Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  By the time Černi came back from the camp, Rikard Goldberger was already waiting for his letter from Vienna. Whether he tried to help him or actually did help him is unknown. Jaroslav Černi soon died, in the winter of 1950, at the age of forty-one.

  The visit to the attic on Mehmed Pasha Sokolović Street shook my mother.

  What she saw there was devastating, but even more so was the fact that the name Rikard Goldberger was inscribed, even if only marginally, in Stubler history. When Karlo Stubler had been driven out of Dubrovnik in 1920 and the family was living off of union support, Goldberger would come around to see them in their rented little house near Ali Pasha Bridge. He would talk with Karlo and bring him books, though he was somewhat stiff and restrained seeming. They got the completely wrong impression that he looked down on them. Only after the war, in 1945, did Karlo’s Dubrovnik friend, the union organizer Marko Bašić – the same man who came to ask whether Karlo would go after Boras now that his own people had come to power, and whom Karlo had told it was too late for all that – this same Marko Bašić revealed to him who had been the main donator of union funds that the Stublers had lived on in the years before Karlo got work at the Doboj train station: it was the waterworks engineer Rikard Goldberger.

  Nano searched across Sarajevo to thank him on behalf of his father, but it was as if the engineer had fallen off the face of the earth. He was nowhere to be found. He would reappear only thirty years later, in a rotting attic on Mehmed Pasha Sokolović Street.

  I don’t know exactly how much time passed, but it seems to me my mother got social services moving immediately, calling the Association of World War II Veterans, and explaining to them Goldberger’s situation. Everything played out in two or three days.

  The next time she came to see him, the whole neighborhood was roused. A tin coffin of the sort that the homeless were put in would not fit through the tiny attic door, so they had to carry him out. No one knew how old Riki died, but he died like a dog after all.

  My mother soon after earned her medal.

  The nicely designed medal of patinated white metal with a bright red cross in the middle lay on a small cushion in a blue cardboard case. For years it was spotted around the apartment, on different shelves among old documents and newspapers, popping out from the general mess, materializing in various distant parts of the apartment, as if it were a living thing that moved at night from one room to another, hounding us or else trying to tell us something by its presence. I would come across it after the war too, and in later years when my mother renovated, adapting herself to retirement, adjusting to the beautiful pipe dream, in which I supported her, of opening a bookkeeping service for which she converted one of her rooms to an office. Then too the nameless order of the Red Cross appeared on a variety of new shelves, slipped off, popped out again, and it’s probably still there somewhere. In the meantime, objects that had meant something to me disappeared, or ended up by accident in the trash, or my mother treated them as worthless, gave them away as gifts, or simply tossed them out of the apartment, which had accumulated too many private objects, too much family history. The medal meant nothing to her. She didn’t see it as an acknowledgment of her talent, activism, or ability. In general she never boasted about her volunteer work with the Red Cross the way she did about things that she hadn’t actually taken part in. She didn’t recall the people she had helped. It wasn’t important to her, and the medal was a piece of useless jewelry that sat around collecting dust, taking up space and serving no purpose whatsoever.

  When I brought up Rikard Goldberger, she would immediately begin telling the story of how Marko Bašić had come to Karlo Stubler in 1945, bringing oranges and two stories: the one about Boras, against whom revenge was in order, and the one about Goldberger, who needed to be thanked. She never said anything about taking me to the attic. That was something terribly sad for her, about which nothing more could be said. She watched as the three old-timers tried to force the tin coffin through the tiny attic doorway, cursing horribly when they couldn’t manage it. In red pencil on the unfinished wooden door had been written “Rikard Goldberger, Engineer.” In case the postman came with a letter from Vienna.

  The improbable story of Rikard Goldberger would be, if it were literature, the pinnacle of my mother’s need to tend to the dying and the poor. And perhaps the saga of the Stublers could end with Rikard Goldberger if it were written as a fictional story, rather than as a chain of actual episodes sealed by the death of the storyteller. As it is, the Stubler benefactor, the mad old Riki who fed the pigeons and waited for a letter, explaining to the children the wonders of electricity and hydroelectric power, remains on the margins of one story, illustrating an unusual passion of my mother.

