Robert Kroner, vaguely aware of this role of his house, found confirmation of it only in the round brown eyes of Milinko Božić, eyes filled with reverence. One time, when the young man arrived early to call for Vera and was left for several minutes standing stiffly in the dining room, Kroner came out to offer him a chair. Noticing, as they chatted, that Milinko looked curiously and admiringly at the book-lined inner depths of his study, he invited him in. First they took down the encyclopedias and placed them on the table: the one-volume Yugoslav editions, a German one, Meyer, in twelve large tomes, and a Hungarian, Revay, in eight. Milinko realized then how narrow was the range of his information, based on only secondary sources and limited by the knowledge of only two languages. He shared this thought openly with Kroner, who, nodding in agreement, began to speak about the history of reference books and the law of influences.
“It’s like people,” he told Milinko, who was all ears. “Even nations borrow from each other. Nothing is born in a vacuum, nothing develops from itself alone, and anyone who claims otherwise—usually to laud the culture to which he belongs—is lying. All life is imitation. The way we live in this house is a copy of the way my father and mother lived in it, and they in turn patterned themselves on others. This kind of home, these objects, the storeroom in the back, the courtyard through which one passes from the private world into the business world and back again, all existed long ago, before this house, and served as a model when it was built and furnished. You could probably trace the migration of this type of merchant’s house, going back in time, from street to street, from the outskirts of town to the center, from town to city. Thus Novi Sad would perhaps lead you to Szeged, Szeged to Pest, Pest to Vienna, Vienna to Berlin. It might have been in 1862, or 1852, when this kind of merchant’s house was first adopted in Berlin. The same goes for books, whether they contain artistic material”—for material, Kroner said “Stoff,” the German word, unable to find an adequate Serbian term—“or whether they are of a scientific nature. Invariably you find traces of imitation. For example, an idea current in my youth in Austria and Germany, Dr. Freud’s psychoanalysis, had only recently been mentioned in Novi Sad, and then critically, but it will be accepted in the next generation. This is where the intelligent man has an advantage: instead of waiting for a new idea or style to reach him via its long geographical-temporal course, he can receive it at the very beginning, before everyone else. In Novi Sad, the merchant who first built himself an Austrian house had an advantage over the old-fashioned merchant who used the market stall. Similarly, the intellectual who reads the books that are current among the larger, more developed nations will have an advantage over the one who waits for innovations to come to him.”
Here he paused, allowing Milinko to plunge into the books before him, and returned the volumes to the shelves when they were done with. But Milinko suddenly stopped and sighed: What was the use of looking at something he couldn’t obtain? He would have to go to Austria to buy books of this kind—to Germany, that is, now that the two countries were combined— with his pockets full of marks. Not at all, Kroner said cheerfully. In every trade, even in the book trade, business could be done by correspondence, and Milinko had only to send a postcard to the publishers of the encyclopedias he wanted, and he would receive detailed catalogs and price lists. “Unfortunately, or let us say, in this case, fortunately”—his thin, mobile mouth in a wry smile—“Austria—or, rather, Germany—is now not only our neighbor but, so to speak, our second identity, which undoubtedly will make it easier for such purchases to be made.” He went around the wide desk, opened a drawer, rummaged through it, and pulled out a bundle of brochures and booklets held together by a yellow rubber band. “These are some old catalogs I happen to have.” He spread them out, arranged them on the desk. In addition to printed information, there were photographs of the books in rows of dark red, blue, green. “Brockhaus, Langenscheidt, Meyer, Knaurr—you’ll find those the most interesting,” pointing to each with his long, thin middle finger. “Of course they are out of date; you must ask for new ones.” He tore a sheet of paper from a note pad and handed it to Milinko with a pencil. “I suggest you draft a simple request first, to fit on a postcard.” He looked over Milinko’s shoulder as the sentence was slowly and thoughtfully written. “I think it might be better to put schicken instead of senden. Sounds more businesslike,” he remarked, but otherwise noted, with surprise, that Milinko’s German was correct. “If only Gerhard or Vera could write a letter like that! How long have you been studying German?” When he learned that Milinko had been taking lessons as long as Vera and that, unlike Vera and her brother, he had never heard German spoken, Kroner was most impressed. Milinko, flattered, did his best to carry out these instructions, and on his next visit he reported to his adviser that the postcards were mailed.
