Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Once she got started, and when she again found in the story her parallel reality, one that her illness neither followed nor respected but was instead unnerving her and killing her off before it destroyed her physical body, I knew my mother would tell the story to the end. Or until the morphine took over. But I didn’t know when the end would come, how many stories there would be in the time she had left, and what length might possibly be expected of them, though the difference in this case between subjective and objective time was especially pronounced.

  So I began The Stublers as a novel that could end at any moment. What was announced in one chapter might never end up being told but would still have its own meaning and its own end. Her stories quickly began outpacing me. I couldn’t get them all down. Besides, she had begun to narrate in two parallel lines: one that followed the Karivans, the Kreševo family descended from smiths and miners, and another following the Rejc family from Kakanj and Zenica, Nono’s brothers, who lived as part of the industrial proletariat in mining and railroad colonies. These two lines did not belong to the Stublers. Nor did they have the content or consistency favorable for chapters in a novel. My mother simply didn’t know enough about them or was not interested in their destinies because they didn’t intersect with the important points in her life, her dying. I stitched these two lines into one, the sequence called Miners, Smiths, Drunks, and Their Wives. By contrast to a novel, quartets have their own musical structure and rhythm.

  When she died, I wasn’t able to continue The Stublers. I needed to write down the story that she told. In the end, The Stublers didn’t reveal the most vital part of the story: the circumstances of Mladen’s death. While it is announced in several chapters, this great and horrible finale remains outside the novel, just as it had remained outside their lives, like something that happened but about which there was only silence – as if, in the end, there was good reason for Mladen’s suffering to be described and documented somewhere outside the rest of the whole.

  I did not invent anything in that novel, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely true. She invented a bit, lied, or narrated things as they seemed to her. I didn’t touch any of her skillful lies. But there are not so many.

  The Stublers is a collection of stories my mother lived through when her life had become a torment, when she could no longer go on alone. But my mother wasn’t confessing, she was narrating. And maybe she was narrating for the same reason that people confess – to make herself feel better, to set her suffering to one side, to live a little more outside the failing of her physiology. She was happy while she narrated, and it was easier for me because she didn’t cling to my conscience or ask me to do something I wasn’t able to do. These then were our moments of collective happiness. We were never so happy together as when she was telling me her story, never so close. But this was not the closeness of a mother and son, or that of friends, or that of a grown man and a dying child – it was that of the last two people on earth. At the end of each story, each phone conversation, we were no longer alone, and we were no longer close, but each of us was left again with her or his own struggle. The Stublers was that vanished world, the story of two happy people. I believe that happiness can be felt in every sentence, all the way to the last one noting her death, even though by that moment she was already gone.

  What made her so happy during the telling? It was what makes any writer happy for whom, for whatever reason, literature becomes a parallel reality. My mother was as happy as Varlam Shalamov was when writing The Kolyma Tales, despite Danilo Kiš’s saying that there never had been a more unhappy man. Probably Kiš was correct, but for that very reason he must have been happy when he was writing those tales.

  Love didn’t bring us together. That would have been too simple and, after so many years, impossible. Nor was it human compassion for another who was sick, who didn’t believe in God, and who was dying without hope that brought me closer to her. That could only have driven us away from each other – and I felt this – as well as the fact that I was alive and, from her hopeless perspective, healthy. Because of this she could have only hated me, especially because I never wanted – or so thought the child in her – to create the miracle that could cure her.

  What brought us together was the story, which appeared between us amid the two horrible torments that were killing us. Hers was without a doubt more horrible than mine, but even mine I could hardly bear, even in my dreams I was conscious of it.

  That story was an expression of absolute happiness.

  My mother was not a writer. This wasn’t because she had no gift – about her gift, as I mentioned earlier, I don’t know a thing – but because of the sort of person she was. Her life turned into a single, unusually sad story, a novel to the end of which one could not read, so much unhappiness would it bring. And at the same time that very same life of hers, until she got sick, was that of an ordinary city dweller. Seen from the outside, it was an orderly, healthy life, in complete internal disorder amid the disorder of its own domicile. A writer cannot live parallel lives, for writing is a parallel life.

  But in the story that would become The Stublers my mother behaved like a writer. That was how she talked, taking stock of the details without bothering about the story’s frame, which we know emerges on its own, when the person doing the telling has a good reason to stop. And there is no better reason than death.

  “I don’t know,” said the voice that had given my mother the phone to talk with me that Saturday, December 1, “she laughed when she heard it was you, but now she’s upset.”

  “So, now you know everything,” the voice said, while she cried in the background, before the line was cut off forever.

  Around ten that night she lost consciousness. Her departure took a long time, the whole night. She survived the dawn, when one usually dies.

  The last time she had told some of her story was four days earlier, on Tuesday, November 27.

  It was the first time she’d had difficulty speaking. She sounded unwilling. I asked her lots of questions, to which she gave one-sentence answers. Either something was especially ailing her or some essential change in her illness had taken place, and everything was rushing to the end. Like a bicycle that has reached the top of a hill and begins to fly down headlong into nothing.

