These pictures should have constituted a sort of family memory, but probably no one ever looked at them again. When they returned to Sarajevo, my father bought an album, selected the pictures that were then prepared at the Ivica Lisac studio, delivered the album to us on Sepetarevac, and that was the end of the memory.
I happened upon the album in 2005 and brought it with me to Zagreb. She didn’t even notice it was gone. In general she did not notice I was removing things from her home.
My favorites were the pictures of the monkeys. My father had obviously been fascinated by them. These were a particular species of monkey at the Vienna zoo. He took ten or more shots of them. What was he thinking as he photographed them? Where had Nano and my mother been then? What was so important to him about those animals? Did he want to show them to me on returning? Is that why he took so many pictures? I don’t know. But I think about this, about my father’s monkey photos, the little things left behind by the two of them, those that are remembered, one day to be forgotten, those that took physical shape – like a photo album from Vienna – only to turn into trash one day. Forgetfulness is like garbage, except with forgetting there is no ecological problem. Forgetfulness is an ecological garbage incinerator. Nothing is left behind. But forgetfulness ravages the person, just as garbage ravages the world. Against forgetfulness there is only story, which must be narrated at the moment before everything is forgotten. Then, before the final forgetting, each story at last comes of age, and a picture of a monkey taken by my father becomes important the moment before it turns to garbage, and it, like everything, is saved by story, and the world is saved by story alone.
Besides her concern about Javorka’s lice, her mother didn’t really worry about her daughter.
Her daughter would inherit this tendency. It didn’t bother her conscience when she didn’t worry about me.
Everything had its order and reason for being.
But as a little girl, she’d had willpower. The world was open to her, and at the time she was the very best.
Her class had two women teachers. Marija K. was mean, beat the children, and everyone was afraid of her. But she did not beat Javorka, the best student in class. She praised her and held her up as an example. This made the girl uncomfortable. She didn’t like being praised so highly by Miss K. She had a premonition that something bad might happen, the situation would change, and Miss K. would start beating her too.
The other teacher was Nada Vitorović. A kind, good woman, but this is not the only reason I use her first and last name. My mother did not want Nada Vitorović to be forgotten. She pronounced her name aloud, repeating it many times over, whenever she could find a way of threading it into a story.
This was when she was lying in the bed where she would die, telling the story of what would become A Family Novel, which was interrupted only by the day of her death. This perhaps makes it an unfinished family novel. Or she just happened to die at the exact moment when it was complete. I had at that time about another ten stories, written in notes, which I wouldn’t complete. The Stublers’ end was marked by her death, the death of the last of Karlo’s grandchildren, the last of the children who had learned from him their first words of German.
My mother did not want Nada Vitorović to be forgotten, perhaps because of the manner of her death in 1992 or 1993. How she died is unknown. She was an eighty-year-old woman when soldiers with the insignia of the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina took her from her apartment. She was living somewhere near Bistrik Street, or maybe in that high-rise near Drvenija Bridge, in the part of town where the old men and women who lived alone were taken away, the Serbs, or those who were presumed to be Serbs by their executioners because of their first or last names. Where and how they were killed is unknown, no one asked after them, and no one, in the heroic history of Sarajevo that began thereupon, which in part constituted the newly christened Bosniak nation and its suffering known throughout the world, no one asked about Nada Vitorović.
In the infantilism of her dying, or even earlier, my mother cared deeply for her teacher. She cared deeply for Sarajevo, and also always for her teacher. Even though her Stubler-Rejc-Karivan heritage was from all over, and in a declarative sense she was one day a Croat, another a Slovene, according to the manner in which the nation had been defined in the Balkans for the previous twenty years, my mother was a Bosniak. In addition to sharing the sentiments of her female Muslim co-workers, she was a Bosniak also in her readiness to speak about the crimes committed by Croatia, to express her outrage, all while asking how people could lock up other people in sheet-metal hangars in one-hundred-degree July heat without giving them any water; she was ready to return ad nauseam to what the Serbs had done in Srebrenica and their bombardment of the city for three and a half years, but about the Bosniak ill deeds in Sarajevo, the killing of Serbs, particularly those about whom no one was there to ask any questions, she barely said a word. This was someone who would say just about anything, even if it took her through a hundred barriers, to get back to the stories of Prijedor and Srebrenica in her next sentence. She would be shocked at the stories about Muslim atrocities, as if somewhere in the depth of her soul she was worried she might be personally responsible for these atrocities. And the more worried she was, the quieter she became, and her strange problem grew larger, though in fact it was not really a problem for her or for me, for my problem would have only been if she felt the need to stay silent about Croatian atrocities. And so I was calm. Like the majority of her neighbors, she had a problem with Serbs. And also with Croats – because they made her feel personally ashamed. And because they continued that story of hers, begun long before, in 1941, which had brought evil into our family. In the end, if those people, the Croats, had not been what they were, then her elder brother would not have died as a German soldier and she, as a little girl, would not have been guilty in the eyes of her mother for his death. Guilty for having been born.
