Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

He thus became her shadow, and though perfectly aware of this, he felt no shame. Or, at least, any shame he might have felt on Janja’s account was so pervasive that it merged, as a river merges with the sea, with his original shame, the one that had sent him on a pilgrimage into the streets and among the poor on the outskirts of town. The reasons for that shame were now mercifully far from him: the house on Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, Father and Mother, Erzsébet Csokonay and Kocsis, and the secret, interconnected relations, and his own complex and impure relations, which he could not cast off because they were in his blood, his every move, his every word. And now, rising above the morass of his life, Janja. Janja, shame clarified and justified by love. Janja and her vulgarity, her moods, her caprices. Janja and her arbitrary way of holding him at bay or giving in. Janja in her innocence and shamelessness. Janja barefoot and disheveled, rosy and breathless, in her younger sister’s short dress. Janja tired from work: pale, cold, and angry. Janja and her hard job, Janja and her bread and cherries, Janja and her pleasures, the dissipation and disorder all around her. He sensed more in all this than the expression of a personality or series of personalities; he sensed something primordial, indestructible, a rootedness in the soil, the soil of the dusty outskirts of Novi Sad, in the language, in the customs, which were more diffuse yet stronger than his, untouched by foreign models and influences, unconcerned with fitting in or assimilating, on the contrary, opposed to everything on the outside, opposed not by desire or intention, which is in itself a concession, but by instinct, because nothing could be more natural, because like the soil, like the language, those customs are born of instinct, the instinct for food, love, hate, for life without premeditation.

By now he did not even dare dream he could win her over, have her; the best he could hope for was that he would be won over by her, that she would grind him down and dissolve him in her, much as he had become an indistinguishable part of her dull but strong, unshakable existence, of the everyday round of simple movements and words and thoughts that, while routine, were the expression of a fundamental instinct.

He felt unreal — false, rehearsed, clownlike — when he came up with the words to ask Janja to marry him. Yet he was shrewd enough to know that she could not turn him down: compared with her, he was rich, educated, refined, he had “class,” as her family put it. He also knew how much he was deceiving them with his superiority, aware of the insecurity and cowardice that lay behind it, aware how immature he was, how cowed by day-to-day existence. He knew she deserved better and would get better from any of her clumsy dancing partners or admirers, and he knew that basically he was out to use her, to squeeze what he could from her, that he was after lifeblood, ties, identity. But she was his only chance, his only love, and he reached out to her with his eyes half closed, as one plucks a flower from the rim of an abyss.

THE DULAG ( Durchgangslager , transition camp) for Jewish deportees from Novi Sad and vicinity was housed in the Novi Sad synagogue. The Hungarian authorities did not give much thought to the choice. The synagogue was a huge building designed to accommodate the entire congregation, and now it had to accommodate the flock driven in from the countryside as well, but since that flock, like its Novi Sad counterpart, had been halved as a result of hard labor for the young and a number of raids and arrests, there proved to be room enough.

The deportees entered through the gate in the iron fence, which was otherwise kept locked and under guard, in the order in which they arrived. They were then led into the sanctuary proper, where they found places for themselves and their belongings on the hard wooden benches or, once the benches were full, on the stone floor. It was late April, 1944, the weather springlike and mild. Jews were still wearing their most durable clothes and carrying carefully selected, high-calorie food in their knapsacks and bags. They were supplied with water for drinking and washing by the kitchen personnel or could drink and wash when the guards took them to the lavatory, so during the three days and three nights of their stay in the synagogue, before they were herded to the station and loaded into the train for Auschwitz, their most essential needs were taken care of. All of them, prisoners and guards alike, had long known the Jews would be deported, so these three days, the Jews’ last on the soil that they had accepted as their own and that had accepted them, served both groups as a kind of breathing space, a space filled with thoughts of foreboding for the prisoners and thoughts of relief for the guards, yet its temporariness united them and made them almost friendly in their shared respect for the rules and regulations involved. The Jews sat patiently within the confines of the synagogue; the guards did their duty meticulously, showing anger only in the street, when they had to disperse curious onlookers — one group of which included a dejected-looking Blam, exempt because of his marriage.

The only discordant note in this otherwise harmonious waiting period came from the animal world rather than the human world; it came in the form of the dogs that had trotted alongside their masters to the synagogue and that remained outside when the guards refused to let them through the gates. There were not many, five or six at most, because the owners had generally found homes for their beloved pets and guardians among non-Jewish friends, or at least had managed to hide them somewhere. But these few dogs were a disturbance, because their instinctive loyalty kept them as close as possible to the people they still thought they belonged to. They were a disturbance to the Jews, who on their way to the lavatory or for water almost had to hide, fearful they would be recognized and their dogs’ loving attempts to rejoin them would force them to break yet again with a world from which they had so painfully severed all ties, and they were a disturbance to the guards, who were constantly tripping over them as they watched for an opportunity to dash inside. The guards would chase them away, yelling and cursing, even swatting at them with the butts of their rifles or kicking them; they clearly considered such work beneath them, and it infuriated them. But the dogs stubbornly held their ground, their distance from the synagogue depending on how afraid of the guards they were, some huddling against a wall, others going back and forth in front of the gate that had claimed their masters, pricking their ears and twisting their necks at every noise. By the second and third day, driven by hunger, they would wander off to the nearby marketplace or follow a string bag with the smell of meat, but the moment they had had their fill, they would trot back to the gate, heads high, and take up positions at a wall or tree.

They did see their masters again. When at dawn on the fourth day a lineup began to form in front of the synagogue, the dogs rushed up and filled Jew Street with joyous yelps and fawning whimpers. The people tried to restrain their children, who wanted to throw their arms around their beloved pets; the guards shouted, but to no avail. Shooting was out of the question — though it had been suggested — because the march to the station took in the dark to keep it from drawing attention. The only recourse was to set the lineup in motion as soon as it was ready.

The dogs had a last moment of glory while their masters were waiting at the station: they could nuzzle them and wheedle a hidden morsel. But soon they were alone on the tracks. For a while they ran after the train, but they stopped when their noses lost the familiar smells. They stared in wonder at the fields and ditches where they found themselves, their long, red tongues hanging from their mouths, and started back, one after the other, in the direction of the city.