Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  The tenants of such an apartment, one divided into parts, were called partaja. In official bureaucratic language, a partaja was “one with the right to co-tenancy for an indefinite period.” They all had just one door and entryway, the toilet and washroom were shared, and next to the doorbell was a set of instructions indicating how many times to ring for which tenant. So alongside their other daily tasks and occupations, the partaja needed to count the number of times the doorbell rang. They would put the washroom schedule up in the entryway, and, even among accommodating individuals, of which there were always too few, disagreements simmered regarding who had failed to remove their hair from the bathtub or whose turn it was to scrub the toilet.

  With the partaja system, which was likely invented in the Soviet Union during Stalinism and adapted from there to life in our own cities, the Party had tried to solve two burning problems. The shortage of housing and the surplus of it. To some this might appear mistakenly to be a single problem seen from two different perspectives. But that is not the case. The matter here had to do with two cultures, one that belonged to the past and suffered from a chronic surplus of housing, and another that was dedicated to the future and truly had nowhere to live. Their lack of agreement and mutual unhappiness would last for a long time, for decades even, until both would disappear, past and future collapsing, and in place of communism something else would be promised to the citizens: the end of war, the heavenly kingdom, the exit from an economic slump.

  Whenever a partaja received an apartment from her or his employer or, God forbid, died, the occasion was equally joyous for others since they would all gain from the resulting surplus of living space. Everything one could live without was still considered surplus, but still, the dead partaje were not replaced by new partaje.

  Madam Marija Peserle died in 1959, and thus did the end arrive for the history of this building above the Sephardic temple, which had been built at the beginning of the century with the money of her sister Emilija Heim and Madam Heim’s deceased husband, a Sarajevo restaurant and hotel owner.

  In this five-story building, the entire first floor with its vast, high-ceilinged four-room apartment was occupied by Madam Emilija Heim. On the second floor were Marija Peserle and her sister-in-law Dragica, while the ground floor, the upper ground floor, and the third and fourth stories were comprised for the most part of nice, rather spacious, two-room apartments intended as rental space. Emilija Heim rented these apartments out to better-off postal workers and railway officials, to professors, and to Sarajevo’s upper crust. She took such things into account because she wanted to have her peace and also for others to be comfortable. She thought, at any rate, it was better for each person to live according to his station, with his own class and race, people of quality with people of quality, workers with workers, poor folk with other poor folk. To her way of thinking this was a recipe for perfect social harmony. She didn’t give a thought to revolutions or revolutionaries, they had nothing to do with her, nor did she have anything against communists, or religious devotees, or Jews – to the latter she would have gladly rented an apartment, for, based on her insight into their world, Jews were a very tidy people, even when they were not especially affluent – but, in accordance with her limited means and abilities, she did what she could to ensure that no revolution, whether red or black, ever came to pass, and that people did not suffer for being what they were through no choice or desire of their own. And in fact, up until April 1941, it seemed to all of us that Emilija Heim was quite successful in her historical designs, and her building would remain an oasis of peace amid the flames of a belligerent Europe.

  In those times before the war, and even during the war, the stairways were perfectly clean, and from the ground floor to the tops of the building there were bright red carpets spread out on the landings, a little like the red carpets of Hollywood, while the building superintendent and housekeeper made sure that at every instant of every day the walls were perfectly whitewashed. Actually the building’s stairways resembled the exquisitely illuminated hallways of a fine European hotel.

  Such was the state of the building in which Franjo and Olga Rejc rented their apartment upon moving to Sarajevo. The apartment was on the fourth floor, just beside the attic, and while it might not have been spacious enough for a married couple with two sons, one of whom, Mladen, was already attending high school, this was how the two of them were. Having a smaller, more elegant, and orderly apartment was more valuable to them than having something that might have been larger and disorderly, surrounded by neighbors of all sorts. This variety of civic caution was typical of the Stublers, and perhaps Franjo got it from her, but it had a paradoxical effect on anyone who knew about their social adaptability and, especially Olga’s, sympathy for the poor, strangers, and people of other faiths or customs. They lived within this paradox, and probably because of it they never achieved much affluence. Karlo was paying for Omama’s treatment at expensive German baths, partly out of the belief that her heart would not last through another spring, partly because he loved the orderliness and seriousness of a world to which he did not actually belong, the sort of world described in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, while Rudi was spending both his own and his father’s hard-earned money on travel, concerts, and Viennese cafés, and Olga and Franjo, why not, wanted to live in the fine, upscale apartment building of Emilija Heim.

  Emilija was the eldest and most enterprising sister. Her husband had died relatively young. We do not recall what sort of a man he was because we never met him. When we moved into the two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor, Madam Emilija was already a widow. She had two daughters, but they had married by then.

  One of the first memories of Olga and Franjo’s daughter, born sixteen months before Mladen’s death, was connected to Madam Emilija.

