“Nonsense! I feel all right. I’ve never felt better.” That wasn’t absolutely true, but I had no time for confessions. And it was better that way.
As usual, Katarina couldn’t let it be: “You’ve been told to walk in fresh air for at least an hour every day.”
“Don’t you think I do?”
Indeed, I had established my regular walk inside the house. I had opened all the doors between the rooms and made myself a “track” long enough so I didn’t have to turn around every minute, since a change of stride bearing weight on my damaged right leg still caused me pain.
“You call that walking in the fresh air?”
“I’ve opened the windows. We’ll see about going out later on.”
I never actually said that I wouldn’t leave the house until the war was over. I wasn’t in the mood, or it wasn’t the right moment. Sometimes I wasn’t feeling well, since the effects of my injuries were still with me. And lastly, I had at hand my most convincing reason, the only one in which there wasn’t even a suspicion of pretext: I had a lot of work to do. Each day I had to read Golovan’s summaries and various experts’ findings, sort out the rent receipts, approve the signing or termination of leases, documents for which the powers of attorney were insufficient, bring my correspondence up to date, file papers, check the ledgers, put the card index in order, study the photographs which had been coming in for some time, and in general occupy myself with my houses even more actively than when I had had them constantly before my eyes.
Apart from all this — I note it for my own satisfaction — I now had time to complete my education in housing. I had read a great deal before, and knew more than many practicing architects and most city landlords, but it was never enough, always less than what any self-respecting property owner should know of his profession.
Here I shall take advantage of a pause in my narrative.
•
Article 1. Fully conscious and in possession of all my mental faculties, I hereby express my wishes concerning each section of my personal library in the field of architecture, easily recognizable since all volumes are bound in dark red calf-skin. All these books are to be excepted from the total of my immovable assets at Kosančićev Venac, which I otherwise bequeath to my lawful spouse Katarina Negovan, née Turjaški. The books shall be entrusted as a separate bequest to my nephew Isidor Negovan, son of Jacob Negovan, architect of Krunska Street, No. 19a.
(The list of books which makes up the legacy bequeathed to my nephew, Isidor J. Negovan, will be found with the other documents attached to my last will and testament in a white sealed envelope at the bottom of the top right-hand drawer of my desk. The key to this drawer is hanging from my belt with my other keys.)
•
But again, can I bid them farewell without a single good word for them? Of course I can’t say that those books about architecture made me fall in love with houses. They only explained to me why I love them. From them I was schooled in houses’ physiology, their circulatory system, their epidermic defensive envelope, even their stomachs, their sensitive stomachs, not to mention their life process. In addition to those features common to the majority of houses, I was particularly troubled by these secondary differences, I’ll call them differences of class and race, which despite the same materials that created them, distinguish the Morić Khan in Sarajevo from the Carleton Hotel in Cannes; Mansart’s Maison Lafitte from Eigtved’s twin palaces in Copenhagen; Hood’s Daily News Building in New York from Loos’s House of Commerce in Vienna; Perret’s building on Rue Franklin in Paris from Gaudi’s Casa Mila in Barcelona; or even my Daphina, designed by J. K. Negovan, from Wright’s Falling Water.
Lastly, also bound in calfskin on my shelves, were the biographies of the great master builders which I had obtained through the kindness of Jacob Negovan, through Mr. Kon the bookseller, or in the course of my journeys abroad. From books, then, I had come to know the mysterious process of a house’s conception, initiated long before its violent birth on the building site.
So as I have said, I had more than enough work, and an abundance of pretexts: my illness, business affairs, the war, the Occupation. In the final analysis, doesn’t everyone have the right to take a breather, to retire, to collect himself? When some famous person goes into a monastery, walls himself up suddenly in the stone box of a hermit’s cell, we show approval, but when a businessman takes brief refuge under the roof of his own house, he comes up against strident objections. Anyway, I went on repeating, I am, my friends, in excellent shape, you can expect to see me out again very soon. Yes, yes, out and about. When? That, unfortunately, I can’t say. In all probability, I’ll go out when the situation clarifies itself and I manage to find out what’s really going on outside. Incidentally, isn’t everything taking its normal course? I attend to my work, my professional interest in my houses hasn’t diminished. What’s more, it’s been strengthened through the action of an intermediary. (However much confidence I entertained toward Golovan — far better if I hadn’t! — my lawyer served me almost as an adding machine, a writing implement, or a tool which, while functioning irreproachably, had to be oiled regularly, supervised, and corrected.) We entertain as before; Katarina still has her Thursday sessions — true, because of work pressures I drop in on them less often, but we listen to the radio, subscribe to newspapers. In short, contact with the outside world is maintained in all respects.
To be honest, all that about the radio and the newspapers was not exactly the truth. For some time we did indeed listen to the radio. Apart from my beloved music, especially if it could be visualized in material terms — I transposed Bach’s fugues into the soaring towers of Gothic cathedrals, Mozart’s concertos into transparent crystal-glass pavilions, and Schubert into family salons looking out onto a garden, but was incapable of making anything of Beethoven (I wasn’t fond of Beethoven, who seemed like a storm, always in unpredictable movement; I couldn’t find a form for him in any building) — apart from my beloved music we listened to the various communiqués from the fronts until, I can’t even remember in what year, the air raids on London began. It was not enough for those monsters to attack houses; now they had started to demolish them as well. I responded by refusing to listen, and then I ordered the radio taken out of the house. As for newspapers, here I was less threatened, for I could pick and choose what I read. They too became preoccupied with the war; when I read of how much damage the Allied bombing had caused to Berlin apartment houses, I gave up all my subscriptions and freed myself of the obligation to suffer because of the insanity in which I had no part.
And so it became the custom not to talk about the war, out of respect for the owner of the house. This deterred George from dropping in, as my brother could think of nothing more useful than battles. Since not even politics, the cause of this destruction, were mentioned, other family friends stayed away who held forth on nothing else.
At first, because of their carelessness, certain events broke through the deadening layer of cork with which I’d lined my study at Kosančićev Venac. Thus I was made aware of food rationing. I learned also about the curfew, though it had little bearing on us except that Katarina had to arrange her Thursday soirée for the early hours of the afternoon. I knew of course that the Croats had proclaimed some sort of independence and liquidated their Serbs, Ličani, and Bosnian Moslems — always unreliable builders, by the way — whose bodies, it was said, were floating down the Sava as far as the piers of the railway bridge. I couldn’t make out a single one with my strongest binoculars, to confirm whether such refugees’ tales were exaggerated. Much was made also of a certain Mihailović (no relation to the gentleman from the basement flat), an infantry officer of the General Staff, who at the head of volunteer peasants was fighting against the Communist rabble which had committed that infamous outrage against me at the junction of Kosmajska and Pop-Lukina Street. By all accounts the Russians had begun to reconquer Russia. And when, on my own misplaced initiative, I learned from Major Helgar that on January 25, 1943, they had entered Voronezh, the vision of merchants thrown on their knees in the mud — the vision which has haunted my footsteps for the last fifty years — was sufficient to confine me to my bed, from where I categorically forbade them to tell me anything more about the war.