The second printed source, Naše novine, appeared as the events took place and bears the stamp of the men who masterminded them. Although it covers almost exactly the same period—from 16 May 1941, when its first issue came out, to 6 September 1944, when it closed—it gives quite a different picture. True, it contains items that read: “E. F., a Jewish cantor from Belgrade, was tried yesterday by the Supreme District Court for crossing the border illegally . . . Once he has served his sentence, he will be sent back across the border.” They give everything the semblance of legality, but fail to mention that E. F. has crossed the border between Serbia and Hungary illegally in order to escape the gas chamber and that when he is sent back across the border, he will inevitably end up in one. Moreover, these or similar stories—about the decision to check identity papers in a certain part of town or the arrest of Communist suspects or the shoot-out that resulted in the deaths of Estera Blam and Andja Šovljanski—always run side by side with other items that, taken together, are meant to provide a panorama of daily life, one in which court cases and shoot-outs and other unpleasant incidents are counterbalanced by happy occasions. “Among the first to pass the driving test given yesterday morning at the driving school was the well-known radiologist Marcela Jagić.” “The choir of the Cathedral Church sang its two hundredth liturgy under the direction of Professor Milutin Ružić on Saint Nicholas’s Day.” “A sixty-two-year-old agricultural worker by the name of Paja Nikolić tried to kill his wife and then himself in a fit of insanity. . . He attacked his wife Marija for no apparent reason upon arriving home the night before last.” “Pera Nikolić, cabinetmaker, hereby announces his marriage to Bojana Jovanović.” “Madame Biljana, the well-known cosmetics expert, will soon begin writing a column for Naše novine.” “Barber, 24, Eastern Orthodox, owns shop, seeks suitable marriage partner. Hairdresser preferred. Send letters to ‘Barber’ c/o Naše novine.” “The Kiddie Korner: Greetings, children, to your special page! Readings for the young of every age!” “Naše novine’s Story of the Day: The Most Expensive Kiss.” “Naše novine’s Latest Serialized Novel: The Investigating Corpse.” And so on.
Naše novine did not come out on 21, 22, and 23 January 1942, the days of the Novi Sad raid (the general curfew prevented both reporters and typesetters from leaving their houses), but neither the next issue (25 January) nor the one that followed made any mention of the event. As if on 25 January there were not more than a thousand frozen corpses lying in the streets, as if the snow were not red from blood, the walls not splattered with brains, as if a whisper of horror were not making its way through ten thousand houses. Naše novine reported, on that day as on any other day, first the news from the front, then the orders of the German High Command and proceedings of the Hungarian Parliament, and finally such local items as “Express Train Traffic Halted,” “Thirty-Six-Year-Old Peasant Found Frozen to Death,” “New Price for Thatching,” “Minus Twenty-Seven Recorded at Sunrise on Friday,” followed by the children’s page, the story of the day, the serialized novel, the classified ads . . .
Which of these is the true picture? Both, of course, and neither. Representing as they do the opposing viewpoints of accusation and defense, finality and continuity, the essential and the superficial, openness and secrecy, history and day-to-day existence, they are like two drawings of a countryside, one showing the mountains and rivers, the other the roads and villages. The only way to come up with even a marginally accurate landscape is to superimpose one drawing on the other.
MIROSLAV BLAM’S LOVE erupted along the border that determined his behavior in school, that is, the border between Aca Krkljuš and Ljubomir Krstić Čutura. With the Occupation, the differences between these two became even more clearly marked: freed from the restraints of the classroom, Krkljuš started a jazz band and Čutura went underground. Yet both were motivated by the same stimulus, revolt, which in those early months of the Occupation, when the shock of being uprooted from the daily routine for an unforeseeable period of time and with unforeseeable consequences was still uppermost in the minds of the entire population. Revolt for the Hungarians and Germans was a matter of taking a deep breath and seizing the unexpected opportunity to rise in the world, to become rich and famous; for the Serbs, it was a matter of feverishly sniffing the air and predicting that a regime based on murder and abuse could not last forever; and for the Jews, it was a matter of stammering about how offended and humiliated they felt. But each group pinned its desire for change on revolt, as when a ship goes down, the flailing passengers grasp at full or even capsized lifeboats.
Blam was one of the passengers. He too clung to the idea of revolt, eager and apprehensive, excited and remorseful, full of hope and the darkest foreboding. Until the Occupation, Blam was a prisoner of the house on Vojvoda Šupljikac Square—in chains but with privileges—having been charged, as the only son, with the mission of acquiring a higher education and a place in society, so he could break down the walls of alienation surrounding the family. Then suddenly he was deprived not only of the chance to pursue his education but also to make use of what education he had, thereby losing both his prisoner status and his privileges and ceasing to be anything at all. Paradoxically, however, he gained by the loss. It put him on an equal footing with others. Because now schooling, jobs, progress up the social ladder—everything he had been counted on to achieve—had for tens of thousands of others become the booty of chaos, the spoils of war, blood, despotism, and destiny. They were all of them wrenched from the comfort of their homes and tossed into the street, at the mercy of the people pursuing them, closing in on them like a pack of stray dogs around scraps of meat.
