Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Johanna Skedel, who acquired the married name Stubler, was born in the village of Lokve, near Škofja Loka, in Slovenia. This is the only piece of reliable information connected with her ancestry we have. Which means perhaps Omama’s name was actually not Johanna Skedel but Ivana Škedelj. These two identities alternate with a certain monotonous regularity in her identification documents and family papers over the course of her life. On her report cards they used one, in the marriage registry the other; on her identity card she was called one, in her travel documents the other. In the places where she was called Johanna, she was a German, but where she was Ivana, she was considered a Slovene, and later a Croat. Everything had a certain order that might seem absurd to us now, but in the days when Omama was growing up, it was possible to live according to that order. Not everyone lived this way, there were those who perished, fomented revolution, and served time in prison because of a name in a birth registry and for the right to be called by one name rather than another. But to Omama it was all one, and therefore, according to the customs of the time and the rules of propriety under the Stubler roof, it was all one to us too. This is how it was among the Stublers in 1910, when the Southern Slavs began fooling around with unification, prepared to rise up against our good old tsar and king, and again in 1918, when by some miracle they managed to unite, and in 1920, when Karlo Stubler was exiled from Dubrovnik, and in 1933, and 1941, and 1945. Omama was called Ivana Škedelj in some papers, Johanna Skedel in others, and there was no one to ask her whether she was a Slovene or a German.

  Omama had two sisters. The eldest got married in Vienna and the middle one in Loznica, Serbia. Johanna was the youngest. She moved with her parents to Slavonski Brod. There her carpenter father, Martin Skedel, had got work on the railroad. Karlo Stubler worked on the other side of the Sava River, in Bosanski Brod. This was how they met, fell in love, and were married in one of the final years of the nineteenth century. Johanna’s father didn’t live long, but her mother Josefina Skedel, née Patat, continued to live with her daughter and son-in-law, moving with them from station to station along the Bosnian rails, coming to know that dark, distant country that seemed so far away from their homeland, as far as Bangladesh seems to me today.

  My great-great-grandmother Josefina Patat, whose married name was Skedel, the mother of my great-grandmother Johanna Skedel, who gave birth to my grandmother Olga Stubler, whose married name was Rejc, was born in Udine and was actually Italian.

  So this too was known: Omama was Italian on her mother’s side. But on her father’s was she Slovene or German? The answer, which would forever remain secret, would not have changed anything in the story of the Stublers, in the long history of their fading away, nor would it have been important in my life that a few drops more of German or Slovene blood flowed through my veins, but in the time of the Stublers, Omama’s national ambivalence – or more correctly, her national indifference – was important.

  Were we to judge by the spirit and logic of the language – which is always fatally incorrect when the judgments are about last names – then it is more probable that Omama was Ivana Škedelj than Johanna Skedel. Skedel is a Germanized version of the Slovene Škedelj, but many Germans and Austrians had Slovene last names, just as Slovenes had German ones.

  A possible elucidation of this doubt, or just a way of multiplying it still further, would arise in Doboj in 1922, when the youngest daughter, Olga, brought to the house the handsome young rail worker and future Stubler son-in-law Franjo, who was by nationality, but more importantly by his sense of cultural belonging, a Slovene. Knowing that his mother-in-law was from Škofja Loka and wanting to please her, he began speaking in Slovenian.

  And this was when we learned that Omama didn’t know Slovenian.

  She spoke German, and Serbo-Croatian, with the consistent old-fashioned accent and intonations of central Bosnia, and even a little Italian, but Slovenian she did not know. Not a single word. Nor was she pretending – why would she? She really didn’t speak Slovenian. In those days this still did not mean out of hand that she could not be a Slovene. Maybe the carpenter Martin Škedelj thought his daughters would be happier and find better marriages if they spoke German in the house, if they were Germans. The nineteenth century was a time when people could choose from among everything on offer, both what ethnicity to be and what language with which to pray to God. At the time they arrived in Bosnia, they could still have chosen even the faith they’d belong to, but we, unfortunately, did not take advantage of that opportunity. We remained Catholics and, maybe for that very reason, without faith. God was tired of us.