  Much more important was the death of Aunt Doležal.

  Because of her my mother stopped working for the Red Cross, because for two years, in 1976 and 1977, she needed to take care of that woman. Aunt Doležal, as I noted in The Stublers, at one point lived in the same building with us, that of Madam Emilija Heim, exchanging apartments after the war with her son-in-law, Vladimir Nagel, and moving to Marijin Dvor. The Nagel apartment was nice, spacious, high ceilinged, and located in an impressive, visually attractive Austro-Hungarian building. But according to the evaluation of comrades on some committee or other, or the city’s living space commission, the Nagel family had a surplus of living space, the Šleht family would be accommodated in half of their apartment, and the bath and toilet would need to be shared in comradely fashion.

  Perhaps Vlado Nagel really did have too large an apartment, but there were vengeful motives behind this: the Nagels were Germans, Protestants, the war had just ended, and if it were no longer possible to find that they had collaborated with the occupiers and domestic traitors, to put them on trial and sentence them to exile, then at the very least they could be hindered from getting to the toilet. When Vlado married Vilma, Aunt Doležal’s only daughter, they decided to exchange apartments. That’s how Aunt Doležal ended up with the Nagel apartment and the entire Šleht clan: hearty, healthy representatives of the new age, prepared to live long enough to one day expand into the whole apartment. The partaja idea was based on the same principle as that of our entire homeland: to those who can survive and overpower befalls the whole world – along with the bathroom and the toilet.

  Thus did Vilma Doležal senior, whom everyone including her contemporaries called Aunt Doležal, after losing her husband – who had been a prison guard and had perhaps helped the revolutionary Olga Humo escape – in a concentration camp in the far north of Norway, end up in a communal apartment, more likely due to the fact that her son-in-law belonged to the enemy German nationality than because he had excess living space. She was punished because of her son-in-law. But she was rewarded because of her deceased husband: she received a commemorative testimonial for his time served in 1941, along with a veteran’s pension.

  If my mother hadn’t taken care of her during her last two years, Aunt Doležal might have ended up like Rikard Goldberger. A decade earlier Vladimir Nagel had moved with Vilma junior and their son Bucik to Rijeka, and Nagel was the last of the evangelical Christians to disappear from Sarajevo. The beautiful Protestant church was sold to the state, which turned it into an art academy. Aunt Doležal’s daughter died soon after, so that in the end her only blood relation was her grandson, though he was far away.

  My mother had good reasons for taking care of Aunt Doležal. They had to do with the psychological state of her own mother after her son was killed. Nona had been beside herself, in search of a guilty party, someone through whom she could ease her conscience and blame for Mladen’s death. These were also the years of her most severe migraines. Her head would ache for days, for a whole week each month, driving her and everyone around her out of their minds. Nona might well have wanted the world to go mad along with her, something which must have been rather frightening for my mother as a little girl.

 
When her mother was ailing, she had to be very quiet. And her mother’s head hurt for so long and so often that the little girl always had to be quiet. She had to be silent, not ask any questions, not utter a word, until the migraine had passed.

  So Aunt Doležal would come for her, take her to her apartment, give her the little red can, the rote tane, into which she dropped a handful of dry beans, and the little girl could shake the beans to her heart’s content, raising a racket for as long as she liked until she lay down and fell asleep. And so, whenever her mother’s head hurt, and even when it didn’t, Aunt Doležal would come get her, give her the little red can, and let her make all the noise she wanted. This small act was something the little girl would never forget.

  My mother believed things would have been much worse without Aunt Doležal.

  No one was as kind to her, and while she was capable of forgetting and hiding all sorts of things, she never wanted to fail Aunt Doležal.

