That, then, was the reason why even now it made no sense to look for another route to Simonida. Between me and my threatened house serried ranks of riffraff, whom nothing could disperse, were still passing; in fact they were there only in my irritating memory, and their phantom procession was no longer under the control of the real laws of pressure and compression, but of some kind of laissez faire, protected by memory, over which only I had a certain influence. Only I, therefore, could eliminate them, although the term “eliminate” could in no way be taken literally, for it was not my aim to erase my events from my memory; I could have done that only by eliminating their living results! Rather I desired to reconstruct them in the transforming light of new consciousness, bearing in mind the forthcoming meeting with Simonida, over whose uncertain position they perhaps had a fateful power — to reconstruct them unhurriedly, objectively, as it were outside my own self, and to show myself that my decision to withdraw from society had been at the very least premature, irrational, unfounded, in short mistaken, and that but for that decision I would today have been free of the need to defend my embattled domain.
I believe, however, that it would be useful to look back a little and explain why I hadn’t returned home immediately on coming face to face with the demonstration. I can safely assert that among the property owners there was not one (and I knew them all well, and had maintained professional relations with the most eminent of them) for whom the safety of his own skin wouldn’t have been more vital than his work — work in that higher sense which doesn’t depend on the size of income or the index of growth, but on the character, capacity, and depth of feeling which together are put into it.
Such men increased their possessions either through inertia, to be secure in old age, or simply to strengthen and solidify their personal or social integrity. They didn’t do it to augment their property as such, or in any way to become identified with the things which belonged to them, so that they should merge with these objects of commercial control into an indivisible whole, be absorbed into a mutual lymphatic system for the flow and flood of capital, feeling, will, rent, ideas, instinct, profit, hope, beauty, revenue, passion, and the remaining forms of living — a unity of two otherwise opposite beings in which, as in ideal love, it would no longer be possible to distinguish possessor and possessed, owner and owned, and where the very act of possession would be so completely reciprocal that sometime, perhaps in some perfect world, it would become one with the act of self-perception.
It goes without saying that my professional friends were far from the ideal concept of property ownership. The exception, although in a completely different sphere, was perhaps Theodore, the deceased Theodore X., Negovan’s adopted son, the one who had studied at the Jewelers’ School in Amsterdam. Every diadem, necklace, bracelet, stud, earring — each individual piece of jewelry in his shop possessed him to the same degree as he, Theodore, was its possessor. Even more so, for Theodore was capable, in his otherwise voluntarily subordinate position, of manifesting scrupulous effort, fatherlike care, tender love, and even adoration of the particular article of adornment he owned (compare this with my attitude toward my houses), while the jewels (again akin to my houses) could only return all this devotion with an unimpassioned shine which sparkled, in all its colors, from behind the thick crystal pane of a display cabinet, with its comfortable bed of purple and dark blue satin.
Certainly those other possessors would not be capable of such things. Indeed, can I call them by that honorable name? They have become so alienated from their own possessions that, since no direct or personal link binds them, they no longer possess at all in the popular sense of the word, nor does the possessed have any right over them. These men no longer operate in real objects belonging to them, but in their vague, alien, shadowy affairs, such as acquisitions on the stock market whereby industrial and agricultural products, immovable assets, land, mineral wealth, ores — in a word, all the wealth of this planet — are transformed into paper values, barely perceivable in concepts of rent, dividends, shares, loan extensions, cash and terms of work, or agreed-upon deferred payments (just as nothing at all could be found out about my houses — about their appearance and soul, or our mutual relations — from the concept of rent). Inevitably, that abandoned trace of reality is finally lost by its owner. Yet it’s quite inappropriate to call them owners, for they have acquired only echoes of those shadows — in fact, their formless movements up and down, movements defined by the stock exchange index, by the possessor who, speculating à la hausse, on the rise of shares, or à la baisse, on their fall, in fact possesses only disembodied differences between changeable and similarly disembodied sums, nuances which themselves are exceptionally inconstant and changeable.
In short, between the other owners’ and my own understanding of possessions there had come about — gradually, of course — a complete difference of opinion which could, for the sake of expressiveness, be compared with the essential difference between the theological representation of God as an impersonal concept of omnipotence, and the real, incarnate God which believers experience in their very soul. This opposition had led me to suspect that all my apparent “professional friends,” if by some mischance they had found themselves in my position, would have retreated before that street of rioters, probably because everything which made it necessary to pass through that pandemonium, through that molten hell as over an enemy redoubt, could be postponed to some more favorable occasion; or if it couldn’t — if it really were a question of that unique chance by which it is sometimes possible to surprise the market — they would nevertheless have preferred to renounce the profit involved than to risk their own life.
(My exclusive aim in pausing at this to some extent historic spot was not to reconstruct my feelings at that time, in the context of conditions and their meanings for me then—that would have been a real and useless feeling, like that which against my will had once again drawn me back to the funeral of Constantine Negovan or to the laundry room under the stone trough — but rather to subject them to a critical assessment from the considerably altered present-day viewpoint. To disclose the errors of my behavior which had almost brought about my demise, I had to comment on them, so as to be able to argue with those earlier feelings as if they hadn’t belonged to Arsénie Negovan, but to some other person, quite indifferent to him.)
Although I wasn’t stubborn in the usual sense of the word, I was embellished — if indeed it is an embellishment, and I believe it had to be so, Katarina’s views to the contrary — I was embellished, I repeat, by that conqueror’s nomad’s, and traveling merchant’s constancy of purpose which brought my ancestors, still bearing the Graeco-Tsintsarski name of Nago, from the backwoods of Aegean Macedonia, out of dreary anonymity, to attain first of all a separate identity, and later our enviable present-day power in society.
I would never have written all this down, of course — I was already making spontaneous use of it, living it in fact — had I not been asked to give a lecture at the Jubilee of the Circle of the Sisters of Serbia. The ladies of the organizing committee intended this to be a series of lectures about the multiple aspects of urban life under the general title “The Different Faces of Belgrade,” which was to take place once a week in the large hall of the Kolarac Institute. B.P., Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Belgrade, was enlisted to say a few words to those eminent ladies, so desirous of knowledge, about the artistic realities of the capital. (To this day I’m not clear why he thought it appropriate to deliver, in his otherwise incomparable manner, something on “The Eighteenth-Century Frenchwoman.”) N.N., an experienced Treasury architect, was to summarize the architectural content of the general theme, following which the biggest names were engaged according to their own special interests. And so, as secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, I was chosen to inform my ambitious listeners about that less romantic aspect of Belgrade life, the mechanism of its economic development; in this way, apparently the part of the general title of the series promising an insight into the unknown side of the town would be fulfilled. So I had to talk about the monetary system, stock exchange speculations, exports and imports, industrial perspectives, trade and the market; about goods, clearing, rent, stocks, shares, bills of exchange, bankruptcy (both real and fictional), imposition of taxes, accumulation, profits, and wages (I remember that under wages it was suggested that in passing, in nuce, I should dispose of the Problem of the Workers). But all this, of course, in a way which would be both entertaining and accessible to the ladies.