Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  That summer he quarreled with his adoptive mother. We don’t know what it was about or what she might have said to him, but we never saw him again after that. Šiško disappeared forever, from Dubrovnik and from our lives. He had never got completely used to our family, just like Aunt Lola in fact, but he had been part of it. We don’t know if he’s still alive, but if he is, maybe he visits Dubrovnik occasionally. None of us are there anymore, none of us are anywhere anymore because, in turn and out of it, we have all disappeared. And now, if he’s alive, Šiško lives in God’s peace, alone.

  My aunt Branka was a striking, upright woman. She completed medical school and became an anesthesiologist. From her father she inherited a gentle, clear disposition; from her mother, an inclination toward a life of beauty and freedom. She worked in the Vinograd Hospital in Zagreb and married the actor Jovan Ličina. When they divorced, she remarried in Germany in her late forties and gave birth to a daughter, Katarina, and then promptly died in her sleep. An aneurysm, they said. She’d lived five years longer than Aunt Lola.

  Karla, Lukretia, Lukre, Lola Ćurlin, née Stubler, rests in the Boninovo Cemetery, beside Uncle Andrija, Željko, and Branka. Their family vault is overcrowded. When Branka died, or rather, when it was time to bury her, it seemed that there wouldn’t be enough space. But then one of the gravediggers banged his shovel into the coffin where Aunt Lola was lying and it burst into tiny pieces. Bad wood, they said, chipboard. Don’t make them like they used to. So, freeing us from the burden of finding a new grave, they swept to one side what little remained of Lola’s bones. Branka’s coffin, which they’d brought from Germany, now had a place to rest.

  If they hadn’t done that, who knows what we would have done with the deceased. It was good that way. Excellent in fact. There was no one left in Dubrovnik besides those in that brimming vault, which we didn’t visit, and which we wouldn’t even recognize anymore among the innumerable graves.

  May Josip Sigmund Be Upon Your Soul

  It’s a shame our Nano had no children. And it was for quite sentimental reasons that he didn’t marry. While it might have long seemed, when looked at from outside, that Rudolf Stubler was a scatterbrained layabout – until well into his forties he still didn’t have a single day of regular employment – Rudi was a man with a broken heart.

  He had excelled in everything from an early age, had neat, elaborate handwriting, was well-read and talented in all the fine arts, was a gifted mathematician – scholars from all parts of Bosnia and Dalmatia would come to Dubrovnik to watch and wonder as seven-year-old Rudi solved the most complex problems of arithmetic and geometry. No one questioned whether Rudi wanted to continue his education, it was assumed he would go to Vienna. The only question was which branch of learning he would choose and in which of the sciences he would distinguish himself.

  The Great War had just been concluded, Germany’s teeth had been smashed in, and forever, or so it was believed at the time, its imperial aspirations had been quashed. In the east the fiery dawn of communism was gobbling up Russia, and there was nothing left of the Habsburg monarchy beyond an oversized Vienna where minor geniuses from the peripheries of the vanished empire arrived, predestined to distinguish the great century of Europe. Mostly Germans and Jews, an occasional Serb, Croat, Slovene, or Czech, a gifted young painter or violinist would come to the great academies, impelled by ambition and sometimes fear, both dark and painful, an eccentric spirit that meant ruin for all those unable to conceal themselves in large cities.

  Rudolf Stubler was a child of this future century. Or he should have been. But Rudi was free of any ambition or fear. And that is why he became a layabout.

  He studied at polytechnic institutes in Vienna and Graz. He regularly wrote long, beautiful letters home in which he described life in the metropolises, gatherings with our Viennese relatives, theater productions, operas, and concerts. Rudi wrote about everything like a skilled newspaper reporter, but regarding his studies he noted only that he was spending days on end in the college lecture halls without seeing the sun for all his learning. Usually this was tucked into one or two sentences, a formality to pacify old Karlo.

