Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Copyright © Miljenko Jergović and Fraktura, 2013

  English language translation copyright © Russell Scott Valentino, 2021

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2021

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  available upon request.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  www.elsewhereeditions.org

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Ebook ISBN 9781939810533

  Cover art: Hieronymus Bosch

  This publication was made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation, the Nimick Forbesway Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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  Contents

  Where Other People Live: A Presentation

  The Stublers: A Family Novel

  Have You Seen Regina Dragnev?

  This is What We Looked Like on the First Day of the War

  May Josip Sigmund Be Upon Your Soul

  A Pine Floor Shining Like the Sun Beneath Your Feet

  Ivo Baškarad and Mujo the Eternal

  Omama Johanna’s Heart Defect

  Eat – It Won’t Get Stuck in Your Seat

  The Long Missive of Mihajlo Fleginski

  Have You Thought About Boras?

  All Our Bee Cousins

  Marija Brana and Vasilj Nikolaevich

  The Mushroom Prayer; or, The Use of Learning

  The Balijan Summerhouse

  Confession Before the Sacrament of Marriage

  Germans in Sarajevo

  The Life and Tenants of Madam Emilija Heim

  Das ist rote tane

  The Grave in Donji Andrijevci

  Miners, Smiths, Drunks, and Their Wives: Quartets

  Aunt Jele and the Kljujić Šumonja Family

  The Karivans: A Short Tale

  For the Love of Your Goddamn Mother

  Uncles

  Revelation Through Story

  Thank God, We’re Catholics

  Slaughtering Pigs in the Colonies

  Mama Ionesco: A Report

  Inventories

  Kakania

  The Path Through Fury and Despair

  Christmas in Zenica

  Olga’s Zehra

  The Frančićs: Joža and Muc

  Erwin and Munevera

  The Croat

  Hunger, Colored Pebbles

  My Mother Offers Her Hand to Sviatoslav Richter to Help Him Climb onto the Ferry for Lokrum

  Kuferaši

  Home

  Mejtaš: Description of a Place

  Sepetarevac: The Ascent

  Zatikuša: Forgotten Alley

  Veliki Park

  Marshal Tito Street: Dream and Memory

  Focht Street; or, The End of Art

  The Church of the Holy Transfiguration: History of a Nightmare

  Two Graveyards

  In Springtime When We Air Out the Graves

  Aunt Finka at Saint Mihovil’s

  188 Lanterns

  On a Poem of Mine

  A Calendar of Everyday Events: Fictions

  Christmas with Kolchak

  The Match Juggler | Furtwängler

  The Bee Journal

  Parker

  Sarajevo Dogs

  History, Photographs

  Translator’s Note

  Where Other People Live: A Presentation

  My father and two uncles went to the same high school in Sarajevo that I did. Despite the nearly fifty years that had passed since my elder uncle was enrolled in the school – back in 1934 – the interior had remained the same. The person who noticed this was my grandmother, who came to the parent-teacher conferences for both him and me. My father and younger uncle were taught by the same art history professor, whom I would eventually have as well. When the old professor died at the beginning of my second year, all three of us attended his funeral.

  From its founding in the 1880s it had been an elite school for the bourgeoisie. The Bosnian author and Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić graduated from it, after considerable torment, about which he would later speak with horror and disgust. This is probably why his name was never mentioned at school functions, when the director would enumerate all the distinguished personages and celebrities who had attended the school. In my own days communist revolutionaries were considered the most noteworthy graduates, in addition to the assassins of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Gavrilo Princip himself, who fired the shots that struck Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, did not graduate from the school, because he had moved to Belgrade by then, but several of his close associates did.

  Our professors often told us that we must model ourselves after these figures – we lived in a socialist society, after all, which held especially fast to its bright and shining examples. Among them our parents and uncles were often held up to us as paragons of sacrifice and heroism.

  Around the subject of my elder uncle there was silence. He never received any grade lower than the very highest. He had pen pals in other countries with whom he corresponded in Latin, he solved unsolvable math problems, he played the guitar, and he wrote an essay on Paul Valéry. In photographs, tall and fragile, with his blond hair and blue eyes, he looks like a young aristocrat in a Thomas Mann novel, someone who will die by the end of the book, from meningitis or gaping caverns in his lungs, but his will not be an ordinary, quotidian death for in it will be gathered the destiny of a family or even that of an entire generation. I should say that while this is how my elder uncle looked, nothing else about him was like in Mann, except that I’d have been happy to reproduce on his gravestone the words with which the doctor of philosophy Serenus Zeitblom takes leave of his own friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn: “May God have pity on your poor soul, my friend, my homeland.”

  But I’m not at all certain what my uncle’s homeland would have been. What’s clearer, at any rate, is that I don’t have one, which means in the end that I wouldn’t really know what such an epitaph on his hypothetical grave would even mean.

  He was born in Usora, a small town in central Bosnia, where his father, my grandfather, was employed as a railroad stationmaster. He grew up along the tracks built by the Austro-Hungarians, changing homes and friends often. From his father he learned Slovenian, while his mother tongue was Croatian, but his first language was German. This he learned from his grandfather, my great-grandfather, a high-ranking railroad official, a Swabian German from the Banat, who was born in a town that’s now in Romania and went to schools in Vršac, Budapest, and Vienna. He too spent all his working life along the tracks of Bosnia.

  You must understand, then, that my elder uncle – let’s call him Mladen because things will get too confused if we keep this up without names – lived in complex surroundings and a complicated linguistic web. It is possible for language to determine a person’s destiny. Mladen’s grandfather Karlo was a nationally minded German, and he spoke only German to all four of his children until he died. Not once did he ever speak to them even a single Croatian word. With his daughters’ husbands – two Croats and a Slovene – he spoke Croatian, despite the fact that all three of them spoke perfect German. With his grandchildren
he spoke both languages, but only after he had been addressed in German. If anyone greeted him in Croatian, Opapa pretended not to hear.

  They say the weekly meals at which the whole family would gather were quite something. There was a strict language protocol of the sort that today probably only exists at the headquarters of the European Union, though no one seems to have wondered why it had to be that way. Karlo’s Germanness was especially important to him; everyone else around him would have to adapt. In return, no one, least of all he, prevented them from being something other than who they were or from speaking whatever languages they pleased. My great grandfather loved his sons-in-law, and it didn’t bother him that they weren’t German; rather, he was proud, I should note, of their civic calling. Belonging to the railroad workers’ trade was for him something like being in a secret society, a Masonic lodge of sorts, whose members differed from other people by their understanding of the world and their own role within it. A German rail man and a Croatian rail man enjoy a brotherhood that allowed them greater mutual understanding than any members of a single nation among themselves. Opapa was a leftist, and in the early 1920s he ended up in prison and later lost his job for backing a rail men’s strike. It wouldn’t have been a scandal if he had not been a stationmaster and a German among the barbarous Slavs. He was harshly punished by the royal government for the betrayal of his caste and his nation.

  But at home we were raised with the belief that all people have the same rights, regardless of their faith or economic status. The poor little country of Bosnia, where nearly 90 percent of the people in the 1920s and ’30s were illiterate, where epidemics of typhus and cholera would take over with alarming frequency, and where an endemic syphilis ravaged generation upon generation without respite, like some kind of evil tradition, this Bosnia was – for Opapa Karlo and his ideas – the ideal place to be living. He never had any notion of returning to the Banat or of moving to Vienna or Germany. Those were foreign countries to him. When asked about it, he would quietly answer that he wouldn’t ever be able to live in those places because that was “where other people lived.” As far as I’m concerned, there’s never been a more precise definition for the opposite of one’s homeland.

  Uncle Mladen was more like his grandfather than the other grandchildren were, even though one wouldn’t have said he resembled him physically. The elderly Karlo had dark hair and a long gray beard; judging by his photographs, he looked more like a Romanian rabbi, or at least a learned Jewish man, than a German. But Mladen, with his Nordic blue eyes and his bearing, took after the Slovene peasants of his father’s side. When I look at the two of them in the faded black-and-white photos, I wonder what their lives might have been like if German had not come so easily to Mladen, if he hadn’t so willingly listened to his grandfather play the violin, if he had been seated farther from the old man during the Sunday meals. I wonder what might have been if the old man had hated the Slav in his grandson even a little bit.

  In the courtyard of the building where my people had lived since the 1930s stood the Temple. There prayed those people who had – like Opapa Karlo and my other great-grandfather, the Slovene – by the will of Franz Joseph, brought their business affairs to Sarajevo, where they would long remain. Earlier, during the time of Turkish rule, there were no Ashkenazim in our town, only Sephardim, Spanish Jews. They were impoverished for the most part, distrustful of the new occupying power, and unwilling to allow the new arrivals to enter their shrine. In a certain sense, they did not even quite believe that these others were Jews, and so they called them, like their imperial and royal patrons, Swabians.

  Right at the beginning of the war, the moment the Germans had entered town, a few days before the Ustaše would take power, a mob broke into the Temple and destroyed everything. These people wore no uniform and were what you might call regular, everyday folks. Among those who ransacked the Temple were the town’s layabouts and thugs, petty thieves and gentlemen, but there were also Roma, who, together with Jews from Sarajevo, would in a few days’ time find themselves in transports bound for concentration camps.

  My Slovene grandfather, whose name was Franjo, watched his people destroy the Temple from his window. Nona Olga kept pulling him inside lest someone see him, but he stayed at the window despite the fear. It was a measure of his courage. He watched the people among whom he lived in the very moment of their transformation. First they would become outlaws, then murderers, and in the end martyrs, casualties of war.

