To Herzfeld’s establishment went local government dignitaries, those who summoned their employees by pressing buttons on their desks. The biggest mill owner came, once at eleven o’clock at night, after his card game with the same male friends and before going home; the local landowner, too, handsome and elegant, so proud that not even the theaters and taverns in Belgrade could entice him to cross the Danube, since, for him, Central Europe ended right in Novi Sad. At Madame Herzfeld’s they all laid aside their vanity and greed; a touch of youth and smooth pink skin beneath their fingers intoxicated them, and for a moment or two they forgot that one day they would all be dead, rotting in the ground, no matter what they did or achieved now above it. That same forgetting — of self, of death — was present even in Sredoje Lazukić’s amorous ecstasies, although his youth kept him from being conscious of it.
He was not yet sixteen when he went to “see the girls” for the first time, with his schoolmate Ćapa Dragošević, who was slightly older. Until then, girls, and that meant all females, had tormented him by their unattainability. They had legs, arms, lips, a belly, teeth; these parts of their bodies were necessary, like those of his own, to carry out certain functions, but they also desperately craved to be touched, to be hugged, to be penetrated until it hurt. Girls and women, however, pretended to have no inkling of this other aspect of their bodies. They used their bodies as if they were only bodies. They crossed their legs to make themselves more comfortable when they sat on chairs, and only the unconscious gesture of pulling a skirt down over bare knees betrayed any sign of awareness that besides making themselves comfortable they were making a point. When they laughed, they displayed teeth and red tongues, as if by opening their mouths they were merely reacting to a joke, yet their teeth and tongues produced an effect quite different from those of a male acquaintance. But no one admitted this. Had Sredoje tried to put his lips onto a girl’s lips, everyone would have been shocked, even though her lips were heavily rouged to draw attention to their fullness, a fullness that could be verified only by touch. In the end, this perceived hypocrisy drove him to hatred.
Sredoje could no longer envisage relations with a woman as anything except a violent demolition of this hypocrisy. Since he knew from experience that it was not only widespread but entrenched, he had to create situations in his imagination that dispensed with all normal behavior, all resistance and pride, and even the slightest pretense of self-esteem. Gradually he developed a capacity for sadistic fantasy. The girls who caught his eye during the day were summoned to his bed at night, when the dark had erased every vestige of reality, to put on a show — not as ordinary girls and women, the real-life daughters and sisters of his fellow citizens, but as obedient subjects of his will. And for him to be able to imagine them convincingly subservient to his every wish, he also had to transform himself from a lustful schoolboy to a full-grown male of overwhelming power. In these fantasies, constantly being reembroidered, he was now a millionaire, now a hypnotist, now a jewel thief, until finally he hit upon the character that suited him best, a career that was the perfect personification of violence and power: captain of a pirate brig.
There opened up before him an immense variety of fiercely amorous prospects and practices. He saw himself in the midst of the fire and smoke of a sea battle, sword drawn, at the head of a crew of ferocious buccaneers. Dripping blood, he would jump over the rail of a proud schooner and fight alongside his men, urging them on, shouting orders to cut down the enemy. His eyes having turned to the lower deck, where, trembling and wringing their hands at the sound of battle and its uncertain outcome, the ship’s passengers huddled together — soft-skinned, elegantly dressed women and girls — he would carve a passage through corpses toward them. Or, after the guns of his ships had forced a seaport to hoist the white flag and its defenders had been disarmed, with a group of his most trusted followers he would search its houses, looking for white females to carry off as slaves. It was always that first stage, the battle, that led to the second, the surrender, for he knew that women obtained as booty through the massacre of their protectors, women broken by the horrors of battle and fearful for their own lives, would readily strip off their veils of hypocrisy and restraint and throw themselves at his feet, begging to be spared at any price. With such women, he could do anything he pleased at last, and he drove his fantasy to create ever newer images of male dominance.
But these scenes, however elaborately played out, brought satisfaction only to the mind, not the body. Mere phantoms, they took his body to the brink of delight only to leave it tied in knots. Afterward, there was nothing to be done but to repeat them, to force them to new and greater agonies of frustration.
Thus when Ćapa, pockmarked and long-necked, his thin, chapped lips twisted in a smirk, explained to Sredoje that only money was needed to achieve carnal power over a girl, that very afternoon — without a second thought — Sredoje took thirty dinars from his mother’s drawer in the dining room and scampered off to meet his new guide.
They took a streetcar to the marketplace, entered a run-down tavern opposite its abandoned stalls, sat at a table by the wall, and, noting with relief that they were almost alone, ordered pear brandy from the dark, heavily built woman who had tottered toward them from behind the counter. Ćapa, more shamefacedly than his earlier bravado might have led one to expect, asked for a certain Živka. They waited, looking around furtively, embarrassed at every loud noise from another, distant, table, where three railwaymen were drinking. Finally Živka arrived, young and thin, with bulging eyes, her skirt above her knees. She sat down between them and hoisted her legs onto the table, so that her skirt rode up to the top of her stockings, showing her bandy thighs. Ćapa, with a wink, accepted this invitation with a grubby fist. After a drink was ordered and drunk, Ćapa and Živka came to a whispered agreement, got up, and left through a door behind the counter. Ten minutes later, Ćapa came back and told Sredoje that the girl was waiting for him in the courtyard. Going out obediently, Sredoje almost bumped into Živka by the door, in the semidarkness of early evening. She took his hand, led him across the rubble-strewn, sodden ground of the yard to a low building, into a room that smelled of laundry and damp rot, unbuttoned the front of his trousers, pulled him down onto the bed, spread herself beneath him, and drew him in. He felt a sudden release of all his pent-up tensions — and from that moment became the slave of taverns and houses that catered to such encounters. A slave of that submersion, after one’s own, in someone else’s orgasm. In its depth, of course, it was disappointing as well. Cold fingers, cold embraces, cold beds, coarse words, coarse haste. Or indifference, or anger, but always the expectancy of the next coupling, of the next woman, who by some miracle might receive him, submissive and elated, clean and sweet-smelling, ready just for him.
8
Although Milinko Božić was his friend, Sredoje Lazukić never spoke to him of his excursions into the demimonde. Milinko was too resolutely upright for anybody to think of involving him in such a subject. Besides, at the time of Sredoje’s adventures, Milinko was in love with Vera Kroner, and so taken with her that he would probably not keep anything secret from her, not even a friend’s confessions. He had sailed into love like a ship into a harbor — not a pirate ship, as in Sredoje’s imaginings, but a white ocean liner docking proudly before a crowd gathered on the quayside.