  It was 1945, again early springtime, a night of Allied bombing, in which our own Željko took part, the son of Olga’s sister Karla Ćurlin, née Stubler, whom we all called Aunt Lola. Željko would later say to Olga – Auntie, I watched out not to hit our house! – though we all knew that in the middle of the night he could not watch out and this was more like the excuse of a well-raised child than the expression of a grown man.

  And while Željko was watching out, we were all in the basement, the building owner Emilija Heim, and her sister Marija Peserle, and her sister-in-law Dragica all curled up, and Aunt Doležal, and Matić with his wife, and the Bilićs, who lived across the way from the Matićs, and all the others who had lived in the building since 1941, and Mrs. Rojnik, who had moved in later with her husband and her daughter Damjanca.

  It was pitch dark in the basement, bombs were falling, thundering from all sides, and none of us was able to estimate just how far away the house was above our heads or whether it was even standing at all anymore. Just once in a while the candle in Madam Heim’s hand would come alive, or Matić would light a match to look at his watch, and for a moment the entire basement would be lit up and Olga and Franjo’s little, not yet even three-year-old daughter would look around at all the faces – she would remember them distinctly for the rest of her life.

  At dawn, after a night of terrible bombing, Olga and Franjo’s daughter recalled, even as an old woman, that Madam Emilija Heim, cane in hand due to her failing hips, made her way up the steps toward the shelter exit.

  All the other tenants stayed where they were. The children asleep, the adults awake, following Madam Heim with their eyes. Of the children, only Olga and Franjo’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter was awake, watching so she could one day remember.

  And it was her earliest living memory: Emilija Heim, holding her cane, tall and straight, standing at the entrance to the shelter and looking out. In front of her are the walls of the ravaged Sephardic temple and, beyond that, clear sky. It is quiet outside, the aircraft engines cannot be heard, perhaps birds are twittering, perhaps there aren’t even any birds left.

  Thus stood Emilija Heim
, in the gaze of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, in her memory, in the memory of a seventy-year-old woman. At the opening and closing of life stood Emilija Heim.

  In April 1941, on the low ground floor of Madam Heim’s building there lived a Jewish woman. We don’t remember her name. We remember she was a widow and that she was very quiet and smiling. To greet her neighbors, she would just smile. As if her throat hurt or as if, for some reason, she was trying to conceal the sound of her voice. And actually, just as no one remembers the woman’s first or last name, no one can recall her voice.

  The tenants of the building above the Temple do however remember her screams.

  Early in the morning, at first light during the month of May, they came for her. They could have been Ustaše, or members of the militia, or even members of the Quisling collaborators. One thing is certain: at that time it was not the Germans who were rounding up and deporting the Jews.

  But we do not remember the color of their uniforms or the signs on their caps or if they were even in uniforms or wearing caps at all. We did not see this but rather hid ourselves away deep down under our bedsheets while the voices reverberated on the stairs.

  In truth it was variations of one and the same human voice.

  It prayed with the devotion of a beggar.

  It offered gold to ransom itself, though it had no gold.

  I’ll go to my sister in Kraków for the gold and bring it back to you, it said.

  And when they didn’t believe it, it shouted.

  It screamed.

  For a long time it screamed, but no one heard it.

  Though nothing had yet happened to Sarajevo’s Jews, and no one knew, or no one wanted to know, of the fate of the Jews of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Vienna, our neighbor, whose name we do not remember, knew everything. And that was why she screamed, in the voice and the voices of an innocent person being led from her living room armchair to the gallows.

  We never saw her again and started immediately to try to forget about her, ashamed at the whiteness and softness of our bedsheets.

  All this happened on a Monday.

  And on Tuesday, into the apartment of the quiet, smiling old Jewish widow whose name we do not recall and who resonates in the memories of the Stublers and Rejcs only through her screams and imprecations, moved Stanko Rojnik, a senior official with Sarajevo’s Ustaše militia, along with his wife and child. The Rojniks entered into the aromas of the old Jewess and were infected, like the people in the Middle Ages who had by some miracle or privilege granted by God survived the plague but then moved into the homes of the dead that still stank of their sweat and fear.

  Did Mr. and Mrs. Rojnik talk about the old Jewish woman, upon whose bed, at least for the first few days and weeks, they lay down each evening? I presume they did, but no form of literature and no amount of authorial imagination by any author can reach the content of those conversations, though nothing else would so truly speak to the reality of Sarajevo in 1941, the war, and the Holocaust, as those, probably naïve, worried, maybe even a bit erotic, conversations between Stanko Rojnik and his wife.

  He was a gloomy, distant man, usually dressed in a cheap, poorly cut suit from before the war and carrying a leather briefcase that was on the verge of falling apart. It was in that case that he carried his militia papers. My uncles, Mladen, who in 1941 had started the seventh form of high school, and Dragan, three years Mladen’s junior, shuddered at the thought of Rojnik and were terrified of his briefcase. Inside it, their still vivid adolescent and childish imagination conjured death warrants and corpses; in that bag there were firing squads, gallows, and concentration camps, laws and mobile courts-martial; in there was everything they were seeing in the city, hearing about from their parents, and especially everything people were silent about and imagined when they were most alone. In Stanko Rojnik’s briefcase there was death. Death for the two of them would forever remain the fear of that tattered, worn-out bag ostensibly with nothing but papers in it.

