Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

THE SEARCH PATROL assigned to the Blam household was made up of two young soldiers from Hungary, two gendarmes brought in from the village of Čurug after the raid there, and Lieutenant Géczy, its twenty-eight-year-old sloping-shouldered, puffy-eyed leader. Géczy, who had been in Novi Sad since the beginning of the Occupation, had finally managed to move his young bride there until ten days before, so on the morning of the raid he arose from a warm conjugal bed. It was still dark when he slid through the icy streets in his new combat boots to the meeting place, the artillery barracks, picked up his instructions and the men detailed to him, and proceeded to the spot on the map marked in red. He was determined to be strict but fair, to accept only authentic documents, and to make thorough searches of each dwelling. By following these rules and making his charges follow them, he managed — on the first day of the raid, with only one break, at noon, when a hot meal was delivered to the men in a covered army truck — to search twenty-one dwellings along Aleksa Nenadović Street in the vicinity of Vojvoda Šupljikac Square and hand over to the roundup patrol two suspicious young men, Serbs, who had come from a nearby village to celebrate a friend’s patron-saint day without proper identity papers.

“No good!” said the general with a shake of the head when he heard Géczy’s report late that evening in the cold corridor of the artillery barracks, where the patrol leaders had gathered and stood in formation for an entire hour, tired, hungry, freezing, and longing to be released and find a warm spot for themselves, the lieutenant longing to be in his bed, with his wife, whose safety in these days of armed revenge gave him cause for concern. “No good at all!” And when the lieutenant tried to explain that the houses assigned to him were particularly difficult to search because they had large courtyards filled with apartments, the general turned bright red and screamed so loud that his voice echoed up and down the corridor: “I’m not talking about houses, you idiot! I’m talking about people! Criminals! Tomorrow you give me a list of a hundred criminals. A hundred, understand? How you find them I don’t care! Next!”

Like the others, Géczy was not allowed to go home; he was given a bed in the barracks to share with a thickset, hairy lieutenant colonel who took off nothing but his boots, pulled virtually the whole blanket over himself, and fell to snoring immediately. Géczy could not get to sleep. His shoulders and feet were freezing. He felt like waking the large, noisy body sprawled next to him to ask how the general expected him to round up a hundred criminals in an ordinary city, though he knew perfectly well how the general expected him to do it and that do it he must. This conclusion only increased the anxiety he felt at hearing the wind howl and the snow beat against the windows and at thinking, helplessly now, of his wife alone in a strange place, with no friends, of the terrible things that could happen to her amid the general chaos.

He awoke at dawn, dazed, chilled to the bone, and angry. The lieutenant colonel and the others had all dressed. Géczy too got up, dressed, and had breakfast. He then went out into the courtyard and found his men standing in a circle and passing a canteen from hand to hand.

“What is it?” he asked the older gendarme.

“Rum, sir. They’re giving it out in the kitchen. Have some.”

The lieutenant was about to refuse — he thought the gendarme out of line — but the night frost, the darkness, and the difficulties of the day ahead broke down his resistance, and he took a swig from the canteen.

“We’ll be doing things differently today,” he said to the gendarme confidentially, feeling the alcohol taking effect.

“Whatever you say, sir,” said the gendarme, clicking his heels and looking the lieutenant straight in the eye, clearly half drunk.

They set out for the house where they had left off the day before, just as the darkness began to dissipate over the ice-covered snow and a truck rumbled up to the corner and let out a roundup patrol.

“I want you to keep your mouths shut,” the lieutenant said, turning to his men. “Just watch for my sign. Then out with the ones I point to.”

But as luck would have it, all the houses along Aleksa Nenadović Street turned out to be inhabited by people with valid identity papers and a disproportional number of Hungarians and Germans, and whenever he tried to make insinuations about people in the neighborhood, the only response he got was a frightened “We don’t know anything bad about them.”

At about nine o’clock they heard a few shots, followed by a volley of fire. Géczy went out and saw that both truck and patrol had disappeared. He called over the younger gendarme — the older one’s eyes were all bloodshot — and ordered him to find out where the truck had gone and where the shooting was and why, then he went on with the searches, though thinking more about the shooting, which did not let up, than about the documents and people.

“The truck’s two hundred meters from here,” said the gendarme, running up to him. “It’s in the square around the corner. And the soldiers are doing the shooting.”

“In the street?”

“Yes, in the street.”

The lieutenant took the men to the next house, but what he really was concerned about was what was going on in the square. Not because he was eager to see blood but because he had a feeling that what he would see would solve his problem. And what he saw after searching the house at the very end of Aleksa Nenadović Street and turning into Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, what he saw through the bare trees of the small, snow-covered park was the large, dark shape of the truck surrounded by small, randomly placed groups of men in olive uniforms or gray civilian clothes. Shots were still being fired, loud and clear now that there was nothing to block the sound, and a chorus of wailing voices rose in response. He saw several civilians trip and fall and men in uniform bend over them, their guns spitting fire at the earth. Two contradictory thoughts flashed through the lieutenant’s overwrought mind: “Everything is settled” and “Everything is lost.” Then the two merged into determination and confidence.

“Follow me!” he ordered. From the first house — Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, number 11—he hauled out a young Serbian woman living in the courtyard who was unable to show how she earned her keep; from the next, a family of seven headed by a Slovak watchmaker who pleaded with him in broken Hungarian, acquired, as he kept saying, in the Austro-Hungarian army. “Take them over there, all of them,” he ordered the two men he had designated as guards, pointing impatiently to the far end of the square.

His confidence reached new heights when he got to the Blams: their papers showed them to be Jews. He gave their frightened and what he judged to be cowardly faces a stern look and said, “Get your coats on!”

“But our papers are in order, sir,” said Blam, playing for time.

“Silence!” Géczy shouted in the voice the general had used on him the night before. “I don’t need instructions from you, understand?”

He left the two guards to watch the couple putting their coats on and took the two gendarmes with him to the widow Csokonay’s. There he learned that her subtenant had a work permit but no police registration papers. He told him off — a Hungarian and failing to comply with the regulations! — then drew him aside and asked about the people in the main house. At first the man tried to wheedle out of it, but he finally gave in to the lieutenant’s frown.

“You know the type. Rolling in money. Don’t care much for us Hungarians. Lost their daughter not too long ago gunning down some gendarmes.”