Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  But when Cica had sought this son out, sending a letter through the Red Cross, he didn’t answer.

  They married at the end of the fifties. Cica was a young girl, Geza already a man of experience in the best years of his youth. It would soon turn out, however, that they were unable to have children. The reason was a common one in those days: illegal abortions performed in sheds and garages, under lurid conditions, by midwives and nurses, retired doctors, and all manner of riffraff without diplomas or credentials, who would have busied themselves with some other kind of crime had abortion been legal. In each case, abortion was something that needed to be survived and if it was, then all sorts of chronic infections followed, visible and not, which ultimately resulted in infertility. Cica was obviously not some old-fashioned maiden. She had given herself free rein in life and was of an amorous nature, attracted to cafés, the theater, and a libertine life. She’d had abortions before Geza. She didn’t say how many.

  This too would not need to be noted if there had been no Geza, who of course knew why she wasn’t able to conceive. She told him, as she might have told him anything else.

  “It’s good this way,” he said, consoling her. “I couldn’t survive the fear that a pregnancy might be the end of you, when you’re so thin and tender!”

  Geza would repeat this to her, saying that children were a worry and a pain, they weren’t for the two of them, who loved café life and everything else that raising children didn’t go with. He had to console her frequently, wooing her in this way because Cica was one of those women who are made to be mothers. However much she might have drunk, smoked, and made merry, she had an incessant need to take care of someone. First she took care of Geza, then her nephew Mišo, then Javorka, and then me when I arrived from Zagreb, and who knows how many others. There was nothing of the martyr in her caring, nothing that reminded you of those miserable, patriarchal women who lived on Sepetarevac, who suffered for their sons and husbands and looked as if they were always prepared for some great misfortune to arrive, their mourning clothes ironed and ready.

  She was a devoted and authoritarian mother. A sure ruler of the domicile and of the collective family unit. She knew what to do in each situation and was always calm and easy amid courageous life decisions. She was a great, genuine mother, a Brechtian mother for frightening times, and there have been no epochs in the history of humanity that haven’t been. Mothers are there to hide their sons behind their aprons. This was the sort of mother Cica was, except that, well, she didn’t have any children.

  And this pained her enormously to the end of her life. She didn’t show it and spoke lightly of her infertility, but it tortured her. And it never stopped. Geza was no more, nothing was important anymore, and soon there would be no more Mišo either – after the war he died of lung cancer, an illness that had long plagued him, but even after his death Cica wasn’t able to ease her conscience. Unborn and unconceived, lost to illegal abortions in post-Second World War Sarajevo, Cica’s children remained forever an unrealized possibility. They would have had a mother who carried them on her back through the minefields and front lines of all future wars. They would have had what most children do not have: the security and assurance of someone who never failed to have both the will and the strength for them.

  My mother marveled at Cica’s unrealized motherhood.

  She marveled at Cica’s ability to act on behalf of others.

  A stubborn, difficult, once beautiful woman, sullen and stern faced whenever she passed anyone she didn’t know. Her coldness toward her neighbors offered no room for questions and no need for answers. Different from the world in which she lived, in Sarajevo and on Sepetarevac. Different from Javorka, with whom, through a coincidence of circumstances, she became friends during the war. Crazy in her own way, she was masterful at controlling my mother’s kind of crazy, holding her own against it, bearing it with the same lightness she bore all who were close to her, with their own kinds of crazy and their own afflictions in life.

  Except in Cica’s life there had not been great afflictions, other than the deaths of others and illnesses, other than what she herself had no control over. Everything that had been in her hands had passed in complete order. Life had slipped between her fingers like squandered flour.

  When the war ended, my mother continued to bring over food and Cica would cook. After lunch, she would lie down on the ottoman while Cica washed the dishes. She didn’t tell Cica about her life. Maybe she tried it once but it didn’t go well. Cica was able to resolve everything she saw as part of the insuperable conditions of life. Cica easily forgave anyone who had ever made her seriously unhappy. Why torment yourself with other people’s wretchedness? It’s easy to forget all that. You’re still young. Find yourself some nice-looking old man to have some fun with…

  Instead of my mother telling Cica about her life, Cica told my mother about hers.

  Cica’s mother had the misfortune of marrying some loafer from eastern Bosnia who would come home, get her pregnant, and then be gone for a year at a time. They lived in Prača, a little town gathered around the train station on the narrow-gauge line that went to Višegrad.

  Cica was raised by her grandmother Vida, who had given birth to three sons and two daughters. It didn’t bother her that her daughter Anđelka had married a Croat. The only bad thing was that he was a loafer and didn’t take care of his house.

  Then came 1941: in front of the Orthodox church in Pale, the Ustaše executed two of Vida’s sons. The people watched. The third boy, Dušan, ran away and didn’t stop until he got to Belgrade. He married a woman from there and after the war didn’t come back to Bosnia.

