Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  She just nodded, saying yes, yes, as if it were something that had happened long ago and had nothing to do with her anymore. Or maybe never did.

  Back when she’d started school, they asked her what she wanted.

  Sandals, she said.

  If her parents hadn’t asked, maybe she wouldn’t have even thought of it, but now that they had, sandals became an obsession to her.

  And I imagine, the two of them were saddened by this. It was 1949, the time of the worst poverty, when it seemed unfulfilled desires would last one’s whole life. After the world war, four years of slaughter in the woods of Bosnia, people hanging from their necks along Marijin Dvor, the disappearance of Sarajevo’s Jews, the death of their first-born son, those sandals of hers fell forcefully on their conscience.

  There were no sandals to be bought in Sarajevo.

  They had them in the state department stores, a miraculous sort of shop which perhaps didn’t even exist and are certainly not mentioned in the books of that time, but my mother insisted on precisely that name, state department stores, and was bewildered why no one remembered them.

  There they had sandals.

  But they were more expensive than a piano. And it would not be reasonable to buy a growing child footwear that was so expensive. Besides, only privileged people could shop in the state department stores, ministers of state, federal envoys…Perhaps Nono could have found someone to buy his daughter sandals – this was one of those infectious obsessions that take hold of a whole family, sparing no one, but was it really worth going hungry over some sandals?

  Perhaps they would have gone hungry. It was a time when all sorts of things were happening and even some children’s sandals could take on the meaning of life. Perhaps Franjo Rejc could have even bought his daughter some sandals – Olga would have been against it but would have refused to take responsibility in the matter. Luckily, he complained to a friend, a Slovene who had a shoemaking shop in a wooden hovel on the spot where the university’s department of philosophy now stands.

  His friend told him not to worry, he would make the girl sandals, better than the ones they sold in the state department stores.

  The Slovenian cobbler shaped and stitched Javorka a pair of sandals that looked like the kind worn by girls in German films set in the Alps. The sort Heidi wore in summer.

  They looked frightening, but no one noticed. Nono was moved by the gesture of the Slovenian cobbler, who had managed to buy the leather webbing and the rubber for the outsole who knows where. Nona too, I imagine, was moved, and my mother had her first pair of sandals.

  These were the very first shoes made expressly for her.

  And they gave her terrible blisters.

  My mother stubbornly wore her Alpine sandals to school for days. Tears ran down her face as she made her way along the Obala for those five hundred meters that took her to school, but she didn’t give up. They told her she needed to be patient, it took time to break in a new pair of shoes. God knows if she believed them, or if she wore those sandals despite their never getting broken in, trying instead to break in the surrounding world. She fought in a way that she never would once she had grown up. When did she give up? Was it when she came back home after her first marital breakup, or when she gave birth to me and understood that this was for her whole life, and she would forever have me as a kind of completed and final fact of life, after which came dying?

  During recess she would play on the school grounds with Gordana Babić.

  Gordana wasn’t a particularly intelligent girl. She was quite ordinary, though also the daughter of a government minister.

  “You have such beautiful sandals!” said Javorka.

  “Yours are really nice, too!” said Gordana Babić.

  In July 2012, after one of her operations, she was recuperating in the former military hospital when I asked her whether the sandals ever got broken in. No, she answered. What happened to them? I asked. How would I know? Nono probably threw them out. These sorts of conversations helped us kill time while I led her along the linoleum hallways of the hospital, supporting her by the arm as she exercised her legs. She walked slowly, dragging her feet, squeezing my forearm so tight that it hurt. It was hard for her, she had no strength, or all her strength was gathered up in her right hand, which she would draw into a fist, taking hold of flesh and muscle. It occurred to me it was the same with babies – all their strength was in their grip.

  I stayed in Sarajevo three and a half days that July.

  I slept for the last time then in the apartment on Sepetarevac, among her patient’s things, in the bed where she was to die. It was sunny and very hot, and I was alone. It seemed to me that never before had I ever spent so much time alone in that apartment: three whole nights. Someone else had always been there, Nona, Nono, my mother, other tenants. Someone had always been sneaking around in the hallway, flushing the toilet, unlocking the door. Someone’s shoes had always been sticking loudly to the linoleum in the entryway. But now there was silence, and I knew somehow it would never be this way again.

  I’d go to the hospital every morning, returning in the evening. I went by taxi, as that was the cheapest way in Sarajevo. Most of the cabbies knew my mother. For years she had got rides from them at the Mejtaš taxi stand, some of them since before the war. It was cheap after the war. Half of Sarajevo went where they needed by taxi. Women brought their groceries home from the market that way. People survived by using the rickety old cars brought in from Germany.

  And some of them knew she was sick.

  They asked me to wish her well. And said she was a great fighter and would surely pull through. She was quite proud when I told her they’d said she was a great fighter. At home, at work, a divorced woman, a single mother, all this worked harmoniously together in a fantastic illusion, in these two words filled with real and ceremonial admiration: great fighter.

