Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

Giving lessons obliged her to move into her own apartment — cheap though it was and in the same poor area — and to buy furniture, if only secondhand and on credit. At the same time, the abundant, home-cooked food she had enjoyed while looking after children was no longer to be had. Most often now she ate only bread, and drank, since her stomach was already beginning to trouble her, camomile tea — prudently gathering the flowers late in the summer, in the wild meadows outside town, and drying them in her section of the attic. Sometimes she would be sick with hunger, but always, when she was on the point of despairing, a neighbor or the mother of one of her pupils would invite her for supper, or send over cakes for her to sample. As time went on, her conscientiousness, the progress made by her pupils, and her modest fee became widely known in town among parents who cared for their children’s future. Besides, the rise in importance of the power that she unintentionally represented by her spoken language contributed to the growth of her reputation. In a professional sense, she began to stand on her own feet.

It was at this time that Janez Drentvenšek turned up on her doorstep, gaunt, his mustache scraggly and drooping, wearing a threadbare suit and coat and sporting a greasy green hunting hat. He had just been released from prison, where he had been sent for fraud. He begged Fräulein’s forgiveness, promised to behave irreproachably, to find work, and she, however disillusioned, could not refuse him. For two or three days he was polite and submissive, taking long walks during her lessons and greeting the neighbors with a ceremonious sweep of his hat. Then he began to ask her for money for cigarettes and newspapers, and finally for the tavern, since one could not find work, as he put it, without getting to know the right people. In time he allegedly became acquainted with such people, and obtained any number of useful ideas from them — though each idea required a certain cash investment. The old quarrels and anxieties revived, with the difference that Fräulein could no longer be taken in. Having to work six, seven, or eight hours a day giving lessons caused her nerves to give way, she stopped eating, and she began to vomit bile. At the same time, her landlords informed her that they had no wish to listen to heated arguing all night long.

Fräulein told her husband he must leave, and he agreed, provided she give him enough money for traveling expenses and to begin a new life elsewhere. Once again she had to borrow. She was forever paying back or saving for something, and she always managed to keep doing so by her own hard work, except that this thriftiness, both with money and with herself, ate away at her enjoyment of life. More and more often she was ill, and her illnesses made ever more remote her secret longing for Mrs. Tkalec’s rose-tinted fantasies and for that masculine voice murmuring in the garden, which she ascribed now to one man, now to another, among her acquaintances and admirers. At last she came to understand that having achieved her independence, she was going to be left too independent, in fact, completely alone, and that she was not up to such solitude. With no one in Novi Sad, that rancid, hostile city, to confide in, she began to keep a diary.

The presence of a German teacher in Novi Sad provided Nemanja Lazukić with the means of employing an ancient ruse — infiltrating the enemy’s camp with a Trojan horse. The Germans were the enemy of his people, and therefore his own. With the backing of the newly powerful Third Reich, German immigrants had usurped the most fertile land in the Vojvodina from the Serbs and on it built huge houses, which they filled with their own progeny — a seemingly anemic and puny brood, but doggedly determined when it came to work and advancement.

In that region of mixed population, Lazukić, too, was a newcomer, but from Serbia. Not only did he not understand German, but he could not conceive that that harshly guttural language (which he had first heard as a young soldier in the trenches, over the sights of a rifle) could be pronounced without shame. And, indeed, from the moment he arrived in Novi Sad, referred to sometimes as “the Serbian Athens,” he had been astonished that a civilized person, one apparently normal and human-looking, could speak like that, and actually within earshot. (Lazukić was also irritated by Hungarian, a more widely used language there, but felt no danger from that quarter. “We’ll eat the Hungarians for breakfast,” he would say.) With undisguised hatred he watched everything the Germans did, publicly and privately; he watched them getting rich, strengthening their position through patriotic organizations, spreading their ideas of conquest, their pictures, emblems, banners. They were doing everything that the Serbs should have done in that borderland, a land won by the sword and with his own — Lazukić’s — participation and sacrifice. But alas, the Serbs had not done, nor were capable of doing, what was needed. And, most painful of all, he himself proved incapable of it.

He had arrived in Novi Sad after finishing his studies, which were protracted because of the war, on a private mission to Serbianize the city. Nevertheless, he accepted, and for a long time remained in, the position of clerk to Dr. Matković, a lawyer who was a Catholic from Croatia and who openly mourned the passing of civilized Austria-Hungary. For the most part Dr. Matković represented Germans and Jews, because they were the most prosperous citizens. In addition to Lazukić’s wages, Dr. Matković provided him with his accommodations, a room furnished with a soft couch and heavy green baize curtains, which kept out the morning light and noise of the street. In the half-light of this room and the shady courtyard onto which it opened, the lawyer’s daughter, Klara — past thirty, pale, fragile — seemed to him a vision of purity, and he allowed himself to be drawn into the marital web which her parents, despairing over their only daughter, spun around him.

Lazukić counted on her old Herzegovinian blood combining with the fresher, younger fire of his own to produce a flood of offspring. He intended to have three sons by her, three heirs to his name, and as many daughters as necessary until that goal was reached. But after the second son, his wife was taken ill, and an operation on her womb, carried out in Zagreb, put an end to his hopes. It was then that he openly turned against the Germans, like a knight whose shield has been knocked from his hand and whose only remaining option is attack. He left his father-in-law’s firm and addressed himself to a different clientele: Serbs, Serbian companies, Serbian politicians. Successful in a number of important cases, he built — on credit — a villa outside the town, near the Danube, where the new ruling class was settling. But above and beyond his own well-being, he cared about the destiny of his nation, and enthusiastically joined the small government-supported Nationalist Party, writing in the pages of its newspaper scathing attacks on German baseness and worthlessness.

These articles had no real effect, for instead of being supported by concrete facts, which their scanty readership expected, they were no more than incoherent cries of anguish and empty posturing. When he asked himself why this was so, Lazukić was forced to admit that unfortunately he knew very little about the enemy that he hated so fiercely. Realizing that it was too late to remedy this deficiency in himself and his elder son, Rastko — who had turned out, like his mother, puny in body and morose in spirit — he decided to equip the younger son, Sredoje, for hand-to-hand combat. Headstrong, dark-skinned, obstinate, Sredoje was his true heir. As a first step, Lazukić sent him to Fräulein to learn German.