Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  The majority of those captured had nothing to confess to and no one to inform against. But it was enough for a single person who did know something to confess and inform. And there were lots of those people, someone in every entryway, café, and office, at every Turkish shop window, with reliable information about three communist sympathizers, two clandestine Partisans, and at least one person at the post office, railroad, or police force who worked for the movement.

  It was a time when the whole city knew who worked for whom and whom you needed to contact if you wanted to join the Partisans, a fact that Maks Luburić – founder of the Independent State of Croatia’s concentration camps, commander at Jasenovac, and one of the worst butchers in Europe during the Second World War – gladly used to identify collaborators in the National Liberation Movement, from nearly all city and state institutions and factories, among the ranks of shopkeepers, town criers, news reporters, and the ordinary, seemingly uninterested people of the city. This was the moment when Sarajevo paid the greatest price for its way of thinking: here each person knew everything there was to know about everyone else, people peeked into each other’s living rooms, kitchens, and stomachs, and a series of open secrets came to stand in for freedom, which this city had never really experienced and which was, in a certain sense, alien to its very nature.

  And so one day, to the surprise of the tenants of the building above the Temple, they came for the tall official from Sarajevo’s Ustaše militia Stanko Rojnik. They took him away and never brought him back. Rojnik was a Partisan collaborator, a secret communist, inserted into the Ustaše militia in the spring of 1941, a cuckoo’s egg in Croatia’s nest, in that Ottoman Turkish Sarajevo. Extremely careful and pedantic by nature – this was what was said of Slovenes, that they were pedantic – he played in our building the role of a morose, unlikable Ustaše bureaucrat who brought death, in all its forms and manifestations, with him in his briefcase. How one person can misjudge another. As in the seventies Yugoslav television series The Expendables or the film Valter Defends Sarajevo, Stanko Rojnik carried secret conspirator documents in his bag, he carried the freedom we would celebrate until the next war.

  When she heard what had happened, Olga did something imprudent.

  Just as her father had taken his Serbian neighbors into his house, which they would not forget when the time of his need came, so she rushed to the ground floor, her daughter in her arms, to be there for Mrs. Rojnik.

  “They took him away!” said Rojnik’s wife, repeating what everyone already knew.

  And that was really all that happened. For the next several hours they sat in the living room, amid the furniture of the old nameless Jewish woman and the few things that the Rojniks themselves had brought to the apartment – it’s easy to imagine what they talked about.

  Olga tried to gently console her. She said: “Stanko will come back, he’s not guilty of anything!” Mrs. Rojnik certainly had nothing to say to that. Or she kept whatever she had to say to herself. Out of caution and fear, because she too, just as her man, was a secret conspirator. She knew well what his work was and for whom. She must have known why he had stuck around in May 1941 to work for the police, which was then in the process of becoming the Ustaše militia, at a time when his Serb colleagues, and the occasional Croat or Muslim wary of making his nationality known, were running as far away from Sarajevo and that militia as they could, usually toward Belgrade, or into the woods to the Partisans. How could she, a Slovene herself, not have known why Stanko remained among all the Croats to suddenly turn into a Croat and take part in cleansing the city of its Jews, Serbs, and communists?

  She knew, without a doubt she knew, just as Luburić knew that she knew.

  And then someone rang the doorbell on the groundfloor.

  Olga was scared shitless. Her first thought was: Why had she brought her child? She could have left her in the apartment with Dragan, who was hiding in the loft to avoid being drafted. Later she would perhaps not love the child with that mythic motherliness, if she would love her at all. Of this we can’t be sure. But when the bell rang, she already felt guilty for what would happen to the child. This is perhaps a protective mechanism of the mother and father: they defend themselves against the fear of death by means of another fear – that something, God forbid, might happen to their child. Perhaps this is one reason why so many people have children.

  Someone from the police, in civilian dress, was standing at the door.

  He was alone. He showed Mrs. Rojnik his ID: “Forgive the intrusion, Ma’am. They sent me for the radio!”

