This worries Slavica Djurašković and has made her bitter, but her conviction, prompted by instinct, is not shaken. She would think of him, dream of him, in a different way if he were no longer alive. Concealing her thoughts from her new husband, who wants her to be continually attentive and cheerful, she broods secretly about Milinko: where he might be, whether he has enough to eat, whether he has shoes and clothing. When it’s cold, she remembers how sensitive he used to be to the cold. But her anxiety is always for one who lives, and whenever a doubt creeps in—“perhaps he is no longer. .”—the doubt is instantly cut off, because she knows, trembling and triumphant, that he is alive, that somewhere he exists, and, in answer to her fear, a warm wave of his presence floods across the space separating them.
The departure of the three Kroners is unusual, because it leaves behind a member of the family, who is protected by her origins and her husband’s generous decision not to urge her to accept his faith. That fourth member prepares food and clothing for their journey in self-effacing silence, like the servant she once was, when her masters went on an outing or a vacation. But she has been cut off anyway from the three Kroners by her liaison with the NCO Hermann Arbeitsam, pulled back down to the lower class. The lower class, however, is now protected, while the upper class moves higher, to heaven, and the irony of this gives an edge to the preparations. The food, packed by a servant who never really became a lady: chunks of cold meat, cheese, and lots of bread. “Do you want the child to be poisoned? And is she to carry all that with her?” Kroner sneers in disgust, his eyes wide in his dark face, not blaming his wife for this piece of stupidity, but for her ignorance of their fate, even though he has only a premonition of it.
A premonition of death, of no return to this oppressive home weighed down with lies and mistakes, a home that, even so, he experiences as the last solid ground before the plunge from a high crag into a chasm. Tomorrow he will step into the street with a haversack over his shoulder, taking with him his mother and his daughter, whose protector he ought to be, in obedience to an order that is illegal by the laws of humanity, the product of a deranged mind. Obeying instead of rebelling, as Gerhard did. Gerhard was right. Kroner acknowledges it once again, and with bitterness feels rising in him his son’s passion for survival, which he once disparaged and condemned. To live in the present, for the moment, while one is still master of one’s actions, and after so many years he wants once again that red-haired woman whom he took for her body, but who now is leaving him for another man.
“Don’t you know better?” he shouts at her, sweeping the clumsy bundles to the kitchen floor, where they fall apart like dead frogs. He replaces them with foods he has selected: bacon, cubes of sugar, bars of chocolate. “Wrap that up!” In exasperation he pushes her back to the table, surreptitiously feeling her arm, thigh, buttock, and his eyes fix hungrily on her neck, on her calves. She is still desirable and warm, and he ought to get her into his room, in the evening when everyone retires after a long day, and take her like a whore one last time. But he is too afraid now even for that. He stands there, the sweat of fear and humiliation pouring down his face.
Vera sees this unseemly lusting, the way her father’s eyes play over her mother’s body, and is revolted. Ah, to escape! That’s what she has always wanted to do, but escape is impossible now by virtue of her birth and the fact that she will be carted off to a place created for her, another prison. But perhaps — she isn’t sure— it will be a better place; perhaps, in some lower, half-animal, day-to-day existence, such as accounts of the camps promise, unprecedented peace awaits her.
Her support is her grandmother, not her father, whose desire for life has flared up so inappropriately. For food, which he shovels into his thin body or wraps into small packages with the precision of a shop assistant, and for his wife, her mother, around whom he prowls like a tomcat. Her grandmother does nothing; she prays. Aloud, on her knees, banging her head against the floor, in words dredged up from a remembered language rich in guttural consonants. Vera takes lunch and dinner to her — her last — in her part of the house and pushes the food into the old lady, who, like a sick animal, distractedly and reluctantly chews at it with broken teeth, letting whole mouthfuls drop into her lap. Vera sees a model for herself in this distraction and abasement, and when the moment of departure comes, she takes her grandmother’s bundle along with her own. Keeping at a distance from her father, bidding a tearless farewell to her mother, who stands at the gate trying to press superfluous things on them and offering ridiculous advice (they should write, they should try not to catch cold), Vera sets off at a slow pace, suited to the old lady, to the synagogue, from where they will all be detailed, so they have been told, and assigned work to redeem their crime of being Jewish.
Vera’s departure will influence the way Milinko Božić leaves home. He watches from a distance, long since removed from the stage and powerless to help, disarmed, in this collision of fire-breathing dragons which, roaring, consume their victims. Six months later, when only memories remain of those taken away, one of the dragons suddenly pushes its furious head forward and offers Milinko a ride. Join the people’s army, drive the Germans out: such is the exhortation on the posters in newly liberated Novi Sad, bustling with public speaking and peasants’ carts.
Milinko has no use for those overheated promises and passions; they remind him, as have all other excesses, of his father’s drunken boasting, whose outcome he had experienced. Milinko’s model is still the quiet wisdom he encountered in the Kroner household during those evenings he spent sitting with his host surrounded by books, knowing that Vera was nearby, Vera, whom he would win through his own quiet wisdom. Now he considers it his duty to revenge the defilement and annihilation of what he held most precious.
That it should be by the violent means the enemy employs saddens him, of course. The thought of doing violence to someone’s body, someone’s thoughts, someone’s will horrifies him. And he dreads pain, which also seems a deviation from dignity and reason. But now he must go to meet chance bullets, throw himself among explosions, expose his throat and belly to the jabs of sharpened metal. He does not feel equal to this ordeal, nor does he believe that he will come through it unharmed; he is more like a nonswimmer who plunges into the water to save a drowning man.
When Milinko first started visiting Vera’s house, Kroner lent him a German novel about the First World War, in which, of all the horrible episodes, he was most affected by a short description of the death of a secondary character in whom he immediately recognized himself: a soldier who does not see the sense of fighting, of killing in order not to be killed, and so lacks the instinct common to hunter and hunted, which turns yesterday’s civilian into a wild beast which crawls, hides in ambush, fires, and finds cover. The character perishes clumsily, absent-mindedly; knowing that he will die, he moves like a sleepwalker toward that inevitability from the very first battle. Reading the book, Milinko was certain that if he was forced to fight, he would share that fate, and felt the character’s wounds in his own flesh. The identification was so strong that it acquired the force of prophecy.