Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  And then, over his own words, Marko burst into tears.

  He was an old man, suddenly he shed all his youth, finding tender refuge in the fact that Karlo had not wanted to cash in the debt he was owed by Boras.

  Everything was talked about in the Stubler home, the same story repeated countless times, expanded upon and enriched, maybe in order one day to be improvised upon, and old Karlo took part readily and often. If he got anything from his resettlement, if all of us got anything, it was this passionate, daily storytelling. In other things he might have remained a Swabian, but in stories, and in the need for stories to be constantly renewed, Karlo Stubler was a true Bosnian.

  But there was always one thing he refused to discuss.

  Who was Boras? I don’t know, nor would any one of us ever know. Marko Bašić brought him up during that first visit of his after the war. He repeated the name several times, and perhaps he pronounced it that night when he began to weep over himself, but he didn’t tell us anything about this man. And none of us asked.

  Opapa, as far as we can remember, during his conversation with Marko, did not even a single time pronounce the name Boras. Maybe this was just by chance. But when Rudi asked him later out of curiosity about this Boras, Karlo went dark as a storm cloud, and then, completely calmly, answered:

  “Niemand.”

  And that was all. Boras was “No One.” Boras was Niemand – and this declaration was irrevocable, inalterable, forever.

  We discussed it when he was out of earshot, fantasized, imagined, and hypothesized who this Boras could be and what ill deed this he could have done to Opapa such that in 1945, four decades after being exiled from Dubrovnik, there was an expectation of getting even.

  Rudi asked Lola. She or Uncle Andrija must have known, living in Dubrovnik. It’s not such a large town that you couldn’t find out. But they didn’t know either. There were a lot of Borases in Dubrovnik, and some in Gruž too, and even if over the years it was possible to discover which Boras from Gruž had transgressed against Karlo, how could we ever have learned the details of what he’d done?

  Something held us back from making further inquiries. Whether because of Opapa’s authority or the collective Stubler fear about what we might find by asking questions like this, Boras’s role in our lives would remain unresearched.

  According to histories of Croatian surnames, the Borases hail from Klobuk, near the Bosnian town of Ljubuški. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the quantity of such last names in Croatia was 749 – approximately eight hundred souls live by that name. Whenever I hear of anyone named Boras, I still feel a little sting.

  Why didn’t Karlo Stubler want his children, or his children’s children, to know anything about him? Because such ignorance was practical?

  Even though he talked at length, and about things that in other families were considered strictly intimate, Stubler was silent about something that had clearly frustrated him, about someone who – we didn’t know how or why – had destroyed years of his life. Boras was a central figure in his exile from Dubrovnik, but we never learned more.

  In much the same way, after 1945 Karlo had ceased to have contact with his relatives from Bosowicz, had not looked into who was alive or who was dead, as if he had suddenly lost interest in his ancestry. He readily told stories from his youth, described the house where he was born and the village none of us would ever see – not a single one of us have ever been to Bosowicz – talked about what happened to his relatives between the two world wars, but this was only until the end of the thirties. After that they never came up in his stories or remembrances, as if they had all suddenly disappeared inside a statistic, the year 1938 or 1939, inside the closed circle of the numeral 9, as if fallen into a black hole.

  Whether Opapa thought about them, just as whether he thought about Boras – how often they came into his mind, how bitter were the memories, of one and the others, none of that could we know, but it wasn’t just that he did not talk, his face would go dark whenever we asked, or whenever he knew that we were thinking about something that we shouldn’t be thinking about. He’d get angry at us as one does at a small child who sneaks a look into his father’s anatomy book.

  His daughters and son thought he did this because, like any father, he saw them as children, snot-nosed little kids, to whom he would eventually, once they were grown, do like in the Jovan Jovanović Zmaj poem and “just say it all.”

  But that wasn’t it.

  Karlo Stubler wanted his German suffering to remain his alone. He didn’t want the questions that tormented him in connection with his relatives in Bosowicz to be laid upon the shoulders of his children. Had these relatives survived in their homes? Where had they been taken away to? Had they been killed or deported to Germany? But also, where were they and what were they doing during the occupation? Had they held the belief that the Banat should be German and that others had no right to remain there? And what had they done if they believed this?

  In 1945 Karlo became a private German. He didn’t renounce his Germanness yet he didn’t share it with his children. He intended for them to become a different people and to take on, in place of German fears and suffering, the fears and suffering of their Bosnian homeland. It would be easier for them this way.

  The fact that he chose to become a private German saved his life on two occasions. The first time was when he wanted nothing to do with his compatriots after they arrived in the town in 1941 in support of the Independent State of Croatia. He could not be brought to support them, nor did he come out against them: in both cases he would’ve been killed. The second time his private Germanness saved his life was when, with unexpected bravery, he hid his Serbian neighbors in his house on the nights when Ustaše ran wild. Had he been less brave then, he would have met his end old and alone in some deportation camp or, if he were lucky, died in a German home, and we would have never known where his grave lay.