  As the old woman declined, my mother was by her side performing all the messy jobs that need to be performed for the elderly, those that can be horribly degrading to a person if she has the misfortune to be aware of them. My mother, in the autumn of her own dying, was aware of this humiliation, but Aunt Doležal would not be. She lived as if inside a ball of wool that was being attacked by millions of moths. While we were still visiting her together – up to a year before her death – Aunt Doležal’s enormous apartment was overflowing with moths. They would fly all around, mindlessly, crashing into the once quite beautiful Vienna Secession Furniture that, after her death, would end up in a Sarajevo junkyard or be broken up for firewood – antiques were not much valued in Sarajevo at the time – gnawing at the gold upholstery of the ottoman and the armchairs until it completely disintegrated, seaweed began to emerge from the insides, and rusty gray springs began to pop out, eating the blanket she used to cover her always cold legs before moving on to her; first they reduced to dust her old shawl, in which, being a small as she was, she could wrap herself up in completely, then they continued with her sweaters and wool dresses, then they nibbled at her hair, and in the end at all of her, starting from the memory of what had taken place just before, then moving back to the one from yesterday, until they had reduced her, as tiny as she was, down to her synthetic pajamas, which not even moths like, to some distant memory, in which there was neither us, nor my mother, nor the little girl shaking her tin can filled with dry beans repeating rote tane, rote tane, rote tane…There was nothing left. The moths had eaten everything, and the time was approaching when the Šleht family would engulf the entire apartment. Some thirty years after the revolution came the end of the era of communal living spaces in Sarajevo, with their shared kitchens, toilets, and bathrooms, where other people’s hair collected in the drains of the old cast-iron sinks, and the end of the time when the number of rings at the door notified the people inside whether the visitor was calling for resident A, B, or C.

  Once Aunt Doležal no longer remembered Nona, we stopped visiting her. It was as if everything grew dark around her, and Javorka was the only one to remain in that darkness, to follow things to their end, and see Aunt Doležal off from this world. This lasted for far too long, and death showed up in a surprising manner.

  During her last afternoon, said my mother, Aunt Doležal fell asleep. She slept for a long time very quietly. It was so quiet that my mother went up to see whether she was still alive, and as she leaned over her to see whether she could feel her breath, Aunt Doležal suddenly opened her eyes.

  “Oh, it’s you, Mrs. Krašovec!” she said in surprise and then died.

  She didn’t even draw a breath. She just died.

  No one knew who Mrs. Krašovec was. My mother looked into it, calling former residents and neighbors from Emilija Heim’s building, but no one knew who it could be. There simply were no women with that surname.

  They trusted that the words meant nothing, the name had popped out of Aunt Doležal’s dreaming the moment before she died, it hadn’t actually belonged to anyone, and there never had been a Mrs. Krašovec. Then someone recalled that she had spent the better part of her working life as an operator at the post office, where several hundred names every day went through her head, so perhaps she had once heard of a Mrs. Krašovec there, and this name, without any visible reason or logic, had been the last one she recalled in life. It was the last drop of consciousness that dribbled out of her.

  Thirty-five years later, while my mother lay in the former military hospital, I asked her about Mrs. Krašovec. It took her some time to remember. This wasn’t important to her anymore.

  My mother accompanied many people from life, but Aunt Doležal was the closest to her at the moment of her death. They almost touched noses when she died. It just turned out that way. And while my aunt’s death was of little interest to anyone in the world anymore, there remained one unresolved question: who was Mrs. Krašovec?

  I was perhaps ten at the time, and the one thing I didn’t believe was that the word had to do with someone who either didn’t exist or was unimportant. I think the same today: Mrs. Krašovec surely existed, and my mother somehow reminded Aunt Doležal of her. Though she was senile – today it’s called dementia or maybe Alzheimer’s, but then it was simply senility – Aunt Doležal surely saw something that we did not, something that I don’t see when I look carefully at my mother, in the same way that others wouldn’t have recognized my mother in Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring when I was so sure that it was her.

