I had the waiter take her a bottle of wine, and after I’d eaten my soup I started to leave. It was going on three in the morning. When I tried to get past her, she grabbed my sleeve.
“You weren’t at Nikola’s funeral,” she said. “You must have been abroad again.”
“Yes, I was.”
“There were only four of us there to walk the coffin to his grave-side. He died in his sleep. They found him a week later. I don’t believe he suffered. Here’s my card. Call me sometime.”
I was listening to her voice as if from a distance. I remember shaking hands with both men, one of whom was her husband. Then I went down Francuska Street toward the Republic Square and then on towards the Hotel Moskva. The shop windows in the passage of the Zvezda cinema were still lit up; dust had gotten into the fabric on the buttons for sale, changing their colors; dead flies covered the glass bottoms of the display cases as if they were dried-out aquariums. The pre-dawn sky was purple with the far-off harbingers of sunrise. When I was in the passage, I heard the jangling of an alarm clock; in a window facing the courtyard a light went on.
The courtyard entrance was barricaded with rotten planks; there were rows of rusty trashcans in front of it. A cat leapt out from between them and raced right past me. I peered through the decayed boards; inside it was dark and reeked of urine. I thought I could hear the squeaking of rats. I walked back out to the road. At the corner I started down Balkanska Street. Through a metal fence I saw a warehouse in the first light of day. The wall separating it from the house in which I’d once lived had been torn down, and the windows of the house had been removed and the roof demolished. In the shed stood a truck loaded with bricks and crushed rock next to enormous rolls of cable. I suddenly became aware of birds twittering, and I looked in their direction. A large sumac tree leaned over the courtyard, its foliage still green and swaying, as though anticipating the imminent sunrise and not simply buffeted by the breeze. I remembered: people can cut sumac back, but a new shoot will always poke up somewhere else. It can penetrate stone or concrete.
During my final years as a student I had found a room in the center of the city — the dream of all students, especially those from the provinces. That gave you not only a certain amount of social prestige but also the advantage of staying late in the cafés without the fear of missing the last bus and then having to wait till early the next morning — chilled to the bone in the wintertime (an experience familiar to all of us). The apartment was located in a passage and had entrances from two different streets. If you went through the passage—with its display windows for leather-goods stores, for stores that would mend nylon stockings, sell fountain pens and buttons, do alterations — you came out in a courtyard of little paving stones. At the far end, on the left, was a recessed doorway that led down to the lower level of the building, facing Balkanska Street, via a set of steps made of worn brick. The building was old and had just two floors. There were Turkish balconies and walls from which the plaster was crumbling, warped window frames, and a shaky wooden door. My landlords were elderly Russians, emigrants who’d come during the 1920s, a married couple without children. They rented out my room for a sum that covered a part of the electric and water bills; one could say they let it out more or less gratis. I had been sent their way by a certain Anjutka, a tour guide. I had met her on Skadarlija Street, thanks to some Russian writers whom she was supposed to hand over to me so I could take them to an official dinner in the Writers’ Club.
I slept on an iron army cot, while the other bed, on the wall opposite, was occupied by Nikola, one of my landlords. Marija Nikolajevna, his wife, slept in the smaller second room, which also served as the kitchen.
Because I was often out of the house — by day in the library, in the evenings at the club — I was satisfied with my new lodgings; they worked fine as a free place to lay my head, and one that was in the city center to boot; I had access to a bathroom with hot water, and my landlords didn’t hold it against me when I came home late.
Marija Nikolajevna was a sickly, somewhat sarcastic woman with a puffy face that was disfigured on one side by traces of burns. Her hands showed the damage too; scalded, contracted skin was drawn taut over muscles and tendons; her fingers resembled claws. Marija Nikolajevna seldom set foot in the “men’s quarters.” She would knock on the door, stick her head into the room, and let fly some incontrovertible observation: “I know you don’t own anything except this guitar. You don’t have to lie.” Or: “Somebody threw up last night in the bathroom. I hope it wasn’t Nikola. Next time it needs to be cleaned up better. Good night.” Or: “Yesterday, the bathroom was completely filled with smoke. You weren’t even home. This means Nikola has started smoking. It’s all due to your bad influence.” (In a very stern voice:) “He’s also taken to drinking with you. He never used to drink before. With you around he’s become a bohemian too.”
Nikolaj Aleksinski was an old man with an upright bearing, short gray hair, and smiling blue eyes. He was as deaf as a door-knob, but that didn’t dampen his spirit or his good cheer one bit. He got up early, showered with cold water all year long (while you listened to him exclaiming “hu-hu-hu” and “ha-ha-ha” from the bathroom), and fasted one day every week, on Friday, for health reasons; on that day he drank only spring water that he had brought home from somewhere in a big demijohn. But this all had nothing to do with that nearly obscene resistance to death so typical of the elderly; this was more like a military kind of mental discipline paired with simple hedonism. I learned how to carry on a conversation with him by means of a kind of sign language. Our alphabet consisted of schematically reproduced letters from the old Cyrillic alphabet once used in Russian, and it contained symbolic abbreviations as welclass="underline" touching one’s hair with a finger indicated the first letter of a word or the word itself: v as in volosy, hair; touching a tooth yielded z for zub, tooth; pressing your palms together gave you d as in druzhba, friendship. It sufficed to get across the first letters of words to him; once the word was underway, he completed it out loud while looking you straight in the eyes.
I show him: thumb and index-finger in the shape of a Cyrillic s, then close the circle by pressing my fingertips together (o), and touch my hair (v).
“Soviet,” he says.
I sign: l, i, t.
And he finishes the word by saying “literature”: “Soviet literature is still in its infancy,” he maintains. “Like new grass. One must be patient while it grows.”
I tell him (using my fingers): “Something is forever trampling on this grass.”
“Yet no one can stop the grass from growing,” he says. “Do you see that sumac tree out there in the courtyard? It grew up out of the concrete. Take a look at it.”
I say: “But people—”
He guessed my thoughts: “People can cut it back as much as they like; somewhere a new shoot will always come forth. Force its way through stone, or through concrete.”
I ask him, “Did you know Prince Ževahov?”
He stares at me in amazement. “Where did you pick up that name?”
I reply: “I read his book about Sergei Nilus.”
Nikolaj waves his hand.
“Ževahov lived in Novi Sad until recently. The Russian emigrants have their headquarters in Sremska Mitrovica. Ževahov was an unfortunate case. With age his mind dimmed considerably. He saw ghosts. Don’t you have anything better to do that to concern yourself with the likes of that mad Prince Ževahov?”