The Book of Blam Page 5

  Yet she was the one who came up with the idea of renting a room, and she was so excited when she first saw it that she immediately threw off her clothes and lay down in the huge, cold peasant bed. She squeezed her eyes shut as he entered her clumsily, her face contorting, her forehead breaking out in sweat, because she was a virgin, and when it was over, she jumped out of bed with the sheet wrapped around her and ran to the basin, head held high, to wash the blood off. Her naked body was firm and slender and had a honeylike sheen. She was not ashamed of it; indeed, she flaunted it by making more trips to the basin than necessary.

  “Do you like the way I look? Tell me!” she asked with a smile, unaware that by so doing she was spoiling the way she looked. Blam felt there were certain things a person did not talk about, one of them being whether a person liked the way another person looked with no clothes on. Before long, however, he was forced to talk about other things a person did not talk about: after their third tryst Lili told him she was pregnant.

  She was very brave about it, even defiant, announcing before Blam had a chance to say anything that this was “no time for weddings and babies.” Nor, to Blam’s great relief, had she any intention of letting her father in on the secret: it would only cause him distress and divert him from his highly demanding work. Still, the unwanted fruit of her womb could not be removed without some assistance from the older generation, so after much hesitation Blam confessed everything to his mother. Though stunned, Blanka was the only one who had foreseen the possibility of the tragedy and immediately went to her husband. Vilim Blam took the news calmly; he even seemed proud that his son had taken a mistress at so tender an age, and he was not the least perturbed by his son’s having chosen a relative. He was therefore perfectly gallant about getting the money together and even invited Lili to Vojvoda Šupljikac Square for three days, telling everyone that it was in celebration of her impending departure. She left the house on foot accompanied by Blanka Blam and returned with her in a carriage, pale and visibly thinner than she had been two hours earlier yet smiling as ever.

  Lili convalesced in the dining room, fully dressed but lounging on the sofa in Estera’s soft slippers, listening to the radio, waited on by Blanka and Estera, both of whom were moved by the event. The men of the family gave her a wide berth, but Ephraim Ehrlich would blithely enter the dining room, kiss his daughter on the forehead, not noticing or pretending not to notice her mysterious condition or loss of weight, and launch into a monotonous exposition of current events, of his achievements and plans, of their departure. After the discovery of and embarrassing epilogue to the incestuous relationship, no one gave another thought to Miroslav’s going with them. Even Vilim Blam stopped bringing up the subject, having most likely realized that a seventeen-year-old is not old enough to live abroad on his own, and Ehrlich seemed to know more than he let on. Only Lili kept begging Miroslav to come with them, painting life abroad in the brightest colors and promising she would let him enjoy it: he had only to say the word, and she would give him complete freedom. But after what he had been through, Blam had lost the desire—or the courage—to throw in his lot with her; in fact, he could hardly wait for her to go. Still, he selfishly yielded to her pleas and took her back to the Dositej Street room several times, though now taking the precautionary measures he had failed to take earlier. Otherwise he avoided her. He had the feeling that her early pregnancy was merely another of her eccentricities and that a life with her would be full of absurd and disagreeable consequences. He heaved a sigh of relief as they parted, she bathed in tears, at the dreary Novi Sad railway station. Her bags, having been purchased in the various countries of her exile and therefore of all shapes and sizes, were like the magnificent finale of a visiting circus, after which life goes back to normal.

  Chapter Five

  BLAM SPENDS HIS mornings at the Intercontinental. He sits there like a bump on a log, like the fossil of a long forgotten age. Which he in fact is, having been blown there by the wind of an extinct climate, the harsh, merciless, climate of the Occupation, though it was slightly milder for a Jew who had converted to Christianity and married a Christian and was therefore exempt from annihilation.