  In contrast to Opapa, Omama was religious. She went to church on Sundays, prayed before going to sleep, and lived according to the catechism of her time. She was not, by the way, one of those God-fearing family missionary ladies who fuss about their grandchildren regularly taking the sacrament and going to church for religious instruction. She kept to her faith, which would be the one thing that helped her after the Dubrovnik and Sarajevo doctors said her heart would soon stop. It was the weakest still-beating heart they had ever heard. Omama did not feel her illness, no matter how aware she was of its presence. Diseases of the heart are often pure metaphysics and don’t resemble other diseases in the least.

  Karlo’s employment in Doboj was awaited like a miracle. Until the last minute, during our move, carrying the bed linen, dishes, and what little furniture we brought with us from Dubrovnik, as we set out on the train from Sarajevo’s Alipašin Bridge to Kakanj, Zenica, and onward, we weren’t sure someone wasn’t playing a cruel joke on both Opapa and us. We could not know whether anyone might, at the last minute, take a peek into the police documentation and be horrified by his official record.

  And we could not know then, in our first-class compartment, with our complimentary company tickets, that a fateful event was indeed in the making, the prerequisite for the line of our future births: if Karlo Stubler had not been driven from Dubrovnik to Bosnia, if two years later he had not miraculously been given work in Doboj, precisely where the young rail man Franjo Rejc was employed, if Olga had not met Franjo, if she had not liked him, and maybe if Franjo had not been – as she would complain twenty years later to her friends – an “empty prick,” there would have been nothing for me to be born from.

  For Omama it was God’s will. If so, God certainly had a sense of humor.

  After getting back to work, Karlo Stubler decided to make every effort to find a cure for Johanna, or, at least, to keep her alive longer. Perhaps the reason he eventually lived in his children’s homes might have been that for years he’d spent a large part of his salary sending Johanna to thermal spas. After he had sent Rudi money in Graz or Vienna, hoping his son would bring his studies to a happy conclusion, and after he’d sent Johanna off to some German bath or other, there was still enough money left for normal city life. (Otherwise, at the time, the twenties and thirties, we were in good shape with regard to paychecks and monthly income: engineers, stationmasters, and dispatchers made about as much as pilots and air traffic controllers do today.)

  Twice a year, in the fall and spring, we saw Omama off to Germany for treatment, not knowing whether she would come back to us. We laid her to rest each time in that last platform glance at her delicate face looking out from the compartment window and at her hand waving goodbye, and each time she came home we saw it as a miracle. Omama would return to us from the dead after a month at the hot springs. And there were a countless number of baths in Germany, so it seemed to us. She would come back from them, as from a Grimm fairy tale, hale of heart and strong like the giant Rübezahl.

  Johanna Stubler would continue her spa therapy throughout the 1920s and a good part of the 1930s. How she found Germany, whether she met anyone there and made friends, whether she noticed that the world around her was changing, that Germany was changing ominously, what her thoughts were as the Weimar Republic was transformed into the Third Reich, whether this change co
uld be felt in the atmosphere of the hot springs, what the heart patients and arthritics were saying about Hitler, or Marshal Hindenburg – about all of this we knew almost nothing.

  In the Stubler nature, and perhaps in that of the majority of kuferaši, there was a tendency to look away from the miseries of the century. Temporary residents foreign to this homeland, similar to the Jews, the Stublers concealed bad news from one another.

  At any rate, good news was so fantastic that we didn’t even have time for the bad. Thanks to the German waters, or so we believed, while Adolf Hitler was becoming chancellor, Omama had outlived all the medical prognoses. Her heart was and would continue to be weak. It almost wasn’t even a heart but a barely perceptible whisper at the bottom of a deep, dark cave. Johanna Stubler woke up every morning resigned to the fact that she would not live to the evening. All her life’s accounts forever needed to be reconciled, she could not afford to have any unpaid debts to those who were close to her or unresolved arguments with her neighbors, for death would soon be arriving at her door like a welcome, long-awaited guest.

