Houses

It was with Simonida that I began to give the houses names. First just ordinary names, then personal ones. They had to be distinguished, just as living beings are distinguished, by real characteristics, and not by the names of the streets where they were built (even though I picked their company for them), or by the tenants who occupied them (even though I tried just as carefully to give them the inhabitants they merited), or by the level of the rents which were paid for them. But I always chose feminine names. I didn’t do this because, in our language, the words house, block, palace, villa, residence, even log cabin, hut, shack, are all of feminine gender, whereas building, country-house, and flat are masculine, but rather because I couldn’t have entertained toward them any tenderness, not to mention lover’s intimacy, if by any chance they had borne coarse masculine names. While still looking at the drawings, I found appropriate names for the constructions I financed, although I often changed them when the buildings were finished.

When I bought houses already built, I would go into a careful analysis of their peculiarities, but in a quite different and much more fertile way than my professional colleagues, which earned me much criticism and mockery. The houses would be christened even before I had paid for them, then registered in the name of Negovan and entered on the property owner’s map hanging on my office wall. This meant that I had definitely decided to buy them. I had recognized something personal, individual, exceptional in the houses offered for sale, something without which they would have had no value for me. This way I could look at them, busy myself with them, and communicate with them as if they were alive, which in fact they were. In the course of time they would be transformed by extensions or conversions, their defects would be remedied or their advantages added to, and they would change with aging as I did myself. In a certain way, I think, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, they were a chronicle of my life, my sole authentic history.

And now they wanted to pull one of them down, Simonida, and in her place, at the junction of Paris and Prince Mihajlova Streets, they intended to put up one of their tin garbage cans.

Yes, I thought, they’re quite capable of it. It’s as if they were Bolsheviks. Perhaps they are secret Bolsheviks waiting for a sign from the Kremlin to rush in and pillage. If I don’t do something they’ll raise their hands against my Simonida. I haven’t the slightest doubt on that score. They tried to pull that sort of trick back in 1931. Lamartine Street at Kotež Neimar had to be straightened. George was living at No. 7a. Several houses which jutted out were threatened, among them the one I had named Katarina. It was named for Katarina because certain features of that thin, narrow house, as well as its simplicity and rationality, coincided with the character of my wife. What I undertook on that occasion I would have done for any house belonging to me. Not just for Katarina. I went to the Town Hall and demanded an annulment of the demolition order. Another street was designated for widening and other houses were pulled down, but my Katarina has remained in its place right down to the present day.

They’re clearly assuming that I’ve lost all interest in my affairs since I ceased to control them personally. But they’re mistaken! Arsénie Negovan isn’t going to stand by with his arms folded and watch them tear down his beautiful houses. No, sir. I still have some influence. It’s true that I seldom use it, but I still have it. In this town they can’t treat a Negovan as if he were a nobody, a peasant who’s just come down from the hills! Particularly if one takes into account that in my own way I’m one of the builders of Belgrade, one of those people who in civilized countries have streets named after them. No, I thought, they won’t be able to harm my Simonida; I’ll find a means of curbing them, I’ll direct their destructive eye onto some other building which doesn’t deserve to live.

First of all I’ll go to Paris Street. I’ll find out what’s happening there. Judging from the conversation between Katarina and Golovan, the demolition hasn’t started yet, but it will start soon. Very soon. They’ll have to use the dry weather to get the lid on their tin garbage can. I know how these things are done. There isn’t a single man in the building business who could put one over on me. Not the insatiable architects, nor the dishonest contractors, not even the slippery construction workers from Trsnotrava, to say nothing of pompous little civil servants. I decided, therefore, to go to the responsible authority once I had made sure that there was no simpler way to save Simonida. From the authorities I expected no problems at all. I knew people at the Town Hall. They would remember me from the times when I used to go to them to get the seal for my contracts. Nor had I anything to fear from higher authorities; there, my name was sufficient. Unfortunately, the difficulties didn’t come from that direction. And it was a question not only of Simonida. But so as not to confuse the issue, I’d take things one by one.

I straightened myself up slowly, in stages. The sharp pain beneath my rib cage had long since passed, but it had left a weakness in my muscles which had to be overcome by movement. It was as if I were lifting a heavy sack of sand onto my shoulders. Yet when at last I had stretched myself out, the weight seemed to have disappeared. I felt quite sound, and if it hadn’t been for a certain stiffness in the joints caused by my lengthy immobility, I’d even say that I felt a certain exhilaration, a renewed youthful élan. This pleased me, for the adventure — that’s the only word for all that I intended to do — required a stronger physical condition than is allotted to a seventy-seven-year-old ravaged by a stormy life.

First I checked if the outer door was properly locked, and as a further precaution I latched the chain. Then I went into the bedroom to choose the suit in which to go out. Opening the creaking doors of the oiled walnut wardrobe, I expected to see before me the dim contours of seventeen once powerful Arsénie Negovans hanging on an iron rod. Their smooth, crumpled shoulders would be drooping down dejectedly so that the hard skeletons of the coat hangers could be made out beneath, glistening with the transparent crystals of naphthalene, soft as hoarfrost. The sharp smell would sting my nostrils; coughing, I would fan the wardrobe doors back and forth several times to disperse the smell, though this would achieve nothing, since the smell certainly penetrated the wood. The ghostly ranks of cloth would tremble with the sharp swinging of the doors, and quite clearly I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to touch them since inevitably, if I put one of the suits on, it would look unreal, like a dried human skin from which the flesh had been shaken. It would remind me again of the photograph in George’s war album: a single gibbet, erected out of iron tubing in the shape of an enormous Greek letter π, from whose crosspiece the Austro-Hungarian soldiers had hanged Serbian peasants. The hanging bodies were crumpled like the suits on the hangers. I recalled another sight, too, that hadn’t particularly moved me at the time: at some abandoned Ukrainian station (was it called Solovkino?), I’d seen a grapelike cluster of five people who, evidently for the sake of economy, had been hanged on one rope with five separate wire nooses around their necks.

Now I’d feel that I had to choose between seventeen dead doubles, each of which was the coffin for one section of my life. For some I could still tell which year of the seventy-seven was buried there; the majority, though, would bring nothing to mind. I couldn’t even say where and when I had had them made. Of course the color and the texture of the material would remind me of the season of the year; but whether I was married in those tails darting out of the cavern of the wardrobe like a snake’s forked tongue, or in the morning coat with the lizardlike back, I simply couldn’t remember. The morning suit I used for official morning visits; it would be too serious for this sort of private stroll. But I didn’t want to put on just anything. This was to be my first time out in twenty-seven years. I was going to visit Simonida, I had to take account of my appearance. As far as the weather was concerned, I could dispense with an overcoat and put on the double-breasted blue with the white pin-stripe, although the light brown Ulster would be less conspicuous. I was afraid that the trench coat would hang too low: I had shrunk considerably since my heart trouble.