Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

Blam sets off in the same direction — here the sidewalk is nearly level with the boulevard’s asphalt surface — past the rear walls of the houses left along the former Jew Street. On one side he is whipped by the wind of the speeding cars and on the other soothed by the peeling plaster and pink-and-yellow bricks. The memory of the family that emerged from the car to act out a scene of their life for him is still fresh in his mind; he goes over the way they moved and gestured. But the houses he is passing also claim him — their proportions and materials, their stains and scratches so long familiar. One side of the street is the past, the other the present. He can’t get at the present, he knows he can’t, though he feels it, feels it bodily, on his skin, like the sporadic gusts of air from the boulevard that lash him and move on, carrying off group after group of people like those he has just seen. He knows he will never sit behind the wheel of a car he is both owner and master of and give himself up to the wind, the speed, taking along Janja and the Little One, who would have no trouble adapting to and merging with a strange city, a strange country. He lacks the self-confidence or the energy for it; nor does he feel the need. His will dooms him to return to the same old roads and streets, to remain their intent yet listless and melancholy observer.

New Boulevard forms a kind of bow arching through the remains of a once-lively community. The sidewalk narrows at the corner of a garden wall forgotten during the demolition process, then branches away from the houses to a side street. Blam passes the wall, enters a narrow alley, and, proceeding to its end, comes out into Vojvoda Šupljikac Square.

The square looks as it has always looked, its houses silently embracing the small park. There is no motion but the gentle sway of the spreading hawthorns. There are no pedestrians. In front of a gate two houses down from Blam’s former house, an old woman sits on a low stool, her gnarled hands crossed in her lap, her jaw moving. At first Blam thinks she is chewing, but as he gets closer, he realizes it is an illusion, her jaw is moving for no reason or else out of boredom or pain. The bowl full of peaches in front of her is untouched. She is selling them here in the empty square, having picked them in her garden, a cramped space behind her modest house, or in her daughter’s garden, or in the garden of a neighbor who does not care to expose herself to the street’s prying eyes. The old woman is patiently offering the peaches at a price below what the market is charging, in the hope of making a little extra money.

Blam has to stop; his legs force him to, as if he too were old, ailing, and exhausted from long waiting and hope. Gravity pulls him down, down to his knees, to touch the ground with his head and weep, not for the old woman’s fate, for her thankless, hapless undertaking, her sacrifice; no, for her faith, which keeps her here by the gate, by the bowl of fruit. Blam sees her faith as the faith of a world now gone, a world of which he too is a remnant. That faith has proved pitiful, futile, because the people who lived by it have all been murdered and forgotten, erased by time and asphalt roads, and he is its last witness, the only person able to appreciate and interpret it, but only for himself. The old woman cannot, though she has survived and preserved that faith. She may even belong to those who did the killing or who looked on in silence while the killing went on or who thought the killing justified. But at this moment she personifies for Blam the now defunct world of ardent faith, and through her he returns to it, to the faces of the departed tradesmen and brokers of the former Jew Street, the faces of his parents and sister and other relatives, the faces of friends who sinned against him and friends whom he sinned against.

*

“Come with us!” Lili said or, rather, “Komm mit” in her guttural, voluble German, because she never learned Serbian or cared to, which infuriated Blam. Nearly everything about her infuriated him: her garish way of dressing and behaving, the sarcastic look in her multicolored eyes, the panache with which she paraded around provincial, patriarchal Novi Sad, swishing her willowy dresses and addressing everyone in loud German as though it were perfectly natural for them to speak her language rather than for her to speak theirs. “Eccentric” was the way he thought of her, not realizing he had taken the word over from his mother, and after possessing her physically and thus emotionally and intellectually, and feeling a need to correct and torture her, he used it openly with her: “You’re an eccentric. No one can live life the way you picture it.” But she would just open her greenish-brown eyes wide with amazement and turn the ends of her mouth down into a pout or up into a sneer, which then spread to the dimples in her cheeks and to the smooth expanse of her forehead. While she never protested, she never seemed to grasp the point of his reproaches; she simply waited until he got them out of his system so she could snuggle up to him with one of her “eccentric” demands: “Kiss me quick!” “What I wouldn’t do for some chocolate!” “I want to go dancing!” “How about a film tonight?” And “Come with us!” He would say no, routinely, more out of spite than conviction.

The only thing he always agreed to was meeting her in their hideaway, a room he had sublet in remote Dositej Street at her instigation, though what Lili offered him was a mixed blessing and even cause for regret. To begin with, the widow he sublet the room from made him uneasy. She was a tired, lifeless woman who may have believed what he said when she rented him the room facing the courtyard with a separate entrance — namely, that he was a student from the countryside — but was then doubtless shocked to find the room locked day and night and to see the young man only on hot afternoons and always with a thin young woman whose arms, legs, and skirt were in constant motion and who never stopped chattering in her strange, incomprehensible language, not even after her green lover let her into the room. He suspected the widow would have thrown him out if she had been less worried about the expense involved in running another advertisement and the energy involved in showing the place again, and as a result he was full of remorse for living a lie and getting away with it, and that remorse poisoned his feelings for Lili. He upbraided her for flaunting their mutual lie the way she flaunted her loud dresses, loud laugh, foreign language, and even more foreign origins.

Shame and spite made him reluctant to follow her on the next leg of her journey, her migration through Europe, this time to Italy, where her father was to sell an invention of his. Ephraim Ehrlich was always bragging; for him, reality and bragging were indistinguishable. Here too, in Novi Sad, he made his living — feeding and clothing himself and his daughter and renting an expensive furnished apartment — more by blowing his own horn than by applying whatever technical knowledge he might have had. He carried on lengthy secret negotiations with greedy, gullible Jews about the advances he needed to develop and perfect the inventions that would bring them millions. “He’s a sharp one, that Ephi,” Vilim Blam would say approvingly, lounging in his armchair and clenching a cigar in the strong, white teeth he was always quick to flash. An Ehrlich on his mother’s side, Blam’s father liked to think of himself as cast in the same spirited mold, as “a sharp one.” He was in favor of Miroslav’s going with his relatives, not because he saw the danger of persecution and extinction drawing closer to Novi Sad (his faith in people and in his own good fortune precluded all possibility of danger) but because he felt that moving away, a change of scene, would provide his son with greater opportunities in life. “Oh, to be young again!” he would sigh, throwing his head back on the antimacassar, patting his stomach with a soft, fleshy hand, and puffing white smoke rings that filled the dining room and said that he did not in the least wish to be young again, that he was perfectly content as he was, with a well-fed body and a cigar between his teeth. “I’d grab the opportunity,” he would say, making a fist, as if he had the opportunity right there in his hand.