Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  What else could he have done but let Olga marry the first man she had taken a shine to? If he’d refused, Olga would have simply run off with Franjo. Or she would have drunk from the goblet, jumped from the tower, killed herself. But one thing is certain: in those days she would not have given birth to an illegitimate child.

  Had Karlo not allowed his youngest daughter to decide for herself, perhaps quite a few future misfortunes might have been avoided, though that iteration of the Stublers, if someone were to tell it, would be an utter fiction. If my Nona had killed herself, I would not be telling this story.

  My elder uncle Mladen was born in 1923, in Usora, a small railroad station near Doboj, where Franjo Rejc had become the stationmaster. Olga gave birth to him at home, far from the hospital, in the blood and sweat of her brow, in the middle of Bosnia, green, dense, misty, poor, disconsolate, and, in absolute truth, plain ugly Bosnia – at least when seen through the eyes of a certain Swabian daughter, a native of Dubrovnik, who once in happier times long ago shocked the solicitous citizenry with her head-first dives from Porporela.

  Mladen was a child born of love.

  But that did not stop Olga from falling in love with a certain Usora teacher, a man whose name we were never able to learn but about whom we fantasized for a good twenty years. Could he have been a Czech, a Pole, an Austrian, a Croat, or – please, God, let it be – some charming Serb with the hairline mustache of a lover from a silent Hollywood melodrama who was sent to Catholic Usora to reform and convert members of that mistrustful Yugoslav tribe prone to Roman schisms? Some imagined that lover of Olga’s, the first after her husband, through the despair and anger of a betrayed and abandoned child, but I thought of him with pleasure and sweetness because my Nona, even as a young mother, fell in love with him and, good God, gave herself to him for all of us future children, born and yet to be born, who would not have the heart for such loves.

  Franjo was traveling a lot at the time. He’d be away on business. He’d visit his relatives in Tolmino. Or he’d go to the railway headquarters in Sarajevo. He studied foreign languages, collected books on beekeeping, read patriotic Slovene newspapers, the works of Anton Aškerc and France Prešeren, and kept up a correspondence with his relatives, but whether he learned about the teacher we don’t know. Either news never reached him of what everyone else knew, or he pretended not to know. Both are possible. It’s also possible that he too had fallen in love with a beautiful teacher. Or with a nun at the Zenica hospital who rebandaged the painful abscess at the base of his spine, a wound that would occasionally reappear to torment him until the end of his days.

  Three years after Mladen, Dragan was born. This was in Kakanj, where Franjo Rejc had received a transfer and was again stationmaster. Kakanj was the last station on his slow advancement toward Sarajevo. They stayed there until the midthirties, when Franjo was transferred to headquarters, where he would soon obtain his highest position: head of railway timetables.

  The years in Kakanj would be remembered as the happiest in Olga and Franjo’s fifty-year marriage. In this small industrial mining town, built during Austro-Hungarian times, which barely had even the smallest of Oriental bazaars, Muslims were the majority, mixed with a Catholic minority composed of indigenous people from the neighboring villages – actually from the oldest, most ancient, royal Bosnia – along with kuferaši from all the regions of the then monarchy of Franz Joseph. Engineers, master blacksmiths, toolmakers and locksmiths, railroad and postal officials, the odd botanist, stray piano instructor, geologist, and surveyor, lived together in Kakanj, taking on with a certain unexpected lightness the rhythms of life, as well as the customs, of the local Muslim population. These people of a different faith were, in a wondrous way, closer to them than the Catholics of the surrounding highlands. By nature the Muslims were closer to the city and to an urban way of life, they were often better off in terms of property, and their social and cultural interests were somehow broader, more diverse.

  No one knows whether Olga fell in love in Kakanj too. Probably not, since she had two children on her hands and the social life was busier than in Usora, so there was not enough time for such excesses or for those excuses she’d once used as a means to slip away. They went on excursions to the surrounding hills or to the Bosna River, making the rounds to the Rejc relatives – there were so many of them, around Kakanj and Zenica in the early 1930s. It gave us the illusion, perhaps for the last time, of being a great and extensive family, whose closeness and sheer size would protect it from all evil.

