The only discordant note in this otherwise harmonious waiting period came from the animal world rather than the human world; it came in the form of the dogs that had trotted alongside their masters to the synagogue and that remained outside when the guards refused to let them through the gates. There were not many, five or six at most, because the owners had generally found homes for their beloved pets and guardians among non-Jewish friends, or at least had managed to hide them somewhere. But these few dogs were a disturbance, because their instinctive loyalty kept them as close as possible to the people they still thought they belonged to. They were a disturbance to the Jews, who on their way to the lavatory or for water almost had to hide, fearful they would be recognized and their dogs’ loving attempts to rejoin them would force them to break yet again with a world from which they had so painfully severed all ties, and they were a disturbance to the guards, who were constantly tripping over them as they watched for an opportunity to dash inside. The guards would chase them away, yelling and cursing, even swatting at them with the butts of their rifles or kicking them; they clearly considered such work beneath them, and it infuriated them. But the dogs stubbornly held their ground, their distance from the synagogue depending on how afraid of the guards they were, some huddling against a wall, others going back and forth in front of the gate that had claimed their masters, pricking their ears and twisting their necks at every noise. By the second and third day, driven by hunger, they would wander off to the nearby marketplace or follow a string bag with the smell of meat, but the moment they had had their fill, they would trot back to the gate, heads high, and take up positions at a wall or tree.
They did see their masters again. When at dawn on the fourth day a lineup began to form in front of the synagogue, the dogs rushed up and filled Jew Street with joyous yelps and fawning whimpers. The people tried to restrain their children, who wanted to throw their arms around their beloved pets; the guards shouted, but to no avail. Shooting was out of the question—though it had been suggested—because the march to the station took in the dark to keep it from drawing attention. The only recourse was to set the lineup in motion as soon as it was ready.
The dogs had a last moment of glory while their masters were waiting at the station: they could nuzzle them and wheedle a hidden morsel. But soon they were alone on the tracks. For a while they ran after the train, but they stopped when their noses lost the familiar smells. They stared in wonder at the fields and ditches where they found themselves, their long, red tongues hanging from their mouths, and started back, one after the other, in the direction of the city.
*
“Look who’s here!” Krkljuš calls out, pushing Blam toward the door as it opens a crack.
The door does not open wider; it pauses, almost shudders, while a pair of narrowed eyes peers out of the dark.
“Come on, let us in,” Krkljuš says reproachfully, but then adds in a cheery voice, “Can’t you see? It’s Blam!”
The door opens, but the effect Krkljuš was hoping for when he asked Blam home is lost. He is impatient, even rough, pushing his friend into the entrance hall. “Go on in,” he grumbles.
Blam plunges into the semidarkness and bows to the minute figure of Krkljuš’s mother, who steps back to give him room.
“You may not remember me,” he says, apologizing more for Krkljuš than for himself. “I used to visit when you lived near the park.”
“You did?”
She sounds dubious.
“Of course he did,” says Krkljuš, stepping forward and closing the door. “He was a school friend of ours. Of mine and Slobodan’s both. We used to study together.”
“So you were a friend of Slobodan’s.” Her voice brightens in the dark. “You’re not with the courts, are you?”
“Really, Mother!” Krkljuš is annoyed. “The courts! That’s not why I brought him here! Blam works at the Intercontinental.” He pushes his mother aside and motions to a strip of light at the other end of the entrance hall. “Go on in.”
Blam does as he is told and steps into the bright daylight of a room with little furniture—a bed, a wardrobe, a table and chairs—but full of miscellaneous objects scattered about. He sees a guitar propped in a corner.
“Sit down,” Krkljuš says, offering him a chair with a gray sweater draped over the back. “No, take your coat off first. You can put it. . .” He turns and notes with a frown that there is no place for Blam to put it. “I was in a rush this morning,” he mumbles, taking Blam’s wet raincoat and tossing it over the bed frame. “There,” he says, turning back to Blam, satisfied.
“Did the workers ever turn up?” Krkljuš’s mother asks suddenly. She is standing in the doorway.
Krkljuš says nothing for a moment, as if caught unawares. Then he rubs his haggard, blotchy face with his thumb and index finger and answers reluctantly, “Not Stevo.”
“Did you send for him?”
“No. Janko was too busy.”
“You could have gone yourself.”
“I had customers.”
She sighs. “Where’s the money?”
He digs into his pocket unwillingly, almost disgustedly, and tosses a wad of crumpled thousand- and five-hundred-dinar banknotes onto the table. The wad swells, as if there were a toad inside it.
“Did the Popović woman pay up?”
“No.”
Sighing another loud sigh, Mrs. Krkljuš goes over to the table, gathers the wad of banknotes with her thin fingers, and leaves the room.
Krkljuš shakes his bowed head in despair. “The damned shop.”
“It’s a lot of trouble?”
“Trouble? No. It’s a plague, a catastrophe,” he says, rolling his tormented eyes. “It’s dragging me down. I can’t concentrate on anything. I can’t do anything of my own.”
“You mean compose?” Blam asks cautiously.
