Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  They had two children: Girlie and Sonny Boy.

  The two of them had other, both civil and baptismal, names for school, but everyone in the building called them Girlie and Sonny Boy.

  Girlie was an anxious little girl, matching the time and conditions of life, and differed not in the least from that generation of Sarajevo girls from better families. Neither pretty nor ugly, not especially bright but not at all stupid, Girlie grew up in a disciplined manner and was not a nuisance to anyone. In contrast to Sonny Boy, Girlie did not really need to be brought up.

  From the time the Matićs moved in, we recognized Sonny Boy from his shouting and howling: even when he was little, he would scream in the stairwell as if he were being skinned alive, and all because of who-knows-what sort of perceived injustice. Later we heard his voice begin to crack as he grew older and began to curse and blaspheme in an attempt to seem important. And then when Sonny Boy had reached a certain age, he began to lead cheap girls down the hallways, so again he gave us no peace.

  It should be said that Sonny Boy was actually just as typical as Girlie was.

  An urchin from a kuferaš family, his mother’s son, impossibly spoiled, as if the entire world revolved around him. And his mama, Matićka, the Zagreb native, who was never at all thrilled with this Oriental mentality, this Bosnian and Balkan sincerity and directness, where everyone addressed everyone else informally, the poor man to the landlord, the pickpocket to the university professor, the patient to his doctor, she tried to instill in Sonny Boy from his earliest years the belief that he was better, more intelligent and capable than others, that he was above the world that surrounded him – for he was from a fine house, his grandma Erika and grandpa Štef were from Jelačić Square, and it was only a combination of strange and silly circumstances that had led to Sonny Boy’s growing up here, on Tašlihan, in Sarajevo, instead of where he should have been according to the nature of things and all the laws of people and of God.

  The boy was not in fact overly bright, or perhaps it was the environment he grew up in that stunted his intellectual growth, and Sonny Boy grew up to be something of an idiot, a word he might have had some difficulty spelling.

  When the war began, as early as the summer of 1941, Sonny Boy did something unusual: he went to join the Chetniks. How the news spread among the neighbors is hard to say. Probably the same way all other news spread around Sarajevo. Or else Matićka, being who she was, complained to the people around her so that soon everyone, and not just in our building, knew that Sonny Boy was in Romanija, then in Vučja Luka, that he was in the king’s army, wearing a fur cap with a cockade and a long knife at his belt.

  The first thing people around them said was that Đuro Matić must be dying of fright, and that the Ustaše would next be turning up at his door to lead him off to Vraca without his having done anything wrong at all. For absolutely everyone knew for a fact that he’d had nothing to do with Sonny Boy’s upbringing. The boy had been brought up by his mother, he was her pride and joy, while Đuro had watched over their daughter. Orderly, serious, and quiet, she was his child. Sonny Boy was entirely his mother’s. He was a lawyer, he did his work, and he respected the state, every state – this one too.

  Of course the colonel and his wife knew where Sonny Boy was. They couldn’t help but know, no matter how uninterested in their neighbors they were, no matter how much they were focused on themselves, their parties, and their slaughtered swine.

  The Bilićs and Matićs lived through the four years of the war in peace, door to door. They met one another at the entrance, went down the stairs together, and never was an impolite word exchanged between them. Not a kind one either if the routine greetings exchanged by people don’t count.

  The fact that Colonel Bilić was not prejudiced toward Sonny Boy for his desertion to the Chetniks would be unusual in some invented story or novel about the time of the Second World War in Sarajevo, but in life, as it really was, there was nothing miraculous about it. The miracle would only come after the war had ended.

  The colonel’s wartime enemy and, until yesterday, neighbor concerned him about as much as anything else, which was not at all. He was as cool and indifferent toward Sonny Boy’s Chetnicking as toward the fact that his neighbors could see the delicacies in his maid’s room. Only an evil person or some sort of Croatian idealist would have punished Đuro because his son was a Chetnik. And Bilić was neither evil nor an idealist. The fact that Matić was a Serb also made no difference to him. He had nothing against the Serbs, he had lived among them for many years, and his daughter had been born in Serbia. The fact that he had adjusted and accommodated himself under the pressures and injunctions of great history does not mean that he changed his convictions. He didn’t have such convictions, until he needed to. But even then, he was very, very moderate.

