However, what I was really going to find I couldn’t possibly foresee. Although I strove sincerely, while making my final preparations to go out, not to think about Simonida, nevertheless from time to time I found myself letting my imagination run on, ordering incomplete and sometimes hardly formulated suppositions, as if cutting from an enchanted picture book damaged photographs which only partially realized all the possibilities passing through my mind. Who knows, perhaps I would find her firm, solid body decrepit, her face wrinkled and lined with creases; perhaps she had lost her freshness and inspiration. Well, all right, everybody gets old, houses too have their life span, and not even the best of care can save them from eventual decay; but Simonida could not possibly be in that condition yet. Simonida wasn’t yet fifty; next December she would be only forty-three. That isn’t old for a house. It’s the prime of life.
Why, then, was she being pulled down?
That was what I had to establish. I’d become accustomed to this problem through my experience with the two-storied Katarina. It was torn down for reasons which had nothing to do with the house itself. For just as people who have done nothing at all wrong are got rid of simply because they stand in the way of something, so houses too are destroyed because they impede somebody’s view, stand in the way of some future square, hamper the development of a street, or traffic, or of some new building. Yes, even though they are quite innocent — still in good repair and often, alas, in their prime — houses suffer execution because they hinder some more elegant construction, a building with a stronger spine, a building which lays claim to their place, their site. So Simonida didn’t have to be too old or fatally, incurably ill, for the decision to do away with her.
But what if she was? What if she were horribly ill — it couldn’t be old age — and it had been hidden from Arsénie Negovan? Arsénie had been told: Simonida is quite all right, you should see how firmly she stands, how superior she holds herself among all those youngsters, all those empty-headed upstarts of concrete, steel, and glass. Modern buildings have outgrown her but they cannot outstrip her. What mixture was she painted with that the color needed renewing so rarely? What was she built with to be so resistant? But now she has been stricken down by some mysterious disease, she’s falling apart, her stone is porous and disintegrating, her lintels are cracking, her walls crumbling, her stucco peeling like burnt skin, the wood at her heart splitting; nobody has lived in her for a long time, the occupants had to be evacuated so as not to be buried alive. But Arsénie was told — for he could see that Simonida’s rents weren’t coming in — that her tenants were in financial difficulties, and that no money should be expected from them for a long time to come; but you don’t need money, do you, Arsénie? — you collect houses, not money, you’re an owner of property, not a moneylender.
And suddenly everything had become possible. Since Katarina and Golovan — albeit for my own good — had tried to hide from me the fate which now threatened Simonida, why wouldn’t they with still greater reason have kept me in the dark for years regarding her true condition? And also of the condition of others about which, in that fateful sense, nothing had been said? Why had the money from the houses dried up all at once? It’s because of the crisis, Arsénie, I was told. Crises never affect everyone, Katarina. Outlay for repairs, Arsénie. Repairs are never carried out all at once, Katarina.
Once I had lost confidence in Katarina, I could no longer remain calm regarding other information offered me about my houses, my beloved houses.
I went up anxiously to the property owner’s map. This was a blown-up plan of Belgrade, drawn in India ink on a background of snow-white draftsman’s paper, on which the names of streets, squares, districts, and suburbs were marked in red, other geographical features in green, and the heading typed and stuck across the upper left-hand corner where the map ended toward Umka. As a basis I had used An Alphabetical Index, Compiled from Official Data from the Municipal Land Register, T. D. No. 25728/33, which had been edited and published in 1934 by St. J. Sušić, and Belgrade Street by Street, A Guide and a Plan, 1933, by the same compiler. Changes in street names, at the time when I still took an active interest in my affairs, were written in ordinary pencil, but clearly. At each spot where I owned a house there was a tiny cardboard flag, lemon-yellow or sky-blue depending on whether the house was bought or built under my direction. Each little flag had on it information about the name of the house, the district and street where it was situated, its number, the year in which it was built, the names of its designer and builder, the size of the plot of land, the number of stories and the style of the building, its investment value, its living area, the number and category of its apartments, and last but not least its rent.
I hesitated before the pictorial map like a worried general before a plan of his positions under attack, before the map which resembled my brother George’s headquarters sections, those useless copies of wars. Only on this map it was not phantom tank columns which were moving forward, nor phantom companies which joined battle, nor phantom bombers which razed towns to the ground. There was no record of ruin and destruction on this map, but only of building and preservation of what was already built. It was a picture of creation and not of destruction, and I stood before this model of my threatened possessions gripped by the fear that I might arrive too late, that during the time I had spent as a hermit, isolated from evil, irremediable misfortune had already befallen Sophia, Eugénie, Christina, Emilia, Serafina, Katarina, Natalia, Agatha, Barbara, Daphne, Anastasia, Juliana, Theodora, Irina, Xenia, Eudoxia, Angelina, and on their whole breed, as had now happened to the most beautiful of them all, my good Simonida.
Here in front of an ordinary drawing, a street plan in a bamboo frame, as if in front of some family altar, I felt remorse that I had abandoned everything I’d lived for to the care of others — even though at that time there had been strong reasons for my decision: the riots which had almost cost me my life. I felt remorse that in a cowardly way I had believed that I could keep myself from danger by cunningly dropping out of sight as if dead, instead of taking the bull by the horns as all true, stubborn Negovans would have done, resisting, fighting, retreating in order to advance again, until victorious or slain in battle.
Fortunately, I now again felt young and determined, just as when I had gone out into the town to contract the work for my first house with the builders. I turned back the page on the church calendar — it was June 1968—and without bestowing a further glance upon the room in which the open shoe boxes lay stranded like stricken ships, I went out.
•
And once again, by the gong at the front door of the house, I found myself in one of those distressing moments of my past.
Here come the first bombs. They’re falling slantwise. They seem to come from nowhere, swarming down magically out of the white honeycomb of the sky. Black holes open in the cloudless air. The aircraft can’t be seen. Not even their silver trails, ribbons of silver paper like the tail of a kite floating behind. They must be hidden by the upper arch of the east window, through which I’m leaning. The explosions are soundless. I pay no attention to them. I leave them to George. I’m certain that, shielded by the eaves above the balcony in Lamartine Street as by some stone umbrella, my brother, with the same binoculars — provided, of course, that Mlle. Foucault hasn’t yet dragged him away to the shelter — is watching the Allied squadrons and subjecting to withering criticism their frivolous formations, their badly chosen bombing runs, their ineffectiveness.