Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  My mother would die on a Sunday, and Cica died on a Monday. I don’t recall the date, but I am sure it was a Monday.

  A neighbor called who had been going over to check on her for the past few days and said she had died.

  The envelopes were opened. Inside the one with Mišo’s friend’s name on it was a piece of paper with the words “funeral and wreath.” There was precisely enough money for these things. In Javorka’s envelope were the words “television, electricity, telephone, rent.” And the money for the last, unpaid month of Cica’s life.

  My mother complained that Cica’s character had seemed to change in the last six months of her life. That probably came with her illness. She had always been generous, paid no attention to money, and spent freely in keeping her house. But suddenly she had turned miserly. She had found it hard to give money for meat. We don’t need to eat meat every day, she would say. This too had got on Javorka’s nerves. How could she live beside someone who had turned into a skinflint overnight? Even if it was the result of her illness. And now everything was clear: she had been saving for her funeral and for a single wreath. From Geza she’d just a small musician’s pension. You needed to save up a lot in order to die.

  Cica Šneberger had gone to church, celebrated Christmas and Easter, fasted on Good Friday, but hadn’t believed something better would come from such a life. She had not believed in anything other than life. Of course God existed. And hell was the disconcerting of the dead. There was no heaven beyond life and outside of the fine, old-fashioned café where Geza played with the orchestra of the Petković brothers, while Ruža Balog sang café tunes and folk songs. That was a heaven in memory.

  But still she had left money for the television and telephone bills to be paid, as if in the heavens or on earth someone would be asking about her debts. She had died in such a way as to remain no one’s debtor. What people said about this was not important to her. She had never cared about the neighbors. She had left the envelopes for two people who were close to her, simply sending them to an office window to settle the bill.

  People say and do all sorts of things before death, but this sort of composure and this sense of obligation toward society are rare.

  The apartment she had lived in was returned to the landlord. The furniture was discarded because nothing was worth anything. Cica had had good luck with household appliances: her Obodinov refrigerator was forty years old, the Sloboda Čačak stove was even older, and the TV was a prewar Grundig. The apartment merely needed to be cleansed of another person’s having lived there.

  She had no more family. I asked my mother to take all Cica’s photographs from the apartment. I would bring them with me to Zagreb. She asked what I would do with them. Nothing, but let’s not throw them out. In one of them there is a newly married, very ugly couple. Someone from Cica’s prewar family. The black-and-white photo had color added by hand in a shop in Rogatica, Prača, or Višegrad. Could there have been a photo studio in Prača before the war? I don’t know and there’s no one left to ask. When a person dies, her personal effects turn into trash, and humanity is left with a long string of questions that only the deceased could have answered. Humanity of course doesn’t trouble itself about this, for all the questions will quickly be forgotten. Like this one: was there a photography studio in Prača before the Second World War, or did people go to Višegrad to have their pictures taken? And then, two weeks later, they would have come to pick up the developed and hand-painted photograph. Around this picture, in which two strangers appear under a light ellipsis suggesting marital union, a single family forms, a structure rises up above them, a home is built, and at least one unwritten family novel unwinds. And in the end what remains is just a picture of two unknown, comically unattractive people that hung on the wall of my neighbor Slavica Šneberger’s apartment and not even my mother ever asked her who they were. Or perhaps we asked and then forgot. A photograph doesn’t chronicle memory; it notes the moment of death. Each opening of the aperture marks a death.

  Cica’s passing didn’t disturb my mother.

  She mourned, her life was changed, she was left alone, but she wasn’t disturbed.

  She no longer had someone to make her lunch or wait for her to return from work.

  She no longer stretched out on the lumpy ottoman in the kitchen.

  She didn’t yell or fight with someone close to her.

  She no longer went looking for doctors for another. Next time she would be doing this for herself and less successfully.

  But she wasn’t disturbed by Cica’s death.

  Cica was a cuckoo, she would say, such a cuckoo. She would have lived to a hundred if she had taken her medicine. There hasn’t been anybody since the dark ages who died from just letting her heart fall apart. It wasn’t even primeval! Do you know how long her heart had been bothering her? she asked. Ten years! God, it had been ten years since her first EKG! And then again, the next time Cica came up, she would repeat the same thing, without sadness, matter-of-factly…She was angry with Cica. Soon after, several months later, my father would die, and the story would simply be transferred over to him. At that point she was no longer angry with Cica, and whenever she recalled her she would say that Cica had made a choice about when and how she wanted to die.

  My mother was very devoted and reasonable when the lives of those close to her were near their end. She saw them off, remaining beside them when they were conscious, demented, comatose, asleep, frightened, prayerful, faithless, exhausted, sleepless, blithering, silent, angry, kind, agitated, reconciled, sorrowful, cheerful, weepy…She wouldn’t run away when she was alone at the deathbed. She’d stay to the end, leaning forward as if against the railing of a skyscraper, toward the other world, without the least fear that she might fall. My mother was like a child. She thought death did not have anything to do with her. Or she somehow needed to be the last voice and companion in that final solitude, she didn’t mind being the one to stay. My mother ran from nearly all the obligations of her life, but from this one she never did. It’s easy to walk away from a dying person. People believe you if you say you just can’t manage it. But my mother never said this.

