But at the next dance things went unexpectedly badly. Not that Janja had changed; the problem was, she was the same. She welcomed him with her open smile, and even before he could finish his playful bow, she removed her hand from her partner’s shoulder and placed it on Blam’s. But when a short, chubby boy with a lock of hair flopping on his forehead cut in, she did the same, beaming at the newcomer and dismissing Blam with a quick nod. She was too popular, too much in demand; too many boys made up to her and vied for her favors. The situation was perfectly clear now. Still, Blam couldn’t forget the straightforward way she had talked to him, and he was certain she didn’t talk to other boys that way, because he didn’t talk to other girls that way. He asked her to dance the next dance with him and she agreed, but someone cut in immediately, so he tried again, this time asking first thing whether he could walk home with her.
“Not tonight,” she said with a slight frown. “I am otherwise engaged.” And she flashed her smile at the boy who had just come up to cut in.
Blam withdrew sullenly. He was offended less by her rejection than by the vulgar way she had put it. “I am otherwise engaged.” What a stupid, tasteless, unnatural, pretentious thing to say! He decided to give her up immediately and began asking other girls to dance, girls he had found attractive in the past. But he had trouble concentrating on them. In spite of himself he kept looking for her, Janja, and when he found her, he followed her every move, trying to read her large fleshy lips and keeping track of the boys she danced with. Sometimes their eyes met, and although she never turned hers away, her expression remained unchanged, bright and friendly and blank, innocent of any message. He stopped dancing and went up onto the podium to attract her attention. He leaned over Raka’s shoulder, and Raka moved his head to Blam’s, his fingers still running over the keys. Blam, looking straight at Janja, told Raka about a friend of his who had seen Raka with a girl of ill repute. Janja saw Blam and returned his stare, but again without a hint of the admiration or curiosity he had expected: she had apparently lost all interest in the musicians, now knowing everything she needed to know about them. So she was shallow as well, Blam concluded, almost pleased, and sat where he was without budging until the dance was over, at which time he saw her leave with a tall pale boy he had never noticed in her presence before.
It was now clear that she was unworthy of his attachment or even attention, that he should regard her as an attractive body that he might or might not have. And since he wanted to have it, he needed to concentrate on that and only that, not on his feelings or an assessment of her personality; he needed to find another occasion to approach her and then make his move, bind her to him. But it had to be the right occasion; he would have to be patient. He knew that neither the tall pale boy nor anyone else would last. The time would come when they’d all be gone, and then whoever happened to be in the vicinity—Blam, for instance—would have his day.
Two Sundays went by. She failed to turn up at the dance on the first one, and on the second she told him she was leaving early to go to the movies.
“Who with?” he couldn’t help asking.
“Oh, a group of friends,” she said with a shrug and a smile, but with no invitation to join them.
The band was playing a particularly fast number, and he could feel her muscular body bouncing in his arms, but neither her bounce nor his gave him any pleasure. They looked ridiculous, he thought, hopping across the rotting, rough-hewn, barrel-resonant dance floor and arguing, practically like enemies, over a silly date.
“Can I ever go to the movies with you?”
“Of course,” she said simply, as if she had expected him to ask. “Next Sunday.”
“But it’s so far off!” he said gruffly, though his heart was pounding, and he suddenly felt the thrill of their bodies touching again.
Janja thought for a moment, her eyebrows fluttering. “All right, then. Wednesday.”
“Shall I pick you up at home?”
“No, not at home,” she said, shaking her head. “On the corner.”
So Wednesday it was. He took great care in choosing the film, making sure it was not something she could have seen on Sunday (he forgot to ask her what she was going to see). He decided on the film playing at the Avala, the posters promising a love story he thought likely to please a girl of her sort. He bought tickets for the last row in the balcony, traditionally occupied by lovers, and set out at six. But turning down one of the narrow streets connecting Karadjordje with Šajkaška, he panicked: he didn’t know the way. He went back to Karadjordje and walked more slowly, trying to concentrate, but again he was forced to return. He started once more, but couldn’t tell if he was right and couldn’t ask anyone either: on their walk he had been too absorbed in what he was telling her to notice the street signs. He broke into a sweat. He went back two or three more times, turning again, then suddenly found himself just where he was supposed to be: on the corner of her street, facing the house with the peeling plaster. It was half-past six. He was on time.
