WHILE TIHOMIR SAVIĆ was hard at work on his Christmas feature, Blam spent a good deal of time just below Savić’s windows in the courtyard of the Avala. These were the weeks immediately following Blam’s marriage and Estera’s death, a time when his summer fever of rebellious expectation, fear, and hope gave way to shock. It was in a state of shock that he made the daily but brief, tongue-tied visits to his mother and father, trying to comfort them but knowing he could be of no help, not even by reminding them of his existence as a son, a druglike substitute for the object of their attention. In addition to the state of shock, which he fought, he had a numb drunken feeling, which he embraced. He saw Estera’s death — so sudden, dramatic, and out of character with the person he knew, yet so inexorably real — as the end of a period of wanderings, false hopes, and vain psychological schemes. Death was something Blam now found everywhere, in every word, movement, and newspaper report, in the patrols in the streets, the flags flying, the guards and weapons making their appearance everywhere. Anything outside those clear signs of destruction — the visits he paid to his parents, for instance — was merely an opiate, a means of putting death out of his mind for a while and thus letting it come more quickly, easily, painlessly.
The most effective opiate was his work at the travel agency: it was so hopelessly dull that during the eight hours it lasted, it precluded all thoughts of the existence of the other, absolute hopelessness. The moment he set off for home, however, the effect wore off like that of a bad medicine. At home he would find Janja waiting for him, but not the Janja of the summer vision, not Janja at the pump, hot and unkempt, who could have whipped up the frenzy he so longed for. Instead, he found the Janja he later observed from the tram, the hard and self-assured Janja who had whipped up her own frenzy with no thought of him, with her own life, her own apartment, her own job, her own lover, and everything that went with them, a Janja who, without ever having opened up to him, or softened, or brought to life the picture of her he carried with him, had taken leave of him every bit as inexorably as he had taken his leave of life.
This double image of the end proved too much for him: it drove him out of the house, into the streets, and not in search of hints or clues, as in the summer, because by now the guessing game had become a disease, a preparation for death. No, now he wandered aimlessly, looking neither left nor right, not thinking, or trying not to think, using all the strength of his legs and the warmth of his insides to push on through the cold and the sleet. He avoided human contact, especially friends, because the sight of a familiar face only called forth new visions of destruction. And yet, or perhaps as a consequence, he tended to choose the busiest parts of town for his wandering, places where people were crowds rather than individuals, impersonal, purely physical, and their moving, surging, pushing brought the fatigue he desired, like the wet snow and fierce wind. And so every day he made his way to the Avala. And one day he ran into Čutura again.
It was evening. He had just paid his visit to the house in Vojvoda Šupljikac Square, and a cold, disconsolate visit it had been, like sitting by the bed of a corpse. Yearning for contact with the crowd, he circled Main Square and had just reached the Avala and the pillars supporting the editorial offices of Naše novine, when he felt something brush his elbow. It was different from the listless, unconscious pressure of the crowd that kept his body steady as he made his way forward; it was a cautious yet deliberate prod. He turned, frightened. In the shadow of a pillar he made out a figure in a broad-brimmed hat and a heavy winter coat with a turned-up collar. Only the angular line of the chin, lit up by a patch of light from the lobby, told him it was Čutura.
Čutura’s disguise as a vagrant or day laborer made it immediately clear to Blam that he was in hiding and that it was dangerous to be seen with him. But numbed by his solitary wandering and anxious thoughts, Blam responded to Čutura’s wordless request and stopped. Čutura took a step back, to hide his face in the dark.
“I need to spend the night at your place,” a tense whisper reached Blam from the darkness. “Cross the courtyard slowly. I’ll follow.”
Blam did as he was told. Instead of walking around the Avala’s rectangular courtyard, gazing at the posters of coming attractions and immersing himself in the temporary security that they and the people who came here for pleasure afforded him, he cut through the crowd and proceeded along the narrow passage between the walls of the cinema and the courtyard apartments. The squeaky sound track of the film showing inside filtered through the bolted doors, but the passage was dark and deserted, the people in the apartments having withdrawn behind their curtains to have supper or go to bed. Not since Blam had become obsessed with death had he ventured into a place so isolated and unfamiliar, and he felt extremely uncomfortable. Stumbling on in the dark, he sensed more and more that Čutura had descended upon him when his defenses were down and was dragging him into something against his nature.
Čutura wanted to spend the night at his place. Blam could not imagine how that would work, it was impossible, and seeing how impossible it was, he saw all the more starkly the impossibility of his own situation, of his life as it was. In a series of disjointed images he pictured Čutura entering the Mercury and climbing to the mansard; he pictured himself letting Čutura in and explaining to Janja who he was and Janja, perhaps suspicious, perhaps accepting, giving him something to eat. But through those images, he felt, more, Čutura’s penetrating eyes on them, assessing the new things Janja had brought into Blam’s life — Janja herself among them — conjecturing what their relationship was like, sensing the discord, the division, deducing from a word in passing what Janja’s new job was and perhaps even who had obtained it for her, the editor-in-chief of the collaborationist Naše novine and the Blams’ former tenant. And thus Čutura would pronounce a pitiless sentence on Blam’s life. Blam did not want Čutura to condemn his life: he wanted that life to disappear without judges or witnesses; he wanted the shame of that life to disappear with him.
Thinking these thoughts, he reached the far end of the Avala. Here the narrow passage broadened into a street of sorts — one side consisting of apartments not unlike those in the courtyard, the other of scattered hovels and ramshackle workshops — and the sound track, fading, was replaced by other, closer sounds: the banging of a less than firmly closed door each time the wind blew, a child’s voice calling out. Blam stood still. What was he to do? How could he go back on his word? He turned to survey the passage, now as black as an abyss, and the dimly lit courtyard beyond it. Not a soul in sight. No Čutura. Had he walked too fast despite Čutura’s instructions? Yes, of course he had; his unpleasant thoughts had driven him like a fugitive, and he now remembered having all but run over the uneven cobblestones in the passage. But, then, he could indeed run, race through the next courtyard and vanish without a trace by turning down one of the side streets. It was an attractive possibility. He stared into the dark and through the dark to the far-off lights, seeking the figure of Čutura, seeking a decision, and saw that the lights did not come from the courtyard, they came from two windows above it, in other words, the windows of Naše novine. You could easily get there from here in the dark without anyone’s seeing you, avoiding the square. Had Janja ever sneaked in like that? Maybe he’d see her instead of Čutura, see her scurrying along the passage, still flushed from her parting embrace. But no sooner did this thought flash through his mind than it was replaced by another: the thought, no, the picture of the parting embrace of Janja and Popadić, and not here but down by the customs office, a definitely more cozy and less conspicuous meeting place than the editorial offices of Naše novine. He could just picture it, a room in an apartment belonging to a friend of Popadić’s or specially rented for the purpose, their naked bodies intertwined… and suddenly the image of the room with the enormous peasant bed and dark-green threadbare curtains came back to him: his own little love nest on Dositej Street.