Milinko waited for the replies, and Kroner waited with him, never once failing to ask about them when Milinko came to the house. The first reply arrived after ten days: a stiff, yellowish-brown envelope with a two-pronged metal fastener and a white address sticker with Milinko Božić’s name and address neatly typed. From it slid a whole pile of triple-folded brochures describing expensive books: histories, geographies, encyclopedias, dictionaries, much more than Milinko had requested or expected. He immediately took the package to Kroner, who was not at home, but Milinko asked the maid to put the envelope in the study, and that evening he went back so that they could enjoy it together. They studied the catalogs, read them over each other’s shoulders in half-whispers, but raised their voices when they came to important things: number of volumes, price, method of payment. Kroner took a pencil and underlined. Milinko made up his first order. More catalogs arrived, and soon thereafter a parcel of books: Knaurr’s World Atlas, which they examined together in great excitement. The ordering became, within the limits of Milinko’s schoolboy budget, a constant occupation for them, an inexhaustible subject of plans and discussions.
But then, on Main Street, after large-scale renovation of an ironmonger’s shop vacated by a Serb, there appeared display windows full of German books at very reasonable prices, and a sign over the entrance, in Gothic letters: DEUTSCHE BUCHHANDLUNG. Milinko could now browse, inspect, and buy on the spot anything he wanted, no longer needing the assistance of Kroner to cross the boundaries, albeit “erased,” between countries. For Kroner, this meant a separation. If he went into the German bookshop with Milinko and was recognized as a Jew, they might throw him out, insult him. And he, insulted, might lose his temper. So he stayed at home, retreating into its rooms and furniture, into their lifelessness and silence.
For four hours in the morning and for as many in the afternoon, he was in the office, keeping the books, the inventory, listening to conversations, which ebbed and flowed, as in most places where people congregated, about what they felt, what they knew, and what they wanted to find out. Sometimes the words were addressed to him, sometimes to Count Armanyi, sometimes to Julia Nemethor, the cashier, or to Žarko, the porter. The words disturbed Kroner as much by their sound as by the monstrousness they carried. He had heard these things already from Sep Lehnart, in a dense, bloodstained mass, and could take no more; each new arrival, each new voice made his flesh crawl. Exhausted, he would return home and wrap himself in solitude like a man bandaging a wound. His family, too, troubled him, for their very existence meant the possibility of exposure to new harm.
Only Milinko did not disturb him, since Milinko’s words were peaceful; they settled alongside the books like birds settling on their nests. Milinko, he knew, would arrive in the early evening, at the usual time for young lovers; the unimaginative young man had never thought to suggest anything else, and the time coincided with the hour Kroner withdrew after coming home from the office. Kroner sat in his room, the blinds lowered, separated from the dining room by a frosted-glass door that went from wall to wall, opening in the middle and folding back in double flaps. He did not switch on the lamp or turn on the radio, but sat slumped in his armchair, r
esting, his eyes closed. As soon as he heard the doorbell, however, he would take the book ready on his desk and open it at random. This was not hypocrisy—he liked to receive Milinko with a quotation from a book. It was a way of starting a peaceful conversation. He would look up from the book and see Milinko’s outline approach across the dining room, stop to let the maid pass on her way to Vera, hesitate before the glass door, then lift his hand to knock. Kroner would shout “Come in!” and Milinko would enter. “What are you reading today?” Milinko would inquire and, without waiting for an answer, crane his neck to see. As a rule it was a book from Kroner’s youthful Vienna days, stories or a novel by Arthur Schnitzler or Paul Heise, though he would sometimes select an older writer, Heine, Goethe, Schiller, from a series of collected works with titles printed in gold, or a biographical novel by Stefan Zweig or Lion Feuchtwanger. It had been a long time since he had read these books—some he had never read at all—but he looked at them now with nostalgia, turned them over, tapped them with a finger, as if they were made of the finest china.