She was not. He walked up and down in the stifling twilight of the late summer day, looking at the house, looking at his watch. At last the gate opened, but instead of the neatly dressed, well-groomed Janja he expected, out came a disheveled girl with dusty bare feet wearing a short dress and swinging a dented red water pail. He scarcely recognized her. She greeted him with a clatter of the pail and pattered off in the direction of a pump in the middle of the square just behind the house, her bouncing dress revealing a strong pair of thighs half tan and half white. Her appearance was such a surprise, yet so powerful and natural, that instead of going after her Blam just stood there, as if under a spell, and watched her run across the square, lean over the pump to hang the pail on the spout, pump the handle (which she did with such force that the water splashed all over the sides of the pail), then remove the pail and return, slightly lopsided and flushed from the burden, her hair in her eyes and over her cheeks, the tip of her tongue between her teeth, her every step carefully balanced. It was not until she reached the house that he ran up and offered her a hand. But she jerked away in surprise, spattering her grimy knee with water and thus making it shiny as well. “Let me go,” she said, “I’ll be right with you!” and disappeared behind the gate.
True to her word, she came out very soon and was all clean—with her hair smoothly combed, in a white linen dress, wearing white shoes on washed feet, handkerchief and keys in hand—as if she were going to a dance. But walking next to her, Blam could not forget the image he had just had of her. It was as though he had seen her naked or in a lewd act and could no longer appreciate her regular appearance. Or, rather, much as he admired the pert, beautiful girl at his side, from then on he saw instead the flushed and breathless little girl beneath. He yearned for that little girl, body and soul; she was the feminine ideal he had long sensed and only now saw revealed. But since she had changed back, hiding her true nature, he was unable to talk freely to her and, later, unable to go through with his plan of conquest in the dark of the last row in the balcony. True, he took her hand from her lap as soon as the lights went out, and she let him hold it, but the hand, instead of clutching or kneading his as he had hoped, lay there dry and limp. He put his arm around her waist, and she adjusted her body to give it room. He felt how firm the waist was, a taut arc between the rounded, softer areas above and below, but it remained stiff to his touch. She followed the images on the screen with rapt attention; he could see her moist eyes shining in the dark. What was she thinking? Could she sense the hunger in his fingers? He put his hand on her face and turned it to his; he put his lips on hers and pressed them. She offered no resistance and even opened her mouth obediently to receive his tongue, but she kept her eyes open and slightly to one side so as not to miss entirely the flickering images. And he had to accept it, because she accepted everything, clearly regarding it all as the duty of a girl who goes out with a boy. He kissed her again later, and after the film, and on the way home, and on the corner where he had waited for
her. But there she pulled away from his embrace, saying she had to get to bed, she had to be up early, she’d see him at the dance on Sunday. Her response to his protest was “It’s only three days away!”
Even after he got to know her better, she remained distant. She occasionally let him see her home or take her to a film, to a café, or for a walk; she let him hold her hand and kiss her, but she was always sober, even calculating, in any case far from the image he had had of her at the pump. But the moment he left her, the moment she was gone, his disappointment would yield to the image of her warm, half-naked, flushed body, so powerful, so alive that he felt the only reason it did not materialize for him was that he had taken the wrong tack, had been overcautious, not bold enough, and he longed for their next encounter to right the wrong. He therefore kept trying to see her and refused to be put off by her stalling. He begged so hard that she eventually agreed to let him come to the house.
“All right, if it means so much to you. But I can’t guarantee I’ll be there.”
