Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

Life. She must look out for herself. She returned to the kitchen and carefully washed herself, then dressed, meticulously smoothing out every crease. She walked into town. It was early evening. A man in rubber boots with a cap on his head was riding a bicycle with a bucket balanced carefully on the handlebars. Slops! It came back to her: peacetime. She was pleased with herself for being so clever, so composed. She smiled. She must buy a decent dress, shoes, she must get some money. She walked along streets that were the same as they had been a year earlier, but clear of Germans, of danger. There was occasional traffic. She reached a small square; Veličković’s stationery shop was there, where she had often bought notebooks, pencils. She went in; the bell above the door tinkled as it always did. The shop was dark, no customers. Behind the counter stood Mr. Veličković, short, thickset, a graying toothbrush of a mustache beneath his flat nose. Vera remembered her father once telling her mother that the stationer didn’t like being alone in the shop; he couldn’t leave to relieve himself and as a result had bladder trouble.

“I am Vera Kroner,” she said, coming to a stop in the middle of the shop, breathless from just those few words. “I don’t know whether you remember me.”

Veličković opened his small eyes wide; his mouth became rounded. “Oh, it’s you, Miss. You haven’t been around for a long time.” And he stretched out both his short, fleshy hands across the counter toward her.

“I was in a camp,” she told him, and tears came to her eyes, because he seemed genuinely grieved. “I wanted to ask if you could lend me a little money.”

“Of course,” Veličković said quickly, and leaned over the counter to pat her on the shoulder. “The important thing is, you’ve come back alive.” He looked around him. “If only I had someone to look after the shop, I’d take you home so we could have a talk.” Vera wondered if he still had bladder trouble. “And your family?” he asked.

“I’m the only one who came back,” said Vera, again making no mention of her mother. They stood silent for a moment. Then she stuffed the money into the pocket of her tunic and left.

In the next few days she made the rounds of the local offices, received certificates, ration cards. The Confiscated Goods Office she found in an unused mill; an NCO with a mustache showed her into a vast, cold room piled to the ceiling with wardrobes, beds, shelves, tables, and chairs. Spreading wide his arms, he said, “Take your pick, Comrade.” She took her time searching for pieces that would suit her, secretly hoping to come across something of her own. For a moment she thought she recognized a settee from the maid’s room, and she and the NCO clambered up to get it out from under other things. But the flowers on it were different. She took it all the same. She had to arrange for the carrying of the furniture herself, so she ran to the market and hired a porter; he loaded the pieces onto his handcart, and they started down the street. She felt ashamed; everyone was watching her, or so it seemed, but at the same time she had a feeling of triumph, that she had taken something, preserved it. She hurried needlessly, and several times had to wait for the porter to catch up with her. She unloaded the furniture in both rooms — the concierge had moved out the night before — and fell on the settee, exhausted. For days she did nothing. The furniture stood in disarray, and in the evenings she crawled under a bare quilt thrown over the settee. What were those possessions to her?

Yet hunger and discomfort drove her to continue with her petitioning. One office would give information out about another where she could obtain something she still needed. Finally she arrived at the Jewish Society, next door to the synagogue. She went in hesitantly, her heart beating fast, half expecting to find it ravaged, the floors spattered with blood. But when she opened the door, she saw two tidy, sparsely furnished offices; the front one was unoccupied, but in the one in back a dark, heavy-boned, big-nosed woman sat knitting behind a desk. She looked at Vera over her glasses, laid aside her knitting, picked up a pencil, and pulled a thin note pad toward her. She took down Vera’s name and surname, address, inquired about her family. Vera told about her brother, her father, her grandmother, then stopped, undecided. The woman, as if guessing the reason for her hesitation, arched her neck and asked, “And your mother?” Vera explained that her mother was German and had not been deported, that she had gone to live somewhere else while Vera was in the camp. The woman sniffed doubtfully, went into the front office, opened the window, and shouted into the synagogue courtyard: “Deskauer! Deskauer!” or some such name. She shut the window again, and soon thereafter an elderly, round-bellied man appeared at the door. The two whispered, the man nodded from time to time, casting furtive morose looks at Vera, then the woman came back and placed two hundred dinars on the desk in exchange for Vera’s signature. “We can’t give you more,” she said, putting aside the note pad. “We have a lot of people who are old and ill.” Then reluctantly she added: “You can come back again on the first of the month.” Vera went out past the old man, and in the corridor she ran into little wizened Mitzi, a Post Office employee whom she had known casually. Now Mitzi embraced her, pulled her head down onto her thin shoulder, and exclaimed in a hoarse voice, “Poor thing! Poor thing!” She asked Vera to wait, she had only to pick up her monthly allowance. Then they went off together, arm in arm, Mitzi full of questions about what had become of the Kroner family, and Vera replying reluctantly.

But Vera agreed to drop in at Mitzi’s on the way home, and was surprised at the comfort of her room, which was on the second floor of an old mansion. There were armchairs, a couch covered by a blanket, a radio, stands with fresh flowers, even several framed embroideries. Vera asked how she had managed to keep them. But they were not hers, Mitzi explained, she had got them from the Confiscated Goods Office. Hadn’t Vera been there yet? Who knows who they once belonged to — a Jew, or a German who had fled; it didn’t matter. She wanted to make her little nook as cozy as possible in the present circumstances. She offered Vera tea, and soon the sound of water boiling came from the kitchen, cups appeared in whirling clouds of steam and on dainty porcelain saucers, and there were cakes, and even napkins, which Mitzi got from the Post Office, for she was already working. She had cut the thin office paper in squares and folded them diagonally. Her lively, volatile, tireless patter made Vera sleepy.

“Poor thing,” she repeated, sipping tea and offering Vera cakes. “Now you’re alone, and I know it’s hard. But here we are, God wanted us to meet, and now we’ll get together often, won’t we? The few of us who survived that horror must be one big family, we must help one another.” She enumerated the camp inmates who had returned — for Vera, they were familiar or not so familiar names, faces from the pages of an album. Many had already found jobs, and Mitzi knew where. Did Vera want to work? Mitzi could get her a job at the Post Office. Vera had finished high school, hadn’t she? And they agreed that she should get in touch with Mitzi as soon as she was all settled. But to save time, Mitzi persuaded her there and then to fill out an application on the piece of white paper she pulled from a drawer. Mitzi would present it to the personnel officer the next day.

Vera went home in a fever of excitement, full of new discoveries and new decisions. She would arrange her furniture neatly, as she had seen it done at Mitzi’s. But, tired, she stretched out on the settee and fell asleep. The next day, the meeting, her sudden and artificially fostered friendship, seemed faded to her, unreal. Had she dreamed it? She saw Mitzi’s face before her, expressive with emotion, and then the faces of those she had mentioned, which swarmed around her, dancing a mad reel that wearied her. The room was silent, with the concierge gone, and the creaking of carts in the street and the cackling of hens in a neighbor’s yard could be heard. Sounds of peace, in contrast to that rush of words, which took her back to the madness of killing, pillage, to death instead of the life that was here, warm and sleepy in her body.