After Sredoje recounted the episode to Milinko, the latter, in accordance with his sober, antiviolent nature, took pity on Vera and began greeting her. Since more often than not this occurred while he was walking with Sredoje, for a long time she failed to respond—which amused Sredoje. When Milinko meekly bowed his head, and the red-haired girl turned hers the other way, refusing to look at him, Sredoje would double up with laughter. Noticing this, she suddenly changed her tune and returned the friendly boy’s greeting in a reciprocally pleasant manner, being quick to notice what effect this favor had on his friend, who was not its recipient. Sredoje went on pretending that her ill will amused him; then, gradually, all three of them began to be amused by these encounters, where every gesture was so charged with meaning, or else meaningless. Finally, they could hardly wait for the next meeting, so each could observe the behavior of the others and compare it with the time before.
Sredoje and Milinko never let a day pass without talking about the girl, and she, having no confidante, recounted these events to herself every evening. By the time they were old enough, as seniors, for dancing lessons—held one week in the boys’ and the next in the girls’ high school—they were already well acquainted. When asked by the potbellied, frock-coated teacher to choose a girl with whom to practice the new steps, Milinko did not hesitate to make a bow to Vera. Keeping his arm tightly around her waist while dancing evolved into accompanying her home after the lessons, and soon they arranged to go to the lessons together. He became “her boy” and she “his girl.” That meant that she belonged to him and he to her, and soon a circle of restraints grew up around them and brought them still closer together.
Sredoje, the nearest observer of all this, treated it with gleeful derision. By then, he was already making the rounds of the taverns on the outskirts of town, practicing, not dance figures, but far more intimate connections. And though it seemed to him that the former could make sense only as a preparation for the latter, he knew—was firmly convinced—that dancing was in fact a preparation for nothing at all, that all those nice little girls, after all those undulating turns to a waltz played by the teacher’s small, dark, wavy-haired wife, went from their partners’ embrace straight home—either alone or accompanied by an innocent boyfriend—to their mother, to have supper and go to sleep in a narrow, virginal bed.
To what purpose, then, was all that touching, that exchanging of glances, those pleasantly ambiguous remarks, that walk home? But, for all his mockery, he did not remain indifferent to those firm, supple hips on which, at the prompting of the piano, he placed his hand, nor to the warm, trembling fingers that rested, light as feathers, on his shoulder. Their touch aroused him, however, precisely because of his experience of a deeper and closer contact, even though it was with girls far less beautiful and delightful—girls from his illicit excursions, whom he could often call “girls” only in derision, so worn and faded were they, so irritable from drinking, almost always vulgar and ignorant, for it was that very vulgarity and ignorance, that social inadequacy, that had usually pushed them down to the bottom rung of the ladder in the first place.
How far removed from the slave girls who had preceded them in his imagination, sweet-smelling and beautiful and dedicated to pleasing him! But just as far removed from those fantasies were these girls at the dances, their movements strictly prescribed by the dancing master, their signs of submission studied, not an act of submission itself. That game of hypocrisy! Both kinds of girl came down to the same thing—a mere illusion—and he approached both with equal suspicion, sensing, in advance, disappointment, rejection, discord. Yet when he danced with Vera Kroner for the first time, quite by chance, finding himself opposite her at the moment the teacher told them to begin practicing a figure he had just demonstrated, it turned out that their movements harmonized so smoothly and so completely that they did not feel themselves to be separate individuals. Surprised at this, each stepped back a little to look the other in the eyes, but even this interruption did not impair the harmony of their movement, for, once they joined again, they continued to glide as one, as if tied fast with strings. They could not now deny the concord that bound them. Although they pretended not to seek each other out, they in fact did so, arranging to be opposite when couples were being formed, curious to see if that earlier rapport would repeat itself, and then, because they could no longer doubt it, they sought each other out for the sheer pleasure of that movement. It tempted them more and more as they mastered the art of dancing, progressing beyond the set steps, abandoning themselves to the rhythm that carried them along, joined together, like fast-flowing water. Now, for the first time, they enjoyed dancing for its own sake, but when they tried to experience the same pleasure with other partners, to their surprise they discovered they could not. Once again they turned to each other, trying to define this feeling that proved to be incomplete or a total failure with anyone else. Unable to find any explanation, they only became more necessary to each other.