  It took him a long time to grasp what it was Rudi was actually doing in these studies of his. Or perhaps he understood immediately but hoped that something would change with time, that after a year or two of nights and days out in the Vienna cafés and vaudevilles, Rudi would finally grow diligent and would apply himself to real scientific learning.

  But that did not happen.

  Our Nano never finished his studies. His father tolerated the boy’s being in Vienna and Graz, sent him pocket money from his meager means and from the help provided by the unions, until the day when news of the great scandal reached Sarajevo and Ilidža from far away – in Vienna Rudi had fallen in love, and with none other than Dora Dussel, our close cousin.

  This loose and cheery incestuous adventure exceeded even his father’s tolerance. In a terse, sharp letter, Karlo Stubler told his son to return home immediately. Rudi obeyed because he had no other choice but to do so. Such were the times, or such was the strength of the old Stubler’s authority. On the whole, it didn’t even enter his son’s head not to return home. He’d left Dora behind unreservedly, and she remained until the end, until her own death and after, our dear Viennese relation. She would visit Sarajevo. In the fifties we took her to Vrelo Bosne, the wellspring of the Bosna River, where great family dinners were organized, even during the leanest period of socialism.

  They would sit next to each other at the overflowing table in Ilidža, talking about everything that relatives who have not seen each other in a long time talk about. It was a time when everyone lived with their own secrets. Only these secrets were of the sort that other people also knew about. And conversations went on as if there were no secrets at all.

  On returning to Sarajevo, Rudi continued to live his own kind of life. As there were no Viennese cafés and vaudevilles, he solved math problems, played preferans, and frequented the theater. For years he played violin in the Sarajevo movie theaters, both before and during the films. Fortunately, the fashion of sound cinema developed slowly and with difficulty in Sarajevo, so he always had work. The theater owners were actually grateful to him, because as soon as Rudi had come back from Vienna they didn’t need to keep a piano around anymore. They said that Rudi’s violin conjured up whatever was happening on the screen better than any keyboard. Karlo Stubler never went to a movie. He wasn’t angry at his son. It was his life. If he had decided to fritter away all his talents, so be it. But it made him sad all the same.

  After the eccentric and half-baked love affair with Dora, our Nano fell in love only once more. Several years after he returned from Vienna, he took a shine to a girl in Mostar whose name we don’t remember. All that is known is that she was a Muslim. Their romance was short and stormy. Her family rose up against this young Sarajevo native, prepared to perish in defense of honor and faith, and the virtue of the young woman. The vehemence of the attack astonished us and struck fear into our hearts.

  “Why do they hate us so much?” asked the bewildered old Karlo, and this question, so naïve, would remain among the family lore, carried forward like a counterpoint to circumstances in the state, wars, neighborly quarrels, and even massacres. This memory, perhaps, appealed to a different time.

  Why do they hate us so much? Opapa Karlo asked himself, not the family members around him. He asked out of fear, but also out of arrogance. There was arrogance because he felt a certain sense of superiority for not hating anyone. But of greatest interest was, again, his fear. He was afraid, this Swabian from Bosowicz, of what he represented for them, as a foreigner in Bosnia, an eternal foreigner, an Ahasuerus, into whose family they would not allow their daughter to marry, even should the world come crashing down upon their heads.

  Karlo Stubler didn’t believe in God, and never had second thoughts about this – God had been permanently absent f
rom his life. Everything that happened today was what had always happened. This didn’t mean, however, that he was unable to distinguish the differences between himself and Muslims. However absent Jesus Christ was, along with Jehovah, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, they were his in their nonexistence, while Allah, their God, was something else. It wasn’t his place to think about Allah’s existence or lack thereof.

  Our Nano, so the family story goes, was prepared to do anything to hold onto his bride-to-be. If necessary, he would turn apostate, run away with her, do all that her family might require of him. Nano was willing to humble himself, if only they would allow her to become his wife.

  But it was all in vain: this unhappy love was the last of his life. He would travel to Mostar no more. He’d look at the town from the windows of his train car. This for the next thirty years until the memory faded.