  The evil of our century was preserved by such moderation.

  In the spring of 1945 Mrs. Bilić was alone with Jolanda in one apartment while in the other Đuro Matić and Matićka were holding their breaths about what might have happened to Sonny Boy.

  It would not take long for them to find out.

  The Partisans had captured him, dirty and lice ridden, somewhere in Romanija, after which, as was the practice, he was put on trial by a people’s court in Sarajevo. We do not recall, or we were never told, the length of Sonny Boy’s sentence, but he served a good three years. Then he came back home, life in the building continued on its course, Sonny Boy was again Sonny Boy, only a little older, quieter, and more distrustful. We only heard from him when he drank.

  By the time Sonny Boy returned from prison, Mrs. Bilić had moved with her daughter Jolanda to Zagreb. While living in Zagreb, Jolanda wrote a collection of poems, which was published by the well-respected publishing house Zora, who had also brought out the selected works of Miroslav Krleža.

  Madam Emilija Heim died in 1952. She was old and sick. One afternoon we were all at the gravesite at Saint Josip’s, where she was buried in a monumental family vault. We left her to be alone amid those white and black marble confines, covered in their German Gothic script and Silvije Kranjčević poems, as heavy as the first November snow, which falls suddenly, at first light after an unexpectedly warm evening, when the sweet, muddy stench of the city canals is all around and a person might once again believe that winter would never come, that death did not exist.

  Das ist rote tane

  It’s the fourth of April 1945, early afternoon, and everything is unexpectedly quiet. The electricity has been out for some time. Someone’s knocking on Aunt Doležal’s door.

  Madam Emilija Heim, between two German soldiers in full combat gear.

  “Mrs. Doležal” – Madam Heim cannot seem to catch her breath – “Mrs. Doležal…”

  Aunt Doležal leads them into her entry, then into the living room, offers Madam Heim a chair, helps her to set aside her cane, and the two helmeted soldiers with their rifles stand by, embarrassed.

  “Please, gentlemen,” Mrs. Doležal says at last in German.

  The two men brighten, the wall between them and the light having disappeared, and they let go of their rifle straps…

  “We’ve been given the task,” says one of them, “of keeping an eye on Trebević, and the mountain is most clearly visible from your window!”

  And so on the fourth of April 1945 Aunt Doležal, who did not yet know she had become a widow, her husband having been lost or killed in a German work camp in Norway, took into her apartment two despondent German recruits.

  They stayed until the next morning, when, with a naïve, somewhat childish goodbye, they left. Only then, as they were making their way downstairs, did Aunt Doležal realize she had not asked their names. If they went away like that, she would have lost them completely, gone forever. She wanted to run after them and ask their names, but then thought better of it. Even if she knew their names, it was not likely she would ever see them again, but by
learning them, oblivion would have at least seemed to have been postponed.

  Who knew what the two men would have thought, and who knew what others would have thought, had they heard her talking with the German soldiers, just two days before the liberation of Sarajevo. That conversation is no longer relevant to anyone. They went away, disappeared, and were no more.

  But let us return to the moment when the two have just entered the apartment, and Madam Heim has sat down, and is catching her breath, drinking water.

  There is someone else in the apartment just then.

  She’s sitting on the floor, playing with a small red tin jug that her aunt has filled with beans, which the little two-and-a-half-year-old daughter of Olga and Franjo is shaking up and down.

  She shakes the little toy, the tiny dry beans knocking against the tin, which makes a clanging noise that every adult ear finds unbearable. This is why Aunt Doležal has brought her to her place, given her the little jug and the beans, because Aunt Doležal knows how, whenever anyone in life needs it, not to be an adult. And for someone of her years this is an important thing to know.

