Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Had my mother found her bullet or her shrapnel then, as Karim Zaimović had in the last moments of the war, the world would have been filled with sympathy. Zagreb would have been filled with sympathy, my Zagreb, filled with friends who were then sensitive to every Sarajevo death that was so near to them. I can feel the firm, masculine embrace of the publisher of Sarajevo Marlboro, my friend, who twenty years later, when my mother really did die, would be the friend of the Croatian writer who published in Književna Republika that one doesn’t waste precious bullets on the rabble and that any bullet the Serbs used on me would have been good money down the drain. What happened in the interim? We outlived, both of us, our expected deaths, which had functioned as something of an attraction back then. She died after the light of Zagreb’s stages had been extinguished, in the long night of Sarajevo, in the darkness of my heart.

  By living through the war, my mother freed me of my guilty conscience. Even when I was a kid, she’d known how to make me feel guilty, as she had for the eleven months of her illness, as she would continue to until I managed to forget or until I turned her life into literature, but never did she once, by word or glance, reprimand me for leaving and not coming back. I will never be grateful enough to her, the unhappy woman, for that. Probably this is why I was never grateful to her while she was alive. Nor do I say this, or any of the rest of it, out of sentimentality. I’m speaking coldly: I was never grateful to her while she was alive, and never did I express anything in the forty-six and a half years we knew each other that might have sounded like filial or even human gratitude. I clearly remember in the second grade, in Sarajevo, when we were writing compositions in anticipation of the March 8 International Women’s Day on a simple topic with the title “My Mother,” resorting for the first time to true literary artifice. I wrote about another, made-up mother who bore no resemblance to the real one, rather suggesting Nona, but in a masked, hidden way, because as a seventh grader I would have fallen into an abyss if anyone had said I thought of my grandmother as a mother. Not even to myself would I have admitted it, but the resemblance was obvious: my mother was patient, never yelled, told me stories, and when my eyes grew heavy in the evening, she read to me from The Paul Street Boys…The whole class laughed at my heavy eyes and my mother reading a book to a bumpkin like me at night. The truth was that my mother had never read to me before bed. It was Nona who’d read to me. But only until I started going to school. Then I was supposed to read for myself. Even when my eyes were heavy. Though actually I always wanted someone to read to me before bed, and so I assigned this to an ideal mother. Nona believed I was lazy about reading on my own and that this would pass with time. But even today, when I’m already older than Nona was when she lost Mladen and soon will be older than my mother was at the start of the siege of Sarajevo, I wouldn’t mind at all if someone were to read to me before going to sleep.

  There was no hatefulness in my lack of gratitude. Sometimes there was contempt, sometimes sorrow – an ugly kind of self-abasement, perhaps a genetically inherited tendency – and there was stupid spite. I never stopped feeling spiteful toward her even during the year of her dying. Though I yielded to her in everything, quietly put up with her demands, gladly lied that I would carry them out all while rejecting them as unreasonable, carried out all sorts of things that were unreasonable, accepted her despair as my own, fell before those who were cold to my distress, put up with the minor, tasteless jokes of Sarajevo’s lyrical puppies, complied completely with the role of a son whose mother was dying, of a servant who would be buried alive inside the pyramid along with his pharaoh – still I did not stop feeling spite. And never was I grateful.

  When I left, a heavy burden fell from my soul. But it seemed she too freed herself of a burden then. In one of the worst years of the war in Sarajevo, she changed jobs: from the Academy of Cinematic Arts, where she had worked for the preceding ten years, she moved to the Pedagogical Academy. She seems to have finally come out from menopause then, or, with conditions of life growing ever more complex as the tanks rumbled around her, as if the world had suddenly come to reflect her will, and she forgot she had once considered suicide. She didn’t really change or become any more diligent, and she would continue to live amid the most spectacular, unsalvageable chaos, but she had turned away from the worst years of her depression. Perhaps this wasn’t unusual. Life was degrading and insufferable for everyone. Beginning as early as fall 1992, when any hope that the siege would be broken quickly had been crushed, along with any hope of getting electricity and water back again, people lived in Sarajevo as if it were a slightly more comfortable form of concentration camp. By contrast to the Nazi and Stalinist camps, Sarajevo was special in that the prisoners did not as a rule set eyes upon their murderers and that – though this too was not the rule for everyone – they lived in the same dwellings they had lived in before the war. But everything else, the dying, sickness, freezing, and starving, was like the Nazi camps. The comparison of Bosnia’s wars with the Nazi crimes in the Holocaust, which Bosniak nationalists insist on, is completely out of place and aggressively self-pitying.