  She held on to this even in her illness. As soon as I called, on those days when she wasn’t feeling so badly, she’d steer the conversation to who had said this about her the day before and what words they’d used: a great fighter, a dragon, a hero.

  I wouldn’t tell her what the cabbies had said.

  I was never so kind to her as to satisfy her vanity. This, I believe, is the purest expression of love: to always satisfy someone’s vanity, without any sort of ulterior motive.

  It’s not difficult for me to admit that I didn’t love her.

  Just as I didn’t love my father.

  But I didn’t love my mother in a completely different way.

  Not loving him in the end was easy, superficial, like the sadness one feels for a bird lying dead on the asphalt after it has been hit by a car on a forest road. A small part of me was taken up with this absent love. When he died, nothing crumbled. The world continued on without him.

  Not loving her was frightening and all encompassing, like a magnet that attracted everything around it, creating devastation and terrible disorder. This absent love left for me a huge mess. Her death shook me, emptied me out, left me feeling as if I didn’t even care.

  Whatever people said to me now, I did not care.

  Even if you are shocked by such a lightly uttered truth – that I didn’t love her, that I felt relief when she died but miss all that suffering through all the four seasons of the year, that I have missed her, unloved and unhappy, since the moment of her death – I could not care less. With her death, things turned out to be all the same to me on many counts.

  Those three and a half midsummer days in the empty apartment on Sepatarevac had been lovely, when no one was around and she was lying on a hospital bed after her operation. I was leaving for Zagreb on Friday, and she was being brought home from the hospital on Monday. This was known in advance, for there was still a certain order in everything at that point. In the next phase that order would be completely lost. Perhaps the beginning of her death should
be defined as the moment when all order in her illness was lost.

  The apartment was clean, airy, and light.

  The women who took care of her kept it up. Several weeks earlier, in June, someone had had to start spending the night with her. She could be alone for several hours during the day, but at night someone needed to be with her in the apartment. It was harder and harder for her to breathe, and she often had to go to the bathroom.

  They cleaned the apartment, those women who took care of her. They created a kind of order in it that had never been there before. With the furniture dusted, the windows washed, the dishes wiped clean, and the floors immaculately swept, the apartment on Sepetarevac looked like it hadn’t since 1969 when we’d moved in.

  It was the first thing I noticed when I arrived.

  For three days I enjoyed this orderliness.

  And the silence that was unbroken by a single voice. I didn’t turn on the television and instead went out to make phone calls so as not to destroy that unlikely silence, the peace of the walls within which so much had happened.

  As I looked through the apartment, peering into drawers, at the overcrowding and the crush of her narrowness, the closet that was about to explode from all the things inside that had long since turned into garbage, the bookshelves on which her biography and mine were frighteningly displayed, along with just recognizable traces of the lives of Nona and Nono, it occurred to me this was where she would die. Somehow I knew this would not happen at the hospital. She had to die here where Nono had, not with Nona at Koševo Hospital, or with my father at the former military hospital. She had been closest to him, her father; he had understood her, though he didn’t know how to help her, while Nona and my own father were just figures of her misfortune.

  That’s why it seemed to me she would die here. In the room that, between two deaths, had been considered mine. This was where I’d lived until the beginning of the war, when we’d had to go into the basement because Trebević was visible from the window and already by April 1992 a couple of anti-aircraft rounds had landed in the room. This was where I had watched television at night – the broadcasts of football matches and the breakup of the last congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party – and smoked heroic amounts of marijuana and hashish without fear that my mother might come in. The agreement was she would not enter my room. The agreement was maintained because she knew what I was doing but didn’t know how to take a stand toward it. I was twenty-two or twenty-three, working and making my own money, and I didn’t need anything else from her, not even that she rouse herself enough to get up out of bed and stop sleeping throughout the day, and anyway marijuana was good to me. It was kind to me and with a mother’s hand led me into the war and the apocalypse.

  It seemed during those three July days that the walls remembered all this.

  This was my farewell from Sepetarevac.

  The next time I came, I would sleep in a hotel, coming here as to the hospital only to visit my mother.

  The apartment would no longer be tidy, and this would no longer be my space. Something in it would have changed, or there would be something excessive in it. One might say that two deaths in my room was excessive.

  I tried to be as quiet as possible. I looked at the rows of books, lined up just so, according to the orderly sense of the husband of one of my mother’s friends, who had organized them the last time the apartment was painted. Lately she’d been able to find people who would carry out such tasks in her place. People were pleased to render her this service, refurnishing and changing the interior of the apartment, and she praised them for it.

  She had called me in Zagreb while he was organizing the books. She told me, loudly enough for him to hear, that I would be thrilled. And then she pushed the receiver at him so the two of us would talk. And so I talked with the guy arranging the books in my mother’s apartment on Sepetarevac. I never saw him. I don’t know what we talked about. We were both uncomfortable.

  She liked to do this: call me when someone was at her place and have us talk. I was acquainted with some of the people, others not. Usually we had nothing to say to each other, neither they to me, nor I to them. But for some reason this gave her pleasure. I had become a well-known writer, and these were all friends of hers.

