14
Only Robert Kroner appreciated the aura of devotion that shone from Milinko, and it was questionable whether even his appreciation was sincere. It may have been the result only of the general decline of values around him. His wife interpreted the signs of the young man’s respect in terms of his humble origins and modest circumstances. Here she forgot her own hatred, fed by poverty, for the well-to-do and the established, a hatred that had included the Kroners while they were her masters.
Reza Kroner had only the vaguest notion of events outside her own home, especially developments of international importance, and failed to see that the social status she had achieved through her marriage was inexorably disintegrating, that the name Kroner was no longer a guarantee of esteem, of prestige, and that the days of the family’s material security and even physical safety were numbered. Since the birth of her son, who was to remain to the very end the apple of her eye, she saw those around her in terms of him and him alone. When Milinko first made his appearance at the house behind the Baptist church, there was nothing, in her eyes, that posed a threat to Gerhard’s future. Gerhard had finished school a year before the war and that autumn had enrolled in the Technical Institute in Belgrade. Even though his studies were interrupted the following April as a result of the outbreak of war, she was not worried, for as soon as the Institute closed its doors, her son came home again, back under her protection. That protection meant little for his career, since during the Occupation he was prevented from continuing his studies, but her love, pleased at the proximity of its object, had no difficulty in postponing the righting of this injustice to an indefinite future. The more so since her son himself did not seem particularly disturbed by it.
Gerhard had no liking for school, for work, for anything that achieved its goal through long-term effort. He accepted almost with relief this change, though for him it was a reversal, and he looked with mocking eyes at the spectacle of humiliating falls and arrogant promotions, sucking noisily through his teeth whenever he spoke of them. Measures that affected him directly, such as the summons to forced labor for all those in his age group, he simply ignored. “If anyone asks, I’m still in Belgrade,” he told his father, who tried to warn him, the day the notices were posted, of the dangers of failing to report. “But what if they see that you are here?” his father argued. “Tell them I just arrived and I’ll report tomorrow.” But that tomorrow never came, and while other young Jews pulled on their old clothes at the crack of dawn and hurried off, shivering, to the mustering points — to cart bricks, accompanied by blows and curses, all day long at the airport and to fill in craters made by German bombs — Gerhard stayed in bed, or loitered around the courtyard, or sat in the kitchen eating fruit from the basket the maid brought from the market, or vanished into the cellar with the neighbor’s wife, or read Hungarian and German detective novels, with which the newspaper kiosks were flooded. Kroner thought this behavior provocative; everyone could see Gerhard, including Count Armanyi, the store official, who often stood at the office window watching. But Reza would not agree to Gerhard’s remaining hidden in the house; the lack of sun and fresh air could harm his health. As for the regulations, announcements, and the threats they implied, she decided quite simply that they did not concern her son. She had agreed to let him accept the Jewish faith because at that time she believed that all Jews were wealthy, but now that the newspapers and the radio were accusing the Jews of being responsible for the war and the high prices, calling on Christians everywhere to help rid the land of them, she ceased considering him a Jew. Her own hatred of the Jews returned, especially after Sep’s visit, which reminded her of her past servitude to that race, a race alien to both of them, and had she been asked to give her opinion, she would certainly have approved of their extermination. And her son would have, too.
The more brutally the Jews were persecuted and the greater the humiliations they suffered, the more bitterly Gerhard despised them. It was as if he had made all the Christian prejudices his own, while still belonging to the Jewish faith. He would leer mockingly when a dusty column of civilians passed in the street, driven on by two soldiers, forced sometimes to march at double time and sing some nationalist Hungarian song, often anti-Semitic. He would imitate their unmilitary stride, their cowed stance, would pout to make his lips full, like theirs, and flare his nostrils to enlarge his nose. As few dared, particularly now that taunting carried the threat of real danger, of the deprivation of all one’s rights, he would say loudly, “Those Yids” or “Is he a Yid?” or “Are you a Yid?” to some unsuspecting fellow Jew, and the only reason he was not answered by a blow was that the butts of his mocking tongue were all too wretched, too frightened. It was this resignation that exasperated him.
He took a curious pleasure in studying the caricatures of Jews that appeared more and more frequently in the newspapers; the caricatures presented them as potbellied, hairy, thick-lipped, and having fleshy hooked noses, features that conjured up the vices of their race: greed and cunning. He could not stand the jokes that at that time the Jews were directing against themselves, for he was astute enough to understand that the purpose of that humor was to blunt the pain of reality. If anyone told him the kind of joke in which a Jew, in a situation of no escape, outwitted his enemy or found consolation in irony, Gerhard, instead of laughing, would say, in deadly earnest, “Yes, and then they grabbed hold of your Cohen and hung him on the nearest tree.” And only then would he bare his regular, white teeth: “Haha.”