  Having reconciled himself to the fact that they would not be Germans, and being happy about this fact – for being German in isolation is painful and difficult – he didn’t want to expose his children to temptation, either to commit the acts he assumed his relatives had committed in Bosowicz in 1941 or to do what he had done in saving his neighbors. Somehow the two extremes were not so different. They were villains from a feeling of having superior merit, from a German pride and arrogance, but he too had taken the decision to stand before Maks Luburić’s drunk Ustaše out of a similarly prideful attitude. Despite the guns in their hands and the symbols on their caps, Karlo Stubler saw them as inferior to himself. And they had bought it, turned, and walked away.

  Between the German crime committed against neighbors and Karlo’s neighborly beneficence the difference is only in the morality of the action. So even though his attitude might have resembled that of his Bosowicz relatives, it was an underlying morality that set Karlo Stubler apart from them.

  Karlo wanted his own family to feel less constrained. He left us to choose our own compatriots, hoping in this way we would be less alone. Who knows whether he miscalculated.

  And so, rather than being frustrated at Boras’s unknown role in our family destiny, we feel just a slight prick when we hear of someone who bears that name. And then promptly we forget – like everything else, it’s all the same to us.

  All Our Bee Cousins

  Though he never built his own house, Karlo Stubler was still a house-proud man. He created small furniture pieces: with the help of a handy carpentry kit and woodworking tools brought some time in the distant past from Vienna, he made a small wall cabinet for the household medicine containers and placed it next to the front door, so that, in case anyone got hurt working in the courtyard or the garden, he would have bandages close at hand, as well as adhesive tape, rubbing alcohol, iodine, hydrocortisone ointment, acetisal, aspirin, activated charcoal, an enema pump…He also made a single kitchen chair, some stools and footstools, an
d a wooden box for keeping track of various documents.

  What he made around the house was more important. The moment the masons came to build the house that he would live in with Omama for the rest of his life, Karlo Stubler planted a weeping willow sapling twenty paces from the edifice. It wasn’t any longer than a switch for punishing a naughty child. And that’s exactly how it looked: like an ordinary, thin stick. During the house’s construction, he was careful to prevent anyone from stepping on it or splashing it with whitewash. Today the enormous, monstrous tree, the most massive on all Kasindol Street, towers over the house in which they’d once lived and can be seen from the planes landing in the airport at Butmir.

  Ten paces farther out, he built a small carpenter’s workshop and, in front of that, a rabbit hutch. Next to the rabbit hutch he made a chicken coop. Behind the workshop was a garden. In the first part, nearest the house, there were raised beds for berries, tomatoes, lettuce, peas, and beans, and his little plantlets grew in neat rows like a regular Sokol gymnastics parade. They were hoed and watered daily, watched over lest a wild blade, weed, or evil caterpillar approach too close, and from a distance Opapa would supervise our care of his garden, pleased and tranquil at the prospect that everything was growing, sprouting, blossoming, and yielding fruit according to some natural order, free from history and from the lead that seeps out of newspaper headlines, ready for those who would refashion it into bullets, artillery ordinance, bombs.

  After the kitchen garden came the raspberry bushes and the black and red currants, from which Aunt Rika, under Omama’s supervision, would make juices and preserves for winter. Another ten paces farther were the rose bushes, bright red, pink, deep red like thick human blood, and white. Here the bees’ buzzing grew louder, and with a few steps more it would seem as resonant as a thousand tiny tin wings scraping all at once against a round tin drainpipe, which is to say that nothing could be heard but the buzzing of the bees. It was much softer than a human voice and not shrill, but everyone in the midst of it would begin to speak more quietly, to whisper, so as not to interfere with the bees.

  Here Opapa built a wooden apiary with six hives. Inside, behind the hives, were the garden tools and, in one corner, neatly arranged, the beekeeping gear. Here too, hung on a peg in the wooden wall, was the mysterious beekeeper’s outfit, which at first frightened the children and later attracted them to beekeeping. When he put on the hood, the wide pants and gloves, his face hidden behind the apiarist’s veil, Opapa would look exactly like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who would one day appear on our television sets, though then, in that pre-television age, he looked to us like some sort of a wizard and alchemist holding a device in his hands that blew smoke, and drawing out from the teeming hives, like metal from a forge, chock-full honeycombs with hundreds of living, thronging bees – surely doing something important right then – each honeycomb looking like a factory or like a New York City street where humanity at the pinnacle of its history scuttled in all directions. Like God in a solemn uniform, his face invisible, Opapa Stubler presided over the pinnacle of apian history.

  But that was just in our imaginations, for in the forties and fifties, when the number of Stublers was at its greatest, when our social life was at its pinnacle and seemed would not come to an end any time soon, neither Karlo nor his son Rudolf were using the beekeeper’s suit anymore. The bees were well acquainted with them, had grown accustomed to the smell of their bodies – they say bees are sensitive to the odor of sweat, it makes them nervous and it’s because of this that they attack – and neither Opapa nor Nano were afraid of bee stings any longer, if they’d ever been to begin with. Without gloves, in short-sleeved shirts, they would approach the hives, extract the honeycombs, slide their hands through the heart of the bees’ world, and perform all the complex and – to us – mysterious acts described in Opapa’s thick German books with their Gothic script. The bees endured this good naturedly, having grown used to their seasonal visits, and perhaps in Nano and Opapa they had come to see their apian gods who would deliver them from every evil, whether famine, illness, or fire. Deliver them from everything that it might occur to people to ask for deliverance from when they prayed to their own God.

