This continued right up to the autumn of 1944—with the exception of the comforting news that the Russian onslaught on the Danube had finally been stopped, and the further news that by rapid advances through Italy and Greece the English and Americans were tightening a double pincer around the Balkans. In 1944, with the end drawing near, I couldn’t hold it against Katarina when she informed me that Allied and Yugoslav troops were at the approaches to Belgrade (fortunately nothing more was said of the Bolsheviks); that, judging by the gunfire, their entry into the town could be expected any day, as I observed for myself with my binoculars trained on the street fighting down by the King Alexander Bridge.
It had been said that I had had more good fortune with the Occupation authorities and their civil representatives than other property owners due to my reputation, the name Negovan, and my maintaining relations with them only through my attorney Golovan, who (I must give him his due for that period) had been a forceful representative and faithful interpreter of my owner’s rights. My rigorous retirement, I believe, had saved me from those unpleasantnesses to which even our nearest neighbors on Kosančićev Venac were exposed. Even so, I’m in no way ashamed to declare how elated I was to see the backs of the Germans — and the shuddering rears of their tanks like a praying mantis — crawling over the bridge to the west. My good Katarina was crying — from happiness, of course — and that was the first and last time I ever saw her cry. She was trying hard to get me away from the window, from which, quite forgetting myself, I was loudly encouraging our valiant liberators. Even more, I had completely ignored the danger to which, in the street fighting, they were quite involuntarily subjecting my houses, those same defenseless buildings for which I had so ardently prayed to God during the air raids. And so, close to the window, I wouldn’t give in to Katarina, until I realized that such childish behavior didn’t accord with my dignity, never mind my years, and what’s more could be fatal, because the west window dominated the river, the bridge, and the Sava quays, and could be taken for a command post.
I should make it clear at once that I didn’t follow my father Cyrill or my brother George in their monarchist convictions, even though, of all art forms, architecture had been the most favored by the monarchy. But that day, October 20, whose dawn on the greenish, shaken walls I greeted with all my heart, was not an ordinary one; for me it signified the explosive return to their God-given place of things violently overturned; the restoration of the lawful regime; the re-establishment of security.
With such encouraging prospects in view, I could already begin to think of going out of the house. Not at once, of course. Things had to be given time to settle down. My unhappy experience after the first war prompted me toward caution: for quite a few years after the Armistice conditions had been highly irregular. I remember the efforts I had had to make to obtain even the simplest building material, to achieve priority in litigation over building lots in the center of town, and to get bank credits. But in the Twenties I had been young and in a hurry, whereas now I had time to wait and see how the new turnabout would work. After the Unification I hadn’t possessed a single house except the two I had inherited, and they were shared with my brothers George and Emilian (his religious name); after the Liberation I had forty-nine, not counting building plots already purchased, land under option, and sites where work in various stages had been stopped to await better times. Clearly I had no cause to be rash or overbold in going out into town again.
Katarina agreed to this new postponement, although it continued to place on her shoulders the responsibility which we had originally agreed would be only temporary. But in fact, on her initiative, I now began to think of prolonging the status quo for an indefinite period, especially when she picturesquely described to me the pitiful state of the town: “You, Arsénie,” she said, “you simply couldn’t bear all those ruined buildings!” Yet eventually I would have gone into town if Katarina hadn’t behaved quite as uncompromisingly as on the occasion of my first decision not to go out. She now deterred me from it with the same Turjaški stubbornness she had once used to urge me to go out, and I was thankful that she had at last understood my decision to retire. The change in Katarina’s attitude was probably influenced by the unexpected visit of Dr. Simeonović, according to whom the condition of my heart had sharply deteriorated, so that any kind of movement was precluded. And so, when I asked for newspapers, I was told that the war was still going on, and when Germany capitulated, that the newspapers were still filled with war news, so that it seemed it had never ended. “You can’t find a single page,” said Katarina, “on which there isn’t a photograph of some ruin.”
Then came the crisis which I have already described: the chance discovery that my Simonida was to be torn down; doubts about Golovan, Katarina, and their professional reports; the fear that something was happening to my other houses as well.
That very morning, June 3, convinced that it was still not too late, I had impatiently waited for Katarina and Mlle. Foucault to leave.
I was actually going out!
With a feeling of relief and adventurous pride I got up from the bench and, as much as my years would allow, hurried off toward Simonida, where I hoped the professional rebirth of Arsénie Negovan, property owner, would begin.
How best to approach the house in these unusual circumstances?
It was important to re-establish our onetime personal relationship, maintained during my hermitlike seclusion by means of photographs and Golovan’s suspect submissions. I cannot but admit that everything I had undertaken since going out of the house was more like the pilgrimage of a dispirited old man, searching for the past in unfamiliar places where he had erected its landmarks as memorials, than the march of the architect forging his future plans. Simonida was my last chance to end this futile wandering, to spend the rest of the day usefully for both myself and my possessions.
My pride in my house was, alas, rudely shaken when, en route, I found myself quite by chance in front of the most insignificant of them: the only house which, thanks to the builder’s pigheadedness and my unforgivable negligence (I had been away on a journey) enjoyed that life in an evil way, an adequate, but truly evil way and the only one that I shall speak of without respect or love. I would very gladly leave her out, but everything that is written down here on receipts and rent accounts is nevertheless my legal testament, and in such a loan from death there is no point in lying.
This “house”—which I must summon up all my courage to call mine — did not have a name. Even her model, built as a result of Katarina’s forgetfulness or carelessness of my own, was chopped up with an ax and burned the very day its illegitimate creator brought it from the office. In short, she was expelled as a monstrosity from the tribe of my houses, and the fact that she hadn’t been sold was due partly to the war, partly to the fall in market prices, and partly to Golovan’s negligence. Finally, to round it all off, this house was truly ugly with her blind, prisonlike walls, clumsily bared, with bilious yellow ceramic moldings on the parapets, and bands of flowery white natural cement in horizontal spurts, with windows like gun emplacements, with a gate which called to mind the sooty doors of a baker’s oven. Despite this, I shall proceed with it in the following manner: