“Quick!” Andja cried and ran back out. “Let’s go!”
Estera followed. They ran through Andja’s garden and leaped into the neighbor’s, but in front of the house they had hoped to reach they saw two gendarmes, their rifles ready. At the same time they heard the heavy pounding of a rifle butt on the door to Andja’s house and the crack of wood from the blow. Another shot rang out.
About twenty steps away stood a small, neatly white-washed structure, the neighbors’ summer kitchen. They made for it instinctively. Andja got there first and flung open the door. They both flew in and slammed the door shut. There was nobody inside. It was cool and quiet. Andja managed to slide the bar into the socket and bolt the door. Then she reached into her pockets, pulled out two hand grenades, and laid them on the clean empty stove.
“Take those two grenades. And make sure you don’t miss.”
She took the third grenade in her left hand and the pistol in her right. They then moved back to the wall and waited.
As the footsteps and whistling came closer, they could make out the voices and shouts of the men surrounding the garden. Then a shadow fell on the curtain covering the door window, and someone pressed the handle.
Andja pulled the trigger once, twice, but the gun did not fire: there were no bullets in the cartridge. She was stunned. At that moment the panes in the door window shattered, covering the kitchen floor with glass, and a rifle barrel topped by a fierce, mustached face rammed through the opening and past the curtain. The rifle went off. Andja grabbed her chest and fell to the floor with a scream. Estera jumped to the side, into the far corner, escaping the bullet intended for her. Crouching there, she realized she was still holding the grenades. She looked down at them, put them both in her left hand, and pulled the pin on one, as she had learned to do that summer in military practice. Then she threw it at the gendarme who had tried to shoot her, but it hit the crossbar between the broken panes in the door window and fell to the kitchen floor. She leaped to her feet, pulled the pin on the other grenade and this time managed to throw it through the opening in the door. At that moment the first grenade exploded on the floor, sending pieces of metal into her head and chest and thrusting her against the wall. She too fell. Immediately thereafter the other grenade exploded outside the door, wounding two gendarmes, one in the face and shoulder, the other — the one who had shot through the window — in the stomach and leg. Then all was quiet. Not until the gendarmes from the second squad had finished breaking down the door to Andja’s house and reached the summer kitchen did the shouts and curses start up again. There they found Andja and Estera lying dead on the floor, in puddles of blood slowly merging into one dark pool.
Chapter Ten
IN THE Naše novine Christmas issue for 1941, the first year of the Occupation, the paper’s cub reporter, Tihomir Savić, published a full-page feature entitled “The Life and Times of Our Editorial Board.” It is written in a jocular tone, as befits both occasion and subject matter, and illustrated by five portraits (four men and one woman) from the pen of an anonymous artist with a fluent, cartoonlike hand. The article begins with a description of the office: three rooms crammed with desks and piles of newspapers, proofs, and printing plates and populated by a small army of newspapermen scribbling, dictating, talking over the phone to correspondents, assigning articles, accepting advertisements. The article goes on to introduce the members of the team separately — sketch and text, sketch and text, and so on, down the line. First comes Predrag Popadić, who is characterized as invariably well-groomed (his sketch shows him with an arrow-straight mustache over a sarcastic smile, shiny, wavy hair, and a tie perfectly tied) and coolheaded, never losing his equilibrium, not even if he is short of material for the next issue, in which case he sends a cub reporter — Tihomir Savić, say — to some “scene of the crime” or other, knowing Savić will not dare to show his face without a scoop. The subject of the second sketch, a large-nosed profile with hair sticking out behind the ear, is the chief political commentator; he is described as morose and laconic, always off in his dream world. The next, who has a round, bald head, a double chin, and two dots for a nose, is the editor for national news. He is known for injecting a note of levity into the tensions of life at the paper. Then comes a good-natured, bovine face with eyes slanting downward and a bow tie under a wiry neck. It belongs to the editor of the games and children’s page, who is in fact a confirmed bachelor with no hearth or home, a connoisseur of cafés and streets after dark. The only woman — who is pictured with heart-shaped lips, long eyelashes, and a turned-up nose — is said to be not only the fastest typist in Novi Sad but also capable of brewing the most divine coffee and winding the most ornery customer around her little finger. And finally the boyish face, all eyeglasses and flowing hair, belongs to Tihomir Savić himself, who is so young that he still believes in the beauty of life: in addition to the articles that put food on his table, he writes poetry in the wee hours of the night.
Notwithstanding the superficiality of the texts and accompanying drawings, they give a recognizable if one-sided picture of their subjects, but, then, Naše novine looks at everything one-sidedly. The other side is lies and coverups, a willingness to whitewash reality — to preserve a little place sheltered from reality — with a non-existent harmony and meaning. The editors will eventually pay for that other side: the editor-in-chief, the chief political commentator, and the national news editor will be shot for collaborating with the enemy; the editor of the games and children’s page will be sentenced to hard labor and die in prison; and the sweet young typist and reporter poet, who marry the following year, will escape with the retreating German troops and end up running a bed and breakfast in Australia.
Nothing Savić’s article describes is left in Novi Sad today but the premises he evokes in the opening passage: the three rooms above the Avala overlooking the courtyard, then as now bustling with filmgoers before the matinees and evening shows. Immediately after the war came to an end and Naše novine closed up shop, the space was occupied by a young partisan officer and commissar who used it to entertain transient Comrades and local girls, but he was soon replaced by a higher ranking officer and his family. Next, the entire floor — the entire building, in fact — came under the management of the cinema, which was ordered by the local command to find the officer another apartment. From then on, Naše novine’s former premises resounded once more with ringing phones and clacking typewriters, though the staff was of course different: two young women — one newly married, the other, a cashier with a trace of a mustache and newly divorced — and a middle-aged family man, a former gymnast with a stiff, dignified way about him. But if a current-day reporter decided to do a feature on them, he might well come up with similar portraits; indeed, even the side of their characters omitted from the feature — their tendency to lie, though now in the more innocent guise of providing fantasies on the silver screen — could be seen as unchanged. Which confirms both the stability of the human condition and the futility of the word as a means of exposing it.