The man didn’t understand what Melkior was on about, and the word imagination struck him as downright offensive.
“Imagination?” he asked sternly. He knitted his eyebrows and looked Melkior in the eye with unconcealed disapproval. “Conscience, not imagination! What’s there to imagine? Shall I pretend I’m not afraid of war? No, not for myself! Nor for the wife! I told them this morning at the Mobilization Office … They gave me papers for Apatin … I said, I’m not talking about my wife … If there’s got to be a war, I said, you won’t be canceling it for my wife’s sake. Right? But how can I look my fourteen-year-old boy in the eye and pretend to be as full of cheer as if I were going bowling when the child reads the papers and knows that the Jerries broke through the Maginot Line and took France in a month? Children are no longer babes these days. The boy knows where I’m going and he never says a word … And I hear the little ones talk: Daddy’s going to drive a tank, they say. That’s what things have come to!” and the man spread his arms, showed that they were holding nothing, empty helpless arms.
“So you’ve been …” but the man didn’t let him finish.
“Called up!” he cried sharply as if cursing God. “There, see for yourself: youngsters strutting about free as birds, picking up girls, while they go calling us up, the class of nineteen hundred! They told me — because I’m a driver with Impex — they told me I’d been reclassified as a tank driver. But I’ve only seen tanks in the cinema! How on earth am I going to drive one? And Russian — because they say the Russians are going to give us the tanks — Russian tanks are not designed for our kind of terrain, no sir, not by a long shot! That’s something for those bigwigs up in Belgrade to sort out, not for a simple driver like myself, right?”
Melkior had been looking in all directions in search of Dom Kuzma and scarcely listened to the argument about the tanks. He asked the man offhandedly, only to be polite:
“Not for our kind of terrain, you say?”
“By no means! Those are steel fortresses, weighing upwards of ninety tons, what use can they be up our hills? This is a mountainous country.”
“How strange …” said Melkior quite absentmindedly. He was overcome by an odd kind of queasiness at the word mobilization. “Mobilizing, aren’t they?”
“You bet they are! My best friend’s been in since last Tuesday. Class of nineteen hundred, same as me. He’s all right, he’s a tailor, they didn’t post him, he’s stitching great coats, sleeping at home. They didn’t even cut his hair. And me they’re sending to Apatin!”
The man had softened with self-pity, so much so that his eyes went moist. Melkior felt the pointless need to offer consolation which humans resort to when failing to find a better or more sincere feeling.
“Who knows? Perhaps it’s only exercises. After all, there’s a war on in Europe, nobody wants to be caught by surprise.”
“That’s just it!” cried the driver with desperation as if Melkior has guessed what he feared most. “That’s what Hitler is counting on — surprise!”
Coming quite close to Melkior, he said in a confidential whisper, “There are Jerry spies and fifth columnists everywhere. They’ve been paddling about in rubber boats since nineteen thirty-seven, photographing the natural wonders. Tourists,” and he laughed with bitter irony as if he had found some relief in a shot of stiff drink.
“But you’re busy,” he added, self-conscious, having noticed Melkior’s impatience. “Yes, well, we’ve all got our worries. Goodbye,” and off he went, opening his paper again with an air of importance, like a caring man among the lot of happy-go-lucky fools.
Melkior remained where he was. What was his rush? His pity over Dom Kuzma’s fate struck him now as ridiculous. The word mobilization had filled him with a feeling of unbearable dread, the restlessness of a terrible anticipation had come over him. This was now something he would have to live with. … There appeared (childish, of course) images of deserted streets, of doors and shops boarded up. … The dead city has shut itself into its walls, with not a sound to be heard, not a light to be seen. Behind closed shutters cautious matches were struck, papers burned in stoves, things piled into suitcases: people packing, hurrying, leaving. … The streets were deserted and silent. The eerie quiet was disturbed only by an occasional government motorcar driving past at breakneck speed; it carried urgent orders: burn the documents … submit the report. … The echoes of horses’ hooves in the night, the whisper of mysterious words among the sentries, top military secrets.
Unrealistic and childish, like Dom Kuzma’s Samson story in Melkior’s boyhood. Nevertheless Melkior found serious, military pathos in those images. He pictured himself as a muscular, strapping soldier decked out in full army gear (isn’t that what they call it) standing at attention in a column of awesome Samsons about to slay the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. … All they were waiting for is the order from the officer on the white charger …
Reflected in the plate glass window, among the shoes on display, was Melkior’s thin, unprepossessing silhouette, a poorly built city dweller. The slanting image reflected in the shop window triggered a crafty sneer inside Melkior, and the word mobilization suddenly found itself in autumn mud churned by a squelching olive drab monotony of dejected strangers on some endless trek; there was the bluster of angry sergeants, the tired voice of sodden boots, and the mysterious word “aide-de-camp.” Here was born a fear of the new events around him: the driver bound for Apatin to drive a tank … across our mountainous country. … Oh for a mountain and a forest in which to go quiet and still like an insect curled deep inside the bark of an indestructible tree: I’m not here … and to live, to live. … How to conceal one’s existence, steal from the world one’s traitorous body, take it off to some endless isolation, conceal it in a cocoon of fear, insinuate oneself into temporary death?
Dom Kuzma had no idea that he might be the object of envy. … Arriving at a weighing machine tended by an invalid in a passageway, he doffed his hat, ran his handkerchief over his small moth-eaten head with ears — as if two angels were carrying it, ran his handkerchief over his thin sweaty neck and the inside of his hat, donned the hat, put the handkerchief in his pocket and stepped up onto the platform.
The invalid was waiting only for him (it was getting very dark): he stirred obligingly and made a hurried stomp with his wooden leg, put on his thread-reinforced glasses and weighed Dom Kuzma with what might have been due reverence. By all appearances, Dom Kuzma was a good regular customer who had long since earned the man’s full confidence. The question of confidence was key here.
The patient whose life depends on testimony from a common weighing machine is likely to have little confidence in a commercial device (which was after all invented for the purpose of deceiving), and even less in its master. He is suspicious and thinks everyone is out to con him, to do him out of several precious decagrams, of the last thing supporting his life — his very life, my friend!
Dom Kuzma waited anxiously for the fateful amount which meant to be or not to be. He actually fiddled with the arms of the scale and had some words with the invalid, brushing the latter’s hand away impatiently, but calmed down eventually and made his peace with the scale, collected his ticket and went away, worried.
It seemed to Melkior that he was witnessing a crafty rite designed to test the grace of God, if not His actual existence. With intellectual embarrassment, as if he were extending his palm to be read by a palm-reading neighbor, he stepped onto the platform with an anxious heart. Apatin is a town on the Danube, he thought, or the brand name of an anti-apathy drug. …