“So you did ask around! And did a little guessing of your own!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I had to go back to the house to collect what was left of my parents’ belongings. It was the new tenants who told me that Kocsis and the woman had moved to Budapest.”
“But you didn’t find the money.”
“No.”
“Of course not. The money’s what got them to Budapest. They wouldn’t have been able to budge without it. But if it hadn’t been for the money and the part they played in your parents’ death, they wouldn’t have needed to move. Can’t you see that? They were afraid they’d get caught, so they beat it. They didn’t realize they were dealing with someone like you, who wouldn’t lift a finger to avenge the death of his parents. They could easily have stayed. They may even have come back. After they saw that nobody was going after them or making any claims and realized the dust had settled. In fact, I’m sure they’re back. How much could it have come to anyway? Ten thousand pengő? Fifteen thousand? That’s nothing for a bastard like Kocsis who can’t hold on to a thing. And when the money was gone and the fling was over, back they flew to the nest. Because I bet they left someone here when they went off on their ‘honeymoon.’ ”
“I don’t think she had anybody. Just a daughter, and I’m sure she took her with them. But Kocsis was married, if I remember correctly, and had children.”
“Well, then, it’s easy. All you have to do is track down the family and get them to tell you where Papa is.”
“No, it’s not so easy. I never really knew them. I don’t know where they lived.”
“The Bureau of Internal Affairs has all kinds of records. Might I ask the first name of this Kocsis character?”
“Lajos. His name was Lajos Kocsis.”
“I see. Well, it shouldn’t be too hard to look up every Lajos Kocsis in Novi Sad. Are you game?”
“Game?”
“To let me take over. I don’t share the compunctions you seem to have when it comes to the man. I think his crime cries out for revenge. The people who killed my family had my brothers to reckon with, and this Kocsis is getting off scot-free. I feel it’s my duty to do something about it, if only because of Estera, in her memory.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s the right way.”
“We won’t know until we try. But you can’t have anything against my asking around.”
“Of course not.”
“Good, it’s a deal. And you can be sure I’ll have something to report before long.”
BUT ČUTURA IS no longer among the living, and Blam leaves the square for the former Jew Street, unencumbered by third parties, thinking his own thoughts. As he makes his way along the resplendent shopwindows lining both sides of the street, he feels a venal shudder of regret that Funkenstein would not let him turn and look at the adulterous couple caught in the act. Again he pictures the dark, nattily dressed man and the tall blond woman, her skirt pulled tight around her thighs, pictures them embracing, and realizes it is a goodbye embrace, the repetition of an embrace he witnessed long ago and experienced as a personal farewell.
He experiences it once more, with a bittersweet feeling of loss and withdrawal, though of liberation as well. The memory belongs to memories of the shops now catching his eye. The reality is that the shops have been remodeled, their entrances widened, the cracked wood of the window frames replaced with shiny metal, the merchandise in the windows transformed from aggressive jumbles into neat and expertly arranged displays, the exotic names of owners on the signs supplanted by staid generic terms, the staff supplemented by the young and apathetic ranks of the bureaucracy. It is all quite soothing, a step in the direction of impersonality. It relieves him of the conflict he used to feel when confronted with the dark, tense faces, the rolling eyes, the guttural voices fulsomely praising their wares and humiliating him with reminders of his background. Now the shops, purged of their past, have become for him too places of straightforward buying and selling. I’d like this and that. How much is it? I’ll take it or no thank you. Yet he could not help missing the more enterprising tribe to which, even if reluctantly, he had belonged.
The goodbye embrace was similar to — yet in a way the opposite of — the farewell scene he had accidentally witnessed from a tram many years before. Accidentally, because on that day Ferenci, the head of the Úti Travel Agency which had just hired him, asked him for the first and last time to leave his desk and deliver a packet of documents to customs. It was a cold November morning in the first year of the war, and Blam sank against the wooden back of a corner window seat as the tram made its wobbly way toward the customs office. The streets were nearly empty, the morning rush to jobs and the shops being over by then, and all that Blam’s absent gaze met as he looked out of the window were a dawdling old man, a housewife rushing home late from the market with her net bag, a postman, an apprentice toting a basket on his back. Then, just before the customs office, where a few small houses huddled together, the tram came upon a couple embracing: a dark man in a gray overcoat and a blond woman in a blue suit. They were standing near the curb, between the tram tracks and the houses, on their own, free, with no one to bother them, leaning blissfully against each other, his swarthy hand resting on her tightly sheathed thigh, her arm over his shoulder, her head and blond hair covering his face. Yet Blam had no trouble recognizing the couple as his wife, Janja, and Predrag Popadić. The realization that she was deceiving him with that man was like a knife in the gut, it took his breath away, it nearly made him faint, yet he did not scream, did not leap up and rush off the tram; he stayed put, leaning against the wooden seat, turning his head to follow them as the tram tottered past. The sight of their embrace on the deserted street filled him, despite his horror, with reluctant admiration; he was almost moved. It was the last embrace of the tryst — he could tell from the way they stood there, from the serenity, the blissful ease of their bodies — an embrace reflecting pleasure and a oneness that came from shared memories of recent intimacy. Joy radiated from them, the joy of oblivion, of having satisfied a natural instinct that, though now abated, still suffused their bodies, the joy of ignoring the world around them, the cold, gray day, the prosaic city with its trams and their troubled passengers. Their joy so vividly contrasted with his grief that for all the pain it caused him he could set it apart and display it like an exquisite object unfathomable in its harmony and forever beyond his reach. He knew then that Janja as she was at that moment, the Janja he had longed for when he was courting her, would never be his, yet the anguish of this knowledge was tempered by relief. By embracing the man out in the open, in the street, she was in a sense taking leave of him, achieving an ideal (even if many years later and with someone else), an ideal that Blam too had yearned for yet never understood and that now proved to be a gentle, sisterly parting, a farewell to a person completely unlike her, alien to her, which would resolve the strain and tension that had always weighed on their relationship, in much the way that the shame and danger of identification with the Jew Street shopkeepers had weighed on him, until they disappeared for good.
BEFORE THE WAR number 1 Jew Street was occupied by a leather goods manufacturing company called Levi and Son. It was run by Levi the son because Levi the father, the firm’s founder, was racked by disease and spent all his time in the upstairs apartment with a black silk yarmulke on his head and a tartan traveling rug over his knees. (Levi the grandson was studying to be a pharmacist in Belgrade.) When the Hungarians marched into Novi Sad, they declared Levi the father’s leather goods essential to the war effort and carted them away in military vehicles. The empty shop was taken over by Julius Mehlbach, the Levis’ longtime apprentice, who turned it into a shop specializing in leather bags and accessories. Levi the son, however, had managed to hide quite a bit of leather in the upstairs apartment, and he offered it to Mehlbach on the condition that they share the profit from the bags made of it. Mehlbach agreed, accepted the leather, and reported Levi the son for concealing goods essential to the war effort. Levi the son was arrested and beaten so badly that his kidneys bled. He was released, but died before the week was up. On his deathbed he summoned Mehlbach and made him swear to care for his all-but-immobile father, promising him a gold coin a week to cover the costs. Mehlbach fulfilled his duty until the spring of 1944, when the old man was deported to a camp in Germany with the rest of the Novi Sad Jews. He never returned. (Nor did Levi the grandson or Levi the grandson’s mother, who happened to be with him in Belgrade when the war broke out.) Mehlbach searched the upstairs apartment for the rest of the coins, prying up floorboards and digging behind walls, but never found them, and in the autumn of the same year he was forced to flee the advancing partisans and Soviet Army and thus to abandon the shop and the house.