She didn’t develop a hatred for the Serbs, even after three and a half years of siege. The Serbs were to blame for massacring the city and killing people, other Serbs among them. She did not hate them, but she readily spoke about their atrocities. As time passed and Sarajevo became a city intolerant of the Muslim and Bosniak majority, might the story of Serb atrocities cease being connected to sentiments regarding the past and begin to create a future? Was my mother aware of this possibility? She was. In relation to the Serbs she did not naïvely take on all the feelings of the Bosniak majority. Or rather, her identity was that of a resident of Sarejevo, the same as it could have been when she started school and was happy that Marija K. was no longer her teacher, but instead Nada Vitorović was, the best teacher in the world. Love for her mother, love for her teacher, love for Tito…
For her the progression perhaps began with her teacher, Miss Vitorović, just as it did for me from Nona. Nothing more can be known about this.
I’ve forgotten the name of her school friend, the one who shared her desk, who suggested to her when they were in second grade that they announce their desire to study religion. I didn’t write her name down, or I can’t find it in my notebooks, but for my mother this was an important event. Girls mature earlier than boys, and she matured very early, entering a religious phase that I somehow completely bypassed.
The question of God was important and needed to be answered. At least for a while.
Nona and Nono didn’t put up any resistance. When she told them that same afternoon that she wanted to take a religion class, they just shrugged. It was 1949 or 1950, the two of them were not believers, but they were far from the Party and all the political opportunism of the time. And maybe they were pleased that Javorka might find something that they’d lost. Like when you lose a fountain pen and years go by before your child finds it.
That would make for a good story: on God and a fountain pen.
The one problem was that the religion course was held far from their house, in the convent
at Banjski Brijeg, so her mother gave her a long explanation about how to cross the very busy Tito Street. It was true that along the major thoroughfare of Sarajevo at most twenty cars might have passed, but that was enough for an accident. And they had no idea that a time would come before long when there would be many more cars than that.
They set out for the religion course twice per week. Before the thirty girls and boys the old priest would tell stories from the Bible, always highlighting a moral at the end. And the moral would be that everything was God’s will and good always defeated evil, and each misfortune would turn out well, for he willed it to be so.
It was from him that Javorka first heard the name Satan.
The devil had already appeared in her life. Nona and Nono mentioned him, he was present in every story, mostly naïve, mischievous, and clumsy, but Satan was something completely new. That name was impossible to just pronounce and then go on with one’s sentence without thinking about and thoroughly comprehending it. Satan was God’s main enemy but in terms of strength or wisdom he in no way measured up to God. Satan could only pose problems for God when he ingratiated himself with people, bewitched them and led them astray, such that they might revolt against their maker. Nothing caused God greater sorrow than when Satan led man astray.
Thus did the old religious instructor speak in the first years of communism, without giving up anything that might have been taken badly from the standpoint of a faithful communist. God could only be of use, as a help and support to the soul, a true companion on the road to communism, a society in which each would have according to his need and produce according to his ability. And everyone would find his place in communism, along with the opportunity to create his personal happiness and the happiness of his family. And this was how Satan would be put out of work, for man would no longer have anything to rebel against. And God, when there were no longer people prepared to rebel and engage in pacts with Satan, would himself become man again.
The religion instructor, of course, did not speak like this.
This was how I interpreted and reformed things as my mother told the story of her childhood religious instruction on Thursday, the eighth of November, 2012. She had less than a month of life before her. Her chin was covered with tumors, like those of a leper, and on her left leg, where the disease had begun, there were small open sores, from each of which several droplets of pale blood emerged. Luckily those wounds did not hurt. The doctors said these were all side effects of the smart drug therapy. The leg was enormous, swollen up like an elephant’s. Death had taken up residence there.
But before her leg killed her, God would approach. I still didn’t know whether she heard him that Thursday in November. Nona and Nono passed by him mute and didn’t hear. Karlo Stubler was an atheist, a convinced Austro-Marxist, a German among Slavs, who professed every day that there was nothing beyond the mirror, nothing beyond life. His wife, Omama Ivana Škedelj, whose actual name might have been Johanna Skedel, did believe in God, and used to ask Javorka after she joined the Communist League of Yugoslavia, “Do you ever cross yourself, child?”
In accordance with church procedure, she took her First Communion in the late autumn of 1950 in Sarajevo’s Cathedral of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. There as well, on Tuesday, December 4, at five in the afternoon, a mass for the repose of her soul would be held. The handles and decorative trim on the cathedral’s doors were forged by her Slovene grandfather, a smith and drunkard, who had come to Bosnia precisely to forge those handles, and this was one of the conditions for Javorka’s birth.
Her godmother was Angelina Bašić, whom everyone had called Deda. Nono’s and Nona’s friend, the wife of Josip Bašić, an official in the railway headquarters. Bašić was from somewhere on the Pelješac peninsula, maybe from Kuna. It was from there that the first oranges arrived at the home of Franjo Rejc after the war.
