It was after this second disaster that Arsénie resolved never to leave his apartment again, running his real estate empire from a distance through reports from his wife and his lawyer and the monthly rent rolls, not to mention his trusty binoculars. Only in June 1968, after twenty-seven years indoors, does he finally resolve to venture out and inspect his properties. He has finally become suspicious that the documents he’s been shown might have been misleading him. The foray, his reentry into history, leads not to his enlightenment but to the third great trauma and then to his death.
Arsénie’s reminiscences seem to drift by free association from one time frame to another. Memory is interwoven with memory; at times it can be hard to keep track of whether he is talking about 1968 or 1941. Only gradually does it become clear how masterfully Pekić has built up his portrait of Arsénie and his world, brushstroke by brushstroke, conveying just enough information to advance not the story but the reader’s comprehension.
Arsénie is perpetually congratulating himself on his perspicacity, but he never comprehends the real reason for the changes he’s observed in the cityscape over the years, or why his wife and his housekeeper have been deluding him about the state of his real estate holdings: He is now the resident of a Communist country, and all of his buildings have long since been expropriated. Those characterless but efficient structures going up across the river are the innovation not of capitalist rent-gougers but of state planning officials. He’s lived a life of delusion for twenty-seven years — or longer than that, if one considers that his imaginary romance with his buildings had already long since ensconced him within a fantasy life that (just as much as the ordinary rentier’s calculating attitude) had alienated him from genuine human relations. Inwardly, he accepts responsibility for the destruction of a house—“it was I who had killed Niké”—though it was in fact ruined in a bombing raid, yet he refuses any responsibility for the people whose lives he has damaged: an old woman who commits suicide after being evicted for nonpayment of rent; his cousin Constantine, a builder, who died after a fall from a scaffolding following a quarrel between them; and finally the student demonstrator Arsénie confronts in the course of his final outing.
Must we condemn Arsénie? Should we pity him? Ethics and aesthetics may be at odds here, for Arsénie is a narrator of rare energy and, yes, charm. He may have kept faith with his sense of himself only by ignoring the world in which he’s been living, but how much he’s noticed, how many sights and sounds and smells he’s saved up in memory or imagination and spread out like treasures before us as he tells his story! And once he’s re-entered the world after his twenty-seven-year absence, with what fine-grained perceptiveness he takes in all that he continues to misinterpret! Consider the extraordinary scene in which, in his final walk through Belgrade, Arsénie seeks out a certain Martinović, the man who back in 1941 had purchased at auction the house that he, Arsénie, had so desired:
The room looked like a refuge in which the Martinovići, burnt-out survivors, had hidden the remains of their devastated possessions: canvas shades through which a greenish dusty light barely settled on the faded, threadbare surface of an office sofa; a table covered with a worn oilcloth; a triple Altdeutsch dresser, which creaked at every step; battered walls from which ribs of wallpaper hung down like dried tobacco leaves; and finally — there in the corner of the room, probably once the kitchen — a Moorish folding screen which in the pale glimmer from the window looked like ice overgrown with wild flowers and briars. I sensed too the bitter smell of stale medicines, musty leather, unaired eiderdowns, decaying clothes, parchmentized documents, and other petty reminders of decay: in a word, the intangible scent of misfortune.
And of course Arsénie is right — the Martinović family has suffered an immense reversal, though not for the reasons he assumes. They’ve been ruined not by speculation—“a gambler’s mad rush for easy profits, made on the bitter green baize of the roulette wheel of the stock exchange, in the lackeylike service of the god Mammon”—but rather by the reversal of fortune brought on by political revolution. Unlike Arsénie’s, their home has never been a haven from the encroachments of history. While Arsénie cannot understand what he’s describing, he conveys the scene with an almost hallucinatory vividness. As for Mrs. Martinović, perhaps it is not so strange that she takes Arsénie for a police agent. Who else has been so nosy about her husband’s confiscated property? This Serbian Rip Van Winkle is bound to be as misconstrued as he misconstrues everyone and everything around him. And yes, we readers can believe that we understand the encounter we’ve just read about as none of the actors in it can — the delicious irony — but we should also take it as a warning that many of our own sure understandings might be just as misguided.
Arsénie, that spoiled eccentric, is a grotesque, but one with whom it is easy to identify, at least for those of us who recognize that our illusions die hard. It takes more than one trauma — in this case even three are not quite enough — to overcome the self-confirming bias of belief. Pekić considered Communism to be one of those delusions, yet from a Marxist viewpoint, his novel can be considered a study of bourgeois self-deception.
Few novels have so brilliantly represented the isolation of the individual while at the same time conjuring, almost entirely through indirection, the historical forces (capital, war, revolution) that form him and against which he reacts. Jorge Luis Borges once reflected of his beloved Quixote that, “for both the dreamer and the dreamed”—that is, for both Cervantes and his protagonist — the tale “had been the clash of two worlds: the unreal world of romances and the common everyday world of the seventeenth century.” However, he continued, “they never suspected that the years would at last smooth away the discord, never suspected that in the eye of the future” the everyday reality of seventeenth-century Spain would be swallowed up by the kingdom of myth, “would be no less poetic than the adventures of Sindbad or the vast geographies of Ariosto.” The anti-Communist Pekić, by contrast, writing in 1970, undoubtedly dreamed of a day when the “common everyday world” of postwar Yugoslavia, the implicit frame for Arsénie’s tale, would have passed into the realm of mere legend, but he could never have suspected how quickly this would happen — or how quickly the very name of Yugoslavia would vanish from the map. Yet in a sense, the novel anticipates the abrupt transition that was to come two decades later, for the Communist era in his country takes place entirely outside the novel; it functions a bit like a strange dream one has had, whose mood imposes its character on one’s morning even though it’s impossible to recall.