As I feared, the shoemaker Sofronije Živić worked on his loathsome shoes in a workshop of unbaked bricks which, parasitelike, clung to Aspasia’s defenseless back. A workshop resembling a disgusting tick which sucked out of the parent house’s body all the strength it possessed. And of course, under such conditions Aspasia’s garden was no longer a picture-book rosary but an abandoned polygon paved with bricks, halfway between a cesspool and a stockyard.
From the shoemaker, in his apron of shiny brown leather — to whom, incidentally, my name meant nothing — I managed to learn very little, except that he had settled there in 1950, that he took in footwear of all European types from boots and sandals to dress shoes and slippers, that the area had been heavily bombed, and that before he moved here, the ruins had been removed and the little park built in its place.
What could I do? I thanked the shoemaker and left. Only when I had gone halfway along Carica Milica Street did I remember that I hadn’t even looked at Aspasia.
My bookkeeping had always been irreproachably accurate; there were no inexplicable gaps or ambiguities. Subsequent alterations, falsifications, and deletions were unthinkable in the affairs of Arsénie Negovan. Every entry was written down punctually and precisely in the appropriate column. More than that, for each individual house I had kept in detail a kind of running record or diary in which, just as a proud father notes down important dates in the margins of the family Bible, I recorded important moments in the life of my houses: all the stages of their development on paper and their burgeoning growth on the building site; their short childhood, that carefree time in which they were not inhabited; their marriages, as I called their transitory associations with their tenants; and their temporary illnesses or misfortunes, followed by old age and death. Even those which for various reasons I disposed of — unwillingly, always with a sense of shame — were still entered in that account book as if they were mine, as if I were still caring for them, which in fact I secretly was: I established a discreet surveillance over them and in an indirect way I influenced their destinies, though to all appearances they were in the hands of others.
The bookkeeping columns dedicated to Niké, however, were half-empty. The last entries referred to Stefan’s letter (the invitation to the auction); then, under March 27, 1941, a space had been left where I intended to note down the price for which I bought the house. Under a later date was the information that on the evening of the 27th, as I was being carried back to Kosančićev Venac, the house was sold to Mr. Jovan Martinović, a wholesale grain dealer. Beneath Niké no line had been drawn; her account had not been balanced.
Was it because I had been guilty of her misfortune?
Was I guilty?
Alors, suppose that I hadn’t come upon the demonstrators, or that I’d pushed my way through the mob, taken part in the auction, and bought Niké. What difference would it have made, during the bombing in which she was destroyed? I couldn’t have protected her from the bomb: she would have been hit anyway.
No, Arsénie, you can’t give a true answer until you know how she was hit and to what extent she was damaged. Perhaps with a certain effort and expense she could have been put right and restored. Her plans still existed. (Even so, would that new, resurrected Niké have been my Niké, or just her successful imitation?) Perhaps Mr. Martinović hadn’t regarded such an error as either profitable or useful. For Mr. Martinović it had just been a heap of ruins like any other. I had to pay a visit to Mr. Martinović. Only he could give me the information that would establish the true measure on my part in her downfall.
The Martinovići lived in Topličin Venac, and it wasn’t difficult to find them: my memory for houses was infallible. There was no building which I couldn’t describe in detail, especially if it had attracted my attention because of some unusual feature. I could hardly remember Martinović himself, but recalled his house distinctly — most probably because of its color, since it had no other striking feature. It looked in fact as if it had been rubbed with wet ash. And if the house lacked character, this was entirely in keeping with the reputation Martinović enjoyed as a grain dealer in the market place. Now the house was hardly upright on its foundations, it was so run-down. Its paint — still cadaverous but visible — had peeled, as if the walls had been afflicted by some skin disease. The window panes were cracked; the wood was moldering like that of old sea chests. The crooked and rusty drainpipe came down, like a tin intestine, only as far as the ground floor, and ended in a broken stump.
Although Jovan Martinović had never been a house-proud owner in the professional sense of the word — my judgment of him was for that reason more tolerant than otherwise — he was not, even so, capable of such shameful neglect. Its desolate state could only mean that he had moved on, God forbid, gone bankrupt, which would not have entirely surprised me, since against all my warnings he had foolishly involved himself in speculation on the stock exchange. Unfortunately, my worst supposition was confirmed. As soon as the door of the mezzanine floor was opened, and the warm, dark, fishy smell of the entrance hall mingled with the semi-darkness of the stairway which smelled of a cold, unwashed marble ash tray, it became quite apparent that Mr. Martinović had indeed experienced the catastrophe I had foreseen.
Anyway, in the doorway, distorted on the smoky porch, as if from the depths of a dream brought on by an upset stomach, there appeared a strange being, an undulating form swathed in a shaggy bathrobe. Controlling my uneasiness at not knowing who it was I had in front of me, I said that I should like, if possible, to speak with Mr. Jovan Martinović.
“Are you blind or something? It says there clearly: Martinović, two short rings and one long.”
Indeed, on a slip of paper pinned to the doorpost it was written: two short and one long.
“Forgive me. I don’t see too well.”
“Go ahead, Grandpa, you don’t have to explain!”
With these words, the carnival-like being moved aside and banged its fist on the board which had replaced the glass in the inside door.
“Martinović, someone to see you!”
My reception was preceded by a scurrying from the other side of the board-backed door, a hurried scraping as if furniture was being moved. As I waited, it occurred to me that I should have written or at least telephoned before barging in on them. The door at last opened and in its narrow frame appeared a dried-up woman in a dressing gown of loose violet cotton. I recognized her, I admit unashamedly, more from the location than from memory.
Of course I could see it all. I take in everything with a lightninglike glance, whose efficacy comes from communication with houses and was perfected at auctions. 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. My professional experience helped me identify in it that element by which ruin, that final death throe of wasted riches, is distinguished from the smell of innate, inherited poverty — a smell which I had met long ago in the houses I rented out to people in the suburbs until, out of shame and loyalty to my theory of mutual possession, I sold them all without excessive loss and some even at a profit. I was at the very center of the devastation which Speculation had left behind; I was standing on the cold ashes of Possession, which had burned down in the fire of 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. And I felt unspeakably sorry that I had come here at all.