  In those days the Intercontinental was still a minor branch of the Budapest-based Úti Travel Agency. Since Hungary was at war and her borders were closed, it dealt entirely in local train and bus lines and had only two ticket counters and two desks in a single Main Street office, and it was here—in the farthest corner, in the penumbra of accounts payable and outstanding correspondence—that Blam holed up, hoping to escape the public eye and ill will. Although this imposed isolation made him something of a martyr, although the stamp of martyrdom meant he could welcome the change in regime with open arms and a clear conscience (he and he alone remaining, all the other employees—starting with Ferenci, his boss—having fled), or perhaps for these very reasons, the Intercontinental even in peacetime was still a place of seclusion, depression, and alienation for him.

  All that had changed were the externals: the witnesses and agents of his condition. After the enterprise was reformed and restructured in the postwar period, it was headed by Slavko Jurišić Juriš—former partisan, former municipal clerk, and former student of theology—whose virile allure, significantly enhanced by the gun at his waist, attracted half a dozen girls from newly founded patriotic organizations. The premises proving too small for so large a staff, Jurišić gradually expanded the operation (which municipal headquarters voted to give its new, internationalist name) by requisitioning apartments in the back of the building. And whether Jurišić had intended it or not, the newly converted office space led in turn to an expansion of the Intercontinental’s activities: before long it was dealing in all kinds of travel and tourism, with a bevy of pretty and accommodating women behind glassed-in counters and, in the background, an army of glowering administrators, bookkeepers, and drivers.

  Blam, the longest witness of the growth, follows it with distrust, a distrust that grows in proportion to the general increase in demand for travel, action, change in a world drunk on peace. The son of the enterprising, devil-may-care Vilim Blam, whether from bitter family experience or out of rebellion, tends toward severity and moderation, so whenever the Intercontinental is about to take a risk on a long-term group of package tours, say, or the purchase of a vehicle on credit, he feels wary, close-fisted, and if anyone asks his opinion, he will advise against it and predict the direst of consequences. But package tours are the rage, and with more and more money in circulation, interest rates have gone down. Bitter, almost disappointed, Blam retreats. The lack of moderation on the job and in society at large is at odds with his nature. He refuses to take on complex tasks, sticks to billing and filing at his old desk off to the side, out of the limelight, and plods his stubborn way through boring work.

  Jurišić, who has a soft spot for Blam because they have worked together since the beginning, is concerned. “Poor old Blam,” he says, sighing a gently reproachful sigh and giving him a warm, anxious look. He sits down opposite the calculating machine, no longer in uniform or carrying a gun but with a heavy coat over his shoulders, having been plagued for years with an inflammation of the kidneys. “You don’t understand how things work nowadays,” he says in the intimate tone he uses only with Blam. But when Blam merely shrugs his shoulders, Jurišić’s concern gradually blends into confession and ends in self-pity. “Maybe you’re right to act the way you do. You’ve got your peace of mind, and that’s what counts. Look at me! I’m a wreck!” He launches into laments over how much work he has and how bad his health is. Then, encouraged by Blam’s silence, he delves into the complications of his private life, which Blam, alone among the employees, can grasp immediately, having witnessed how they came about. “The witch has sent me the kids again.” The “kids” are the children from his first marriage, which fell apart when, in the process of taking over the office with pistol still at his side, he set his sights on one of the ticket-counter girls. Now he is supporting both
women, and both are always demanding more. “You’ve got a nice, quiet life. Not very exciting, maybe, but no problems.”

  Blam nods. Then, confused, he shakes his head: he doesn’t want it to seem that he is confirming Jurišić’s problems. Blam’s problems are nothing like Jurišić’s—they are not nearly so obvious and tangible. What gets Jurišić into trouble is his willful character (something Blam has never had to worry about). Blam pities him. No, admires him. Admires his impetuosity, his refusal to acknowledge hardship and danger, his impulsive decisions, his disregard for the voice of reason and doubt. In the man’s simple-minded rashness Blam feels a power alien to him, the power of risk-taking; he feels an animal warmth emanating from Jurišić and engulfing him, especially when Jurišić opens up to him so completely and about such intimate things. As miserable, ill, shivering, and jaundiced as Jurišić is, he draws Blam in, draws him to the oneness of people who think and feel alike, who belong to the same generation and share its experiences, and eventually to the oneness of all people living on the planet.