  In Kakanj Olga made one of the best friends of her life. In contrast to all her other girlfriends, from Dubrovnik and Sarajevo, whose names were long ago forgotten, though we look at their beautiful, young faces in photo albums, knowing nothing of these nameless faces except that they were Nona’s friends – in contrast to all of them stood Zehra, a simple, illiterate woman.

  In fact, she wasn’t the least bit simple, but then how does one explain this to someone so they might believe you? Her husband, like most Kakanj men, was a miner. They lived in a humble house that nevertheless had one completely unexpected sign of comfort: in place of a floor of packed earth of the kind seen in the homes of most of the miners and iron workers, Zehra had a floor made of pine planks. Always irreproachably clean, it glowed and glistened like a ray of sun. When both Zehra and Kakanj had disappeared into the distant past, and nothing was left in her life but to die, my Nona would talk about never having seen anything cleaner or shinier under her feet than that floor of Zehra’s. If a paradise exists, and if she had not been, like the rest of the Stublers, punished by God for her atheism, Nona’s paradise would surely be covered with that floor of luminescent yellow pine.

  Zehra, however, believed in God. In her world the question of God’s existence would’ve been impossible to ask, meaningless, for there was no way that there could not be a God. What could there be without Him? She fasted, prayed, and did all that was expected of an old-fashioned Muslim woman. Nothing in her life resembled the way Olga lived. But Zehra somehow understood everything, and if there was ever anyone to whom Olga spelled out the pain of her life, to whom she explained why she had married Franjo Rejc, it was Zehra. Their friendship would be deep and lifelong, but its content would remain a secret. We can only guess what she saw in Zehra, and why she would remember her sunny yellow floor and talk about it with such wistfulness up to her dying day – but why Olga was so important to Zehra, why this city girl, in many ways a foreigner, should remain Zehra’s dearest friend in life, we are still in no position to even imagine. Let alone the question of how she spoke about Olga to God. Of one thing I am certain: in Olga’s whole life there was no one who spoke to God about her – surrounded as she was by nonbelievers – as Zehra did.

  From Bosowicz, as a family gift and signifier, Karlo Stubler brought along something that would last longer for us than any memory and that would be transmitted forward to a time when we no longer even knew his German language anymore – migraines. Most of his children and his children’s children would suffer from occasional intense headaches accompanied by visual and olfactory irritability, and the Stubler migraine, though less intense and growing rarer with age, would come to be my inheritance as well.

  When Franjo would head off to work and Olga was left alone with her migraine and her two sons, who she found impossible to care for at times, she would lock herself in a darkened room and let them do as they pleased as long as they let her be.

  “They can break the dishes for all I care, I won’t say a word!”

  This was known to go on for days. She would lie in the dark, moaning, not suspecting, fortunately, that these migraine-filled days, weeks, and months, would be the best of her life.

  Through the closed door the boys could be heard fighting.

  “You Kakanjan, Kakanjan!” Mladen would say to Dragan.

  “Oh, yeah, you Usorian. Usorian…”

  Nona would listen and laugh, w
hich would only make her migraine worse.