  What attracted her to them? Was it just that she felt more alive when she was in the vicinity of the dying and so was drawn toward precisely what made them afraid? It seems to people that death is infectious, that it will suddenly leap from the eyes that are going dull and grab them by the throat, as in a cartoon. This pushes them away from the dying person more than the horror that comes just before the moment in which, contrary to all that a person thinks and feels, a living being becomes a dead one.

  She saw Nano off when he lay in the neurological wing of Koševo Hospital in December 1976. He’d grown ill one morning when blood had begun gushing from his nose. He had lost consciousness by the time the ambulance arrived, and then he lay in a coma for days. It was the clinical definition of a stroke, though not everything concurred and some symptoms were contradictory. And then, suddenly, on the last night he started to get better. He was beginning to wake up from his coma when he died. This happened before morning, but she didn’t wait for daylight, nor for his relations to wake up of their own volition. Instead she started calling everyone to tell them Nano had died.

  While she’d been politically active in the city committee of the Socialist Youth Union in middle school and at the beginning of her university studies, and later was a regular attendee at the Party meetings of the various companies she had worked for, at the beginning of the seventies she became active in the Red Cross. For several years after that she made the rounds of the hospitals and the indigent in our part of town, bringing food and money, taking care of them, visiting social services, finding places for people in shelters and homes for the elderly. She would take me with her – so I could see how the people lived and not be cruel, so I wouldn’t grow up pampered. She had a thousand explanations and was actually trying to share with me something
of her fascination with human suffering and misery. She was happy only when she was helping people who were less happy than she was. In proximity to death she was alive, ready to run or break into song, do something completely inappropriate, the sort of thing only the living can do.

  I hadn’t ever thought of this while the two of them were still alive, and it didn’t really occur to me until just now, but my early childhood, after Nono’s death and our return from Drvenik, was marked by my father’s need to take me with him on his rounds in Pale and the mountain villages of Romanija, showing me sick people, their small yellowish-gray heads amid the abundant white down of their peasant beds, and by my mother’s need to take me with her on her visits to Sarajevo’s destitute. I was eight, nine, ten years old, and these were extreme experiences for me. They shook and changed me, implanted in me a variety of fears. Reality would continue in my nightmares, which for a long time always unfolded in one and the same place. All my fearful dreams took as their backdrop the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Transfiguration in Novo Sarajevo.

  I grew up amid my father’s sick and my mother’s poor.

  Perhaps this was why I learned so early that we are all very close to death. I was amazed that we were even still alive, and continual human health seemed one of the most improbable miracles. There were so many sick people and so many illnesses, and the illnesses were all for the most part incurable and appeared out of nowhere, sprouting like nettles inside a person who just a little before was healthy. Since the majority of my father’s patients from Romanija had heart problems or lung or liver problems, and were primitive villagers, factory workers killed by hard work, drunks and heavy smokers, their illnesses were part of their destiny. Or this was how my father presented them. Bellies filled with water, livers like misplaced lumps protruding from beneath the right side of their ribs, and those yellow, gray, nearly green faces that would visit me in my dreams – all this was the result of a mistaken life and such a mistaken life had been determined by one’s destiny. A grandfather would die of cirrhosis and the next spring so would the son. In the end, by the time I had grown up, the grandson would have been diagnosed with it as well. This happened in a village called Vučja Luka.

  I also learned it was a miracle that we weren’t poor like the poor.

  Sarajevo’s poverty was frightening at the beginning of the seventies, in the entrances to Turkish-era high-rises that were about to collapse, made of adobe that eroded under every downpour, in the apartments with rotting wooden floors that cracked beneath your feet, swaying and trembling as if they might break at any moment, in the tiny rooms where the inhabitants were cared for by the Red Cross. To these people they sent my mother, who didn’t even know how to take care of herself, but she fought for them like a lioness. She would shout into the phone, threatening to call journalists, to reveal everything to the municipal authorities, to take it all the way to Belgrade if she had to.

  Those old men and their withdrawn, speechless wives, casualties of stroke from long ago, would take no notice of me. I’d sit motionless on a little couch, not touching anything, while they described their needs to my mother. Medicine, food from the Red Cross’s kitchen, and coal for the winter. Coal for the winter without fail – ćumur, they would say, pronouncing the Sarajevo word like a prayer, the extended hand of a beggar, the word from which all humanity began. The poor feared nothing so much as the winter, something which I had not yet taken notice of. Yes, being cold was understandable, but the fact that the cold could be a source of such suffering, worse than all other suffering, much worse than hunger or squalor, this I had not yet come to understand. In Sarajevo this was learned as part of growing up and part of war, which afflicted every generation of the city.