  In a psychological sense, life in this city-turned-camp did my mother good. It was hard for her, she suffered physically, froze and feared for her life, putting up with conditions that were inhumane in every way, but they were the same for everyone. Not just the same. For others they were much worse. This was what consoled and emboldened her, what had strengthened her during the siege, such that when I saw her for the first time upon returning after the war, I saw her reborn. I left behind a ruin and came back to find an off-center, wacky, but rather strong woman. Such was she in 1996, when ghosts roamed the Sarajevo streets and most of the people were gray, skinny, and toothless, still imprisoned in their camps and in their constrained, involuted, internally concentrated worlds. She was an exception then, but as the years passed and the city recovered, she would begin to fall behind and fall apart, dividing her world into the part that belonged to fantasy and story and the part that was real, as both fell into chaos and failure.

  But she would never be depressed again.

  Nor would she ever care about anything until her illness.

  She would be angry, enraged, dissatisfied.

  She would believe everyone was against her.

  That they didn’t value her, that they harassed her. That was her favorite word: harassment.

  But she wouldn’t be depressed.

  Or care about anything.

  Until the lump.

  Her wartime transfiguration came about thanks to her last great friendship, which emerged almost by accident, as a miracle and reward for the many good deeds she’d performed in her life. Or actually it was a reward for her insufferable – to me at least – openness toward other people, for that particular kind of indiscretion that one can’t stand from people who are close but is actually not such a hated characteristic among people one just happens to meet.

  Slavica Džeba, or Miss Cica, whose married name was Šneberger, lived in the basement apartment of her family’s one-story building one street number down from us. We would see her after we moved to Sepetarevac in 1969, but nothing went beyond hello. Cica was not a real Sarajevo neighbor woman. She didn’t press herself on us to get invited over for coffee, or hug and kiss on the street, and she smiled a lot less than is considered proper in Sarajevo, such that neighbors might have perceived her as odd. She lived with Geza Šneberger, a huge, fat man with heart disease and diabetes, whose black, Clark Gable mustache, given his heavy, tired-out sickliness, was the only thing that made his face appear youthful and tidy.

  All that was known about Geza was that he was a musician and that he drummed in the cafés and had played in what used to be the radio orchestra – at the time someone remembered there used to be one. Everything else took place a long way from the eyes and ears of the neighbors, who after a certain amount of time would lose interest in those who didn’t need to reveal everything ab
out themselves in public – their background, work, family relations – and such people would soon be called “marginal.”

  In a certain way, Cica and Geza were marginal, even if it was not possible to say they lived like eccentrics. They were just of a different mold, which was enough to exclude them from the ceremonies of traditional neighborly kindness, or rather, from the sticking of their noses into your business.

  Nono had just a little longer left to live then, barely enough to meet them.

  They heard him coughing in those summer nights in 1969, ’70, ’71.

  “Poor Mr. Rejc! He’s having a rough time.”

  Nona said hello to them but not more than that.

  There was a neighbors’ stand-off between us.

  In 1985 and the next year we kept a dog named Nero in the garden. He was tied up with a chain, lived in a little wooden doghouse, and was always in the mud. I was not kind to him, a fact that would forever plague me. If I’d been kind, Nero wouldn’t had lived attached to a chain but rather with us in the house.

  And this could have happened had I just wanted it.

  After Nona’s death in 1986, we were left alone with Nero.

