Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  The teacher would come up to Laura and stroke her head. And then everyone would see Laura’s shoulders heaving. The teacher would quickly pull her hand away, as if she had touched a hot stove with the tips of her fingers. Several days later, having forgotten, she’d again stroke Laura’s head. And everything would start over.

  In the spring of 1952, Mihailo, Maria, and Laura stopped coming to school. Before the beginning of the first class, the teacher said they had moved away. Where to? someone asked. To Germany, she answered quietly. And that was all, in effect, that would be said for the next sixty years. No one even noticed that the women with the gathered skirts who didn’t speak our language had disappeared, along with their fathers and grandfathers with their drawling, welcoming Vojvodina accent.

  Suddenly there were no more barracks, renovation and construction were in full swing, new houses had sprouted on what had been a muddy wasteland, and even the Temple would soon be restored. The Jews of Sarajevo would make a gift of it to their city, and it was there that the most acoustically attractive concert hall in Bosnia and Herzegovina would be built. So that it didn’t ring hollow when there were no concerts, in the seventies and eighties daily movie screenings were held, mostly action films. And since it was always cool inside, the Sarajevo layabouts and Roma children would cool off and take their siestas at the morning and early afternoon screenings in the hottest days of July and August.

  Of the five or six years that the Banat Swabians spent in Sarajevo there is no trace in journalistic accounts, chronicles, or novels inspired by those days. Sad and frightened, they passed through the city like a summer downpour, after which the asphalt quickly dries. Even by the next day no one remembers it. Except for the children who were in class, though they too would soon forget Maria, Laura, or Mihailo, whose pages in her grade book their teacher crossed out, with the help of a ruler and fountain pen, carefully tracing a line from the upper left corner to the lower right, and writing in her best penmanship across the middle, over grades that no one cared about anymore, in science and society, mathematics and Serbo-Croatian: relocated.

  She did the same for the two girls. The bureaucratic language avoided emotion and any feeling of closeness to those who were no more, and sometimes a gendered pronoun can function as an unnecessary and dangerous emotion for the wary, bureaucratic mind.

  At the time of their resettlement and disappearance, the engineer Püframent was still living with his wife and children in the Hotel Pošta. And they continued to come visit us on Fridays. Uwe and Wiebke started school and spoke Serbo-Croatian as we did, and everything was normal and ordinary. Only the coffee was no longer the substitute kind, made from over-roasted barley, but real coffee, Ethiopian.

  Franjo and Olga also became friends with an engineer named Petstotnik and his wife, also Germans from the Hotel Pošta, but in 1949 they suddenly had to return to Germany. The Befehl came one Friday, ordering them to be on a special train in the early morning on Monday, which would bypass the regular lines and timetables, taking them through Hungary to Dresden, a city so obliterated during the bombing that it practically ceased to exist in 1945. The Petstotniks had been born in Dresden, and their parents were from there. One day in late winter or early spring of 1945 the sirens had begun to howl and the two of them, being disciplined Germans, went down into a shelter. When they came back out, Dresden was no more. None of their friends or relatives made it, and no one and nothing was left of the city. They did not feel fear or sorrow for their loss, for everything had so suddenly and thoroughly disappeared that a person just did not have time for ordinary emotions. And in the end, fear too was just another ordinary emotion.

  The one thing that happened that day and night, and the next day and night, was that Mrs. Petstotnik lost the ability to get pregnant. Neither of them was able to assess precisely the relationship between the American bombs and her fertility, but Nono and especially Nona, took them at their word.

  A veil of grief settled over Mrs. Petstotnik when the order came for them to return to Dresden. She could not stop crying when they came to say goodbye early Sunday morning. Mr. Petstotnik was serious and spoke about the next day’s journey as something that needed to be undertaken with complete professionalism. Fate was like an engine in need of repair.