“That’s exactly what I mean!” says Krkljuš, moving closer to Blam and overwhelming him with the stench of alcohol. “I have all kinds of ideas, but never time to sit down and sort them out.”
“Some time ago, I can’t remember exactly when,” says Blam, recalling only that it was a long time ago, long before the last time he saw Krkljuš, several years, in fact, “I heard a song of yours on the radio. It was sung by a woman, a local.”
“Oh, it must have been ‘Return to Nature.’ ”
Blam spreads his arms to show he is at a loss. Krkljuš goes over to the corner, picks up the guitar, presses it to his stomach, and plays a melody that soars through the air. “Is that it?”
Blam nods.
“It’s one of my last pieces.” He drops the guitar on a pile of crumpled clothes on a chair. The strings twang softly. “It made it to the Opatija Festival. I was with the radio at the time, and they backed me.” He purses his lips.
“Why did you leave?”
“Come off it, will you? They fired me. I was one of Carević’s protégés. You know Carević, don’t you? You don’t? Well, he’s an idiot. A bureaucrat. One day I turn up at the studio slightly tipsy, and the first thing he says is, ‘I’m docking you.’ As if I couldn’t have stayed home and called in sick. I was so mad, I got plastered the next day and kept it up, day after day, until he fired me. But he didn’t last long himself. The Comrades got rid of him.”
“Couldn’t you go back now?”
“Now I have the shop to worry about. Mother takes care of the old man, and we’d never be able to live off my salary, so it’s out of the question.” He rubs his wrinkled forehead and closes his eyes for a moment. Then he looks over at Blam. “How about a drink?”
Before Blam can find an excuse to say no, Mrs. Krkljuš comes into the room, her tiny face twitching suspiciously, her eyes darting between her son and his friend, then alighting on the guitar, in the hope there is some business plot in the making. Disappointed, she settles her eyes on Blam.
“Do you live alone?”
“No. I’m married.”
“Children?”
; “One girl.”
Mrs. Krkljuš heaves a deep sigh, as if Blam has confirmed her worst fears.
“I told my husband you’re here. He wants to see you.”
“Mr. Krkljuš?” Blam asks, getting to his feet.
“Wait a minute!” says Aca Krkljuš angrily, pushing Blam back into his seat and turning to his mother. “Leave us alone, will you! Blam’s here to see me! Me, understand?” The blotches on his face turn redder, and a quiver runs through his hollow cheeks. “Look, bring us something to drink.”
“I only have coffee,” she says with tears in her eyes but does not move.
“There’s no need,” Blam interjects to smooth things over.
But she does not seem to have heard and leaves the room.
Krkljuš bursts into laughter, but tries to suppress it by pressing his hand to his mouth. “Wait,” he says and, going over to the bed, stoops down, bends over, and comes up with a small green canvas suitcase. He opens it, shuffles impatiently through some magazines and notebooks, and pulls out a flat bottle with a yellowish liquid sloshing in it. “Have some,” he says, holding it out to Blam on his knees.
“I’d rather not.”
Krkljuš nods approvingly, then unscrews the tin cap, tosses his head back, and takes a few quick gulps. He exhales, lifts the bottle to his lips again, and takes one long swallow. Then he screws the cap back on and drops the bottle into the suitcase.
“Open the window, will you?” he says to Blam with a wink.
Blam goes over to the window and opens it. A few tiny raindrops graze his hand.
Krkljuš starts covering the bottle with the magazines and notebooks, but pauses. “Would you like to see some of my new things?” he asks hopefully.
“Sure. Let me have a look.”
Krkljuš takes a blue, a yellow, and another blue notebook from the stack in his hand and, still kneeling, lays them out, open, on the soft quilt of the unmade bed, but they close by themselves, so he bends one back and runs a trembling middle finger over the pages filled with music.
“These are melodies. All I have to do is arrange them.” He bends back the yellow notebook impatiently and taps his finger on a page where the notation is neater and in black ink. “This one I sent to Raka, and he wrote back that it was worth orchestrating.”
“Where is Raka?”
“In Germany, didn’t you know? Frankfurt, I think, for now. He’s got his own band! You can do that in Germany. The Germans have no time to make their own music.”
“You could have it played here too. With all the festivals.”
“Maybe you’re right. I’ve actually been thinking of submitting a piece to Opatija. Want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
But just then the door opens, and in comes Mrs. Krkljuš with a tray. Aca shoves the suitcase under the bed and gets up, shaking his knees free of cramps. “Later,” he mumbles.
“So you opened the window,” Mrs. Krkljuš says in a shrill, suspicious voice, still standing in the middle of the room with her tray.
“Blam was having trouble breathing.”
The woman narrows her eyes, then lifts her head and sniffs the air.
She puts the tray on the table with a caustic “Hm” and turns to Blam. “I’d let Aca go his own way if my Slobodan was still alive and there was someone else to look after the business.” She sighs and makes a face. “See if it’s sweet enough.”
Blam picks up a cup of the steaming coffee and takes a sip. “Thank you. It’s perfect.” But because Mrs. Krkljuš does not move, he realizes he must drink it all in her presence. Hot as it is, he ingests the coffee in small swallows and puts the cup down.