  These people had ordinary names – Jozo, Meho, Sulejman, Roza. These were the names of the poor. The truth was that many rich people had such names, but it seemed somehow natural to me that poor people should have them. Basic knowledge of the world was still being imprinted on my brain at the time: blue sky, fresh bread, bitter chocolate for cooking, good dogs, dangerous wasps…The theory of poor people’s names belonged to this basic knowledge about the world. Once they gave you the name Jozo, it was somehow expected that the Red Cross would take care of you. Otherwise wouldn’t they have named you something else? Because this was the way it had to be, there had to be a poor Meho in the world, and I didn’t think anything in all this might have been so audacious as to change. There was a regular order to things and names, there were rules and basic knowledge about the world that children learned – blue sky, white bread, bitter chocolate.

  But what did one do when someone destitute, the poorest of all, was called Rikard Goldberger? He lived in a loft on Mehmed Pasha Sokolović Street. Actually he lived in an attic that had a door so low even I had to stoop to get through it. The summer was horribly hot, and the attic stank of shit and one other odor I’d never smelled before. I was uneasy, my heart was thumping as if two drummers were competing at each of my ears. My mother turned white, grabbed me by the hand, and tightened her grip. I thought it was good she had brought me here and not the other way around.

  On the floor lay a rotting pillowtop mattress cover with yellow and brownish stains that made it look like a map replete with the seas and continents, and on top of that sat a small, naked man with a scab-covered head. He was looking at us in astonishment.

  He was very polite, offered a seat to my mother – I remained standing – but did not understand why we had come. He was fine. He didn’t need anything. No, he wasn’t hungry. He was healthy. No, he didn’t need firewood. There was no stove anyway, look. He wasn’t planning on being here when winter arrived. He was waiting for the post office to deliver a letter from his brother with a train ticket for Vienna. The letter could arrive any day. It was supposed to come on Friday, but maybe the postman had had a bit to drink. You know how they are. Always been like that, postmen. He didn’t hold it against them since what difference did it make if a letter got there on Friday or Monday? The important thing was that the ticket not have the date and time on it. He reminded his brother, though he didn’t have to since his brother knew what postmen were like. They loved to drink. It’s not easy for them. People would offer them rakija, and sometimes it was hard to turn them down.

  His neighbors had called the Red Cross to help old Riki. He was a good old fellow, children loved him. Generations on Mehmed Pasha Sokolović Street had grown up alongside him. He fed the pigeons in Veliki Park, explained how electricity worked to the kids, and how they built hydroelectric plants. Entire classes would gather around his bench, but that was when his daughter was still alive. After the poor woman died, old Riki had began to decline. But he couldn’t just be left to die like a dog.

  He had lost his mind when his wife died in 1945. She’d been hit by a military truck near the Markale market. The unfortunate woman suffered for days, and when it was time to record the cause of death, they put down: heart attack! What kind of heart attack was it when she was hit by a truck? Riki couldn’t grasp this. They took him off to OZNA, the department of national security, to explain things to him, and it was probably from their explanations that the poor man went crazy. Since then he had been waiting for nearly thirty years for a letter from his brother to arrive from Vienna with a train ticket. The neighborhood wanted to take up a collection and buy him a ticket, but he refused. Afterward someone made inquiries, or rather, an old retired man from the water department, said, “A brother in Vienna? Rikard’s parents and brother ended up in Auschwitz. He doesn’t have anyone in Vienna anymore.” They went to tell old Riki this, to try and get through to him and bring him back to himself because, you see, he had always been normal. He greeted everyone and asked about them, talked about everything like anyone else, only with nicer words, somehow more civilly, like a gentleman, for old Riki was still a gentleman, it’s just that some didn’t see it anymore, but the neighborhood did and that’s why they all felt awful that old R
iki was dying like a dog. But when they went to tell him all that had happened in Auschwitz, he just laughed and said, “I know all that very well. Don’t you worry about it, child!” And the next day it would start again: he was waiting for a letter from Vienna.

  Rikard Goldberger had been an engineer in the municipal waterworks. He’d married a Catholic girl from a devout Swabian family. Getting baptized was all the same to him. Archbishop Stadler himself performed the wedding ceremony. It was Goldberger who hired Jaroslav Černi at the waterworks when Černi returned from his studies in Prague in 1933, while Černi turned Goldberger on to communism. Except that Rikard Goldberger was enclosed in layers of armor, and not only did no one really know anything about him, he even tried to save Černi from being transported to Jasenovac. He made phone calls all around, rousing the German command, calling Zagreb, and none of them were suspicious. There were no secrets in Sarajevo, but it was as if no one knew Goldberger was a Christianized Jew. And it could not have been known that he was a communist. After the war some evil tongues said Goldberger was a double agent working for the Gestapo and this was why neither the Germans nor the Ustaše ever touched him, but for such people it seemed every Jew who survived the war had worked for the Gestapo. The same people said that OZNA had interrogated him because of his collaboration with the occupier rather than because he was asking questions about the military truck that ran over his wife. People were scum. Or perhaps they were ordered to say such things.