The concentration camp at Auschwitz, near Cracow. Acres of flat land encircled by a high barbed-wire fence and heavily built up with long squat huts; an administration building with an upper floor, grimy workshops, a low whitewashed brothel, a hospital, a prison with torture chambers in its cellars and walls suitable for shootings and hangings — all overshadowed by slender observation towers and the round chimney of the cremation oven, the crematorium.
3
Fräulein’s arrival in Novi Sad: a shipwrecked sailor arriving on dry land. But this dry land was modest, a place of cart drivers and bricklayers, day laborers who worked too long and for too little money to be able even to give themselves over totally to vice. Every Saturday they washed in a tub in the kitchen, which their wives filled with hot water; then they changed into clean clothes and went to the taverns, returning drunk to beat their wives and make them pregnant. The downtrodden remainder carried within themselves the poison of their frustration: they were striving toward something. They read the Sunday picture magazines and dreamed of becoming millionaires, or, at least, police inspectors, so they could set themselves up with fabulous brothels, or else prevent others from doing just that.
But Fräulein did not share their views on class distinctions, even though she lived in cheap rented rooms in Novi Sad, right in the midst of the innocent working class. The world she came from was another, far different, one: the wine-growing hillsides of the Zagorje, the farthest slopes of snow-white mountains, a small town with clean streets, and a house with green shutters, a house obsessively aired. A town where on Sundays people discussed with the parish priest the indestructibility of the faith and their children’s progress at school. A German woman surrounded by Slovenes and Croats, she was the daughter of a lame watchmaker, whose wife had abandoned him when Fräulein and her sister were five and seven, respectively. She was extraordinarily careful of her behavior and of the way she spoke, and insisted on having what was hers, asserting herself despite her isolation and the moral shadow hovering over her. Because of this self-assurance, which he perhaps took as a telltale indication that she was well off, the eye of a solicitor’s assistant clerk fell upon her: he was a Slovene, tall and angular, with a deep tan and a hooked nose protruding above a wayward ash-blond mustache. As soon as they were married, he persuaded her (he was most resourceful in bed) to ask that her part of her father’s inheritance be added to her dowry, which had proved inadequate, so they could move to Zagreb and set up an independent business. The “independent business” was to be a kind of lawyer’s office — or, rather, an advice bureau, for Janez Drentvenšek had no law degree, but simply a liking for the field. The office turned out to be a basement in a side street of the Old Town in Zagreb, with a sign in gaudy colors over the entrance at sidewalk leveclass="underline" “Legal Aid! The solution to your problems lies behind this door.” This Drentvenšek had copied from an article on American business practice. But no one brought his troubles down the creaking steps of that long-empty former cobbler’s workshop, despite the new and alluring sign, and the only financial transaction made there was the payment of the rent. Still more rent was required for a furnished room, which the newly-weds took not far from the “office.” Anna Drentvenšek cooked barley and fried groats and frankfurters on an old iron stove refurbished with silver paint. She had learned from her aunt, who had brought up the two sisters in their runaway mother’s absence, that although cheap, this was “hearty food,” which men enjoyed. But Drentvenšek was not so Spartan; he like luxury, Wiener schnitzel, and beer, bright and warm rooms where music played, and he avoided coming home, pleading the press of business. In fact, he spent his time looking at the window displays on Ilica, the main street, and dined in taverns.
In one of them, he got to know a cloakroom attendant, a woman in her thirties with big breasts and hairy lips, and took up with her, mainly because it gave him the right to sit around until closing time, waiting for her in the smoke and animation of the tavern rather than being cooped up at home, bored. In their furnished, room Anna languished, tearful, for he no longer even came to her bed, though she waited up for him all night, the groats on the still-burning stove slowly charring to cinders.
In the daytime, when she emerged from her lonely room, she found solace in the company of her landlady, the widow Tkalec, who also was German and also had been deceived in marriage. Her husband had been a talented musician and something of a composer, but had contracted a disease of the lungs and died without leaving her any offspring, having first driven her to distraction with his cantankerousness. The only bright spot in the landlady’s recollection of married life was at its very beginning, when, just married to the trumpet major Tkalec, their honeymoon was spent traveling by boat, in a cabin, all the way from Vienna to his first place of employment, Novi Sad, far to the east, but still on the Danube. At Novi Sad, as in Vienna, German was widely used, and there was a large military compound opposite the town. It seemed to her that everything in Novi Sad swam in rosy reflections, as if bathed in eau de Cologne. The Danube was rosy at dusk, the air rose-tinged early in the morning, the orchard blossoms roseate in spring, and her husband’s voice floated from a rose-filled garden, where he taught violin and trumpet to youngsters whose parents had to queue to pay for their lessons.
These colorful memories wove inexhaustible patterns through Anna Drentvenšek’s lonely days, and unexpectedly transformed themselves into a way out for her when Janez disappeared altogether, surreptitiously taking his personal belongings in their jointly owned suitcase. Previously he had sold all the furniture from the office, which, as it turned out, had two months’ rent still owing. His young wife was left without any means of support in a town where she had been subjected only to humiliation. Although her own small town was not far off, she could not possibly return to it. It seemed more natural, more necessary to get farther away. As far as possible. To a place where people were still uncomplicated, where prosperity and generosity still prevailed. Weeping, she got ready for the journey; weeping, her landlady gave her her blessing, envying her the youth which would bloom once again in that gentle and beautiful place. But when Anna arrived in Novi Sad (by train), a summer rainstorm had turned the unpaved station yard to mud, and she sloshed through it on high heels to the nearest inn, which was full of peasants and salesmen. From her room on the second floor, she listened until dawn to the wailing of a singer in the room below, and to the laughter of waitresses bringing guests upstairs.
The next day, she went to look for a room to rent, and took one on the outskirts of town — prices there were more reasonable — in a one-story house that had a well, a pump, and a clapboard privy. This town was to be the center of her existence to the end, as well as the cause of her dissatisfaction, headaches, and loss of appetite. In this setting of sand and sticky black earth, thoughts of her wine-growing Zagorje, with its gravelly soil and swift, clear waters, would always make her homesick, and her eyes would search in vain for the promised rosy hues on gray sidewalks — sidewalks burning hot in summer and at all other seasons covered with mud — or in the unbridled growth of the gardens, or in the wind-torn milky sky. The food she was able to obtain tasted of the sand that was driven through the streets and deposited in handfuls under the cracks beneath doors and around windows. The neighbors, sluggish and cunning, watched her, trying to fathom the secret of why she had come to live among them. Her defense was to recall her healthy childhood, her worthy father, who had not gone to pieces after he was faithlessly abandoned with young children, but had stubbornly gone on, dragging his lame leg from the house to the market, from the market to the house, from the room to the workshop, from the workshop to the room, and to the church and the Town Hall, protecting his two girls, standing in front of them with his head held high and his chest stuck out like a fortress of righteousness. Now she herself was that fortress, of necessity refortified, so that nothing could crush it.