  For a while Rudi’s sisters did their serious best to get him married. They’d bring home acquaintances from work, pretty, unmarried girls, a French teacher or hotel decorator, and he would excuse himself to the bathroom, then run off through the back garden and across the neighbor’s courtyard, returning in the evening when the coast was clear. These incidents would then be talked about, and thus did new family legends arise in whose recitation he too would come to take part, until everything turned into a big joke.

  There were such sons in those days, mostly among the kuferaš families, those who didn’t have deep roots in Bosnia and in Sarajevo but rather, since the time of the Austrian annexation, had lived in an atmosphere of temporariness, as if preparing for an impending move, and the fathers often would not even notice that their sons were layabouts and were growing old. Anyway, they would think, somewhat presciently, the enemy would take all this away one day soon, drive us all off somewhere, leaving the land desolate and empty.

  It didn’t take much for Rudolf Stubler to be mobilized.

  He was the ideal recruit. Unemployed, well educated, and an ethnic German to boot. They made him a first lieutenant, even though he had not served in the military before, and sent him to Bijeljina. He was paralyzed with fear and lived with it every day for months – because he was by nature something of a coward, a lone boy among sisters, and because heroism didn’t come naturally, or in any other way, to the Stublers, and because Rudi found himself among people with whom he had little in common. He followed the rules, was a respectable citizen, a top student, and would not have revolted against the authority of the state in any way, no matter whose state or what kind of state it was, nor would he have gone to war, or spilled a drop of his own or another’s blood in the name of the state, whatever state it might be.

  After the fall of Stalingrad and a winter of starvation, followed by a series of failed German-Ustaše offensives, the Partisans attacked suddenly and from behind, often striking quiet, unassuming defense garrisons far in the rear. And so, at a certain point, they set upon the region of Semberija, reached Bijeljina, and along the way destroyed the unit in which Rudi was serving. In the battle where he managed to save his neck at a certain hopeless instant by lying under shallow cover with only his buttocks protruding, his head covered with his hands while he waited for the roaring to subside, the spectacle of him – as he himself recounted the story later – softened even the battle-tested Partisan machine gunners, and in the end he escaped at a run through the corn fields and was not even taken prisoner. When he realized that no one was chasing him, he ripped the officer’s markings from his uniform with the intention of making his way by foot to Sarajevo. He had a friend with him, someone of similar character evidently, and together they struggled for days through the fields and woods, feeding themselves on the rare fruits of the forest that city kids like them could recognize, and they would have soon died of hunger had a Partisan patrol not taken them prisoner near Kladanj.

  They brought him before the Partisan commissar, a kind, refined man. He offered Rudi a seat, spoke with him, and correctly concluded that he was in no sense a real enemy.

  “Would you like to stay with us, Mr. Stubler? You won’t be worse off, and we need interpreters. And you’ll be fighting for the right cause.”

  “Must I stay?”

  “The struggle for freedom is a voluntary affair,” said the commissar with a frown. “Freedom cannot be forced on anyone.”

  “In that case, I think I’d rather go home,” said Rudi sheepishly.

  “Alright then, if that’s what you’ve decided. But remember: Josip Sigmund was a German like you, and he laid down his life for this people. You will surely live to see freedom, people like you always survive, but may Josip Sigmund haunt you and your soul, if you have a soul.” Saying this, he gave him a signed transit pass with which Rudi could travel to Sarajevo across Partisan-controlled territory.

  When he arrived at the door to our apartment, we didn’t recognize him. Rudi’s sister Olga didn’t even recognize him.

  “What do you want?” she said, trying to sound angry, as she looked at the ragged man holding a shoe box in his hands, with crazed eyes, a face contorted into a spasm of weeping, stinking to high heaven.

  “But it’s me,” he whispered, shuffling back.

  If Olga had slammed the door then, if she hadn’t taken another look and instantly recognized him, who knows what might have happened to our Nano.

  First she gave him a careful examination to make sure he didn’t have lice or fleas, while he was still clinging to the shoebox.

