In answer Vera shrugged and said that happiness and unhappiness could not be measured by fact but only by feeling, by the state of mind.
Sredoje could not accept that. If it was only a matter of state of mind, there would be no justice or injustice, no good or evil. What would Fräulein have said if, instead of the deprivation she imposed upon herself, she had been forcibly deprived — whether by others or by society — of the experience of love? Or if, the other extreme, she had been forced to accept love against her will, as Vera had been forced?
Vera said nothing.
Did that mean, Sredoje went on, that Vera considered herself less unfortunate than Fräulein?
They were two different kinds of misfortune, Vera answered suddenly and without hesitation. They couldn’t be compared.
But Sredoje persisted: Didn’t indecision in love seem laughable when compared with rape, just as death from an illness developing within us, limiting the span of our life, seemed tame, almost idyllic, compared with death by violence?
It amounted to the same if one was not resigned, Vera said, but this time uncertainly.
Resigned? Both surprised and thoughtful, Sredoje repeated the adjective, as if tasting it. And had she, Vera, been resigned to the embraces that had been imposed on her?
With a shrug Vera said that perhaps she had been resigned. She survived, didn’t she? She suddenly burst into tears. She cried her heart out, lips twisted, face streaming; her body racked with such sobs that the couch on which she was sitting creaked. “It was an insane asylum,” she blubbered, “where the guards were more insane than anyone. The screams, howling, blows, the crowding and shivering with fear, and the roll calls, over and over again; it made you resigned. How resigned? So resigned, so obedient, that you smiled and opened your arms to the soldiers who came in like wolves, and when one of them chose you, you trembled with gratitude, you hugged and kissed him and rolled your hips so he wouldn’t complain later, so Handke wouldn’t kill you with his stick.”
Full of remorse, Sredoje sat down beside her and took her hands to comfort her, but she pulled them away and shook her head.
“That’s what I was, Sredoje, obedient, cheerful, because I had resigned myself. Yes, I was resigned!”
He took her in his arms and kissed her wet face, her hands, shoulders, breasts, first one, then the other, and gradually the embrace of consolation became an embrace of love, sensual, unrestrained, because now that the face he knew so well was contorted, there arose before him another face, and beneath it another body, shy, helpless, the body he had imagined and desired as a boy, which now ran to meet him, naked, innocent, enslaved, across a wide, empty space, along a plank as perilously narrow as the line between life and death.
He pressed, sculpted, formed her body into the one of his dreams, and it yielded, opened, molded itself to his need. Out of breath, they sat up, not looking each other in the eye. Then again they lay down and joined, this time deliberately, slowly, exciting each other with experienced movements, until their whispered endearments turned to cries of pleasure. Afterward, they lay there smoking, silent, and, since it was warm in the room, completely naked.
Now that the days were long and it was light until midevening, each could see every detail of the other’s body. Their bodies were no longer in their first youth: Sredoje had put on weight, while under Vera’s white skin was a network of blue veins, and sudden motion made her thighs shake. But these bodies were the only future their bond held for them, and Sredoje and Vera, having exhausted the pleasure, became aware of this.
For several days they would not see each other; then they would arrange to meet on a definite day and at a definite time, blaming the interval on the time of year, the end of the pitiless winter. Sometimes, when Sredoje came to see Vera, he found her in a bad mood, stubborn, and once half drunk. He lectured her, even though he himself drank. She retorted, finally, that she knew a place where she could drink as much as she liked, and when he raised his eyebrows, she reminded him with a self-mocking laugh that her mother owned a tavern in Germany. Sredoje, who had expected a worse, more shameless answer, lowered his eyes and asked if she wanted, then, to go to her mother. “Why not?” Vera said spitefully. He thought of dissuading her but realized that he had no right to do so, since he had no future to offer her, and when she saw that Sredoje was hesitating, she began to consider seriously the possibility she had thrown out offhandedly. She concluded that apart from making love with Sredoje there was nothing for her in Novi Sad. She said as much to Sredoje, but he was silent.
As a first step, which did not obligate her and from which she could always draw back, in a moment of alcoholic decisiveness Vera wrote to her mother, and since the answer she received was encouraging — though accompanied by the carefully reiterated condition, not at all to her liking, that she must help with the work — she made up her mind. She renewed her passport and, on the basis of her mother’s written invitation, registered and attested to at the Frankfurt Town Hall, obtained a visa and, through a travel agency, a ticket valid for two months. Her departure was fixed for September 14.
Now they both waited for that date, waited for it with the unspoken wish that it would never come, for notwithstanding the clear awareness each had of the other’s imperfections, each still desired and loved the other. But neither Vera nor Sredoje had the strength to take the responsibility for changing the decision; so time carried them inexorably to their last meeting, which was the afternoon before Vera boarded the train.
Sredoje postponed two lessons to the next day and arrived on time. Vera was dressed for the journey, and next to her on the floor stood Mitzi’s old suitcase and the tartan traveling bag she had brought with her from Germany. She looked around to make sure she had not forgotten anything, and in her agitation stuffed a few more objects into her open bag, a Turkish coffeepot, a hand towel, then changed her mind and took them out, placing them back on the table or the nearest chair as useless, of too little value. Fräulein’s diary still lay on the table.
“What will you do with it?” asked Sredoje, whose eyes had kept straying in that direction.
“Nothing,” said Vera, although until that moment she had no idea. “I’ll leave it for you,” she decided.
“For me? But it’s yours.”
“No, it isn’t. You found it.”
“In your house, in your cupboard. With your writing in it. It’s yours.”
Vera shrugged. She wanted to say that the house was no longer hers, but such words were irrelevant now, so she said vaguely, “Why should I take it with me to Germany? There’s no point.”
Sredoje thought for a moment, then suggested, “As a memento?”
Vera pursed her lips. “As a memento of whom?” And she looked at him in surprise, because she had expected, thinking of the diary, that they would argue, instead, over who would keep it, and that such an argument might even unite them at the last moment. But at the sight of the packed suitcases she realized that without Sredoje she had no need of the diary, and that Sredoje, without her, had no need of it.
“Shall we destroy it?” Sredoje asked.