  And so I began to imagine Mrs. Krašovec, searching for her among old photographs, but most often in the stories I told myself when I was bored in the dentist’s waiting room, or when we were traveling by train toward Ploče, or in the evening before going to sleep. This was how I took up literature, though I wasn’t conscious of it. I had started my first year at the gymnasium when I first saw Citizen Kane, which begins with the last word of the main character: rosebud. What was rosebud? The viewer learns the answer, but the characters in the film do not. In this way someone knew Mrs. Krašovec and didn’t know that it might have been important.

  I don’t know and don’t want to know what my mother’s last words were. She didn’t say them to me. I wasn’t there. To me she just yelled, because I had lied to her about things being all right. That was the last thing. She thought I had tricked her. It got worse and worse, and then she was no more.

  My mother died like a child. This was the last great injustice of a life filled with so many other injustices. She believed she had never really been given a chance. Her life was reminiscent of the frustration of a back-up soccer goalie who never got the chance to stand before the goal. At least to try. This was how she consoled herself, drowning in self-pity as if in a bath of chocolate pudding. I taunted her with this, though it was spiteful of me. My petty revenge.

  She never had a chance. Everything had gone badly from the start. It had been horrible. And then there had been one false man, another false man, and a son. That son had been a foreigner in life. Half formed by a man she had come to hate. He had taken away the one small chance she had of living. Who had taken away her chance? The man? Or her son? It was unknowable. Later, she couldn’t go back. She couldn’t start over. It was the end. Childhood, old age, and again childhood. This, all of it, had been life.

  Inventories

  Kakania

  My grandfather Franjo Rejc lived his life in Bosnia. As a high-ranking railroad official, he moved from station to station until, several months before the outbreak of the Second World War, he arrived in Sarajevo to work at the main headquarters with the title of chief railway inspector. When I first wrote about my grandfather’s working as a chief inspector, the critics interpreted it as a postmodern inscription for Danilo Kiš, whose novelistic and actual father had the same job. This, however, was not something I was thinking about at the time. I did not compare the life of my grandfather with the lives of heroes in books. But I was still pleased b
y the critical observation. Anytime anyone would later ask me whether the figure of my grandfather as a chief inspector was an homage to Danilo Kiš, I would lie and say yes. In the end, perhaps it really was. Perhaps the actual life of my deceased grandfather Franjo Rejc was a palimpsest of some written or unwritten Kiš novel. And perhaps the rest of us are living the lives of some future or past literary characters.

  But there is something real that connects Kiš’s father and my grandfather – the long-lived emperor and king Franz Joseph I. It was under his good leadership that the tracks were constructed where the two of them performed their highly responsible work. The job of a chief inspector is to somehow arrange the movement of trains such that no two trains are ever found on the same stretch of open track, hurtling toward each other. His job is to foresee and avoid all possible accidents and collisions.

  From the spring when he arrived in Sarajevo as an experienced railway man to design timetables, until his final days, my grandfather lived in fear of accidents across the territory for which the headquarters in Bosnia and Herzegovina had responsibility. It didn’t matter where the fault lay – with a drunk engineer, a broken signal light, tracks in disrepair or inclement weather, a storm, an earthquake, a fire – he believed deep inside that if only one thing were different, if the arrivals and departures of the locals, the regionals, the internationals with people and freight had been planned better, casualties could have been averted or, at the very least, lessened. The network of narrow- and standard-gauge lines were mapped as if onto the network of his nervous system. But as the lines for which he had responsibility were part of a wider structure, the largest piece of which had been planned and built during Austro-Hungarian times, he did the calculations for his timetable and put it in accord with all the others, from the Baltic and mythic Galicia, from the Kingdom of Kraków, from Ukraine and Romania, across Hungary and Vojvodina, all the way to Austria and the capital of the dual monarchy in Vienna. Every accident that took place in this territory was part of his responsibility. Even though the Habsburg monarchy and the Kakania of Robert Musil had been dead for decades, my grandfather Franjo Rejc’s native country, to the end of his working days, and then to the end of his life, spread out across the entire land-mass of what had once been Austria-Hungary. It might seem a nice metaphor to some, but his country was, before all else, the space of his personal responsibility.