Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  The two of them also had a son, but the boy died and they persisted alone.

  There was also another version of the story, but the Stublers didn’t believe in it: the son had joined the Soviets and was never heard from again. This is the more frightening version.

  Marija Brana had fallen ill early in life. Even before the war her hips were in bad shape, and she would sit on a sofa all day long. No one ever saw her take a step outside. Anyone who later called her to mind could picture her clearly, seated on her couch, leaning forward like a snowdrop and looking ahead with laughing eyes. Marija Brana was a very kind woman. When she spoke, we imagined her by the side of a train about to set off for Leningrad, on its way to which it would be traveling till the ends of our lives, while she had stopped to say just one more thing to us before she boarded.

  Vasilj Nikolaevich had been an officer in the army of the tsar. His long aristocratic face fit the part, as did his beard, which was of the sort worn by the Russian upper class, even by the tsar himself. On his legs were officer’s boots, to just below the knee, like those German officers would wear in the coming war. Had he come all the way from Russia in those boots? Probably, but this was something beyond our knowledge, for in those years, the late 1930s, we only saw such boots at the theater, in the costumes of French and Russian melodramas, and on Count Tolstoy, in the plate reproductions of an encyclopedia of Opapa’s.

  The boots Vasilj Nikolaevich wore made him seem unreal. He often appeared in the children’s dreams, where he was sometimes good and sometimes evil. When they were awake, the children were a little afraid of him and ran away, for Vasilj Nikolaevich had a strange way of speaking. He would start saying the next word before finishing the previous one. This was how Russians spoke who hadn’t learned our language well, and not a single Russian had.

  On Mondays Vasilj Nikolaevich put on his shoes and went out to work. He worked as a minor clerk in some railway office. He couldn’t get any other job because nobody needed an officer from the army of the tsar. His empire had fallen, and his particular military skills were useless translated to another country. Which in a way seemed absolutely logical to us.

  Marija Brana and Vasilj Nikolaevich had not brought any gold along when they were escaping from Russia because they didn’t have any. But this is not to say they had nothing: they’d brought tablecloths, bedspreads, wallrugs, and one woven Turkish carpet. We didn’t know anything about wallrugs. But in their little house, every free space of the newly whitewashed walls was covered by a rug.

  The two of them had some sort of a Russian name for the thing, but we could not remember it. We didn’t even really try, because after all this wasn’t Russia, everything had to have one of our Serbo-Croatian names for it. And how else would you call a carpet for a wall but a wallrug?

  We children told Marija Brana and Vasilj Nikolaevich that their walls were hung with wallrugs. Vasilj Nikolaevich laughed, but by the next day he too was calling them wallrugs.

  Later we heard how, during their conversations in Russian, they would insert the word wallrug. Maybe they could no longer remember what that thing was actually called in their own language.

  If we had told someone in Sarajevo, at school or on the street, about the wallrugs, if we had said that Marija Brana and Vasilj Nikolaevich covered their walls with them so as to be warmer in their house, they would have told us we’d made up a story and it was a stupid story at that. A person, after all, has trouble believing in something he hasn’t seen with his own eyes.

  For them, the war came and went.

  Neither the Germans, nor the Ustaše, nor the Partisans laid a hand on the two of them. The Red Army did not enter Sarajevo, or Ilidža, but even if they had come to take them away like they took Mihajlo Fleginski from Jagodina, even if Marshal Tolbukhin had come to liberate Sarajevo, they would not have laid a finger on them. People fear misfortune, just as they fear poverty.

  You only need to have enough misfortune, or enough poverty, for people to be afraid of you, for you to be protected your whole life long, to be avoided and bypassed. This was a kind of misfortune that couldn’t be explained or recounted in words for it had no content, it was misfortune plain and simple, well bred, cultivated like an English lawn, all the more horrifying because it could not be made the object of scandal.

  All that was known was that Marija Brana and Vasilj Nikolaevich’s son had died shortly after they took refuge in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. That was everything. He would shrug and, folded in on himself, say it was God’s will. She would smile like a snowdrop and say not a single word.