My mother boasted about the fact that it was thanks to Deda Bašić that she’d seen oranges so soon during the meager postwar years. She was eating them before she would taste her first sugar cube. This happened in 1948: she received the cube as a gift and put it in her mouth but was frightened when it started to melt and spat it out.
Deda and Jozo Bašić remained family friends to the end of their lives. Jozo died in the seventies, just like Nono, but Deda Bašić lived through the siege.
They had two children: Franjo, whom everyone called Kiko, and Maja.
Maja worked at the railway office and never got married.
She had twins out of wedlock, and she was the only person who knew who the father was. One of the two died at birth, and the other, Boris, survived as an only child. He was born in 1950, a few weeks before Deda Bašić would become Javorka’s godmother.
They lived in Marijin Dvor, on one of the streets that shells rained down on when, in 1992, Karadžić was trying to turn the old part of Sarajevo into a ghetto for Bosniaks. He didn’t succeed.
When it started, and it usually started in the morning, everyone would descend in an orderly fashion into the basement, where they would remain until evening. Only Boris would go up into the apartment occasionally to check on Grandma Deda, to see if she needed anything, or to bring her lunch.
Deda Bašić was at that point hardly moving. She couldn’t make it downstairs and told them to leave her on her couch, for nettles in your pocket will keep you safe from lightning. She told them not to play around with their lives, they would all die if they tried to help her down to the basement every morning.
She was lucid and composed to the last day of her life. She knew very well what she was saying to them, and they had to listen.
And so Maja and Boris went down to the basement.
And Boris came up to check on Grandma Deda.
As he was climbing the stairs up to his apartment, a mortar shell fell in front of the building entrance and killed Boris Bašić.
And thus did Deda Bašić, Javorka’s godmother, outlive her only grandson. She died when the war was over. Satan had long since ceased showing up to lead people astray. Probably because he didn’t have to.
The building in which my mother attended religious instruction would soon, after 1950, be nationalized and taken away from the Church. A grammar school was opened there and named after Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević. This would be my school.
My mother had her elementary education in the Teachers High School, on Obala Kulina Bana. This was where the instructors from the Teachers High School would come for their student teaching, so the public school teachers were also their teachers. This meant that Nada Vitorović also served as an instructor for future teachers in Sarajevo.
She had two Jewish classmates: Jakob Finci and Isak Kamhi. Blanka Kabiljo, another Jewish student, was one year older than them. No Jews were born in Sarajevo in 1941 or 1942. Years later she would learn why this was the case. In those years – 1949, 1950, 1951 – this was not talked about in school. It was still early, and the crimes and misfortunes were still fresh, so both teachers, the evil Miss Marija K. and the kind Nada Vitorović, rolled out only positive examples, thanking Comrade Tito and the Partisans, while saying almost nothing about the Ustaše. Or the Chetniks. Actually they didn’t talk about the Germans either. Only about Hitler.
It wasn’t easy for the teachers to talk about the Germans because Maria, Laura, and Mihailo, three Germans from the barracks camp at the theater, were in their class.
Mihailo was a completely wild, desperate child. He fought every day, attacking the other children, taking suicidal leaps from the garage roof onto the playground asphalt. They avoided him, hated him, and couldn’t understand why he acted this way.
Maria was aggressive.
Laura wept constantly.
The girls came to school in traditional dress.
Mihailo wore Swabian breeches.
Once he fell asleep in class.
Miss Marija K. dragged him by the ear from
his desk and started beating him. She pounded him with her fists, and he dropped to the floor, screaming. She kicked him, shouting at him to get up. Mihailo didn’t move, just shouted something in German through his tears. The demon took ever greater hold of her and she continued to beat him like that in front of the class.
“I think it was a nervous breakdown,” my mother said. “I think Marija would have killed little Mihailo,” she said, “if Blanka Kabiljo hadn’t started crying. That calmed her all of a sudden. Or Blanka shouted something or jumped up from her desk. I don’t know what happened, but Marija suddenly froze. It didn’t enter our minds that Blanka was a Jew and she was crying because the teacher was beating the German Mihailo. Not at all. We were just happy she’d stopped hitting him and we didn’t have to watch anymore.”
It was in the third or fourth grade that Maria, Laura, and Mihailo stopping coming to school. Miss Vitorović made the brief announcement that they had moved to Germany. And again this was normal and ordinary to everyone. For children everything is normal if they know nothing else. For things to be out of the ordinary comparisons are needed. With the first comparisons some things start to be abnormal. The same goes for suffering. Suffering exists only if some previous times were without it.
In the second grade, for homework, they wrote Tito a birthday letter. (The little Germans too, it would seem.) The very best of the letters from the students at the Teachers High School was written by Javorka. This letter won the competition held among all Sarajevo’s elementary schools and was sent to Belgrade, along with a relay baton, for the hands of Comrade Tito.
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