The Book of Blam Read online

  Chapter Seven

  “ARE YOU UP?” the woman asks in a low voice. She must have heard Blam stirring. “It’s six thirty.”

  It is more admonishment than statement of fact. Stocking in hand, she takes a step to the table and pushes the metal cap of the alarm clock with a pudgy index finger: no need for it to ring. Every morning after the clock does its silent job of measuring time on her side of the bed, she moves it to the table and sets the alarm that she doesn’t use, not wishing to disturb the Little One’s sleep.

  Her effort on his behalf affords him a slight, malicious satisfaction. “Coming,” he says, though he merely props himself up on his elbows. Janja has suggested they buy another clock for his bed, but he says no, claiming that the ticking bothers him. What he really wants is for her to wake him, because it makes her think of him the moment she opens her eyes.

  Think of him. He knows what she thinks of him. He knows she wrinkles her prominent forehead and pictures him with his eyes on the ground, mute and motionless, an object. An object you’ve got to set in motion if you’re going to get anything out of it. That’s what he is to her.

  But it doesn’t matter. He’s just one object among the many hemming her in. The others force her to brush against him now and then. If she had more of them, if the kitchen were smaller and crammed with things and if her bed were here too, they’d have to touch all the time. Maybe then—body to body, breath to breath—they’d feel the need to put their arms around each other on a morning like this, when the imagination is more footloose, even after insane dreams that make your heart pound—or because of them.

  What he wouldn’t give to pull her into bed now, to bury himself in her soft, freshly washed skin, to sink into her supple body and find freedom from his sweaty, insecure self. He feels his arms ready to reach, feels his hands and groin quivering with desire, but the request that must precede the embrace—no, he cannot bring himself to utter it; he cannot even imagine putting it into words. Words—real words, words that demand or explain—have long since died between the two of them. He rooted them out himself after catching sight of her from the tram. He made himself dumb rather than try to keep her or accept what she did. The words they exchange now are superficial, almost mocking in their matter-of-factness.

  “I’m dripping with sweat,” he grumbles.

  Janja pauses in the minute motions that make up her dressing ritual and stands up straight, her bare arms and shoulders rosy in the light of the sun.

  “Want a towel?”

  He is unnerved by her naked beauty, glowing, willing to accommodate but not to love.

  “Don’t be silly. I’ll get it myself.”

  He drops his feet to the rug covering the cold tiles, steps into his slippers, and squeezes through the narrow passageway between the bed and the table to the sink-and-shower combination. The kitchen-bedroom was originally a bathroom that Janja cleverly remodeled, leaving the main room for the Little One. And for herself, of course, because she is utterly devoted to the Little One.

  Now each is busy in opposite corners—he washing under the tap, she finishing her dressing—their bends and arm movements all but synchronized. But it is pure habit: her thoughts are far removed from him, he knows—at the restaurant, perhaps, where a boisterous group of friends await her daily, or here with the Little One, who is still asleep.

  They finish at the same time and walk over to the window together, she to raise the venetian blind and open it, he to toss his pajamas on the bed and take his shirt from the chair.

  Janja picks up the pajamas from the bed, holding them as far away from her body as she can, and lays them out on the windowsill, where the sun is beating.

  “So they’ll dry. But shut the window when the Little One wakes up. Because of drafts.”

  She goes to the refrigerator, opens it, and, bending over, sticks her head into its cool light.

  “Don’t forget to give the Little One butter and honey. And take the chill off the milk.” She issues her orders in the harsh voice of her early years. The only reason she wakes him—the only reason she acknowledges his existence—is to give orders.

  “You’re not going to eat anything?” he asks in turn, though he knows the answer.

  “I’ll have something at the restaurant.”

  “One of these days they’ll catch you, and you’ll be sorry.”

  “We all have breakfast there,” she says, waving goodbye and flashing the usual false, bored smile.

  Blam is alone. He listens to her footsteps echo through the entrance hall until they are cut off irrevocably by the click of the lock. Then he looks around. She expects him to clean up and make breakfast; he has no desire to do so. Once she is gone, he has no desire to do anything here. Everything around him looks suddenly wrong; nothing feels familiar, his own. The bed, with which they have replaced the bathtub in the alcove under the window, reminds him of a couchette in a train, and the stove, the sink, the wall cupboard, the refrigerator are so many utilitarian items, stopgaps. The distances between them were calculated to the last centimeter, as was everything else, to accommodate as many objects as possible and leave space in the Little One’s room. Not that he was against it. In fact, he was the one who proposed that he move out of the main room—the child needed her peace and quiet, after all—and he had helped Janja rearrange things. It was as if he wanted to be pushed out of the family, out of their life together, to be isolated by the faceless necessities of cooking and keeping house. As if he were punishing himself for ever having tried to form a bond with, become one with, another person. Or was it that he hoped to provoke Janja into opposing him and joining him in his self-imposed exile? But she accepted his suggestions readily and without hesitation.