  They brought us things that they would not be able to take with them in the rush: a porcelain tea service and two monogrammed silver spoons. In the half century that followed the tea service would gradually break – I created a fictional episode in the novel Dogs at the Lake that was based on it – and one of the teaspoons would be lost, the other is still around as living proof that the Petstotniks had once lived in Sarajevo.

  The suggestion that the Petstotniks stay was on the tips of Olga’s and Franjo’s tongues that Sunday in February 1949, but the words remained unspoken. Neither of them liked Stalin or Walter Ulbricht, not a trace of their property in Dresden was left, and in these two or three years in Sarajevo they had come to feel completely at home, made friends, learned the language, and so there was absolutely no reason for them to set off on Monday from the old railway station at Čengić vila with just a couple of cardboard suitcases toward East Germany, whose Communist Party had condemned the revisionism of their Yugoslav comrades as a betrayal of the proletarian international and an example of Marshal Tito’s grandiose historical adventurism.

  Olga went with them to the station. It was not yet dawn when the train carrying the Petstotniks set off. We would never hear anything from them again. They promised to write, but no letters ever came. They left behind a peculiar sense of insecurity and a slight but insistent sense of guilt – the Petstoniks might well have stayed had the suggestion merely crossed the lips of Franjo or Olga.

  But the Stublers so rarely interfered with their own destinies that it would have been uncharacteristic of them to meddle so directly with the fates of others.

  Frau Maria Püframent had become pregnant with her third child in Sarajevo. For her engineer husband and herself this was an occasion for great joy. Wiebke and Uwe were happy because they would get a kid sister or brother. By contrast to them, their sibling would be a born Sarajevan and true Yugoslav, which would make the two of them a little less German and more ours. No one had said anything ugly to them just because they were Germans, but still Wiebke and Uwe so wanted to be thoroughly ours.

  She was in her sixth month, when one day standing in line for bread. It was no longer the time of the worst postwar hunger and shortages, but people continued to stand in lines and, for luxury items, they would until the very end of Yugoslav history.

  Frau Maria, in the meantime, still stood in line for bread, with the memory of the war still quite vivid. In truth, Sarajevo prided itself then as it would a half century later, on never questioning nationality or the particular God prayed to, which explains why the majority of the Germans from the Hotel Pošta grew so easily used to the local customs and mentality and adopted them as their own. And so it happened that, deceived by someone else’s kindness, or maybe already having become a little Bosnian herself, Frau Maria ended up in an argument with another woman, a nosy, prying gossip, Christian or Muslim – it made no difference in this case – about who was in front of whom in the line for bread. No one knows who was in the right, nor does it matter.

  But when the woman understood from Frau Maria’s person or speech that she was German, she kicked Frau Maria with all her might in the stomach.

  That same afternoon, in the Koševo hospital, Frau Maria and the engineer Heinrich Klaus Püframent lost a child, whose facial features and sex were already clear. We did not ask whether it had been a boy or a girl.

  Maria told Olga what had happened in the bread line. Every detail.

  It was unpleasant for her to hear all this, to the point where she almost felt guilty, and she said something ugly about a woman capable of kicking a pregnant woman in the belly and railed against what she imagined that woman’s identity to
be, or about Bosnia in general, where such women lived.

  “You mustn’t speak that way,” said Mrs. Püframent. “Who knows what torments her life was stitched from?”

  She actually said this somewhat differently since the two of them only spoke German together, but the story in the Rejc and Stubler households was passed on so that each time it was told this very folklike phrase, which is perhaps not possible to translate into German, would be repeated: who knows what kind of torments her life was stitched from?

  Whenever we came back to this event, and to Nona’s exchange with Mrs. Püframent, we would not comment on the backstory. Or perhaps we weren’t aware of it while there were still Germans from the Hotel Pošta, among them the Püframents, in our lives. Besides the history was still too fresh, between us and them there was always something we didn’t talk about, something about which we kept silent or were simply unable to put into words.

