Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

True to her word, she came out very soon and was all clean — with her hair smoothly combed, in a white linen dress, wearing white shoes on washed feet, handkerchief and keys in hand — as if she were going to a dance. But walking next to her, Blam could not forget the image he had just had of her. It was as though he had seen her naked or in a lewd act and could no longer appreciate her regular appearance. Or, rather, much as he admired the pert, beautiful girl at his side, from then on he saw instead the flushed and breathless little girl beneath. He yearned for that little girl, body and soul; she was the feminine ideal he had long sensed and only now saw revealed. But since she had changed back, hiding her true nature, he was unable to talk freely to her and, later, unable to go through with his plan of conquest in the dark of the last row in the balcony. True, he took her hand from her lap as soon as the lights went out, and she let him hold it, but the hand, instead of clutching or kneading his as he had hoped, lay there dry and limp. He put his arm around her waist, and she adjusted her body to give it room. He felt how firm the waist was, a taut arc between the rounded, softer areas above and below, but it remained stiff to his touch. She followed the images on the screen with rapt attention; he could see her moist eyes shining in the dark. What was she thinking? Could she sense the hunger in his fingers? He put his hand on her face and turned it to his; he put his lips on hers and pressed them. She offered no resistance and even opened her mouth obediently to receive his tongue, but she kept her eyes open and slightly to one side so as not to miss entirely the flickering images. And he had to accept it, because she accepted everything, clearly regarding it all as the duty of a girl who goes out with a boy. He kissed her again later, and after the film, and on the way home, and on the corner where he had waited for her. But there she pulled away from his embrace, saying she had to get to bed, she had to be up early, she’d see him at the dance on Sunday. Her response to his protest was “It’s only three days away!”

Even after he got to know her better, she remained distant. She occasionally let him see her home or take her to a film, to a café, or for a walk; she let him hold her hand and kiss her, but she was always sober, even calculating, in any case far from the image he had had of her at the pump. But the moment he left her, the moment she was gone, his disappointment would yield to the image of her warm, half-naked, flushed body, so powerful, so alive that he felt the only reason it did not materialize for him was that he had taken the wrong tack, had been overcautious, not bold enough, and he longed for their next encounter to right the wrong. He therefore kept trying to see her and refused to be put off by her stalling. He begged so hard that she eventually agreed to let him come to the house.

“All right, if it means so much to you. But I can’t guarantee I’ll be there.”

The very next afternoon he set off for the house with the peeling plaster, excited and festive, as if having been granted admittance to a secret sanctuary. His heart pounding, he entered the spacious courtyard, where a girl in a faded dress — a dress he recognized, because it was the one Janja had been wearing when she ran for the water — was hanging out the washing. At the creak of the unoiled gate she turned to Blam the same open, curious look that Janja had, though she was much younger, still a child.

“I’m looking for Janja,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the dress.

His stare did not faze her. She turned her narrow back to him and called “Danka!” into the courtyard in a loud, almost angry voice.

A young woman with a freckled face appeared in the door of the back house and looked Blam over without much interest.

“He wants Janja,” the girl explained, shaking the last drops off a man’s white shirt. She did not turn around.

“You know she’s not here,” said the young woman, as if Blam were not present. But then she looked at him again and said with a shrug, “You can wait if you like.”

He waited in the courtyard and waited so long that the young woman finally invited him in. The house consisted of a main room and a kitchen. The earthen floor was covered with rag rugs. There was little furniture apart from a number of beds, but what little there was, though it looked rather worn, was covered with starched needlepoint hemmed in blue thread. The young woman and the girl were Janja’s elder and younger sisters, the tired-looking woman sitting at the kitchen table and overseeing their labors — her narrow head propped on large bony hands crisscrossed with dark veins — Janja’s mother. Janja was the only one who went to work: she was a day laborer for a local landlord. The younger sister did the housework, the elder — newly married, pregnant, and living apart with her husband — spent the whole day in her former home, joining the husband only when he came back from the factory. Neither the mother nor absent brother was gainfully employed, the former because she was ill, the latter because he was lazy.

Blam gathered this information quickly and easily during his first visit to Janja’s, sitting at the kitchen table and, having asked permission, smoking one cigarette after the other while he listened to the women’s conversation. It was brusque, like the first words Janja’s sister had addressed to him, and in the same harsh, shrill tone, as if following a pattern that came from the mother, perhaps, or someone before her, the father, who had long since died. Where are the clothespins? Have we got enough bread for supper? Does old man Miško know that Janja is busy tomorrow? Such were their topics of conversation. But whenever Janja’s name came up — they were surprised she was not home yet — they would lower their voices as a sign of respect and even a hint of fear.

Just before dark, Janja’s brother, smooth-cheeked and blond, his cap pushed back as far as it would go, burst in and demanded, with no greeting and in the same harsh tone the others used, to be served his supper. He sat down, planted his elbows on the table, and began shoveling cracklings and bread into his mouth, glaring at Blam without saying a word, as if he knew what Blam had come for. Then he left.

Janja turned up very late, in the pale light of a petroleum lamp. She was pale herself, her face looking smaller than usual under the wispy bun into which she had done her hair. Dripping with sweat, barefoot, she was so exhausted that she collapsed into the first chair she came to, but held on to a basket of cherries. Blam, both embarrassed and stirred by her pitiful appearance, did not dare ask her to take the walk he had planned for them, saying instead that he had simply dropped in to say hello. “Well, you chose a bad day,” she replied in a voice hoarse from exhaustion but firm. “I’m really a sight. I have to wash and then go straight to bed.”

She was out the next time, too, but because someone had invited her out. A young man, naturally, but neither her mother nor her sister could tell Blam who he was, just as they would have been hard put to identify Blam, never having asked him his name or what he did in life. They seemed to accept the fact that Janja was sought after; they didn’t fret over it, though they didn’t rejoice either: they were simply unwilling to judge. And after several unsuccessful visits their passive attitude began to influence Blam. He too sat there judging nothing, simply waiting for Janja to appear, waiting sometimes in vain, sometimes even taking a certain pleasure in the situation: it gave him the right to come back the next day, and in any case he had spent the time in her aura and shared the humility of her dear ones like a prayer.