Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Suddenly she sees me as a powerful and influential person, before whom the world will tremble at the threat of my pen. I try in passing during our conversations, which grow longer and longer, to slip in the fact that someone called me an “incurable Chetnik” in a Sarajevo paper, but this no longer reaches her. It’s a part of reality that’s been removed by the scalpel, without any need to send it off for histological analysis. It’s wrong of me to bring up such things: if she could think about them, if there were room in her head for the remark of some Sarajevo poet about her son’s being an “incurable Chetnik,” she would go crazy. Or perhaps she’d kill herself, knowing in her head as well as her heart that there was no more help for her.

  Our perspectives differ: I would like for her to have a little tranquility, for her not to ask things of me that are impossible and crazy, that won’t be helpful for anything, and I don’t see, I really don’t want to see, that she’s grabbing onto me like a drowning person, and if I don’t keep my head about me we’ll both go down.

  What does keeping your head about you mean in such a situation?

  You would need to call someone in Sarajevo, tell them what was happening with your mother, ask for help, for someone to be there. I’ll call H., to whom I can pour out my heart. He’ll understand everything in the right way, but I wouldn’t even know how to do that: pour out my heart. It seems there aren’t any others left…

  The next day everything starts again: she expects me to blame someone, make threats, find a lawyer, announce to the world what this doctor has done to a celebrated writer’s mother and how the medical bureaucracy is trying to cover it up. Then she comes back to the doctor, repeating in detail what happened two and a half years before, when there was still time. I listen, say that she told me all that already, but she just says, “So what if I already told you! Do you know what that man did to me? This is about my life, not yours!”

  And then she starts the story again from the beginning, exactly as it happened, not leaving out a single detail, as if the repetition contains its own sense and is in itself the sought-after cure.

  She was born on May 10, 1942. Her elder brother Mladen – who would receive, a few days after her birth, his recruitment notice, as an ethnic German, to report for duty with Hitler’s SS – wanted his sister to be called Javorka. She couldn’t be christened with that name, her birth couldn’t be registered with it, so the common Stubler name Regina was the one officially given to her.

  She was sixteen months old when Mladen was killed.

  The environment that grew out of that event would shape her life. She was not a beloved child. Her mother suffered sharp pangs of guilt for having sent her son to his death, for not having allowed him to desert or escape to the Partisans, for she had believed that serving in a German uniform might save him. A foolish belief, but useless to talk about now. And so mostly it wasn’t talked about. Instead there was silence, and my mother grew up in its midst.

  Her mother, Olga Rejc, was an intelligent woman. She had an artistic spirit, played the guitar, the zither, and the violin a little. After Mladen’s death she never sang again. She read, mostly prose, every single day, entire libraries of books, in Serbo-Croatian and German. None of us who followed her ever were able to read as much as she had. She read quickly, totally concentrated and voracious, in all situations. In the kitchen, with mixing spoons on either side, over a batch of dishes that had just been washed, waiting for a cake to bake. She read constantly, simply in order not to have to live or think about living. Although she did not write, her thoughts and sayings turned immediately into literature. She treated her pangs of guilt with literature. Unsuccessfully.

  The newborn girl had taken Mladen’s place in the world. His reference number, his fate, his breath. It was unbearable. And she refused to allow the girl to take his place. Probably she wasn’t conscious of expelling the girl so completely from her life.

  As time passed, rather than the wounds healing and all the horror growing diluted in the blessing of forgetfulness, the circumstance of Mladen’s suffering remained in our apartment and within the wider family, growing ever more present and alive. Javorka became the very face of Mladen’s death. She and her mother’s restless, horrified conscience. She loved her, I suppose, as any mother loves her child. And she hated her at the same time, with an inhuman, indescribable, unspeakable hatred of the sort that, unfortunately, didn’t exist in any of the novels she read. Such hatred could not exist in literature.

  When I was publishing my first books and knew to what end our family story was tending – though I could not imagine the exact circumstances – I thought the trajectory of my mother’s life could be altered as simply as if one of the great novelists Olga so loved to read, someone like Pirandello, Dostoevsky, Andrić, Gorky, Tolstoy, Pearl Buck, Flaubert, Bunin, Hamsun, Crnjanski, Bora Stanković, Zola, or Thomas Mann, were writing a book about a mother who blamed her newborn daughter for the wartime death of her son. Had such a novel been written, my mother’s and her mother’s lives, and mine too, would have taken a completely different course. Perhaps the Stubler family finale would be different too, and the story of Karlo Stubler’s moving from Bosowicz would have never come to pass.

