Gerhard became so unpleasant that Jewish circles in Novi Sad spoke of him in indignant whispers. Some thought him mad; others said that he had joined the Gestapo, making good use of his half-German origin, and had been given the special job of demoralizing the Jews. They began to regard even Gerhard’s father with suspicion. Kroner’s relatively favorable position in the requisitioned store and his friendly footing with Count Armanyi suggested an accommodation with the Germans. And when it became known that Sep Lehnart was staying in the house, and when a bunch of old ladies on an afternoon visit to Grandmother Kroner came upon the young SS officer in the gateway, spick-and-span and about to go off into town, the disgust became total. Only the attempt on Sep’s life, had it been made, could have dispelled this suspicion. But Gerhard’s plans came to nought, and his associates, Franja Schlesinger and the Karaulić brothers, under the pressure of rumor and the disappointment of their failure, began to avoid him. This suited him well, because he did not have much confidence in them, particularly when their plan of escape by crossing over into Srem did not materialize. Now, left alone with his project, he could take action without having to worry about anyone else.
Like his uncle, he often went for long walks, but not in the center of town; instinctively, his wanderings took him to the remote streets on the outskirts. Those back streets, overgrown with grass and lined with squat, low houses, almost entirely inhabited by Serbian agricultural workers and small tradesmen, were scenes of the greatest cruelty when the Hungarian troops arrived. The soldiers, carrying out their raids, were not in the least restrained by the sight of such modest means, such neglect. There, among the houses with damp walls, faded flowers in the windows, the image of the killings still hovered, muted. The people who in the evenings came out to talk at their gates still pointed to the lampposts from which their neighbors had been hanged, and to the darkened windows of the homes from which a friend had been led away. For these people, there was no topic of conversation more lively. Gerhard enjoyed listening. He knew almost no one there, but was helped by Milinko, who lived in the area and who, unaware that he was doing him a service, was flattered by the attentions of Vera’s older brother. Milinko introduced him to his friends, his neighbors, and took him to the “promenade,” the longest tree-shaded street in the neighborhood, where the young people, boycotting their haunt in the middle of town as a form of silent protest, now congregated. Gerhard’s coarse ways were liked here; they went with the atmosphere.
After the tremendous shock caused by the senseless, wholesale killing, the young people, previously pacifists, slipped into the opposite extreme. The crimes committed against them and their like freed them from responsibility. Forgetting the ghastly gaping mouths of the people who had been hanged, they began to speak of them as simple fools who had not taken seriously enough the frenzied armored troops. It was as if this were no more than a soccer match, the first half of which had passed in blows and a confused passivity. But now that half time had arrived, they were preparing for a counterattack, rapidly hardening themselves to use the same means by which they had been beaten. Everyone now talked of rifles and revolvers, even couples holding each other close in doorways. So it was not difficult for the Communists who had managed to escape the first wave of arrests to find new recruits.
With the instinct of animal trainers, the Communists immediately chose Gerhard, because of his loud mouth, his arrogance, and his self-castigating outbursts against Jewish weakness, as the best of the lot and enlisted him in a shock group. Every day he walked a dozen kilometers, always taking a different route, to a small wood between Novi Sad and Kać, and there, with a whistle as a signal, met with three other comrades and a reserve lieutenant who taught them to fire a revolver and throw grenades, weapons that despite the regulations he had held onto. To avoid being discovered and to save ammunition, it was usually an empty revolver that they aimed and fired, and rocks instead of a bomb that they threw at a target. But Gerhard imagined, with every click of the hammer and every thud of a rock against a tree trunk, a mutilated body sprawled at his feet. His participation in the shock group filled an enormous void, and he stopped his insulting, his mocking. He became serious, precise, almost good-humored. He had no further use for Milinko, because now he knew the people in this neighborhood better than Milinko did, but he did not abandon them. Rather, he tried to convince him, in a few heart-to-heart chats, that he ought to dedicate himself to the destruction of the invader. But Milinko was too much an individualist to become part of a collective aim and will. His thoughts, spell-bound by the quest for knowledge, kept him high above the ground he walked on, and his association with the elder Kroner and, through him, with the spiritual riches of Germany, dissipated any wish for vengeance. Milinko made excuses to Gerhard, who in turn shrugged him off. Also, while Gerhard spent more and more time away from the house because of his revolutionary activities, Milinko, as Vera’s official boyfriend, spent much of his time there. Which was not to the liking of Vera herself.
Vera had had no fondness for her home, and when the steamroller of war passed over it, turning it into a house of people deprived of all rights, her feelings were given external justification. Now it was a trap for her. Sometimes she tiptoed from room to room, from windows facing the street to windows facing the courtyard. The building in the back, the storeroom, was a barrier to her possible retreat, and the windows on the street side were breaches in the defending wall. Sometimes she listened to people’s voices — voices ordering merchandise, giving directions to the kitchen, greeting a guest — and they sounded to her like a strange ghostly jumble, confused echoes from another world. She asked herself what she was doing there and what bound her to the house. There were family ties, of course, ties, by her birth, to a father, a mother, a grandmother, and a brother. Yet when she searched their faces — she felt a need to look at them closely — she decided that her connection to them was a matter of chance, and harmful besides. Each one of them had his or her own idea of life, which was either different or else totally contrary to Vera’s. Her mother, for example, considered life to mean serving Gerhard, which Vera thought was altogether lacking in taste, while Gerhard dreamed only of rebellion, of deeds that were clearly doomed to fail and dangerous for the whole family. When she learned from Milinko that Gerhard was consorting with the hotheads on the outskirts of town, she tried to explain to him where this would lead, but he, condescending to her as always, laughed: “You, young lady, take care of your own nice round little bottom and keep quiet.”
But why should she keep quiet when it was her life that was being put at risk? In order to die quietly with the rest of the family? She had no stomach at all for such a family end, yet the house, remaining in the house, forced her toward death. Would leaving it bring salvation? But where to go, and with whom? She would not be able to escape by herself, not with this inexperienced, newly matured body of hers, so sensitive and vulnerable; she could see that clearly. With Milinko? But Milinko, coming to the house to see her, only stared wide-eyed at her father in the semidarkness of his room, and at his books, as if they contained clues to salvation, as if they could rescue one from being beaten, cursed, spat upon, killed. Several times she confided in him, told him of her terror, but in response received only moonstruck assurances of the inevitability of the victory of reason over the temporary forces of darkness, and in this she had no difficulty recognizing the self-absorbed delusions of the ineffectual father of the family, Robert Kroner. So she shut herself off from Milinko into a malicious silence, a silence broken only by a still more malicious, almost mocking encouragement, through which she pretended to be his pupil, the pupil’s pupil, and watched him swell with pride as a result of the deception. She began to think that everyone was pretending, boasting of a power they did not have, while those who had the power did not talk but simply made use of it.