The Use of Man by Aleksandar Tisma

Vera mourned everyone who had ever spoken to her, who had longed for her, whether out of love or lust, even the German soldiers whose convulsive spasms on top of her before they left for the front were the last expression of their will to live. They were all shadows now, voices from the past. Was there anything solid on this earth, anything that stood firm, so one would not need to say of it: That, too, has passed? It seemed to her that there was nothing. Desires, plans, people sending their calls of love and screams of pain into the air, and ultimately all this dissolved into a fog that floated aimlessly. And she herself was a wisp in that fog, lost among strange shadows and voices. Did she exist, or was she just another of those shadows and voices?

Sredoje Lazukic returns to his hometown of Novi Sad in Serbia as a member of the victorious Partisans at the end of World War II. His former home is occupied, but the home of his old friend and crush Vera Kroner stands empty. Wandering in, he finds a strange object: a little red book, a diary that once belonged to Fraulein Anna, who taught them both German, and who died young of illness before the war began. This object brings Sredoje back to the life he once had as a boy, and to the lives of others: Vera, a beautiful and aloof half-Jewish girl, her boyfriend, Sredoje's friend, Milinko, who ended his days armless, legless, deaf, and blind in a field hospital, to their various parents and siblings, killed in war or in camps, or simply absent.

Structurally, The Use of Man is a wonder: it vaults from the era before the war to the era after, to the war itself, from Sredoje to Vera to Milinko to Fraulein Anna to Vera's father to Sredoje's brother, and on, and on. It's one of those books that seems to have no organizing principle but intuition, and an intuition that works flawlessly. Although, now that I've said that, I think there's perhaps one organizing principle: it keeps until the very end the story of Vera's experience in the concentration camp, where she was spared a quick death by being selected for a special block in which the German officers kept the women they wanted to sleep with. Even then, she outlives most of the other girls, who are tortured to death when the officers tire of them, or over petty slights. When we read this section--recounted in pitilessly toneless fashion, like the tale of a dead and numbed psyche--we begin to understand why Vera, having returned to Novi Sad, submits sexually to any man who darkens her door; it is the rote mechanical movement of someone whose life has been emptied out of everything but this horrible routine.

Sex is a big part of The Use of Man. It ought to be called The Use of Women, honestly. Vera's trials are mirrored by Sredoje's sexual sadism, Sredoje who only ends up with the anti-occupation Partisans because he's chased out of the Serbian police force for abusing the power of his badge by threatening to arrest prostitutes unless they service him for free. Despite this, Sredoje and Vera are the twin poles of the novel, destined for each other as much as they are foils for one another. When they finally re-meet, years after the war's end, Sredoje is in possession of the diary that was given to Vera by the dying Fraulein. They kindle a brief romantic and sexual relationship centered around it, reading and re-reading it, dumbfounded by a relic of despair recorded by someone who never even saw the war's beginning. Was it better to die, like Fraulein Anna, of some strange disease, than to live through the war's ravagings?

The way in which the war upended lives is the novel's big theme. To make it work, Tisma lingers for a hundred pages on the pre-war lives of the characters in Novi Sad, not without their conflicts and complexities, but somehow, like Anna's, conflicts and complexities of a different tenor and scope completely. The book's structural tricks give this prelude a sense of foreboding and doom; Tisma sets aside one chapter to tell us, paragraph by paragraph, how each of the characters will die, which by gas chamber, which by bullets, which by suicide. The war is a knot into which time enters in both directions. It gives a sense, too, of how the ethnic and cultural complexities of the Balkans exacerbated the war's uncertainty. How does Vera's father, the Jewish Kroner, end up with his brother-in-law Sep, a dedicated anti-Semite and Nazi, staying in his house? This could be merely a preconceived notion, and much of Europe must have been the same way, but something in The Use of Man reflected the flammable ethnic and cultural conflicts that have dogged the Balkans forever.

The Use of Man sounds like a too-familiar book: a Holocaust story in a realist mode. Who needs another book like that? It makes it all the more impressive, I think, that the book is so engaging and affecting; though the structure is clever and skillful, it's the richness of the characters and the detail of their lives that makes the novel what it is.

With the addition of Serbia, my "countries read" list is up to 63.

Orient Express by Graham Greene

Because his future had an almost certain limit, he began to dwell, as he was not accustomed to do, on the past. There had been a time when a clear conscience could be bought at the price of a moment's shame "since my last confession I have done this or that." If, he thought with longing and a little bitterness, I could get back my purity of motive so easily, I should be a fool not to take the chance of forgiveness; I have no conviction that there is anyone to forgive. He came near to sneering at his last belief: Shall I go and confess my sins to the treasurer of the Social-Democratic party, to the third-class passengers? The priest's face turned away, the raised fingers, the whisper of a dead tongue, seemed to him suddenly as beautiful, as infinitely desirable and as hopelessly lost as youth and first love in the corner of the viaduct wall.

