Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

Men and women crowded into the compartment, carrying bundles and baskets, which they pushed under the seats; sitting, they took out bread, bacon, and bottles of slivovitz and water, offered food to Vera, who refused, even though she was hungry. They chomped and slurped, lit cigarettes, their bodies exuding the smell of sweat. It was a familiar smell, one that had surrounded her all her life but had been conspicuously absent on her mother’s premises. Frequent baths, Vera concluded simply, and saw her mother in the room above the Beim vollen Tisch telling her to wash after the journey, and that vision melted into the face of the Blockälteste, her arm pointing imperiously, sending prisoners to the showers. Was bathing part of the mania of cheerfulness? The air in the compartment grew thick with the smell of greasy food, exhaled by the gaping mouths of those who fell asleep. The sleepers: faces bony and swarthy, hands big and dark, bodies sprawled, legs stretched out in an unfinished movement, clumsy and uncomfortable. Their clothes were rumpled and not particularly clean, either. Poverty. Vera was slowly sinking into poverty, dropping on the social scale. The train passed through empty fields; barking dogs could be heard; at the stations shouts and curses echoed; faces glistening with dew or sweat appeared in the doorway, took a long look at the sleeping passengers, though it was clear from the start that there was no room.

At Stara Pazova, Vera got out to wait for her connection. It was early morning. The restaurant was closed, the waiting room full of scaffolding and buckets of whitewash. No shelter there. Shivering people were grouped around a heap of suitcases tied up with string. Then they all boarded a rattling, filthy old train that was saturated with the smell of urine. Chugging, wheezing, whistling desperately, it struggled over the bridge across the Danube. Novi Sad was her station: familiar porters, railroadmen, drawled speech. She took a streetcar home, entered the apartment, in which everything was just as she had left it. Disorder, neglect. Opening the windows wide onto the empty, quiet, barely awakened street, she had a sense of teetering over a pit of darkness and mud.

She had no regrets about the life she had left behind, but much regret about the life she now had chosen. Regret about everything: the quiet streets, the exhausted passers-by, the unsightly grass that pushed up between the worn Turkish cobblestones, the houses that seemed a shade darker since she last saw them. She went to the Bernisters’ to pick up her first allowance; it was a working day, but the trade representative was at home, as if expecting her. He gave her the money; his wife brought in coffee and stood in the doorway. They asked about Germany, Frankfurt, her mother, about Bernister’s brother, whom Vera had seen only once and who had asked similar questions about his relatives in Novi Sad.

She went to see Mitzi, but found someone else’s name on the door. She rang the bell, and an elderly woman, the new tenant, informed her that Mitzi had passed away two months ago. Mitzi had retired from her job, was about to move into an old-age home in Zagreb, had made all the arrangements, paid the first installment, chosen the room, and on her last day said good-bye to her neighbors, packed her belongings, sold or gave away what she didn’t need, and in the evening dashed off to the hairdresser’s to have her hair done. She came home, got undressed, went to bed, and the next morning, when the taxi driver she had ordered to take her to the station arrived and the neighbors broke down the door, they found her in bed, neatly covered, her freshly waved gray hair held in position by a hairnet, dead of a heart attack.

Vera went to the cemetery, found the mound with a polished wooden board at its head giving Mitzi’s name and years of birth and death. She looked around and left, visiting no one there but Mitzi, because they had all gone unmarked — her father, grandmother, brother — and it was hard enough to see the grave in which Mitzi lay, with her wrinkled face and waved hair, slowly decomposing. Whom should Vera mourn the most? She mourned them all. She remembered the old ladies, her grandmother and her friends, who, along with Mitzi, only a few years earlier, had left their houses in a column escorted by soldiers with bayonets fixed. How they had wept, turning back to look at this dusty town, which, indifferent, continued to live without them.

She walked home, and as she approached it from the corner, the house looked the same as always, its foundations deep in the ground, its walls scarred by rain and wind, and its roof blackened, with the apartment that had once been her family’s turned into an office, and her father’s shed transformed into a store-house for lentils and beans. She had the feeling that she was entering yet another cemetery. Here, at the gateway, she had usually met someone, her father, her brother, the maid; and from there her grandmother, absurdly dolled up in her black dress with white polka dots and black straw hat, used to go off on her visits; and there Count Armanyi had stopped her and, clutching his hat to the breast of his expensive gray suit, spoke of his longing for her. She mourned him, too, now, that man in whom she had once placed her hopes even though she had seen through his selfish intentions from the start. Even his selfishness, male and petty, she mourned, wondering what it had become, what the man had become. Was he alive, or dead like Mitzi, under a mound in Hungary or somewhere else?

Vera mourned everyone who had ever spoken to her, who had longed for her, whether out of love or out of lust, even the German soldiers whose convulsive spasms on top of her before they left for the front were the last expression of their will to live. They were all shadows now, voices from the past. Was there anything solid on this earth, anything that stood firm, so one would not need to say of it: That, too, has passed? It seemed to her that there was nothing. Desires, plans, people sending their calls of love and screams of pain into the air, and ultimately all this dissolved into a fog that floated aimlessly. And she herself was a wisp in that fog, lost among strange shadows and voices. Did she exist, or was she just another of those shadows and voices? She didn’t feel like going in, didn’t feel like eating or drinking. She had no need of anyone’s company.

A person from the past found out that she had come back and, in the early evening, day after day, knocked at her door. She saw his silhouette in the frosted glass. It was not Bernister, it was a young outline, with a lock of unruly hair combed to one side. Unable to remember anyone like that and not wanting to, she simply waited for the man to go away.

And out there the seasons changed. It was autumn again, early autumn, still warm; the earth swelled; the trees in the courtyard bent low with dusty leaves; flies and bumblebees buzzed their way in through the window but could not find their way out. Vera got dressed and went out to buy food. (She went out only in the evening.) The windows were lighted; she could see women getting beds ready for the night, she could hear music blasting from a radio and a child’s voice shouting “Mammaaa! Mammaaa!” in despair that there was no response. The cry grew softer as Vera moved down the street. Perhaps Mama was lying beneath Papa, or was out in the yard hanging up the wash, or had not come back from her afternoon visit. Who could tell? Not that it mattered — the misunderstanding remained, the child’s vain call determined by some remote, unknown inevitability. Vera’s eyes were moist: she knew that she would never be the cause of such a misunderstanding, because that possibility had been torn out of her. The sense of futility grew unbearable; she felt that she was ill, ill in her mind and heart, as if some germ had found its way into the coils of her brain and was digging, digging, and she could do nothing about it. And when it dug to the center, she would collapse or go mad. Then she heard her name repeated several times and saw a man of medium height hurrying toward her; his teeth gleamed in the light of a street lamp as powerful arms folded around her in a familiar embrace. When the arms released her, she looked closely at the man’s face and saw that it was Sredoje Lazukić. She dropped her head on his shoulder and sobbed.