Blanka Blam, unfamiliar with the ways of earning money because at the onset of married life her husband had laughingly refused to share any such information with her, took to seeking advice from the neighbors, and once her naive hope of finding some simple but lucrative part-time employment evaporated, she came to the conclusion that like an impoverished widow she would have to take in a tenant. At first Vilim Blam rejected the idea outright, arguing that Hitler and his ludicrous homegrown followers were on the brink of collapse, but eventually the pressure of unpaid bills forced him to yield. He did set one condition, though: they were not to take in just anybody, a student from the countryside or petty official, people his wife would find demeaning to serve; they were to find someone who could be respected by their circle as a friend of the family. It was Vilim who brought home a tenant: an unmarried newspaperman, his younger colleague, one might even say his protégé, Predrag Popadić.
Popadić was twenty-six at the time and new to journalism. He had come to it at the insistence of his father, a well-to-do landowner in the area who had grown tired of supporting his eternal student son in Belgrade and had pulled strings with the governor, who enjoyed the influential Popadić Senior’s political patronage. The young man was good-looking and had a cheerful disposition; he enjoyed dressing well and was always clean and clean-shaven, thin, black mustache neatly trimmed and wavy black hair lightly pomaded. He was not much interested in journalism, or interested only insofar as it gave him an entrée to the town’s high society—more precisely, to its beautiful and beautifully groomed women, on whom he constantly trained his lively, brown, doglike eyes. But when he lacked the funds for the sort of gallant rendezvous requiring flowers or a gift (and he often lacked funds, spending extravagantly when he had them), he was content with conquests of a lower order: the widow Csokonay complained to Blanka Blam that Popadić could not keep his hands off her when she cleaned his room, and he was not above bringing a somewhat tarnished specimen of female home from a coffee house, though he always did his best to slip her through the entrance hall unnoticed.
At one time a man of such loose behavior would have met with censure in a family like the Blams, but now they looked the other way. Besides, for Vilim Blam, Popadić represented a living link with the paper, with the intoxicating smell of printer’s ink, the glory of boldface bylines, and whenever Vilim found him at home alone—that is, not in disreputable company—he would fairly beg him to join the family at table, where he would interrogate him about the latest goings-on, the intrigues and backbiting that every newsroom thrives on, and the true state of politics and war preparations, which newsmen gleaned from the gossip they heard and the odd communiqué they picked up at government offices. Their conversations, which lasted well into night when Popadić lacked the wherewithal to go out on the town, were of interest to other members of the family as well. Torn at the time between the nightly scenes at the bathroom window and his first encounters with Lili, Miroslav saw Popadić as the embodiment of the free, mature male, who, when he was in a good mood, would give the lad a conspiratorial poke in the ribs and show him pictures of naked women. Estera steered clear of him—his burning eyes and masculine odor, both repulsive and attractive, were not lost on her—but she would sit in her corner for hours watching him smoke, cross his legs in their dark silk socks, and stroke his mustache.
The most complex reaction to his presence, however, came from Blanka Blam. She was annoyed with him for being so free and easy, so unreliable, for making a mess of his room and dirtying it further with visits from women of ill repute, for keeping her husband from his work and her children from their studies; on the other hand, she was enthralled by him, in that he represented her first earnings and therefore a new independence. She looked after him not as a member of the family, not as a matter of course, along a well-established emotional track, but literally, strictly, as if he were a temperamental but useful machine in constant need of appraisal and adjustment. Popadić gradually became the axis not only of her monetary calculations but also of her feelings and worries. She began to think of him as her own creation, exclusively hers to direct, to return to the straight and narrow, to make better use of—but how?
Then came the painful incident with Lili. They needed a bold yet discreet gynecologist, and neither she nor Vilim Blam nor any of their law-abiding friends could come up with one. She had no choice but to turn to her tenant with his connections in the fast, fashionable, bachelor set. Popadić not only proved ready to cooperate; as it turned out, one of his closest friends was himself the sort of doctor Mrs. Blam was looking for, and Popadić immediately undertook the delicate negotiations. Since neither Vilim nor the children were to guess what was afoot, Popadić and Blanka took to whispering together. She would slip into his room the moment she heard him arrive, hoping to find out when things would be settled and how, fretting, weeping; he would comfort her. And so it happened that in those difficult, dangerous times of commotion and secrecy, Blanka Blam’s femininity underwent a feverish late blossoming, which awakened Popadić’s desire and led him, early one morning when the house was dark and quiet, to lure her into his room and make her, after a bit of panicky but ineffectual resistance on her part, his mistress.