  This unspoken something later becomes the impetus for a story, or for literature itself. And had there been a writer there, a writer with talent and time, a saga might have been written, or a novel in frescoes, or a Modernist novel written in stream of consciousness, or an infantile multivolume narration, in the first person, from the perspectives of a chorus of children, or a detective novel presented in several different time periods, as a story from 1952, or one from 1972, or 2012…

  Olga was pricked by her conscience for something that had been done in her name, in her city and homeland, while Frau Maria showed a generosity of spirit without which life in Europe after 1945 would have been unthinkable. The price for this reversal of roles was the life of one unborn child.

  A year or two later, the Püframent family would move back to Germany. The engineer completed his work, said goodbye to his friends and colleagues at the railroad, and everything proceeded in the best possible order. Who knows how all this might have turned out if their third child had been born in Sarajevo.

  By 1955 the last of the German technicians and specialists had moved out of the Hotel Pošta, which continued to operate for another twenty years. Later the only part of the hotel that remained was the café, and after the last war the café too disappeared. The building was all that was left, the same old walls, windows, and gutters.

  The Life and Tenants of Madam Emilija Heim

  It was early spring and the peaks of Trebević were white when the soldiers came to evict Madam Marija Peserle. They removed the small furniture in silence and emptied the cabinets and closets amid the clinking of pots and plates. They tossed all this out into the entryway or onto the steps, so that the rare passing tenant could barely get by. But anyone who did would hear Dragica, Madam Peserle’s sister-in-law, who was standing out on the steps as if she too were a thing tossed out, repeating, “Oh, good God, good God, oh good God…”

  Dragica repeated her expressions of grief and despair as if she were practicing to a metronome. She knew nothing else, this old maid and sister of Ivan Peserle, the famous journalist and owner of numerous Croatian and German newspapers from the Belle Epoque. Dragica hadn’t lost her mind, but rather for her the time had become the same as the summer when Gavrilo Princip shot Ferdinand – nothing could move beyond it. And when time stops, misfortunes simply accumulate one atop another, like all those items out on the steps that turned completely useless the moment they found themselves outside the cabinets, shelves, and drawers of Marija Peserle’s luxurious apartment, as if outside that apartment their very existence lost all its value.

  Fortunately, Madam Peserle was a collected and rational woman. About her and Dragica’s fate she spoke coldly and from something of a height, as if she were wondering aloud whether to dismiss a messy housekeeper during an afternoon tea with her lady friends, Viennese dames and the wives of royal and imperial generals. While her sister-in-law was cracking her knuckles as she recited her mantra oh, good God, oh, good God, she sat in our living room, drinking sweetened wheat coffee as she talked with Olga.

  “What will you do now?” Nona asked Madam Peserle, who was the sister of our former landlady, the late Emilija Heim.

  “I don’t know” – the old woman hesitated for a moment, then said, “I’m thinking it might be best for us to go to the nursing home, in Turbe. Madam Hoffstädter wrote me that it’s nice there” – and like that she had decided, in complete calm, as if she were discussing where to spend the weekend.

  And what would become of her things?

  Actually, nothing. Madam Peserle had packed two large suitcases for herself and the distraught Dragica. She had used them on her travels to Opatija, where she and Ivan used to spend their summers before the Great War. There would be no inconvenience or indiscretion regarding the other items as she had kindly asked Mrs. Matić from the third floor to put them into her basement as it was the most spacious, or, beforehand, if they liked, Mrs. Rejc, Mrs. Doležal and Mrs. Bilić, as well as the local women and prewar lessors, could look through it all and, without any hesitancy, take whatever they might want or need. Neither she nor Dragica would have any further need for such rubbish.

  This is the word the old Peserle woman used: rubbish.

  She looked at her life and fate in this manner, condescendingly, from on high. God forbid if we others had fallen from such heights – we would’ve all broken our necks.

  She on the other hand, accompanied by oh-good-God-oh-good-God Dragica, the very next morning, with her two suitcases, which had been carried before the war by Gypsy porters from Tašlihan, in the company of two male natives of the building, her head held high, in a long blue dress and a hat – spruced up as if it were 1901 – rushed off toward the train station without once looking back.

