Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

“My dear Vera,” said the letter, “I’ve written to Mr. Bernister twice, and have now heard from him that you are well and living in our house. I am sorry I was not there to welcome you, but fate decided otherwise. When they took you away, I had only Hermann left, and he had to escape from Novi Sad, though he did nothing bad. He was kind to all regardless of faith. Hermann is now my husband; he is forty-six, the same age as I am. We were in a camp in Karlsruhe and now live in Frankfurt am Main. We run a small tavern. Hermann says he would like you to come here. He will treat you like a daughter, for he has no children of his own, and he respects me because we manage our little tavern together. I am waiting for you. I wrote to Mr. Bernister also, to tell you to come and that I am expecting you. If you need money for the trip, I cannot send it to you because they told me I could not at the Post Office, but Mr. Bernister will give it to you, and we will pay it back to his brother in Hannover. So come quickly. Your mother, Tereza Arbeitsam, sends you greetings and kisses.”

Vera placed the letter on one side of the kitchen cabinet, tucking its upper edge beneath the frame of the glass door, and the envelope with its brightly colored stamp on the other. Occasionally she would go up to it, look closely at her mother’s slanted handwriting, read a word or two, or run a finger over the stamp, which depicted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with a wide cravat under his aged, sagging chin. She now had a secret, a goal. When a man came and she gave herself to him in the darkness of the kitchen, her inner eye would go to the cabinet and her mother’s letter, and she would not feel defeated, but somehow, because of her secret, triumphant. How she despised all those males who forced their seed, their unrest into her, quickly, violently, seed she could not germinate, for within her was an emptiness they did not suspect.

She waited for Bernister, sometimes resolved to refuse him, sometimes resigned to submit to him as before. But he did not come. Nor was there any communication from the police station regarding her passport. She went there, to the window where she had made her application, waited in a long line, inquired, and received from a different clerk the same noncommittal answer. Then she walked to the Bernisters’. This time Mrs. Bernister opened the door; silently she stepped back into the dim hall, showed Vera to a tidy but unheated room, asked her to sit down, and went to make coffee. Mrs. Bernister herself drank no coffee; the doctor had forbidden it on account of her high blood pressure. Mr. Bernister was out of town; the year before, he had bought a vineyard in Fruška Gora, and since two of the rooms in their apartment had been taken over by a high-ranking officer, during the week her husband stayed in a hut he built at the vineyard, coming home only on Saturday and Sunday to wash his clothes. Inadvertently Vera was thus given the explanation for the regularity of his visits. Had Mr. Bernister been home in the last few weeks, she asked. Yes, said his wife, but he didn’t go into town; he was tired and looked as though he had suddenly aged a great deal. That was said with a certain acerbity, with a meaning Vera could not quite unravel. Mrs. Bernister asked how Vera lived; did anyone do the cooking and shopping for her? And when Vera answered, the old woman nodded with a clouded, almost tearful look. Erika, too — she sighed — would have been an independent young woman by now, had she lived. Mrs. Bernister told Vera that Erika died on her way to visit her fiancé, a German airman stationed in Budapest, in the summer of 1943. American planes attacked the train, and a bomb destroyed the car in which Erika was sitting. Only her shoes were found, and that was how she was identified. Mrs. Bernister left the room; when she came back, she placed a pair of red shoes with wide cork heels, virtually new, in Vera’s hands. Vera held them; they were light, like the last pair of prewar shoes her mother had ordered made for her by the shoemaker across the street.

The next time, Vera went on a Saturday, and found Bernister at home. Covered with dust, he was pulling sacks of fertilizer from a shed. He wiped his hands with a rag, inquired about the status of Vera’s passport, and went into the house to type a letter requesting a quick response to her application. Vera signed the letter and put it in her handbag. Mrs. Bernister brought in two cups of coffee and stood, as usual, at a distance, watching them attentively. When Vera was ready to go, Mrs. Bernister accompanied her to the door and asked her to come again.

This Vera did on working days, when Mrs. Bernister was alone. She liked the semidarkness of the cluttered room, whose old bourgeois furniture so much resembled her family’s. She missed those familiar surroundings, surroundings that had not been happy or free but soothed by virtue of their emptiness. Her own home was difficult for her, tense. Her mother’s letter and envelope tucked between the glass and the frame of the cabinet now seemed to threaten rather than promise. They said that nothing changed, they pressed down on Vera like a stifling shroud, like mildew.

From time to time Mitzi showed up to reproach her for not having kept in touch, for not having put her life in order. Or some man would bring his desire and leave money. Vera dreaded both. She found it hard to sit still while Mitzi, chattering, went about the housework she felt it her duty to do in the unkempt rooms, or served tea and cakes, and when Mitzi left, Vera breathed freely again, as if she had escaped an attack on her life.

With the men, Vera truly feared an attack on her life, feared that one of them would strangle her in the middle of an embrace, or stab her in the stomach with a knife pulled out of nowhere. Why did she allow strange men into her locked room, allow their powerful hands to explore her body, even its most private places? She swore that she would never again let anyone in, that she would tell the next man who knocked to go away, acting tough, as she had done that time with the secretary, and if they didn’t listen, she would rush to the window and call for help. But when a visit was actually announced by a catlike scratching on the door, her throat tightened, and her body, accustomed to its servitude, despite fear and common sense, began to inch toward that summons, her arms reached out, her fingers turned the key, and when the strange hands seized her, she melted and spread herself wide to accept the onslaught.

One day, after she had been tossing and turning on her settee for hours, she jumped up, got dressed, and rushed off to see Mrs. Bernister. She rang, threw herself at the woman’s feet, and poured out her anguish. The uncomprehending Mrs. Bernister helped her into the living room, sat her down on the couch, stroked her hair, mumbled words of comfort, and she, too, burst into tears, as if someone else’s misfortune had broken down a barrier, and began hurling reproaches at her husband. All he had ever cared about were his indecent pleasures, the gratification of his urges. He had urged Erika on to her destruction by allowing her to become involved with a man in the middle of the war, who was thousands of kilometers away; Mrs. Bernister had begged him to act like a father, to make Erika come to her senses, but all in vain. And now he was running away from responsibility. Instead of finding work, like everyone else, he bought a vineyard to avoid being with her, to avoid sharing her grief and loneliness, the hardship of a divided apartment; he hid himself from her eyes, from her accusations, crawled into the ground like a mole, or else chased after peasant girls. “But I’ll help you, my child,” Mrs. Bernister assured Vera. Her subtenant, the officer, was a serious man, alone in the world, not well; she could see he was not unkind, and he certainly had influence; she understood nothing about those stars on his uniform, but a soldier delivered a newspaper to the house for him. She had never asked for any favors, though they had shared an apartment for three years. Every day she cleaned the bathroom they used in common and sometimes out of pity put a piece of his dirty laundry, left lying in a corner, in with her own, so that he wouldn’t have to worry about it. Mrs. Bernister would invite him for coffee that evening, and Vera should join them. Now that they had a plan of action, the two women calmed down, and Vera left.