  “What’s this?” she asked, grabbing the box.

  It was empty, not a thing was inside. Later we would ask him why he had carried an empty shoe box around with him, and Nano replied, “That’s what happens when you’ve lost your mind.”

  I never believed this.

  I’ve thought about it often during the forty years since I first was told the story of the box. I grew up, watched films, read books about wars and bouts of madness, I lived through one war and became a sort of kuferaš myself, finding my deepest foreignness in Zagreb and in Croatia, but I’ve never been able to fathom what First Lieutenant Rudolf Stubler carried inside the empty shoe box. Whatever it was, it must have been important. It’s hard for a person to walk empty handed, especially if he’s ragged and hungry.

  “I’ve had enough of your brother and his lying around. These are serious times!” said my Nono, intent on finding work for Rudi so he wouldn’t be sent back to war.

  This was the greatest, actually the only, instance of favoritism in the history of the Stublers.

  Nono found him a job in a railroad stokehold. Rudi was then forty-three years old. In the stokehold he would continue to be a diligent and valued worker even after the war, someone who never took sick leave or was late for work, not even by five minutes. A true Swabian, they would say, while he also worked on the accounting and bookkeeping, despite the rules. As a single man, however, he was not able to get his own apartment. To the end of his life he lived with his relatives in Ilidža, in a basement room.

  Near the entrance to the building where Rudolf Stubler worked until his retirement hung a commemorative plaque dedicated to Josip Sigmund Pepi, a skier, mountain climber, prewar communist, and locksmith in the railroad stokehold, who had worked in the Partisan underground, that is until the Ustaše criminals discovered him.

  A Pine Floor Shining Like the Sun Beneath Your Feet

  Karlo’s youngest child, my Nona Olga, was born in 1905 in Konjic, where her father served briefly as the stationmaster. She grew up in Dubrovnik, finished elementary school and then started at the Italian high school. Olga was the most intelligent of Karlo’s children and the most interested in literature and art. By the time the century reached its end, we’d also need to add, the most unfortunate child too.

  Olga fell in love the moment she arrived in Bosnia. Handsome like a tall cypress, he was a young railway worker who had just returned from Italian captivity where he had spent nearly four years, my future gr
andfather Franjo Rejc.

  Whether Franjo defiled her in haste or Olga, who was barely seventeen, committed a wayward sin and got herself pregnant, or whether it was all a stormy but pure love in which they were both consumed for the rest of their lives, we no longer know because some of the important dates have since been lost (perhaps on purpose), so we aren’t sure how many months passed between Olga and Franjo’s wedding and the birth of their first son, my uncle Mladen.

  All we know is that Olga’s announcement to her father was quite ceremonious and that all were anxious about what would happen and in what state she would come out of Karlo’s room, where she had gone to say that she’d fallen in love and would like to marry a young railway worker, a Slovene. My retroactive anxiety is perhaps deepest of all, for on this conversation my very birth depended.

  Anything in all this could have put Karlo out. Olga had not finished her third year of the classical high school – she was a minor, the age Gypsy girls marry, the time of year young bitches first go into heat, by all accounts an absolutely inappropriate time for a Stubler daughter to marry. Besides, one of his daughters – Karla – had stayed behind in Dubrovnik, having refused to go with him to Bosnia, while now the other would come to be married several months later in the east. The old man surely had a feeling that she was promiscuous – his dearest, most gifted child. So beautifully did she play the zither, that mournful, solitary instrument he had carried with them all the way from Bosowicz…

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. He just looked at her silently, then finally pronounced what sounds today more like a prison sentence than a father’s blessing:

  “Fine. If this is what you have decided. But just remember, there’s no coming back!”

  They lived together in a house rented from strangers. Karlo supported them with money provided by the union, collected from people who were poorer than he was. He was humiliated, and it didn’t look as if anything would ever change. But then suddenly someone took pity on him, or they mislaid his police file, because he landed a job in the largest railway junction in Bosnia, and for a while he moved to the town of Doboj.