At the end of the year, the theoretical part of the dancing instruction was over, and the lessons became only the practical application—two hours of rocking back and forth to the now-fast, now-slow numbers that the teacher’s tiny wife hammered out with ever greater gusto, bounding up and down on the piano stool. Milinko, who at first had monopolized Vera’s dancing time, had long since retired from the field, pushing his girl into Sredoje’s arms in the belief that he had acquired sufficient knowledge of dancing and gladly renouncing the pleasure of putting that knowledge into practice. Unknown to him was the urge that at the first sound of music takes hold of bodies and pushes them toward each other, that liberating feeling of abandonment to a rhythm, to a beat, that intoxication that comes from swaying in a permitted embrace, in full view of everyone. For him, dancing was a social game, like chess or any other, entertaining and useful while being learned, but a waste of time if, without any possibility of further progress or perfection, it became simply repetition. Meanwhile, Sredoje and Vera danced, holding each other around the waist, around the shoulders, breathing against each other’s cheeks, burning each other with the coals of their closeness.
9
The dance lessons broke down the barrier Vera had put up between herself and others. She had felt herself to be quite unlike anyone else, even her brother, who alone, of all the people she knew, represented the same strange, discordant mixture of her father’s and mother’s worlds. Her brother saw that clash in the opposite way—as a special advantage, a privilege—and thanks to this assumption of superiority, felt a compelling need to put himself on the level of all sorts of people. He enjoyed striking up conversations much given to raillery with the phlegmatic old German merchants who sat on the crates in front of the Kroner storeroom while waiting for their carts to be loaded; he would draw them ever deeper into the oddities of their dialect, which he learned accurately to mimic. Or, just as fluently and with the same mocking delight, he would call to his father’s toothless Serbian porter, Žarko, whenever the latter appeared at the gate dragging a handcart loaded with sacks, “I’ll be darned!,” for that was Žarko’s favorite expression.
Robert Kroner and his wife had come to an agreement on the eve of their wedding in an attempt to protect their future offspring from the consequences of their indiscretion. Thus, Gerhard and Vera were brought up in, and officially registered as belonging to, the Orthodox Jewish faith. As a result of his instruction in that religion, Gerhard developed a zeal that far exceeded the wishes of his enlightened father, learning to intone the prayers and sing the psalms more correctly than Kroner himself and in an eastern cadence that so pleased Grandmother Kroner that she rewarded him financially for it. This recompense seemed to give the boy as much mischievous pleasure as his recital of the ancient ritual. Eccentricities attracted him. Whenever he came across someone whose behavior or mode of expression was odd, he literally gaped and grunted with astonishment. As soon as he could decipher its key, he joyfully took it for his own, bursting with pride if he managed to i
mitate it successfully.
Vera was just the opposite. Afraid of peculiarities of any kind, she avoided all those expressions, proverbs, superstitious sayings her mother had learned from her own peasant mother and made use of when she put Vera to bed, took care of her when she was ill, or punished her for disobedience. In the same way, with an almost physical revulsion, Vera was disgusted by the mystical curses that spewed out of the semidarkness of Grandmother Kroner’s room. She was not interested at all in knowing what customs or accumulations of meaning lay hidden behind those provincialisms. She had difficulty in remembering any of them, and if one was forced upon her as having some special significance, she let it slip past as if there had been a mistake. She refused outright to attend the synagogue with her grandmother when she was old enough to do so, since her school friends didn’t, and stubbornly screamed and hit herself on the temples with her fists until she was allowed to go to school on Saturdays like everyone else.