  As she plays with the jug, the little girl looks at the two soldiers and says, “Rote tane, rote tane, rote tane…”

  The soldiers look at her. They don’t understand what she’s saying because they don’t understand this language, and four years of war has not been enough for them to learn it. The girl has a bright complexion, light, almost pure-white skin, blue eyes. She looks at them as if she’s the only one in the world who knows something about them.

  “Das ist rote tane!” she says, and at the same moment their faces break into smiles.

  This event would be remembered thanks to Aunt Doležal, who could not have felt indifferent when she saw the German soldiers at her door. Two or three years earlier, we are unsure whether this was in 1942 or 1943, the Gestapo had questioned Aunt Doležal for several days, while her husband, our neighbor Pepi, was deported in a cattle car far to the north, to Norway.

  Josip Pepi Doležal was a jailer in the Beledija city authority. Beledija had been an ancient Sarajevo prison, which existed since Turkish times, though its most famous days would not come until the Austro-Hungarians, when members of the Young Bosnia movement and the assassins of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be interned there. But Pepi was still a boy then, not yet at the prison but instead trying, without much success, to finish high school. That didn’t work out. He failed grade after grade. While he wasn’t especially stupid, he was the laziest student in the school. This legendary, colossal laziness also defined his life’s calling: as a jailer he really didn’t have anything to do except keep track of the keys.

  But even then, he wasn’t able to keep track of them.

  Besides laziness, Pepi had another great passion: rakija. He was a notorious drunk, he was always drunk, though in his drunkenness he was also always good natured. Or rather as soon as he was drinking he got that way, became nice. Aunt Doležal lived with him that way, drunk as he was, and besides the eternal smell of alcohol, there weren’t any other problems in their life. Their marriage had its own kind of harmonious basis.

  They had a daughter who, according to Pepi’s desire, was given her mother’s name of Vilma. During the war Vilma was already a big girl in middle school.

  At the time of the monarchy, Pepi’s alcoholism didn’t give him any problems at work. Jailers are often dark, difficult people, with some sort of hidden fault or abnormality. They are psychopaths or sadists, people born to suicide, wannabe police detectives or wannabe generals. But Pepi was just a simple drunk. Toward the prisoners he was never harsh, toward his colleagues he was always friendly, ready to conceal at any given moment the consequences of his wayward character. Being drunk, he was blind and deaf to most of what went on in Beledija.

  And at the beginning, it seemed that the arrival of the Ustaše and the Germans would not change anything. Pepi Doležal kept on drinking, and perhaps he did not even notice the moment when the prison turned over into a torture chamber. Or perhaps it is just nicer to think he didn’t notice.

  It will never be known for certain whether the prison guard Josip Pepi Doležal aided the communist Olga Humo to escape from Beledija out of conviction or if it was because of the booze. The fact is that Olga Humo was saved and managed to get to free territory, while her savior ended up in the hands of the Gestapo. She would later fight alongside the Partisans, while he would die somewhere far off in the north, from extensive exposure to cold and toil. His despairing letters found their way to Aunt Doležal, as if either the Norwegian camps were unaffected by the strict German and Ustaše censorship or the contents of the letters were part of some intended mutual punishment.

  She soon understood that Pepi would not be coming home. That he could not survive. Nor could even those who were stronger, more resolute, and soberer than him. After the war, Aunt Doležal would receive a commemoration of Pepi’s martyrdom in 1941, but she too could never be certain whether the suicidal action that had saved Olga Humo came from Pepi’s convictions or from his alcoholism. One day she thought one way, the next the other, and all of it she would recount with a light, laughing air, as if all of a person’s life and fate right down to death in a concentration camp could be transformed into a joke.