  If there were peace, and if I could quiet my life as she did, I would write a novel about all this. About life in the German baths of the twenties and thirties, about the sendoffs from the station at Alipašin Bridge, and about death that had so often passed idly through the Stubler house that Omama no longer feared it. She was the only one in our home who was not afraid – this was not because she was a believer, for she did not talk about dying with God, but with the German doctors.

  When she wasn’t at the springs, Omama read books (novels in German and Croatian, adventure stories, both serious and non-serious literature), listened to the radio, or had quiet conversations with her children. She did not cook dinner, clean the house, or take care of guests. Omama never lifted anything heavier than a spoon.

  She was a good and cheerful woman. She didn’t unload her own suffering onto others. She laughed easily and often but in laughing would clutch at her chest. She would not have regretted dying in that way, while laughing. We kept all other forms of stress from her, but never laughter. It might have seemed occasionally that we were trying kill her off by getting her to laugh, but who would have believed that her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren had killed Johanna Stubler through laughter, to spare old Karlo the expense, all in the hope of his building a home and providing us with deeper roots?

  In old age she would get anxious. It would seem that a form of Parkinson’s disease seized her in those moments. But then she would again start to smile. Or a laugh would rumble up through her body.

  Omama outlived Opapa. She died just before her ninetieth birthday, quietly, without great upheaval, the way heart patients depart.

  The year before she died, with a resigned air, she’d asked one of her grown granddaughters, who had just become a bonafide member of the Yugoslav Communist Party: “Do you ever cross yourself, my child?”

  Eat – It Won’t Get Stuck in Your Seat

  The weekly dinner in the Stubler home in Ilidža. Beef soup, boiled meat with sautéed potatoes and horseradish, and at the end – buhtle. Such a meal is a child’s torment: we would need to grow up, maybe get a lot older, in order to start liking that heavy Swabian soup with the homemade yellow noodles and archipelagos of fat floating in the dead calm of the weekly family peace and harmony; and after the soup, that meat, full of tendons and gristle, and the bones from which Opapa and Nano loudly sucked the marrow – they said that was the very best part and the reason we made beef soup each and every Sunday. Great suffering and affliction fell upon us at the children’s table because, according to an old family rule, we had to eat everthing on our plates – the gristle, the tendons, the assorted nodes and slobber, the oozing yellow balls of fat, and every part of the meat, which the grown-ups enjoyed but set the children’s imaginations to run wild as, horror struck, we saw what we had there on our plates. And then someone from the big family table would glance over at our little table:

  “Don’t pick at that meat. Eat – it won’t get stuck in your seat!”

  These ugly words, this ghastly verbal concoction, were never spoken by Opapa. He looked out benevolently from the head of the table, as if surprised at the world’s immutability: there were always some children who pushed the veins from the meat to the sides of their plates and always some adults there to force them to finish.

  Because whoever didn’t eat their meat didn’t get any buhtle.

  In the Stubler home buhtle were the regular weekly cakes. For Christmas and Easter, birthdays, name days, and other celebrations, they made special cakes, like tortes, which didn’t always succeed, because they were made infrequently and were not a regular kind of cake. Cakes recalled and carried forth countless family sagas, the biographies of aunts who had disappeared and passed on, grandmothers and great-grandmothers who had lived in distant lands, uncles who had never returned from the faraway frontlines of Europe, and it seemed that baking cakes on festive occasions and bringing them out to the grown-ups’ and children’s tables was a way to remember and tell stories that had been told many times before. Only buhtle did not have their own story. We baked them every Sunday, early in the morning, and all our stories were contained in those buhtle, which is why not a single one is remembered. Thus the Stublers are forgotten. When I think about them, my mind is a perfect blank.

