I myself, on the other hand, am attracted by the bombs. The round, moving, shaking azure veil in the binoculars is crisscrossed with projectiles like flying dots, like the wayward petals of a giant iron flower which has fallen apart high above the roofs, and is now scattering itself over the earth in slow, hesitant fragmentation, casting its seeds over the thick, powder-dry, smoke-filled furrows. Katarina pulls me away from the window—“You must go down into the cellar, Arsénie”—but I won’t give in, I cannot leave my houses. I go on trying to guess in what area the bombs will fall, which of my houses is in danger. This is difficult, all the more so because my wife is at me to come away from the window. At first I think that the raid is over the Third and Fourth Wards, above the heads of Agatha, Juliana, and Barbara; then, carried by the wind, it’s all falling on Sophia, Christina, and Simonida; then from the right, from the direction of the railway station, comes a crash like the tearing of gigantic dry tree trunks, which I can hardly make out. Now, with Katarina trying to get me to go down into the cellar, I’m leaning across the sill of the west window, from which I can catch a glimpse of the balustrade railings on Angelina’s roof. Luckily, Angelina is unscathed, wreathed in a fiery mist but apparently undamaged. Unfortunately, from this distance one can’t tell if she’s been hit in the back. Behind her the detonations move on, lightninglike, downriver; it’s as if along the shore, between the blades of the railway line, some invisible beast whose red paws are raising clouds of soot-colored dust is moving forward in convulsive bounds. The giant grows weak before reaching the top of Senjak hill. Calmer now, I have time to explain to Katarina why I can’t go down into the shelter while my houses are in danger, why I have to stay where I can give them courage even if I can no longer save them, but that I have no objection to her going down, and promise that I’ll follow immediately. In the meantime a second invisible giant with a roar follows in the smoke-filled track of the first, directly onto Senjak ridge, where Eugénie stands alone and unprotected. A third rumbles away to the right, its heavy footsteps stamping across the river, and buries itself in the Sava embankment.
Beside me stands Major Helgar, Bruno Helgar from the ground floor. “Um Gottes Willen, Herr Negovan, das ist ein Wahnsinn! Hören Sie nicht den Luftalarm? Man muss in den Keller hinabsteigen!” “It’s very easy to go down into the cellar, but why don’t you stop them?” I shout. “They’ll destroy my houses! Haven’t you got some way of making them stop this bloodletting?” “Our antiaircraft defenses are in action, Herr Negovan. We are doing everything we can.”
With Katarina’s gentle support, Helgar drags me away from the window. “Don’t be foolish, Herr Negovan, you can’t help your houses. You’ll only get hurt yourself.” “Am I important?” “And who’ll be left to take care of the survivors?” asks Katarina. “Who’ll repair those that are damaged?” There’s some sense in that, lato sensu, and I’m obliged to accept it. I let myself be led down the stairs, which are shaking as if a powerful motor is buried beneath the stone — a furious dynamo which keeps grinding to a halt with a muffled explosion, then continues its pounding with redoubled force — and I am taken into the laundry room, away from the vaulted edge of the concrete trough which is faintly lit by a dimmed oil lamp. Seated on an upturned linen chest, I suddenly feel as if the maddened machine is all around us, around the mildewed walls which are shaking off plaster and cement, and which tremble as if in the grip of a fever. Major Helgar takes a slim metal flask from his pocket. The raid had caught him in the bathroom: his officer’s jacket is thrown over his pink torso, overgrown with curly bristle the color of corn, and his cheeks are covered with a white, dried layer of shaving soap, like a clown interrupted while making up. He offers me the brandy, confessing that for such occasions—für diese besondere Gelegenheiten—he has prepared a dozen such containers (empties from some army medicine for rheumatism) which are both solid and light.
I decline his offer.
“My husband doesn’t drink, Major,” explains Katarina. She wraps me in a blanket which she had been carrying when we were still arguing, when she still wasn’t certain whether I’d agree to come down, and when I was still certain that I wouldn’t move from the observation post until the air raid was over and all my houses safe.
“I won’t drink with you, Major.”
“Why?”
“You can guess.” The motor around us slows down, then starts rumbling again.
“Because I’m a member of the occupying forces, I suppose. Ein einfacher Eroberer, nicht wahr?”
“No. It’s because you’re a soldier. Because of your war and not because of your occupation, Major.”
“Well, the war is as much yours as mine, Herr Negovan! We’re only two sides of the same bitch of a war.”
“You’re mistaken,” I counter emphatically. “This war is not mine!” I’m shouting above the detonations which now merge into a single incessant rumbling. “A man who builds houses or owns them cannot be party to a war. For him all wars are alien.”
My tenant’s lips open and shut in short jerks. He is talking, not to me but to Katarina, whom he is urging to get away from the outer wall and take shelter beneath the concrete trough. In that continuous torrent of noise, I’m striving to pick out from the single impervious mass of sound, from the middle of the acoustic cube in which I’m imprisoned, the scream with which my houses collapse — to distinguish the death rattle of Theodora at Dedinje from the agony of Alexandra at Vračar.
I ask Major Helgar — as a soldier, invader, and destroyer he ought to know — if every house dies as it lives, or if, like people, in death they cease to be distinguishable from one another. Instead of answering, without the slightest respect he pushes me rudely under the trough, and then he too squeezes in sideways.
I might easily never have recalled that barrage of noise. In fact the very next day after the Easter raid in 1941, when I was brought an exhaustive account of the damage — which, thank God, was far less than my panic-stricken estimates — I began to exclude that ill-favored raid from my conscious memory; or rather, I compressed it into a relatively ill-defined area of my memory, a cocoon which only under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances could be broken open. Thus of all the raids, there remained only a condensed impression in which an indefinite feeling of horror predominated over the most impressive scenes, and I would never have relived it in such frightening detail had I not again come down the same steps, and had that disintegrating pressure not at last been exerted. This time, of course, I didn’t continue down into the cellar but went out into the street, reflecting on the creaking gate which needed oiling.
The ground floor shutters were flung wide open; I had to move off quickly to avoid the kind Mr. Mihajlović, whom I hoped I had left in the certainty that I was resting in bed. I rounded the corner of Srebrnička Street, from where, stealthy but unhindered, I could take a good look at the house in which I lived, and which from the window I could only see at an angle. Near it a gas station had been installed. On both sides of a prefabricated hut, in which all sorts of brightly colored cans with strange labels were displayed, stood four squat blue-and-white gas pumps with thick hoses twined around them.