  Several days later, into Marija Peserle’s apartment, on the second floor of the building on Yugoslav National Army Street, behind the Temple, moved the family of a colonel whose first and last name we don’t remember. He was from the frontier region of the Krajina, a nice man who greeted everyone politely from the very first day, held the door open, offered to carry his neighbors’ shopping bags, to help them, give them things, keep things for them, take care of things…

  His wife was from the city. She too was kind, polite, and discreet. They had a son, his name was Brane, he was in the second grade, and he didn’t make a sound. The other kids would run up and down the steps or suddenly cause a ruckus, which, especially during the afternoon repose, would provoke some irritability in the building, but nothing was ever heard from Brane. As if he were walking on tiptoe, kind and considerate, ready to greet anyone politely the first moment he saw them.

  At the beginning, the neighborhood took pains to keep them at a distance. And that would well have continued, since the colonel and his wife did not force themselves on anyone, but little by little it was understood that none of that made much sense. After all, they weren’t the people to blame, it wasn’t the colonel who had forced Madam Peserle out of her apartment, others had done that. Nor was it the soldiers who were to blame – what do soldiers know, they do what the higher-ups tell them to do, counting the days until they can take off their uniforms – and God forbid anyone might say the fault lay with the people from the regional committee or the military command. It was the whole of human misfortune that was to blame, Hitler was to blame, Stalin was to blame, injustice in the world was to blame, history and geography were to blame, for they had determined that we would be born precisely now and precisely in this place. This was a truth one could stand by: Hitler, Stalin, and difficult historical conditions were to blame, not the colonel who had moved into Madam Marija Peserle’s apartment.

  But this was not the end of Peserle’s story.

  Several years later, the colonel and his wife along with Brane would be ringing at one door and another, excusing themselves to say that they were going away, moving, as the colonel had been transferred to Zagreb. And everyone said they were sorry to hear it, and were probably lying. But as soon they had closed the doors of the
ir homes after the sturdy farewells, when they caught sight of themselves in the mirror by the coat rack, they understood, with some embarrassment, that there’d been no need to lie since they really were sorry to see the building lose such good neighbors.

  Immediately following their departure, that very same month, the large four-room apartment of the late Ivan Peserle, in which he had lived with his wife and sister, was divided four ways. Into three of the newly created studio apartments moved, for the most part, lower-class citizens, the Resch family (Sarajevo Germans who had collaborated with the occupiers), a quiet office worker with his wife and their rachitic son, a stoker from the railway works with his wife and two children – but the fourth and largest of the rooms was returned to Madam Marija Peserle.

  From Turbe she returned just as upright and undaunted in her splendid certitude that her life was characterized by something grander than material well-being, more important than money or any form of property. Her stay in the nursing home had neither aged her nor taught her anything she didn’t already know or that she wasn’t able to rationalize away. The difference being that Dragica was no more. She’d died in Turbe, and Madam Peserle had arranged to have her buried at Saint Josip’s, the old Catholic cemetery in Koševo, in the monumental family tomb of the Heims and Peserles, which still today is located immediately beside the sepulchral arcade and the entrance to Saint Josip’s itself.

  Nona took me through that gate two or three times as a young boy. She would stop there for a moment or two, without faith and without God, in front of the stone memorials for her two sisters and their husbands, and then we would move on, down Koševo or alongside it. I did not ask her why we’d gone in, whose graves these were, or who they were to us, these people whom I would once upon a time recall so vividly, even though they had all died before the year of my birth. We visited gravesites often. At some of them we had our own dead, while at others we did not, but it seems to me that to a great extent I grew up among graves, without fear of death, sadness, or anxiety, in the midst of a world that, I would come to believe, belonged uniquely to me. In today’s Sarajevo – today is October 30, 2012 – even just by thinking of a few graves I feel myself at home in my native city.