“Yes,” I said without bitterness. “Always new construction.”
There was no point in harsh words. She, poor child, just didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand that possession, like any other living thing — like love, for example, love or fame, power or capability, vice or virtue — must be fed, must grow, become fruitful and multiply, if it wishes to go on.
At this, I somewhat conceitedly set about explaining to her the beneficial significance of the reproductive urge for the industrial and social prosperity of the nation, referring continually to nature, and seeking out its already well-trodden paths, when suddenly she burst into tears. Seeing her distress, I abandoned my exposition. (Our personal contribution to this universal urge for reproduction was at that time, due to the ramifications of my landlord’s affairs, relatively lacking, and the fate of our only son, then not yet born, would later demonstrate that it was better to put a stop to such negligence.)
“For God’s sake, Arsénie, can’t you forget that house just for once?”
That evening we were awake for a long time, both because of the heat, which the proximity of our overheated bodies in the marriage bed increased unbearably, and from worry.
“How can I forget it when he’s ruined a whole street?”
“Sometimes I feel like setting it on fire!”
“And how do you think I feel about it?”
“It and all your own cursed houses!”
“He’s loused up the whole street!”
“The whole filthy town!”
“The whole street, I tell you!”
Indeed, as regards Stefan’s respect for conventions such as the unity of the object with urban space and its character, he could have put up a Chinese junk or some mammoth Polynesian idol at No. 41, had he wished to, and produced the same unseemly effect.
“What can you do now? It’s there.”
Perhaps I could have forced something through the Town Council. I would have received support from the property owners of Kosmajska Street: something of the sort was hinted at (with due respect for my family ties with Stefan) by Mr. Martinović, the wholesale grain merchant at the corner of Kosmaj and Topličin Venac, with whom I had the doubtful pleasure of making my first visit to the monstrosity. But the affair could never get as far as pulling it down, which would have been the only just and logical decision. God knows what kind of administrative circus we would have had to embark on — evidence and counterevidence, committees and subcommittees, complaints and petitions, applications, specialists’ reports, delays and postponements — without any real administrative outcome other than to provoke a dispute with Stefan and to offer the Negovan-Turjaškis yet another chance to accuse me of the Oriental sin of disloyalty to the family.
“I’d end up being called disloyal, and envious into the bargain, but still not achieve what I wanted.”
“I think I’ll go to sleep now,” said Katarina.
“You don’t understand it at all.”
“No, I don’t.”
“That monstrosity of Stefan’s would stay where it is, but I don’t say that nothing at all would be achieved. At least we could make certain that such abominations were stopped in the future, perhaps on the basis of some committee to keep watch over the town, since we still don’t even have an advisory body to defend our town by law from the whims of dilettantes and the nouveaux riches. We want to build a skyscraper — the only reinforced concrete skyscraper in Europe, and so forth — but when you get caught short in the street as I did recently, while tying yourself in knots you have to rush around to a friend’s — if you’re lucky enough to have one — and even then you can’t rush off straight from the door. You have to kiss your hostess’s hand before you can work around to your emergency. Otherwise you’re left only with some statue in the park, or a telegraph post like any little dog. He has to lord it over us, doesn’t he, with his Viennese secessionist horns for architectural candles. He probably thought that Kosmajska Street’s deadly provincialism needed jolting, as if streets were plum trees that have to be shaken, and as if Aspasia, say, wasn’t exciting enough. Some of our buildings are depressing, no question about it. But that my Aspasia with her faced stone and restrained decoration is old-fashioned, as he’s been saying, and rather impoverished-looking, we’ll have all that out in the open and soon, too. And if Stefan imagines that by building his monstrosity he’s found the most effective way of reviving the street, that just shows his own obscene sense of life.”
Unfortunately, that evening my reflections found no support in Katarina; on other evenings she was generally less vague, more receptive. She had been asleep, I suspect, for quite some time. She was sleeping soundly as if nothing at all unpleasant had happened, and attentive as I am, I didn’t have the heart to wake her and go over my decision with her. But later, whenever mention was made of Stefan’s house, Katarina expressed a harsh, irrational hostility toward it for which I was never able to find a sound basis.
A day after I had ceremoniously pronounced that I was going to ignore the monstrosity, I stood before it again. Every day, Sundays and holidays excepted, according to an established schedule, I paid a visit to one of the rented houses, and on the following day I went to see Aspasia. Once en route, I was ashamedly aware of where I was really going. Stephanie of Vračar was on the list, and there was no legitimate reason for me to change the route of my inspection. And of course, when I found myself there, I couldn’t, and most probably didn’t want to, overcome the temptation. And so, furious at my own irresolution, I walked a few paces farther and once again found myself in front of Stefan’s house.
Hardened by the first appalling impression, I was now able to look at the house in its own light, resisting the temptation to pass judgment on it because of the imagined unpleasantness it would cause Aspasia. I could cope with the unpleasantness later; for the moment, it was the house itself that troubled me. With quiet deliberation I plunged into her luxuriant forms, her butterfly-shaped roof with the upturned edges beneath which tin was curved up into the gutterings. The copper dome for some strange reason no longer reminded me of a boil but rather of a full breast straining skyward. As for that tympanum, supported on columns of Corinthian slimness, it would indeed have looked much worse if the designer had filled the simple field between the architrave and the main arch with figures of famous warriors or gods, half-gods, and quarter-gods in some farcical action such as the slaying of bulls.
Then the portal, a special feature of that deranged house which seemed to lead not into an ordinary lay dwelling but into a shrine: a shrine to Money, perhaps, and in which I failed to recognize, until I got up close to it, a wild variation of the triple-nave porch of King Milutin in the cathedral church of the Sacred Presentation of the Virgin at Hilendar. Its various divergences from the original were the obvious contribution of Madame Jelena Negovan-Georgijević to that weird house: the surround was like Hilendar, of white marble, perhaps slightly more grained, grayer, but it was outlined by the Tree of Good and Evil. The vault, also like Hilendar, was supported by three consoles; three Doric caraway trees in the form of a half-rolled leaf with protruding veins, which would suggest to the uninitiated a family crest, although no Negovan ever bore such a thing. On the plaque behind the caraways it looked as if someone in righteous anger had smashed a beer bottle against the door jamb — which, all things considered, would not have been surprising. Finally, the door itself was quite independent of its Mount Athos originaclass="underline" it was oak, cruciform, double-paneled, and from it, as from a gloomy face, emerged the thick yellow tongue of an engraved doorknob.
And so, when I saw her for the second time, I mollified my judgment of Stefan’s house; I went on calling her a monstrosity, but there was no further mention of avoiding her at all costs, and what’s more, I singled out the gutter as a successful combination of the useful and aesthetic. Leaving aside the details, the portal was the only feature which I could in no way swallow, but this apart, the house was to the highest degree an individual expression. In principle, of course, I liked such powerful and imposing houses, and in actual fact, they were the only ones I liked. Among my own houses not one could want for praise, not only for some particular feature, but for the special impression which the house made as a whole. Now, one way or another, I began to go around more often; pretexts about Aspasia were no longer necessary. With every meeting the dome, that hidden boil on her tin crown, became not a breast but a bud which oxidization had successfully changed into spring greenery; the four petrified tears which slid down the tympanum now excellently matched her troubled face (later I came to believe that they were tears of longing for me); while only the portal of the house stubbornly maintained its sobering role and had the effect of a single startling feature in an attractive face, a feature which, by some inverted logic, charms us more than all the other features which truly attract us.