  His heart starts up again, rasping inside his chest as though it had outgrown the rib cage. He knows this comes from the unsettling thoughts he has been having, but he is fairly sure it is not dangerous; it is dangerous only when Janja is present. Hers is the hand that can and must undo the knot of his life and death. The rest is waves and reverberations.

  He goes from the appliance-filled kitchen into the entrance hall, the crossroads between the main room and the outside. Here the air is close and stifling; outside it is a brisk, sunny morning. All he has to do is open another door and walk across the terrace, and he’ll be out in the wind, under a blue sky. Or even in the sky. All it would take is a leap, headfirst, that would be best, abandoned as he is. Janja would be coming out of the building about then, and he would land smack in front of her like a frog. “You forgot to kiss me!” he would say with his last breath as she bent over him, dumbstruck. Yes, he would like to shock her. Though she might simply run back upstairs to see whether the jump had woken the Little One. The Little One’s head, not his bleeding one, would be the one Janja pressed to her breast.

  The room he now enters is enshrouded in a darkness the consistency of india ink, so tightly are the curtains drawn. He knows his way, however, knows it almost better than he knows his way around the room he lives in: everything has its natural place, in an instinctual sort of way: wardrobes on one side, table in the middle, settees in the corner flanking the tiled stove, and plenty of space along the soft rug leading to the window. His outstretched hands soon feel their way to the cord for the roller blind, which with a creak of the slats lets a beam of light into the room.

  The girl is lying with her back to the window, so Blam must go around the bed before talking to her. The pillow has cast a shadow over her face, but her healthy baby complexion shines, conquering the dark. It is oval, her face, and simple, with blond locks strewn over forehead and cheeks, the face of a young Janja, a Janja still in the making, still gentle and tender. And of whoever sired her. Popadić? Or any one of the many casual lovers Janja surely had at the time when the Little One was conceived. He never asked Janja about it; the scene he witnessed from the tram was all the proof he needed. He observes, and the child’s face confirms an already firm conviction. No, there is nothing of him in those feat
ures. And this calms him. He may admire her, watching her burgeon into an individual before his eyes and with his help, but he feels no special, dangerous parental affection for her. If she were thinner, more fragile, if her hair or skin were dull like his, if she had his deep shadows or closed expression, it would upset, even pain him. He would worry about what lay buried in the lines and shadows, seek out familiar patterns in and behind them, severed, shattered connections, as on the face he saw that morning in his dream. This face does not bind him to anything. It belongs to another world, a world with other thoughts and other problems. He is glad when the child is healthy and happy, growing fast and doing well in school; he is full of compassion when she falls ill, distressed when he goes for the doctor or for medicine, sorry he can’t take the pain, the fever, the fears upon himself; she is so small, so innocent, so trusting; he is absolutely certain he would give his life for her; he would give his life for Janja too, he wouldn’t think twice, it would be a relief, it would make up for his lack of emotional attachment, his deficient love.

  His guilt probably makes him a gentler parent than Janja with all her zeal. Leaning over the Little One, he carefully lowers his hand onto the thin arm resting on the quilt. It is so tiny, the skin so smooth and glowing, that he is loath to wake her with his sullying touch. Still, he taps her two or three times, and she stirs, stretches, opens her eyes for an instant, then shuts them again. But in that instant his face has registered, and it has comforted rather than frightened her: her lips draw into a vague, sleepy smile.

  “Time to get up, darling. Mama’s orders.”

  She stretches again and purses her lips. She and Blam have developed a playful way of conspiring against Janja, the embodiment of rules and obligations but also of love.

  “Why?”

  “I think she said you’ve got a lot of studying to do. Is that right?”

  Her eyebrows twitch just like Janja’s when Janja tries to recall something. Her face is motionless for a moment, but then she opens her eyes wide and gives a serious nod.

  “There, you see?” he says and, raising an index finger like a conductor’s baton, gives her the signal for their ritual repetition of a sentence he once taught her in jest when she complained how strict Janja was: “Mama is always right.”

  They laugh.

  “Good girl,” he said. “Now you get dressed, and I’ll go and clean up.”

  Back on his own turf he is somber again. How many of his comic and tragicomic quips and gestures will remain when he leaves? None: the need for them will disappear when he does. Their life will run its course without him, might even be better when Janja takes over. There will be less confusion, less uncertainty.

  He hears a door creak: she’s climbed out of bed and crossed the entrance hall to the toilet. Soon she’ll be in to wash, and he wants to have his bed made by then so she won’t be embarrassed: she’s a big girl now. That problem too will disappear once he’s gone: the women will have the run of the apartment; they’ll move around freely, without inhibitions. There will be more space too: they’ll remove his bed from under the window and put it somewhere else or sell it, and the room can go back to being a bathroom with a few kitchen utilities added. “I have a combination kitchenette and bathroom,” he can hear Janja almost boasting to one of the women in the restaurant. “It used to be a studio apartment, but we did it over.” She may mention that they did it while he was alive, that he gave them a hand, that it was his idea, forgetting how much he was in their way. But she may also tell the Little One that he isn’t her father and so spare her the pain.

