Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  And so, from Aunt Doležal’s loft window the two nameless German soldiers examine the movements of the Partisans, people walking up and down the slopes of Trebević, talking or nibbling on green stalks as they look down at the city in the valley. They look at them through the binoculars, write something in their black notepads, even though it is already too clear to them that no report will be written and what they’re doing isn’t needed by anyone anymore.

  Aunt Doležal wants to host them with some rakija, the šljivovica that Pepi has not managed to finish off, since the Gestapo took him away.

  They say no, German soldiers do not drink alcohol, especially when they’re on duty, on watch. They grow serious at her offer, as if the war were not finished already.

  Aunt Doležal brings them a serving dish, and on the dish are two Turkish coffee cups, and in the cups there is coffee. It isn’t really coffee but a barley coffee substitute, with a little bit of actual coffee added. For every nine spoons of barley coffee, there is one spoonful of real coffee. At least this was what Hasan, the prewar shopkeeper, had said when he brought her a box of the substitute and accepted payment in the form of a gold ring, though maybe he was lying and there isn’t even a bean’s worth of real coffee in it. It would be fine if that were the case too, for it is important to believe there is coffee in that barley, or that from barley one can make coffee, and that the story about the Ethiopian and Brazilian plant was invented.

  The Germans brighten, pleased, thanking her for the honor, and Aunt asks them the same question people would ask the German tourists of thirty years later: have you managed to learn any of our language?

  “We have not managed to learn your language, and we have forgotten our own,” one of them answers sullenly. This too will never be forgotten, as long as we are alive.

  In the morning, looking younger than they are or than they were the day before, the soldiers leave, without Aunt Doležal’s having asked their names. She starts after them to correct this, but then stops: someone might think something of it.

  And again the beans in the jug go clink, the little girl happy that the noise does not bother her aunt as it does her mother, and she starts up her mantra once more:

  “Rote tane, rote tane, rote tane…”

  The Grave in Donji Andrijevci

  A frigid, dry frost without snow anywhere. The bus crawls slowly toward Slavonski Brod. Along the road, in the courtyards before the A-frame houses, sliced-open pig entrails hang upside down. The intestines, livers, and hearts are steaming into a cloud, as if the animals are still alive or their animal souls are streaming up into the sky after the horror of the slaughter. It is November 29, Republic Day in the year 1970, and Javorka Rejc – this is the first time we commemorate her by her given and family names – the little girl who until a short while before was jingling beans in a small tin can and repeating rote tane! rote tane! is taking the bus on her way to Slavonia, to Donji Andrijevci, a village near Kopanica. For two years now she has been working at a public bookkeeping service, the first job she’s ever had. By the time she retires, thirty-seven years from now, she will have worked at the National Museum, in a university’s department of dentistry, at the Academy of Cinematic Arts, and in the School of Education, but she cannot know this as she sits in the bus, two rows behind the driver, looking through the window at the steaming pig entrails on this frozen November day. She’s twenty-eight years old, separated, with a four-year-old son, but as always there has to be a life before her. This is not the way she thinks or feels; she is unsatisfied, deprived, and unhappy. Some terrible things have happened to her, which we might relate at some point, but it all started late in 1943, when her elder brother by nineteen years was killed – Mladen, whose grave she is on her way to visit.

  The story of his death we shall set aside for the end, even though it has already happened and was long ago recorded amid the Stubler chronology, defining their family history not only in the future but in the past as well. This event changed everything: all that had happened and all that would happen; with it, probably, our family history was finished. Although life went on, death had already announced itself, and the end was all that was awaited, in accordance with people’s petty biographies and the chronologies that we cannot respect but merely imitate through a more accurate tracing of scenes, temporal flows, and chronologies, and then say that Javorka went on living her life after her family’s death, and her own.