She thought religious customs, dress, and conventions outdated and silly, but at the same time dangerous, because they invariably classified people whether they liked it or not. For that reason, she never had any girlfriends, whereas Gerhard, who was fondly known among street acquaintances as Gerdi, was torn apart by passionate friendships and enmities. These he cultivated faithfully or bemoaned loudly, for he suffered as much, if not more, from being deprived of the company of those who regularly beat him as from the beatings themselves. But Vera, as soon as she noticed something different about the little girl or boy she happened to be playing with (more often than not brought along by an adult), something in their dress, hair style, or speech—a word, if the child was a Serb or Hungarian, or an idea unacceptable to her family, if the child was a German—she would prick up her ears in uncertainty or stare, not in order to imitate it, like Gerhard, or even understand it, but to shy away from it apprehensively.
Everyone believed blindly in the universal validity of their own customs. No one asked Vera: What about yours? But if she happened to ask herself that question, she was overcome by fright, for in her own house of mixed faiths, nationalities, and languages, the customs were ridiculously disordered; guttural German and sibilant Yiddish competed with one another, and the holidays were completely confused, since for each one—New Year’s, Easter, Christmas—there were two or even three different dates, names, rituals. Yet nothing was genuinely celebrated, nothing genuinely believed in. She was infuriated by the madhouse in which she lived, of which she was inseparably a part, and by which—as she came to understand with ever-increasing horror—she was judged and her place defined. So she tried hard to hide the peculiarity of it (which was also her own) as much as possible.
The means to this end were as follows: not to allow herself to become involved in the peculiarities of others, which would have encouraged a closer examination of her own. But since one’s personality is in fact made up of such peculiarities, it followed that her relations with people remained superficial. She went no farther than the threshold of a confidence, no farther than the threshold of a confession, never revealing her family circumstances, never recounting the scenes that took place at home, never bringing visitors home with her. It was neither her own decision nor her desire to go to the dancing lessons, but the choice of the school administration. The lessons, however, turned out to be a world of just the same sort of superficial contacts.
The piano played music for popularly accepted dances—the waltz, tango, or foxtrot—and the teacher in his tailcoat showed the students how to dance them. The girls tried them out by themselves first and then with the boys. Although these contacts were physically close, or perhaps because of it, they did not involve anything personal. They merely followed, as did the dance itself, a set of rules established for everyone, with steps that were to be performed in exactly the same way everywhere. The skill of the individual consisted in mastering this pattern of movement as precisely as possible and eliminating from it anything personal or particular. Vera threw herself passionately into this anonymous current with the unfailing instinct of a fugitive, for in it no one could recognize her as this or that individual, her father and mother’s daughter, the one who lived in the house behind the Baptist church. Instead, people had to see in her those qualities expressed by her dancing alone. Whether she danced correctly or incorrectly, lightly or clumsily, freely or hesitantly, that was what Vera was judged by here, and at long last she could stand out without giving away anything of her real self, or her origins and past. The activity involved only her body, and she became aware that her body was an almost independent piece of machinery, capable, to an unexpected degree, of adapting itself to a pattern. At the same time, she was able to make the most of all the beauty she possessed, the shape of her hips, long legs, and prominent breasts, giving pleasure to herself and to others. At the dancing lessons, as she swayed to the music in the arms of a young man, her body was both aim and achievement, and everything else that signified her person receded from the sound-filled hall, pushed into the background and forgotten.
10
Bodies. Vera’s pearly complexion. The finely slanted slits of her dark-blue, almost violet eyes, her red mouth with its long pink tongue, the pinkish nostrils, the shells of her ears. Long limbs, hesitant roundnesses. Small languorous, pale nipples; a flat stomach; her mount of Venus low between her thighs, its red, silky hair. Sluggish circulation, a tendency to headaches, inflamed tonsils. Frequent cold sores on her lips; wounds that heal slowly; heavy perspiration when excited. A softer, gentler reflection of Tereza Kroner, née Lehnart.
Tereza, her thinner, more muscular arms and legs, which only after her second child became heavy, as did her hips. But breasts that were full from puberty, high, sharp, firm, milky. Moist lips, mocking blue eyes, a straight nose. An irascible nature, prone to extremes, quarrels, love, envy. An iron constitution.
