Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

She gets up, goes shopping, the streets are full of movement, the army is packing up, German citizens are climbing into carts, just as the Jews climbed into carts half a year ago, her Vera and Robert. She sees people she knows, approaches them, asks where they’re going, but they answer through clenched teeth. To them, she’s Kroner’s wife and they’re angry, as if it’s her fault they’re losing the war. If she asks a Serb, she doesn’t get a straight answer either, because they know about Hermann and hate her or are afraid of her. Here Hermann comes at last, sweating, his cap pushed onto the back of his head, his eyes bulging, and his face gray. His long nose quivers.

“The Russians are outside the town. We must leave.”

“What about the lieutenant?”

“They all left this morning. I only just managed to stay, for your sake.”

She’s moved by that. With him, then, in life or in death. To redeem her dead son. “When?”

“Now, right away. The truck is waiting on the road to Futog.”

“Won’t they come and fetch us?”

“How can they? All fifty of them?”

She looks at him. Before her eyes appear the possessions she has been jotting down for weeks as the most important to take: winter suit, fur coat, quilts, Persian carpet from Robert’s room, leather armchair, German books with their gilt embossed titles, icebox, almost new. “Are you mad? How can we leave empty-handed?”

“Take what you can carry,” he yells, “or the truck will leave without us.”

Like a sleepwalker she obeys, grabs her bag with her money and jewelry, yanks her fur coat from the closet, picks up the cut-glass vase from the table, and he’s already pushing her out the door. “On foot? Like this?”

He clutches his head, tortured by her pleading tone, her woebegone face. “There’s a bicycle in the hall.”

“Gerd’s bicycle?”

They climb on it, she on the crossbar, hugging the bag and the fur coat and the vase, he perched on the saddle behind her, his jacket half-unbuttoned, like two young lovers going to the river for a swim. Hermann pedaling, out of breath, sweating, she cramped by the crossbar, which cuts into her flesh, they go through the town, past hidden, mocking eyes, not looking back, afraid that someone will run up to them and knock them down on the main road.

Gerhard dragged away, a year and a half earlier. Between two policemen, handcuffs on his wrists, through the entrance hall, past the bicycle, which has been standing there ever since the official took over his father’s business. What if he jumped onto the saddle, threw off the policemen on either side, rode through the open door and out into the street? He could steer even with his hands tied. But they would catch him before he could pick up speed, would knock him down or shoot him. It wouldn’t matter if they killed him, but if they wounded him, that could weaken his resistance to interrogation. He should have defended himself the moment they entered, should have made a dive for the kitchen table and stabbed at least one of them with a knife. Selling his life dearly. But even that could be a mistake, a hasty assumption, because he didn’t know the charge; there was always a chance, one in a hundred, that this might be a mistake, against which he could defend himself.

They manhandle him through the gateway to the street and into a tall black limousine, whose driver rushes to open the door as soon as he sees them in the side mirror. Gerhard sits on the soft seat; he is enveloped by their breathing, their sharp evil-smelling sweat. He sniffs himself; he doesn’t smell like they do. Is it because he’s young, or because he’s not afraid? This is perhaps the last moment without fear, he thinks, watching streets in the evening quiet as they pass. A minute can be a lifetime if one lives it intensely, if one pays careful attention to the passing houses, the people, if one knows that one has done what one wanted to do. What would he have gained had he not been arrested, holding out until the final victory? Nothing. A repetition of what had gone before. And as for other experiences, such as new places, new people, a woman he might have desired, they are insignificant compared to this sense of certainty growing within him. To solidify that feeling, Gerhard opens his mouth and begins to sing loudly the first song that comes to mind, the one his mistress was singing in the cellar the night before, after they made love, her head on his chest, in her steady metallic alto, “Midön Mexikóban hajóra szálltam én,” from the film “Juarez,” which he otherwise considered a simple-minded, sentimental apology for monarchy.

The departure of Slavica Božić to the village of Gajdova, at the insistence of her second husband, the veteran noncommissioned officer Veselin Djurašković, who had been released from the army as an invalid and given a house there. Packing into chests, secretly, out of Veselin’s sharp sight, all Milinko’s belongings, down to the last objects, his little comb, pencil, sharpener, because when he comes back to her, he must find it all. She is certain that he will come back, that he is alive. She has received no official notice of his death, as have the parents of the other boys who went into the army with him and perished in the offensive in Slavonia. He has disappeared, yes, because she has had no news of him for three years, but two of his comrades, Stevo Crnobar, who took part in the attack on Dravograd at Milinko’s side, and the company commander, Marko Orlović-Dečko, said that as they retreated from the overrun position on the canal beneath the bridge they saw Milinko — left behind by the others, probably wounded by a mine — being put on a truck by German soldiers. The Germans very likely thought that he was one of them, because, the day before, the commissar gave him a uniform taken from a dead German soldier, to replace his civilian clothes, as a reward for good conduct and bravery in battle. But that eye-witness account, now that the war is over, has not led to any trace of Milinko, despite requests for information made to the Red Cross and more recently to the Yugoslav Military Mission in Berlin.

This worries Slavica Djurašković and has made her bitter, but her conviction, prompted by instinct, is not shaken. She would think of him, dream of him, in a different way if he were no longer alive. Concealing her thoughts from her new husband, who wants her to be continually attentive and cheerful, she broods secretly about Milinko: where he might be, whether he has enough to eat, whether he has shoes and clothing. When it’s cold, she remembers how sensitive he used to be to the cold. But her anxiety is always for one who lives, and whenever a doubt creeps in—“perhaps he is no longer. .”—the doubt is instantly cut off, because she knows, trembling and triumphant, that he is alive, that somewhere he exists, and, in answer to her fear, a warm wave of his presence floods across the space separating them.

The departure of the three Kroners is unusual, because it leaves behind a member of the family, who is protected by her origins and her husband’s generous decision not to urge her to accept his faith. That fourth member prepares food and clothing for their journey in self-effacing silence, like the servant she once was, when her masters went on an outing or a vacation. But she has been cut off anyway from the three Kroners by her liaison with the NCO Hermann Arbeitsam, pulled back down to the lower class. The lower class, however, is now protected, while the upper class moves higher, to heaven, and the irony of this gives an edge to the preparations. The food, packed by a servant who never really became a lady: chunks of cold meat, cheese, and lots of bread. “Do you want the child to be poisoned? And is she to carry all that with her?” Kroner sneers in disgust, his eyes wide in his dark face, not blaming his wife for this piece of stupidity, but for her ignorance of their fate, even though he has only a premonition of it.