“Goethe,” he said, drawing out the name melodiously. “There was a phenomenon only the Age of Enlightenment could produce, that great century which celebrated light, clarity, and balance. We have no men and no writers like that today. Mysticism now rules the world, the cult of blood and violence, darkness, the longing for the past, nationalism. Do you think that anything great and noble, like this book, can come out of such chaos? No; you’ll see, our time will be remembered for its barbarity and barrenness.” At this point he felt that by generalizing he was rather dishonestly winning the young man over to a point of view rooted in his own downtrodden state, but he justified it with the thought that the enemy, fascism, without any such scruples, was corrupting not one person but thousands at a time. Kroner was attracted by the idea that although he himself could not take up arms, as Gerhard had suggested, he could at least prepare someone else to make that decision. This was also his answer to Gerhard, a justification of a kind, proof that he was not entirely incapable of action, that, though not a fighter, he could contribute in his own way to the fighting. Kroner, indeed, hoped, with the double egotism of a father and an ideological opponent, that Gerhard, his son, would fail as a fighter and that Milinko, his champion in the contest, would triumph through patience, reason, and determination.
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Street scenes. People strolling in twos and threes past shop windows displaying fabrics, wool, jersey, linen. Wishful faces; one leg at an angle in unconscious imitation of a posing mannequin. A little beggar, his short-cropped hair sticking up and eyes without pupils, sitting on the sidewalk against a wall, a black cap turned upside down between his bare feet. Bells ringing from the tower of the cathedral on Palm Sunday, children in new clothes, white knee socks, tiny bells on pink ribbons around their necks, clinging to the hands of grandmothers, who nod to each other in greeting. A column of soldiers with rifles, backpacks, rolled blankets across their packs, entrenching tools at their belts, and their boots crunching. Soldiers in 1940, in blue-gray uniforms with high collars and puttees; in 1942, in low boots and greenish uniforms, with the lightning bolt on their soft collars, caps low and angled to their faces; in 1956, in boots and olive-gray uniforms with gray ties. High-sided carts, a shovel planted at the top of a mound of coal. Carts with black rubber wheels, loaded with bottles of soda water, a chorus of a hundred voices, a hundred separate lakes gleaming through glass of different colors. Cabs with hoods in the shape of an open palm or a cabbage leaf. Streetcars swaying on sharp turns, their bells ringing. Buses taken by storm at lunchtime. Cars abandoned on the sidewalks of narrow streets, Baker Street, Furrier Street, Chandler Street, covered with dust, their windows gaping at the walls. Married couples with baby carriages on Sundays. A mob, their hands stuffed into their pockets, a threatening look in their eyes, released from movie houses. Seated in the sun on the wide sidewalk in front of the Queen Mary Hotel—formerly Queen Elizabeth, subsequently Erzsébet Királynő, still later Vojvodina—at marble tables inside a wrought-iron railing, over mugs of beer, glasses of slivovitz, cups of French coffee, merchants and tradesmen in bowler hats, officers of the Royal Army with their caps on the chairs beside them, actresses of the Serbian National Theater observing the scene through lorgnettes. A teen-agers’ “row”: a two-way battery of ardent glances and fixed smiles. The town’s eccentrics: the seller of lottery tickets, hunchbacked, with a white goatee; the hairless idiot poking his flute in young girls’ faces to play “Tamo daleko”; the woman in a long threadbare coat, gray hair hanging loose, wandering from shop to shop asking for empty boxes. Young girls in long skirts, like a shower in early summer washing the boredom off the dusty town. A woman in tight-fitting clothes, her legs the shape of upturned wine bottles, standing at the entrance to a department store. A woodcutter in a torn coat, two axes slung over his shoulder, a purple nose, a mustache white with frost, loitering on a winter morning in front of the Agricultural Bank. Two young teachers, one of history, the other of literature, the first straight-backed and balding, the second round-shouldered and with downcast, sad eyes, both gesticulating as they disappear into a restaurant. A truck with a bright-colored sign painted on its side and a loudspeaker in an inverted funnel on its roof, moving away as it announces that the circus has just arrived in town and is setting up at the fairground. Wreaths of