Robert Kroner, slender, angular, stooping slightly from the waist upward. Long, agile legs, dark-yellow skin, greasy black hair, velvety black eyes. Uneasy blood, irritable, prone to melancholy, pessimism.
Nemanja Lazukić, tall and thick-necked, with square, bony shoulders, but narrow-chested, narrow-hipped, loose-limbed. Ashen skin. A man of thick, dry, dark, disobedient hair, watery blue eyes, a large, regular mouth and healthy teeth, full, wide nose, lesions beneath his ribs from pneumonia (during the war), his lungs and bronchial tubes full of mucus. An inveterate smoker, fond of wine and slivovitz, given to quick enthusiasm just as quickly sated, a determined lover, faithful to his wife, not attracted to other women, seeing in them disorder, imperfections. Particular also about food.
Klara Lazukić, heavy-legged and slow-moving, the top half of her body slimmer and more mobile. Small, empty breasts, drooping shoulders, a receding chin, a fleshy nose, soft green protruding eyes, fine graying hair. Suffering from varicose veins and bouts of fatigue. A mother for the first time at thirty-three, she never completely adapted to the state of motherhood, or indeed to marriage, but dedicated herself to both out of an exalted sense of duty.
Anna Drentvenšek, dark-skinned, tall, big-boned, with prominent cheekbones, clear gray eyes, sharply outlined broad lips, large white regular teeth, healthy skin. Sensitive nerves as a result of enormous effort and neglect; her resistance to cold weakened.
Slavica Božić, a fair, round, small head, inquisitive blue eyes, white skin, well-defined breasts and hips. Resilient, growing old with a slow and uniform rhythm.
Her husband, a crooked nose, low forehead, his upper lip long and turned up questioningly at the edges, an elongated body and short, crooked legs, indefatigable in any physical effort, but with explosive nerves.
Milinko, taller than his father, with darker, wavy hair, a well-balanced figure, patient and even-tempered.
Miklós Armanyi, very tall and lean, with a ruddy, supple skin and a profusion of lines across his wide forehead, a long straight nose, smooth firm cheeks, thick lips, light-blue pensive eyes. Suffered in childhood from mild epilepsy, which disappeared complet
ely in later life, but as a lasting memory of it, disposed to regularity and discipline.
Gerhard Kroner, pale, a turned-up nose, jutting forehead and cheekbones, hard, pinched lips, small ears, big chest, strong legs. Frequent nosebleeds in infancy, a slight tendency to asthma, but big and powerful muscles giving the impression of perfect health.
11
The German offensive to the east, which reached Novi Sad and the Bačka in April 1941, had in the winter of that year its own representative in the Kroner house. Sep Lehnart, Reza Kroner’s brother, had been given leave from the battles in Russia and very quickly exhausted any wish to pass his free time with his mother in their village, where his new black boots had nowhere to wander but the muddy, deserted streets. In the village, what he missed most were worthy listeners, for even in the heat of battle he had looked forward to telling his adventures. Not, however, to his sixty-year-old mother, who would pity rather than admire him, accompanying his words with sighs as the tears rolled down her wrinkled face. Nor to the well-fed peasants, who would squint at him doubtfully or ask him how things were over there where he had come from, what the houses and stables in Russia were like, the cattle and barns.
Sep himself had never been a true peasant. Left without a father, with an indulgent mother and an uncle who secretly tried to cheat him of his property, he went to work early, just as Reza had done, for a local Jewish merchant. Perhaps that Jew, the blond-bearded Solomon Heim, was the one person Sep could tell about his military exploits, showing him who he was now, and frightening him out of his wits, thus avenging himself for all the blows and heavy work he had been subjected to as a young apprentice. But when he got home, he learned that Heim and his twenty-year-old son, who was the same age as Sep and a bad example for him, twisted as he was by envy, had been killed by the Hungarian police in the course of the mop-up operation a few weeks previously, and that Mrs. Heim, after burying them, had gone off to her sister in town, leaving the house and shop boarded up.
The Use of Man Page 7
