Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

“Acoustics, acoustics!” Funkenstein waves what is left of his cigarette in the air. “What about the Youth Hall of the Board of Commerce where we had concerts before the war? It had acoustics, didn’t it? And if the town fathers think a magnificent hall is so important, why don’t they build one themselves? Because they haven’t got the money, that’s why. And you know why they haven’t got the money? Because they haven’t got the Jews to earn it for them!”

“Really, Mr. Funkenstein!” Blam admonishes. “You’re going too far!”

Funkenstein frowns, then bursts out laughing like a child who has been found out. “You mean you don’t agree?” And grinding his cigarette butt into the floor with his heavy shoe, he changes the subject. “So we’re in business? We’re going to do something about your house?”

“I really think it’s too late. How can I prove my father didn’t get the entire sum when I’m not even sure myself? And even if I could, what good would it do? The money is worth twenty times less today than it was then.”

“You could have the house reevaluated,” the ever practical Funkenstein points out. “You could claim the contract was broken and demand the property be returned to you. If you pay back the amount he received, you can resell it. Why not give it a try?” He pauses, then adds a provocative “You don’t need capital, do you?”

“No, I don’t really,” says Blam with a smile, glad they have come the heart of the matter. “Here? Now?”

“The here and now means nothing to us,” says Funkenstein, suddenly serious again. “We are here today and gone tomorrow.” Again he puts a conspiratorial stress on the “we,” lowering his voice and almost winking. “Who knows? Maybe you could get foreign currency for it. Maybe you could sell it abroad, in Israel, say. Do you ever think of emigrating?”

“Me? No.”

“Well, I do. I’m seventy-three and have nobody left. I think about it all the time. But I’m accumulating my capital in goods, in books. That’s right. Surprised? Well, I buy books, books people want to read — novels, stories, history, memoirs, mostly memoirs, the things our people abroad want to know about. Because if anyone starts coming after us again, I’m getting out, I’m going to Israel. If I can’t die here, where I was born, I want to die in Israel — and books are something you can always take with you. They’re not gold, they’re not jewels, you don’t need to declare them, and the moment I get there, I’ll open a lending library for Yugoslav Jews. It’s a going concern in Israel, did you know?”

In the heat of the conversation they have reached the entrance, its huge, dark doors open wide to the invisible night. They are the only ones there. Funkenstein takes out his cigarette case and lights up again. He tries the lighter three times before he can get a flame to last long enough — a brisk wind is blowing in from outside — but he scarcely notices.

“We’re all so naive,” he says with a sigh of resignation and expels another cloud of smoke. He has suddenly shrunk into a little old man, or that is how Blam sees him now that they are alone. Blam feels sorry for him, repentant now instead of shocked and resistant. Something in Funkenstein’s words has touched him, something warm, intimate, a tone he has not heard in years, a long-forgotten spirit, a long-absent excitement, and suddenly a multitude of faces from the past floods his mind: his father sporting a mustache twisted upward, the calm and collected Ephraim Ehrlich, Lili. Lili is especially clear with her importunate “Come with us!” No one has invited him anywhere for a long time, and although he has no particular desire to go anywhere, his world is the poorer for want of invitation.

“How did you get through the war, Mr. Funkenstein?” he asks on impulse, sympathetically.

“How?” Funkenstein shrugs, not surprised by the question. “It was owing to what we’ve just been hearing, actually: music. My whole family, all seventeen of us, were sent to Bergen-Belsen in 1944. The head of the camp was known for his love of music. At roll call he asked who played a musical instrument, and I stepped forward. I was the only one who survived.”

He gives Blam a penetrating glance, as if Blam, not he, made the statement.

“You know what my job was? I played for prisoners on their way to the firing squad. They would be loaded into a cart, always the same one, a children’s wagon, a few boards on four small iron wheels pulled by prisoners. The condemned man would stand in the cart, bound hand and foot, and we’d walk behind him and play, me on the violin, Kohan on the trumpet, Eisler on the drum, though Eisler died early on and a youngster by the name of Gogo took his place. We kept it up for nearly a year, got better rations for it, and survived.”

He pauses. But just then something squeaks. At first Blam thinks it is an instrument at the top of its register, then realizes it is a bell in the ceiling announcing the end of intermission. They turn back. Funkenstein flicks his half-smoked cigarette to the ground and steps on it with the nonchalance of a street-corner loafer. What opens before them, obstructed by the backs of the men and women returning to their seats, is the temple’s elongated hemisphere, magnificently lit and dazzling in its gilt ornamentation, symbolic of the infinite vault of heaven or perhaps merely of the wealth of its former congregation or the desire for wealth on the part of those who conceived or commissioned it. Funkenstein looks puny and old under the vault. Blam pities him. The way he stamped out the unfinished, unnecessary cigarette makes Blam aware of how weak, half-formed, and unfulfilled Funkenstein is, the product of a small mind with large dreams.

“I’ll let you know about the house as soon as I make up my mind,” he says apologetically as they go off in different directions to their places.

BACK IN HIS seat, Blam tries to forget the whole incident. He settles in, crossing his legs and positioning his elbows on the armrests. The curtain parts, revealing the gold door behind the altar, and the first musician, a violinist, emerges, followed by the rest of the strings in single file. They are greeted by a muted, diffuse applause that increases when the energetic conductor, all smiles, makes his appearance. He mounts the podium, bows, and raises his baton for silence. Then with a subtle wave of the hand he calls forth, out of nothing, out of the void above the heads of the audience, a slow melody. Like many around him, Blam lowers his eyes to the program in his lap, recalling what he knew, namely, that he is listening to Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings .

It begins dreamily, cajoling the emotions, pulling them into its wake. Blam follows its course, trying to submit to the flow like a swimmer leaving the shallows for the main current. But the melodic current eludes him: he is too aware, breaking it down into its components, its themes, and listening for individual instruments. He shuts his eyes, hoping to enjoy the music more, but even in the darkness under his eyelids he can see the musicians contributing their particular strands to the melody, the conductor signaling how and when to come in, the audience attentively following the torrent of their combined efforts, and himself among the audience, tense and overly sober, though seemingly in rapture. Yes, he sees himself clearly. It is as if another eye, a third eye, has opened within him or off to the side and is observing everything, independent of his will and the will of those around him. For a moment he thinks he has located the point from which the eye is observing, and since that point is more or less an extension of the bench he is sitting on, the bench he left at the intermission in the vain hope of remaining unnoticed, he has the feeling it is Funkenstein watching him. He opens his eyes and turns his head to the end of the row, expecting to find the pudgy old man in the black pin-striped suit and white breast-pocket handkerchief observing him. He sees no one. The bench is nothing but a row of heads facing forward, and beyond it there is nothing but the empty aisle and the wall rising rigid and solitary despite its golden scrolls and swirls. Then who is doing the observing?