But there were still papers, photographs, and letters among the layers of disarray in the Stubler home on Kasindol. Those she could not burn or wipe out.
Another thing we know of Olga Rejc is that she had at least one abortion.
In the winter of 1945, not long before the liberation, while Vjekoslav Luburić was cooking people alive in the basement of a Skenderija villa, and the Independent State of Croatia was, with the blessing of our archbiship Ivan “the Evangelist” Sarić, squaring accounts with all those not living in accord with Jesus Christ and the Poglavnik Ante Pavelić, my Nona – who knows where or how in Sarajevo then – had her final abortion. If they had captured her, she and whoever had helped her would have found themselves among those hanging from their necks along the boulevard in Marijin Dvor. Those were the final moments of the Croatian state, no time to be fooling around by throwing some woman into the camps at Jasenovac. Also they were the final moments an abortion could have been carried out, for a month or two more and the fetus would have been too large to dispose of.
When Aunt Jele, Olga’s sister-in-law, the wife of our uncle Karlo, once asked, “Good Lord, why isn’t Franjo a little more careful?” Olga Rejc, née Stubler, my Nona, sighed and said, “Oh, my Franjo is an empty prick!”
This kind of unintentional wittiness was all the more impressive for the fact that intimate secrets would slip out without any sense of discretion – which among the Stublers was always quite clear and was why they so often betrayed it – and would be recounted in stories for years, even in front of Olga, who could not stand any allusions to the subject of sex.
Slipping out in this way, word got out that after the birth of his second son, Franjo Rejc had begun using condoms. But they were rather poorly made – that technology was just getting started – so sometimes they would fall off or break at just the crucial moment. Their daughter, born May 10, 1942, sixteen months before Mladen’s death, was conceived and later came into the world despite the condom.
Just like my mother’s, one might say my own birth was made possible by the inferior quality of the work of a certain Zagreb factory division charged with the fabrication of those delicate elastic products.
But perhaps one other circumstance was crucial.
The Independent State of Croatia was, in many ways, the herald of ideas, ideals, and political practices of the state that would emerge within those narrow borders some half century later. And as in Tuđman’s Croatia, where the politics of procreation, or of the natural proliferation of Croats, was one of the main factors behind popular enthusiasm from day one, along with church incursions into the intimate life of that hitherto secular society, so in the Independent State of Croatia, following Hitlerite science and by then the multi-year Nazi strategy of procreation, the question of increased breeding was exceptionally important.
Besides this, abortion was punishable by death – a position staunchly supported even by the church fathers, for whom then, as today, the life of the unborn was more important and somehow holier than the lives of the born – and because condoms were in short supply, they would be snatched up the moment a new shipment arrived at the local pharmacy.
Everyday mythology is created and thus, gossip and rumors spread, along with disinformation – this was punishable, once again, by deportation to Jasenovac – but one of the most interesting, slightly humorous, slightly threatening rumors was that certain priests, in collaboration with the pharmacists, or even under the directive of the authorities, were using tiny needles to poke holes in the condoms.
That was a story told around Sarajevo in the fall of 1941. Likely it was made up, a joke, or barroom yarn, whose origins no one can know, but it was revised and elaborated upon through such countless retellings that in the end it started to sound authentic. Even too authentic. So authentic that there was no way it could be true. To the extent that anyone might find even a grain of truth in it, that grain of truth would not be worth accepting, let alone believing.
This is what my grandfather Franjo Rejc was thinking as he was buying condoms through a connection of his at the pharmacy on the city’s main street, which in those days, in the fall of 1941, had not yet been named after Poglavnik Ante Pavelić, since the Croatian leaders in Zagreb were still deciding whether it was necessary for every large Croatian city’s main street to bear the name of either the Poglavnik Pavelić or the Führer Hitler. Franjo Rejc despised them both, but by no means did he believe that devout priests were going around to the pharmacies in the dead of night to poke holes in condoms so children would be born. Just as it is for a rich man to enter the heavenly kingdom through the eye of a needle, so it is in a dark, godless time for a Catholic or a Muslim, a true Croat, to enter this world, this vale of tears, through the tiniest of rips in a condom. Nine months later, on May 10, 1942, a child weighing barely two kilograms was born in Sarajevo’s Koševo Hospital.
Whether my Nono’s condom slipped off, or it broke at the crucial moment, he could never remember. Maybe he forgot, although men rarely forget such events, especially when they don’t want to have a child.
From my perspective, precisely at the sunset of the Stubler line, in the mystery of my eventual birth, alongside a variety of other coincidental, cryptic, and unlucky circumstances, the following two factors remain noteworthy: the poor quality of Zagreb-manufactured condoms, and the Catholic shepherd yearning for as many lambs as possible to be born by the following spring.
My Nona didn’t want to talk about any of this, not even after time had passed – for her all the born or unborn children had become one and the same. Furious, she would say it was all bullshit and only old bullshitters like Franjo’s card buddies talked about such things.