The affair went on unnoticed for a month or two, until Popadić, perhaps having come into a bit of money, set out in search of new conquests and began returning home at dawn again. One night he brought a woman who, instead of disappearing in the morning, timidly stuck her head into the kitchen and asked if she couldn’t make a cup of tea for herself. Startled, Blanka Blam gave her some boiling water. But when the woman began settling in and even brought over a suitcase with her things, Blanka tearfully announced to her husband that the situation was unacceptable and it was his duty as man of the house to turn the intruder out. Assuring her that Popadić would soon tire of the girl as he had of the others, Vilim Blam only poured oil on the fire. Increasingly nervous and upset, Blanka renewed her demand, but Vilim kept giving excuses. One day, after a particularly vehement argument, she flew into the tenant’s room and ordered his concubine to leave the premises immediately. In the midst of the insults and screaming that followed, the woman clutched her ample bosom, rolled her eyes, and fell to the floor, her limbs twitching wildly. Popadić shouted for help, and the rest of the family, which had been following the quarrel from the dining room, came running. Together they managed to lift her onto the bed, where her round white legs, which Popadić unsuccessfully tried to cover with a blanket, continued to shake. The convulsions loosened the woman’s tongue as well as her limbs, and in her delirium she revealed that the person who wanted her removed was her rival. When Vilim Blam grasped her meaning, he screamed, grabbed a pitcher of water, the first object he could find, and—aiming perhaps at Popadić, perhaps at his wife—hurled it against the glass door. The deafening crash of broken glass put an end to the scene: the woman on the bed calmed down, Vilim Blam burst into tears, and Blanka Blam threw herself on his breast and, calling over the children, who were by then also in tears, withdrew with the family to their part of the house. The children were sent to bed, and Vilim and Blanka Blam stayed up late into the night weeping and whispering more or less the same words of reproach and repentance in the dining room, as Popadić and his guest were whispering next door.
The guest left the house that night, and it was tacitly understood that Popadić would move out the moment he found another place to live. But two days later he received notification that he was to report immediately for military duty, and his only goodbye was a note asking the Blams for permission to leave his belongings—two suitcases in the corner of his room—until such time as he could arrange for someone to come for them. He was unable to do so, however, because no sooner had his unit been assembled than it was sent to Serbia. He came for the suitcases himself two months later, dark from the sun, unshaven, and wearing a suit much too big for him: he had bought it surreptitiously from an Užice coffee house owner on the day the army surrendered to avoid being
taken prisoner.
In the meantime, Vojvoda Šupljikac Square had become a battlefield, the scene of the Serbian army’s retreat in disarray and the entry of Hungarian occupation forces amid a barrage of artillery fire intended to kill off the leaders of the previous regime as quickly as possible. Among the hundreds of victims in this first purge was the owner of the newspaper Blam and Popadić worked for, and the offices were soon closed. This shared misfortune, together with the blood that had flowed since they last met, served to mitigate the shame between them. Blam sat Popadić down in the dining room to hear what turned out to be Popadić’s none too glorious adventures as a soldier, and when evening fell and the patrol marching past reminded them of the curfew, Blam went into the kitchen, where his wife had retreated, and after a short consultation offered the homeless Popadić his old room until things calmed down. Sincerely moved, Popadić shook Blam’s hand and accepted.
