Knowing his son’s pigheadedness, Kroner could not bring himself to tell his wife this. He assured her, instead, that Gerhard was alive and in good health, though for the moment his whereabouts were unknown (which was true), since he was being held in secret, which boded well for the outcome of the inquiry. Having taken the burden of this embellishment upon himself, Kroner desperately tried to think of some way to persuade his son to give in and save himself. Through Armanyi he requested to be allowed to send his son a letter, but permission was denied. He then began to imagine their conversation in a cell, face to face, like their earlier discussions in the evening hours, when they listened to the radio, the radio for which now, alone, Kroner had neither the inclination nor the patience. But with the dank, solitary cell and barred windows as a setting, and with the sight of the bloodstained prisoner, his son’s viewpoint always came out on top. Gerhard had been right, Kroner told himself in those one-sided conversations based on words spoken long ago. But now, in the new, grim light of prison, and of the suffering and misery he pictured, it was too late to admit this. In a cowardly way he was almost relieved that he had no access to his son. He continued every day begging Armanyi for help. Armanyi sometimes tried to do something, and sometimes only said that he had tried. Kroner compounded Armanyi’s lie with his own, passing it on to his wife and daughter, and in time a dense and elaborate web of unreality was spun around the detainee.
Yet another person became entangled in this web, lured into it by Reza Kroner, who, not trusting the assurances of her husband, set about seeking help for her son in the quarter where she felt the most confidence: among her compatriots. Carrying a basket with food and clean clothing, she went to the German barracks, entered into conversation with the soldiers on guard, asked them to call the duty officer, and laid before the latter her petition. On one such occasion she came upon an NCO of the Field Police, Hermann Arbeitsam, a forty-year-old from Mainz, who took pity on her and promised to try to find out where her son was. He, too, was unsuccessful (his rank not high enough), but their acquaintance, deepened by frequent meetings in the park near the barracks, by the woman’s pleadings and the NCO’s clumsy comfortings, grew into a friendship, and the friendship, for Arbeitsam, who had never married, into a true, late-life passion.
He would come and stand in front of the Kroner house on the pretext that he had new information, and Reza would run out and talk at great length, wiping away her tears and tolerating his friendly pats on the back and arms. Their meetings did not go unnoticed by the maid and later by Vera, whose own plans had become enmeshed in the activity following Gerhard’s arrest, because the savior she had latched onto had now to be used for the purpose of saving her brother’s life. But that savior was mortally afraid of being involved with a family that had brought down on itself the clanking of chains and the shadow of the gallows. He no longer came out to see Vera; he avoided her on the pretext of heavy new responsibilities. But Vera understood that he had cold feet and that the possibility of escaping with him was gone. She gave up entirely, fell back into the misfortune and shame of her home, tiptoeing around, listening for the front door, hoping for the arrival of a messenger, or even Gerhard, safe and sound, as they all did, but believing it less and less.
When the news came that he was dead, “killed attempting to escape,” as the official communication was worded, she put on black, as did all the family, and wept with them, and tried to comfort them with her presence and gentleness, as she herself was comforted — but knowing, all the while, in the depths of her being, that she had been diverted from her own path, pushed against her will into that bloody and dark gutter that only she had clearly foreseen. Now she was slipping deeper into it, with the others, to destruction. She told Milinko, who came to express his condolences, that she could no longer see him, and the young man went away, agreeing that it would be sacrilege to continue with their courtship. So, too, the conversations about books in Kroner’s study came to an end. The books the policemen had scattered during their search were put back on the shelves, and no one took them down again. What had happened during those last few months refuted them entirely, and they became what they were when not opened and interpreted with trust: objects of paper. With their fine bindings and titles, they looked out blankly at the people who still moved beneath them, who soon would be, under that blank gaze, taken away, torn from their resting place, and turned upside down, just as the books had been, but permanently.
15
Natural deaths and violent deaths. Sarah Kroner, née Davidson, choking in an Auschwitz gas chamber disguised as a bathhouse. Stumbling, without Vera’s arm to lean on, surrounded by shouts whose sense she cannot understand, her fingers too feeble to unbutton the front of her dress, the dress torn off her by someone else’s hand, then her underclothes, down to her wrinkled skin. Her shame, her cry for protection, for her son, who was left behind somewhere, for Vera, who did not come with her, her prayers, no more than a meaningless mumbling, for she has nothing more to hold on to, nothing in the world but a chunk of soap pushed into her hand to fool her. She can see the faces around her turning green, eyes bulging; her own chest is racked by coughing, her mouth gasps for fresh air, but there is none.
In the Gestapo cellar, the shattering of Gerhard’s skull under the blow of a wooden truncheon wielded by guard János Korong. “I didn’t talk! Or did I?” The doubt echoes in his damaged brain. His gaping mouth turns toward his murderer’s hand, his white, bloodstained teeth showing in a snarl at the thought that they may have let slip out names he can no longer remember but which he knows must be concealed by the silence of death.
Fräulein’s struggle against her fever in Boranović’s clinic. Her father’s lame left leg, his limp, the movement with which he would drag his body out of immobility, out of deadness, into the green of the garden, the black silhouette of that leg, toward which she strains her every pulse, as if toward a high safe ledge, above the flames that are consuming her. Her arms have not the strength to raise themselves to touch that silhouette, that saving solidity that is moving away from her, limping, growing smaller, the uneven sound of its steps moving upward, becoming softer.
Robert Kroner lying on his black winter overcoat in the transit camp, his choking “No!” to Vera’s imploring cries, that “No!” to a continuation of the journey, a continuation of the suffering, a continuation of responsibility, sinking into irresponsibility, eyes shut tight, ears refusing to hear, thoughts refusing to understand that he is letting them go, leaving them, being left behind by them, abandoned to the shouts, the blows, the rifle bullets that now, suddenly, hit him at close range, tearing open his chest, setting him free, at last setting him free.
Nemanja Lazukić’s contempt for the roll call, for the lumbering prisoners tied to him, because he doesn’t belong with them, hates them, would like to push them away, spurn the faces and names that intrude on his senses, the ropes that cut into his flesh, because the prisoners are dragged along by their own weight, their clumsiness, their jerking movements, their joints red and swollen, the stench from their sweating bodies. His attempts to catch the eye of one of the guards, whose faces, in the cold gray dawn, show neither interest nor pity. His shout of “Don’t, brothers!” which is a lie, sour in his mouth, another lie among all the lies, lies from the beginning to this moment when truth is nothing more than contempt, the wish for exceptional treatment of which there is none, the revulsion that the shooting puts an end to, after which he is thrown onto a heap, on top of others, under others.