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PARTISAN REVIEW
to her relatives' home in Trieste. Maks had spent the last few months in
Sarajevo, just long enough to put his affairs in order.
In
agreement with
his mother he had sold his old father's house on the Miljacka and most
of his things. Now he was on his way to his mother in Trieste and then
he might go on to Argentina, perhaps even to Bolivia. He did not declare
it openly, but it was clear he was leaving Europe for ever.
Maks had grown larger during his life on the front, had roughened;
he was dressed like a businessman, as far as I could tell .
In
the darkness
I could just make out his strong head with thick blond hair and hear his
voice, which had become deeper, more masculine over the years, and his
Sarajevo dialect, with its softened consonants and its blurry drawn-out
vowels . His language gave out a certain feeling of insecurity.
He spoke, even now, as if he were reading from a book, using many
unusual, bookish, learned phrases. But that was all that remained of the
former Maks. Otherwise, there was no reminder of either poetry or
books. (Nobody remembered
Prometheus
any more.) At first he said
something about the war in general, with a great bitterness, more in the
tone of voice than in the words-a bitterness that did not expect to be
understood. For him, there were no opposing fronts, so to speak, in this
great war; they had mixed, flowed one into the other and utterly
merged. The general suffering had veiled his vision and deprived him of
an understanding of everything else. I remember how shocked I was
when he said he congratulated the victors-and that he pitied them
deeply, because the conquered saw where they stood and what they had
to do, while the conquerors could not even suspect what was ahead of
them. He spoke in the caustic and hopeless tone of a man who has lost
a lot and can therefore now say what he pleases, knowing very well that
no one can harm him for it nor will saying it help him any. After that
great war there were many such embittered men among the intelli–
gentsia, embittered in a peculiar way, about something indefinable in
life. These people could find in themselves neither the ability to recon–
cile and adapt, nor the power for firm decisions in the opposite direc–
tion. He was, it seemed to me at the moment, one of those people.
But our conversation halted quickly, because neither of us wanted to
quarrel that night, after so many years, at this place for a reunion. That
is why we spoke of other things. Actually, he spoke. Even now, he spoke
in carefully chosen words and complicated sentences, as a man who
spends more time with books than with people, coldly and matter-of–
factly- without hesitating and embellishing, just as when one opens a
medical textbook and finds in it the symptoms of his own illness .