The very next afternoon he set off for the house with the peeling plaster, excited and festive, as if having been granted admittance to a secret sanctuary. His heart pounding, he entered the spacious courtyard, where a girl in a faded dress—a dress he recognized, because it was the one Janja had been wearing when she ran for the water—was hanging out the washing. At the creak of the unoiled gate she turned to Blam the same open, curious look that Janja had, though she was much younger, still a child.
“I’m looking for Janja,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the dress.
His stare did not faze her. She turned her narrow back to him and called “Danka!” into the courtyard in a loud, almost angry voice.
A young woman with a freckled face appeared in the door of the back house and looked Blam over without much interest.
“He wants Janja,” the girl explained, shaking the last drops off a man’s white shirt. She did not turn around.
“You know she’s not here,” said the young woman, as if Blam were not present. But then she looked at him again and said with a shrug, “You can wait if you like.”
He waited in the courtyard and waited so long that the young woman finally invited him in. The house consisted of a main room and a kitchen. The earthen floor was covered with rag rugs. There was little furniture apart from a number of beds, but what little there was, though it looked rather worn, was covered with starched needlepoint hemmed in blue thread. The young woman and the girl were Janja’s elder and younger sisters, the tired-looking woman sitting at the kitchen table and overseeing their labors—her narrow head propped on large bony hands crisscrossed with dark veins—Janja’s mother. Janja was the only one who went to work: she was a day laborer for a local landlord. The younger sister did the housework, the elder—newly married, pregnant, and living apart with her husband—spent the whole day in her former home, joining the husband only when he came back from the factory. Neither the mother nor absent brother was gainfully employed, the former because she was ill, the latter because he was lazy.
Blam gathered this information quickly and easily during his first visit to Janja’s, sitting at the kitchen table and, having asked permission, smoking one cigarette after the other while he listened to the women’s conversation. It was brusque, like the first words Janja’s sister had addressed to him, and in the same harsh, shrill tone, as if following a pattern that came from the mother, perhaps, or someone before her, the father, who had long since died. Where are the clothespins? Have we got enough bread for supper? Does old man Miško know that Janja is busy tomorrow? Such were their topics of conversation. But whenever Janja’s name came up—they were surprised she was not home yet—they would lower their voices as a sign of respect and even a hint of fear.
Just before dark, Janja’s brother, smooth-cheeked and blond, his cap pushed back as far as it would go, burst in and demanded, with no greeting and in the same harsh tone the others used, to be served his supper. He sat down, planted his elbows on the table, and began shoveling cracklings and bread into his mouth, glaring at Blam without saying a word, as if he knew what Blam had come for. Then he left.
Janja turned up very late, in the pale light of a petroleum lamp. She was pale herself, her face looking smaller than usual under the wispy bun into which she had done her hair. Dripping with sweat, barefoot, she was so exhausted that she collapsed into the first chair she came to, but held on to a basket of cherries. Blam, both embarrassed and stirred by her pitiful appearance, did not dare ask her to take the walk he had planned for them, saying instead that he had simply dropped in to say hello. “Well, you chose a bad day,” she replied in a voice hoarse from exhaustion but firm. “I’m really a sight. I have to wash and then go straight to bed.”
She was out the next time, too, but because someone had invited her out. A young man, naturally, but neither her mother nor her sister could tell Blam who he was, just as they would have been hard put to identify Blam, never having asked him his name or what he did in life. They seemed to accept the fact that Janja was sought after; they didn’t fret over it, though they didn’t rejoice either: they were simply unwilling to judge. And after several unsuccessful visits their passive attitude began to influence Blam. He too sat there judging nothing, simply waiting for Janja to appear, waiting sometimes in vain, sometimes even taking a certain pleasure in the situation: it gave him the right to come back the next day, and in any case he had spent the time in her aura and shared the humility of her dear ones like a prayer.