  He left behind a receipt for a confiscated shortwave radio. He said thank you and bowed upon saying goodbye. He was very polite. So polite that Mrs. Rojnik broke into tears. If she had retained any kind of hope until that moment, right then she knew Stanko would never come back alive.

  On that April evening when the Ustaše retreated from Sarajevo, and Luburić was already far away – purportedly in the forests near Konjic, along the tree-lined boulevard that no longer exists in Marijin Dvor, near the Church of Saint Josip – secret communist operatives, sympathizers of the movement, and English spies, or those whom Maks Luburić considered as such, had already been hanged. Among the untimely Christmas decorations hanged Stanko Rojnik.

  Several months after the end of the war his widow moved to Slovenia. She had no one in Sarajevo and was all alone. She needed someone to help her take care of Damjanca in those ugly, hungry times. This was not a city where she could stay. She lived in fear in Sarajevo, and eventually she saw her fears come true.

  The name of Stanko Rojnik survived for a time in the memories of the tenants of the building above the Temple. Perhaps up until 1969, when the Energoinvest high-rise was built immediately beside it, and the majority of the tenants moved to other parts of town. Afterward nothing remained that would remind them of this man, whose name is noted only in some old books in the city archive, among the lists of the “victims of the fascist terror.” Nothing was ever named after Stanko Rojnik. Nor would anything ever be. What he gave his life for no longer existed in any form whatsoever.

  A decade after the liberation, news reached the building that Damjanca had died somewhere in Slovenia. Not how or why or from what. We merely learned that she had died.

  Everyone in the building had shrunk from Stanko Rojnik. Except Franjo Rejc, a romantic and naïve Slovene.

  But not a single person had been at all afraid of the Home Guard colonel Bilić and his gracious wife. He worked at the headquarters, spent almost all four years of the war in Sarajevo, only rarely went out into the field, to Romanija and eastern Bosnia, and really didn’t give the impression of being a high-ranking officer, especially one from the kind of army that was Croatia’s. He seemed like more of an Englishman layabout sent into the foreign service in India, doing the job in such a way as to protect his own hide. From his Zagreb perspective, Sarajevo, along with our building and its tenants, may as well have been India. He and his wife simply wanted to enjoy life without letting anything get in the way. They were superficial and easygoing. Petty riffraff and his lady.

  Colonel Bilić had once been a royal officer.

  As soon as the time had come and the country was transformed, he became a Home Guard official. Polished and well bred, he was also in his element with the Germans. They had a daughter, Jolanda, who was twelve years old in 1941 and had been born in the Serbian town of Smederevo. They had moved into our building when Bilić was still a royal officer. His historical transformation was as natural to all the other tenants as it was to him. It wasn’t a subject for conversation. Bilić was not feared in the least. It’s possible none of us even thought about him.

  After Mladen’s death in the autumn of 1943, once Dragan had graduated in ’44 and become old enough for the army and for dying in an Ustaše uniform, we hid him in the loft so that he wouldn’t have to do so. Did it occur to Nono and Nona to ask for their neighbor Bilić’s
protection, to ask him to intercede the first time, when Mladen had been enlisted into the German army, to have him assigned to Home Guard headquarters, to some sort of desk job? Or, perhaps when Dragan was threatened with the draft once again, this time into the Croatian army, it probably never even entered their heads to talk with Colonel Bilić. To him, after all, they were India.

  The Bilićs would frequently organize get-togethers in their house that turned into loud parties as the night wore on. The colonel would invite Home Guard officials, as if he were not especially concerned over the bad news from the front lines in 1942, 1943, and 1944, as long as there was an occasion, a holiday, national celebration, birthday, or name day, or for no reason at all, as long as it raised the fighting morale, and they would arrive with flowers and boxes of chocolate, as if it were the most peaceful of times at some tree-shaded villa in Vienna or Zagreb’s Tuškanac district, a pianist playing or a gramophone, the latest recordings having just arrived by diplomatic courier from Paris and Berlin.