Vilim Blam’s generosity did not go unrewarded: spurred by the loss of his job and the desire to return to his idyllic existence, Popadić tirelessly made the rounds of his acquaintances, and although he did not realize it at the time, he was simultaneously working for his landlord. He made inquiries, offered his services, carried on negotiations, and finally found his way to the newly appointed vice-governor, a Hungarian lawyer he had often played cards with and who, as luck would have it, was entrusted with the task of putting the public life of the occupied city in order. A new round of talks and deal making followed, and one day Popadić ran home from the governor’s office beaming and with two pieces of news: the Serbian paper Glasnik would begin publication again under a new name and under his, Popadić’s, editorship, and as a sign of the government’s confidence in him he had been given a three-room flat in the Mercury vacated by a Yugoslav official recently packed off to Serbia. First came the congratulations, then the farewells. On her husband’s orders, Blanka Blam served coffee and wine. Popadić made a solemn vow to find a place for Vilim Blam in the new setup, not on the editorial staff, of course, which would call unwanted attention to him, but in advertising, where he had been when the war broke out. Life, different as it was, could thus basically go on as before.
Everyone but Estera accepted this situation. When the schools opened again a few days later, she attended classes as doggedly as ever but no longer touched a textbook. Instead she read tattered, greasy, illegally published political brochures and talked furtively on street corners with a group of girls whose company she now sought as much as she had avoided it before. She spent less and less time at home, but when at home she had constant visitors, mostly girls, but a boy or two as well (Čutura came two or three times; the Blams knew him as Miroslav’s friend and were surprised when he asked for Estera), and they would sit and whisper, or he would give her messages to deliver, or take her to meetings. When the summer vacation came, Estera turned into a complete renegade, leaving early in the morning with her bathing suit and a cold lunch and returning at night, dirty, sunburnt, full of scratches and with a new, coarse, mocking expression on her once round, now gaunt, wolflike, raw-boned face. She ate her supper silently and voraciously, hardly hearing her mother’s reproaches, and then went off to a bath and bed.
One night she failed to come home at all, and Vilim and Blanka Blam ran all over the neighborhood looking for her. They even phoned the hospital—to no avail. She showed up at the door early the next morning, just after curfew, in her summer dress and sandals, shivering and covered with mud, and when Blanka Blam began showering her with questions and threats, Estera cut her short by saying that no one was to tell she’d been away that night if they cared for their lives. Called to the rescue from his warm morning bed, Vilim Blam tried the mild tone of an older friend, but he received an even sharper response, namely, that people were different and so they should mind their own business, as she had when the two of them committed their indiscretions not so long ago.
That autumn, like most of her friends, she went back to school, but one day late in October, when her mother was expecting her home for lunch, two agents appeared at the door asking for Estera Blam. Before Blanka had time to explain that her daughter was in school, they shoved her aside, entered the house, searched every inch of it—even under the beds in Erzsébet Csokonay’s apartment—and, after tearing all Estera’s books off the shelves, ordered the petrified woman to notify the police the moment her daughter showed up. But she and Vilim, who came home just after the agents had left, waited in vain. They would never turn Estera over to the police, of course; they would sneak her onto the train for Budapest, where Blanka Blam had a niece. But Estera didn’t come back that day or that evening or that night. She never came back.
The morning after that sleepless night, Vilim Blam went to the Mercury to see Popadić. He woke him and explained what had happened. Popadić told him to be patient and promised to find out what he could. Vilim went home to get a little sleep, but in the afternoon he was back at the newspaper office waiting for Popadić. Still no news, Popadić said with a sympathetic shake of the head. But a short time later he was on the phone telling Blam to return to the office immediately. He sat him down and solemnly, silently handed him a sheet of paper, an official press communiqué provided by the police. At noon on 23 October 1941 the Communists Estera Blam, student, aged seventeen, Jewish, and Andja Šovljanski, seamstress, aged eighteen, Serb, were killed in an armed battle with the Royal Gendarmerie while resisting arrest. They were suspected of having taken part in antistate activities: distributing pamphlets and setting fire to grain fields in the vicinity of the city.
Blam read the communiqué several times but refused to accept what it said. “That’s not my Estera. That’s not my Estera,” he mumbled, looking up expectantly at Popadić. But Popadić stood there helpless. Then Blam rose to his feet and put down the communiqué. “I want to see her.” Popadić told him it was impossible: Estera had been buried in an unmarked grave and with no witnesses. He tried to make Blam face the inevitable. It was the times, he said. No one knew what tomorrow might bring or whose actions now would prove far-sighted then. “You may be proud of her someday,” he said to him confidentially, ushering him out of the office and advising him to stay at home for at least a week.
