Sredoje’s whole past swept back into him like an underground river. He tucked the notebook into his uniform jacket and returned to his barracks. But when he read it there, he was disappointed. Fräulein, whom he had known as self-assured to the point of obduracy, was suddenly revealed to be fragile to the point of helplessness in the face of life. Nevertheless, he held on to the diary, as if it were the sole belonging saved from a fire, and burned it only five years later, at the insistence and with the agreement of one other person, for whom it also had some meaning. He was not to know that there was yet another person still alive who was invisibly involved in the circle of the diary’s existence.
That person was Milinko Božić, a patient in the veterans hospital in Sauerkammermunde. Armless, legless, eyeless, his eardrums and vocal cords shattered, Milinko lay covered up to his neck with a blanket, from beneath which a rubber tube led to a receptacle on the floor. At intervals he was unable to determine, someone attended to him, let in fresh air (which sometimes stung his face with cold), and the smell of its freshness was mixed with the scent of that person — an odor of sweat, soap, and skin which Milinko recognized to be that of a woman. The woman lowered the blanket and removed the tube from his penis; a sponge filled with warm water moved over his face, neck, chest, and torso, to be followed by the touch of hands, sometimes soft and warm, sometimes hard and chilling, which took hold of him and rolled him onto his stomach, passed the sponge over his back and buttocks, rolled him back over, replaced the tub, and pulled the blanket up over his body. Then another tube was put in his mouth, and soon, as he sucked, he began to receive, drop by drop, warm nourishment, at once sweet and salty. He had no way of indicating when he had had enough, but he had the impression that someone else could judge, since the food usually stopped flowing through the tube as soon as his hunger was satisfied, to be followed by water. Then everything came to a halt till the next visit, when again he would sense the familiar wave of scent slowly ebbing and flowing around him and try to guess what kind of woman it belonged to — fragile and dark? plump and mousy-haired?
Occasionally he felt that the woman tending to his needs was a redhead, and, remembering Vera, would let out a silent scream, painful and protracted. He could not go beyond that scream, for he knew nothing else: where he was, how he had got there, or why he was anywhere in the first place. As for Anna Drentvenšek’s diary, he remembered only that once (but what did “once” mean?), somewhere (but what did “somewhere” mean?), it had been mentioned in the street, when he could still use his legs (if he had ever had legs), by a girl (if she ever existed), who spoke to him about a diary (but he no longer knew what speech was). And then he would scream again, the scream being the only response of which he was capable.
2
Habitations. First, the Lazukić house, with its dome, set on concrete pillars in the fine, restless Danube sand, sand forever shifted by the winds. The façade, with its three semicircular bays of casement windows. A wrought-iron fence facing the street, with a gate that shuts with a clang. On the courtyard side, a terrace with twin flights of steps leading left and right into the garden, onto a lawn with three pines planted in a triangle. The air full of the smell of water and rust. Above the roof, a white gull’s flight and its near-human cry and laughter. Cleanliness, the rooms too well aired and drafty even in summer, and in winter warm only near the tiled stove, which go cold by dawn. Spare new furniture, polished to a high gloss. People calling to each other from room to room, echoes that deceive. Misunderstandings, weariness.
The Kroners’ house in the old center of Novi Sad, in a short, narrow cul-de-sac behind the Baptist church, where sewer and water pipes made their appearance later than in the suburbs. A solid, rectilinear frontage, unequally split by a wide, vaulted gateway, always open, that leads into an asphalt courtyard strewn with casks, crates, bits of carob pods, and, in winter, orange peels. Large rooms on both sides of the house, gloomy because of their narrow windows and cluttered with worm-eaten old furniture alongside expensive new pieces, all jumbled together. Vast, cold kitchens, larders with mounds of empty bottles and jars; a bathroom where towels are left hanging anywhere and more often than not end up on the floor. At the back of the courtyard, a detached, sorry-looking storeroom with dusty, many-eyed windows, a line of concrete blocks like an apron around its waist, and a wooden lean-to office.
The tenement containing Milinko and Slavica Božić’s apartment, behind the cavalry barracks. The roadway here graveled, bordered by ditches full of mud and rubbish, and in summer, choked with grass like the hair growing out of an old man’s ears. A low building at the back of the courtyard next to clapboard sheds and communal toilets. Swarms of flies and bees; pigeons on the roofs. At the entrance to the apartment, a kitchen with a shiny scoured stove, a sewing machine, and a sink that is repainted white every year. Beyond the kitchen, the main room, with twin beds; in the center, a table and straight-backed chairs; a dresser with rows of jars containing fruit and paprika preserves, each with a label giving the year.
Two streets farther on, in a small, low house, Anna Drentvenšek’s tiny apartment. One room and a kitchen. An old bed, a wardrobe, a table covered with green baize, a shelf of books — mainly textbooks and dictionaries falling apart from long use, but also an occasional novel and an anthology of German sayings, Geflügelte Worte. On the wall, a landscape in oils bought from the painter himself, a young man who sold his work from door to door one winter. In the kitchen, a half-rusted iron stove, a cabinet, table and stools, a hot plate on which Fräulein does most of her cooking — hastily, impatiently, because the room is permanently cold.
In Belgrade, a bachelor apartment on the third floor of a large four-story building with entrances on two streets. Massive, heavy objects, a clock with a chime, a dozen icons on the walls, an atmosphere of neglect impregnated with cigarette smoke.
Taverns in Novi Sad and Belgrade, established in low houses whose once-spacious courtyards have gradually been filled with summer kitchens, sheds, laundry rooms, rooms for assignations, courtyards where refuse has choked the grass, weeds, and the last unpruned fruit tree.
The hospital at Sauerkammermunde on a hilltop, 1,636 feet high, with an asphalt driveway ending at its gate. A high brick wall, behind which stand four square buildings, identical and equidistant, like the four spots on a die; each two-story building containing thirty-two rooms, of which one is the doctors’ office and another a small medicine storeroom. Behind the buildings, through a doorway in the brick wall, surrounded by trees — the forest yields to their advance — mounds with nameless wooden crosses.