multicolored lights, lanterns in the shop windows on New Year’s Eve, confetti scattered over the sidewalk. The emptiness of a public holiday, solitary drunks with foreheads pressed against the advertisement kiosks, girls laden with bags hurrying off to visit their aunts. The muffled darkness of night, with its street cleaners, lovers returning from trysts, night-shift workers hastening to the factories. Peasant girls in wide, brightly embroidered skirts on market days, hanging around dairy bars and the stalls on wheels that sell scarves and bathing suits. Regiments of bathers at the bus stop, coming from the Danube, in shorts, cheerful tee shirts, loose dresses, and children sucking lollipops, cheeks red from the sun and legs heavy with fatigue. In front of the theater in the evening: two or three long skirts and high heels crossing the yellow circles cast by the street lamps and going up the steep steps. Lemonade vendors beside white iceboxes with bell-shaped glass covers; ice-cream vendors beside two-wheeled carts with shiny tin lids in the shape of a snail’s shell and, on the top, a partitioned wooden box for the wafer cones; fruit-juice sellers with bottles lying flat on ice in the baskets of their bicycle carriers; bootblacks with little boxes and metal footrests between their legs. Street cleaners, each with a brush, a spade, and a tall cylindrical bin on wheels. The policeman on the corner, in his white peaked cap and long protective gloves of white canvas, stiffly and precisely indicating left, right, go, stop. Schoolchildren with their satchels plodding home, their dreamy eyes raised to the sky. A conversation at the corner: someone’s wife and someone’s husband, casting anxious looks around, afraid of being seen. Flower girls, baskets on their arms, making the rounds of the sidewalk cafés. Children selling almonds in little white bags. Flag-waving crowds on their way back from a soccer match, in lines of six or eight abreast, their open-necked shirts flapping, their faces dusty and covered with sweat. Draftees on their way to the station, arms around each other’s waists, free hands holding half-empty green bottles, singing off-key in hoarse voices. A wedding in front of the Town Hall: cars, the bride in her white dress and veil, the sharp cries of the children as they run after the tossed coins rolling away. Around three or four in the afternoon, linked by an invisible thread, men and women walk toward the cemetery, the space between them diminishing as they approach their destination. Stray dogs, trotting along, sniffing the air, keeping well away from humans. Pigeons on the church porch and along the main square. The Austro-Hungarian colonel Kranjčević, retired these forty years, taking from the pocket of his heavy overcoat a little bag of bread crumbs, tossing the crumbs onto the snow. Above him, a leaden sky.
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Only Robert Kroner appreciated the aura of devotion that sho
ne from Milinko, and it was questionable whether even his appreciation was sincere. It may have been the result only of the general decline of values around him. His wife interpreted the signs of the young man’s respect in terms of his humble origins and modest circumstances. Here she forgot her own hatred, fed by poverty, for the well-to-do and the established, a hatred that had included the Kroners while they were her masters.
Reza Kroner had only the vaguest notion of events outside her own home, especially developments of international importance, and failed to see that the social status she had achieved through her marriage was inexorably disintegrating, that the name Kroner was no longer a guarantee of esteem, of prestige, and that the days of the family’s material security and even physical safety were numbered. Since the birth of her son, who was to remain to the very end the apple of her eye, she saw those around her in terms of him and him alone. When Milinko first made his appearance at the house behind the Baptist church, there was nothing, in her eyes, that posed a threat to Gerhard’s future. Gerhard had finished school a year before the war and that autumn had enrolled in the Technical Institute in Belgrade. Even though his studies were interrupted the following April as a result of the outbreak of war, she was not worried, for as soon as the Institute closed its doors, her son came home again, back under her protection. That protection meant little for his career, since during the Occupation he was prevented from continuing his studies, but her love, pleased at the proximity of its object, had no difficulty in postponing the righting of this injustice to an indefinite future. The more so since her son himself did not seem particularly disturbed by it.
The Use of Man Page 10