But Vilim Blam and his wife did not have time to take pride in their daughter’s death, their own following three months later, nearly to the day. The only person to derive some benefit from Estera’s heroism was Miroslav Blam, because Popadić now transferred his favor to him—perhaps out of guilt for having sided with the murderers.
It so happened that while Estera was undergoing transformation into a political activist, Miroslav also separated himself from the family. He suddenly married, rented a furnished room as if he had no home, and, without a thought to either his further education or employment, declared himself independent. Vilim Blam, though stricken by so unconsidered a move on the part of his pride and joy, resolved to help him. Since Miroslav would not hear of coming back home and since Vilim could not afford to support two households, Vilim quickly sold the house—with Funkenstein as the agent—and passed most of the money on to his son to cover basic needs.
Such was the precarious state of affairs at the time of Estera’s death. When Vilim Blam returned to work in Popadić’s office seven days after the tragic event and, encouraged by his friend to unburden himself, mentioned how concerned he and his wife were—over and above their inconsolable grief at Estera’s death—about the intolerable position their son and last hope was now in, Popadić thought a moment and said that, unlike Miroslav’s worried father, he regarded Miroslav’s marriage as a sign of common sense. By marrying a Christian and converting to Christianity—which he, Popadić, was willing and able to facilitate through his ties with the clergy—Miroslav would avoid being persecuted as a Jew. During the next few days, while Miroslav Blam lay with his hands under his head in his rented room waiting for Janja to come home from work, Popadić made phone calls and had a number of personal conversations on his behalf, after whi
ch he told Vilim Blam to have the boy report to his office. He ordered a taxi and took Miroslav first to the Orthodox church, where a priest in full regalia was waiting, and then to the Úti Travel Agency, where Miroslav was hired as a bookkeeper. The expedition wound up at Miroslav’s temporary residence, where Popadić had a chance to observe his protégé’s straitened circumstances and to meet his wife, Janja. His interest sparked by both, he obtained an apartment for the newlyweds at the Mercury and, somewhat later, a regular job for Janja at a nearby restaurant.
Chapter Eight
THERE ARE TWO published records of Novi Sad under the Occupation: a book entitled Crimes of the Occupation Forces in Vojvodina, 1941–44, which devotes an entire chapter to Novi Sad, and the run of Naše novine, the daily edited by Predrag Popadić under Hungarian rule.
The book was written after the war. It is therefore based on materials found in the enemy’s archives, statements made by survivors and witnesses, war criminals’ confessions of the atrocities inflicted on the civilian population from the entry of Hungarian troops on 11 April 1941 to their retreat on 22 October 1944. Its pages trace how the invaders put their intentions into practice; they include directives of the High Command and Counterintelligence on the use of terror against the Slav and Jewish population, on the suppression of Communist activities in their ranks and the society at large, and accounts of the arrests, transports to camps and hard labor, and beatings and killings by which the directives were carried out. In some instances, the thread from intention to practice leads through dry reports, beginning with circular number such-and-such that provides the basis for order so-and-so and ending with the measures taken and the number of people detained, imprisoned, or liquidated. In others, an eyewitness account by an onlooker or perpetrator will paint satanic pictures drenched in blood still warm and accompanied by echoing screams. We learn, for example, the grounds for officer A. B.’s decision to sentence prisoner C. D. to “trussing,” which involved counting how many minutes a person could stand on his toes while bound hand and foot before fainting, having a heart attack, or going out of his mind; we learn which agent hammered tacks under Communists’ fingernails, which one mashed their testicles, which one slashed the soles of their feet, or which detachment of soldiers sent to carry out a search riddled with their bullets every member of the household from Grandma and Grandpa lying ill in their beds to toddlers wailing as they ran for cover under wardrobes and tables. In other words, sometimes it takes a bit more imagination to conjure up the crime, sometimes a bit less, but crime is always the dominant goal and theme.
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