  The next morning, her voice sleepy and tearful, she accused me of having changed my number so she couldn’t call me anymore. She talked as if it had been a long time, maybe years, since we’d last spoken, and as if I didn’t know she was sick.

  This was on Wednesday.

  But on Tuesday she had wanted to talk about the youth labor actions she’d participated in as a middle schooler.

  At the time my mother had been a member of the Socialist Youth Presiding Committee of Sarajevo. But this was not the reason for going on the labor actions. She wanted to get out of the house, run away from Nono’s and Nona’s mutual recriminations, which usually took place without a single spoken word, through the clinking of the spoons in their coffee cups, the running of water in the sink, and Nona’s coldness, directed at her as she grew older and was becoming a young woman. Everything in her life would take place over the next several years, like in a speeded-up film, and then all of it would come to an eternal sudden stop, in a long postponement of the end.

  The labor actions belonged still to that world of childhood.

  And to her strong, pure faith. At the age of fifteen, in her fourth year at the gymnasium, as a young adult, she became a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party. She was one of the youngest. They wrote about her in some of the Belgrade papers. I had the clippings for a long time, keeping them in a drawer with other documents, but have since lost them.

  The next year, when she was sixteen, she went on a labor action in the south of Serbia with the Sarajevo Middle School Brigade. The village was called Džep, near Niš. The action commander was a Montenegrin named Jovan Lakičević.

  The fo
llowing summer, the youth labor action was in Sutjeska. She was the headquarters secretary. An important position. I asked what she did. I don’t know, she said. She hadn’t answered this way before. She was no longer narrating a story, just listing details, as if I were filling out some kind of form.

  I thought: this is the end. Then it seemed to me this was just a bad day for her. They had warned me two weeks before she would at some moment go onto the morphine drip. And then it would be over. There was no more conversation. As if I had done something wrong. Or maybe I was speaking with her about things I didn’t need to – stupid things, family gossip, youth labor actions, when the Stubler women had their first periods, in what years they had experienced menopause. Instead of saying goodbye, instead of asking her about serious things, or maybe preparing for what was to come, I was asking her the name of the youth action commander in Sutjeska in 1959. Or was it 1960? What did my mother mean to me if I was asking her such questions?

  But I had no better ones.

  She couldn’t remember the commander. It was on the tip of her tongue. It would come for sure as soon as she stopped thinking about it, but now – no.

  “Okay, I’ll remind you tomorrow.”

  “Okay, tomorrow,” she said, sighing with relief, as if it had become hard to remember things all of a sudden.

  I mentioned to her something that happened in Sutjeska.

  I told the story of how she had set out for Perućica with some friends who wanted to show her the primeval forest and one of the places where the great battles for Sutjeska had been fought. It was, in the root meaning of the word, off-road, without shepherds’ paths, mountain paths, or any kind of paths at all. They only had a compass. At one rocky pass they’d been attacked by snakes. A frightening number of venomous snakes. They ran into the forest and there, right in front of them, saw a bear.

  They lost all desire to continue their excursion and only wanted to go back to the youth encampment.

  They had a choice of which way to go back: through the woods where the bears were or across the dry path filled with snakes, like some sort of Old Testament story. (From my earliest memories, I had known this story. My mother had often recounted it as one of the most exhilarating days of her life. She’d had to choose which she feared more, bears or snakes. Her comrades left the choice to her, because she was a woman, because she was the headquarters secretary, and because they themselves were half-dead from fright. On one of the two sides waited death. And perhaps it lurked on both. I read the Bible seriously for the first time in 1979, in a deserted Sarajevo. It was a Zagreb printed book, published by Stvarnost, which my mother had purchased from a traveling salesman. The Old Testament had reminded me of the story of the snake-filled gorge and the bear-filled woods.)

  She didn’t interrupt me as I told a story she was supposed to tell.

  Nor did she add anything to it.

  She only corrected one thing: it was a sow with her cubs, not a male.

  I wanted to ask her which way they took in the end, the snakes or the bear, for I had forgotten that part in the meantime. But I didn’t. Perhaps I thought there would still be time later, or I knew the story would be better without that part. Perhaps I believed I would remember one day.

  Her third labor action was the best.

  The highway across Serbia.

  Again just bare facts without any story.

  The commander of the Sarajevo Brigade was Pavle Dutina.

  The commander of the Belgrade Brigade was the future historian Veselin Đurić.

  The shifts lasted a month at a time.

  There were no peasants among the participants.

  Only kids from the city.

  There wasn’t much falling in love.

  The relationship was different.

  Everything was different.

  According to my notebook, the phone conversation ended at 1:40 pm. I only put a date on a few of the last ones, writing the time of day or the exact hour.

  When as a journalist I flew out of Sarajevo in May 1993 on a UN Hercules Cargo Transport and didn’t come back, my mother remained alone in the apartment on Sepetarevac.

  It mortified me not to be returning. This was a grave sin in my world. But for the people around me it was the only possibility. Who would go back to Sarajevo in 1993 once he’d gotten out? This was what they said to me. But there were people who went back to Sarajevo because they had left behind something that was important to them. A bedroom full of comic books on shelves reaching up to the ceiling, a home library, a piano, a father, a mother, a grandfather…There were people who had left something in Sarajevo that was so important that they simply had to go back.