“Now we can go and see my husband.”
Blam looks over at Aca, unsure of how to respond. Aca is peering down at his as yet untouched cup, as if waiting to be left alone. Blam stands and follows Mrs. Krkljuš out of the room.
They go into the entrance hall, Blam keeping close behind the small woman because the light is so poor, but then she reaches out and opens a door, and suddenly everything is light again.
They go into the room. It is larger than Aca’s or looks larger because it is less disorderly. It has two old beds, an armchair, and a wardrobe that doubles as a kind of room divider. A door frame shows just above it.
Old Mr. Krkljuš is sitting in the armchair. He is wearing a pair of pajamas with a sweater pulled over them. He seems to have put on weight since the last time Blam saw him (and until two years ago he saw him often in the doorway of the shop: tall and with a protruding stomach, but with narrow hips and shoulders), and his face is bloated and moist with sweat. From the waist down he is covered with a blanket that slopes off to the right.
“Hello there, son,” he says in a tremulous, gentle voice by way of greeting. “You can sit here.” He motions to the bed next to him.
Blam takes a seat.
“You can smoke.”
“No, thank you. I’ve just had a cigarette.” He reaches into his pocket. “Would you like one?”
“I’ve given up smoking since all this began,” he says sadly with a wave of the hand, then lays the hand carefully on the part of the blanket that is slipping. “Had to give up everything. But worst of all”—he leans over to Blam and waves the limp hand in the direction of the wall behind the bed—“is that Aca doesn’t obey me anymore. Just drinks.” He shakes his head. “And my Slobodan, my wonderful son Slobodan, is gone.” His face is suddenly inches away from Blam’s. “You know what happened to my Slobodan, don’t you?”
“Of course,” Blam says, more hastily than he would have liked, almost boastfully. To mitigate his haste, he adds, “My parents were killed in the raid too.”
“They were?” says Mr. Krkljuš, coming to life. “Then we were together. I didn’t know, I didn’t know. Where did they die?”
“In the street, apparently, near their house.” Blam justifies the vagueness of his answer by adding, “I wasn’t living with them at the time.”
But Mr. Krkljuš does not notice. “My Slobodan, he died in the Danube,” he says, shaking his head sadly. Suddenly he looks up at Blam with renewed interest. “Are you Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“Then I have something to ask you. It’s been on my mind for ages. Do you know any Jewish lawyers in Novi Sad?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Really? Not one?”
“Not one.”
“Hm.” The old man huddles deeper into the armchair. “Nobody does.” His face gradually resumes its defiant look. “Würzmann is no longer with us, is he?”
“No, I don’t think he came back from the camp.”
“That’s what I heard too.” His eyes seem to be pleading with Blam. “What about Vértes?”
Blam shakes his head.
“I see. Aren’t there any young ones?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Hm. And I gather you have nothing to do with the law.”
“No. I work in a travel agency.”
“I see, I see.” His voice is indifferent by now. Suddenly he turns to his wife. “Isn’t the water hot yet? My back is freezing!”
Mrs. Krkljuš, who has sat there listlessly until now, stands up, takes the pot off the hot plate on the bedside table with the edges of her apron, and removes the lid to let some steam escape. “Where’s the hot-water bottle?”
“Here behind my back,” says Mr. Krkljuš, bending forward impatiently.
Blam stands. “Let me help.”
“No, no,” says Mrs. Krkljuš, shaking her head. “I’m the only one who can do it.” She puts the pot back on the hotplate and turns to her husband.
“Well, I’ll be going, then,” says Blam. “I hope you feel better soon.”
“Yes, yes,” the old man responds distractedly, searching behind his back with one hand as his wife bends over him, concerned. “Goodbye. Goodbye.”
Blam goes out into the entrance hall, gropes his way to the door to Aca’s room, knocks, and goes in. The window is st
ill open, and Aca is back on the unmade bed, surrounded by his notebooks, his hands between his knees, his face gloomy.
“Pestered the hell out of you, I bet,” he says with a sarcastic, almost hostile grin.
“Don’t be silly. We hardly talked. Well, what do you say? Are you going to play me that song?”
“Forget it,” Krkljuš says with a weary wave of the hand. “Some other time. Sit down and have a drink with me.”
Blam does as he is told, but as he sits, he is overwhelmed by the alcohol on his friend’s breath. It is as if the bed were soaked in it. The smell makes Blam nauseated and at the same time dizzy with hunger. “You know what?” he says, aware he is about to commit a betrayal. “Let’s have that drink some other time. I need to put some food in my stomach.”
“All right,” says Krkljuš, taking Blam’s departure surprisingly well. “Time to get back to the damn shop anyway.”
Blam goes into the entrance hall accompanied by his friend, who is whistling a tuneful melody.
“Say goodbye to your parents for me, will you? I don’t want to barge in on them. Tell them I had to leave.”
“Fine. I will,” says Krkljuš and sees him down to the main entrance, where, leaning against the wall, he follows him with unsmiling eyes.
The Book of Blam Page 12