  After she had lost her sons, Grandma Vida came to Sarajevo and brought two of her little granddaughters with her. She lived with them very modestly in a basement apartment in the center of town. Out of respect for her deceased son-in-law, she sent the girls for religious instruction with the nuns, celebrated their Christmas and Easter, and was steadfast in raising them as Catholics.

  Thanks to Grandma Vida, Cica had all the sacraments: in the photograph of her confirmation from 1943 at the cathedral, in which, far in the background, below the angels in white dresses, can be seen the protective figure of Archbishop “the Evangelist” Šarić, translator of the Bible and composer of hymns to the supreme leader Ante Pavelić. Grandma Vida believed in a God who towered above politics. Being mindful of a human order without which the world would lose its mind and her along with it, she raised her granddaughters in the faith of their father, and of her sons’ killers.

  She died after the war, her conscience clear, reconciled with the world.

  Cica declared herself a Croat on the census and occasionally went to church. The priest would bless her home every year. On the walls of her apartment, off to one side in each room, hung faded holy images.

  She was a Catholic, as Grandma Vida had determined.

  In the meantime, she celebrated Christmas and Easter according to both calendars, performed Orthodox acts of piety, burned votive candles in the church in Varoš, for Grandma Vida, for her dead uncles, and for her mother Anđelka, and would cross herself each time she was in an Orthodox church.

  I asked her how one genuflects in an Orthodox church. She grew perplexed. You know, she said, I didn’t think about it. I crossed myself without considering how, the way Catholics do it.

  In this too Geza was an ideal partner for her. He didn’t ask her the sorts of questions that other husbands surely would have, the sorts that arose among the neighbors as they snooped and gossiped about what faith Geza and Cica really belonged to.

  For Geza all this was very simple. As it had been for Latif Husni Orak, the Gypsy performer, circus man, acrobat, and musician, married to the Hungarian Catholic Rosza, with whom he’d had two sons, one Muslim, the other Catholic. Latif Husni Orak loved his Bosnian daughter-in-law. When the couple visited, he would take her to the side to ask whether h
is son was being good to her.

  It was a beautiful and frightening story that spread out all of a sudden before me and my mother. She was already used to it since she was practically living with Cica, but I would only experience it each time I visited Sarajevo. During those ten years, until 2007, I visited often, every other month. Looked at from the standpoint of this story, this was a long period of saying goodbye.

  Cica’s heart ailed her, but she refused medicine. She said doctors poisoned people and she knew best what was good for her and what was bad. She smoked cigarettes from which she removed the filters beforehand. She smoked each one to the end. She had a torn smoker’s voice. Even with that voice of hers she sang well. She drank in moderation, less as the years passed, though when I would come from Zagreb we’d knock back some welcome rakijas. Cica was a café aficionada, and in cafés people’s hearts and lungs usually suffer.

  My mother brought doctors to her, the best Sarajevo cardiologists.

  She brought her other suggestive, talkative doctors, trying to find someone who was able to convince her. And so they tried to frighten her with stories about death. But she couldn’t be frightened. She was as cold toward death as she was toward her neighbors. To the doctors Javorka brought into her house she was barely even polite.

  She simply couldn’t stand them. They’d brought no useful medical expertise when Geza was sick and so long in dying. Then they couldn’t help Mišo either.

  What use could they be to her now?

  In the last two or three years she rarely left the house. She was out of breath after three steps, and Sepetarevac was rather steep.

  Anyone on Sepetarevac whose legs failed or who could no longer breathe on the ascent would likely not go anywhere anymore. An ambulance would have to come to take him or her to the hospital. Or the morgue. It had been that way since we moved there in 1969. People would just stop coming out of their houses, and then we would see them for a little longer, leaning, pale and gray, against their windowsills, looking somewhere down the street, along which, if everything went according to the usual order, death would come suddenly.

  Then she told Javorka not to bring any more doctors by. If Javorka came with even one more person with her, she wouldn’t let her in. If Javorka did that, she wouldn’t let her into the house anymore. She’d had enough.

  My mother took it badly.

  She called me right away and said she didn’t want to have anything to do with Cica anymore. So deeply had that woman offended her. It’s her illness, I told her. That doesn’t matter, she said, illness or no illness was completely the same, she’s dead to me. You shouldn’t talk that way, I said, laughing. You shouldn’t dare call a sick woman dead. It doesn’t matter, she said again. You’ll go see her again, I said. I won’t and there’s nothing more to say about it. I have my dignity! Let go of your dignity. You won’t get any use out of it. I learned that in Zagreb. What did you learn in Zagreb? That there’s no use in dignity. My nerves are not up to this anymore, she began again. I’ll take doctors to see her and she…

  The next morning she was back at Cica’s.

  She pretended to be mad, but she was laughing up her sleeve because Javorka had come.

  And then again Javorka started trying to convince her to take medicine for her heart. First she tried persuasion, for days on end, then she started bringing doctors by again.

