Blam applauds as well, then rises to go out for the intermission. His seat, only a few moments before a haven of secret meditation, is now just a space on a dark-brown wooden bench, angular, hard, coarse to the touch. Moving away from it, he inadvertently bumps into the people inching along ahead of him, and he finds that human contact as distasteful as the contact with the bench. Both are prisons. The people moving along the rows are no longer a faceless crowd drawn here by the rules of music; under the harsh light of the chandelier, their bodies take shape, their features become recognizable: they are now Dr. Such-and-Such and his wife, and that young man with the long hair, he is Professor Futoški’s son, and over there is a man whose shop Blam sometimes patronizes, and if Blam greets him, he will activate the workaday shopkeeper-customer relationship, and the man may well ask whether Blam was satisfied with his latest purchase of lemons or soap.
To escape that danger, Blam bends his head and gazes down at the feet of his fellow citizens, which he is less likely to recognize than their faces, and hopes that he is less likely to be recognized. But just as he is about to leave the row, what should appear before his lowered eyes like a fish from turbid waters but a beaming, round, shiny face, its eyes wide in joyful recognition. Funkenstein! Is it possible?
Yes, it is none other than Leon Funkenstein dressed in black from head to foot, standing there waiting for him, hands in pockets, stocky short legs spread wide, firmly planted in the aisle that most of the people are taking to get to the vestibule. There is no trace of the amnesia Blam met with in the Main Square that summer. Funkenstein is festive in his stiff black suit with its somewhat overbold white stripes and white, bannerlike, breast-pocket handkerchief.
“I kept wondering if it was you,” he says, holding out a warm, fleshy hand. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you at a concert before. Are you a music lover? Are you by yourself?”
Blam answers in the affirmative, though vaguely, because he is not certain exactly what he is agreeing to in Funkenstein’s outpouring, and Funkenstein takes a ceremonious step back and bows ever so slightly but purposefully, to make room for Blam rather than to let him pass.
“I adore music!” he announces too loudly, lifting his face to the glittering chandelier, the gilt drapes gracing the walls, the colorful windows reflecting the artificial light against the dark of the night. “I’ve loved it since I was a child. We were poor, you know. My father was a feather merchant, and there were six of us. But we each had a hobby. Mine was music. Our religion teacher — Jolander was his name, you wouldn’t remember him — played the violin, and I decided I would too.” He clicks his tongue in fond remembrance.
They have passed into the vestibule with its four white marble pillars supporting the choir loft. Funkenstein looks around cheerfully and says, “I think we can smoke here.” He takes a flat silver cigarette case out of his breast pocket, obviously placed there for this occasion. When he opens it, Blam sees that the inside is tarnished and the rubber bands holding together several spindly cigarettes amid much loose tobacco have lost their elasticity.
“Cigarette?” he asks, and when Blam declines and takes out a pack of his own, he lights Blam’s cigarette and one for himself with a lighter that has suddenly materialized in his hand. “We have time for a stroll,” he says, setting off at a brisk clip through the clusters of people, as if Blam’s acquiescence were a foregone conclusion.
Blam can do nothing but follow. Funkenstein stands out among the quiet people around them. Blam is put off by the man’s raucous voice and finds his offhanded, pushy manner vulgar and unsuited to the ambience of a place of worship, which, though converted into a concert hall, has retained something of the sanctuary. Can he have adopted such a manner to show that he alone here is not an interloper? Blam senses that that is the case, and it only makes him more uncomfortable. It is as if the two of them have come to the synagogue with the express intention of demonstrating that it belongs to them, the survivors, as a disinherited landowner might visit a castle as part of a tourist group and at a certain point beam confidently and say, “Right! You’ve guessed it. This castle was once mine.” It is as if they have come as a warning or even rebuke: “We aren’t dead. Not all of us. Don’t believe everything you hear. This is our temple. We feel at home here.” Blam does not see how their presence as “former owners” can possibly go unnoticed. He has the impression that when the people around him lean over to one another, they are pointing out the two Jews huddled together, birds of a feather, a living reproach, a memento. He feels he has accidentally joined a crowd chanting a slogan he has no desire to chant and waving a banner — that defiant white banner of a handkerchief fluttering above Funkenstein’s breast pocket with his every step — he has no desire to wave.
Funkenstein seems to be doing everything to confirm Blam’s impression.
“That house of yours,” he says for all to hear. “Where did you say it was? Masaryk Square?”
“No, no,” Blam answers reproachfully. “Vojvoda Šupljikac Square. But that’s over and done with.”
“Why?” Funkenstein asks, stopping in his tracks and thereby making Blam stop with him. “Tell me. Why?” He starts walking again, mindlessly flicking the ashes of his cigarette on the mosaic floor. “Didn’t you say last time that you had been forced to sell it during the war? Because of the Jewish laws or some such thing.”
Blam blushes. He knows where the misunderstanding lies, but hasn’t got it in him to straighten the man out. All he says is “No, we weren’t forced into it at all. I only wondered whether my father was paid the money for the house.”
“Money, money,” says Funkenstein dismissively, completely abandoning the brash attitude he struck in the earlier part of the conversation. “How often we let it buy our silence,” he laments, stressing the “we” to show he takes their common fate for granted. “But there are things money can’t buy. We accept money as reparation for our suffering in the camps; we accept money for our families killed, for the experiments performed on us like guinea pigs. We’re willing to turn anything into money. Even this temple.” He turns on his heels, blowing a thick cloud of smoke up toward the vault, where colorful rosettes in round windows, blinded by the electric light, stare down on them. “We agreed to sell it. And who did we sell it to? An abstract municipal entity that put the money into remodeling and didn’t pay us a blessed thing!”
“But there are so few of us left we couldn’t possibly have kept it up on our own,” says Blam, using the argument he heard while negotiations were still in progress. “Besides, it has wonderful acoustics, and now at least there’s a place for us to hear music.”
“Acoustics, acoustics!” Funkenstein waves what is left of his cigarette in the air. “What about the Youth Hall of the Board of Commerce where we had concerts before the war? It had acoustics, didn’t it? And if the town fathers think a magnificent hall is so important, why don’t they build one themselves? Because they haven’t got the money, that’s why. And you know why they haven’t got the money? Because they haven’t got the Jews to earn it for them!”
“Really, Mr. Funkenstein!” Blam admonishes. “You’re going too far!”
Funkenstein frowns, then bursts out laughing like a child who has been found out. “You mean you don’t agree?” And grinding his cigarette butt into the floor with his heavy shoe, he changes the subject. “So we’re in business? We’re going to do something about your house?”
“I really think it’s too late. How can I prove my father didn’t get the entire sum when I’m not even sure myself? And even if I could, what good would it do? The money is worth twenty times less today than it was then.”