Blam too, with nothing to do, no goal in life, separated from a family racked with anxiety and desperation, attracted to everything new, excited yet frightened by it like a child by fireworks, spent all his time in the street—watching. He watched the Hungarian officers in their caps jauntily pushed back, their trim tunics and gray lace-up boots, watched them strut over soil they had conquered only with the aid of a foreign power, watched them bow to and kiss the hands of the wives of newly appointed officials, the wives of new owners of shops confiscated from Jews, and the wives of Budapest lawyers who had descended on this hotbed of lawlessness like vultures; he watched the women, some beautiful, others hideous, dressed in their best but all vulgar reflections of faded glory; he watched gendarmes in black plumed hats patrolling the streets two by two with flashing eyes and with rifles slung over their shoulders, defending the new order, the new disorder, the insanity, the disease; he watched the German soldiers as they stood guard before their barracks, arrogant under their helmets, scornfully observing the spectacle they had set in motion and were now directing; he watched the Serbs and Jews, shopkeepers, artisans, and former officials stopping to have a word with a fellow sufferer, whispering, looking both ways, shaking their heads, then parting sadly to return to their deserted rooms to wait. He watched old men and women in black who, not having grasped the change or lacking the strength to adapt to it, went with heads bent to church for consolation. And he watched young people restlessly gathering, pushing, shouting in the squares, along the promenades, bursting with anger, resistance, the desire to fight, hatred, youthful indignation at injustice, foisting pamphlets on one another, sharing news, showing off the knife or pistol handles under their clothes. He saw Čutura among them, always in a hurry but purposeful, always on the fringe of a crowd he seemed to hold together with the invisible rope of his will. He saw Krkljuš dragging his saxophone case on the way to practice or surrounded by the members of his band and whistling the latest swing or fox-trot hit they would be rehearsing the next morning. Hoping to learn how to merge with a strong, well-defined group, Blam would join sometimes one, sometimes the other.
That Krkljuš exerted the greater attraction can perhaps be attributed to a certain caution in Blam or to his lack of need to give his life direction, the same need that was to lead Estera to action. Čutura was completely absorbed in providing direction
, to his own life and that of others, and Blam often wondered why Čutura had never tried to involve him in his political endeavors, though Blam was also careful not to give him the opportunity. On their walks home from school, engrossed in a discussion about a teacher, student, or class incident—in other words, in a discussion about the mechanisms of human nature and human relations—they often paused at the park fence, so intoxicated by the harmony of their thoughts that they were unwilling to let go of them, and Blam would suddenly feel that he was on the verge of paying for it all, that Čutura would ask him to deliver a secret message or at the very least confide in him the plans for a dangerous plot. Then, out of fear, he would put Čutura off with a joke or pretend to become skeptical or indifferent, thus cracking the armor tightening around him but also letting them preserve the pleasure they took in their heart-to-heart talks. After all, Čutura valued their talks as much as Blam or he would not have continued with them. The talks supplied him with themes and ideas, and while he did not draw on them directly, they helped broaden his outlook. The Occupation put an end to this formative period: it required an ironclad commitment, and Čutura was ready. The fact that the Occupation coincided with the end of school and hence the end of their walks together was merely an external confirmation of their separation. Sparks of happy recognition still flew between them later when they met in the street or at a gathering, but they no longer felt the need to exchange ideas, and by the last time they saw each other, shortly before Čutura’s death, the rupture lay far in the past and was complete.
Once he was cut off from Čutura, Blam followed the inertia characteristic of his dependent nature and leaned more and more in the direction of Krkljuš and Krkljuš’s circle—the friends of Krkljuš who magnanimously tolerated Blam or even valued him. Again, Blam supplied them with something they lacked, because a need for ideas is often felt by people or groups with narrow interests. During those few months Krkljuš’s band—Krkljuš, Raka the roly-poly pianist, Miomir the drummer, and Jole the lively trumpeter, always in a hurry and a sweat—lived only for jazz. Jazz was their revolt, their means of fending off the senselessness around them: the curfew, the blackouts, the bayonets at the ready, the orders pasted on walls all over the city. But they liked having an outsider in their midst, someone able to point out how shortsighted or vain their enthusiasm was, if only so they could recognize it better and cultivate it further. Blam was more observer than friend, fluttering around them like a fly around a swarm of bees or a hill of ants, showing up now and then at their rehearsals in Raka’s house (Raka came from a wealthy family and had a piano), smoking his first cigarettes, dropping a word of encouragement, an impression, a thought, and then leaving. Or he would stay and watch silently while they argued, gesticulating wildly, waving their instruments like sabers, each whistling and humming to demonstrate that his way of doing the previous song or the song to come was right. It was with them, yet at the same time apart from them, that Blam began showing up at the Maticki Dance School, which hired the band for a pittance every Sunday from five in the afternoon until nine in the evening.
