Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

Vera spent her days lying on the settee while time passed; she could tell it passed from the bands of light that moved across the floor under the curtained window. She would go out to buy food and cigarettes. She had started smoking on the journey home, and now could find no moderation in the habit, lighting cigarette after cigarette, and the butts piled up on the plates amid the leftover food.

One day, someone knocked at the door, then banged loudly. Mitzi came in, out of breath, her hair tousled, carrying two drooping pink carnations wrapped in thin office paper. She looked in the empty room that gave onto the courtyard, passed into the larger one facing the street, waved her free hand to disperse the smoke in the air, dropped the carnations on the table, went to the window, raised the curtain, and flung it open to the warm early-evening air. “You’re letting yourself go, my dear, and that’s no good!” she said reproachfully. Not limiting herself to words, she asked for water, a match, lit the iron kitchen range with a slip of wood she found in the pantry, and soon the dirty dishes disappeared into a bowl, from which they were resurrected, smooth and wet, to be laid out in perfect order on the top of a crate, which she had also found somewhere and placed on two chairs.

While she bent over the dishes, scrubbing, news came out of her in a stream: Vera’s application had been accepted, she was to put in an appearance at the Post Office tomorrow, she would work in the accounts section, payroll, she would get eight hundred dinars a month, it wasn’t a lot but would provide her with security and access to a good cheap dining room that the Post Office ran. Were those all her kitchen utensils? Mitzi looked around; the housework was finished. As soon as Vera got her first pay, she should buy some crockery, and first and foremost an electric hot plate; nowadays that was an essential part of every household. Why should Vera live primitively? There’d been enough of that during the war; that had been the Germans’ aim, to make progress impossible; that’s why they had it in for the Jews, because the Jews were the most progressive of all, the most resourceful. Now that there was only a handful left, they should not give the enemy the satisfaction of thinking that he had achieved his aim.

The next day, on the top, the fourth, floor of the Post Office, Vera was received by a hefty, slightly stooped woman with broad cheeks; she was kindly, talked in a loud voice, asked which camp Vera had been in, then told how she herself had been interned in Gradiška, in Croatia, until she escaped and joined the Partisans. She brought their talk to an end by banging her fist on the table and took Vera to the floor below, to a large room with six desks at which were seated a cluster of girls and one young man with flaxen hair, his left arm missing. No one seemed surprised when Vera walked in, not even Mara Brkić, a plump girl with a pouting mouth who had been her high-school classmate for a whole year. But they were all attentive; they gave the most comfortable chair to her, turned it to the light, cleaned the desk in front of her, smiled at her, and showed her how to transfer names and figures from small lined lists to a ledger that was half a meter wide. Then they forgot themselves, teased each other, laughed. A pretty, dark girl began to sing a marching song, which the others took up softly. They offered one another cigarettes, divided snacks, and Vera received her share on a piece of paper: bread and meat juice sprinkled with paprika, and water from a green liter bottle. At midday they all rushed off to lunch together, their wooden heels clattering down the corridor, down the stairs, and greeted the old mustachioed doorman as they emerged into the sunlit street and ran across to a dining room, in what had once been a tavern. They sat in two small airless rooms, waitresses brought them food, good-smelling, thick, greasy food, and they gobbled it up fast, because others out there were waiting their turn. Mara brought Vera a book of tickets with dates written on them and stamped with the words “Lunch” and “Supper,” for which she would not pay until the first of the month.

So now Vera had another thing in her schedule: to go from her apartment to the dining room, and back, between seven and nine every evening. In the evening, she was no longer in the company she knew: the people at the table were strangers, but loud and eager to make friends. They asked no questions, they accepted her. Gradually she gained confidence in the group, adjusted to their ways. For these people were not only close to her in age but also like her in their vagabond independence: if they still had parents or relatives, even if they lived with them, they insisted on being separate from them, rejecting the norm in clothing and speech, competing for soldiers’ trousers and jackets, neglecting face and hair, rushing to the dining room as if there was nowhere else to go for food and refuge. Several times, Mara said that she would be glad to visit Vera at home, and although Vera was reluctant to invite her, she couldn’t avoid it the day they left the dining room together and were going in the same direction.

The emptiness and disorder of Vera’s place delighted Mara; she clapped her hands as she turned around and around in the dim room, where clothing was piled high on the chairs and dirty dishes on the table and window sills. She threw herself on the settee, where the quilt and the pillow lay as Vera had left them, stretched her legs, stretched wide her arms. “Ah, what a life you have here!” She saw Vera’s slovenliness as a protest against the bourgeoisie, and must have reported this to the others, for in the next few days Vera was surrounded with offers of friendship. But she shrank from this aggressive camaraderie. She felt that by opening her home to Mara she had exposed something private, secret, that her former isolation had been compromised, and at night she would lie down in disgust on the settee and pull the old quilt over her.

Vera continued to receive only Mitzi, who dropped in and, chattering on and on, washed the dishes and made tea for both of them on the electric hot plate she had finally bought for Vera and installed herself. Did Vera tolerate Mitzi because Mitzi was Jewish? No. Vera stayed away from the few Jews who had come back, and whom Mitzi wanted her to meet. Nor did Vera go again to the Jewish Society. She was afraid of questions that would probe too deep, a fear she did not feel with Mitzi, in whose curiosity she sensed an innocence, as of a spinster who never saw beyond the façade of married life, a façade of order, work, and family gatherings. It was as if the hatred and distrust caused by inhuman cruelty had not touched Mitzi.

Yet Mitzi, too, had suffered: for four years she had worn on her chest and on her back the yellow star; had spent a year in a concentration camp; had been in the same transport as Vera and her family. Often they reminisced about the humiliations they had been subjected to, but in Mitzi’s lively mouth those reminiscences were dry, clean, comprehensible. “You needed will power to survive” was her conclusion, as if she were talking about the treatment of an illness. “Anybody who gave up, who gave in, was done for. Me, I never did.” Jutting her chin obstinately, she told how once, under the kapo’s very nose, she grabbed a handful of potato peels from the rubbish heap and ran off through a fence gate that happened to have been left open, into a hut where she could not be recognized; and how, sent off to work in the salt mine, she had treated the chilblains on her feet with her own urine so the doctor would not send her to the crematorium.

“Your poor grandmother, of course, was too old to withstand all those ordeals,” said Mitzi, allowing that exception to the rule. “But your papa, so proud and helpless, he had to break. It’s better that they didn’t suffer long. Think of it that way and you’ll be able to console yourself.” And as she listened, Vera felt that some higher, colder justice spoke through Mitzi, granting passports only to the strongest. Or to the most bestial. Mitzi’s stories brought back images, and Vera saw a procession of shrunken, shaven heads on thin necks and emaciated bodies, like a field of sickly plants above which leered the ghastly faces of the kapos, masks from a madman’s dream. She saw the Zimper sisters before they were taken out to be beaten, saw them sitting on the edge of a bed huddled close, their hands entwined, then saw their thin naked bodies tied to the wooden vaulting horses, heard the whistle of the blows. How was it that Vera was spared? Because of her faith in life? Or because of her lack of faith, her baseness, her submission to force? Having survived, she was numbered among the victors, and here she was with Mitzi, wielding wisdom over the mistakes of the dead. Ridiculous, vile. In the name of those who had died she ought to smash that cackling head. Instead, she was drinking tea, saying nothing, nibbling on cakes.