  After the war, Olga Humo lived a peaceful, happy life in Sarajevo with her husband Avdo and with her daughter, who was the same age as the little girl with the little red jug. Well-educated and very attractive, from Belgrade’s famous Ninčić family, she worked as a high school English instructor, and later became a professor at the newly opened School of Philosophy. Comrade Olga Humo devoted her life to the ideals of proletarian internationalism, to the enlightenment, consciousness raising, and edification of her neglected and ignorant people, but she didn’t remember Vilma Doležal, the widow of her jailer, nor did she ever ask about her. In 1956 Humo moved to Belgrade, where Avdo was a politician in the federal government while Olga was a professor of English at Belgrade University.

  Thus did the fates of the postal worker Vilma Doležal and the famous Yugoslav revolutionary hero Olga Humo cross paths, in one of history’s least significant moments, never to cross again unto time immemorial.

  Aunt Doležal would live another fifteen years in the fifth-floor apartment of Madam Emilija Heim’s building, at which point she would trade apartments with Vladimir Nagel, a German member of Sarajevo’s tiny Protestant minority, who had become her son-in-law. Aunt Doležal then moved to what had once been Nagel’s large apartment at Marijin Dvor, which had, in accordance with the rationalization of living space, been divided into two smaller apartments with a shared entry and bath. The Nagels received the Šleht family as partaje, and with them, as had been decided, they would share the good and the ill, mostly the ill, until one or the other moved out or died, after which the survivors would spread out into the whole apartment.

  Vlado Nagel resolved his problem with the Slehts, who were difficult, unfriendly, and detestable people, such that he left them his mother-in-law. And Aunt Doležal, being the person she was, endured being a partaja the same as she had everything else in her life, with a sense of humor and a sort of almost flippant resignation.

  At the end of the sixties, as the Energoinvest high-rise was being constructed and the inhabitants of the late Emilija Heim’s building were emigrating, the Nagels moved to Rijeka. Several years later Aunt Doležal’s daughter Vilma died there, and Aunt Doležal herself was left alone in the world at Marijin Dvor, among the moths and the Slehts, dust strewn and long ago widowed, without anyone to joke with.

  Then the girl who had shown her little red jug to the two German soldiers and repeated, rote tane! rote tane!, returned her childhood debt. She visited, brought food, turned the old sick woman in her bed, bandaged her, and in the end accompanied her to Sarajevo’s new Bare Cemetery. Peacetime telegraphist, bearer of a 1941 Partisan commemoration, Vilma Doležal died at the end of the sev
enties. The Slehts then expanded into the whole of Nagel’s apartment, and the story was complete.

  But all that was still far in the future.

  On the fifth of April 1945, the little girl says, “Das ist rote tane!” and the German soldiers smile.

  This would have been a nice, comforting end to the war.

  Several hours later, troubled by the noise of heavy footsteps above her head, whose force was making the chandelier sway as the cheap glass pearls clinked against one another, Matićka, the native of Zagreb, Đuro’s wife and Sonny Boy’s mother, went upstairs to see what was happening and found Vilma and Olga in conversation.

  “What in the world are you doing in the loft, you two old fools?” she asked, pretending to be angry.

  “It’s not two old fools, my dear Mrs. Matić, but two German soldiers!” said Aunt Doležal, and for the next fifty years everyone would laugh about that, until they died.

  The Germans spent the night in Aunt Doležal’s loft. They watched Trebević through their binoculars, observing the tiny figures of people who were no longer rushing toward anyone else because no one could hurt them anymore, without fear of the snipers or their rifles, let alone two such soldiers watching them from a town that had not yet been liberated. They were not afraid, because they knew it was all over – the war, that is – and there would be no continuation, and a new time would soon begin, when they would no longer come into contact with their enemies, for all their enemies would be dead, or re-clothed as tourists visiting the Dalmatian coast, German engineers and technicians, doctors and nurses, perhaps under whose care they would one day die, should they travel to Germany seeking a remedy for some otherwise incurable illness. But before that new time arrived, there would be a pause, an in-between, an intermezzo, when no one was rushing toward anyone else and everyone lived their lives as before, only a little more quietly and slowly, as if just before dying.