The school was located on the outskirts of town, where Karadjordje Street ends after winding through the center, in a one-story house, not quite a peasant house, with a large annex at the far end of a courtyard. The dance teacher, Ognjen Maticki (who was absent during the Occupation, having been sent to hard labor), had torn down the walls inside the annex and turned it into two large rooms: a bright entrance hall with a brick floor and a spacious main hall with a wood floor, walled-up windows, and lamps shining at all times. Dancing was confined to the main hall, but even as the dancing went on, the young men and women ran nervously to the entrance hall and from the entrance hall into the courtyard and to the gate, gathering out in front, looking for someone, waiting for someone, deciding whether to go in or find somewhere else to go, counting up money for tickets (which were sold in the entrance hall by Maticki’s mother, an elderly, swarthy woman who wore a kerchief and sat at a table covered with a white tablecloth), or simply basking in the confluence of the music within and the conversations without, the smoky air and the fresh air, the bright lights and the twilight that grew darker as the evening wore on.
It was the constant commotion, the coming and going, the pushing and pulling, the indecision and sudden decisions that attracted Blam to the school. Participating in the excitement gave him a sense of relief. He would go in, usually with the musicians, take a seat on the podium behind the old, no longer shiny piano, and watch a slender, young, closely-cropped Mrs. Maticki welcome the first dancers and guide them to the chairs along the wall. He would listen to his friends tune up, or he would make an occasional comment, a suggestion about what number to open with, and not until they began to play and the couples were swirling did he join in. He would join a group of young men watching the dancers in the middle of the hall, which Mrs. Maticki did not like and put chairs against the wall to prevent. He would make up his mind which girl to ask, whether one of the quiet ones waiting along the wall or, more likely, a girl already on the floor. Cutting in was a common, even gleeful practice, though Mrs. Maticki disapproved, because life in the Occupation was looser. As a result, he could go up to a couple and separate the girl from her partner with a slight bow and dance with her until someone else cut in, at which point he would go out into the entrance hall and buy a soft drink from a well-groomed boy in a white jacket, take a seat behind the old Mrs. Maticki’s back at the cloakroom (empty because it was summer), or slip out into the courtyard when it got dark, weave his way among the couples seeking privacy—catching words of love, mockery, rejection, postponement—and out into the street, where he stood to one side, hands in pockets, as the crowd pushed past, going in and coming out, its voices blending with the music in the distance, so that he was both present and absent, aware that he could go back in and resume dancing or, just as easily, leave without anyone’s noticing in the dark and the crush. He loved how impersonal it all was, how he could ignore everyone around him, how coarse and natural life was outside the city; he loved this place where he was simply accepted and he could leave at any moment, because whether he came or went had no bearing whatever on the only thing people there cared about: a good time.
How wonderfully different it was from school dances, which only students attended and where under the eyes of the teacher on duty you did only the decorous steps you had learned from the dancing instructor brought in specially by the school. Here Blam found everything healthier, more interesting. The girls—shop assistants or daughters of local farmhands—were much freer, livelier, and, yes, prettier than the skinny, boring, nunlike students in their navy-blue pleated skirts and white blouses. He felt freer to strike up acquaintances when they committed him to nothing, when they lasted only a dance, even less if someone cut in. He felt no qualms, as he did at school functions, about asking the prettiest girls to dance, and it excited him to think that they took notice of him, remembered him, looked up, eager, as he moved in their direction, and even sought him out with their eyes when he happened to be near them. He was perfectly aware that most of the girls at the dancing school had steady boyfriends they would be leaving with—to go home? to take a walk? to kiss in the nearest house entrance?—and he wished he had a girl like that, so he could be like the others and take full advantage of the evening’s magic. When he noticed that one of the girls he danced with quite often—a tall blonde with a prominent forehead and an easy, open smile—changed partners from one evening to the next, he concluded that she was not attached. He went up to her one evening just before the last dance and asked if he could see her home. She said yes.
The first thing she said to him when they emerged into the dark of the street was “You know the musicians, don’t you. You’re always up there with them.”
That gave him a chance to go into the nature of his friendship with the band and even touch on how he helped plan what they were going to play and the way they were going to play it. But Janja was more interested
in their personal stories: she’d heard Krkljuš liked to drink and seen Raka in the company of a girl with a bad reputation. Blam disabused her of a good deal. He hardly noticed when she came to an abrupt stop in front of a one-story house with peeling plaster.
“This is where I live,” she said, holding out her hand. “Good night.”
He almost forgot to ask whether she would be going to the dance next week.
“Of course,” she said, looking at him in surprise.
He could think of nothing better in response than to give her large hand a shake full of meaning and to bow.
For the rest of the week he thought about nothing but their brief walk. He had never felt so comfortable with a girl, so uninhibited and free of the fear he would do something wrong. He attributed this to her easy manner, which he suspected came from having a certain amount (maybe a great deal) of experience, and if she was so used to being courted and to the intimacies that went with it, he wondered whether he hadn’t been a bit too formal with her, whether she hadn’t expected him to be more forward. But when he went over everything she’d done and said, he couldn’t find the slightest hint of this, so he concluded that he had done the right thing, for the first time at least. He put all his hope on the next encounter, when he would get her to talk about more personal matters and try to kiss her, and if she let him, he’d have to find a place where they could be alone—the room on Dositej Street, for instance, if it was still available.
The Book of Blam Page 10
