Vera was just the opposite. Afraid of peculiarities of any kind, she avoided all those expressions, proverbs, superstitious sayings her mother had learned from her own peasant mother and made use of when she put Vera to bed, took care of her when she was ill, or punished her for disobedience. In the same way, with an almost physical revulsion, Vera was disgusted by the mystical curses that spewed out of the semidarkness of Grandmother Kroner’s room. She was not interested at all in knowing what customs or accumulations of meaning lay hidden behind those provincialisms. She had difficulty in remembering any of them, and if one was forced upon her as having some special significance, she let it slip past as if there had been a mistake. She refused outright to attend the synagogue with her grandmother when she was old enough to do so, since her school friends didn’t, and stubbornly screamed and hit herself on the temples with her fists until she was allowed to go to school on Saturdays like everyone else.
She thought religious customs, dress, and conventions outdated and silly, but at the same time dangerous, because they invariably classified people whether they liked it or not. For that reason, she never had any girlfriends, whereas Gerhard, who was fondly known among street acquaintances as Gerdi, was torn apart by passionate friendships and enmities. These he cultivated faithfully or bemoaned loudly, for he suffered as much, if not more, from being deprived of the company of those who regularly beat him as from the beatings themselves. But Vera, as soon as she noticed something different about the little girl or boy she happened to be playing with (more often than not brought along by an adult), something in their dress, hair style, or speech — a word, if the child was a Serb or Hungarian, or an idea unacceptable to her family, if the child was a German — she would prick up her ears in uncertainty or stare, not in order to imitate it, like Gerhard, or even understand it, but to shy away from it apprehensively.
Everyone believed blindly in the universal validity of their own customs. No one asked Vera: What about yours? But if she happened to ask herself that question, she was overcome by fright, for in her own house of mixed faiths, nationalities, and languages, the customs were ridiculously disordered; guttural German and sibilant Yiddish competed with one another, and the holidays were completely confused, since for each one — New Year’s, Easter, Christmas — there were two or even three different dates, names, rituals. Yet nothing was genuinely celebrated, nothing genuinely believed in. She was infuriated by the madhouse in which she lived, of which she was inseparably a part, and by which — as she came to understand with ever-increasing horror — she was judged and her place defined. So she tried hard to hide the peculiarity of it (which was also her own) as much as possible.
The means to this end were as follows: not to allow herself to become involved in the peculiarities of others, which would have encouraged a closer examination of her own. But since one’s personality is in fact made up of such peculiarities, it followed that her relations with people remained superficial. She went no farther than the threshold of a confidence, no farther than the threshold of a confession, never revealing her family circumstances, never recounting the scenes that took place at home, never bringing visitors home with her. It was neither her own decision nor her desire to go to the dancing lessons, but the choice of the school administration. The lessons, however, turned out to be a world of just the same sort of superficial contacts.
The piano played music for popularly accepted dances — the waltz, tango, or foxtrot — and the teacher in his tailcoat showed the students how to dance them. The girls tried them out by themselves first and then with the boys. Although these contacts were physically close, or perhaps because of it, they did not involve anything personal. They merely followed, as did the dance itself, a set of rules established for everyone, with steps that were to be performed in exactly the same way everywhere. The skill of the individual consisted in mastering this pattern of movement as precisely as possible and eliminating from it anything personal or particular. Vera threw herself passionately into this anonymous current with the unfailing instinct of a fugitive, for in it no one could recognize her as this or that individual, her father and mother’s daughter, the one who lived in the house behind the Baptist church. Instead, people had to see in her those qualities expressed by her dancing alone. Whether she danced correctly or incorrectly, lightly or clumsily, freely or hesitantly, that was what Vera was judged by here, and at long last she could stand out without giving away anything of her real self, or her origins and past. The activity involved only her body, and she became aware that her body was an almost independent piece of machinery, capable, to an unexpected degree, of adapting itself to a pattern. At the same time, she was able to make the most of all the beauty she possessed, the shape of her hips, long legs, and prominent breasts, giving pleasure to herself and to others. At the dancing lessons, as she swayed to the music in the arms of a young man, her body was both aim and achievement, and everything else that signified her person receded from the sound-filled hall, pushed into the background and forgotten.
10
Bodies. Vera’s pearly complexion. The finely slanted slits of her dark-blue, almost violet eyes, her red mouth with its long pink tongue, the pinkish nostrils, the shells of her ears. Long limbs, hesitant roundnesses. Small languorous, pale nipples; a flat stomach; her mount of Venus low between her thighs, its red, silky hair. Sluggish circulation, a tendency to headaches, inflamed tonsils. Frequent cold sores on her lips; wounds that heal slowly; heavy perspiration when excited. A softer, gentler reflection of Tereza Kroner, née Lehnart.
Tereza, her thinner, more muscular arms and legs, which only after her second child became heavy, as did her hips. But breasts that were full from puberty, high, sharp, firm, milky. Moist lips, mocking blue eyes, a straight nose. An irascible nature, prone to extremes, quarrels, love, envy. An iron constitution.
Robert Kroner, slender, angular, stooping slightly from the waist upward. Long, agile legs, dark-yellow skin, greasy black hair, velvety black eyes. Uneasy blood, irritable, prone to melancholy, pessimism.
Nemanja Lazukić, tall and thick-necked, with square, bony shoulders, but narrow-chested, narrow-hipped, loose-limbed. Ashen skin. A man of thick, dry, dark, disobedient hair, watery blue eyes, a large, regular mouth and healthy teeth, full, wide nose, lesions beneath his ribs from pneumonia (during the war), his lungs and bronchial tubes full of mucus. An inveterate smoker, fond of wine and slivovitz, given to quick enthusiasm just as quickly sated, a determined lover, faithful to his wife, not attracted to other women, seeing in them disorder, imperfections. Particular also about food.
Klara Lazukić, heavy-legged and slow-moving, the top half of her body slimmer and more mobile. Small, empty breasts, drooping shoulders, a receding chin, a fleshy nose, soft green protruding eyes, fine graying hair. Suffering from varicose veins and bouts of fatigue. A mother for the first time at thirty-three, she never completely adapted to the state of motherhood, or indeed to marriage, but dedicated herself to both out of an exalted sense of duty.