  In December of that year, he tried to jump over the fence while he was still chained, and he stayed hanging like that until he died. It was cold, ten below Celsius. I buried him in the garden. The iron pick broke in two against the frozen ground.

  Nero used to bark all night. He wasn’t a smart dog, but he was lonely and good-natured. He barked at the cats and hedgehogs on their nocturnal hunts.

  Geza had been seriously ill at the time. He could hardly breathe and had been in the process of releasing his soul for months. The dog’s barking bothered him.

  Cica rang at the door to complain about Nero.

  As it happened, this was the day we took Nona to the hospital, from which she would not return. My mother sent her away quite rudely. Cica didn’t know, and my mother didn’t know that Cica didn’t know. When she found out, she was terribly embarrassed. She never complained about Nero again. Geza was destined to listen to Nero’s barking every night until the dog died that winter. Then there was silence.

  I was angry. So was my mother. We didn’t think about his being hardly able to breathe or sleep because of Nero’s barking. We had our own worries, just as Geza and Cica did.

  And nothing more would have come of this if the war hadn’t begun.

  She had by then already buried Geza and was living alone in her basement apartment. Although it was the same old Cica and the neighborhood was for the most part also the same, her relations with the world had changed. Or rather, those who were on their own had suddenly been accepted. In those three and a half years of war, within that tiny circle at the top of Sepetarevac at the confluence of three sheltered Turkish alleys, they lived in the midst of all sorts of caprices and oddities, like in some sort of a psychiatric ward. It started in 1992 when the first shells landed in our garden, and then developed and deepened as such cases grew worse and worse. It seemed as if the siege would go on forever, so people needed to make one another’s lives bearable and joyous – they had to laugh in order not to go mad. And this was how Cica entered into the social life of Sepetarevac. It wasn’t something she ever worked at or set out to do. It was simply the result of circumstances.

  People cooked in the gardens and basements, and on the streets in front of their houses.

  They died while cooking.

  And so, at a certain point, after I had left Sarajevo, my mother came together with Cica around cooking. She would bring food from wherever she could find it, collecting humanitarian aid and whatever she got from work, and Cica would prepare it for the two of them.

  Sometimes Mišo, Cica’s nephew and stepson who worked as a television production manager, would come from the other side of town. Traveling from the Radio and Television Building to Sepetarevac was like arriving from the ends of the earth.

  Cica was a fantastic cook in a way that was unknown in our house. No one in Javorka’s family prepared food like this. In the Stubler and Rejc homes they ate their food according to Viennese and old kuferaš recipes, with lots of dark rye flour and starch, beef and chicken broth, dumplings and stewed vegetables. It was the same as what they ate in Zagreb and Vienna – unimaginative and, for the most part, unhealthy. But Cica prepared food as if she were observing, through cooking, her and Geza’s family tree, which, as in wartime and postwar stories, had grown in all directions, taking on the flavors of different national cuisines, from Vienna, across Bosnia and Serbia, to Istanbul and as far as Izmir on the Aegean.

  Geza Šneberger was born in Turkey of a Muslim Gypsy father, and a Hungarian Gypsy mother. His father, Latif Husni Orak, had been a circus acrobat and a musician. When he was young, he had flown on the trapeze, juggled, tamed wild beasts, and for years traveled with his circus family across Asia Minor, the Near East, and along the coast of the Black Sea all the way to Odessa. One cannot live such a life for long. At least this was not the custom in his family, which for generations from distant Ottoman times had been engaged in circus work. Rather, after spending one’s youth on the road, working hard and playing hard, the time would come for appeasement and retraining. Variety artist would turn into musician, usually marrying a girl encountered on the road who had run away from home to be with him. Just like a folktale: she ran away with the Gypsies. She ran away to the circus…

  Latif Husni Orak brought Rosza along from somewhere in Hungary. She birthed him two sons and couldn’t have more children after that. They lived a rich and happy life in Izmir, each side observing his or her own faith. Without much consideration for their professional orientation or calling, the sons continued the family tradition. This was the time of the republic of Atatürk, the foundations of society were being altered and transformed, and the family circus suffered. It simply collapsed amid the general modernization and the infatuation with Western novelties. Audiences in Turkey were not interested in the old Gypsy circus, with its variety-show bits and conventions that probably had not changed since Mehmed the Conqueror. They could no longer travel to Odessa, for Odessa now belonged to a communist paradise, while Russian circuses, which were incomparably better than Orak’s old thing, were ranging across Europe, having escaped from that selfsame paradise.

