Dear God, I’m at the end of my strength. Be with me!
October 20
There are days when I feel better. I’ve gained 3½ kilos, thank God. But I’m still very ill. My work goes well, though I’m doing less. God preserve me.
November 1, 1940
The bells ring out sadly. All Saints. A new illness. Dear Father in Heaven, do not abandon me. Dear Father in Heaven, restore me to health.
22
The end of the war, like its beginning, long expected yet sudden when it came, was announced by gunfire: soldiers joyfully turned the muzzles of their rifles skyward and pulled the triggers.
The salvo found Sredoje in Koprivnica, and when he ran into the street and saw the red trails of the tracer bullets against the May sky, he understood their meaning, that he had been made a gift of the future. With emotion he loaded his radio equipment onto a requisitioned peasant cart, jumped on with his three assistants, and at full speed, whipping the horses and singing, in a night and a day covered the road to Celje, their new destination. They merged with a flood of soldiers and prisoners there in the streets, which were pleasantly warm in the milky sun and wild with rejoicing.
The town was his. He deposited his radio equipment in a barracks building outside town and set off to look for a place to sleep. He found it in the first house at whose door he knocked: in a town that had lived under the Germans, no one would refuse a Partisan liberator.
And before long Sredoje was a Partisan with silver stripes. The relaxation of standards in the suddenly expanded army brought him the rank of sergeant and membership in the League of Young Communists. This meant new advantages and new responsibilities. The recognition filled him with pride — he had succeeded, he had not lagged behind others — but it came as no reward for his convictions. Rather, it now required him to have convictions. He had to profess a loyalty he did not feel, even impose that loyalty on others, and this put him in a foul mood. He went to the Party meetings with his stomach in knots, and returned home feeling as if he had been plunged in deep water and held down to the limit of endurance. There was no air to breathe. He found air where his mind could be emptied, and where there was even a demand for such emptying: in fornication.
For a soldier, all of Celje was one great fornicating ground, as the instinct for survival strove to make up for wartime losses. And to whom could its treasures be opened more freely than to those who had by some miracle survived? In those days girls and women walked the streets like bitches in heat, trailing the scent of lust behind them; it was simply a matter of stopping them, asking them. Secretaries on their way home from work, peasant girls passing through, women waiting for their husbands to return from battle, young girls, and divorcées who had long ago renounced love to preserve their honor and their peace of mind — all now unhesitatingly stepped across the threshold of Sredoje’s room, in an apartment that belonged to a young mechanic with four children, and surrendered themselves, their hearts beating with the hope that in him they would find a man for the life that was beginning anew.
He disappointed that hope, of course; he changed women constantly. At three o’clock, after lunch in the mess, he was capable of persuading an attractive woman walking by to go home with him, and then, after he had had his enjoyment and got rid of her, of going into town again in the early evening and finding another to waken his desire. Exhausted after a day of panting and sweating in bed, he would drag himself to the park in front of the railroad station and rest on a bench. There were always people there. Women with bundles would sit down on benches nearby, and again he would stir, ferret, introduce himself, boast of his sufferings, show his wounds, and into the bushes, instead of taking her back with him to his little room, which was permeated with the smell of sperm.
The predictability of his encounters began to irritate him. He realized, also, that he was participating in something that had been arranged beforehand, arranged by the women themselves, that he was their instrument as much as they were his. He took them with anger, contempt, caused them pain, yet they rose from his bed with a smile of understanding, perhaps even finding excitement in the humiliation they suffered, and soon went on to the beds of others, driven by their own glands, their own needs. He disliked negotiating with them, disliked the wordless, impatient escortings to his room. He moved to a room nearer the park, in the house of a retired accountant on a street facing the station, but after five weeks looked for a third place, something that would vary the routine of these rendezvous.
His attention was drawn to a cul-de-sac that crossed his own street, and a two-story house set back in a small but well-cared-for garden. Here, not far from the bustle of the station, a profound silence reigned. The silence of a trap, he thought. He lifted the latch on the iron gate; it swung open noiselessly. But the door of the house was locked. He rang the bell. A young woman with brown hair opened it, and he told her that he needed a room. She stepped aside, and he entered a cool hallway from which a staircase led up to the second floor.
“Who lives here?” he asked.
“Downstairs there’s only me,” said the woman, “and upstairs an elderly lady.”
Sredoje stepped past her and took a look around. To the left, underneath the stairs, a door opened into a small room with a blind lowered over the window, so that he could just barely see a low bed, a wardrobe, a table, and chairs. To the right was a larger bedroom and, beyond it, a very clean, bright kitchen and bathroom. He took a minute to make up his mind, walking up and down in the hallway, on tiles that rattled faintly. Then he pointed to the room he had looked at first. “I’ll take this one.” When the woman nodded, he turned toward the entrance, said he was going to get his things, saluted, left. Intrigued not only by the room’s cavelike tranquillity in that cul-de-sac full of flowers, but also by the submissiveness of the young woman, he hurried to the room he currently occupied, threw what few personal possessions he had into his haversack, knocked on the kitchen door — the landlord and his wife always sat in the kitchen, so as not to dirty the rooms — told them he was leaving, and a few minutes later was back at the house nestled in the garden.
Entering quietly, he walked down the hallway and found the doors to both rooms wide open. In the room he had chosen, in front of the open wardrobe, the young woman stood with ironed white sheets in her arms. Surprised by his rapid return, she froze and stared at him wide-eyed. He set the haversack on the table, took his belongings out, and turned to put them in the wardrobe. But the woman’s sudden stiffness and her gaze, which was drawn despite herself from him to the shelves, made him look more closely inside. Behind the white stacks of linen he spotted something silver; bending down, he saw a German officer’s cap, with silver braid around its shiny visor, on top of a carefully folded green uniform.
Sredoje straightened and looked at the woman; she looked back at him with large pleading eyes. He threw his things on an empty shelf, turned, and left. But he did not go to the park to find a woman with whom to try out the attractions of his new room; he was too taken with the recent discovery and the woman’s eyes, which promised much more than a surrender achieved through negotiation and persuasion. He went to the center of town and wandered, waiting for evening. At the mess he had supper, then stayed to watch a chess match played by two NCOs after the tables were cleared. He was delaying his return to the house, as a gourmet postpones a meal to whet his appetite.
When the clock on the wall struck nine, Sredoje got up and left. The little street was lit by a flickering street lamp; the house in the garden was quiet and dark. He pushed the latch on the gate; it opened, but when he shut it behind him, his fingers touched a key left in the lock. He locked the gate. It was the same with the door, and he locked the door also. In his room he switched on the light and found the bed made with clean sheets. He went to the wardrobe: the uniform and the cap were gone. He undressed quickly, went to the bathroom and washed, but on the way back, instead of going to his own room, he entered the room opposite. Its door was unlocked. In the bed by the window, in the faint light from the street lamp through the cracks in the blind, the woman lay with her eyes open. He got in beside her and spent the night with her.