  Javorka was an excellent student and also attended a music school where she learned to play the piano. She became a member of the Communist League of Yugoslavia at an early age – at the time, in the latter part of the fifties, this was more connected to being part of the cultural elite than to any sort of political gesture – was selected as the 1961 valedictorian of the Second Gymnasium, and studied medicine in college, though she didn’t complete her degree, withdrawing after the first year, a fact that, twenty years later, in fits of bitterness, she attributed to her parents’ peevishness toward her medical ambitions. Maybe this was true, I don’t know, but in this circumstance, and in a long line of others, which would lead to her being alone in the end, dying as she did, in a room that once had a view of Trebević but now faced the white wall of a new building, there were always self-justifications and reasons for seeing herself as a victim to the last day of her life. Death came as a finale – almost as if she had said, I knew it would be like this! – to the stream of monotonous, compelling, mournful stories whose course was set the moment Mladen, in the midst of a Partisan ambush, tried to run from one haystack to another. They killed him like a rabbit, and the story flowed onward in a single direction, as monotonous as a toothache, to her death, or to the moment when the story of her death would be recounted.

  That summer, before the end of her first year of medical studies, she fell in love and ran away from home. This episode would become known only much later and never in its entirety. He was a political figure in a youth organization. She probably met him at a conference, celebrating the anniversary of the revolution on Zelengora, and convinced herself that this was her chance to remedy all that was constraining her, that with him she could make a happy life for herself. And of course, she was hugely mistaken.

  She felt nothing for this man, by contrast to all her other loves and lovers, for whom she retained passionate emotions, which she would express in her oft-told stories about them, as if they had happened yesterday. She spoke about these former lovers as if they might turn up at any moment, and their stories would continue from where they had left off. She was the same toward each of them but not toward the man who had been her first husband.

  I had long since grown up when she confessed to me that she’d had another husband before my father. It was the only time my mother ever expressed shame before me, and truthfully she had no reason whatsoever to feel that way.

  That escape from the house had deepened Olga’s hatred.

  Though she had never run away, as a seventeen-year-old Olga had come to her father and announced she was marrying a man her parents had never met. He let her, of course he had no choice, but he also said, “Now it’s done, he can split firewood on your back, but there will be
no return to this house,” and such a proclamation had pained and scarred her. She never tried to return, she had no reason to, but she could never let him forget what he’d said.

  Javorka, meanwhile, came back a little over a year later. But she didn’t return in the same way she had left, for she had nowhere else to go. She described what awaited her there with a sufferer’s self-assurance, as when the mother of a fallen soldier becomes accustomed to her role, so that it was impossible to believe her story. Not because it was inaccurate but because it was emotionally twisted and impossible to listen to. In telling it she blamed her mother and with her all the world.

  The fact that she had come back after having run away provoked in Olga both anger and sadness, more than might have been justifiable. The sadness probably had to do with the fact that returning had been forbidden for Olga herself, even if Franjo had split firewood on her back. He didn’t do that – in fact she was always the greater authority in their house – but she still knew that the Stubler home in effect no longer existed for her. Not when her parents grew old and weak, not even when they died – she came to know there really does exist a place to which one can never return.

  Olga had a powerful, highly literary imagination and imagined different courses of life for herself. There was always at least one unrealized opportunity, better and happier than anything that actually happened. She must have wondered what her life would have looked like if she’d not met that young rail man in Doboj, if she hadn’t fallen in love and run off with him, but instead had remained her father’s favorite for but a few years more, if she hadn’t had a child early but instead had begun some other life that, perhaps, was more in accord with her nature. Immortality, perhaps, would still not mean anything, but trying out a variety of possibilities in the span of the same human life, the opportunity to return to the beginning and start over again, following a different path, that for Olga would have been the realization of the dream of eternal life.

  Instead, several months after haughtily leaving – just as her mother Olga had haughtily announced her marriage to the young railman – Javorka did that which for Olga had never seemed possible: she returned.

  My mother was barely twenty years old then.

  Her mother, my Nona, had just turned fifty-seven.

  First she tried to find a job, but that didn’t work out. Next she started a degree in economics. There was never even a word about the possibility of her continuing in medicine. After all that she had done, she couldn’t become a doctor. In doctors you had to have trust, and it was not possible to trust her anymore. A stable job for a woman, even a divorcée, would be behind a counter.

  This was how things looked to Olga in her anger. Or maybe Javorka imagined this was how her mother saw things, and from there she began to erect her private monument to self-pity. Later, at the beginning of the eighties, when Nona’s health was beginning to fail and Javorka’s final life loves were in the process of leaving her shattered and broken – though she was hardly forty years old – hysterical fights would take place, mostly on Sunday afternoons. Javorka would erupt with accusations of a ruined life, how Nona had kept her from studying medicine…At some point Nona would stop speaking, just wait for it to pass. All this would be happening somewhere around me, the doors slamming, my mother throwing herself on the floor, yanking at her hair – like a child – while I sat silently, always by Nona’s side.

  Before all of this, in 1964, my mother met my father. I don’t know how it happened, I forgot to ask. After she’d died, that same week, when I had come back to Pula from the funeral, I realized that I didn’t know how my father and mother had met.

  This happened on Sergijevaca Street, on the steps that lead to the Sacred Hearts Gallery. I remember the exact place, and the moment and feeling: it was like when a person remembers he’s forgotten his keys at home, and now he has to go back for them. The difference was that I no longer had anyone to ask about what I’d forgotten, or never known. Several days before, until she had been put on the morphine drip, all the answers had been there – one life, and the several lives surrounding it, everything about them could be known – but now it was over, there was nothing, no one left.