  No army would lay a finger on such misfortune, for people believed ill-luck was infectious, just as they believed all the wells in an occupied territory were poisoned. They also wouldn’t have laid a finger on them because Marija Brana and Vasilj Nikolaevich were invisible to everyone but children and the Stublers.

  It’s hard to know what our friendship with the two of them was based on. They were émigrés and foreigners, just as we were foreigners in this land. This was perhaps a good basis for mutual recognition.

  Vasilj Nikolaevich would come to the Stubler house on Kasindol Street, take the best seat at the table, partake of the coffee, cakes, or whatever else was being imbibed at the moment, and then, most often, he’d be forgotten about. Someone would bring up a story about something that had happened that day or the century before, Opapa would say what he had to say, Omama would insert a couple of words of her own, while everyone else would jump in one after another, interrupting each other’s train of thought, which would then be interrupted by someone else, and thus would the pleasant afternoon hubbub proceed, with only the rarest of breaks, unless someone managed to get into a quarrel. Or someone brought up something the others hadn’t heard about. Usually a death.

  During all this, Vasilj Nikolaevich would be sitting in his place, accepting whatever was offered to him and not saying a word. He’d remain quiet, listening, polite and absent, like some minor god who had created his little world and stepped back from it. Vasilj Nikolaevich, it seemed, had taken a step back from life. But he continued living because it was the decent thing to do. If each person’s presence in the world serves somehow to compensate for some kind of absence, and this in turn is the most important reason for that person’s existence, then Vasilj Nikolaevich compensated for the world’s lack of decency.

  So why would he come over to our house only to remain silent?

  There are very few things as important as this question. None of us was ever able to answer it. For some this was because they wondered about it only while Vasilj Nikolaevich was still alive and later forgot. Others didn’t even try, because they were afraid that behind such a question, as with everything connected to him and Marija Brana, there lay some sort of misfortune which they’d rather ignore. A third group among us never became conscious of the question at all.

  For me, having been born six or seven years after Vasilj Nikolaevich’s death, the question would come to mind while traveling by train from the West toward East Germany, or across Poland, on the way from Warsaw to Kraków, Katowice, or Wrocław, or whenever my car might land itself in Zagreb’s afternoon traffic jam, which would not let you move forward or back. At such moments the question grew to such a fever pitch that I’d turn off the radio and think in silence:

  But why did Vasilj Nikolaevich come to the Stubler house, to sit among all those men and women with their children, and be completely silent, like a ghost in our midst?

  When I’m bored or have nothing to think about, or when I feel desperate and at the end of my wits – as I do now as I write this novel of the Stublers, whose end is known from the start, a novel out of time and in it, which continues even after it is finished and is finished already by its very first sentence, which reads, “There in Bosowicz, in the Romanian Banat, on his departure for Bosnia, my great-grandfather Karlo Stubler left behind an elder brother” – again I wonder why V
asilj Nikolaevich came to our house.

  Atop this question, whose lack of an answer I try to preserve within me, cultivating it like an oak bonsai, a line of equally unknown answers grows, and each is in harmony with its own narrative genre, stylistic format, or perspective from which the same question is always posed.

  Vasilj Nikolaevich came to remain silent among us because we created for him an illusion of family unity, and beyond that an illusion of a homeland, a motherland. That is, of everything he had lost when he fled Russia. He was like a devoted paraplegic soccer fan in a wheelchair beside a field on which the world championship was being decided. Once in a while, Vasilj Nikolaevich was flooded with happiness for his lack of a family. This happened in those moments when someone close to us died. He was there when the military notification of Mladen’s death arrived and when they telephoned from Zagreb about the crash of Željko’s aircraft. He hugged us all, comforting and strong, cried with the women, and was happy that, besides Marija Brana, he had no one of his own and no one he could lose.

