Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

The lieutenant nodded curtly and went outside with his men. The Blams were standing in front of the glassed-in veranda wearing hats, thick winter coats, and high rubber snow boots. The soldiers guarding them had to stamp their feet to keep warm.

“That’s it for here,” the lieutenant called out. “Lock up the house. We can go.”

He waited for the command to be carried out, then went out into the street with his two gendarmes, pausing for a moment to watch the four figures — two in formal black, two in uniform — moving across the square. He was impatient — they seemed to be moving inexcusably slowly — but at last they reached the truck and disappeared among the olive uniforms. Two shots rang out. Géczy waited for his men to emerge from the crowd, and when they saw him waiting, they started running. He made a sign for the others to follow and knocked on the door of the next house to be searched.

The house in Edouard Herriot Street, where Janja’s family lived, was also in line for an identity check and search on the first day of the raid. The patrol in their part of town was led by Police Lieutenant Aladár Szalma, two well-trained policemen, and two members of the reserve forces: a shop assistant from Budapest and a strapping young peasant from northern Hungary. Szalma was a lawyer with a checkered past. Unable to find employment in his field because of the Depression, he had spent most of the thirties moving from one small town to the next as a private tutor to the children of shopowners and landowners and learning to drink on the sly and seduce the more attractive of his charges. When the borders of Hungary were expanded to include Slovakia, he began working for the police. When the borders came to include a part of Romania, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Though calm and collected on the surface, he was in fact quite depraved. Still, he realized at once that the instructions “more a purge than a routine identity check” would end in a massacre, and his besotted but penetrating brain told him that he might one day be called to account for his part in it. As a result, he decided to place as great a distance as possible between himself and the dirty mission at hand and, insofar as he could, to keep his two men from it. As always when they were on a field mission, he instructed them to keep both canteens full and to take over the inspection of the citizens’ documents — his eyes had a tendency to blur, he told them — though he assumed the documents would be in order. He left the searching to the older of the reservists, the Budapest shop assistant, whose overeager, doglike enthusiasm and crazed impatience for the raid to begin showed him to be mentally unbalanced. Thus Szalma devised a double plan: the identity check run by himself and having virtually no consequences and the shop assistant’s hysterical search through every nook and cranny of every house and resulting in either nothing suspicious or in the discovery that under a bed or wardrobe, or in an attic behind some old furniture, there was a pistol or rifle or a whole cache of weapons. The moment the shop assistant deduced from Szalma’s conspicuous laxity that all decisions about guilt would be his and his alone, he began seeing himself as a champion of the truth. Having served one master or another since his youth, he seized this long-awaited opportunity to get even with the high and mighty. He also took revenge as a spurned suitor, separating or destroying young couples still basking in the warmth of conjugal bliss or exacting their gratitude for pardoning them on account of their newlywed status, depending on whether he felt they had had enough of each other or were still desirous of pleasure and possession. And so it happened that the owners of the house where Janja’s family lived, a well-to-do, flamboyantly mustached farmer and his rosy-cheeked, buxom wife — as well as the lame carpenter and his wife and child from the courtyard — were hauled off, while Janja’s mother, brother, and younger sister were spared. But when the patrol reached the neighboring Margetić Street the following evening, Janja’s elder sister and her twenty-year-old electrician husband were accused of harboring weapons and sent to the roundup patrol, and the roundup patrol took them to the cemetery with hundreds of others and executed them.

Karadjordje Street, which ran from the center of town to its outermost limits, was divided by the raid’s strategists into two sections; the outer section, which included the house where Čutura’s family lived, was assigned to Lieutenant Désberényi of the gendarmerie. Tall, dark, and handsome, a career officer and, at twenty-six, the first in his class to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant, Désberényi had had experience dealing with recalcitrant populations in both Slovakia and Romania. Moreover, he had had the luck to be assigned three gendarmes, one of whom was a sergeant and two of whom had served in the newly acquired territories for years. Only the patrol’s fifth member, a corporal from the reserves, was a rookie and recently transferred to the Bačka. Désberényi immediately gave him the job of standing watch outside the houses being searched.

Realizing that he would be unable to proceed effectively without a handle on the situation, the lieutenant moved into the courtyard kitchen of a house belonging to a Hungarian and ordered the sergeant to find him an informer. The man came up with a grubby, light-haired nineteen-year-old from the neighborhood, a half German, who had been convicted several times of theft before the Occupation. Désberényi sat him down in the kitchen and gave him to understand that he was aware of his past and in the current reign of law and order he could have him put to death without anyone’s being the wiser. However, he also offered the deathly pale youth the path to redemption: join the patrol and supply it with information about the inhabitants of each house before they were questioned. The young man shrugged and consented.

The first thing Désberényi learned from the sergeant when the patrol went out into the morning frost was the unpleasant fact that it was impossible to establish contact with the roundup patrol, because as the result of a foulup only one had been assigned to the entire stretch of Karadjordje Street and it had been posted closer to the center of town. He considered asking headquarters to intervene but decided against it: it would only drag things out. Instead, he would take the liquidation of suspicious elements upon himself and present the execution list to the roundup patrol after the fact, thereby giving further proof of his gift for leadership.

Off they went on their rounds. Even before entering a house, Désberényi decided the fate of its inhabitants on the basis of information provided by his informer. He left the informer outside with the corporal from the reserves — who, besides standing guard, was now required to keep the execution list — went in with his gendarmes, and read the documents, not so much to check their veracity as to confirm the identity of the condemned, whom he then handed over to the men to be shot. They reached the Krstić household on the second afternoon. Désberényi had received a particularly detailed report on the Krstić family from their young neighbor: two brothers had been taken prisoner, and another, a recent graduate, had been killed in a skirmish with gendarmes. They entered the courtyard, and Désberényi ordered the family to line up in front of the house according to age: the mother, the two daughters, and the remaining son of fourteen. He took the documents from the elder Čutura sister, set aside the mother’s baptismal certificate and police registration, and read the names on the other documents aloud, waiting for each person to respond. That done, the gendarmes ordered the mother back into the house and took the three children to the far end of the courtyard. But the old woman, having heard shots all that day and the day before, guessed what was going on and instead of following orders rushed after her children. There was a scuffle, one gendarme striking her in the groin with his rifle butt, the other two hurling themselves at the children, who were trying to come to her aid. “Enough!” the lieutenant shouted and made it clear with a wave of the hand that the old woman was to be taken out with the others. One of the gendarmes picked her up, and they all walked through the courtyard to the garden fence, where the gendarmes lined them up as they had in front of the house. Then they moved back and took aim. Three shots rang out, and the boy and the younger girl fell to the ground; then another three shots, and Mrs. Krstić and her elder daughter, who had clasped her mother to her, fell together. The lieutenant went up to them and, turning all of them over on their backs with his foot, established that they were dead. Then he ordered that the bodies be taken to the gate so the roundup patrol could find them easily. He placed the old woman’s documents with the rest and handed them to the reservist so he could add the names to his list.