  Unfortunately, the Bilićs’ apartment was directly below ours, so it was often impossible to get to sleep because of the colonel’s all-night gatherings, especially after Mladen’s death, when Olga’s and Franjo’s sleep was somewhat shallow because even their dreams would be invaded by what they couldn’t stop thinking about during the daytime. One such night, in the spring of 1944 – it might have even been the tenth of April, Croatian Independence Day, the partygoers had gotten so carried away, or Nona was so much more upset than usual, that she grabbed the push broom and leaned out the window to knock on the Bilićs’ window to see if that might quiet them down a little. And as often happens in the middle of the night, when a person’s body is not completely under control, she slipped, knocked too hard against the glass, and broke the neighbors’ window.

  The three of them almost died from fright.

  The party immediately below suddenly grew quiet. The song stopped, all the gramophones and pianos died away, and they all just waited to see what would happen next. Dragan ran back into the loft, Nona wrung her hands – Oh, God, what should we do, Franjo? – but Franjo just hissed back angrily, “Now you ask me what we should do? Now?” and both of them ran up and down the room, as if by running they could make something right.

  The torture lasted for some fifteen minutes, but then the celebration started up again. It was even louder now, since Colonel Bilić’s apartment had one fewer window pane. Never had the obnoxious singing made us so happy.

  Neither the colonel nor his wife ever brought up the broken pane. Either they were too drunk to have noticed the broom when it stretched down from the floor above, or, and this seems more likely, they found one broken window a minor price to pay for not having to go talk about it with people whose despondency frightened them. They must have known the Rejc family had lost a son, that he’d been killed somewhere in Slavonia, as a German soldier no less, and they really didn’t want to allow themselves to notice such misfortune if there wasn’t an important reason to. Unhappy people are like a magnet and a chasm: they pull a person in and swallow him up…

  The building’s tenants didn’t experience much during the first winter of the war: there was still food and heat, Pavelić’s kunas maintained some of their value, such that you could even buy something with them. But the winters of ’42 and ’43, when Stalingrad was in the midst of falling and the war’s victor could be sensed on the horizon, especially in ’43 and then ’44, those winters were cold and hungry. People went to Slavonia on smuggling trips, where from the greedy, self-serving villagers (or rather from people whom God had given the opportunity to enjoy the charms of the market economy), one could, with Austrian ducats and jewelry passed down through the family, buy flour and some eggs, which were valued by those who purchased them as if they had been hatched from Gustav Fabergé, rather than some mangy Slavonian chicken. One went by train to Slavonia, through war-torn Bosnia, through Partisan ambushes, past Chetniks and hajduks, and even ordinary highway bandits completely uninterested in politics, in fear of everyone and everything. But a person didn’t have a choice. As always, you had to survive, and since others were taking smuggling trips, Franjo set out as well.

  In accord with the architectonic standards of the beginning of the century, each apartment in Madam Emilija Heim’s building had a spacious pantry. Before the invention of the electric refrigerator, when every city domicile would prepare its winter provisions with the beginning of fall, and at the beginning of spring would explore methods of ensuring that as temperatures rose the food would not go bad, decompose, dry out, begin to stink, or germinate, the pantry resembled a chemistry and physics laboratory, in which each individual mistress of the house was her own Marie Skłodowska Curie. During the wartime shortage and hunger, the pantries of Emilija Heim seemed wider and more spacious than even the brightest and most expansive living rooms.

  Only one pantry was full to the brim.

  Our neighbor on the fourth floor was Mrs. Vilma Doležal, who we would call Aunt Doležal. Aunt Doležal’s husband had been a jail guard and revolutionary collaborator. He was discovered in the pre-Luburić period and sent to a labor camp in Norway. It was not the Croats who had been responsible for his disappearance, but the Gestapo. He would never come back.

  From Aunt Doležal’s bedroom window, the so-called maid’s room in the Bilićs’ large apartment could be seen like the back of your hand. The empty space, the gap in the middle of the building, thanks to which it was possible to peer into the maid’s room of our better-off neighbors, was called the atrium.