  That early afternoon in the bus on its way to Slavonski Brod, Javorka was a young, pretty, blonde-haired girl, and none of her fellow travelers would have thought she had just separated from her husband or that she had a child. She wore ugly patent leather boots of the sort that were in fashion that winter, a skirt cut just above the knee, a wool sweater, with a sheepskin coat that was for some reason called a “hunter” thrown over her shoulders. People wear those sorts of coats now, too, but the name has been lost in the meantime. On her lap sits a lady’s handbag she will not let go of because it contains a purse with all the money she has. Underneath, in the luggage compartment, is a small suitcase made of fake black leather that was purchased in Stuttgart that spring, which would make its appearance on various occasions in the apartment at 23 Sepetarevac Street all the way up to the beginning of the war, in the spring of 1992, when it too, would at last disappear.

  In Slavonski Brod she transfers to a rickety local that will take her to Andrijevci. The bus is empty – everyone’s been home for some time now, slaughtering a pig, celebrating Republic Day, and warming themselves up with this year’s šljivovica. By evening, the sausages will be made, the meat ground up and packed into the wide, flexible pork intestines, the cracklings will have been salted and left to cool in the summer kitchens on wide, black baking pans, the cats will be gorging themselves around the courtyards on the pig spleens and the little bits of their animal insides that a person cannot manage to swallow, and everyone will be dead drunk, singing Croatian songs about the Fairy of the Velebit and Ban Jelačić, and when the rakija has wiped away their minds completely, they’ll be emboldened and shout to the memories of the Ustaše Jure Frančetić and Rafael Boban, and to the glory of the Poglavnik Pavelić, and neither the People’s Militia nor any village informants nor spies will be there to report the songs or the singers, for they too will in that moment be feasting on their slaughtered pigs, singing different Croatian songs or maybe the very same ones. For it is the year 1970, all of Croatia has awakened, cheering the Croatian Spring and its leaders Miko Tripalo and Savka Dabčević-Kučar, the rebirth of national heroism, bravery, and consciousness. People no longer want their money to go off to Belgrade – “Croatia toils, Belgrade takes the spoils” – but are instead for a politics of open accounting, so that all will be clear as to who brings what to this socialist collective of ours. People are filled with joy and with anger, which is why they’re singing so loudly, shouting out what they would not have dared shout out even a day ago. From their graves long-gone fathers and uncles have risen up, regiments from the battles of Stalingrad and Dravograd in columns of two and four deep making their way toward the shallow mass graves that the asphalt and cement of socialism have not yet managed to cover over; and from their graves frightened Home Guard soldiers have risen up who in the meantime have become heroic as dead men, and they too sing as one with their sons and grandsons; and up too have risen the Jasenovac cut-throats and Croatian martyrs, who in 1942, their fucking swords drawn, ranged across Kozara, burning, raping, and murdering, and they too now join in this grandiose Republic Day pig slaughter, in remembrance of November 29, 1943, when the eternal brotherhood of the Yugoslav nations and peoples was founded in the town of Jajce.

  But she rides along in the ancient Mercedes bus toward Andrijevci, looking in front of her at the dirty headrest cover, her stomach unsettled by the mixture of smells: the stench of sweat and children’s vomit, diesel fuel, cigarette smoke, and burnt plastic, all mixed together to form the single, unique aroma of
traveling by bus. She’s trying not to think about anything, taking deep, regular breaths through her mouth. She is alone, on this journey and in life – this is how she feels, and this is how she yearns to feel, awash in self-pity and the belief that everything is over and all her life’s opportunities have been lost and destroyed, and that she’s not responsible for any of it: her mother, her former husband, and her awful mother-in-law are to blame, as is that little boy whom she gave birth to; it’s his fault too that her life is now finished, even before it really was able to start.

  It was over when she was barely eighteen months old and the news of Mladen’s death arrived.

  Ivan Latić is waiting for her at the gravesite in Donji Andrijevci. The caretaker of the graveyard, actually a local villager transformed into a caretaker by the kin of those soldiers collected there who, out of gratitude to him for caring for the graves of these brothers and sons who perished on the wrong side, give him money each time they visit. There are not many graves, just five or six – five from the Home Guard, and the sixth, Mladen’s, is German, SS – but those few graves are enough for an illusion of the importance and privilege of one’s work.