  And so the Orak brothers were appearing with small bands of acrobats when the youngest, whom they would name Geza after the mother’s father, followed the circus routes to Yugoslavia. In Bitola he fell madly in love with a girl of the Orthodox faith, with whom he would have two children, and from whom he would later be divorced.

  She would not be important for our story if Geza hadn’t gone to Belgrade because of her and been baptized according to the Catholic rite, taking his mother’s maiden name – Šneberger. During the Second World War such performers could not find work even in Serbia – especially those who were known to be Gypsies and whom the authorities, at a minimum, looked askance at – but during the war, more than during peacetime, they did play in cafés and hotel ballrooms, at weddings and funerals, so much so that there weren’t enough musicians to go around. This was the story Geza told Cica, who told Javorka, who told me, and which I then asked Cica to tell me in detail, as Geza had told her.

  For entire days in the summer of 1998 during the Sarajevo Film Festival, Cica told me the story of Geza’s childhood and youth in Izmir, and of Belgrade during the Second World War, about all the places he played music and with whom. She listed the cafés and the orchestras, hundreds of names of people, and wove a great and luxurious tale, and it was as if this story had no end and would never arrive at the year 1945. She knew it all to the smallest detail, as if she’d been there herself.

  I didn’t write any of it down, fascinated as I was by the story. I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much if I were taking notes. I didn’t know then that what she was telling me was important. I didn’t know that after her death n
o one would know the story of Latif Husni Orak and his two sons. Or the love story of a Gypsy musician and a young woman from Bitola, with the embedded story of a baptism in a Belgrade Catholic church, which, though her family staunchly opposed it, had been the only option – Geza could not have been baptized in the Orthodox Church because his mother had been a Catholic. He could be either a Muslim or a Catholic, and this was exactly what he was: Gypsy, Muslim, Catholic. The order might have been different. Cica explained all this as she told the story, just as Geza had explained it to her, and everything was in perfect accord, proper and logical. If the principles of society and civilization could be subjected to logic, then those of Effendi Orak, his Hungarian wife Rosza, and their two sons were perfectly logical.

  It’s a shame that all this will remain unwritten.

  One September morning, on one of those rare days when it seemed to my mother that she was truly getting better and everything was much better than it had been the day before, we tried to reconstruct together, over the phone, the lives of these two individuals and the histories of their families, just as Cica had explained it to us. This was perhaps our longest phone conversation. It lasted for two hours.

  Geza divorced his wife after the Second World War. He was in contact with the children but after they were grown, they slowly lost interest in their father. During the siege, Cica tried contacting Geza’s son, who lived in Germany. She actually wanted to ask for his help – two hundred marks would have been of enormous assistance – but he didn’t answer her. Later she blamed herself for having done that. One doesn’t dare beg, she said. The man was in the right. Better that he didn’t respond. This she said too. And actually she felt rueful, for she had spent something that was priceless to her. When Geza died shortly after Nona and Nero, she worried about just one thing: what would happen to her? Even though for years he hadn’t been able to get to the bathroom without her help, while she had made sure he was clean and well groomed, his clothes were pressed, his hair combed, and everything taken care of; even though all the money that Geza ever earned, including his musician’s retirement money, had always been with her, such that she had to make sure he didn’t leave the house without any cash on him; even though, in fact, from the very start Cica had taken care of everything while Geza had just played music, she was in a fearful panic that without him she wouldn’t know how to live. And that was when he’d said to her, as he lay dying, that if, God forbid she ever needed anything, she could call his son in Germany.