  But as I’ve said, the gist of our godlessness was an empty heaven. The feeling that above and below us there is nothing, and that after us there will be nothing. I never managed to imagine how it would be to live with God, a life in which the heavens are not empty and one’s imagination is populated by stories about the creation of the world, the apple of sin, or the Immaculate Conception.

  If God exists, if his presence is conceivable, then he appears in different forms, wearing the masks of people and animals. God is an actor who through his various roles tests humanity’s relation to him, or humanity’s relation to itself. He is the negative of a person’s portrait. We were hearing from God alongside Vasilj Nikolaevich, in his silent vigil at the family table through the long years and decades of the twentieth century.

  Is this true? No, just as no story from a family history is exactly true, or ever quite right. The truth is in the exchange of answers to the same impossible question.

  Marija Brana died first, at the end of the forties.

  She’d been sick ever since arriving in Ilidža. Her hips had given out, she sat on her sofa, her eyes laughing. And it seemed that this would last to the end of the world. We buried her in Sarajevo’s Stup district, in a graveyard on top of which, forty years later, one of the entrances to the city would be built, a road that from its top takes in the entire cemetery and then, closer to the Stubler graves, flows into an avenue on its way to the center of town. I don’t know where in that cemetery the graves of Marija Brana and Vasilj Nikolaevich can be found, under the kindred foreignness of Russian Cyrillic.

  Vasilj Nikolaevich continued to visit after his wife’s death. He might have even grown more talkative. Good and kind, a retiree with the smallest of office-worker pensions, this solid and upright man of the tsar lived a humble life.

  Sarajevo was full of Russian émigrés. Well-off individuals, professors, doctors, forestry engineers, scientists, café keepers and waiters, script writers, indigents, impoverished counts, workers, drunks, good-for-nothings, burglars, and experts on all forms of locks, they were people of various kinds, but for the most part, Russian émigrés did not want to know about one another. Not a single one of them wanted to know about Vasilj Nikolaevich. Let him drop dead – every man lived for as long as he was allowed! While we were sort of surprised by this, there wasn’t really any need to be.

  Vasilj Nikolaevich died at the beginning of the sixties.

  His death was long anticipated. There was no one whose name could be written on the death certificate. No brothers or relatives. And this was a time when every death needed to be recorded on a death certificate, which would be tacked up on tree trunks and telegraph poles. But Vasilj Nikolaevich was by then completely alone in this world. As alone as God.

  In the end, he left the wallrugs to the Stublers. Though in the years of confusion, disorder, and disappearance, they were eaten through by moths. He’d also left a pocketwatch issued for an officer in the army of the tsar. The watch too, like everything else, has disappeared.

  The Mushroom Prayer; or, The Use of Learning

  Ever since his early days in Dubrovnik, Opapa Karlo had collected encyclopedias. From the first days of spring until the first autumn rainfall, in the cool of the courtyard, sprawled on a deckchair or sitting at the garden table, he would explore the entries that had reached him that day along the river of time. Mahatma Gandhi had died. He looked up his name in the German and Yugoslav encyclopedias, lexicons, and handbooks. Having studied everything there, he moved on to new entries: India, Hinduism, Buddhism. And so on until the next day’s afternoon rest, when some new event, a detail from everyday life, would lead him to take up the study of hydraulic pumps, blast furnaces, or Chilean saltpeter deposits.

  And thus did the circle of his knowledge widen, knowledge never to be used, unless the use was in fact what that knowledge itself enabled him in contemplation. To his children and grandchildren Opapa Karlo imparted the belief that reading for its own sake was a very useful thing.

  On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1947, he was sitting at the garden table, teaching his five-year-old granddaughter a song. Sixty-five years later, though she is now a seriously ill, demented old woman, she remembers every line:

  The fly agaric’s red cap

  And all the puffy puffballs

  Chanterelle, boletus

  Opened their umbrellas

  Praying to the Lord:

  Rain, rain, give us rain

  To make us grow and let more remain.

