Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

Ehrlich would sit opposite Vilim Blam with his hands folded on the table — he did not smoke — and nod approval. He tended to be serious, formal. His narrow face and strong features made him look more like a pastor than an inventor, and his bright blue eyes and thin lips made him look utterly different from Lili, whom he adored, perhaps for that very reason, as she adored him. His speech was slow, monotonous, and dry but so effective that one felt compelled to listen. He maintained that the Jews of Novi Sad, Blam included, were making a big mistake by ignoring the experience of those already threatened and destroyed. He cited the example of friends from Vienna who had sat twiddling their thumbs until the Nazis threw them out of their factories, shops, and apartments, and then, after robbing them of their money and connections, sent them off to camps and starved them to death. “ ‘What are you waiting for?’ I said to them. But they stayed put. They didn’t listen. And you know why? Because they had no faith in themselves, because they thought they couldn’t live without their Persian rugs and crystal chandeliers.” Then Ehrlich would give detailed descriptions of the contents of vacant Jewish houses and the plundering of the valuables, and Blanka Blam, who was fanatically devoted to hearth and home, trembled with horror and threw her husband desperate glances begging him to restrain his relative, for Ehrlich was very much his side of the family, and she secretly believed that her much stricter clan could never have produced so merciless an observer, though how could the man be otherwise with no real profession, no real home, how could a man widowed at such an early age fail to marry again, how could he bring up that child, that Lili, on his own, letting her do whatever she pleased, letting her seduce the boy in front of everybody?

Lili did in fact seduce Miroslav. To persuade him to leave, she did not use her father’s tactics of referring to horrors suffered and witnessed; instead she flattered him, yet gave him reasons much like his father’s. “What’s a man like you going to do in this dead end of a town?” she would ask, looking at the nearly deserted streets of Novi Sad, though she seemed to be having the time of her life there. “A smart, handsome, capable man like you? Why, you’re made for the world!”

Blam was embarrassed by her praise, but it made him feel capable in her presence, even handsome. It made him wiser and deeper. He parried Lili’s arguments with bitter, proud sobriety: Yes, he realized he could expect a vain, futile existence here, even degradation and death, but he saw no reason to try and escape his fate. “Life has no meaning anyway,” he would say. And, “Life is pure illusion.”

If Blam himself was surprised at the bleak maturity of his pronouncements, Lili was enchanted by them, and much as she protested in fact, they were precisely what she wanted. Though the same age as Blam — and therefore, as a woman, considerably more mature than he — she was certain he knew more about love. Once, when they were still getting to know each other, she spun around and, peering up at him to see how he would react, came out with “I have a fiancé in Vienna, but I don’t know if he’s alive.” Which set Blam off on a jealous disquisition about how senseless it was to keep a relationship going after the bonds of attachment had come undone: she was like a child holding a broken kite string. “Oh, how right you are!” she cried contritely and threw her arms around his neck. They were in Vojvoda Šupljikac Square (whose name she always replaced with a laugh, never able to pronounce it) after one of Blanka Blam’s abundant meals, having left the grown-ups and lazy Estera to digestion and serious talk. “Kiss me!” Lili said for the first time, standing on her toes and pressing her small, firm breasts into his body. “Somebody might see us!” Blam replied, flustered yet managing to sound prudent and reasonable, so that Lili had to say, “But there’s nobody here!” the truth of which Blam confirmed with a cautious glance. “All right, then,” he said and lowered his mouth to her thin, burning lips, which quickly sucked it in. Her whole body trembled, twisted, and in the end she burst into tears. “I can’t betray Hans. He’s in a camp, and at this very moment they may be torturing or killing him!”

Yet she was the one who came up with the idea of renting a room, and she was so excited when she first saw it that she immediately threw off her clothes and lay down in the huge, cold peasant bed. She squeezed her eyes shut as he entered her clumsily, her face contorting, her forehead breaking out in sweat, because she was a virgin, and when it was over, she jumped out of bed with the sheet wrapped around her and ran to the basin, head held high, to wash the blood off. Her naked body was firm and slender and had a honeylike sheen. She was not ashamed of it; indeed, she flaunted it by making more trips to the basin than necessary.

“Do you like the way I look? Tell me!” she asked with a smile, unaware that by so doing she was spoiling the way she looked. Blam felt there were certain things a person did not talk about, one of them being whether a person liked the way another person looked with no clothes on. Before long, however, he was forced to talk about other things a person did not talk about: after their third tryst Lili told him she was pregnant.

She was very brave about it, even defiant, announcing before Blam had a chance to say anything that this was “no time for weddings and babies.” Nor, to Blam’s great relief, had she any intention of letting her father in on the secret: it would only cause him distress and divert him from his highly demanding work. Still, the unwanted fruit of her womb could not be removed without some assistance from the older generation, so after much hesitation Blam confessed everything to his mother. Though stunned, Blanka was the only one who had foreseen the possibility of the tragedy and immediately went to her husband. Vilim Blam took the news calmly; he even seemed proud that his son had taken a mistress at so tender an age, and he was not the least perturbed by his son’s having chosen a relative. He was therefore perfectly gallant about getting the money together and even invited Lili to Vojvoda Šupljikac Square for three days, telling everyone that it was in celebration of her impending departure. She left the house on foot accompanied by Blanka Blam and returned with her in a carriage, pale and visibly thinner than she had been two hours earlier yet smiling as ever.

Lili convalesced in the dining room, fully dressed but lounging on the sofa in Estera’s soft slippers, listening to the radio, waited on by Blanka and Estera, both of whom were moved by the event. The men of the family gave her a wide berth, but Ephraim Ehrlich would blithely enter the dining room, kiss his daughter on the forehead, not noticing or pretending not to notice her mysterious condition or loss of weight, and launch into a monotonous exposition of current events, of his achievements and plans, of their departure. After the discovery of and embarrassing epilogue to the incestuous relationship, no one gave another thought to Miroslav’s going with them. Even Vilim Blam stopped bringing up the subject, having most likely realized that a seventeen-year-old is not old enough to live abroad on his own, and Ehrlich seemed to know more than he let on. Only Lili kept begging Miroslav to come with them, painting life abroad in the brightest colors and promising she would let him enjoy it: he had only to say the word, and she would give him complete freedom. But after what he had been through, Blam had lost the desire — or the courage — to throw in his lot with her; in fact, he could hardly wait for her to go. Still, he selfishly yielded to her pleas and took her back to the Dositej Street room several times, though now taking the precautionary measures he had failed to take earlier. Otherwise he avoided her. He had the feeling that her early pregnancy was merely another of her eccentricities and that a life with her would be full of absurd and disagreeable consequences. He heaved a sigh of relief as they parted, she bathed in tears, at the dreary Novi Sad railway station. Her bags, having been purchased in the various countries of her exile and therefore of all shapes and sizes, were like the magnificent finale of a visiting circus, after which life goes back to normal.