  Mrs. Rojnik, in contrast, was a good and decent woman. She must have noticed that her neighbors avoided her, though perhaps she attributed that to the fact that the two of them were actually Slovenes. This was a distracting factor in the lively story of Stanko Rojnik: a high-ranking Ustaše militia official, but also a Slovene. To my grandfather, Franjo, it was not at all clear how this could be possible. Franjo’s Sloveneness was idealistic and naïve, and naïveté and idealism are a dangerous combination where nationality and identity are concerned, for they can easily lead a man into trouble with the guileless ease of an opiate.

  Ordinarily, early in the morning, Franjo would be making his way down the steps, dressed in his expensive suit, a new bag in hand, and would run into Stanko Rojnik on his way, wearing his ugly, cheap suit, which always reeked of tobacco smoke, carrying that tattered briefcase that was always on the verge of falling apart.

  He’d greet Rojnik not a whit more cordially than the other neighbors. And he would look him the eye, just as he did with everyone else. He didn’t lower his gaze the way one usually does from the eyes of a policeman.

  Rojnik noticed this, and seemed to smile back at Franjo.

  Or maybe it just seemed that way.

  When he came home one afternoon, Franjo said to Olga, “I saw Rojnik this morning!”

  “God knows where he’s been!” she said, quickly bringing down his mood.

  And then Franjo Rejc sat quietly, in his own kind of fear, wondering what in God’s name Stanko Rojnik, that Slovene, did at night. And he could think of nothing good.

  The Rojniks spent the whole war that way, in the ground floor apartment from which our Jewish neighbor had been sent to her death. In 1943, the worst time of all, a little before Mladen’s death, they had a daughter. They gave her the very unusual name of Damjana. In Slovenia, before the war, there had been Damjanas, but in our beautiful homeland, reborn through the goodness and wisdom of the Poglavnik Ante Pavelić, and with the support of Croatia’s great friend and the defender of the Croats, the leader of the Greater German Reich Adolf Hitler, probably not a single Damjana had ever been born.

  Mr. and Mrs. Rojnik liked to call the little girl Damjanca. Damjanca helped Franjo, and after him Olga, to take another step toward Stanko Rojnik. Franjo had given his daughter a name that was impossible to find in the Croatian church registries, and to the cautious priests of Archbishop Ivan “the Evangelist” Sarić the name had sounded rather Serbian, even though it comes from the name of a tree that grows in both Croatia as well as Serbia, so it was necessary that the child have a second name. Besides the one from the tree, she was also called Regina, after Olga’s sister. And like Regina, the little girl had been baptized in the Catholic Church.

  Franjo told this to Rojnik, expecting that he would say something in response. But he didn’t. The policeman cordially nodded in acknowledgment but said nothing. Franjo didn’t dare say anything more. He was even a bit concerned that Rojnik might have thought that he, Franjo, was insultingly suggesting that Damjanca was a Serbian name.

  But then the Poglavnik dispatched Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburić to Sarajevo to straighten things out. It was the end of the war, the beginning of 1945, and an inkling of how it would all end was beginning to be felt, so there was disorder among the municipal authorities, between the soldiers and civilians, which would only become worse and more widespread after the Germans, who had their own worries and defeats on all sides, lost interest in what was happening in the city. They were prepared at any moment for withdrawal toward new lines of defense, about which they were not informing their co-combatants, so that not even the Poglavnik had any idea to what point, to what fateful line, Hitler’s troops would pull back. At that time in the city corruption was rampant, the black market flourished, prices soared, and the Partisans strolled calmly about. They would merely put on civilian clothes before stepping out onto the asphalt or cobblestone streets, heading out for a spritze
r and kebab. So it seemed to the Ustaše.

  Luburić arrived as a grand reinforcement. After him nothing would ever be the same, let alone Croatian history in Sarajevo. What he did in those few weeks, or that month and a half, during his frightening control over the town, would forever be remembered. Each day, in the basement of the villa into which he had descended on Skenderija, he would torture his captives, boy and girl high school students, street traders, postal workers, anyone he’d heard from somewhere might have some connection to the Partisans, the English, the communists, Stalin, enemies of red, yellow, and black…He cooked people alive in pots of boiling water, peeled the skin from their backs, tore out their nails, sliced off women’s breasts. This was what Maks Luburić did, or what his people did, Sarajevo perverts, reprobate sons of former Turkish beys, syphilitics, the offspring of brother-sister incest, the sons of Sarajevo servant girls and high school dropouts from outlying counties, the oafs of Sarajevsko polje come to town for the first time, the God-fearing sons of Herzegovina black market shops, kids from Trešnja longing for adventure, war veterans, good-for-nothings, layabouts, and devout Catholics and Muslims – they tormented people, in Maks’s name, until those people confessed and informed against others.