Blam goes out into the entrance hall, gropes his way to the door to Aca’s room, knocks, and goes in. The window is still open, and Aca is back on the unmade bed, surrounded by his notebooks, his hands between his knees, his face gloomy.
“Pestered the hell out of you, I bet,” he says with a sarcastic, almost hostile grin.
“Don’t be silly. We hardly talked. Well, what do you say? Are you going to play me that song?”
“Forget it,” Krkljuš says with a weary wave of the hand. “Some other time. Sit down and have a drink with me.”
Blam does as he is told, but as he sits, he is overwhelmed by the alcohol on his friend’s breath. It is as if the bed were soaked in it. The smell makes Blam nauseated and at the same time dizzy with hunger. “You know what?” he says, aware he is about to commit a betrayal. “Let’s have that drink some other time. I need to put some food in my stomach.”
“All right,” says Krkljuš, taking Blam’s departure surprisingly well. “Time to get back to the damn shop anyway.”
Blam goes into the entrance hall accompanied by his friend, who is whistling a tuneful melody.
“Say goodbye to your parents for me, will you? I don’t want to barge in on them. Tell them I had to leave.”
“Fine. I will,” says Krkljuš and sees him down to the main entrance, where, leaning against the wall, he follows him with unsmiling eyes.
ON THE DAY she died, Estera Blam went to school as usual and spent the early morning hours in class. During the third period — mathematics with nearsighted Mrs. Bajčetić—a folded piece of paper fell onto her exercise book from behind. She opened it and read the following block-letter text: “They are coming to arrest you. Go to Mara’s immediately for further instructions.” It must have been smuggled in. She turned instinctively to see where it had come from, but Mrs. Bajčetić noticed a disturbance at the door and the fuss in Estera’s vicinity, banged her ruler on her desk, and called the class to order. Estera hunched forward and read the message a few more times, then folded it, ripped it into tiny pieces, and dropped them into the ink bottle on her desk. Slowly, noiselessly she slipped her books into her bag, then raised her hand and asked Mrs. Bajčetić for permission to leave the room. The teacher granted it reluctantly, and Estera reached for her bag, but suddenly realized that she had no reason to take it with her, so she shoved it back into the desk and went out into the corridor. There she looked both ways, hoping to find the messenger, but seeing no one, she simply took her coat out of the cloakroom and left.
The house where Andja Šovljanski, alias Mara, lived was located on the outskirts of town, approximately a kilometer and a half from Estera’s school. Estera reached it at about eleven o’clock. By that time her class and the entire school had been searched by three agents. Angry at having found nothing and having received no explanation from the school’s administration or her fellow students for her disappearance, they phoned Counterintelligence from the headmistress’s office and asked for additional manpower. One of the agents remained behind at the school just in case; the other two set off for Estera’s house, where they hoped to find her or set an ambush for her.
In the meantime, Andja Šovljanski, Estera’s comrade from the Yugoslav Communist Youth League, had received word that her cell had been exposed and that she was to wait for Estera Blam and go with her to the village of Klisa, where the two could hide with an old woman by the name of Dara Aćimov. Andja knew the house, because she had spent the night there once after a field-burning session. The only trouble was that Andja’s message had arrived early in the morning and made no reference to the fact that Estera might not receive hers until quite a bit later. Andja dressed immediately and distributed the weapons she had been given for safekeeping — three hand grenades and a small-caliber pistol — among the pockets of her winter coat. Then the feverish wait began. She was alone with her grandfather; her father, a tinsmith, was at work, she had no mother, and her brothers were married and lived away from home. After sitting for hours in her coat weighed down with weapons, she started wondering whether she wasn’t wasting valuable time: maybe the instructions were wrong or she hadn’t understood them correctly, or maybe something had happened since they were written, something she didn’t know about, maybe more people had been arrested, Estera maybe, and here she was, sitting in a trap. By the time ten o’clock came and went, impatience got the better of discipline, and she decided to find out what was going on. She told her grandfather that she’d be back soon, that a friend might come looking for her, and that the friend should wait here for her. With that she left the house.
Estera found the door to Andja’s house locked and had to knock. Andja’s grandfather came to the door wearing a fur hat and a sheepskin coat and let her in when she told him who she was. They walked through the courtyard, which was bare of foliage (it was late autumn), and went into the kitchen, where a fire smoldered in the stove. Andja’s grandfather said Andja would be back soon. He laid more wood on the fire and rolled a cigarette with some tobacco from a tin box, and while he smoked, coughed, spat on the floor, and rubbed the spittle into the dirt floor with the rubber sole of his shoe, Estera stood at the window in her navy-blue coat and watched for Andja.
Andja had gone to see Sofija Kerešević, the cell comrade who lived closest to her. Proceeding warily along a treelined path and through mostly deserted streets, she paused at the slightest noise and ducked behind a tree whenever anyone walked past, remaining there until she was certain that it was merely a local resident on a peaceful errand. At last she reached the Kerešević house, which like hers was set back from the street and fenced off. She observed it for a long time. Nothing seemed to be moving inside, but she was still extremely cautious. She went back to the corner, turned, then turned again into the street that ran parallel to the street the Kereševićs lived on. She tried several gates, and when one yielded to the pressure of her hand, she went into the courtyard. There she found an old woman tossing her chickens corn kernels from a deep white plate. She asked the woman permission to cross her garden and, without waiting for an answer, set off through the withered plants, patches of grass, and half-bare fruit trees. She recognized the Kerešević house beyond the barbed-wire fence at the back of the property. She thought she saw something black moving in the courtyard, but couldn’t tell whether it was a person or an animal. She stood there, holding her breath, but when nothing seemed to move again and nothing made any noise, she slowly crawled under the fence and jumped into a ditch. The Kerešević courtyard now lay before her.
She saw no one, just the smoke coming peacefully out of the chimney in light white puffs. She straightened and climbed into the courtyard. Suddenly she caught another glimpse of the black thing. It was behind a fruit tree. She ducked just as it emerged in the shape of a human figure and started walking in her direction.
She spun around and retraced her steps, racing along the ditch and crawling back under the fence. A shout and then a shot rang out, but she did not stop. She heard a curse and saw out of the corner of her eye that the black figure was caught on the barbed wire. She ran past the startled woman with the plate of chicken feed and out into the street.
She could have kept running, out of town, through the fields, all the way to Klisa, where she would perhaps have found safety in the double attic of Grandma Dara’s barn, but she suddenly remembered that her instructions were to take Estera Blam to Grandma Dara’s, and she realized how wrong she had been to disobey them. So instead of running into the fields, she ran home. She heard shots, footsteps, barking, and whistling behind her, and through a fence with missing boards she saw several figures running from the neighboring street into hers, yet on she ran. When she got to her house, she slipped through the fence at a point where a board her father had not had time to reattach was lying on the ground; she even had the presence of mind to put it back so it looked as if it were firmly in place. Then she raced into the kitchen, where she found her grandfather sitting and Estera standing next to him, nervous from the echoes of the chase she had heard.