After Sredoje recounted the episode to Milinko, the latter, in accordance with his sober, antiviolent nature, took pity on Vera and began greeting her. Since more often than not this occurred while he was walking with Sredoje, for a long time she failed to respond — which amused Sredoje. When Milinko meekly bowed his head, and the red-haired girl turned hers the other way, refusing to look at him, Sredoje would double up with laughter. Noticing this, she suddenly changed her tune and returned the friendly boy’s greeting in a reciprocally pleasant manner, being quick to notice what effect this favor had on his friend, who was not its recipient. Sredoje went on pretending that her ill will amused him; then, gradually, all three of them began to be amused by these encounters, where every gesture was so charged with meaning, or else meaningless. Finally, they could hardly wait for the next meeting, so each could observe the behavior of the others and compare it with the time before.
Sredoje and Milinko never let a day pass without talking about the girl, and she, having no confidante, recounted these events to herself every evening. By the time they were old enough, as seniors, for dancing lessons — held one week in the boys’ and the next in the girls’ high school — they were already well acquainted. When asked by the potbellied, frock-coated teacher to choose a girl with whom to practice the new steps, Milinko did not hesitate to make a bow to Vera. Keeping his arm tightly around her waist while dancing evolved into accompanying her home after the lessons, and soon they arranged to go to the lessons together. He became “her boy” and she “his girl.” That meant that she belonged to him and he to her, and soon a circle of restraints grew up around them and brought them still closer together.
Sredoje, the nearest observer of all this, treated it with gleeful derision. By then, he was already making the rounds of the taverns on the outskirts of town, practicing, not dance figures, but far more intimate connections. And though it seemed to him that the former could make sense only as a preparation for the latter, he knew — was firmly convinced — that dancing was in fact a preparation for nothing at all, that all those nice little girls, after all those undulating turns to a waltz played by the teacher’s small, dark, wavy-haired wife, went from their partners’ embrace straight home — either alone or accompanied by an innocent boyfriend — to their mother, to have supper and go to sleep in a narrow, virginal bed.
To what purpose, then, was all that touching, that exchanging of glances, those pleasantly ambiguous remarks, that walk home? But, for all his mockery, he did not remain indifferent to those firm, supple hips on which, at the prompting of the piano, he placed his hand, nor to the warm, trembling fingers that rested, light as feathers, on his shoulder. Their touch aroused him, however, precisely because of his experience of a deeper and closer contact, even though it was with girls far less beautiful and delightful — girls from his illicit excursions, whom he could often call “girls” only in derision, so worn and faded were they, so irritable from drinking, almost always vulgar and ignorant, for it was that very vulgarity and ignorance, that social inadequacy, that had usually pushed them down to the bottom rung of the ladder in the first place.
How far removed from the slave girls who had preceded them in his imagination, sweet-smelling and beautiful and dedicated to pleasing him! But just as far removed from those fantasies were these girls at the dances, their movements strictly prescribed by the dancing master, their signs of submission studied, not an act of submission itself. That game of hypocrisy! Both kinds of girl came down to the same thing — a mere illusion — and he approached both with equal suspicion, sensing, in advance, disappointment, rejection, discord. Yet when he danced with Vera Kroner for the first time, quite by chance, finding himself opposite her at the moment the teacher told them to begin practicing a figure he had just demonstrated, it turned out that their movements harmonized so smoothly and so completely that they did not feel themselves to be separate individuals. Surprised at this, each stepped back a little to look the other in the eyes, but even this interruption did not impair the harmony of their movement, for, once they joined again, they continued to glide as one, as if tied fast with strings. They could not now deny the concord that bound them. Although they pretended not to seek each other out, they in fact did so, arranging to be opposite when couples were being formed, curious to see if that earlier rapport would repeat itself, and then, because they could no longer doubt it, they sought each other out for the sheer pleasure of that movement. It tempted them more and more as they mastered the art of dancing, progressing beyond the set steps, abandoning themselves to the rhythm that carried them along, joined together, like fast-flowing water. Now, for the first time, they enjoyed dancing for its own sake, but when they tried to experience the same pleasure with other partners, to their surprise they discovered they could not. Once again they turned to each other, trying to define this feeling that proved to be incomplete or a total failure with anyone else. Unable to find any explanation, they only became more necessary to each other.
At the end of the year, the theoretical part of the dancing instruction was over, and the lessons became only the practical application — two hours of rocking back and forth to the now-fast, now-slow numbers that the teacher’s tiny wife hammered out with ever greater gusto, bounding up and down on the piano stool. Milinko, who at first had monopolized Vera’s dancing time, had long since retired from the field, pushing his girl into Sredoje’s arms in the belief that he had acquired sufficient knowledge of dancing and gladly renouncing the pleasure of putting that knowledge into practice. Unknown to him was the urge that at the first sound of music takes hold of bodies and pushes them toward each other, that liberating feeling of abandonment to a rhythm, to a beat, that intoxication that comes from swaying in a permitted embrace, in full view of everyone. For him, dancing was a social game, like chess or any other, entertaining and useful while being learned, but a waste of time if, without any possibility of further progress or perfection, it became simply repetition. Meanwhile, Sredoje and Vera danced, holding each other around the waist, around the shoulders, breathing against each other’s cheeks, burning each other with the coals of their closeness.
9
The dance lessons broke down the barrier Vera had put up between herself and others. She had felt herself to be quite unlike anyone else, even her brother, who alone, of all the people she knew, represented the same strange, discordant mixture of her father’s and mother’s worlds. Her brother saw that clash in the opposite way — as a special advantage, a privilege — and thanks to this assumption of superiority, felt a compelling need to put himself on the level of all sorts of people. He enjoyed striking up conversations much given to raillery with the phlegmatic old German merchants who sat on the crates in front of the Kroner storeroom while waiting for their carts to be loaded; he would draw them ever deeper into the oddities of their dialect, which he learned accurately to mimic. Or, just as fluently and with the same mocking delight, he would call to his father’s toothless Serbian porter, Žarko, whenever the latter appeared at the gate dragging a handcart loaded with sacks, “I’ll be darned!” for that was Žarko’s favorite expression.
Robert Kroner and his wife had come to an agreement on the eve of their wedding in an attempt to protect their future offspring from the consequences of their indiscretion. Thus, Gerhard and Vera were brought up in, and officially registered as belonging to, the Orthodox Jewish faith. As a result of his instruction in that religion, Gerhard developed a zeal that far exceeded the wishes of his enlightened father, learning to intone the prayers and sing the psalms more correctly than Kroner himself and in an eastern cadence that so pleased Grandmother Kroner that she rewarded him financially for it. This recompense seemed to give the boy as much mischievous pleasure as his recital of the ancient ritual. Eccentricities attracted him. Whenever he came across someone whose behavior or mode of expression was odd, he literally gaped and grunted with astonishment. As soon as he could decipher its key, he joyfully took it for his own, bursting with pride if he managed to imitate it successfully.