During the evening promenade with Vera, Milinko strutted, squaring his shoulders, his dark-brown eyes darting back and forth in search of acknowledgment. Yet he was not in the least surprised that Vera had taken to him (it was Sredoje who was surprised), having become convinced that diligence and honesty made one worthy of everything, even of the favor of an exceptionally attractive girl. For that favor he had worked hard, from the moment he had first caught sight of Vera, just as he worked for good grades at school, or for his own pleasing looks by caring for his hair and teeth and working out in his spare time. Milinko had the gentle but resolute nature of his mother, whose ally he had previously been in bringing one war in the family to a victorious conclusion — his father’s suicide.
Milinko’s father had been completely unlike the two of them: inflexible, short-tempered, weighed down by the credit he had accumulated by denouncing pro-Hungarians in the days of the formation of Yugoslavia. As reward he had received only the position of plainclothesman, the pay for which was barely sufficient for him to get married and set up house. He liked the responsibility of detective work, but, in hanging around taverns and street corners in order to keep an ear to the ground, he had begun to drink, and promotion had passed him by. The rebuff had embittered him. He adored his son and dreamed of securing for him a high social position, but an inadequate salary, much too much of which was spent on alcohol, dragged him steadily downward. His wife was ready to come to his aid. She had studied domestic science in school and could sew, but he forbade her to apply her skills to make money, in the belief that it would detract from his dignity as a policeman. So in secret she began to alter old dresses for her neighbors, for insignificant sums. With his investigative flair, he eventually uncovered the subterfuge, viewing it not only as disobedience but also as a kind of betrayal. On coming home drunk, he would drag the culprit from bed by her hair and force her to confess how many dresses she had worked on and what she had been paid, as if it were a question of adultery for money.
Awakened by the shouts and crying, Milinko would sit up in bed and watch wide-eyed these settlings of accounts. As soon as his father’s rage subsided, he would spring up and run barefoot in his nightshirt to his mother, to help her to her feet and bathe her bruises. His father by then would be holding his head in his hands, and for him Milinko had not even a glance of understanding. In time, the policeman could no longer endure it. After one such angry dispute, he ran from the house (it was in December and snowing), rushed to the shed, smashed in the door with a blow of his fist, entered, pulled out his revolver, and shot himself in the temple.
This spectacular end left no scar whatever on Milinko, as it would have on many other, less sensitive, children. Instead, it simply strengthened his conviction that evil must always succumb to virtue. Moreover, his mother’s life and his own, after his father’s death, took such a turn for the better that the conviction was unavoidable. The policeman’s salary came to an end, of course (being replaced by a paltry pension), but so did all those wasteful expenses that had piled up debts and quarrels. Mother and son left their cold two-room apartment overlooking the street in a middle-class neighborhood, where they had been held in contempt because of the shouting matches and bloody battles, and rented another place, much cheaper, at the back of a large courtyard, among modest working people who respected them, and who formed a suitable milieu for the work of the humble, conscientious seamstress that Milinko’s mother willingly became.
Her sewing machine, which had come to her as part of her dowry, hummed all day by the window in her kitchen and until late in the evening, while in the only other room Milinko sat at a table studying. For him, too, to be able to work alone, without his father’s outbursts, was akin to bliss. He sat at a high, oval walnut table, the surface of which was protected by blue wrapping paper held down by thumbtacks. With his books, notebooks, and pencils arrayed closely around him, he felt like a hero behind the ramparts of a besieged town, a hero who was acquiring the knowledge that would allow him to save it.
Very early, as far back as elementary school, he had understood the importance of time for successful learning: how time inevitably — as if independent of one’s will — contributed to the achievement of one’s aim, but only if beforehand the connecting link between the source and mouth of the river of knowledge was correctly established, just as the needle of his mother’s machine had to be correctly positioned on the cloth. He felt himself to be the master of time and therefore the master of knowledge, and since he believed that knowledge opened the door to all ambitions, he felt himself to be the master of his destiny as well.
This feeling fostered a self-assurance that made him attractive. He never hurried, but always looked at others calmly, with smiling dark-brown eyes; at school, his responses were restrained, for he knew that there would be ways and time enough to show his ability, and his teachers valued him highly. His classmates did not hold him less in their esteem for that. He thus became friendly even with Sredoje, who was a less-than-average pupil, but who, thanks to his home circumstances — particularly his mother’s penchant for surrounding herself with beautiful things and good books — possessed an extracurricular knowledge unavailable to Milinko. This at once aroused the latter’s interest. “How do you know that?” he asked in surprise when Sredoje informed him that a certain term in tennis was pronounced differently from what the rules of the Serbian language prescribed. And how was one to acquire a legitimate opinion about matters of this sort outside school, which avoided such dilemmas? Where was one to look? That was how he found out about encyclopedias, those repositories of knowledge that Sredoje had skimmed through even before he could read, attracted by their colored pictures.
The possibility that Milinko, too, would be able one day to open such a book was crucial in his getting close to Sredoje and coming to tolerate the latter’s bouts of indifference and mockery, which Milinko treated with a smile, as mischievous irrelevancies. His patience was rewarded one day when Sredoje invited him home to the villa, as the house with the dome was then referred to. There, Sredoje had his own room, on the second floor, with a view of a carefully trimmed lawn and three young pines. Not allowing himself to be corrupted by this luxury, Milinko waited impatiently for the afternoon to end, dutifully going over arithmetic exercises with Sredoje, whose attention was no more than apathetic. For doing so, he had been promised, after the ailing Mrs. Lazukić retired, that he could go downstairs and stand in front of the tall glass bookcase in the now-empty living room, where Sredoje would hand him the huge book.
Once opened, there glistened before his excited eyes long columns of information in small type. He took his time examining the book, reading here and there at random, to make sure that it was really what Sredoje had said it was and what he himself had imagined. He then turned to the front matter (something that Sredoje had never done) and carefully took note of the title and details of publication. The following day he recited these to the proprietor of the bookshop near the school, who returned in triumph from his storeroom carrying a copy of the very same book and more than happy to inform him of the price.
During the next few months, Milinko saved up to buy the Minerva Encyclopedia of General Knowledge. In time he became an avid encyclopedia collector, for an encyclopedia exactly corresponded to an ideal he had imagined but could not believe existed: a book containing nothing superfluous — as was often the case with schoolbooks, intended for the dull, average pupil — but only the most essential facts all so arranged that they could be located without reference to chronology (as in history books) or taxonomy (as in texts on natural science), but according to one’s needs.