  What had I left behind in Sarajevo? Who had I left behind?

  A mother on the verge of suicide, or on the ceremonial, poorly performed verge of suicide – this was actually never really clear. Since she didn’t kill herself, I reserve the right to say it was all bad acting, selfishness, and despair, though would she really have had to go through with killing herself in order for me to admit she actually wanted to?

  I left her as she was coming out of menopause. She was fifty-one. Her menstrual cycle had stopped earlier than her mother’s. I left her when it was impossible to anticipate what sort of person would emerge from that phase of her life, if indeed she were allowed to emerge from beneath the Serb bombardment and snipers.

  When she’d make her way down Sepetarevac toward town, from the hills on the other side men would watch her through the sighting devices produced by Sarajevo’s Zrak, which had also produced the optical instruments for the first spacecraft to land on the moon. This was absolutely perfect: my mother in her green Chanel suit and a pair of worn old shoes, her hair golden but not gray – you couldn’t buy hair dyes anymore – observed by the eyes of an experienced marksman, who a little before afternoon, at the time when she headed for work at the Pedagogical Academy, evaluated who he would kill or not.

  Is this not what happened?

  If not then what did? Can anyone ever discover according to what criteria the snipers selected the people they would shoot at?

  Once in a while a bullet and then another would whiz by above her head, and mine too when I was still there, lodging itself in a facade or Sepetarevac’s steep asphalt.

  This was an amateur learning how to kill. Or perhaps my fellow Serbian writers trying their hand. Not long ago, during the year my mother was ailing, one Croatian writer in Zagreb wrote that the Serbs didn’t want to waste a bullet on me. One time mixes with another, the years blend together into the past, the future, while people congregate who are quite distant from each other, separated by hundreds of years, and literature exists to bring all this into order and create some new chronology that is close to the nature of the moment. The Croatian writer who today laments the fact that a Serb didn’t want to spend money on a bullet with which to shoot me in Sarajevo in 1992 or ’93 is an ideal demonstration of my solitude. Thanks to him, and to the blending of distant epochs that his pronouncement made real, I can make my way through Zagreb in the manner that one’s eye makes its way across the oils of Giorgio de Chirico – magnificent and comforting is the wasteland of the city, at twilight, when, in late June, the sun has dipped below the horizon.

  But what was I thinking about her when I lived in this city then, which was friendlier to me at the time for, in their eyes, I was a victim. People shy away from victims for fear of becoming victims. I assured them I was not a victim because I didn’t like being seen as one. This distracted me so I didn’t have to think about my mother. In those years I thought more about Zagreb than about her. And once I had at last convinced them I was not a victim, the Croatian writer wrote about me and the wasted bullet. I would have thought less about this and about Zagreb had I dared to think about my mother remaining in Sarajevo, and for a time, a very long time, I knew nothing about her. For a year and a half, until the be
ginning of 1995, we barely heard from each other. For most of that time I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I heard the reports of bombings in the city on the radio, in which Mejtaš and Bjelave were mentioned, and Sepetarevac was right between the two. On TV late at night I would see the images of the killed and massacred from the Sarajevo streets and be terrified by the thought of recognizing my mother, her face, her hair, one of her legs…At the time, I was living with a woman who didn’t know why I would stare spellbound at the screen, and before my nose got to the point of pressing right up against it she would ask me to get her some juice from the fridge, question me about my day, while I was like a crazy person, like Alice in Wonderland, glued to the screen just a step from falling in. It was really quite enviable how it never entered her head who I was looking for or what it was I was even looking at.

  I was frozen by the idea of recognizing her among the casualties, just as twenty years later I would be frozen for eleven months by the thought of her death. I imagined that moment in order to make it easier to bear.

  That scene, when at last I moved away from the television, telling the woman, who understood nothing, what I actually saw; that moment when she answered that maybe I didn’t see it right and she got all worked up about immediately taking some kind of action, while her eyes filled with tears and she wept because she thought now I ought to cry: the time it took me to calm her, saying I had already lived through this and explaining why I’d been pressing my nose to the screen these past several months, waiting for the news from Bosnia; the next night, when she looked for a way to console me and I was afraid of her consolation, and the next morning, when I headed to the embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina, trying in vain to verify what had happened, and the day when I phoned everywhere, calling friends and acquaintances, former editors at Oslobođenje, to ask them to try and find out through their connections what had happened to my mother, in which morgue she lay, where she was buried, in a park or a cemetery; that moment when at last I discovered what had happened – a shell? a sniper? in the head? blown apart? deceased en route to the hospital? – and the five minutes that followed, when I called everyone who needed to be called – her brother Dragan and who else? – right down to the breaths in and out behind which all feeling would be hidden. I ran through these hypothetical proceedings and repeated them every night before bed a hundred, a thousand times, just in order not to be surprised and shocked, so that she would not die suddenly for me, as everyone in war did.