  One day, in the freezing winter of 1943, someone knocked at our door.

  Dragan quickly stole into the loft, Nona adjusted her hair out of habit, and slowly moved toward the door while her son managed to hide.

  “Who’s there?” she asked in her innocent voice, the kind that raised the greatest doubts among the police.

  “It’s me, Mrs. Rejc, Vilma!”

  “Oh, Mrs. Doležal. Why are you sneaking up on us?” asked Olga angrily as she opened the door. (The two of them addressed each other formally throughout their lives, although they were very close. This somehow accorded with Aunt Doležal’s sense of propriety and her irrepressible sense of humor, which none of life’s horrors could manage to destroy – not the loss of her husband, or the war, or any of the other things that permanently embittered most people and crushed the most resilient of characters.)

  “Please come with me. I have to show you something!”

  She led her to the window through which the colonel’s maid’s room could be seen. Beyond the opened curtains and gently separated light drapes was a table with a white damask table cover. On the table, sunning itself in the wintry January sunshine, lay a slaughtered suckling pig. Not even three months old, as if preparing itself to be eaten for Christmas dinner, it lay there completely dead, and somehow alive.

  Without thinking, Olga asked, “What are they doing with a pig in the maid’s room?”

  “Dear Mrs. Rejc, I’m of the impression that they could not put it in the pantry.”

  From then on, Olga would go over to Aunt Doležal’s to see what they had over at the Bilićs’. And she would tell her to wait for her before looking herself because it was only an experience when you looked at it and enjoyed it together.

  Aunt Doležal swore never to look without her. And who knows, perhaps she was telling the truth. The spectacle offered by Colonel Bilić and his wife’s maid’s room was remembered more than anything else. Maybe it was for the suckling pigs, chickens, hams, apples, pears, sacks of white flour and sacks of corn flour, the turkey-hens and geese, the long, thin Slavonian sausages, the baskets of eggs and the baskets of unshelled nuts, and the live carp in water troughs, maybe it was only for all this treasure, this manna from heaven, that those two people and their house were still remembered. It made them immortal. Otherwise, perhaps they’d be forgotten by now.

  Colonel Bilić was
not thoughtless and crass, however, nor did he give in to despair. He knew well, by contrast to others around him, the guilty and the undeserving, the criminal and the apathetic, the murderous and the future martyrs, just how much each thing costs and how much human suffering was worth. Although he was not the vindictive sort, at least as far as we knew, and did not commit even the slightest offense toward anyone in the building – nor did he help anyone either – Colonel Bilić was nevertheless aware of how heavy and terrible the victor’s retribution could be.

  No one saw him as he was leaving, and no one knew when he did so. But he left in time, when it was still possible to take one’s own car to Zagreb and onward, to who knows where. We don’t know what happened to the colonel, but we believe he survived. He was that sort of a person.

  Mrs. Bilić, however, stayed with Jolanda in their beautiful, spacious apartment, as the liberation rumbled through. The maid’s room emptied out or Mrs. Bilić lowered the blinds, neither Nona nor Aunt Doležal could remember which. Before long, two or three years after the liberation, Jolanda graduated, and the two of them quietly and in orderly fashion moved to Zagreb.

  No one in the building felt bad about these neighbors’ departures. No one would remember them with good or ill will, for the three of them had in the end been neither good nor bad. They were exactly like the time in which they had lived, to which they gave nothing of themselves. Maybe it was better that way. Empty souls, like circus balloons filled with helium, they disappeared, flying off to Zagreb or the West. At least they forgave us that broken windowpane.

  But this is not the end of the Bilićs’ story.

  Across the way from them on the third floor lived the Matićs. Đuro Matić was a Serb who’d been a pre-war Sarajevo lawyer, later employed in some state institution. His wife, whom we called Matićka – we do not recall her actual name – was from Zagreb. Although she had lived nearly half her life in Sarajevo, she spoke as if she’d arrived just yesterday from Jelačić Square.