I must immediately make it clear that before this offer I had never appeared at public gatherings; with the evident exception of meetings of the Chamber, auctions, and professional conferences, this particular art was for me something completely new. Without any doubt, I would have refused to take part — however flattering it was — had I not had in mind the benefit to my own business affairs which could accrue from this close and essentially intellectual contact with the wives of our most important and influential industrialists, merchants, bankers, capitalists, statesmen, and politicians. Above all, I didn’t have a very able tongue, although — here I’m giving passively the opinion of others — I knew how to rise to heights of poetic inspiration whenever I talked about my own houses or something directly related to them. On this occasion, however, there was to be nothing about houses, or at least about mine, though property ownership did come within the scope of the lecture. I was to talk about such great matters as the mechanism of economic developments which, it was naively believed, would lay the foundations for the prosperity of our flea-ridden, Levantine community. Most lamentably of all, in my statement of the essentials of the banker’s profession, for example, I was expected to praise that very type of possession which is the true antithesis of real possession, and to turn real possession’s living forms into a vampirelike roundabout of soulless and faceless figures on the current stock exchange index!
Arsénie Negovan could not agree to such blasphemy! I decided to make use of the occasion for myself — and, in a somewhat indirect way, for my listeners’ husbands — to outline my own ideas about the subject, mainly my views about the essential difference between the erroneously favored single-phase ownership and the benefits of the equal, reciprocal dual-phase type. This was my own terminology to illustrate the fact that true ownership can only be one in which the subject and the object share possession mutually, in consequence of which all differences between them are erased, so that the Possessor becomes the Possessed without losing any of the traditional function of Possession, and the Possessed becomes the Possessor, without in any way losing its characteristics of the Possessed. In short, I would explain my philosophy of Possession.
Carried away by this power for enlightenment, I threw myself into the work and quickly prepared an outline of my lecture. Bearing in mind my inexperience as an orator, I thought it best to test my impact on some more experienced speaker. Not wanting to give my casual, so to speak, amateur soliloquy any prior publicity — for it was in some way to be a conversation with myself at which, quite fortuitously, the matrons of our town were to be present — I took it in typescript to Mr. Joakim Teodorović, through whom, as the initiator of the function, I normally communicated with the Circle. It would be unjust to complain that Mr. Teodorović didn’t show an immediate interest in my work — perhaps “interest” is too modest a synonym for the tense expression of his face while he literally raced over the text, in which the heavy Remington letters stood out in lines like grains of wheat, like the lead beads on the wires of a child’s abacus — or that he was miserly in his praise, although for my restrained taste they were a little overeffuse.
Despite this promising reception, I never appeared on the rostrum of the Kolarac Institute with my “completely original angle.” To this very day I am unaware as to why this came about, and why in my place Mr. Teodorović himself gave the lecture, meekly and unintelligently retracing all those weary errors by which this vast subject is devastated. In actual fact I presume he retraced them, for it goes without saying that I didn’t have the honor of being present at the lecture. But this was not important for me now, invidia virtutis (or as is said nowadays, comes — invidia virtutis comes; envy is the companion of virtue), as the Romans would have exclaimed; all this was but a pretext for me to recall something quite different. Actually, in putting together the sketch of the lecture that was not to be, I had noted down in the margin, just as they came to me, several concise definitions, paradigmatic notes which were really too exclusive to be included in the framework itself. These notes should have been read by that idiot Joakim Teodorović, for him to see what a “completely original angle” really meant, but they were indeed the barest essentials of what, in a more subtle version, I intended to elucidate for my Serbian Sisters of the Circle. As far as I remember, these notes could be reduced to a number of axioms:
1. I do not own houses, we, I and my houses, own each other mutually.
2. Other houses do not exist for me; they begin to exist for me when they become mine.
3. I take houses only when they take me; I appropriate them only when I am appropriated; I possess them only when I am possessed by them.
4. Between me and my possessions a relationship of reciprocal ownership operates; we are two sides of one being, the being of possession.
There were several others — probably they began to develop the above principles in individual areas of ownership — but, hesitating on the asphalt threshold of Pop-Lukina Street, looking at the pale-colored, unequally hewn-out gashes of the streets on the other side of the imaginary procession, I wasn’t capable of recalling them. It was, indeed, superfluous to try. The ones I could remember were sufficient to restore my faltering conviction about the decision which I had then taken. I had to get across. Such decisiveness, whatever may be said, came straight from my possessor’s heart and was therefore legitimate.
Here, of course, that ill-considered step which for many years shut me in my house cannot be hidden. Perhaps the mistake was made later. I don’t deny the possibility that I even foresaw something of the sort, that I got something confused while forcing my way through the mass, or even during the subsequent incident. I can allow this — I’m only at the beginning of my reconstruction — but without any doubt, at the intersection of Zadarska and Pop-Lukina Streets I couldn’t have acted in any other way than the way I did.
At that time my heart, my possessor’s heart, was worrying about the house which my cousin on my father’s side, Stefan Negovan, had built on Kosmajska Street, No. 41: “Stefan’s Folly” as the neighbors called the free, and certainly lighter and more intelligent, copy of Dietrich and Eizenhofer’s Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Its appearance, taken from a baroque, aristocratic hôtel particulier, with some of the aspects and forlorn contours of a Chinese pagoda, gave the impression of a dwarf-size castle in the middle of the town, with tin, butterflylike wings as roofs from whose arch a mildewed copper dome burgeoned like a festering boil, like a breast with a circular lantern around it, with a tympanum in the middle of the façade, a blind, three-cornered Cyclop’s eye from whose edge hung two pairs of (four in all) Corinthian columns like stalactite tears, with the three-sided hollow of a balcony between them and loggias to the left and right, with French windows and an ornately worked portal instead of an entrance door. Nor did the interior lag behind the façade: It was hung with expensive wall lamps, and the ceilings were of alabaster and the floors of lacquered oak, with spiral staircases and raised marble daises. Even discounting the unique furniture — in which, en route to a bearable compromise, the haphazard taste of Stefan’s wife Jelena had clashed with the patriarchal heritage of her hated mother-in-law — the house recalled a padded chest where precious souvenirs were collected. And now it had come about that Stefan’s Folly had cast its Cyclop’s eye on me.