Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

He experiences it once more, with a bittersweet feeling of loss and withdrawal, though of liberation as well. The memory belongs to memories of the shops now catching his eye. The reality is that the shops have been remodeled, their entrances widened, the cracked wood of the window frames replaced with shiny metal, the merchandise in the windows transformed from aggressive jumbles into neat and expertly arranged displays, the exotic names of owners on the signs supplanted by staid generic terms, the staff supplemented by the young and apathetic ranks of the bureaucracy. It is all quite soothing, a step in the direction of impersonality. It relieves him of the conflict he used to feel when confronted with the dark, tense faces, the rolling eyes, the guttural voices fulsomely praising their wares and humiliating him with reminders of his background. Now the shops, purged of their past, have become for him too places of straightforward buying and selling. I’d like this and that. How much is it? I’ll take it or no thank you. Yet he could not help missing the more enterprising tribe to which, even if reluctantly, he had belonged.

The goodbye embrace was similar to — yet in a way the opposite of — the farewell scene he had accidentally witnessed from a tram many years before. Accidentally, because on that day Ferenci, the head of the Úti Travel Agency which had just hired him, asked him for the first and last time to leave his desk and deliver a packet of documents to customs. It was a cold November morning in the first year of the war, and Blam sank against the wooden back of a corner window seat as the tram made its wobbly way toward the customs office. The streets were nearly empty, the morning rush to jobs and the shops being over by then, and all that Blam’s absent gaze met as he looked out of the window were a dawdling old man, a housewife rushing home late from the market with her net bag, a postman, an apprentice toting a basket on his back. Then, just before the customs office, where a few small houses huddled together, the tram came upon a couple embracing: a dark man in a gray overcoat and a blond woman in a blue suit. They were standing near the curb, between the tram tracks and the houses, on their own, free, with no one to bother them, leaning blissfully against each other, his swarthy hand resting on her tightly sheathed thigh, her arm over his shoulder, her head and blond hair covering his face. Yet Blam had no trouble recognizing the couple as his wife, Janja, and Predrag Popadić. The realization that she was deceiving him with that man was like a knife in the gut, it took his breath away, it nearly made him faint, yet he did not scream, did not leap up and rush off the tram; he stayed put, leaning against the wooden seat, turning his head to follow them as the tram tottered past. The sight of their embrace on the deserted street filled him, despite his horror, with reluctant admiration; he was almost moved. It was the last embrace of the tryst — he could tell from the way they stood there, from the serenity, the blissful ease of their bodies — an embrace reflecting pleasure and a oneness that came from shared memories of recent intimacy. Joy radiated from them, the joy of oblivion, of having satisfied a natural instinct that, though now abated, still suffused their bodies, the joy of ignoring the world around them, the cold, gray day, the prosaic city with its trams and their troubled passengers. Their joy so vividly contrasted with his grief that for all the pain it caused him he could set it apart and display it like an exquisite object unfathomable in its harmony and forever beyond his reach. He knew then that Janja as she was at that moment, the Janja he had longed for when he was courting her, would never be his, yet the anguish of this knowledge was tempered by relief. By embracing the man out in the open, in the street, she was in a sense taking leave of him, achieving an ideal (even if many years later and with someone else), an ideal that Blam too had yearned for yet never understood and that now proved to be a gentle, sisterly parting, a farewell to a person completely unlike her, alien to her, which would resolve the strain and tension that had always weighed on their relationship, in much the way that the shame and danger of identification with the Jew Street shopkeepers had weighed on him, until they disappeared for good.

BEFORE THE WAR number 1 Jew Street was occupied by a leather goods manufacturing company called Levi and Son. It was run by Levi the son because Levi the father, the firm’s founder, was racked by disease and spent all his time in the upstairs apartment with a black silk yarmulke on his head and a tartan traveling rug over his knees. (Levi the grandson was studying to be a pharmacist in Belgrade.) When the Hungarians marched into Novi Sad, they declared Levi the father’s leather goods essential to the war effort and carted them away in military vehicles. The empty shop was taken over by Julius Mehlbach, the Levis’ longtime apprentice, who turned it into a shop specializing in leather bags and accessories. Levi the son, however, had managed to hide quite a bit of leather in the upstairs apartment, and he offered it to Mehlbach on the condition that they share the profit from the bags made of it. Mehlbach agreed, accepted the leather, and reported Levi the son for concealing goods essential to the war effort. Levi the son was arrested and beaten so badly that his kidneys bled. He was released, but died before the week was up. On his deathbed he summoned Mehlbach and made him swear to care for his all-but-immobile father, promising him a gold coin a week to cover the costs. Mehlbach fulfilled his duty until the spring of 1944, when the old man was deported to a camp in Germany with the rest of the Novi Sad Jews. He never returned. (Nor did Levi the grandson or Levi the grandson’s mother, who happened to be with him in Belgrade when the war broke out.) Mehlbach searched the upstairs apartment for the rest of the coins, prying up floorboards and digging behind walls, but never found them, and in the autumn of the same year he was forced to flee the advancing partisans and Soviet Army and thus to abandon the shop and the house.

Number 4 was occupied by a tailor named Elias Elzmann, a refugee from Galicia who had moved first to Germany, then to Austria, and finally to Yugoslavia. His knowledge of Polish enabled him to communicate with his customers, while his wife and grown-up children (who like their father were of heavy build, with oxlike eyes and big noses) spoke only German. For that reason his family — a wife, two sons, and two daughters — did the sewing while he rushed from one customer to the next in a constant sweat, taking measurements, making alterations, bowing and scraping, and lisping all the while in his Slavic mishmash. The Gestapo had the Elzmanns down as German citizens and required the Hungarian authorities to hand them over. They were sent to Serbia, where they perished in the gas chambers. When the Hungarian soldiers went to Jew Street to round them up, they amused themselves by making the Elzmann daughters dance naked in front of their parents and brothers, who had to sing foxtrots and waltzes and clap in rhythm.

Number 3 was the workshop of a small, hunchbacked watchmaker named Aaron Grün. He was commandeered to help clear the rubble from the Novi Sad Airport, had a heart attack, and died in June 1941. His elder son, also a watchmaker, was mobilized in the same year and sent to forced labor in the Ukraine, where he froze to death during the fighting at Voronezh. Grün’s younger son, who was still in school and remained at home, was executed together with his mother in the January 1942 raid.

The upper story of number 6 housed the law office of Sándor Vértes. Vértes was a morphine addict, and his wife had tuberculosis. They were childless. Detained as a Communist, he was interrogated and beaten for two days, but was released when he was discovered to be the wrong Vértes. He went home and immediately asphyxiated himself and his wife in the kitchen.