  A tender image from my childhood – one I have not known how to describe and so has remained unused, unwritten, and from which no novel or string of stories has branched out like the delta of a river – comes from the summer of 1974, 1975, or 1976. In Ilidža, in that overgrown and tucked-away Swabian kingdom of flowers, fruits, and insects, Nano is seated on a folding chair showing a bee to me and my cousin Ladislav Cezner, Aunt Rika and Uncle Vilko’s grandson. He’s holding it in his palm, playing with it. It seems to us he’s pushing it lightly with his finger, and maybe he really is, but the bee doesn’t do anything to him. It was friendship.

  When a bee stings a person out of fright or when it’s trying to protect itself or those close to it, the bee is left without its stinger and its insides; its entrails, which spill out, and that’s the mortal end of the bee. Many bees stung Nano and Opapa in their lives – it was said this was good for rheumatism, so what did they care – but each of these stings would stand as a sad moment. Yet another unnecessary death in the long line of Stubler demises. Yet another irremediable misunderstanding never righted.

  It appears his seemingly intrinsic knowledge of bees was another thing Karlo Stubler brought with him from Bosowicz. But then he also ordered books – Rudi would bring them to him from Vienna or they would arrive by mail – in which everything people knew about bees and beekeeping was collected. First came the handbooks on practical skills and on errors in traditional and popular beekeeping, as well as books on the construction and architecture of hives, varieties of pasture, and the influence of climate and seasonal changes on the rhythm and variety of the work of bee farming, then came handbooks on bee illnesses and propagation, on the types and manners of healing, along with brief overviews of the largest and deadliest epidemics, as if to say that sickness and death stand at the gates of every metaphysics, of every history of civilization or society. In peace and collectedness, in the lateness of evening and winter, Karlo cultivated his metaphysics of the bees and with a feeling of trepidation imagined a bee history, which, like that of human beings, was no more than the history of plague and evanescence. The difference lay in the fact that the bees had reached the completion of their civilization; reliably, stubbornly, and in perfect order they built their architectonically perfect hive, which had always been the same, over thousands of years, just as the honey and the bee’s daily rhythm had been. People should not take bees as their example because people are not complete. It was in the imitation of bees that people became Nazis.

  Beekeeping seemed to run in the family. Rudi inherited his father’s love of bees.

  Franjo Rejc, my grandfather, grew interested in beekeeping and became a keeper soon after he married Olga and became a member of the family. He was still living in various parts of Bosnia, wherever his work took him, and he did not have land of his own – nor would he ever acquire any – so he placed his first hives on someone else’s meadow, the rent for which would be paid in pots of honey, somewhere near the little railway station in Želeće, between Nemila and Zavidovići. On days he had off from work he’d take the train to his bees, spend time with them, prepare them for winter, extract honey, sustain them against epidemics, using this trip as an escape from what was tormenting him in his everyday family life. In contrast to Rudi and Karlo Stubler, what the bees afforded to Franjo was this possibility of escape, and as he was more thorough and bookish in his fascination, and knew more languages, books came to him from all parts of the world; he subscribed to several beekeeping magazines, and, through the Sarajevo beekeepers and honey sellers’ association, he even engaged in a sort of educational work.

  Franjo Rejc was absorbed in this for more than half his long life. He suffered for many years from cardiac asthma. He was nervous and unhappy with his life and its
surroundings, and, had it not been for the bees, he would have likely died years earlier. They extended his life, infused him with health, gave meaning to his everyday existence. It is quite probably due to the bees that I even met my Nono and that he was able to answer certain important questions. Though I have an aversion to them, fear their stings, and am incapable of keeping my fear in check, I also suffer them, at least a little, as relatives of sorts, part of my Stubler kin. We became relations and then, like so many others, they disappeared.

  Nono kept his bees until 1966, the year of my birth. He’d just turned seventy, and that spring he gave all his hives into the care of a beekeeper neighbor, whose name we no longer remember. This was near the Dražnica station, on the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina. Twenty-seven years later, in a new war, an entire village would be killed in this exact place. The living descendants of Nono’s bees would buzz around the open eyes and nostrils of people who would no longer shoo them away.

  An orchard grew just behind the Stubler apiary. Apples and the odd short, humble pear, up to the edge of the property. Every little piece of Karlo’s land, land he borrowed from his son-in-law and daughter, was attended to, and its purpose and significance was clear to everyone – almost an entire human age would need to pass in order for the earth to forget him completely, to wipe from its surface his choices of what was to grow, and where.

  Marija Brana and Vasilj Nikolaevich

  Marija Brana and Vasilj Nikolaevich lived in a one-story little house with two rooms somewhere on Sarajevsko polje. His name was actually Vasily. Nikolaevich was his patronymic, and he surely had some sort of a last name, but for the people of Ilidža he was just Vasilj Nikolaevich. Everything else disappeared and had been lost when, in their long exile from home, they settled here, put down their roots.