  At the time the Temple was destroyed, Franjo and Olga’s son Mladen was starting the seventh grade. They taught him that what was happening was not right. They told him that Pavelić was a savage, that Hitler was insane and he would surely lose the war in the end. The two of them explained to him, as did Opapa Karlo, everything that from our perspective today seems necessary. Of course they also told him not to say anything anywhere, if he valued his life, about what he thought of Hitler or Pavelić. And he should steer clear of those who revolted against the new Ustaše government. My grandfather and grandmother, just as their parents and our entire family in the broadest sense of the word, were in principle opposed to any resistance to the authorities. Nothing could be done. It was not up to us to change the government. You would get yourself thrown in prison, nothing more.

  When he graduated a year later, Mladen was preparing to study in Zagreb or Vienna. He wanted to study forestry: Opapa used to tell him that it was crazy to live in Bosnia and not live with the forests.

  But then, in the summer of 1942, the conscription letter came, written in two languages (respecting the conventions of a “united Europe”). The unit in which Mladen was being called to serve was part of Hitler’s army, not the Croatian armed forces, and the call included the best and brightest of Sarajevo’s young men of German or Austrian descent.

  There were two possibilities at that moment: either Mladen would report for military duty and go off to war, or he could escape to the Partisans. His parents, my grandfather Franjo and grandmother Olga, didn’t doubt for an instant that Hitler would lose the war and Pavelić would end up on the gallows. Not for a single day, not for a single hour in his life did Franjo believe that those who had destroyed the Temple, those who had led away our Jewish neighbors, could be victorious. Although he was not a believer, it was out of the question that evil could win out in the end.

  But instead of sending their son to the Partisans, they sent him to the Germans. They thought he would have a better chance of survival. There would be several months of basic training, but by then Hitler would have already lost the war. It was a mistaken calculation, and fourteen months later my eldest uncle was killed in battle against the Partisans. It was the first battle for his unit, and he was the first and last person to be killed. Several days later the entire unit together with its commander joined the Partisans. After the war, in the summer of 1945, four of Mladen’s war buddies sought out his parents. They were now members of a liberating army, and Franjo and Olga were the parents of an enemy combatant. After the death of her son, my grandmother never again went to mass, never again crossed herself, and she stopped celebrating Christmas and Easter. When at five years old I asked if God existed, she answered, “For some he does, for others he doesn’t.”

  “Does he for you?”

  “No.”

  “Does he for me?”

  “You’ll have find that out for yourself.”

  While his grandson was fighting as a German soldier, Karlo lived in his house in the southern Sarajevo suburb of Ilidža, which at night was often raided by soldiers of various kinds, mostly drunk. When the Ustaše would set off on their nightly rounds to kill and loot in the Serbian homes, he would take in his neighbors – it wasn’t unusual for there to be as many as fifty taken in at time. And when the Ustaše arrived at his gate to conduct a search, he’d wait for them on the shadowy threshold and call out to them in Croatian:

  “This is a German house. You can’t come in!” />
  And no matter how drunk they were, they would turn back and go away without a word. He stared at them with hatred and a look that altered his features so completely that he seemed a different person. A terrifying person. Someone once said that I inherited that look of his.

  Sarajevo was liberated in April 1945. A month or two later they came for Opapa to take him to a camp, from which he, like all his compatriots, would later be deported to Germany. He walked the kilometer and a half to the train station in Ilidža, flanked by two Partisans while a third nudged him forward constantly with a rifle barrel. That man had known him from before the war, and he understood very well who and what Opapa Karlo was, but it made him feel good to mess with him a little. That’s the way it goes. You never know who will get led off to a concentration camp, or why – only that people rarely think it could be them.

  But when they got to the station, in front of the stock cars that the Partisans used to transport their victims to the camps, Opapa’s Serbian neighbors had gathered. They said that for four years he had saved them from the Ustaše and even if he was a German a hundred times over they would not give up comrade Karlo, they would go where he was going. The Partisans tried to disperse them, they flared their rifle butts, some got their heads bashed in, but the more they were struck the more resilient the people grew.

  They returned Karlo to his home that day, and no one ever came for him again. Who knows whether he would have made it there alive, so it’s entirely possible his life was saved by the same people whose lives he had saved. One good deed repaid with another, as in a children’s fable. Opapa died several years later, before I was born.

  My father and my younger uncle, Dragan, were mobilized by the Partisans after the liberation of Sarajevo and fought in one of the bloodiest theaters at the end of the war, near Karlovac. They went into the war as high school students, and they graduated as demobilized Partisans. After that my uncle studied metallurgy and my father medicine. Both were successful in their specializations and became respected members of society. And both carried in their hearts and heads family stigmas, which went into their police files. My uncle’s stigma was his kid brother, who had died as a German soldier; my father’s was his mother, who along with her two sisters, was active with the Ustaše Youth in Sarajevo – after the war she was sentenced to prison, while her sisters emigrated to Argentina.