  She comes in. He makes the bed while the water splashes into the sink. He feels his pajamas—they are nearly dry—and sticks them under the pillow.

  “Did Mama leave me a note?”

  He turns and looks at her. She is wearing a meticulously ironed pink dress; her hair is neatly combed. She has her mother’s well-groomed look.

  “A note?” he asks, feigning surprise. He is well aware that the two of them constantly leave each other messages about errands to be run and deadlines to be kept. “You know what your schedule is for today, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Papa,” she says, but with a hint of disappointment in her voice.

  “Put the milk on, will you?”

  She complies, leaving him nothing to do and somewhat contrite: heating the milk is a task Janja always assigns to him.

  “Do you feel a draft?”

  “No.”

  Still, he shuts the window.

  The girl lifts the pot from the stove in a self-assured, feminine way and sets it on the table.

  “Is it warm enough?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure? Mama told me to make sure it was warm.”

  The girl looks up at him, wondering whether he is making fun of Mama, but in the end she decides to smile.

  “Try it.”

  He takes her smile as a sign of complicity and smiles back.

  “No, no. You’re the housewife today.”

  She cocks her head contentedly and starts setting the table. He sits down.

  “Do you like making your own breakfast?”

  “I do.”

  “My mother used to make breakfast for me,” he says didactically, ashamed of himself for including her in his family, which is most likely not hers. “My sister too. You know I had a sister, don’t you? Estera. She was a little like you. I don’t mean that she looked like you, but she acted like you.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “That you had a sister and she was killed in the war.”

  “Yes, darling. She and my father and mother.”

  “And your mother’s sister, Darinka.”

  “That’s right. My mother’s sister, Darinka. And many others. Thousands.”

  “Why did they let themselves be killed?” she asks thoughtfully, pausing with the sugar bowl in her hand and looking at him inquisitively with her curious, clear blue eyes. “I’d have tried to defend myself, I think.”

  “Some of them did try to defend themselves. My sister did. She shot back at her murderers. But not everybody could. It was very hard. You’ll understand when you grow up.”

  UNLIKE THE RESTLESS and rarely cheerful Miroslav, Estera Blam was quiet, a homebody. She liked to “rest,” as Blanka Blam euphemistically characterized her daughter’s tendency to sit in a corner or recline in an armchair and stare at the patterned curtains or the faces of the family as they talked. It was probably because she spent so much time indoors that, even as she grew into adolescence, she remained pale and chubby. She got on well with girls her own age, with boys too, for that matter, yet she had almost no friends. When friends of her mother brought children to play with her, she was perfectly willing to let them take over her dolls and toy furniture and miniature cake tins, but she never asked to go and see them. Like a small domestic animal, she felt most comfortable in the nook where she was born, so she loved first her house and later its extension, school. She attended school with the punctuality of a pedant: she never missed a homework assignment, kept all the prescribed paraphernalia in her satchel, and was so careful with her schoolbooks that she did not even need to cover them. Vilim Blam, whose vanity led him to favor his male offspring, secretly thought his daughter simple-minded. Nor would Blanka Blam have been surprised if Estera, for all her academic zeal, had made only mediocre progress; that Blanka had not done particularly well at school herself she ascribed as much to her sex as to anything else. But such was not the case with Estera. While Miroslav with his nimble mind stood out in elementary school, slacking off later on to such an extent that they had to hire private tutors at the end of every year to get him through, Estera was at the top of her class from the start and maintained her position there unwaveringly.

  She had a phenomenal memory: anything registered by her big brown eyes and fleshy ears—word, name, number—was engraved in her memory as in wax.

  Helpful as it was in school and in the
normal circumstances of growing up, her memory became a burden when the wave of social reckoning reached Vojvoda Šupljikac Square. Estera suddenly found herself in the position of a hen sitting on eggs that someone had maliciously sneaked into her nest. All the ominous rumors that other people clucked at and then put out of their minds as unbelievable, she registered carefully and for all time in her impartial memory bank. She ingested all the daily news, no matter how far-fetched or self-contradictory, absorbed every émigré’s story, assimilated all written and oral reports of the sufferings and deaths of innocent people, and before long her round, listless, but observant eyes and sheeplike ears were taking in the chaos occurring in her immediate vicinity.

  It began when Vilim Blam, being a Jew, lost his position at the newspaper for which he had worked with all his heart and soul for two decades: he was demoted from reporting to advertising. The change would not have noticeably affected conditions at home had it not noticeably affected his morale, for although he could make as much money by selling advertising as he could by writing articles, he had no desire to invest his energy in something unless he saw it the next day, as usual, in print under his name. So instead of making the rounds of the tradesmen and artisans, briefcase in hand, he would succumb to the lure of the coffee house even more than before, drinking much too much and poisoning the atmosphere with his politics. Telephone, electricity, and gas bills began piling up on the dining room sideboard, and the grocer grew more and more insistent that his account be settled.