Orient Express was Graham Greene's first big success, a popular novel about political intrigue on the famed train running from Ostend to Istanbul. Funny, though, how its success must have been dwarfed by Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, which came out two years later and at the same time as the film adaptation of Greene's novel. Greene originally titled his book Stamboul Train; I'm not sure about the timing but it's hard not to wonder if the filmmakers, and those who subsequently titled the novel's American edition, were hoping to piggyback off Christie's success. A comparison between the two might be instructive: though Greene considered Orient Express an "entertainment," without the weightiness of some of his later, more serious novels, I think you'd be hard pressed to say that it is quite as "entertaining" as Christie. There's murder and bloodshed on this train, but they don't quite lend themselves to the cathartic crime-and-solution two-step of a satisfying mystery novel. In Greene's version, only a few--and not necessarily the reader--are privileged enough to arrive at their intended destination.

As you might expect, Orient Express is about people from all walks of life, gathered on a train. There's Carleton Myatt, a Jewish businessman, dealing in currants, who is preoccupied with the possibility that he is being cheated by his agent in Istanbul. There's Coral Musker, who is traveling to Istanbul to join a chorus line; Myatt gifts her his own first-class berth when she faints suddenly in the corridor. There's Josef Grunlich, who has just shot and killed a man during a robbery when he boards in secret at Vienna--one of the sensible things about the way Greene structures the novel is that people are always getting on and off the train, you know, as people do, instead of being "stuck" on it in the classic mystery setup. There's Dr. Richard John, who is really a Serbian Communist named Dr. Richard Czinner, who is headed secretly back to Belgrade to stand trial for a past attempt at revolution. Czinner's return is spoiled by a journalist named Mabel Warren, a really ugly sort of character: not only are her journalistic methods unscrupulous, but she's also a drunk and a predatory lesbian who's enraged by the desertion of her beautiful "partner." (This character is not Greene's finest moment, I think.)

"Entertainment" or not, the politics of Orient Express are subtly radical. Czinner forms the novel's moral spine: he knows he is returning to face certain death in Belgrade, and his thoughts are the thoughts of a dying man, reckoning up the sum of his successes and failures. Czinner's revolution has been twice scuttled, but he goes to affirming his own convictions by suffering at the hand of the despised state. It's Czinner, too, who occupies the role of the lapsed Catholic that appears in nearly all of Greene's novels. Greene writes that Czinner had "blown that candle out with his own breath, telling himself that God was a fiction invented by the rich to keep the poor content," but when faced with failure and death, he longs for the return of a belief that will shape his sacrifice into a meaning that still eludes it.

It's Myatt who is Czinner's foil: although he is dogged throughout the novel by casual anti-Semitism, Myatt's life is organized around capital. He gives his bunk, and eventually his first-class ticket, to Coral, who is inwardly ravaged by the question of what she owes him in return. Myatt and Coral seem to genuinely like each other, but their budding relationship is troubled by Myatt's gift. When Coral says "I love you," after giving herself--and her virginity!--to Myatt, how much of that is genuine love, and how much is predicated on his promise to give her a place to live in Istanbul? She doesn't know, and neither does Myatt: capital and capitalism, Greene suggests, present an insurmountable barrier to human connection.

I've never read Murder on the Orient Express. I assume Christie, for the sake of narrative unity, keeps the action pretty focused on the train itself, and doesn't let anyone off. But the climax of Orient Express comes in the Serbian border town of Subotica, where military officials--thanks to Mabel's morning article, which reaches Belgrade before the train can--have orders to seize Czinner. Their dragnet scrapes up Josef and Coral, too, separating her from Myatt, and providing the dramatic setup for the novel's final push. Coral gets an opportunity to absorb Czinner's moral clarity, freed from the complications of capital; Myatt gets a chance--though not necessarily a successful one--to perform an act of heroism that will be a gift to Coral of more than monetary value.

It's clear to me that Greene's work got better than age, and if anything, even more cynical about the operations of European capitalism and imperialism. Czinner stands out as a character here, but stands out also as a prototype for more interesting and complicated apostates, fewer good men trying to understand their own goodness and more bad men who do good things despite all their best efforts. Still, Orient Express is a much deeper and more thoughtful book than Greene seemed to believe it was.