“Waiting long?”
Blam looks up at her, suspicious, not so much of her as of himself, of his release, his excitement. It is bitter, the meaning he has found yet knows to be momentary, fleeting, on the point of melting, like a current of mild air on a cold day, into droplets of wrath and dissension.
“Oh, I don’t mind. Where are we going?”
“You mean you’ve forgotten?” she says, staring at his face the way he knew she would, as if he were a gadget that refuses to do what it’s supposed to do. “First stop is the quilt maker.”
Chapter Eleven
LOOK AT THE map of Novi Sad, and you will see a kind of spider’s web intersecting on one side with a broad ribbon in the form of a half circle but extending evenly in all other directions. The ribbon, usually colored blue, is the Danube, the city’s permanent eastern boundary and also its womb. For here, near its once marshy banks, the mud and fumes received the first seeds of settlement: the huts and cabins of the artisans and traders in wine and foods who from this filthy, humid lowland supplied the dry, stately military fortress of Petrovaradin, otherwise off limits to them, on the rocky shore opposite. Those early settlers brought the provisions they sold and the raw materials for their crafts from the rich hinterland plains. They built long, straight roads through those plains, roads lined with the houses of market gardeners and draymen and forming a network that grew wherever geography did not interfere. The oldest settlements, which took root along the banks between tributaries and swamps, are still designated on maps with squiggly lines that abruptly, capriciously become circles, that is, marketplaces. Today they are the business centers, the shops, restaurants, churches, and offices. They are home to the Avala and, diagonally opposite, the Mercury. The newer settlements, which sprang up along the roads, stretch deep into the hinterland and are connected by a network of transverse byways only to lose track of them and peter out finally in long, individual streets among fields, like the taut outermost strands of a spider’s web invisibly attached to the center.
SUCH WAS THE map that two high-ranking Hungarian officers (a major in the gendarmerie and a colonel in the police force) had before them on the evening of 20 January 1942, as they worked out the plan for the raid they were to oversee the next morning by order of Regional Headquarters. Well-trained strategists that they were, they divided the spiderweb of the city’s streets into several hundred smaller webs, assigning patrols to each from the lists of men they had been given. Each web would have a search patrol, whose job was to go through private dwellings; a roundup patrol, which was to collect all suspicious elements; and an escort patrol, which would take them to an identity check and/or execution. The task set before the two strategists was, therefore, almost abstract, consisting of a list of names and ranks, on the one hand, and a grid overlying a city, on the other. Yet behind those abstractions stood individuals with different features and different problems, and the pencil marks made by the two officers as the city was getting ready for bed determined the fate of each one of the one thousand and four hundred individuals who would perish in the course of the next three days and the fate of each of the tens of thousands of individuals who would be allowed to survive. For even though the raid had a single official goal, that of decimating the Slavic and Jewish population, and even though each patrol leader was told to be utterly ruthless, it was still up to the individual to determine, given the circumstances, the degree to which he belonged to those who were being decimated, on the one hand, and those who were doing the decimating, on the other. Or to demonstrate rather than to determine, because the degree to which each individual belonged to one or another category was largely predetermined, by birth, appearance, language, emotional and intellectual makeup, and the pencil marks of the two high-ranking officers merely combined thousands of individual characteristics into that interdependent mesh that in the next three days would — for each of them, many times over — mean life or death, sparing or killing.
THE SEARCH PATROL assigned to the Blam household was made up of two young soldiers from Hungary, two gendarmes brought in from the village of Čurug after the raid there, and Lieutenant Géczy, its twenty-eight-year-old sloping-shouldered, puffy-eyed leader. Géczy, who had been in Novi Sad since the beginning of the Occupation, had finally managed to move his young bride there until ten days before, so on the morning of the raid he arose from a warm conjugal bed. It was still dark when he slid through the icy streets in his new combat boots to the meeting place, the artillery barracks, picked up his instructions and the men detailed to him, and proceeded to the spot on the map marked in red. He was determined to be strict but fair, to accept only authentic documents, and to make thorough searches of each dwelling. By following these rules and making his charges follow them, he managed — on the first day of the raid, with only one break, at noon, when a hot meal was delivered to the men in a covered army truck — to search twenty-one dwellings along Aleksa Nenadović Street in the vicinity of Vojvoda Šupljikac Square and hand over to the roundup patrol two suspicious young men, Serbs, who had come from a nearby village to celebrate a friend’s patron-saint day without proper identity papers.
“No good!” said the general with a shake of the head when he heard Géczy’s report late that evening in the cold corridor of the artillery barracks, where the patrol leaders had gathered and stood in formation for an entire hour, tired, hungry, freezing, and longing to be released and find a warm spot for themselves, the lieutenant longing to be in his bed, with his wife, whose safety in these days of armed revenge gave him cause for concern. “No good at all!” And when the lieutenant tried to explain that the houses assigned to him were particularly difficult to search because they had large courtyards filled with apartments, the general turned bright red and screamed so loud that his voice echoed up and down the corridor: “I’m not talking about houses, you idiot! I’m talking about people! Criminals! Tomorrow you give me a list of a hundred criminals. A hundred, understand? How you find them I don’t care! Next!”
Like the others, Géczy was not allowed to go home; he was given a bed in the barracks to share with a thickset, hairy lieutenant colonel who took off nothing but his boots, pulled virtually the whole blanket over himself, and fell to snoring immediately. Géczy could not get to sleep. His shoulders and feet were freezing. He felt like waking the large, noisy body sprawled next to him to ask how the general expected him to round up a hundred criminals in an ordinary city, though he knew perfectly well how the general expected him to do it and that do it he must. This conclusion only increased the anxiety he felt at hearing the wind howl and the snow beat against the windows and at thinking, helplessly now, of his wife alone in a strange place, with no friends, of the terrible things that could happen to her amid the general chaos.
He awoke at dawn, dazed, chilled to the bone, and angry. The lieutenant colonel and the others had all dressed. Géczy too got up, dressed, and had breakfast. He then went out into the courtyard and found his men standing in a circle and passing a canteen from hand to hand.
“What is it?” he asked the older gendarme.
“Rum, sir. They’re giving it out in the kitchen. Have some.”
The lieutenant was about to refuse — he thought the gendarme out of line — but the night frost, the darkness, and the difficulties of the day ahead broke down his resistance, and he took a swig from the canteen.
“We’ll be doing things differently today,” he said to the gendarme confidentially, feeling the alcohol taking effect.