That Krkljuš exerted the greater attraction can perhaps be attributed to a certain caution in Blam or to his lack of need to give his life direction, the same need that was to lead Estera to action. Čutura was completely absorbed in providing direction, to his own life and that of others, and Blam often wondered why Čutura had never tried to involve him in his political endeavors, though Blam was also careful not to give him the opportunity. On their walks home from school, engrossed in a discussion about a teacher, student, or class incident — in other words, in a discussion about the mechanisms of human nature and human relations — they often paused at the park fence, so intoxicated by the harmony of their thoughts that they were unwilling to let go of them, and Blam would suddenly feel that he was on the verge of paying for it all, that Čutura would ask him to deliver a secret message or at the very least confide in him the plans for a dangerous plot. Then, out of fear, he would put Čutura off with a joke or pretend to become skeptical or indifferent, thus cracking the armor tightening around him but also letting them preserve the pleasure they took in their heart-to-heart talks. After all, Čutura valued their talks as much as Blam or he would not have continued with them. The talks supplied him with themes and ideas, and while he did not draw on them directly, they helped broaden his outlook. The Occupation put an end to this formative period: it required an ironclad commitment, and Čutura was ready. The fact that the Occupation coincided with the end of school and hence the end of their walks together was merely an external confirmation of their separation. Sparks of happy recognition still flew between them later when they met in the street or at a gathering, but they no longer felt the need to exchange ideas, and by the last time they saw each other, shortly before Čutura’s death, the rupture lay far in the past and was complete.
Once he was cut off from Čutura, Blam followed the inertia characteristic of his dependent nature and leaned more and more in the direction of Krkljuš and Krkljuš’s circle — the friends of Krkljuš who magnanimously tolerated Blam or even valued him. Again, Blam supplied them with something they lacked, because a need for ideas is often felt by people or groups with narrow interests. During those few months Krkljuš’s band — Krkljuš, Raka the roly-poly pianist, Miomir the drummer, and Jole the lively trumpeter, always in a hurry and a sweat — lived only for jazz. Jazz was their revolt, their means of fending off the senselessness around them: the curfew, the blackouts, the bayonets at the ready, the orders pasted on walls all over the city. But they liked having an outsider in their midst, someone able to point out how shortsighted or vain their enthusiasm was, if only so they could recognize it better and cultivate it further. Blam was more observer than friend, fluttering around them like a fly around a swarm of bees or a hill of ants, showing up now and then at their rehearsals in Raka’s house (Raka came from a wealthy family and had a piano), smoking his first cigarettes, dropping a word of encouragement, an impression, a thought, and then leaving. Or he would stay and watch silently while they argued, gesticulating wildly, waving their instruments like sabers, each whistling and humming to demonstrate that his way of doing the previous song or the song to come was right. It was with them, yet at the same time apart from them, that Blam began showing up at the Maticki Dance School, which hired the band for a pittance every Sunday from five in the afternoon until nine in the evening.
The school was located on the outskirts of town, where Karadjordje Street ends after winding through the center, in a one-story house, not quite a peasant house, with a large annex at the far end of a courtyard. The dance teacher, Ognjen Maticki (who was absent during the Occupation, having been sent to hard labor), had torn down the walls inside the annex and turned it into two large rooms: a bright entrance hall with a brick floor and a spacious main hall with a wood floor, walled-up windows, and lamps shining at all times. Dancing was confined to the main hall, but even as the dancing went on, the young men and women ran nervously to the entrance hall and from the entrance hall into the courtyard and to the gate, gathering out in front, looking for someone, waiting for someone, deciding whether to go in or find somewhere else to go, counting up money for tickets (which were sold in the entrance hall by Maticki’s mother, an elderly, swarthy woman who wore a kerchief and sat at a table covered with a white tablecloth), or simply basking in the confluence of the music within and the conversations without, the smoky air and the fresh air, the bright lights and the twilight that grew darker as the evening wore on.
It was the constant commotion, the coming and going, the pushing and pulling, the indecision and sudden decisions that attracted Blam to the school. Participating in the excitement gave him a sense of relief. He would go in, usually with the musicians, take a seat on the podium behind the old, no longer shiny piano, and watch a slender, young, closely-cropped Mrs. Maticki welcome the first dancers and guide them to the chairs along the wall. He would listen to his friends tune up, or he would make an occasional comment, a suggestion about what number to open with, and not until they began to play and the couples were swirling did he join in. He would join a group of young men watching the dancers in the middle of the hall, which Mrs. Maticki did not like and put chairs against the wall to prevent. He would make up his mind which girl to ask, whether one of the quiet ones waiting along the wall or, more likely, a girl already on the floor. Cutting in was a common, even gleeful practice, though Mrs. Maticki disapproved, because life in the Occupation was looser. As a result, he could go up to a couple and separate the girl from her partner with a slight bow and dance with her until someone else cut in, at which point he would go out into the entrance hall and buy a soft drink from a well-groomed boy in a white jacket, take a seat behind the old Mrs. Maticki’s back at the cloakroom (empty because it was summer), or slip out into the courtyard when it got dark, weave his way among the couples seeking privacy — catching words of love, mockery, rejection, postponement — and out into the street, where he stood to one side, hands in pockets, as the crowd pushed past, going in and coming out, its voices blending with the music in the distance, so that he was both present and absent, aware that he could go back in and resume dancing or, just as easily, leave without anyone’s noticing in the dark and the crush. He loved how impersonal it all was, how he could ignore everyone around him, how coarse and natural life was outside the city; he loved this place where he was simply accepted and he could leave at any moment, because whether he came or went had no bearing whatever on the only thing people there cared about: a good time.