Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

A murmur of disbelief soon turned into cheers and applause. People hugged one another, kissed one another, wept, dispersing slowly at first, then with greater urgency. The Krkljuš family wanted to find an official with whom to lodge a complaint about their grievous loss, but, swept along by the crowd, they were unable to stop until the exit, where a soldier was trying to keep order. The soldier refused to listen to them and even threatened to shoot if they did not leave immediately. And in fact sporadic shots could still be heard. Mr. Krkljuš and Aca looked at each other, then took Mrs. Krkljuš under the arms again and led her down the stairs, promising that the moment the shooting stopped, they would go and find Slobodan’s body. The promise could not be kept, however, because that very night the army collected all the corpses in the city, including those on the road to the beach, and either buried them or threw them into the Danube. All that remained were the bloodstains, and they only until the next snow.

The Mercury, like all buildings on the side of Old Boulevard with odd numbers, fell under jurisdiction of a search patrol led by Police Lieutenant Nándor Varga, the tall, young, blue-eyed scion of a landowning family. A gambler and drinker and man of limited intelligence but strong convictions, Varga scorned the plebeian awakening of his people under German patronage and resisted it with lordly arrogance. Throughout the raid he strictly followed the regulations he had sworn to uphold and therefore sent for further investigation only those civilians whose papers and oral statements failed to satisfy those regulations. The general’s reproaches, which Varga’s meager reports gave rise to every evening, he heard out at attention and in silence but drew no moral from them, convinced that they did nothing to preserve order. He had sent none of the hundred or so motley residents of the Mercury for further investigation, but that had been partly the doing of Predrag Popadić.

What happened was that on the morning of 21 January, when news of the curfew spread among the residents, two early risers, Doselić the pharmacist and Kreuzhaber the furrier, ran into each other in the corridor and, having exchanged a few words of alarm, decided to turn to Popadić on the third floor for an explanation and for protection: he was close to the regime yet a Serb and a gentleman. They had to ring his doorbell a long time: Popadić had been up until dawn at a patron saint’s day celebration (Saint John). Nor was he alone but with the young grass widow of a restaurant owner, a Serb conscripted to a labor battalion. Popadić had been caught unawares by the news of the raid, but no sooner did he learn of it from Doselić and Kreuzhaber in his entrance hall than he grasped its scope and significance, remembering the talk of reprisals that had been bandied about in official circles during the previous few days. He also foresaw the unfortunate consequences that could result should the woman in his apartment be discovered and her presence there wrongly interpreted. He assured Doselić and Kreuzhaber that he would put in a good word for them, sent them on their way, woke the young woman and told her to get into her clothes, shaved and dressed in haste, and went downstairs to see the custodian, who along with his large family (a wife, two sons, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson) were also up and about. He drank the black coffee offered him (the custodians all loved him, big tipper that he was), smoked a cigarette, and shared a few comforting words with some tenants who had come to find out what was going on. The custodian’s younger son, who had been sent to keep watch in the corridor, ran in to report that the police were at the door.

Popadić threw on his coat and hat and thus appeared in impeccable civilian attire before Nándor Varga as the custodian let the policeman in. He bowed, raised his hat, introduced himself in fluent if somewhat rough Hungarian — which Hungarians from the mother country, in Varga’s case at least, smiled upon as the attempt by a savage to acquire the rudiments of civilization — and begged Varga’s kind permission to present some documents of a rather confidential nature that might facilitate the delicate operation Varga and his men were about to perform. The lieutenant gave an impassive nod and agreed to leave his men in the corridor and enter the custodian’s parlor. There Popadić took the following documents from his pocket and one by one handed them to the lieutenant: a letter from the commander of the gendarmerie authorizing the publication of Naše novine under his, Popadić’s editorship; a pass granting Popadić free movement throughout the occupied southern territory; and finally — what really won Varga over — membership cards for two closed societies: the Catholic Circle and the Association of Christian Merchants. Taking advantage of the impression he saw he had made, Popadić requested permission to say a few words about the Mercury’s residents. They were all, he was firmly convinced, the most loyal and devoted of citizens; he was willing to vouch for each of them personally. The lieutenant smiled, raised his fine eyebrows, handed him back the papers, and coolly invited him, if he so desired, to accompany the patrol and make certain it did its work correctly. Thus Popadić became a participant in the raid (which, as some wicked tongues later had it, made him a traitor), though in the unconventional role of protector.

Before each door, Popadić managed to find something positive to whisper to the lieutenant about the tenants, in the vein of the human-interest story, which he had long ceased to write but which his optimistic nature continued to inspire. Then he would retire to the far end of the corridor or terrace so as not to disturb the men in the performance of their duty or to overstep the bounds of decorum. He reentered the conversation only if a problem arose: a document wanting, an inappropriate answer because of inadequate linguistic knowledge. Blam — who answered the doorbell, deathly pale, together with a wide-eyed, incredulous Janja — Popadić described to the lieutenant as the offspring of an honest family he had known well before the war, “one of those young Jews able to adapt: witness his choice of a Christian spouse.” When they came to the third floor, Popadić unlocked the door to his own apartment and urged the lieutenant — though by then they were not only colleagues but, he hoped, friends as well — to go ahead, to do his duty. The lieutenant thanked him, walked into the entrance hall, gave it a perfunctory glance, and came out with a smile, saying that unfortunately he hadn’t time for a proper visit, but once his tiresome obligations were over, he would definitely give him a ring. (He was in fact true to his word.) Popadić bowed and moved on with him. After seeing the lieutenant and his men to the main door, which the custodian, crossing himself, locked after them, Popadić returned to his apartment, where he found his sweetheart perched on the edge of the bathtub in her coat and scarf, pressing her black patent-leather handbag to her breast.

LILI EHRLICH SENT a number of letters to Blam after the war, but since she addressed them to Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, where other people were living by that time, and because she wrote the name of the addressee in its German form, Blahm (the letters were in German), none of them were delivered; they all went back to the sender marked Unknown/Inconnu.

The following are Lili’s letters, in translation:

  Tivoli near Rome, 1 November 1944

I am writing this letter, darling, in the hope it will reach you, which will mean that you have come out of these awful years alive. How could it be otherwise? You’ll let me know at once that my intuition hasn’t deceived me. You will, won’t you?