  At the time, though Cica could walk with difficulty, she couldn’t manage the stairs. She would cook lunch and bake cakes, ordering ingredients for cheese pies and burek because, after all, I was coming from Zagreb and the only thing I ate was pie. Her ailing heart was considering whether to stop once and for all or keep going a little more, but curiosity drew her on to the next episode, her heart along with her. There are simply some hearts that doctors don’t dare treat. This is humbling for them. But if there was anything perfectly healthy and exact in Sarajevo in those last years of my being there, it was Cica’s heart.

  Of course she rolled out the dough herself for the two pies that would be waiting for me. This was a serious workout even for a healthy heart. It didn’t bother her. Or it bothered her less than the thought of not having my two pies baked and ready, one with cheese, the other with meat. My mother tried to convince her to make them out of premade crusts, but Cica wouldn’t hear of it. He can have pies with pre-made crusts in Zagreb, she said. It was only the last cheese pie she made, three months before her death, that had crusts bought from the store. After that she couldn’t bake anymore. Ana and I brought the pie with us to Zagreb, inside the casserole it was baked in, a round one of just the sort for pies and burek, all wrapped in kitchen towels.

  “We’ll bring you back the casserole next time!” Ana said

  “There’s no need,” she said.

  The round blue casserole with the scorched bottom – for who knows how many pies she’d baked in it – rests now in our pantry, like some miraculous relic that might find its place in a showcase for ceremonial objects if we had one, or in a bookcase for the most valuable of books, manuscripts, and memorabilia. After the pie was gone a couple of days after we had brought it back, we didn’t wash the casserole. There was nothing strange about that. Casseroles for pies sometimes sit around for days unwashed until they’re needed again. The remains of the dough, the tiny, almost invisible crumbs that crunch under your fingertips like shards from a broken light bulb, don’t go bad or become a home for bacteria. And anyway, a strange company had gathered around Cica, so it is completely natural to end this story with bacteria, worms, moths…

  After the fifth day of not washing the casserole, no one had the heart to do so anymore. Ana said nothing about it, I said nothing about it, but between us hovered, unspoken, word of Cica’s death. It is now the end of June, the twenty-fifth day of the month, Maxim Gorky’s name day, three and a half years since Cica’s death, and her round casserole rests on our pantry shelf, in a nice place among things we don’t use. Something prevents us from changing the thing, from affecting the history of our lives by washing it. We don’t discuss this. If we need to clean the shelf it’s on or get something behind it, we take it out. But then we put it back exactly as it was, as it was the last time Cica held it in her hands. Her fingerprints are surely on it. A dactyloscopy analysis conducted in, for instance, Myanmar or Asunción, would establish that four of us had touched the blue casserole: Cica, my mother, Ana, and me. From the prints it would be impossible to tell what had happened to us in the past three and a half years. As seen from Myanmar or Asunción, all four of us are still equally alive.

  Three weeks before she died she gave in and started taking heart medicine. But she did so off-and-on, unwillingly, in fear that the medicine might mess things up. She gave into Javorka because she didn’t have the strength to keep struggling and to have the same conversations over and over. Or she felt everything was all the same at that point. The last doctor to come see her, a veteran from the local clinic with rich experience, told my mother it was the end, useless to do anything more. It was a miracle her heart was still beating. But it wouldn’t be long, maybe a few days.

  Despite this my mother was pleased that she’d been able to convince her to take the medicine. She would call me in irritation whenever Cica refused.

  “Here, you tell her!” she would shout into the receiver.

  And Cica and I would talk for a bit. About everything but the medicine. She was out of breath, as if she were running across a field while carrying on the conversation with me. She asked if I was writing a new book. I said I was. She asked what I was writing about, said I should tell her because she wasn’t going to read it.

  “Why not?” I pretended to be surprised.

  “I won’t have time,” she said cheerfully. She was proud of her witticism, like it was the punch line to a joke.

  Three days before her death, she told Javorka that on the shelf above her bed, on top of the crossword puzzles under the Daničić
-Karadžić Bible, between her reading glasses and her regular glasses, there were two envelopes, and if, God forbid, something unexpected happened, she should take them. One was for her, the other for Mišo’s best friend, who had taken care of Cica after her nephew’s death.

  She called me to tell me as soon as she got home. She was terribly curious. What could be in these envelopes? Although not even at that point, when it was already clear that everything was finished, did she want to admit that Cica was dying – how could she die when she still went to the bathroom on her own and in the morning would sit down on the ottoman and look out the window, lighting up a cigarette to take a couple of puffs before putting it out, how could death come so soon to someone so young? – nevertheless she imagined Cica had written her some sort of goodbye letter, entrusting some great secret to her wartime comrade, requesting a promise of something sentimental: like bringing fresh daisies to her grave every Thursday or lighting a candle for her soul every third Sunday at the cathedral…My mother was prepared for such requests and would have gladly satisfied them, whether it was bringing daisies or lighting candles. Someone just needed to ask her. Such duties were outside reality. They were not of this world but of that other one, the dreamed of reality in which she’d lived and found joy as a little girl, while I in my own way had despised her for this. Or rather, disliked.