  Ivo Baškarad and Mujo the Eternal

  Both Christmas and Easter decorations were on display in the Stubler household, despite Opapa Karlo’s hardened atheism. He was areligious in the same way that some people are tone-deaf. Rationally he knew what God was supposed to be, and he didn’t object to either profound or superficial religiosity in his house, nor did he have anything against the Church or priests. In his soul he was and would remain a union man, committed to justice and equality for all, and in this was very well read, such that neither Marx nor Engels had escaped his attention, but his godlessness had no connection whatsoever to their writings. For Karlo Stubler religion was not the “opiate of the masses” but a plaything and waste of time, a folkloric celebration for the entertainment and consolation of a simple-minded people that he had nothing inherently against. In truth, it wasn’t just that Karlo didn’t believe in God, he didn’t believe that in today’s world, in which the provenance of lightning and thunder had been explained, in which it was known that the earth is round and orbits the sun, that the tides rise and fall in connection with the moon’s gravitation, that there really could exist people who still believed in God. From his perspective, the civilization of the West had been created by individuals, tribes, and peoples for whom it was important to act as though they believed in God. He had nothing against this, nor would he have fought in any sort of revolution against the Church, against faith or superstition. To him this battle simply did not seem serious, and perhaps that is why Karlo Stubler, despite his convictions and thorough reading, never became a communist.

  Years after he’d retired, after the Second World War, he would sometimes briefly lose consciousness. During the afternoon siesta, he’d be sitting beneath the thick crown of a walnut tree, watching the people pass by along Kasindol Street, or he’d be in the midst of a lively conversation, after spending a long time sorting small pieces of wood to make a medicine chest, when he would suddenly stop, go silent, tune out – and everyone around him would hold up and wait.

  “There was an accident, two trains collided…”

  Or:

  “A train flew down into the Neretva River…”

  Or:

  “A train jumped the tracks…”

  All we had to do was turn on the wireless radio, wait for its green eye to light up, and we would hear the details of the accident. Opapa was never wrong. In the thirty years he lived in Bosnia after being exiled from Dubrovnik, he grew quiet like this five or six times, zoned out, disappeared, as if some gentle epilepsy had carried him off for a moment, and he would always come back with a frightening report, and each time it would be confirmed on the news. Karlo Stubler witnessed train wrecks that took place hundreds of kilometers away. This made him uncomfortable on every occasion, because he didn’t believe in superstition or in prophecy.

  Gypsies will examine your palm for spare change, women after their morning coffee will turn over their demitasses to read each other’s fortune in the patterns of the grounds, old crones, before wars and after they were over, once tossed beans across rough-trimmed wooden tables to discover whether brothers and sons who’d disappeared would come back, and a certain Russian who was rumored to have been lady-in-waiting at the court from the house of Romanov – half of Ilidža thought that women of the court were actually upscale tsarist whores, while the other half, better educated and more cultured, said with a certain disdain for the former that women of the court were in fact countesses – flawlessly read the past and future of Ilidža’s pluckier inhabitants from her cards, which resembled those used for rummy and schnapsen except instead of gendarmes and kings printed on them there were people being hanged, court jesters, and Death with a rusty Turkish scythe. To anyone who had the courage to pay her, Liudmila would say when and from what illness death would come. It was said that just after the war Ivo Baškarad dutifully paid to have her tell him just one thing – where he was destined to die. In Ilidža, prophesied the Russian. Really? Ilidža? Yes, really. Ilidža.

  The very same day Ivo Baškarad picked up the things he most needed from home, said goodbye to his family, and left for Sarajevo, never to return to Ilidža. When or how Ivo Baškarad died is no longer remembered.

  Karlo Stubler smiled at all this good-naturedly. He transcended it all peacefully, not believing either the Gypsy women, or Liudmila, or the grounds in overturned demitasses, and we attributed his lack of belief to the fact that great-grandpa was a Swabian. And Swabians were, it appeared, rational people who didn’t even believe in themselves without solid proof, who dealt with facts rather than wasting their time. True enough, and through him we too were German, but something of Bosnia and Ilidža had caught hold of us, clung to us and started to accumulate inside us, so we believed in everything others believed in. We would become Swabians only when others wanted to make it known we weren’t the same as them.

  So how then did Karlo Stubler reconcile his godlessness and firm disbelief in any form of superstition with the fact that he would every once in a while lose consciousness and see a train wreck happening? Was it perhaps from low blood pressure? Or had he never got over the fact of having been dismissed from the railroad, which had been everything to him in his life, so that to that very day he would see a collision of trains with the same eyes as a train dispatcher whose negligence had led to an accident? We would support his theory, and he’d calm down, believing, together with all of us, that those born and yet to be born, that everything before us, had arisen from tiny, almost meaningless, physiological disturbances.

