was foremost in the town, perhaps even represented, if pleasure in love can be accepted as the most powerful of all experiences, a summit for the whole of Novi Sad. Truly, what could surpass it? Balls, dances, even those of the most select company, the doctors’ or the journalists’? Or church services, in the fifteen or twenty churches in the town—Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and the denominations with fewer followers, like the Jewish and Armenian, as well as sects like the Adventists, the Anabaptists, and who knows what else—all calling themselves into doubt by their very diversity? Or learning, nurtured in two high schools—one for girls, one for boys—and in two or three vocational and business schools under the direction of teachers for whom their posts meant assured daily bread after the starvation of their student days? (Not to mention all the voluntary groups and classes, of which one was mentioned in Fräulein’s diary, likewise hotbeds of doubtful, haphazardly undertaken learning distorted by prejudice.) In all these noble pursuits, too, were hidden the temptations of the flesh, infecting them with a lust for money and power that inevitably and quickly, in the restricted circumstances of a small community at the crossroads of Pannonia and the Balkans, exhausted itself in disappointment and self-ridicule.

  To prey on others or be preyed upon, to use or be used, if this was the range of possibilities for inflamed desires, then it was certainly easier, and more direct, to translate them into sensual pleasure, into games of cards and beer-drinking under the shade of trees in summer or in a warm, well-lit tavern in winter, into marbled meat, warm potatoes, cold watermelon, fragrant wine, woolen underwear, and lined shoes.

  What else was there? Boredom, which caresses you like a blind and bloated rich aunt? Streets on which nothing happens, until, say, a cat jumps out of a cellar window and runs across the road, surprised by a maid with a lighted candle and a basket for firewood. That maid with the basket is the only thing that might break the boredom. Her body leaning forward, the quivering light distorting her cheek, her forearms. A woman. While women long for men and cunningly, almost imperceptibly, entice them toward their sex by scent and movement, men, more impatient, simply buy them.

  To Herzfeld’s establishment went local government dignitaries, those who summoned their employees by pressing buttons on their desks. The biggest mill owner came, once at eleven o’clock at night, after his card game with the same male friends and before going home; the local landowner, too, handsome and elegant, so proud that not even the theaters and taverns in Belgrade could entice him to cross the Danube, since, for him, Central Europe ended right in Novi Sad. At Madame Herzfeld’s they all laid aside their vanity and greed; a touch of youth and smooth pink skin beneath their fingers intoxicated them, and for a moment or two they forgot that one day they would all be dead, rotting in the ground, no matter what they did or achieved now above it. That same forgetting—of self, of death—was present even in Sredoje Lazukić’s amorous ecstasies, although his youth kept him from being conscious of it.

  He was not yet sixteen when he went to “see the girls” for the first time, with his schoolmate Ćapa Dragošević, who was slightly older. Until then, girls, and that meant all females, had tormented him by their unattainability. They had legs, arms, lips, a belly, teeth; these parts of their bodies were necessary, like those of his own, to carry out certain functions, but they also desperately craved to be touched, to be hugged, to be penetrated until it hurt. Girls and women, however, pretended to have no inkling of this other aspect of their bodies. They used their bodies as if they were only bodies. They crossed their legs to make themselves more comfortable when they sat on chairs, and only the unconscious gesture of pulling a skirt down over bare knees betrayed any sign of awareness that besides making themselves comfortable they were making a point. When they laughed, they displayed teeth and red tongues, as if by opening their mouths they were merely reacting to a joke, yet their teeth and tongues produced an effect quite different from those of a male acquaintance. But no one admitted this. Had Sredoje tried to put his lips onto a girl’s lips, everyone would have been shocked, even though her lips were heavily rouged to draw attention to their fullness, a fullness that could be verified only by touch. In the end, this perceived hypocrisy drove him to hatred.

  Sredoje could no longer envisage relations with a woman as anything except a violent demolition of this hypocrisy. Since he knew from experience that it was not only widespread but entrenched, he had to create situations in his imagination that dispensed with all normal behavior, all resistance and pride, and even the slightest pretense of self-esteem. Gradually he developed a capacity for sadistic fantasy. The girls who caught his eye during the day were summoned to his bed at night, when the dark had erased every vestige of reality, to put on a show�
�not as ordinary girls and women, the real-life daughters and sisters of his fellow citizens, but as obedient subjects of his will. And for him to be able to imagine them convincingly subservient to his every wish, he also had to transform himself from a lustful schoolboy to a full-grown male of overwhelming power. In these fantasies, constantly being reembroidered, he was now a millionaire, now a hypnotist, now a jewel thief, until finally he hit upon the character that suited him best, a career that was the perfect personification of violence and power: captain of a pirate brig.

  There opened up before him an immense variety of fiercely amorous prospects and practices. He saw himself in the midst of the fire and smoke of a sea battle, sword drawn, at the head of a crew of ferocious buccaneers. Dripping blood, he would jump over the rail of a proud schooner and fight alongside his men, urging them on, shouting orders to cut down the enemy. His eyes having turned to the lower deck, where, trembling and wringing their hands at the sound of battle and its uncertain outcome, the ship’s passengers huddled together—soft-skinned, elegantly dressed women and girls—he would carve a passage through corpses toward them. Or, after the guns of his ships had forced a seaport to hoist the white flag and its defenders had been disarmed, with a group of his most trusted followers he would search its houses, looking for white females to carry off as slaves. It was always that first stage, the battle, that led to the second, the surrender, for he knew that women obtained as booty through the massacre of their protectors, women broken by the horrors of battle and fearful for their own lives, would readily strip off their veils of hypocrisy and restraint and throw themselves at his feet, begging to be spared at any price. With such women, he could do anything he pleased at last, and he drove his fantasy to create ever newer images of male dominance.

  But these scenes, however elaborately played out, brought satisfaction only to the mind, not the body. Mere phantoms, they took his body to the brink of delight only to leave it tied in knots. Afterward, there was nothing to be done but to repeat them, to force them to new and greater agonies of frustration.