On most other subjects, in her attitudes toward life, politics, and religion, she was a liberal. She was far freer of the norms that would hold sway in the social circles in which, a quarter century later, her descendants would live. But on the subject of sex and everything that followed from it she was as hard and closed as an abbess, as someone concealing a great secret or misfortune.
It was usually assumed that all her life’s adversity was tied up with Mladen and his death. Her youngest child, that tiny girl born on May 10, 1942, she would never really to the very end accept or come to love. The circumstances of this rejection were perhaps of an instinctual, animal nature.
Like a she-wolf, she unconsciously linked my mother’s birth with the death of her oldest cub. And she never forgave her youngest daughter for it. She could not forgive her, for if she did, then her troubled conscience over Mladen’s death would have driven her crazy, torn her to pieces.
She was to blame for her son’s death.
The little girl’s life stood as a reminder.
Everything that was to happen from the fall of 1943 to the spring of 1986, from the day of Mladen’s death to the day Mladen’s mother, my Nona, died, would be defined by that troubled conscience, by a guilt which for me is deeper and more frightening than any other Croatian or inner human guilt. She had not murdered Mladen, but she’d done something that, according to the undying conviction of the heart, which is carried from generation to generation – wounding some for life, imparting to others one’s own sense of guilt – was equal to murder or perhaps exceeds it: she had interfered, as a mother, in his destiny and, as a result, betrayed him to his murderers. Mladen would be alive if she had not made his decision for him.
There was a clear and unbroken line in Olga’s case from sex to birth to death.
If there hadn’t been those shadowy evenings in Doboj, if Franjo Rejc hadn’t caught her unawares and got her pregnant, if Karlo Stubler had not blessed – even if unwillingly – their marriage, if several months later Mladen had not been born, then neither his death nor her guilt would have come to pass.
That, perhaps, is how things looked to her or to her demons.
But in that most intimate form of chattering and burbling afte
r the Stublers were no more, in the sick-bed expansiveness of despair, near the twilight of Olga’s youngest child’s own life, to the story of Mladen was added another chapter, warped and wound up in the previous one, creating something that was more difficult and complex than any written or spoken story could be, whether true or invented, but which often ends up happening when relaying a person’s life, especially after we have thought and spoken about that person from the perspective of their grave.
But before this, and before her church wedding – there could have been no other kind at the time – Olga Stubler had had to go to confession.
This happened in Doboj or Usora. We no longer know the name of the church or of the confessor. But this act of faith before God, or before his delegate, was something that weighed on her heavily, more heavily than the abortion. She cried for a long time that day and again the next. It is not known whether she told anyone why she was crying. If she did, it was not conveyed further. But then, in Doboj or Usora, in the confessional of some little, isolated Bosnian church with all its various superstitions, Olga’s spiritual world shattered.
Since her childhood in Dubrovnik she had been religious. As is known to be the case with children who have a strong and lively imagination, one capable of picturing everything, even the good Lord, differently from how it is in catechism, she had a very rich and fanciful inner life, filled with angels, saints, and holy tales. She did not get this from her father, or her mother – Johanna Stubler had a meager imagination and unassertive authority – and while her elder brother Rudi might have taught her something, as he was a firm believer to the end, she would nevertheless develop her own private God and, around him, a picturesque heaven, rich in holy flora and fauna, like a primeval Amazonian rain forest, filled with manifestations, as on the Russo-French battlefields of a Tolstoy novel.
We know nothing about what her confessor said to her or how serious the sins she confided to him might have been. But if we look for clues in our own memories and those of our family to ascertain what really happened, who had what on her or his conscience and what, aside from history, life in foreign parts, and unstable loves, led to the demise of the Stublers, then we can begin to presume what some Bosnian priest, Franciscan friar, or episcopal shepherd under Archbishop Josef Stadler might have said to a sixteen-year-old girl who came to him for confession before the conferral of the sacrament of marriage.
We aren’t sure that Olga was pregnant at the time. But still it’s unlikely that she was not.
Not even in old age did Nona dissemble or try to soften everyday reality by slight circumventions of the truth. She never lied to me, and she would get angry, more than might be expected, anytime I as a young boy lied even a little. She would be as horrified by this as if a grown man had lied to her. She never attempted to get out of trouble by lying, and she did not want me to resort to doing so either. (In this she ended up doing me a disservice. I lie, it makes me nauseous, and then I must convince myself that what I have made up is true.)
She didn’t conceal the motive behind her marriage to her confessor.
The belly, though showing little, continued to grow. As did the powerful, incomprehensible, devastating sin that must have come before it. She did not want to lie, and she had faith in God. That faith was based not on fear but on the personal connection she felt. Had she feared God, she would have remained a believer forever. The bond was severed when the God who she had so much faith in allowed Mladen’s death.
What did a confessor in the 1920s in the backwoods of Bosnia, then still in the grips of its Oriental destiny, say to pregnant young girls who had shown up for confession?