  Fathers wake up at night in fear. They check to be sure their sons and daughters haven’t stopped breathing. But train dispatchers dream their whole life of the collisions caused by their mistake, two trains finding themselves on the same track. Karlo of course never was a dispatcher, he was a stationmaster.

  Opapa was second sighted. And his second sight touched only upon trains and the railroad. He had no insight into our future lives. He did not see the time, not very far off, when there would no longer be any Stublers or Stubler descendants in Sarajevo or Bosnia. What little that remained of his lineage would be hidden within other family names, spread across the earth, drowning and disappearing amid the fates of strangers and foreign identities.

  Likewise, Opapa was unable to foresee the destinies of his Banat relations, the brother who disappeared and the entire extinct world in which, long ago, the Stublers had been born. He was silent about them, and this silence was their only known grave – he did not see them while they were disappearing, neither in his dreams nor in reality. And he was quite convinced that a person could not see what was not present before him, or indicate the past or future with his eyes closed. Nevertheless, he saw railway wrecks more clearly than Liudmila the Russian saw the time and place of Ivo Baškarad’s death. It seemed that of all the things he might have been in his long life, Karlo Stubler was in the end a rail man above all. Composite trains, engines, carriages, and car designs had inscribed themselves in him more deeply and for a longer period of time than Karla, Rudi, Regina, and Olga – more than his God-fearing spouse, our great-grandmother, about whose lifelong heart defect we’ve yet to tell. Although it seems that Karlo Stubler’s life path was defined by his eternally German and kuferaš nature, there was another factor that was even stronger and more lasting.

  In accordance with the customs of his day, for a man with his social status and heritage, Karlo Stubler wore a beard. Every few years he would shave it off, but he would leave the mustache. In photographs with the mustache he looks most like a German. But this was not him. The real great-grandfather wore a beard. He probably knew this, because it was just once in a while that he shaved it. Then he’d let it grow again. The beard would fill out and everything would be in its place. In reminiscences, photos, family mythology, and the stories of neighbors on Kasindol Street, Karlo Stubler wore a beard until he was completely forgotten. None of his descendan
ts would wear one again.

  When, at the beginning of the fifties, with everyone dirt poor, the stores empty, and people washing their faces with garment soaps made from tallow and ash, buck wash or lye, Karlo Stubler contracted some sort of disgusting skin infection that engulfed the roots of the hair on his face. He went to the doctor, who said that there was no remedy for his illness other than to pull out each hair from his face and beard by its roots with a pair of tweezers.

  Every morning, for days and weeks, my great-grandfather would stand before a mirror, yanking out the hair from his beard. It hurt so badly that tears spurted out of his eyes. No one had ever seen him cry, it would not have befit him, but when he pulled the tough, fat hairs from the soft skin of his face, his eyes wept of their own accord.

  When the household began to stir, he would cut short his beard-pulling session for the morning. Damn those idle young people, they just sleep and do nothing! Who knows if he’d ever considered he might have woken us with all his groans. Or if some of those hairs yanked out by the thousands might have perhaps shaken Karlo Stubler out of his godlessness, or if perhaps God was so merciless to Opapa that he refused to show himself in even a single tearfully plucked whisker.

  Omama Johanna’s Heart Defect

  After she had given birth to her fourth child, Omama was diagnosed with a fatal heart defect. First the doctors in Dubrovnik and later the ones in Sarajevo said the same: nothing could save the young woman. It was a miracle that she’d survived as long as she had. Each of her births was its own inexplicable casus for medical science, but if you are a believer, one Sarajevo doctor said to Karlo Stubler, then surely you have some explanation. A sort of cosmic unease fell upon Karlo’s shoulders. And yet at the time he needed to pretend that he was a believer and that a casus was something he completely understood.