She went on with the story:
In the fifties, Lugonja had moved into the Balijan garage, which Nono Balijan had built for himself long ago, when in Sarajevo and in Ilidža there were neither cars nor garages.
A poor, condescending man, Lugonja was liked by no one in the Stubler neighborhood, nor did anyone think much about him, for there wasn’t much to think. His first name was not even known, only his last – Lugonja. Nor did anyone seem to even know he was a Serb.
God, would this be known later!
Nevenka and Naci stayed in Ilidža (Lado was studying in Sarajevo, Regina in Zadar), and the two of them were by themselves.
Nevenka, my mother’s first cousin, the daughter of Nona’s sister Regina, had already lived through one war in that very house. She’d been a child back then.
Now she was getting up in years, having retired from her work as an architect just before the war, and Kasindol Street was now remembered as one of the occupied parts of the city. News of the slaughter and the forced removal of inhabitants had arrived from that quarter, while shells from all directions fell along the boulevard and troops defending the city rushed down it, but the enemy had pushed them back in their useless attempts to break through the circle and – as people put it then – de-blockade the city.
For a long time we didn’t know what had happened to Nevenka and Naci or whether they were even alive. The phones weren’t working. Letters and telegrams crossed from one side to the other through the Red Cross and the kindness of foreign journalists, but you had to find someone who could carry your letter to the Red Cross. In Serb-occupied Kasindol, Croats and Muslims were prohibited from moving about…
They lived however they could, surviving. Serbian soldiers invaded their homes, then bearded Chetniks like those from a Veljko Bulajić movie, then regular soldiers, and again Chetniks…They threatened to cut their throats, but then they didn’t, there would be a period of calm, and then everything would start over…
One of their neighbors who turned into this kind of a monster was the one who they didn’t know was a Serb.
Lugonja.
He was the first one to promise he would cut their throats.
And then he went away, leaving them to wait for the moment when he would fulfill his promise. In an hour or a day, two months or a year. When was all the same – a person who promises to cut his neighbors’ throats will probably keep his word.
And then, rather suddenly, came the liberation.
The Americans grew tired of the war in Bosnia, Sarajevo was de-blockaded, and the Serbs dug up their dead and took them away. From Ilidža and some of the neighboring villages entire graveyards went away. This story too would be one worth telling.
Lugonja, however, disappeared, his promise unfulfilled.
He left his elderly mother in the Balijan garage, a widow, not especially kind, dear to no one. It was not the time for people to pity Lugonja’s mother. For three and a half years he had spread terror through Kasindolska, and who knew how many people he’d threatened and with what. They had watched as he beat people with the butt of his rifle while throwing them into trucks, never to be seen again. No one could have honestly said that Lugonja was a war criminal, but that he had personally turned many people’s lives into a three-and-a-half-year living hell was something that no one could deny.
They didn’t touch his mother, neither to hurt nor to help her.
Nevenka asked her what she was living on.
Lugonja’s mother shrugged. But she was not moved. As if it was all the same to her, or she was not intelligent enough to grasp what her neighbor was asking and how weighty such a question was.
Lugonja’s mother knew what sort of a hero Lugonja had been during the war. She couldn’t have avoided knowing. She had raised her son to become Lugonja after all. What he had done was not hidden from her, whether in some other town or even some other street. It was here in Kasindol, right before her eyes.
Nevenka went to city hall to arrange Lugonja’s mother’s pension for her. And indeed she arranged it, the tiny widow’s pension, what was due to her, enough at least that she wouldn’t go hungry.
The neighbors asked her why she had done it for the old woman.
Why wouldn’t she do it? Nevenka answered.
Lugonja lived several kilometers away, in Lukavica, which was in Republika Srpska. He did not visit his mother. He didn’t dare. The wretch thought Nevenka had taken care of his mother’s pension in order to lure him into visiting so she could turn him in.
One neighbor, Boro, went to Lukavica regularly. He bought and sold things, surviving like everyone else. He met Lugonja, who asked him had Nevenka said anything? She must have mentioned the thing about the throat cutting.
Boro came back specially to tell her about this.
Give Lugonja my regards when you see him, and tell him to fear God, not Nevenka. This was what she answered.
Whether Boro took the message to Lugonja is unknown, but still he did not come. He had things to be afraid of, and he was safe in Lukavica.
Boro remained in Kasindol. No one touched him even though he had been in the Serbian army. One time he brought Nevenka and Naci a small shaggy dog from the frontline. To keep them safe, to bark when anyone came. They named it Žućo. They would joke and call it Žućo the Chetnik. Žućo lived for a long time, longer than Nevenka. Dogs had long lives in the Stubler house.
As she told these stories, my mother did not feel ill, and for as long as she told them nothing hurt.
By the beginning of May 2012 it was clear the sickness was spreading.
She had to have another operation, after which she could not move freely anymore, though she continued to live alone.
