Blam has to stop; his legs force him to, as if he too were old, ailing, and exhausted from long waiting and hope. Gravity pulls him down, down to his knees, to touch the ground with his head and weep, not for the old woman’s fate, for her thankless, hapless undertaking, her sacrifice; no, for her faith, which keeps her here by the gate, by the bowl of fruit. Blam sees her faith as the faith of a world now gone, a world of which he too is a remnant. That faith has proved pitiful, futile, because the people who lived by it have all been murdered and forgotten, erased by time and asphalt roads, and he is its last witness, the only person able to appreciate and interpret it, but only for himself. The old woman cannot, though she has survived and preserved that faith. She may even belong to those who did the killing or who looked on in silence while the killing went on or who thought the killing justified. But at this moment she personifies for Blam the now defunct world of ardent faith, and through her he returns to it, to the faces of the departed tradesmen and brokers of the former Jew Street, the faces of his parents and sister and other relatives, the faces of friends who sinned against him and friends whom he sinned against.
*
“Come with us!” Lili said or, rather, “Komm mit” in her guttural, voluble German, because she never learned Serbian or cared to, which infuriated Blam. Nearly everything about her infuriated him: her garish way of dressing and behaving, the sarcastic look in her multicolored eyes, the panache with which she paraded around provincial, patriarchal Novi Sad, swishing her willowy dresses and addressing everyone in loud German as though it were perfectly natural for them to speak her language rather than for her to speak theirs. “Eccentric” was the way he thought of her, not realizing he had taken the word over from his mother, and after possessing her physically and thus emotionally and intellectually, and feeling a need to correct and torture her, he used it openly with her: “You’re an eccentric. No one can live life the way you picture it.” But she would just open her greenish-brown eyes wide with amazement and turn the ends of her mouth down into a pout or up into a sneer, which then spread to the dimples in her cheeks and to the smooth expanse of her forehead. While she never protested, she never seemed to grasp the point of his reproaches; she simply waited until he got them out of his system so she could snuggle up to him with one of her “eccentric” demands: “Kiss me quick!” “What I wouldn’t do for some chocolate!” “I want to go dancing!” “How about a film tonight?” And “Come with us!” He would say no, routinely, more out of spite than conviction.
The only thing he always agreed to was meeting her in their hideaway, a room he had sublet in remote Dositej Street at her instigation, though what Lili offered him was a mixed blessing and even cause for regret. To begin with, the widow he sublet the room from made him uneasy. She was a tired, lifeless woman who may have believed what he said when she rented him the room facing the courtyard with a separate entrance — namely, that he was a student from the countryside — but was then doubtless shocked to find the room locked day and night and to see the young man only on hot afternoons and always with a thin young woman whose arms, legs, and skirt were in constant motion and who never stopped chattering in her strange, incomprehensible language, not even after her green lover let her into the room. He suspected the widow would have thrown him out if she had been less worried about the expense involved in running another advertisement and the energy involved in showing the place again, and as a result he was full of remorse for living a lie and getting away with it, and that remorse poisoned his feelings for Lili. He upbraided her for flaunting their mutual lie the way she flaunted her loud dresses, loud laugh, foreign language, and even more foreign origins.
Shame and spite made him reluctant to follow her on the next leg of her journey, her migration through Europe, this time to Italy, where her father was to sell an invention of his. Ephraim Ehrlich was always bragging; for him, reality and bragging were indistinguishable. Here too, in Novi Sad, he made his living — feeding and clothing himself and his daughter and renting an expensive furnished apartment — more by blowing his own horn than by applying whatever technical knowledge he might have had. He carried on lengthy secret negotiations with greedy, gullible Jews about the advances he needed to develop and perfect the inventions that would bring them millions. “He’s a sharp one, that Ephi,” Vilim Blam would say approvingly, lounging in his armchair and clenching a cigar in the strong, white teeth he was always quick to flash. An Ehrlich on his mother’s side, Blam’s father liked to think of himself as cast in the same spirited mold, as “a sharp one.” He was in favor of Miroslav’s going with his relatives, not because he saw the danger of persecution and extinction drawing closer to Novi Sad (his faith in people and in his own good fortune precluded all possibility of danger) but because he felt that moving away, a change of scene, would provide his son with greater opportunities in life. “Oh, to be young again!” he would sigh, throwing his head back on the antimacassar, patting his stomach with a soft, fleshy hand, and puffing white smoke rings that filled the dining room and said that he did not in the least wish to be young again, that he was perfectly content as he was, with a well-fed body and a cigar between his teeth. “I’d grab the opportunity,” he would say, making a fist, as if he had the opportunity right there in his hand.
Ehrlich would sit opposite Vilim Blam with his hands folded on the table — he did not smoke — and nod approval. He tended to be serious, formal. His narrow face and strong features made him look more like a pastor than an inventor, and his bright blue eyes and thin lips made him look utterly different from Lili, whom he adored, perhaps for that very reason, as she adored him. His speech was slow, monotonous, and dry but so effective that one felt compelled to listen. He maintained that the Jews of Novi Sad, Blam included, were making a big mistake by ignoring the experience of those already threatened and destroyed. He cited the example of friends from Vienna who had sat twiddling their thumbs until the Nazis threw them out of their factories, shops, and apartments, and then, after robbing them of their money and connections, sent them off to camps and starved them to death. “ ‘What are you waiting for?’ I said to them. But they stayed put. They didn’t listen. And you know why? Because they had no faith in themselves, because they thought they couldn’t live without their Persian rugs and crystal chandeliers.” Then Ehrlich would give detailed descriptions of the contents of vacant Jewish houses and the plundering of the valuables, and Blanka Blam, who was fanatically devoted to hearth and home, trembled with horror and threw her husband desperate glances begging him to restrain his relative, for Ehrlich was very much his side of the family, and she secretly believed that her much stricter clan could never have produced so merciless an observer, though how could the man be otherwise with no real profession, no real home, how could a man widowed at such an early age fail to marry again, how could he bring up that child, that Lili, on his own, letting her do whatever she pleased, letting her seduce the boy in front of everybody?
Lili did in fact seduce Miroslav. To persuade him to leave, she did not use her father’s tactics of referring to horrors suffered and witnessed; instead she flattered him, yet gave him reasons much like his father’s. “What’s a man like you going to do in this dead end of a town?” she would ask, looking at the nearly deserted streets of Novi Sad, though she seemed to be having the time of her life there. “A smart, handsome, capable man like you? Why, you’re made for the world!”