Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

You must be laughing at me, darling, because you know I’m over the hill, getting on to thirty like you. Our age is one of the many things we have in common. But the love that binds me to you is as strong as it ever was, perhaps because it has gone unused, unconsumed for so many years and therefore remains as tender and young as we were then. Now I’ll be able to love you full strength, so to speak. Now that we’re mature and have been through so much.

But here I am sad again, ready to burst into tears. I think of you as my child, to clutch to my breast, to warm and nourish, but I have no child, my child was lost to the world, torn out of me, torn out of me by these very people, maybe by the waiter over there with the scar on his forehead, the one watching me out of the corner of his eye. Where are you, darling? Am I ever going to find you? If Papa and I move here — and we’ve got to, it’s the chance of a lifetime — years and years will go by before we get German citizenship and I have the right to travel freely and look for you. Or will God have mercy and will you answer this letter? My heart is pounding like a hammer at the thought. I can just picture you receiving it, coming home and picking it up, opening it, smiling, nodding, and ten days later I have your answer. Don’t worry, even if we leave Biel for good, I’ll leave a forwarding address with the landlord. He’s very trustworthy. Your letter will find me. I’ll tell everybody and leave the address at the post office too. All you have to do is write! Then we can talk it all through. There must be a way to bring you here. Don’t worry. I’ll see to everything myself, because my only desire is to have you here by my side, for good, till the end, till death, my only love, my husband, brother, and son. You are everything to your loving

Lili

P.S. Write at once. Even if your life has changed and my outpourings sound odd to you. Just let me know you’re alive. I leave for Biel in an hour and a half to give Papa the good news and wind things up there.

West Berlin, 25 June 1951

Dearest ,

I met a Yugoslav here today, a nice person with a lot of go, a businessman who has come to set up a diplomatic mission. Naturally I was thrilled to learn where he came from, and I took the first opportunity to tell him about you and about my unsuccessful attempts to establish your whereabouts. He gave his word first, to pressure your diplomatic representatives, with whom he has close ties, into moving the search forward, and then, when he gets home (in seven weeks), to mobilize his friends in Novi Sad and let me know the moment he finds out anything about you. You can imagine how excited I am. No matter what channels I try — diplomatic, commercial, military — all I get are promises. Maybe personal contact will break through the wall of indifference. The moment this ray of hope appeared, I just had to sit down and write to you, as I have so often before and as I would do much more often were it not for the fear of failure, which unfortunately so far seems justified. In any case, here is my address, and the moment you receive this letter (if you receive it), let me know. And of course let me know if Herr Momir Stoikovitsch — that’s the name of the nice businessman — finds you seven endless weeks from now. I’ve loved you and waited so long! I have no one but you. Papa died last year of a heart attack. I’m all alone in the world. I’m in Berlin now. I run a small jewelry shop. I don’t own it, but I make enough to live on. Enough for us to live on, at least for a while. But what does that matter. Just let me know you’re alive .

Love ,

Lili

I WISH I’D put my galoshes on,” Blam thinks under his umbrella, watching the raindrops sparkle on the semicircular tops of his black shoes. He wriggles his toes and feels the moisture seeping through the shiny patent leather and into the loosely woven fabric of his socks. He meditates on the futility of the layers in which man chooses to wrap himself, on how poorly and provisorily they protect him from the wet, the cold or heat, and the wind: all they need is a slight detail of the unforeseen — like having to stand in the rain at a burial service — and they fall apart and leave him in the hands of the enemy. He twists his head and, peering under the rims of umbrellas crowded together like bats, finds the coffin, now nailed shut and covered by a black pall embroidered with a silver cross, on its bier in front of the chapel. The body of Aca Krkljuš, lying in it motionless, washed clean (Blam saw his face in the chapel; it was free of blemish), would soon, the moment it was deposited in the moist earth, begin to unite — through the invisible pores in the wood and the glue, through the holes made by the nails, through Krkljuš’s clothes and the entire fabric of his body — with the cold, black, slimy juices of nature, eaten away by them and eating away at them.

Blam shudders, but at his own frailty, not his friend’s. He cannot grasp Krkljuš’s frailty, whose death he still perceives as an external matter: an unexpected turn of events, or the dive of an acrobat that is cause more for amazement or admiration than for horror. He feels the need to join the funeral procession, to tug at somebody’s sleeve and mention a fact that may finally make sense of the acrobatic feat. “I saw him only a month ago. He was in perfect health, full of plans…” But he senses that it would sound like a cliché, and besides it is all wrong, because what was unusual about Krkljuš’s fate was not so much the short transition between health and death as the transition itself, the complete surprise of it. When he hears the word “hospital” in the whispering of two former schoolmates (his and Aca’s) in the row in front of him, he moves closer to their wet coats.

“It was his liver,” the thin, stringy-necked Tima Spasojević says in his bass voice, leaning over the curve in his umbrella handle to Dragan Jović, who is shorter than he.

“No, jaundice,” Dragan counters immediately. “I have it firsthand. My brother-in-law’s a doctor. There’s been a regular epidemic lately, he says. Krkljuš didn’t have a chance. Two weeks, and he was done for.”

A murmur runs through the front rows of the crowd, where people are most closely packed. Through the swaying umbrellas Blam can make out the pale, redheaded priest appearing on the threshold of the chapel, followed by the unshaven sacristan holding an umbrella over his head. The procession moves forward. The priest throws back his head until his sparse, reddish beard sticks out horizontally. He rounds his lips, puffs out his chest, and releases a solemn, stately chant that the gap-toothed sacristan joins and doubles in a bleating voice. The murmur dies down at once, and several thin, wailing women’s voices come to the fore. From the archaic but clearly enunciated words of the chant, though even more from the sobs that it calls forth, Blam concludes that the priest is bidding farewell to the deceased in the name of the mourners. Although he too is deeply moved by the terrible finality of the farewell, he is overcome by embarrassment when he notices people all around him crossing themselves. Blam looks at them furtively and wonders what to do: if he joins them, they may think he is a hypocrite showing off his last-minute conversion; if he does nothing, he will seem to be demonstrating an obstinate fidelity to his former and very different faith. Yet there is nothing of either faith — former or new — in him: apart from a general superstitious fear of death he cannot recall a single detail of either of them, a single detail of the ritual. The last time he was at a funeral was when his grandmother died and he was only a child. All his other relatives disappeared at the same time and there were no funerals.