Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

“We should be confident, eh?” he would repeat, taking malicious pleasure in the well-worn phrases, accurately mimicking the speaker’s accent. “We should close ranks? Why don’t you come over here for a while to show us how that’s done? Don’t be afraid. You’ll go on getting your pay; it’ll accumulate in English pounds, and if you get out of this alive, you can collect it all from the cashier. But bring a spare pair of underpants with you; you may fill the first.” Kroner’s narrow face twisted at such boorishness and his “Shhh, I can’t hear” became more desperate and more forlorn. Then, when the broadcast was over and the silence of the summer night could again return to the room, they grew calmer, but only to express their opposing views more clearly. “Still, things are improving,” Kroner would sometimes say. “They’re no longer advancing on Moscow, and in the Caucasus they’re even losing positions.” “Losing!” retorted Gerhard. “It’s all lies! Why should they suddenly start losing positions, when we know what the balance of the forces is?” “It’s not what you think,” Kroner returned. “Just a few days ago there were deliveries of American military supplies to the Russians; millions of tons are getting through, convoy after convoy.” “But the Germans have all of Europe supplying them.” “That’s propaganda. What Europe? And even so, what is Europe compared with the combined forces of England and America?” “But your America isn’t in any hurry to get into the war.” “To all intents and purposes, America is in the war. A lot of the planes defending England are American-made. The tanks in Russia, too, are about a third American. And America hasn’t even started its military production yet.” “What about their men? Where are they?” “This war won’t be decided by men, but by machines, don’t you see?” “No war will ever be decided by anything but men. That’s where you’re deceiving yourself. You sit at home listening to Radio London and imagine that machines made in America will settle the war. But the Germans go on killing. They kill tens of thousands every day. When you count up how many they’ll kill in a year, you can see that they’ll wipe out everyone who resists.” “No. Killing only gives rise to new resistance.” “What resistance? From people like you?” “I’m a civilian. I have no weapons. And there’s no front where I could go and fight.” “If everybody took up a club and hit a German over the head, we’d be rid of them by now.” “Don’t be silly. A club. You talk as if we were in the Stone Age. This is the age of technology. Death spews from tanks, from bombers.” “You won’t frighten the Germans one bit with that kind of talk.” “And you, with your criticisms, one would think you’re on their side!” “I can detach myself from my personal fate. Yes, I’m impressed by the efficient way they fight, and all the fine talk of your experts on the radio disgusts me.” “For God’s sake, Gerhard, one has to prepare for a war.” “One has to win a war, Father.”

It was a running argument; they stopped only when they became weary, or when it was time for the next broadcast from London, in another of the languages Kroner could understand. He had memorized the schedule, and while he argued with Gerhard, he would cast furtive glances at the alarm clock, which was placed alongside the radio on a chest and set back a little, so that only he, in his armchair near the receiver, could see it. Suddenly his bony hand would reach for the knob, click it on, and behind the dark patch of the speaker, as if a wild beast were awakening, the silence would become heavy, expectant, then be shattered by the crackling, buzzing, and whining of distant static, which culminated in the familiar roll of that nighttime drum. For Gerhard, who was absorbed in the conversation, pacing from one end of the room to the other, these preparations often passed unnoticed, and he would stop dead in his tracks as if stung. “Again?” But his father would already be bent over the set and waving his hand above his head—“Shhh!” Gerhard would turn his back on him then in contempt and leave, slamming the door behind him, so that it reverberated throughout the house.

Milinko would never have acted with such rudeness, and not only because this was not his house. Here, as everywhere, he was acquiring knowledge, and therefore had to be attentive, watchful. He would take Vera home from their walk, shyly kiss her good night in the twilight at the gate, his arm around her narrow waist, pressing her body against his, and afterward linger there alone, his eyes straying to the door that led down a long hallway to the living quarters. In this loitering there was, in part, a young man’s desire to steal secretly into a certain room with a white virginal bed, where, hidden from all eyes, he would be able to hold that warm, supple body truly close. But he was intimidated, felt too great a respect for the people and circumstances that stood between him and his beloved. Only here, at this gate, through which carts drawn by heavy, sweating horses thundered during the day, and handcarts filled with crates were pulled by Žarko the porter, this gate turned by the evening stillness into an antechamber to such lofty pleasures as reading, listening to the radio, playing the piano, and quiet conversation — it was only here that he understood how much his own home, squeezed in a communal courtyard ruled by housewives, was unenlightened, exposed, disorderly. The realization made him value even more the one he had come to visit. He would never forget the moment when, at the very start of his friendship with Vera, he came to call for her and, after ringing the doorbell, was invited in by a middle-aged, ample-bosomed maid in a starched white apron. Room after room opened before him, spacious rooms, full of furniture, but also of objects of no particular use — vases, pictures, bowls. In one room off to the side sat a thin, angular, dark-skinned man with a book in front of him, reading. It was a scene full of calm and equilibrium, dignity, reason, like a sculpture, a work of noble beauty among the other ornaments of the house. From then on, when he came to see Vera, Milinko came also for that scene: the serenity acquired by knowledge. Even the Occupation, which thrust the Kroner family into a dangerous and humiliating position, could not ruffle that serenity; on the contrary, the danger and the humiliation only enhanced the special quality of this house. The Kroner house, besieged by the times, in extremity, was a kind of anvil of history.

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.”