Article 9. To Mlle. Mélanie Foucault, retired army nurse, along with the apartment on Lamartine Street I leave, for her enjoyment during her lifetime, the basement house in Tadeusz Koszczuski Street, so that she may receive the rent until her death. Afterward the house is to revert to my universal heir as designated by this will.
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Now that’s done. Katarina will see that, despite my stern demeanor, property owner’s affairs have not alienated me from those everyday sentiments which she herself has cultivated. The legacies to Mlle. Foucault, Mr. Martinović, and the caretaker Maestro Šomodjija — not to mention those to Katarina, Isidor, and Emilian — give proof of my finer feelings, which have been disputed all my life. And since I’ve firmly resolved to leave nothing to that double-dealing lawyer Golovan (apart from the sad duty of certifying this will as cosignatory), and since I have no reason to leave anything to my country, which tomorrow will take everything it can lay its hands on anyway—voilà!
It is precisely that possibility which has worried me whenever I turn from my reminiscences to my will. All the time I’ve felt a certain resistance whose origin I haven’t been able to grasp. I attributed it to my hesitation as to what to leave and to whom, when I passed from my memoirs to my will, and to the sparseness of my own story, when I returned from my will to my life. But my anxiety was a natural consequence of my action; it resided in the irreconcilable contradictions between the order which I prescribed in this document — order which calls for legality, continuity, and justice — and the disorder which brings with it revolution: disorder which, constituting the life of the lower strata, calls for force, discontinuity, and illegality. Therefore one of the two, my memoir or my will, must be in vain. These incidental jottings of my memoir surely can’t be futile; they didn’t have to be and don’t need to be acted upon. But my will must be, if it is to be a will at last, if it is to be upheld as a document which determines the future of my property.
And when did a revolution ever have consideration for property?
When did it ever recognize the right of inheritance?
When did it ever respect any rights of ownership at all?
Perhaps this revolution will do all that.
Perhaps it will show some concern for that man who was carrying the red flag — the one who ruined my hat — if he’s still alive, of course.
Will it or any of its Aramaic brethren perhaps see to it that Mlle. Foucault gets what she has justly merited, or the humble caretaker Šomodjija? And that my houses are distributed as I have determined in this document?
What is it all for? Why am I writing a will?
To abandon it now, half finished — wouldn’t that be an act of surrender to the mob, quite incompatible with the dignity of a Negovan, and even more dangerous than the loss of my Boer hat?
No, not for anything could Arsénie allow his bookkeeping, of which this will is the crowning glory, to be left unbalanced. That would be beneath his professional honor.
And then, well, even the Revolution would have to give way to some kind of order and proclaim laws to be observed, among which those concerned with personal property and personal relations would occupy an honored place — even if the sense of possession was to all appearances abolished. And tomorrow, when Arsénie Negovan will be no more, people will accumulate personal property, and having done so will want to leave it to their children. And their children will want to go on accumulating and add what they accumulate to that already accumulated, and leave it to their children — and so on for ever and ever. The sense of possession is ineradicable; it will go on for as long as man exists, and heart and mind and character, and virtues and vices, and memories and goods and houses, and all this is only one huge estate under mortgage to death which during our lifetime we can augment or disperse.
Because of this, I won’t lay down my pen until I have concluded my testament, after which come what may!
Not counting Emilian, whom I don’t consider an heir, I still have two legacies to make, two further paragraphs in which I will leave my library to my nephew Isidor (insofar as it’s concerned with building), and an appendix to the one in which, along with all my movable assets, I will leave No. 17 Kosaničićev Venac to Katarina. In these additional paragraphs I must take care of the most delicate part of my last wishes: my efforts on behalf of my beloved houses.
By good fortune at least the most eminent of these buildings — by virtue of their incomparable beauty and because, by a coincidence in which their owner (I swear) played no part, they have served as setting for some of the most important if shameful events of our national history (I will mention only the officer’s plot against King Alexander Obrenović, which was hatched in Eudoxia before she belonged to me) — the most eminent of these buildings, I say, must come under the protection of the State. Nota bene, just before the war I presented a memorandum to this end to the appropriate ministries; but with a revolt beneath my windows, it would be unreasonable to hope that the State will take a sincere interest in houses, except to confiscate and destroy them. Originally I had planned, as is our custom, to leave my houses to Katarina. But as I’ve already pointed out, she has no affection for them; though as my heir she is in everything else a trustworthy person, she offered no guarantee of treating them well. And when I so recently discovered that she had conspired — it’s true, from the noblest of motives — with my lawyer Golovan in his miserable negligence, my desire to observe convention (which would surely have cost the life of my beloved possessions) lapsed entirely.
Therefore I have decided to leave my fortune to my nephew, Isidor Negovan, since in my opinion he is the only one of my blood relations who understands my houses, both as an architect and as a person, and who in the status of owner, may perfect that healthy relationship and at the same time — why not? — make it identical with my own.
Isidor J. Negovan is my nephew in the second branch and the fifth degree.
It is not the custom for a testator to justify his decisions, except of course if they go against the natural order of succession or deny someone their so-called rightful share. I nevertheless feel the need, for my own satisfaction, once again to go over the reasons which led to my choice.
First, Isidor loved and understood houses. More than that, Isidor was a builder, one of the most skilled in the business, and therefore the kind of person who, next to their owners, was closest to houses. Isidor was the only person with whom I could talk freely and openly about them. Isidor showed respect for my way of life, visited me regularly, and supplied me with books and especially information of vital importance for my work. Finally, he was alone: his father had left the country in 1944, driven out by the accusation of having built a building — a House of German Culture, or something — which was considered an act of national treachery; recently his sister had also left; and his mother was in an asylum with little hope of recovery. During the last few months Isidor had fallen into deep creative apathy, from which he would be roused only by busying himself with real buildings, instead of using his God-given talents on cemeteries, euphemistically called memorial architecture. Involvement in the possession of real, living houses could well encourage him to build them himself, and in this way he would gradually come back to his earlier grandiose plan to design the perfect city.
It was beyond all doubt that he was undergoing a crisis. It was a crisis that had come over him soon after he had accepted the government commission to build a monument on Banjica to perpetuate the National Triumph. At first he was full of enthusiasm, carried away by the same passion which defines my own relationship with my houses. But even then there was something unhealthy in his interpretation of the projected task. The sketches he brought to show me grew progressively more emaciated, and each time more mutually contradictory, so that the purpose of the building had been changed. Meanwhile Isidor became more and more depressed and ill-tempered. I interpreted his despair as the result of his exhausting struggle with a material which remained unresponsive. How wrong I was! I should have known that for a passionate enthusiast of his temperament, such resistance could only serve as stimulation, and that in his best works — I’ve seen them only in photographs — Isidor succeeded in breaking down the material’s resistance, and in forcing on it a form which at first seemed impossible. In short, I should have known that he was in the middle of something far deeper and more serious — that it involved a much greater alienation from his own art, or perhaps the greatest alienation of alclass="underline" from life.