Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

Vera’s regrets that she missed the chance to get away from Novi Sad were fed by more than the memories of her suffering in the concentration camp. That suffering, once over, was a part of her life, a part of herself, and she could not now imagine that it had never happened. It was her destiny, she decided, to return from the camp to her own town, her own because she had failed, before, to break free of it. Yet she experienced a warmth, a closeness, upon returning, both times, like a troubled attraction of gravity to a planet wreathed in vapors or a sun in mist, drawing her to it, or, rather, treacherously causing her to merge with it. Treacherously on both occasions, for by returning she found that she had gone away from it further than she could ever have imagined. After requesting transportation home from the liberated camp — from its cracked ground covered with bodies, from its torn-down fences from whose posts the corpses of the camp guards were still swinging — it was not home at which she arrived, though it was Novi Sad.

The official truck sent to meet the train from the camp deposited her in the street behind the Baptist church, but on the door of the house was the sign of a government office, a Supply Department, in the rooms a host of desks, and on the desks, chairs, with their legs up, because it was after hours. In what had once been her grandmother’s wing of the house, the concierge came out in answer to her knock, a fat, pink woman, barefoot; she was waiting for her husband, a Hungarian, to come back from the front. Standing in the doorway on one leg, rubbing it with her other foot, she informed Vera indifferently that the last member of the Kroner family, the mother, had left with the Germans in the autumn.

Carrying her bundle tied to a long string over her shoulder, Vera could have turned around and left. But her weariness made her climb the steps past the woman, pushing her aside like a curtain, walk through the rooms, set down her bundle in the biggest, which overlooked the street and was virtually empty, and tell the Supply Department secretary, a middle-aged patriot in riding breeches and boots, who ran upstairs to challenge the intruder, that no one was ever going to drive her out from under her own roof again.

Now she was on her own ground. But where was her own ground? In Novi Sad, a low-lying plain in the middle of a swamp, by-passed by history, and to which the Germans, with their cruelty, their barked commands, their precision, uniformity in behavior and appearance, arrests, internment behind barbed wire, and even murder, had brought a terrible unity, turning the whole of Europe into one vast concentration camp that reeked with the fear of death. Of this unity, after its dissolution, there remained only the tatters of hatred. There remained the fat concierge, her hair unkempt and colorless, usually wearing slippers, always terrified, stranded as on a sandbank by her marriage to the doorman, a member of the “barbed crosses” from some god-forsaken village, to which, after a few days of Vera’s uncomfortable proximity, she would return, in a hired cart, not daring even to take with her the few possessions that were strewn around the big room. And the secretary, sallow, balding, a survivor in the maelstrom of the Occupation only because it was over before he was completely choked by it — by forced labor (twice); by hunger, his own, his wife’s, and his two children’s; by his dismissal from a job in the brewery after it had been taken over and placed under the management of a Hungarian official; by the wounds sustained in the bombing of the textile factory where he had found temporary work; by the denunciations he did not make, for he had been too insignificant for denunciations to be demanded of him.

Living in close quarters with these two, Vera felt almost disappointed: Was this why they had won the war? Her gaunt body seemed hollow, a thing that strained to be filled: she had to obtain food and other necessities. As she made a round of the neighbors, she came upon Gerhard’s former mistress, next door. The woman was frying potatoes in the kitchen, which opened onto the courtyard — it was the month of July, in 1945. At first she didn’t recognize the visitor in her worn-out boots, yellow canvas skirt, and padded Russian tunic, but then she clapped her hands and gasped, as if a large bird had descended on her table. Vera could tell that her joy was not pretended. The woman called her husband from the room where he was reading a newspaper, and shared the surprise with him and then their little girl. The husband offered Vera a chair, and nodding now and then listened to the story of the Kroners’ exile, which carefully left out her mother’s betrayal of her religion and her marriage. It was here that Vera ate her first free meal.

Free? It seemed to her that she had the right to knock on any door and demand anything, simply by invoking her whole long year of deprivation. She felt a need to tell everyone of her terrible suffering, but the words that had not yet been said weighed her down with their truthfulness, and with their nontruthfulness, too, for some things remained stuck inside her, silent, like resin. Suddenly exhausted, sweating from the food, to which she was not accustomed, her stomach in a turmoil, she had to hurry home. There she collapsed on the floor and wept. The words she had spoken and not spoken choked her. The silence and nodding heads choked her. The cry she held back choked her: “And you, what did you do all that time?” She doubled up, a smell of dust reached her through the cracks in the floor, her stomach heaved, and she went into the kitchen to vomit. She looked sadly at the pile of half-digested food.

Tears came to her eyes as she realized how disgusting it all was, how unnatural. She would look for someone in authority, she thought, to report her neighbor. He should not be allowed, without anyone knowing, to hang around, in the shelter of his room, on top of his plump, red-faced wife, whom her brother, Gerhard, used to take to the cellar any time he wanted. She should go out into the street, to the main square, and shout to everyone all that she knew and they didn’t know. She was about to spring to her feet. But she hadn’t the right, because she couldn’t tell everything. Instead, she cleaned up the vomit and dragged herself back to the big room. She sat in a chair, trembling. Where was she? Alone among empty people, strangers. They gave her food to eat and listened to her story, nodding, they walked in the courtyard of her house, from which her family had been removed, and none of them wanted to know what she knew.

Suddenly she felt that in leaving the camp she had left the one place where she was understood, where she was surrounded by real people. The wasteland covered with corpses rose before her, the twisted bodies of the camp guards hanging from fence posts. She almost felt sorry for them, wanted to kneel at their feet, help them down from the ropes, cry out: “Here I am. Beat me.” Yes, she was still very much there, in that arena of oppression. She unbuttoned her blouse and read the black tattoo. Yes, that was she. Better to have stayed there, dead, like Magda and Lenzi, on her bed, riddled by the last of Handke’s bullets, in the silent room of love adorned with red lights. She craved death as one might crave sleep. The nausea receded, the chair she sat in suddenly felt comfortable, and she dozed off.

Hunger roused her again. She must eat. She looked into the room adjoining; the concierge must be in the courtyard, or else had run off to see a friend, to recount the misfortune that had befallen her with the return of the house-owner’s daughter, whom she had long since written off. “No, you won’t! You won’t!” she said aloud. She went into the larder, cut herself a piece of bread, tore off some sausage with her teeth, her eyes searching among the jars for something pickled to season it with. There was nothing. She heard a door bang and stiffened with fright. What was she doing? She had a right to all this; it was not stealing. With her teeth she straightened off the sausage where she had bitten it; the bread wouldn’t be noticed. She walked back into her room, chewing slowly and with enjoyment.