  Latić’s is the last house before the graveyard. It’s an attractive and orderly village dwelling, with a tidy courtyard, in the midst of which some large boars are just being scalded. The blood has long since emptied out from their slit throats, the cinnamon and cloves give off a sweet smell, Latić’s wife is roasting blood sausage, and everything is somehow quiet and solemn, as in a church or at a cemetery. But Ivan Latić is not a typical villager. He doesn’t drink and never has. It doesn’t agree with him. His father had been a horrible drunk, he says, and he knows the kind of unhappiness it can bring. Javorka solemnly agrees.

  He takes her to Mladen’s grave, though she could have found it herself. She’s been here at least ten times, at first with her mother, then with her father – from the time she was little – and then alone. This is the fifth time since then that she has come, once per year, less for the sake of memory and the soul, more out of fear that if she doesn’t visit, the authorities will dig up and plough over this graveyard for occupying soldiers. She’s known Ivan Latić since he was a young man and youth organization member who had once looked with disdain on those who lit candles and brought flowers to these graves. He never would have dreamed that one day he would be the graveyard’s caretaker. He’d matured, grown older, and had woken up to a complex reality. No, he didn’t need rakija to start singing songs that he really shouldn’t be singing.

  She would spend the night at Latić’s. It was this way every time. There were no hotels nearby, and even if there had been, these were not times in which one spent money on hotel rooms. That was for tourists and the affluent, for directors and their chauffeurs, not for someone who came from far away to visit her brother’s grave. Her mother too had most often slept at Latić’s, as had her father once.

  He brought her to a grave with a black iron cross, on which there was a white plate with the first and last name, the date of birth, and the date of death. Latić pulled a few dried-out, frozen weeds from around Mladen’s head, displaying his concern for the grave.

  From her purse she took an old-fashioned white candle and lit it without difficulty. There was not even a breath of wind, and the flame stood up straight and nearly motionless. Then it was as if she didn’t know what to do. She waited at the foot of the grave for some appropriate length of time to pass. This was the time in which believers prayed to God or directed their thoughts to the deceased, calling them to mind, letting some sort of internal movie run in their mind’s eye. But she didn’t remember Mladen, and she didn’t believe in God. Her lack of belief was pure and unambiguous, almost as naïve as some people’s faith. God was unnecessary to her because he had not been able to resolve even one of her problems. And she did not know how to dissemble, lie, or live in a lie. When she died, Father Ivo Marković sent me a note of condolences: “I knew her personally and recall her sincere manner of communicating, of the sort that only children have, which is always something to admire. May she rest in Peace.” He was the one who allowed me to see this fact: my mother didn’t know how to lie like adults, which was only one of her childlike traits.

  And that was why she didn’t know what to do, but just stood there at the foot of Mladen’s grave, a little angry that someone else was standing there because now she couldn’t just quietly walk away.

  Ivan Latić did not understand her reminiscences. He moved his lips as if reciting a prayer, then crossed himself, nimbly as a rote Catholic. As they were leaving the graveyard, he said something that maybe he would not have said had there not been that senseless waiting or had it not been the year before the Croatian Spring:

  “The man who killed your brother lives here in Andrijevci. You’ll undoubtedly see him today. Would you like me to point him out?”

  “No!” she shouted, as if trying to forestall him, or as if Ivan Latić only had to raise his finger and direct it toward someone, though just then there was no one else around.

  That night Mladen’s sister, my mother Javorka, lay in a spacious bed with the sort of elderdown quilt that could suffocate the unaccustomed, as if in a thick sea, and imagined the man who had killed her brother, but more than that, the man who perhaps had had the most crucial influence on making her life what it was. She couldn’t manage to get to sleep before dawn.