In April she went for the last time to the School of Education, where she had worked until retiring. A little bug needed fixing in the accounting program, and the programmer had suddenly died in a traffic accident. He’d been riding his bike on the coast at Neum and been hit by a truck. Now there wasn’t anyone but her who knew the how and what of the computer program’s makeup, and the six-month budget report was fast approaching.
Everyone came out when she got there.
The programming mistake was small, but it was there.
They paid her two hundred marks in cash.
She told them they were kind and it was appreciated.
She told them she happened to be ill at the moment.
But she was proud of the work she accomplished.
The next time they would see her she would be in a closed casket.
I said I would not go into the chapel if the casket was not closed. I didn’t want to see her dead. And I didn’t want others to see her that way. She’d been in such torment that it was no longer her face. There are people who like to look into the face of death. This is why they open the caskets. The waxy gray faces protrude from the piles of white roses or perhaps some less expensive flowers as if to make them more alive.
Throughout May she’d dreamed intently about a special Cuban medicine for her illness that was in use in Albania. When she was feeling better, she said, after the smart-drug therapy (which hadn’t even begun yet), she would take a road trip to Albania with friends. Not even at her healthiest would she have undertaken such a trip, but she was dreaming. She described Albania as she’d seen it in some documentary, talked about the Albanians, what sort of people they were, honest people, all the Albanians she’d ever met in her life…I participated in this, our phone conversations got longer and longer. Soon my phone bill was approaching two thousand kunas, with roaming in Bosnia even more expensive than in the US, and I had even begun to come up with stories about the fantastical effects of the Cuban medicine. I was lying to her, and these early May lies about the Cuban medical miracle agreed with her, leading her away, even if only in dream, on the road to Albania. These had always been her greatest journeys, in dreams and
stories, and this only continued during her illness, which meanwhile did not impart the gift of fantasy, could not lie to her, did not reveal any other reality than hers. This would distress my mother often more than her illness itself. For the first time in her life she had been condemned and bound to a single reality, one in which she could not function and in which she was wretched.
Soon the silver water arrived from Banja Luka.
A certain acquaintance of hers, a woman active in smuggling and altruism, told her about the miraculous properties of silver water. It purified a person from the inside, a little like the way brushes in an automatic car wash cleaned a car, only you had to be persistent enough and drink the right quantities at the right intervals.
She was distracted by this miracle for some time in May but was growing worse and worse. Entropy quickly widened its embrace, the beast growing and swallowing her, appearing where the doctors had not expected it and leaving its ugly, misshappen tracks behind. The findings grew ever worse though the attending physician had a perfected formula for smoothing over their contents.
Nothing unusual, nothing atypical, she said each time.
And my mother, probably like every other patient, believed that it was not bad, it was even good, if it wasn’t unusual and wasn’t atypical. It seemed to her that death was an unusual and atypical phenomenon in her life.
Then on her seventieth birthday came the medicinal mushrooms. She had been at an exam the day before, a Wednesday, and they had said that the smart-drug therapy would be postponed for another two weeks. This was the second postponement, and her disease was spreading.
She needed the mushrooms in order not to go crazy.
But this had lasted only a short time, not even a week.
We talked once or twice a week. On the weekend there was no phone service, I had told her. In the village where I lived the signal was too weak. I had lied to her that there wasn’t any service at all and that I had to walk to another village in order to call. I thought up all sorts of things in order not to have to talk to her on Saturday and Sunday. I thought this was better, she would stop with her obsessive topics, and then on Monday we wouldn’t start up again with what we had already discussed on Friday. But this, as a rule, was not true. The very same conversations would start up again from the beginning, as if they’d never been begun before.
She said I should call the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Sarajevo, that they should help her, since she was suffering as a victim of medical negligence and sloppiness. She said I should call them to help her since she was my mother and I was an important, valued person in the world. They all knew me and knew the value of my words. If they refused to help me, then I should write about it in the papers and make her case public.
She said I needed to file suit to collect the funds for her treatment. To open a special transfer account, put an ad in the papers, announce how much money was needed. And she had calculated that the smart drugs, if they were not part of an experiemental group, which would make them less expensive, associated with the latest auto-immune therapy, could cost up to a hundred thousand euros. She said I needed to immediately send letters to all my foreign publishers telling them my mother was sick and needed financial support…
To distract her from the daily repetitions of the same hopeless demands and requests to make her illness public, I started asking her questions about the past.
Last night, just before I fell asleep, I thought of Omama Johanna, where she was from, what her father did.
“Why don’t you know that? Great-grandpa Martin was a joiner. He was from Škofja Loka, in Slovenia.”
Then she would talk for a while about Great-grandpa Martin, saying everything she knew about him, everything she remembered. At first she talked without much interest, but still she responded to all my questions. When she had finished, it was only necessary for me to have the next question ready, a new topic, so that she would not return to the story of her illness and all I needed to do to help her.
“What did Opapa Karlo like to eat?”
“What do you mean what did he like? He ate what was prepared for him. There wasn’t much to choose from then. Omama didn’t cook. She was sick. Because of her heart she wasn’t supposed to exert herself, so Aunt Rika usually did the cooking. What did she make? Soup with beef fat, and they would eat that beef later, with homemade horseradish from the garden, and often they had rabbit. You know we had a rabbit hutch back then, and Opapa had kept one since settling in Ilidža.”