  It is this intimacy that has kept Blam at the Intercontinental through the years despite the burden of past associations and his disapproval of the way things are run there. He has nothing else. The fact that Jurišić sits down at Blam’s desk to let off steam when he quarrels with his wife or gets a warning from the courts or discovers a new pain, the fact that employees on their way to Bookkeeping remark how cold or dark or smoky it is at Blam’s desk or request a piece of information only he can provide, the fact that the typists and clerks congregate not far from where he sits hunched over his papers, sip their coffee, and discuss their dressmakers or the prices they have just paid for the meat or fruit bulging out of their net bags, not noticing that they are disturbing him and blocking his light, the fact they do not notice not noticing him, which means that they accept him, take his presence for granted, take it as a real and logical thing, the only possibility at that place and time—none of this is a source of annoyance; it is a source pure and simple, a stimulus pure and simple, a way of feeling something genuine, concrete, vital. It is a stimulus that keeps Blam from considering himself invalid or unnecessary or nonexistent.

  BLAM SPENT HIS school years between Aca Krkljuš and Ljuba Čutura. A coincidence? Yes, but like any coincidence not without its reason. Though tall, Aca Krkljuš had ended up on the second bench, to Blam’s left, so that he could be near his elder brother, Slobodan, who was a year behind because of a hearing problem and had been given a seat up front. Čutura sat to the right of Blam—they were separated only by the space between the desks—because the two were approximately the same height. In any case, this coincidence corresponded to a certain reality, the absentminded and solitary Blam representing a kind of transition between the musical, restless, loose-jointed Krkljuš and the slow but steady, thoroughgoing Čutura. If there was anything extreme about Blam’s character, it was in the affection he felt for both friends.

  In their fifth year they had a Russian-émigré German teacher by the name of Yevgeny Rakovsky. Rakovsky was short, thin, and of a sickly constitution, and he wore thick spectacles that made him look bewildered. He nonetheless strutted about the classroom, back straight and head high, and if, carried away by his motion and deceived by his glasses, he bumped into a bench or tripped over the podium, he would turn pale, regain his balance, puff out his chest, fling his narrow head back, and burst into raucous, broken, nervous laughter. What was he laughing at? Himself or the obstacle he had overcome? No one knew. In any case, the class would take advantage of the opportunity for a break and loudly second their teacher’s laughter, laughing to the very limit of decency.

  But Rakovsky gave his students a more generous and more regular break from work: his talks. After a quick and thorough presentation of the material for the day—he had an excellent command of German, though he pronounced it in the soft, Russian way, as he did Serbian—he would clasp his hands behind his back, thrust out his chest, pace back and forth in front of the podium, stumbling now and then and spurting the occasional jet of laughter, and sermonize in his shrill, piercing voice. He spoke of the crisis in Slavdom, whose most powerful branch, Russia, was being eaten away by the Bolshevik blight, an ideology of mediocrity and ignorance designed to bring about Russia’s downfall, an ideology sown by the Jewish nation, which was scattered around the world and which, like all parasites, fed on healthy plants. To combat the evil, he preached a new, militant society based on ancient Sparta, one that promoted might, bravery, and determination and discouraged softness and weakness as breeding grounds for the plutocratic Jewish plague.

  Encouraged by both the attention of his audience and the obvious successes of the Spartanlike military regime in Germany, Rakovsky gradually intensified his rhetoric. Blam was understandably uncomfortable. Whenever Rakovsky came to the end of the brief question-and-answer session after the grammar lesson, folded his hands behind his back, and pulled his puny frame up to its full height, Blam, in his isolation (he was the only Jew in the class), felt cramps in his stomach, the blood draining from his head, and a stabbing pain in his chest, and while he suffered, his classmates heaved a sigh of relief, their faces all smiles in anticipation of a good time.

