Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

That evening Mrs. Bernister, neatly dressed, her hair brushed, opened the door to Vera at the first ring. Then, placing a finger to her lips, she went out and reentered through the bathroom door with a tall, angular, gray-haired man in officer’s trousers and a worn officer’s jacket with no badges. He looked Vera over and then offered her a large, firm hand. Mrs. Bernister brought in two coffees, prepared beforehand, and left them alone. Vera volunteered her story: the camp, the invitation to visit from her mother, the application for a passport to which she had received no answer. The words came easily; the man did not frighten her. His eyes were dull, his lined face like bark on a dead tree. It was as if he were not there, though when she stopped talking, she heard his hoarse breathing. She clasped her hands and waited for his reply. He looked at her thoughtfully, wearily, but said nothing. Suddenly, she slipped her dress off her left shoulder, pulled down the strap of her bra, and leaned over the table, so he could see the tattoo on her breast. The man merely picked up his coffee cup and sipped it slowly. Then he got up to leave, straightening himself to his full, awkward height, and, giving her his hand again, murmured good-bye and some excuse for having to hurry off. Mrs. Bernister came in at once, not hiding that she had heard everything, but she asked no questions. Vera felt drained, sapped of all her strength. On her way home, her thoughts went back and forth like a pendulum between hope and humiliation.

Five days later a messenger in a gray cap brought her a stapled letter containing a permit to travel to West Germany. At once she threw herself into a frenzy of preparation. She went to get her passport, to be photographed, she filled in the forms for her visa and sent them off through a travel agency to Belgrade. She bought shoes, a dress, and because the shops were temporarily out of suitcases, borrowed one from Mitzi, who, thrilled at the news, gave her her blessing. On a rainy afternoon in October, Vera boarded a train that carried her into the impenetrable night air of a foreign land.

She had not taken a trip since she came back from the camp in a cattle car. Now she sat in a clean compartment with soft seats, sharing it with only one other person, a well-dressed older man, who occasionally went out into the corridor to smoke. At the frontier, the Customs officers saluted. Commands shouted in German (“Los! Los!” “Halt!”) drifted in through the window and made her flesh crawl. But the men who had shouted wished her “Good morning” when they entered the compartment and smiled as they looked at her passport: law, authority were now on her side. She took it as a kind of reward for her suffering. The rattle and clatter of the wheels lulled her to sleep.

Daylight found her rushing across rich green countryside with neat houses here and there, passing towns with high, shining gables, which she remembered like a dream from the camp transport. In disbelief she read the familiar names of the stations, peered into the faces of the travelers — a stylish old lady, two young businessmen with briefcases — expecting to find some link to those uniforms and steel helmets. The tranquillity of the faces, the absence of guilt surprised her, all the more because she herself was so disconcerted. She didn’t feel like eating, put off going to the toilet, kept her suitcase locked and under her watchful eye until she got to Frankfurt.

Her mother met her at the station, looking a little older, her hair still copper-colored, but she was half a head shorter than Vera remembered her (or Vera had grown), with an anxious expression on her smooth, round face. They kissed with less warmth than Vera had expected, and her mother pushed her toward a man with a nose like a duck’s beak and small deep-set eyes, in whom she found it impossible to recognize the former field policeman (she had seen him before, but only a few times and from a distance). He now touched her hand warily and said “Hermann” in a hoarse voice, then bent to pick up her suitcase. They left the station, mother and daughter arm in arm and the mother’s husband a step behind with the suitcase. In front of the station, ruins were being broken up by huge wrecking balls moved across the excavated ground by tractorlike machines. But at the very edge of that excavation was a wooden ramp with curving rails, and a group of people waiting. A streetcar came along, and they all climbed in. They rode through wide streets, between bombed-out houses and empty lots where the houses had been cleared away by noisy machines and men in overalls. They got off at a street corner and walked down a long avenue lined with single-story houses, passing small shops that sold furniture, woolens, vegetables. They stopped in front of a tavern whose shutters advertised beer in green Gothic letters. Inside, customers were sitting at a few tables; they paused in their conversation while Vera was introduced to them. Vera and her mother then proceeded up a spiral staircase of shining blond wood and entered a small, clean room with a bed and a wardrobe. “This is your room,” said Reza Arbeitsam, nodding with pride. “The bathroom is at the end of the hall. Go wash and then lie down and get some sleep. I have to go downstairs and work.”

Vera began a new existence. Her room was assailed from below by loud, beer-soaked German voices (as Fräulein’s first hotel room in Novi Sad had been, but Vera did not know that). In the kitchen behind the counter, her mother, in a clean white apron, fried sausages, while a buxom girl by the name of Liese carried out tankards of beer. Hermann Arbeitsam brought the beer in kegs on his tricycle, or he went to the market or to the butcher’s, or sat with the customers and listened, smiling obsequiously, to their talk. When there were a lot of customers, her mother would climb up to the second step and call: “Veraaa!” Then put a knife into her hands and place her in front of a table scrubbed spotless to slice cabbage and peel potatoes. Or ask her to take the food to the customers. “This is for Johann at table three, this for Lenz at table one.” The tables were numbered even though there were only six. Vera carried out her orders obediently but reluctantly, for the customers were elderly people of little interest to her, and, feeling at home in the Beim vollen Tisch, they tried to start conversations, asked questions. The day after Vera arrived, her mother had warned her: “Don’t bring up your father and Gerd, these people wouldn’t understand. For them, you’re simply my daughter who had trouble getting a passport to join me. Not a word about the rest.”

But they were all refugees, like the two tavern owners: from the Banat, from Slavonia, from Czechoslovakia, and from the Hungarian Danube region. A blue-eyed greengrocer spoke to Vera in Serbian, boasted of having attended a school run by Franciscans in Bosnia, and called her “my countrywoman.” “How did you get on under the Communists?” asked a tall, prematurely gray railroadman with no right hand, from Silesia, and everyone paused, beer mug in hand, to hear her reply. “So-so. Neither good nor bad,” said Vera, and their faces registered disappointment. Reza called her daughter to task that evening. “You don’t understand,” she hissed, turning red in the face. “These people are bitter, they’ve lost everything, house, land, members of their families. As far as they’re concerned, anyone who doesn’t curse the Communists is a swine. Just remember that!”

This simple-minded warning from a tavern keeper’s wife echoed the prohibitions of Vera’s girlhood. Everything in her rejected such mindless intolerance. Suddenly she remembered her father, his forever doubtful, half-smiling shrug when confronted with intolerance of any kind, such as Gerhard’s in the last months he spent under their roof. After all the killing, that attitude seemed to her the only sane one. She noted with dismay how much her mother’s behavior had deteriorated since her father’s death; the vulgarity that as a child Vera had but sensed and occasionally glimpsed now was obvious in her mother’s every word and action. She saw how coarse and hard she had become, how carelessly she thrust out her legs when she walked, how she stood, letting her belly protrude, hands on hips, in front of the customers, how wide she opened her mouth, with its row of gold teeth, when she laughed raucously at their crude jokes. Vera felt a shiver of hostility toward her mother, and she withdrew to her room more and more often. But even there she was pursued by the crude voices, as if from an underground, invisible hell. On her bed with pillows over her ears, she tried not to listen, but she couldn’t help but hear and picture, from the muffled snorting, what was going on downstairs: the drunken bragging of former policemen, SS men, camp guards.