  On the third day, when I came back from the hospital, I turned on her computer. I wanted to see what her desktop looked like. The screen was clean with ten very carefully lined up folders, mostly with bookkeeping documents in them. She hadn’t installed a background picture of the sort that people put on their screens to provide color in their virtual everyday lives. She was good at controlling her computer, much better than I am. At the beginning of the 2000s she had taken some informatics courses and later got interested in programming. If she had been younger, she would have left accounting to take up information technology. She could sit for hours in front of the screen, exploring the heart of the machine. This gave her joy. She didn’t have to think. The computer was like a piano to her. It did not seek anything from her, any sort of emotional engagement. It did not oblige her to anything, sitting down on top of her conscience, but instead transported her simply and painlessly to a different reality. This reality calmed her. Composed of binary numbers, of complex simplicities that expanded into infinity and eternity, like the mirrors in a men’s hair salon or the barbershop I had once been taken to at the Hotel Central, computer reality was good for the nerves and the spirit. It contained neither birth nor death. And what was most important: as in piano exercises and études, computer reality contained no other people. It was just her and infinity.

  It was so simple, she said.

  In summer 1999 and after, during the time of the millennium bug, when it was believed that humanity would explode and destroy itself, because computers would not be able to cross the threshold from one millennium to the next, transitioning from counting with a one to counting with a two, she would call me to enthusiastically explain how simple it all was, acquainting me in the process with the miracle of computers and cybernetic thinking. She didn’t care whether I knew anything about it or if I were even interested in computers at all – when I could get a word in edgewise, I told her I really didn’t care about them except for the excellent typing machines they made. By then I’d had about two or three years of practice at turning the computer on and off and writing prose and journalism in the simplest of all programs for idiots, and I had even started to write some poetry on the computer, thereby losing the final connection to pencil and paper, but it took her barely two months to overtake my understanding of informatics and to start speaking about things that I wasn’t able to understand or even follow.

  “You seem to have forgotten I’m not good at math!”

  “But this isn’t math, it’s common sense.”

  “Then I’m not good at common sense. I’m not interested in it. And besides not being interested in it, I don’t understand any of it either.”

  This conversation took place in autumn of the final year in human history that began with the number one. I wrote it down in a telephone address book – at the time I still had a notepad for telephone numbers because I resisted getting a mobile phone – I don’t remember why I wrote down the conversation with my mother (Zgb, 15 Nov, 21:30…), I might have liked how she had reduced the world of the computer and the cyber-galaxy down to a question of common sense.

  She had said something that fit her so exactly:

  Computers don’t have feelings.

  Common sense begins where feelings end.

  Emotions are a disease or the symptoms of a disease. Family history proves this. The history of her life and the history of the Stublers. They disappeared, leaving no trace, because they were led through life by feelings. If they’d been guided by common sense, or if Karlo Stubler had entered the realm of the computer, the simple language of binary numbers, everything would have turned out differently, and we would not have been bo
rn. We would not have been born if Karlo had embraced the common sense that should have guided him through life.

  Once she had mastered working on a computer, she learned how to use a program for small-business bookkeeping that she was able to maintain and update herself. At the time when social networks were just becoming fashionable, my mother created a profile on Facebook and began fanatically messaging both people she knew and people she didn’t.

  After she retired, she would stay up all night on Facebook, responding to messages, friending people, joining support groups…She became friends with one of my classmates from high school who now lives on the east coast of Canada. He had tried to get in touch with me more than once, but I never wrote back. I liked the guy but didn’t know what we’d have to talk about. I don’t like talking on the phone, I don’t like sending emails or e-messages. Then my mother sent him a friend request, which he wholeheartedly accepted. When she died, he sent me a message containing the sort of statement of condolences that used to be sent by telegraphs, once upon a time.

  In one special Facebook group she gathered together the remnants of the Stubler family, living today in Germany, Finland, Russia…She was by far the oldest among them, most of whom were distant cousins. They talked about banal, everyday things – which is, I guess, what chit-chatting on social media is supposed to be about – but also about a fateful discovery of my cousin’s, that my mother unintentionally managed to stage an entire theatrical scene. The last great family performance. This was in August of 2011, the last summer before her illness.

  At night she was surfing the Internet, researching the life paths of people who she had not seen in fifty or more years, following news stories about wars in distant countries, looking through forums that brought together German refugees from Transylvania and the Banat, asking whether there was anyone from Bosowicz, or using her primitive German to look for Regina Dragnev in Bulgaria. She read what they were saying and writing about me as she wandered around obscure Ustaše sites, trying to fathom how I could have wronged them so much, likewise studying fragments from the works of my leftist opponents, understanding only dimly what they were writing about, and she went through the Facebook profile of the famous Zagreb lexicographer and expert on Miroslav Krleža who had patented his discovery of my being a Chetnik, though she did not send him a friend request, and all this actually made her feel good, including the farcical, scandalous writings about me, her son, including the curses and insults on her own account. She was convinced it all was painless and innocent, and that no sort of trouble could come to her from the Internet.