Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

So Vera went back to her original plan of saving herself by making a break with her family. She told her father reassuringly that she had no intention of forcing anything upon him, but that she simply wanted to leave on her own, mentioning as a possible source of help her uncle Sep, who had, as an SS man, exceptional authority and power, which most probably included the ability to help someone secretly across the border to a country beyond the rule of Germany. What country? Kroner pricked up his ears. Switzerland, she answered, or another neutral country, like Turkey, Sweden; how should she know? Now it was Kroner’s turn to be surprised at how well informed she was, because he had thought that she paid no attention to the discussions at the table or the talk on the radio. Pulling himself together, he promised to speak to Sep about it.

On several occasions he attempted to do just that, asking timidly, between his brother-in-law’s ominous descriptions of massacres, if it was possible to escape them, to flee, under such close scrutiny, the wrath of the German forces. Many parents, he said, would gladly pay for their child to be exempted from the fate of their people and tribe, particularly if they didn’t belong completely to that tribe, his own children being a case in point. But since he did not spell out his proposition, and Sep was not quick-witted enough to understand it in that form, such digressions from their conversation were met with silence, no response, quickly choked off by new episodes of SS heroism and terror. At first it seemed to Kroner that this was a stratagem to lure his fatherly concern to offer a greater and greater sum. By the time he discovered that this suspicion was unfounded and that Sep had simply not understood, it was too late. Sep was about to leave.

Part of Kroner, and he dared not acknowledge this even to himself, was thankful to Sep for keeping his daughter from embarking on such an adventure, to say nothing of the money. But the departure of her savior before that salvation was even brought up was a big disappointment for Vera. Only now did she see how mistaken she was not to have applied to her soldier uncle herself, to have let her father intercede for her when she knew how inadequate he was.

She would act on her own. As soon as she made this decision, she was amazed that she had not been led to it earlier by the personality of her newly designated helper. He had been there all along, constantly before her eyes, and yet she had not seen him. He caught her attention first simply as a man, then as the man who could deliver her from her terrible worries and difficult decisions. As she was mulling these over in her mind, she saw him walking across the courtyard, tall and powerful, full-blooded, with long, smooth brown hair and light, close-set sharp eyes that looked into hers with undisguised admiration. At lunch she heard plenty about him, for by now Kroner associated all the advantages and disadvantages of his business life with that same Miklós Armanyi, the official in charge of his business.

At first Kroner had feared that the foreigner might become his tormentor, for during the requisition of the store the man was cold and stern; he examined all the documents and looked into all the corners, and announced that from then on without his authorization nothing could be initiated, nothing changed. But it soon turned out that this strictness was an expression of inexperience, of fear of being drawn onto thin ice by deception. As soon as it became clear to him that Kroner’s only desire was for himself and his family to survive, Count Armanyi abandoned these precautionary measures. He remained distant, but had no hesitation in telling, about himself, what he felt was essential to establish basic human contact. Soon, at the Kroner dinner table, it became known that Count Armanyi was unmarried and a barrister’s clerk whom mobilization had thrust into this delicate position. A position he had no reason to complain of, since it brought with it a wage three times what he had previously earned, and a fine apartment in one of the commandeered buildings that had belonged to local civil servants, and the reputation of a government official entrusted with special responsibilities. But he did not seem to be able to make full use of this reputation in Novi Sad, where he felt half-exiled; among its mixed population, he did not know whether to be more suspicious of the noisy and wild Serbs or of his own Hungarians, who had fattened themselves on their neighbors’ property and now wallowed in the euphoria of their oriental slovenliness and indifference.

He himself was from Pest, a civil servant’s son who had been indoctrinated with the idea that the work and rank of a civil servant should be valued above all else. But here that conviction had been eroded, weakened under the dull pressure of the inefficiency, disorder, and uncertainties of wartime. In high school, Armanyi had learned that the whole nation wept when southern regions of Hungary were annexed by Yugoslavia, but now some of his neighbors told him firmly and openly, for they were Hungarians and not afraid to talk, that under the Yugoslav regime things had been in some ways better, that people had behaved with greater warmth and humanity. Looking at the dusty streets, at the cluttered, small bazaarlike shops, at the movie houses, where people pushed and shoved to reach the unnumbered seats, at the open squares in front of the churches where beggars stood in clusters, grimacing to arouse pity, Armanyi found in the dispossessed owner of the business he now managed, in the thin, dejected, peace-seeking and book-loving Robert Kroner, a spirit of industriousness most resembling his own.

He began to question Kroner about the world of Novi Sad, which he did not understand, and from the answers gathered that Kroner himself understood very little of that world but submitted to it in resignation; this brought them closer together. Did Armanyi feel exiled? Exiled was what Kroner had been here for these twenty-odd years, since the day he allowed himself to be lured back from Vienna to take over his father’s store — temporarily, until a buyer was found, he thought, and until he could talk his mother into agreeing to the sale. But the few months he had expected became years; he was sidetracked by marriage and fatherhood. His way back to the centers of wisdom and civilization he had learned to respect in his youth was cut off: in fact, those centers were no longer there when he came to look for them. Would the same thing happen to Armanyi? Armanyi, too, had been transferred to the south for a short time, until the skirmish with the rebellious forces in the Balkans, which German and Hungarian cool-headedness would know how to subdue, was over. But then the war spread to the immeasurably vast fields of Russia, where battles were being waged whose outcome was by no means certain, while here, in the rear, the Bačka, which had been so easily captured, was a long way from submission. People seethed with expectation, and with scorn for the present situation.

That expectation was personified, for Armanyi, by Kroner’s children, Gerhard and Vera, whom he could observe all day long from the window in their father’s store. These grown-up children lived in idleness, and although he knew that this idleness had been imposed on them by the same state machine that had brought him here to watch them, he could not help but feel that it was part of their character. How could they walk around the courtyard with nothing to do, their hands behind their backs, their faces turned as early as the month of March toward the morning sun as it appeared over the store roof? How could they — with no apparent reason, such as reading a book or having a conversation — wander for hours in that confined space, which would have suffocated him had he not had his duties and his documents to occupy him?