ALEKSANDAR TISMA
559
and only then will you come to the mansard level. And are you willing to
knock at every door and ask for him? If you're too loud and conspicuous,
he may hear you before you find him and thus remain eternally hidden. Yes,
even if you do locate the door to his apartment. Because the mansard devi–
ates unexpectedly from the pattern of the other floors, narrowing as it does
to the width of a footpath, which, protected by an iron fence so people will
not fall to the street, looks like a ship's promenade perched on what is
entirely residential space.
Blam often visits this walkway, this place of celestial freedom, slipping
out of his apartment through a passage tucked between the laundry room
and drying room. Parading thus along the building's edge, he has a bird's–
eye view of the Main Square's spacious rectangle and the narrow pointed
spire of the cathedral that dominates it, or of the broad trough of Old
Boulevard with its endless processions of cars and pedestrians, or the ravine
of narrow Okrugic Street, perpendicular to the boulevard, and the tables
in front of the hotel. True, he is so accustomed to these sights that he
scarcely notices them, his eye resting rather on an uncommon detail, a lone,
dark, pillowlike cloud that seems anchored to the cathedral's spire, or a
pedestrian, or a pretty woman who keeps returning to the same place. He
pauses at the railing, leaning his elbows on it, eager to take part, to merge
with the crowd. He becomes the pedestrian, he becomes the waiting
woman. He knows nothing about them, yet for that very reason he can
string together images of facts and possibilities. The image of an accident
that once took place there, the image of two beaming faces meeting for a
trys t. The screech of brakes, a cry of horror that overcomes the crowd like
a wind. She is married, but her husband is in jail for corrupting minors and
she has phoned an old admirer and asked to see him. The pedestrian hit by
the screeching car was Aca KrkljuS's father. Aca himself showed Blam the
spot when he gave him his drunken account of what happened. His
father's leg was amputated and he could no longer manage his leather
workshop, so Aca had to take over and give up his own work and calling.
As for the old admirer, he is probably frightened by the responsibility
involved-after all, he has remained a bachelor (if he hadn't, the beautiful
woman would never have asked to see him): he senses she wants him to
replace her husband in the performance of certain familial duties as well as
in bed. Aca, or the pedestrian whose choice of position on the street
reminds Blam of Aca, seems to be surveying the terrain; he needs to make
a sketch of it, a legal drawing, to support his indemnity case, which he has
also told Blam about, while the man the woman has asked to see may have
got the time and place wrong, mixed things up, because his memory is so
poor. But the two people who are actually there waiting will in fact
exchange a few glances and hastily thrown-together words; they will grow