  I cannot describe the feeling I experienced just then, on Pula’s Sergijevaca Street, at the moment when the story closed itself off. That the feeling was intense, I suppose, is evident from the fact that I remember the place and time, the color of the sky, and the weather conditions at that instant, as I realized that the time for questions was irrevocably over.

  My father had been fourteen years her senior. He was thirty-six years old when they met, single, an only child, with a difficult mother and a nasty family history. He didn’t know his father and grew up in a modest, tiny apartment with a shared toilet in the hallway on Nemanjina Alley, a couple hundred meters from the building on Sepetarevac Street that would be my home up until my departure from Sarajevo. He was an exceptional student, graduated from the First Gymnasium, received his medical degree early, worked first as a teaching assistant, then as a lecturer, then in a hospital, providing part-time care around villages in Romanija, then studied a specialization, got his doctorate…And all this, mostly, with an unbalanced, aggressive mother and a toilet in a collective hallway in an apartment that had no proper bathroom.

  Before meeting my mother, my father was a hero of socialist labor. An exemplary young man, a doctor who showed by example that nothing was impossible. His successes in life boiled down, for the most part, to his medical pursuits. Everything else was defeat and wretchedness, a bit of luck, a lot of fear, shame, anguish, and then attempts to leave everything to one side and make amends – by his devotion to his work – for the emotional and personal losses of his life.

  He was already like that when he met her.

  I asked her many times, in different moods and surroundings across the thirty-five years of our conversations about my father, whether she ever loved him. She answered yes. But I’m not sure she was telling the truth. What else could she say but that she’d loved him, despite the fact that he had disappointed and betrayed her, and almost driven her mad? Otherwise, in her eyes, she would’ve seemed guilty before me. And there was nothing she wanted more than to escape guilt.

  Their love was short lived. They never lived together. They would meet in the city, he would take her to the movies, go out sometimes to Pale or Sokolac, where on Tuesdays and Thursdays he received patients in the local clinics. They took the bus because he didn’t have a car – he wouldn’t even get his driver’s license until 1975 – and come back to Sarajevo late at night. On one of these excursions, in September 1965, they conceived me in the Hotel Panorama in Pale. Instead of coming home after my father’s shift ended, they had decided to spend the night at the Panorama.

  By the time of my birth, their relationship had disintegrated. The marriage that had been quickly arranged, though no one even knew why, in the spring of 1965, fell apart. The question of when the actual divorce would be filed was purely technical.

  I was born at the children’s hospital in Jezero. The delivery was ordinary, but a portion of the placenta remained inside my mother after the delivery, which caused a serious infection several days later. She barely survived – for this occurrence she blamed the doctors and also her husband, who thoroughly discouraged her from pursuing the issue – so that before completing my first week of life I was separated from my mother. I was breastfed there in the hospital by an unknown Muslim woman, who had just given birth to a girl. The circumstance of having been breastfed by a Muslim woman was something I would recount frequently in the nineties. As if this event defined us politically, my mother and me, at the time of the war between Croatia and Bosnia, and we both spoke about it with a sort of foolish pride.

  I never properly met the woman, she died several years ago.

  After being separated from my mother then, I never went back to her. Nona took me home from the hospital and began carin
g for me, which she would continue to do until her death. Olga never reconciled with her daughter – she coldly pushed her away – and was emotionally uninterested in her younger son – Dragan could never replace Mladen – but the arrival of her grandson in the house gave her new life. She gathered herself up around me, raising me and in a certain sense protecting me from the entropy that was growing and spreading inside the walls of our building, in the apartments of Emilija Heim, and also, since the summer of 1969, in our building on Sepetarevac, for which, given her inability to get beyond her son’s death and ease her conscience, she was probably the most responsible. I was exempted from the coldness that was growing around me, and it was only just before the war and throughout it, in the months before her death, that I grew conscious of what Nona had protected me from.

  Javorka was ill for a long time, first in the hospital and then at home. For the first two months she was not able to care for me and then she found ways of deliberately not doing so. Illness, anxiety, job hunting, taking exams for special classes, arguments with my father – everything was a reason not to take me off Nona’s hands. And later, after six months, I showed a strong attachment to Nona and Nono that was unusual for my age. This would be a favorite topic of conversation over coffee, and they’d say, “Oh, what a smart child he’ll grow up to be” – and relatives who came to see the firstborn son would laugh at the unattractive baby, the baby that acted like a grown man, who was aghast at not knowing how to speak, expressing what he wanted simply by extending a hand – toward his Nona.

  Although I have memories from a very early age – Aunt Mirjana teaching me to walk in Drvenik, choking on a piece of black bread, Nono carrying me across a bridge over the Miljacka while I cry for fear of falling into the river – I don’t remember why I grasped after Nona’s hands as if to save myself from drowning, or what it was that ultimately so repelled me from my mother.