  The nightmare was in no way mitigated by the fact that Rakovsky did not attack Blam personally. He evaluated Blam’s class performance fairly, even overlooking minor errors: his preoccupation with general principles made him in most respects a fair-minded teacher. But Blam sensed that behind the lack of personal malice lay the patience of a fanatic circling his victim with feigned indifference while waiting for the right moment to pounce. Blam found evidence for the circling in the fact that whenever Rakovsky did lose his temper, he aimed his barbs at Blam’s neighbor, Aca Krkljuš, though it must be said that Aca gave him plenty of ammunition, coming to school half asleep, failing to do his homework, not even knowing what lesson they were on, the very opposite of his deaf and dull-witted but industrious brother, and when Rakovsky discovered that Aca went in for jazz, he started singling him out in his talks as a degenerate Slav. At the same time, Rakovsky made Čutura, Blam’s other neighbor, his pet, addressing him personally from the podium, as if wishing to separate and shield him from Blam’s evil influence. The choice of Čutura as a pet demonstrated even more than did the trips and falls caused by his poor eyesight Rakovsky’s inability to grasp reality, because Čutura (whose real name was Ljubomir Krstić, though all the students and even all the teachers other than the infatuated Rakovsky called him Čutura, “brandy flask”) was even then a committed Communist—an unambiguous, provocative, self-confident Communist, whose older brothers were both known revolutionaries in town. But Rakovsky, isolated from the rest of the population by his in-the-clouds ideas and from the rest of the teaching staff by his unpopular political stance, failed to realize not only that in Čutura he had an ideological enemy but also that in Čutura’s pointed, robust simplicity and stoic hostility he had the very type of strong-willed young Slav he called for in his talks. Čutura did no better at his lessons than Aca Krkljuš—he simply had no time to take them seriously—yet Rakovsky gave him high marks for the most superficial answers and accepted anything he said to justify his absences, which were many, for Čutura attended every illegal meeting he was invited to.

  Blam occupied a middle position between Krkljuš and Čutura in the matter of Rakovsky’s respect as well. But he was instinctively aware of the fragile quality of that position, and he feared the day when its equilibrium would be upset. When the day came, after a year or more of teetering, Čutura was the cause.

  Rakovsky, in his usual precise manner, had asked Slobodan Krkljuš to conjugate an irregular German verb, but his Russian accent was too much for the hard-of-hearing Slobodan, who looked up at Rakovsky’s lips with a good-natured smile and asked him to repeat the question. Rakovsky was happy to do so. A cornerstone of his pedagogy was: If you don’t understand, don’t be afraid to ask. But just as he was about to formulate the question more distinctly, A
ca Krkljuš, who had been hunching behind his brother, afraid he would be next if Slobodan got the answer wrong, leaned over to Blam and begged for the verb forms with his eyes. Blam whispered them to him, but he was too loud and Rakovsky heard him and took it for an attempt to help Slobodan.

  “Blam!” he screeched, as if he had just been scalded, his head jerking forward, his clenched fists falling to his sides.

  Blam stood up.

  “What did you say?” Rakovsky croaked.

  “Nothing to him,” Blam answered, flustered.

  Either failing or refusing to understand what Blam meant, unable to accept anything but lies and treachery from Blam (perhaps for some time now), Rakovsky flinched at these words as at a leper’s touch.

  “What did you say?” he repeated shrilly, his face red, his lips twitching.

  Having to pass Slobodan’s desk to get to Blam’s, he bumped into it on the first step, but instead of laughing as usual, he bared his crooked teeth, regained his course, and moved on with short, clipped steps, holding his head high like a soldier on parade, except that his features were convulsed with hatred, his eyes were smoldering and his thin, curled lips were spotted with foam. He stumbled once more in the space between the desks, but undeterred, lifting his fists and waving them over his head, he made for Blam.