  She’d continue to imagine him over the next days, months, and years, until Mladen’s killer became unimportant. She would go to Mladen’s grave only one more time, in 1975. Again it would be in November, when Vesna and Andrija had just got married in Kopanica, and, on the Sunday after the wedding, when the majority of the guests had been felled by a great drowsiness, she went alone to the graveyard in Donji Andrijevci. Ivan Latić was taciturn and suspicious, as if in the interim he had suddenly grown old, and was not ostentatious about his role. He quietly took the money offered, and we never saw him again.

  Countless times she tried to recall each of the men’s faces she saw in Andrijevci that Republic Day in 1970 before she had gone out to Mladen’s grave with Latić. Young men, middle-aged villagers, and the elderly, mostly dead drunk, in open-collared white shirts, bloody from the slaughter, and ribbed-cloth coats. She remembered some of the faces, or so she believed, and others only came to her in dreams. But not once did she regret telling Ivan Latić that she didn’t want to see the man who had killed her brother.

  Until a few weeks before her death she hadn’t told anyone about this. She could not have told her father or mother, or her brother Dragan, who might not have understood. Or if he had understood, then he would have gone to Ivan Latić and asked him to show him the man living with a clear conscience in Andrijevci, despite the fact he had killed someone – an SS officer – in September 1943. But this part was all the same to her. What was important was merely having a story, it didn’t matter which one – just a true story to turn her from the thought that she was about to die.

  Miners, Smiths, Drunks, and Their Wives

  Quartets

  Aunt Jele and the Kljujić Šumonja Family

  I

  Marko Kljujić Šumonja was an enormous man and a valuable one. He was the type of person who’d rather move mountains with his bare hands than stand around with nothing to do. In the highland colonies he built a house, and farther up in the mountains, above the settlement, he cleared a well. The land was not his, nor was the well. He did it for the community, for everyone’s use, so each person would have access to water. What he built here would outlive him and would remain in place through the eighties, by which time all of Kakanj had long since started receiving its water from the water treatment plant. This is why agas and viziers, warlords, noblemen, rich landowners, and all those who wanted to be remembered long after their deaths had built public fountains and improved wells and springs all across Bosnia.

  Marko Kljujić Šumonja had two sons. Mato
was unlucky in life; he married then separated. In those days people didn’t get divorced. After that, he lived alone to the end of his days. The other son, whose name we don’t remember, was in the Ustaše. That’s how he died. We don’t remember when or where. Nor do we know what he was like or whether he ever married. All we know about him is that he was in the Ustaše.

  Marko also had four daughters: Aunt Ruže, Aunt Mare, Aunt Luce, and Aunt Jele, who was our actual aunt. Aunt Jele was married to Uncle Karlo. Uncle Karlo was Franjo Rejc’s brother. But more about Aunt Jele and Uncle Karlo later.

  Aunt Ruže’s daughter was named Manka. Her real name is unknown; everyone just called her Manka. Before the Second World War she gave birth to a son. His name was Ivica. Whether he was born out of wedlock or Manka’s husband left her is not the important thing here. In the mining colonies just about everything occurred, including extramarital children and runaway husbands, and all of it could be suffered through, hurled forward with a flip, along with those things called “illegitimate children.”

  Ivica just barely finished the first two grades of elementary school and didn’t go further. A teacher might have said Ivica was stupid. The village priest might have said, somewhat more kindly, humanely, that Ivica was simply not very bright. Anyhow, it wouldn’t have been right for everyone to be intelligent in the same way.

  But Ivica did have one great desire: to become a chimney sweep.

  At the time, just after the war, becoming a chimney sweep didn’t require any higher schooling. Just a little skill, the courage to walk along rooftops, a black coat, and a brush.

  “Don’t do it, son!” said his mother. “It’s much too high up!”

  Ivica listened to his mother and didn’t become a chimney sweep but instead became a miner.

  Not even six months had passed when, in a very small mining accident, Ivica was killed. He was the only one. He’d been breaking through a rock, and his head had been crushed. An unlucky incident. In such a situation, all the intelligence in the world would have been useless to a person. So it was all the same to Ivica that he had no intelligence.