  But still I can’t imagine living in a world without those Sunday buhtle.

  Actually, it’s sometimes hard to believe that in all the time after my birth, growing up, and getting older, my Nona baked me buhtle barely two or three times, on the rare occasions when Stubler nostalgia would take hold of her.

  In the Stubler home it was Karlo’s middle daughter Regina, whom we called Aunt Rika, who did the cooking. She was the meekest of the sisters, believed in God, and followed all the life rules, both inherited and acquired, that made her a good and faithful Christian. By nature openhearted and tolerant, in one thing only did she show signs of a dangerous fanaticism: as far as she was concerned you had to eat every last thing on your plate. Even when some small child, dreading the sight of the monstrous gristle, tried to resist the bribe and forfeit the buhtle she would confront him with the calm and reason reminiscent of an officer of the Inquisition:

  “You don’t have to eat the buhtle, but in this house the meat and potatoes will be eaten!”

  And that would be the end of it: the formulation of “in this house” was unequivocal in a manner that few things in life are, for in it was inscribed a higher authority. You could challenge anyone, your mother, your father, your aunt, but not Opapa Karlo. He did not yell or threaten, he never ordered anyone to do anything, he never “raised his hand” against anyone, although actually once he had, and a half century later they were still telling the story of how Opapa had got so angry, the sin had been so grave, that he’d suddenly slapped the culprit. So though he didn’t frown or show in any manner that he supported this irrevocable rule according to which only the bones could lay uneaten, anyone who heard that declaration of “in this house” was still fearful lest they deliver a sinful, abstract blow to Karlo Stubler or to his home. While the home, in actual fact, wasn’t even his but rather belonged to Aunt Rika and Uncle Vilko, who had been the ones who built it, while Opapa and Omama only lived there with them.

  After the weekly meal, all the collected children would lie down for an afternoon nap. They were led upstairs and put in their beds. The children who lived there were used to this rule, but those who had come as guests experienced sleeping after lunch as a special humiliation.

  The grown-ups meanwhile would talk on the lower floor. The women hung about in the kitchen, washing and drying the dishes, jotting down cake recipes on the backs of medical referrals which, when we returned to our homes, would be recopied in school notebooks with greasy cardboard covers. The men would continue to discuss politics at the table while dry bre
adcrumbs embedded themselves further into the elbows of their sweaters and jackets.

  Opapa was an inquisitive man, he knew all sorts of things, and could think for himself, but he didn’t always need to be the one controlling the conversation. September 1939 was a rich and beautiful month, the Indian summer would last all the way to November, and the garden in front of the house in Ilidža was filled with scents, colors, and sounds. The birds quarreled somewhere high up in the branches of the weeping willows that Opapa had planted there when he came to live in Ilidža – these one-time saplings would grow to colossal size by the end of the twentieth century, soon after which none of us would be there anymore to see them – thin branches and shaggy crowns that looked in the distance like a head of a bushy green hair. The rabbits tapped on the floors of the hutches with the tips of their nails, the hens beat their wings, running from the frisky young rooster, and everything all around echoed, called, and cried out, as if the earth beneath our feet were breathing. And all in that instant swelled and gave forth life – the year would be rich and full, and everyone for that reason was on the brink of tears, because it seemed to them all that they were actually saying goodbye to this fecund life in which they may have found happiness.

  “That idiot will lose the war in the end! But where are we now, and where will we be by the end of it?”

  Thus spoke Karlo Stubler, while German troops pressed irresistibly into Poland, which would soon fall and disappear, partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union, which among the naïve raised the hope that this was in fact the end, and that now Hitler would stop. They were ready to forget that there had once been a Poland and a Polish people, just so this Indian summer could go on forever, and so we Yugoslavs of three kindred tribes might continue to live in the peace and harmony we’d enjoyed up until then. But it was clear to those in the Stubler home that Hitler would not stop.