The second printed source, Naše novine, appeared as the events took place and bears the stamp of the men who masterminded them. Although it covers almost exactly the same period — from 16 May 1941, when its first issue came out, to 6 September 1944, when it closed — it gives quite a different picture. True, it contains items that read: “E. F., a Jewish cantor from Belgrade, was tried yesterday by the Supreme District Court for crossing the border illegally… Once he has served his sentence, he will be sent back across the border.” They give everything the semblance of legality, but fail to mention that E. F. has crossed the border between Serbia and Hungary illegally in order to escape the gas chamber and that when he is sent back across the border, he will inevitably end up in one. Moreover, these or similar stories — about the decision to check identity papers in a certain part of town or the arrest of Communist suspects or the shoot-out that resulted in the deaths of Estera Blam and Andja Šovljanski — always run side by side with other items that, taken together, are meant to provide a panorama of daily life, one in which court cases and shoot-outs and other unpleasant incidents are counterbalanced by happy occasions. “Among the first to pass the driving test given yesterday morning at the driving school was the well-known radiologist Marcela Jagić.” “The choir of the Cathedral Church sang its two hundredth liturgy under the direction of Professor Milutin Ružić on Saint Nicholas’s Day.” “A sixty-two-year-old agricultural worker by the name of Paja Nikolić tried to kill his wife and then himself in a fit of insanity… He attacked his wife Marija for no apparent reason upon arriving home the night before last.” “Pera Nikolić, cabinetmaker, hereby announces his marriage to Bojana Jovanović.” “Madame Biljana, the well-known cosmetics expert, will soon begin writing a column for Naše novine.” “Barber, 24, Eastern Orthodox, owns shop, seeks suitable marriage partner. Hairdresser preferred. Send letters to ‘Barber’ c/o Naše novine.” “The Kiddie Korner: Greetings, children, to your special page! Readings for the young of every age!” “Naše novine’s Story of the Day: The Most Expensive Kiss.” “Naše novine’s Latest Serialized Noveclass="underline" The Investigating Corpse.” And so on.
Naše novine did not come out on 21, 22, and 23 January 1942, the days of the Novi Sad raid (the general curfew prevented both reporters and typesetters from leaving their houses), but neither the next issue (25 January) nor the one that followed made any mention of the event. As if on 25 January there were not more than a thousand frozen corpses lying in the streets, as if the snow were not red from blood, the walls not splattered with brains, as if a whisper of horror were not making its way through ten thousand houses. Naše novine reported, on that day as on any other day, first the news from the front, then the orders of the German High Command and proceedings of the Hungarian Parliament, and finally such local items as “Express Train Traffic Halted,” “Thirty-Six-Year-Old Peasant Found Frozen to Death,” “New Price for Thatching,” “Minus Twenty-Seven Recorded at Sunrise on Friday,” followed by the children’s page, the story of the day, the serialized novel, the classified ads…
Which of these is the true picture? Both, of course, and neither. Representing as they do the opposing viewpoints of accusation and defense, finality and continuity, the essential and the superficial, openness and secrecy, history and day-to-day existence, they are like two drawings of a countryside, one showing the mountains and rivers, the other the roads and villages. The only way to come up with even a marginally accurate landscape is to superimpose one drawing on the other.
MIROSLAV BLAM’S LOVE erupted along the border that determined his behavior in school, that is, the border between Aca Krkljuš and Ljubomir Krstić Čutura. With the Occupation, the differences between these two became even more clearly marked: freed from the restraints of the classroom, Krkljuš started a jazz band and Čutura went underground. Yet both were motivated by the same stimulus, revolt, which in those early months of the Occupation, when the shock of being uprooted from the daily routine for an unforeseeable period of time and with unforeseeable consequences was still uppermost in the minds of the entire population. Revolt for the Hungarians and Germans was a matter of taking a deep breath and seizing the unexpected opportunity to rise in the world, to become rich and famous; for the Serbs, it was a matter of feverishly sniffing the air and predicting that a regime based on murder and abuse could not last forever; and for the Jews, it was a matter of stammering about how offended and humiliated they felt. But each group pinned its desire for change on revolt, as when a ship goes down, the flailing passengers grasp at full or even capsized lifeboats.
Blam was one of the passengers. He too clung to the idea of revolt, eager and apprehensive, excited and remorseful, full of hope and the darkest foreboding. Until the Occupation, Blam was a prisoner of the house on Vojvoda Šupljikac Square — in chains but with privileges — having been charged, as the only son, with the mission of acquiring a higher education and a place in society, so he could break down the walls of alienation surrounding the family. Then suddenly he was deprived not only of the chance to pursue his education but also to make use of what education he had, thereby losing both his prisoner status and his privileges and ceasing to be anything at all. Paradoxically, however, he gained by the loss. It put him on an equal footing with others. Because now schooling, jobs, progress up the social ladder — everything he had been counted on to achieve — had for tens of thousands of others become the booty of chaos, the spoils of war, blood, despotism, and destiny. They were all of them wrenched from the comfort of their homes and tossed into the street, at the mercy of the people pursuing them, closing in on them like a pack of stray dogs around scraps of meat.
Blam too, with nothing to do, no goal in life, separated from a family racked with anxiety and desperation, attracted to everything new, excited yet frightened by it like a child by fireworks, spent all his time in the street — watching. He watched the Hungarian officers in their caps jauntily pushed back, their trim tunics and gray lace-up boots, watched them strut over soil they had conquered only with the aid of a foreign power, watched them bow to and kiss the hands of the wives of newly appointed officials, the wives of new owners of shops confiscated from Jews, and the wives of Budapest lawyers who had descended on this hotbed of lawlessness like vultures; he watched the women, some beautiful, others hideous, dressed in their best but all vulgar reflections of faded glory; he watched gendarmes in black plumed hats patrolling the streets two by two with flashing eyes and with rifles slung over their shoulders, defending the new order, the new disorder, the insanity, the disease; he watched the German soldiers as they stood guard before their barracks, arrogant under their helmets, scornfully observing the spectacle they had set in motion and were now directing; he watched the Serbs and Jews, shopkeepers, artisans, and former officials stopping to have a word with a fellow sufferer, whispering, looking both ways, shaking their heads, then parting sadly to return to their deserted rooms to wait. He watched old men and women in black who, not having grasped the change or lacking the strength to adapt to it, went with heads bent to church for consolation. And he watched young people restlessly gathering, pushing, shouting in the squares, along the promenades, bursting with anger, resistance, the desire to fight, hatred, youthful indignation at injustice, foisting pamphlets on one another, sharing news, showing off the knife or pistol handles under their clothes. He saw Čutura among them, always in a hurry but purposeful, always on the fringe of a crowd he seemed to hold together with the invisible rope of his will. He saw Krkljuš dragging his saxophone case on the way to practice or surrounded by the members of his band and whistling the latest swing or fox-trot hit they would be rehearsing the next morning. Hoping to learn how to merge with a strong, well-defined group, Blam would join sometimes one, sometimes the other.