Coming after the 1878 departure of the Ottomans and the arrival of Western authority, it was a time of free love. With the Austrians came entertainment with dancing, electric lighting, officers’ balls, a postal service, the railroad and telegraph, and everything suddenly started swirling like a merry-go-round, and life, which had been spilling outward from the interiors of homes and courtyard walls, suddenly became public – for Christian daughters as well as sons – for not only did the new authorities have nothing against all this, they even validated the new morality with a certain openness and sociability.
There were no statistics at the time about such matters, but leafing through old newspapers, reading novels and stories by the writers of the day, and above all, listening to family stories, teaches us that in every Bosnian backwater and in every Christian family there were legends, mostly tragic, and memories and accounts of young women, girls really, who got carried away, ended up pregnant, and paid for it with their lives, or gave birth to illegitimate children and, like loose women of the Old Testament, were ostracized by their communities and families, or saved themselves by jumping off cliffs, slitting their wrists, or drowning themselves in a river, or if lucky enough – if this could actually be considered luck – they’d be rescued from the shame of it all through marriage.
What did the confessor say in such cases?
He likely was not compassionate, nor would her future husband be.
This was the moment when the Bosnian priest – whose identity we could determine if we had the time and means to travel to Doboj and Usora and verify in the church records the names of the clergymen serving and confessing people in those parishes in 1921 and 1922 – directed the life and fate of Olga Stubler, the future Olga Rejc.
All at once, in place of her pastoral inner world populated with spirits, creatures, and occurrences, the church’s gray walls rose up, frozen and empty. Her God suddenly turned Christian, Catholic, average, becoming like the God and vision of the priest himself and his little flock, and also like so many other Bosnian priests and all their little congregations. When he becomes ordinary, God can make the institutions of the Church powerful and influential, but such a God is also weary, exhausted, and hollow, an old man on the verge of disappearing altogether.
The fact that Nona could not tolerate conversations about sex and was so closed off and resistant that her youngest surviving child, in moments of all-consuming resignation, would say her mother found sex disgusting, must stand in some contrast to the fact that as a sixteen-year-old girl she slept with a railroad worker eight years her senior.
Rail men were well paid, and Franjo must have impressed her from that angle too. He was an upright young man, well built, intelligent, kind, and with a handsome face. There could not have been many such attractive, well-educated rail workers in Doboj, while she, dignified by nature and a Dubrovnik native to boot, a schoolgirl from a German family studying in an Italian high school, must have been looking for someone just like him.
But where in the world, and how, had she so quickly and easily slept with him?
Olga was Karlo’s youngest child, after a son and two daughters. He seems to have expected another boy, but it’d turned out to be a third girl instead. The most intelligent, most gifted, most lively in both body and soul.
He was proud of her, more so than of his other two daughters. His son Rudi was an excellent student, but physically he was delicate, more tender even than his sisters. Olga, on the other hand, was strong and solid, as agile as a ballerina. If she had been born in Berlin or Paris, she would have been a suffragette. She took up swimming in Dubrovnik. At the time, during the First World War, it was not yet customary for female children to engage in sports. But she swam and he was proud.
As a fourteen-year-old girl, in the summer of 1919, the year before Karlo Stubler’s banishment from Dubrovnik, Olga placed third in a race held in the port of Gruž, for which she won a medal. Her father was beside himself with joy. He would often talk about that great day, even when nothing remained that resembled that summer of 1919.
She was competing then with kids older than she was, the sole girl swimmer among boys. Dubrovnik residents were a little scandalized, but in Dubrovnik, too, Stubler was a Swabian, which meant that for him different rules applied.
In moments of anger, when blaming her mother Olga for her own life’s missed opportunities, the daughter would say her mother was – in all likelihood – attracted to women but never dared admit it, let alone act on it. That was why she refused with such repugnance to talk about sex, and the race in the Gruž harbor was just a nice scene from a film or an episode from a novel, not proof of anything, though such stories in real life often communicate something that cannot be proven or verified.
But what about the teacher in Usora she cheated on Franjo with?
Maybe he merely served to prove to herself that sex with men made her sick.
Is all this even possible? I don’t know. My job is investigation, into the past, into memories, and nothing in it is real except for the Stublers. And they aren’t really real either. We are a family of phantoms and spirits.
My mother, her daughter, thought she’d shock me by maintaining that my Nona was an unfulfilled lesbian. That it would be difficult and painful for me too, as it had been for her, and that she would not be alone in her sickness and the unfulfilled nature of her relations with her father and mother, which, I always knew, were not good.
I listened to her, my mother that is, and it occurred to me that a person at the end of her life, in old age and sickness, might try to continue the quarrels with her own long-dead parents. Perhaps that was how one was able to slowly cross from one side to the other.
And perhaps it was about revenge too: she knew Nona was much more important in my life than she was. Nona’s memory shaped me, for from it I am kin to something, or rather what I am by language and culture – the surest and strongest center, the foundation of a separate identity, a house, family, and homeland – is really by grace of being her grandson. Everything else is in flux.
Perhaps my mother was trying to get back at me by saying Nona was a lesbian.
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