After Kroner’s library is ransacked by the police, who are searching for his dissident son, Gerhard, Tišma records,
The books the policemen had scattered during their search were put back on the shelves, and no one took them down again. What had happened during those last few months refuted them entirely, and they became what they were when not opened and interpreted with trust: objects of paper. With their fine bindings and titles, they looked out blankly at the people who still moved beneath them, who soon would be, under that blank gaze, taken away, torn from their resting place, and turned upside down, just as the books had been, but permanently.
All the world’s wisdom, Tišma seems to say, avails us nothing. And there is, in the equation of the books’ disruption with their owners’ disruption, a reminder that we are like the books: as they can be reduced, by our inattention, to mere “objects of paper,” so we can be reduced to “objects of flesh”—we can be stripped of, or denied, all that is within us, the particularity of our experience and our souls. The books, with their “blank gaze,” become almost culpable in their passivity: Observing everything, they do nothing.
In this case at least, Tišma reminds us, the scattering of the books has been temporary; the upheaval of lives — of bodies — is permanent. Death entails the total annihilation of the contents of a mind, while printed books — the recorded traces of long-gone thoughts and experiences — may always, eventually, be read again. In this way, the books will endure; but what if they endure without significance or with an altered significance? What is the meaning, Tišma seems obliquely to ask, of creating works of art or philosophy at all?
Against this despair, The Use of Man stands, in its strangeness and darkness, as a small bulwark, the record of humanity in a time of “barbarity and barrenness,” of the small, flickering, sometimes questionable, sometimes uninterpretable light that continues.
And Fräulein Anna Drentvenšek’s diary, the frame for the novel, proves to be just this. The novel opens with a description of the diary itself: “small and oblong, with a coarse-grained red binding of imitation snakeskin, and in the top right-hand corner was the inscription `Poésie’ in embossed gold letters.” This manifestly insignificant object — its banal contents so far from the poetry promised on the cover — will nevertheless prove the catalyst for the novel’s central action.
The Fräulein is a middle-aged German tutor living in Novi Sad on the eve of war. Her diary is vital to her — so important that when she is hospitalized for an operation and has the (accurate) premonition that she might die, she asks one of her pupils, Vera Kroner, to retrieve and destroy it. This Vera cannot do:
Vera had the feeling that the diary contained a whole human being — someone unknown to her until now, or known in a completely different way — and that if she destroyed it, she would never again have the chance… to know that human being more clearly. She was seized by a fear she had not felt at the funeraclass="underline" Was it possible for the content of a whole long life to vanish so easily, so abruptly?
This is a momentous revelation for a young girl, and all the more freighted for the reader, who knows, as Vera in that moment does not yet, that the war will soon descend upon Novi Sad, obliterating innumerable lives and all that has comprised them.
One of three pupils of Fräulein Drentvenšek, Vera studies alongside her boyfriend, Milinko Božić, and his schoolmate and friend Sredoje Lazukić, the son of a Serbian nationalist. These three young people reflect the curious hybridity of Novi Sad in different ways. They are also representative of the mingling of strengths and weaknesses in each of us — traits which in peacetime might have one set of consequences, but which in wartime will lead to other fates.
Vera is the younger child of Robert Kroner, the admirer of Goethe; her mother, Tereza, is a Catholic of German peasant stock, who was the family servant to the Kroners when Robert was a boy. She left their service, but he later encountered her at a brothel. Known as Reza, she is anathema to her devout Jewish mother-in-law; while she in turn rejects her husband sexually, so that, as in his youth, he must once again take his pleasures in the local bordello. Vera’s older brother, Gerhard, the apple of his mother’s eye, is spoiled, arrogant, and bellicose. He will join the Partisans and will pay, early in the war, with his life.
Vera, not unlike her gentle father, is “Afraid of peculiarities of any kind… 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.” Able to glimpse the impending disaster the war’s arrival will bring to Jews like themselves, she tries — and fails — to leave. Afterwards, damaged and painfully marked by her wartime abuse, bereft of all her family, she returns to her birthplace: “It was her destiny, she decided, to return from the camp to her own town, her own because she had failed, before, to break free of it.”
Vera’s boyfriend, Milinko, may be the closest thing to a hero in the novel. Honest, forthright, hardworking, ambitious, he is the only child of a working-class household. His vicious father committed suicide, leaving Milinko and his noble, humble mother to forge their lives together. In spite of this, Milinko has a near-American belief in possibility: “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.” In love with Vera, he also believes in the stability of their relationship, even though we, privy to Vera’s more complicated nature, may have our doubts. For this singularly brave and virtuous soul, history will hold the most unspeakable future.
Milinko’s prosperous but barbaric Serbian friend Sredoje will survive, and survive with a vengeance. A resourceful chameleon, a cunning betrayer, he fights on practically every side in the war, while also terrorizing countless young prostitutes along the way: “Their very submissiveness was exciting, their trembling setting of limits.” He, like Vera, will eventually return to Novi Sad, where he will find the Fräulein’s diary, hidden on a shelf in Vera’s old home, containing Vera’s notation of the Fräulein’s death.
The accidental rediscovery of the diary — and in some inexpressible way, of its contents — reunites Vera and Sredoje, affording us the single narrative strand that might approach redemption, however slight. It’s as if the ghosts of these characters’ innocent prewar selves are clinging, attached invisibly, to the document itself, anticipating a now-canceled and impossible future.
This is true also of the Fräulein: The implication seems to be that war intensifies and clarifies what is, in any event, the inevitable human trajectory — the attempt, largely futile, to make meaning amid the world’s unsignifying sound and fury. After we die, our diaries, once so crucial to us, will seem to others trivial and pointless. In The Use of Man, the chance survival of a diary, and the way it brings together two damaged survivors, can be seen as a bitter joke, or alternatively as evidence that in spite of all, life survives: What unexpected meaning the (meaningless) diary will make! It is, like literature itself, at once nothing and everything.
Tišma is a writer of deceptive structural idiosyncrasy. Not immediately identifiable as an innovator, he nevertheless makes intriguing — often apparently blunt, almost clumsy — choices, with fascinating ramifications. To an extent, he eschews linear narrative; or, rather, he alters it. The novel’s first chapter tells the history of the Fräulein’s diary and reveals, in brief and obliquely, the fates of the principal characters. The second chapter begins with the word “Habitations”; it then proceeds, almost like notes for a novel, to situate Tišma’s characters within the city, within their dwellings. Later chapters will provide similar listings of how an evening is spent; of where the men find their sexual pleasure; and, magnificently, of the individual characters’ bodies. Tišma writes of Vera, almost in note form: “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.” He gives us an entire, memorable, and apparently irrelevant chapter of “street scenes” in Novi Sad, not simply in wartime but through much of the postwar century.