“Did Opapa slaughter the rabbits?”
“God forbid! He wouldn’t even slaughter a chicken. It was Uncle Vilko who would slaughter them, early Sunday mornings before anyone else was up. That was his job. No one knows how he did it. It was on the sly, far from the children’s eyes but also from those of Karlo Stulber. Then all the people just pretended. And ate the rabbits as if they had fallen from the sky.”
“Did the hutch rabbits have names?”
“Yes.”
“So you would eat Bugs Bunny and Long-ears?”
“No, it was only later that we’d notice which rabbit was missing, which one was no more.”
“Did you use the same rabbit names over again?”
“I don’t think so. A name could have been used again only if we all forgot that there had once been a rabbit named, say, Đuro.”
“So there were lots of different names.”
“Yes.”
“And you ate them all yourselves?”
“There were lots of people in the household. Two households ate together: the Stublers and the Stevins. Then on Sunday, when we had rabbit, we would come from Sarajevo too, with people showing up from everywhere, so there would be some fifteen people sitting down to eat. The table wasn’t big, so we had to eat lunch in two shifts.”
“What did Opapa Karlo have?”
Soft-boiled eggs. That was all he ever ate. Aunt Rika would make him about eight of them. If she were out on some errand, he would put the water on the stove himself and, when the water came to a boil, put in an egg to cook for a very short time. Either I was little and it just seemed to me that way, or Opapa didn’t ever cook an egg for more than a minute. He would put it on that ceramic stand. I don’t know what the deal was with that ceramic stand, but it’s probably still in the house on Kasindol Street. He would take it to the table, break off a piece of bread, place everything just right as if it was the beginning of a play, and then with the tiniest little spoon he would flick off the top of the egg. I’ll never forget it. That moment and the sound. Sometimes it seemed as if he lived solely so that every evening he could flick off the top of a soft-boiled egg. And he was pleased that I was watching. I didn’t ask for anything. I was eating my dinner already, like everyone else, because he wanted to eat his eggs in peace. He loved me. I didn’t ask anything of him.
Then the story began to grow, the questions changed the meaning of what she was saying, and I started to jot down her answers. A notebook turned up in my hand, one I had purchased in Belgrade at the Home Army Office at an exhibit of the tragic Serbian artist Sava Šumanović, at the start of December 2011, before her illness. We’d gone to Belgrade twice that month, the first time just for the exhibit, the second, to observe the annual Christmas celebration, as befitting a minority. The first time she had not felt the lump that would, by the second visit, begin this story’s report on her illness.
It is a notebook for mathematics, the covers thick, put out by the Sava Šumanović Gallery. It had been printed in the town of Šid by the Ilijanum Press, which is part of the Museum of Primitive Art, set up as a foundation for the peasant painter Ilija Bašičević Bosilj. The cover bears a reproduction of the 1942 painting Ilok’s Road, one of the last created by Sava Šumanović, before the Ustaše took him away as a hostage and shot him in August of the same year. That same year, 1942, he had stopped signing his paintings, probably so as not to dist
urb the Ustaše by the written Cyrillic characters of his signature, which was rather childish, like that of an eighth grader. So in the left corner of the painting, in thin black brush strokes, only the year is written.
The road, snowy and hilly, runs along an alley of tall, leafless trees. It meets the horizon at the second rise. It is winter, the road is laden with snow, just like the roofs of the houses lining the alley. There’s not a sign of life anywhere, neither people nor cars. The colors are white, light blue, dingy yellow. The grass along the road in the places the snow has not reached has been frozen and burned by the winter.
How that painting might have appeared, what sort of presentiment it might have suggested to the eye of the viewer had Sava Šumanović survived the Ustaše and their intolerance for Cyrillic letters and Cyrillic family names it is impossible to know. And so Ilok’s Road is a clear intimation of death. This is what the painting says.
But this is not what I thought of when I started writing down my phone conversations with my mother in the notebook, her memories of the Stublers and of her own growing up. I wasn’t thinking then about the story of the painting on the cover.
The notebook in which I started jotting things down was not completely empty. On one of its pages, in Trieste, I had written down the short life story of Fulvio Tomizza’s widow, Laura Levi, whose great-grandfather had owned a silk mill in Sarajevo in the 1850s. His envious neighbors had set it on fire, the mill had burned to the ground, and the man had gone both gray and blind overnight.
What happened next occurred by chance. But after the notebook took on its new purpose, Ilok’s Road became an illustration of her dying. I looked at it every day, whenever I took out the notebook during our phone conversations and spread it open on my knees, or in the afternoon or evening, when I concentrated on pulling together the fragments of her story into the chapters of A Family Novel under the title The Stublers. I did not write out the chapters in the order she narrated them but rather according to the internal logic of the imagined novel, bypassing chronology, outside of any temporal frame, so in the end the story once completed would be whole.
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