He thus became her shadow, and though perfectly aware of this, he felt no shame. Or, at least, any shame he might have felt on Janja’s account was so pervasive that it merged, as a river merges with the sea, with his original shame, the one that had sent him on a pilgrimage into the streets and among the poor on the outskirts of town. The reasons for that shame were now mercifully far from him: the house on Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, Father and Mother, Erzsébet Csokonay and Kocsis, and the secret, interconnected relations, and his own complex and impure relations, which he could not cast off because they were in his blood, his every move, his every word. And now, rising above the morass of his life, Janja. Janja, shame clarified and justified by love. Janja and her vulgarity, her moods, her caprices. Janja and her arbitrary way of holding him at bay or giving in. Janja in her innocence and shamelessness. Janja barefoot and disheveled, rosy and breathless, in her younger sister’s short dress. Janja tired from work: pale, cold, and angry. Janja and her hard job, Janja and her bread and cherries, Janja and her pleasures, the dissipation and disorder all around her. He sensed more in all this than the expression of a personality or series of personalities; he sensed something primordial, indestructible, a rootedness in the soil, the soil of the dusty outskirts of Novi Sad, in the language, in the customs, which were more diffuse yet stronger than his, untouched by foreign models and influences, unconcerned with fitting in or assimilating, on the contrary, opposed to everything on the outside, opposed not by desire or intention, which is in itself a concession, but by instinct, because nothing could be more natural, because like the soil, like the language, those customs are born of instinct, the instinct for food, love, hate, for life without premeditation.
By now he did not even dare dream he could win her over, have her; the best he could hope for was that he would be won over by her, that she would grind him down and dissolve him in her, much as he had become an indistinguishable part of her dull but strong, unshakable existence, of the everyday round of simple movements and words and thoughts that, while routine, were the expression of a fundamental instinct.
He felt unreal—false, rehearsed, clownlike—when he came up with the words to ask Janja to marry him. Yet he was shrewd enough to know that she could not turn him down: compared with her, he was rich, educated, refined, he had “class,” as her family put it. He also knew how much he was deceiving them with his superiority, aware of the insecurity and cowardice that lay behind it, aware how immature he was, how cowed by day-to-day
existence. He knew she deserved better and would get better from any of her clumsy dancing partners or admirers, and he knew that basically he was out to use her, to squeeze what he could from her, that he was after lifeblood, ties, identity. But she was his only chance, his only love, and he reached out to her with his eyes half closed, as one plucks a flower from the rim of an abyss.
Chapter Nine
THE DULAG (Durchgangslager, transition camp) for Jewish deportees from Novi Sad and vicinity was housed in the Novi Sad synagogue. The Hungarian authorities did not give much thought to the choice. The synagogue was a huge building designed to accommodate the entire congregation, and now it had to accommodate the flock driven in from the countryside as well, but since that flock, like its Novi Sad counterpart, had been halved as a result of hard labor for the young and a number of raids and arrests, there proved to be room enough.
The deportees entered through the gate in the iron fence, which was otherwise kept locked and under guard, in the order in which they arrived. They were then led into the sanctuary proper, where they found places for themselves and their belongings on the hard wooden benches or, once the benches were full, on the stone floor. It was late April, 1944, the weather springlike and mild. Jews were still wearing their most durable clothes and carrying carefully selected, high-calorie food in their knapsacks and bags. They were supplied with water for drinking and washing by the kitchen personnel or could drink and wash when the guards took them to the lavatory, so during the three days and three nights of their stay in the synagogue, before they were herded to the station and loaded into the train for Auschwitz, their most essential needs were taken care of. All of them, prisoners and guards alike, had long known the Jews would be deported, so these three days, the Jews’ last on the soil that they had accepted as their own and that had accepted them, served both groups as a kind of breathing space, a space filled with thoughts of foreboding for the prisoners and thoughts of relief for the guards, yet its temporariness united them and made them almost friendly in their shared respect for the rules and regulations involved. The Jews sat patiently within the confines of the synagogue; the guards did their duty meticulously, showing anger only in the street, when they had to disperse curious onlookers—one group of which included a dejected-looking Blam, exempt because of his marriage.
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