This careful cataloging is of a piece with the novel’s insistence on the book as our stay against oblivion. It is also reminiscent of the notoriously meticulous record-keeping of the Nazi authorities, in which atrocities were conscientiously noted and the terrible fate of each individual tracked. Reminiscent, too, of images we retain from that war: of piles of shoes or suitcases, piles that appear indiscriminate but every item of which pertains to, and gestures towards, a unique individual, to a personal history, an infinite repository of event and memory. The form Tišma chooses here evokes both impersonality and individualism; it is a shape, at once unwieldy and strangely effective, born of this particular war.
In addition, Tišma “tells,” rather than “shows,” a great deaclass="underline" Much of his storytelling seems almost summarized. This is a mode presently unfashionable (although there are many apparently traditional scenes in this novel). He provides us with very little dialogue. Not only is The Use of Man notable in its looping refusal of the linear (as if to emphasize that our end is always in our beginning, that the future is as much a presence as the past) but also in its refusal of traditional plot structure. There is no building towards a climax — or if there is, it is a climax all but invisible beside the enormity of war’s events: the reunion of two survivors. And even the import of that reunion can only be understood in light of their renewed separation. Tišma will not grant us simple narrative satisfactions, easy hope.
You cannot fail to be intensely moved by this novel — unless, that is, you find it too unbearable to read. But in spite of this embrace of darkness and weakness, Tišma’s enterprise is one of hope against despair. The stakes are of the highest. And these — a cheap diary full of private jottings; the memory of a snowball fight or of a dancing lesson; the weary embrace of two battle-scarred souls — these are the fragments we have shored against our ruins. This — like literature, potentially everything and possibly nothing — is all we have.
— CLAIRE MESSUD
THE USE OF MAN
1
Fräulein’s diary was 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. It was one of those albums that little girls used to be given as presents, to keep the memorable jottings of their nearest and dearest. But in a small town such as Novi Sad on the eve of the Second World War, this was the only tasteful, attractive, and yet intimate kind of notebook money could buy.
Anna Drentvenšek, known to her pupils as “Fräulein,” bought it one spring day at Nahauer and Son’s on Main Street, the stationer where she regularly made such purchases. The store was the biggest and best stocked, and in addition belonged to a German, which pleased her, a German herself, and inspired her with confidence. She turned the massive iron knob in the shape of a drooping fern leaf and opened the glass door between the two display windows, in which were set out, in neat, regular rows, textbooks, note pads, fountain pens, pencils, paper knives, and two typewriters, an Adler and an Underwood. She entered the long, narrow, pharmacy-like solemnity of the shop’s semi-darkness, with its smell of wood and glue. She made her way around a stocky customer who was methodically rearranging, on the counter, the heavy tomes handed him by a lanky, saffron-haired assistant wearing a protective black apron and perched on a stepladder. She stopped in front of a second, much older, assistant with silver-rimmed spectacles. “May I help you?” he asked, a smile barely moving his thin lips as he linked his fingertips across a small, round belly that bulged beneath the same kind of serge apron worn by the first assistant. Or, rather, he said, “Sie wünschen?” knowing she was German and preferred to be addressed in her own language. This was not the case with all the Germans in Novi Sad in the thirties, when, with the arrival of the first refugees and the first Kulturbund uniforms, there was already the feel of another war in the air and the settling of old scores. Shyly, for it would be the gratification of a secret wish, she raised her head — shaded by a broad-brimmed hat — and pointed a finger in a black silk glove at the shelves above the assistant’s head, to where her gray eyes had timidly risen. “A notebook, but with fine paper, please.”
He bowed slightly, with an expression of comprehension appropriate to the price of the article requested, for such was the demand of his calling and of his experience. It was this all-knowing expression that won the confidence of his lady customers, who vaguely and with timid, hesitant gestures asked to be served. He turned to the shelves and, stretching nimbly, began to take out and lay on the counter two, three, seven, eight different notebooks and jotters, with hard and soft covers, slim and thick, till finally, tapping the back of the shelf to make sure he had taken down the whole selection, he spread the notebooks out, opening them and riffling their pages, as a shoe salesman bends back soles and uppers to show their lightness and suppleness. Fräulein’s eyes, slipping over the gray and dark-olive bindings and the squared and lined pages, came to rest on the one with the gold letters “Poésie” printed in the top corner. She picked it up and opened it; its thick, yellowish vellum pages crackled. “How much is this one?” When the assistant told her, she replaced it on the counter. “I’ll take it.” She dug into her handbag and paid after he had swiftly wrapped the book in thin, silky, white paper. She put it in her bag and took it home. Once there, she opened the package, turned to the first of the book’s stiff yellow pages, then sat at the table and, dipping her pen in the inkwell, wrote, “May 4, 1935” and, below, “With God’s help”—all, of course, in German.
The notebook was now a diary. Gradually it filled with the words Fräulein used to give form and sense to the important happenings in her life — until one day, November 1, 1940, when she wrote the words “A new illness,” as she had done many times before, but this was the last time, for the new assault on her body was to exceed her reason’s power to describe it. She would go from doctor to doctor, stretching out on low tables covered with white oilcloth, and with eyes glued to the ceiling would suffer the painful and embarrassing probings of expert fingers. In Dr. Korkhammer’s laboratory, they would take blood from her vein and from her finger, and urine in a glass vessel. She would take their findings to Dr. Boranović’s sanatorium. Finally, Dr. Boranović, a surgeon then at the height of his powers, a thickset, lumbering, fifty-year-old man, told her that she had an inflammation of the gall bladder with an attendant stone, and immediately proposed a date for the operation. “Does that suit you?” His small gray-green eyes, set deep in rolls of fat, looked up at her from the calendar on his desk. She was shocked by the nearness of the date, and asked for time to think. “Well now,” he said with a crookedly pitying smile, “if you take too long to think it over, I may not be able to take you into my clinic at all, because I like my operations to be successful.” The veiled threat hit like a thunderbolt.