  But she doesn’t remember the name of the song. For our purposes, let’s call it the “Mushroom Prayer.” Mushrooms are, after all, the most mysterious phenomenon. They are only created in the wet parts of the forest, in the shade of deciduous trees. We don’t know whether anyone has ever seen mushrooms at the moment of their sprouting.

  No one knows in what book Opapa found the “Mushroom Prayer,” or who wrote it. But somewhere in the Stubler home on Kasindol Street in Ilidža, under the sedimentary rocks of time, beneath brittle old newspapers, clothing, and documents, the wallrugs of Marija Brana, photo albums, medical test results, the faded X-rays of who knows whose lungs, magazines on gardening and on classical music, surely there still exists a book, buried and petrified, with that song in it, the “Mushroom Prayer.”

  The disarray of every home is the result of the disorder of people’s lives, their intertwinings, attachments, and initiatives. It would be best, if possible, for everyone to move out when the father of the house dies, to go live elsewhere, where they can continue their lives, with new wardrobes and dressing tables and nightstands. The living would otherwise take on the lives and fates of the dead. They would bury their dead, threadbare shirts beneath the neatly folded shirts they still wore, their living shirts, and the house, with each passing death, would be transformed into a grave, the living dreaming the dreams of the deceased, afflicted by their own fears, until the sweet, salty, and bitter tastes of their own disintegrating lives began to settle sourly on their palate.

  The disarray of the Stubler house was composed of fifty, or perhaps more, complete and incomplete lives surrounding the figure of Karlo Stubler, our innocent patriarch. That house was never put in order or cleaned out. Every instance of cleaning, or dusting, or purging of old things is an act of violence on a person’s being and life. Every instance of cleaning is an accounting with one’s own biography and the biographies of those close to us. A moment of our death and a reminder that nothing is lasting and everything moves toward oblivion.

  Dusting requires either sheer courage or the complete absence of a soul.

  But that disarray is also a grand metaphor for the interests and occupations of Karlo Stubler, something my relatives who continued to live on in that house were unable to throw out. Although the house on Kasindol is not mine, its disarray is still my disarray. If it could be put in order, if I had the st
rength and will for it, if I had the time, I could write a novel in which not a single name, personage, or event was invented. At its center would be Karlo Stubler, and all around him, chapter by chapter, all the Stublers I know of or would come to know of, those who lived with him and those who knew him well, even if they were born long after his death. Then the story would widen outward in concentric circles, telling of friends and neighbors, of people who lived along Kasindol Street, the long peripheral road that stretches out amid uncultivated land all the way to the new Butmir Airport, of the people Karlo Stubler and his family knew well, of their fates in life, how their fates were entangled with his, and of the fates of all their offspring, up until the present day.

  Such a book, were it possible, would put in order the disarray of the house on Kasindol, the disarray of our souls, having sprung forth from a surplus of memory, but also from the fact that we did not clear away the dust. Such a book would leave us clean and new.

  When he wasn’t flipping through encyclopedias, following webs of associations about useless bits of knowledge, Karlo Stubler would read books on technical know-how. On beekeeping, gardening, fruit growing and agronomy, on steam locomotives, diesel engines, shunting, and a variety of railroad procedures – technical books on anything that might have been a subject of interest to him. And he was interested in anything that could be made, repaired, or transformed with one’s hands. Any mechanical system, electrical device, car, truck, or plane interested him so much that he could become absorbed in the study of quite complex specialized manuals and university textbooks, losing himself in the subject as if it were a stimulating crime novel.

  When on a hot summer evening, while the men would play preferans somewhere off in the cool and the women would make the rounds of the neighbors’ houses for a cup of coffee, he would settle into his deck chair and study the functioning of hydrofoil engines or the use of cement in bridge construction. He never philosophized about what he had read, even if he were asked about something, but would respond somewhat shyly that he didn’t know, he wasn’t an expert in that. Most of what he studied remained with him, archived away in his head, never to be used. But can meaning really only be about use? Karlo Stubler read about engines and cement with the same sort of interest that one might read War and Peace, and no one’s ever read that book to become a great general or lover.