Vera got the news from Milinko the next day, and the funeral was held the day after. She attended it reluctantly, as a matter of form, along with her mother, observing all the while just who greeted her mother (if they were men, how they did so) and also how her mother behaved, whether she was pretending sorrow like the rest of the ladies (like Sredoje’s mother, elegantly pale and ugly), and whether anyone noticed that her mother was different from the rest. Tension prevented Vera from being sad or even shaken by the knowledge that the person she had spoken with only two days before was now prayed over and lowered into the ground, a person whose hand she had touched and from whose lips she had received a last request. The request was constantly on her mind, and as soon as the earth was rounded into a mound over the grave, she left her mother with the dry remark that she had something to do in town, and set off in the direction of Stevan Sremac Street, more to think the request over than to carry it out.
Once she found herself in front of Fräulein’s house, however, she had no choice but to go through with it. Of course she had to wait for Mrs. Šimoković, who had also attended the funeral but who needed twice as much time to return home, arm in arm with her cousin and pausing frequently to pass remarks (among them, the mumblings of the priest that the dead woman’s sister hadn’t made it to the funeral). Mrs. Šimoković was pleased to see Vera, for the girl’s visit made the day’s events last longer, and she gladly and not without curiosity opened Fräulein’s room for her. They both stopped short at the door: it proved to be colder in the room than in the courtyard. (“And it’s only been a week since she had a fire in here,” Mrs. Šimoković said with surprise.) They turned the light on, and Vera went straight to the wardrobe and opened the door, as if she had done this many times before and knew exactly where to find what she was looking for. And indeed she immediately saw the bound red notebook at the bottom of the wardrobe. She picked it up and casually opened it, moving her eyes and lips as if to convince anyone around of her right to the article; then, with a smile, she made her way past Mrs. Šimoković, who was too awed by the written word to entertain suspicions of any kind. Neither of them spoke as they parted, yet Vera felt like a thief. That feeling stayed with her all the way home and troubled her even when she read the diary that night in bed. She was not supposed to do this, she knew very well, but she could not bring herself to burn it unread. Once it was read, the knowledge of its contents prevented her from burning it at all.
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, once the shock of surprise had faded, to come 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? (From her own vantage point, it seemed very long indeed, more than forty years!) She told Milinko of her hesitation, but he, forever upright, advised her to be true to her promise. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, but hit upon a compromise: She wouldn’t read the diary any more at present, but would put it out of sight, for a later, more mature decision. Looking around for a hiding place, her eyes fell on her own wardrobe, but she drew back instantly, almost superstitiously, from such a blatant repetition. No, it would be better to put it in her book cabinet, where no one ever looked. She found the right place for it, between two textbooks— introduction to biology and math — which had been abandoned and were of no further use to anyone. But before doing so — burying it, as it were, instead of cremating it — she thought she should validate her decision — which she experienced as both a denial and a betrayal — by recording it. With this in mind, she sat down at her desk, opened the diary, and, as a continuation of the confidential entries in Fräulein’s firm, slanting hand, wrote on the next empty page, in her own rounded characters, the succinct, stark, tombstone-like inscription: “Anna Drentvenšek died December 19, 1940, after a gall-bladder operation.”
In fact, it was this inscription that persuaded Sredoje Lazukić to take possession of the diary when, quite by chance, he came upon it four years later as a soldier of the Partisan army. His group had marched through the streets of the town that had once been his own, through the triumphal arch that displayed greeting to its liberators — and he was a liberator, accepting chaste kisses on the cheek from the beautiful buxom girls who rushed off the sidewalks to shower the soldiers with flowers and then vanished as quickly as they had appeared. He had merged with a crowd in the main square, to listen to a speech by an unknown officer wearing the three-cornererd hat of the Spanish Civil War veteran. That evening, he settled into the barracks and later went to a dance to try to make time with Nurse Valerie, from Slavonia, until her girlfriend spirited her off to a small room next door, where the officers — the brigade commander at their head — were making merry. Through the half-open door he caught sight of the commander flailing his arms as he danced on a table covered with a white cloth. Sredoje sensed vaguely that a horde of uninvited guests, himself included, was trampling on something that was his, and the feeling did not leave him the next day, when, while waiting to be transferred to the front, he wandered through the streets of Novi Sad.
Everywhere there was filth, burned-out ruins, bedraggled bunting from the celebrations, noise. He went, in spite of himself, as if to a cemetery, to the house that had once been his, a house standing like a lone tower, with a dome that his father had been much taken with when it was being built. He looked at it furtively, from around a corner. Then he rang the doorbell and realized with relief, once faced with an unfamiliar young woman with a child in her arms (to protect herself, it seemed), how much he had been afraid of finding one of his old neighbors settled there, someone who remembered how his mother had been led away to be shot — who perhaps had even been involved. It was easy to tell the young woman who he was, and natural to accept her frightened invitation to come in. He proceeded to walk around the rooms as if carrying out an inspection, his eyes passing quickly over the belongings of others, noting how entirely they changed the space that had once belonged to him. He passed through the house to the garden, now stripped of everything but the three pine trees that his father had planted, one for each of his sons. Then he turned on his heel and left.
This excursion into the past drew him ever deeper into the past’s entangling coils, however, and instead of going back to the barracks or to the square to enjoy himself, he set off toward other familiar places, in whatever order he happened upon them: the Swan pastry shop, the park, the cathedral, the high school. He dropped in at Milinko Božić’s house and from Milinko’s mother learned that his old classmate had recently become a soldier. He peered through the windows of Fräulein’s old room and finally arrived at Vera Kroner’s house. He had never been inside it before the war (though he had very much wanted to be), so he paused, undecided, at the gate. But the disorder in the yard and the wide-open front door convinced him that the house had been abandoned and that he was free to enter it, only to find furniture strewn about haphazardly, carpetless scuffed floors, the remains of smashed crockery. Silently he walked through the debris, searching for Vera’s old room. He recognized it at once, though he had never seen it before, by the white furniture and a scrap of white curtain, caught on the latch of the open window, that fluttered there like a tiny flag of surrender. He opened the wardrobe and found that it had been looted. He pulled open two drawers, and they, too, were empty. His eyes fell on the small cabinet high on the wall, its white doors hanging open, and behind them textbooks in orderly rows on the shelves. No one had touched them, of course, he observed with a wry smile, but when he looked closer, he was suddenly moved by the narrow letters printed on their spines — the very same books he himself had had to toil his way through! Rummaging among them, he spotted a small volume with an unusual red cover, opened it, and was surprised to find it written in German. He was unable to recognize the hand, although it seemed familiar, until he reached the last page, where the change in script was at once recognizable as Vera’s. “Anna Drentvenšek died December 19,1940, after a gallbladder operation.”