Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  All the timetables were kept in our home, from the first in 1923 to the one for the year of his death in 1972. Even after he retired at the beginning of the seventies, he continued to worry about accidents and schedules, though he no longer worked out the calculations for them. He obviously knew the names of all the hubs from Gdańsk to Doboj and Vinkovci. In truth he knew the names of all the stations from the northern to the southern seas. In his world, the great, luxurious stations like the one in Pest, which was the pride of the monarchy at the time of its demise, or in Warsaw, that ugly and incomplete work of socialist architecture, were less important because it was often the small, provincial, nameless stations that posed the greatest risk of serious disaster. A switchman’s wife had died or a station chief had got drunk at his son’s wedding and thought the train from Kiev was behind schedule, and there it would happen – a horrid accident somewhere in the depths of Ukraine in which hundreds of people perished and which was felt from Riga to Kovno in the north all the way to Zelenika, the tiny station in Montenegro’s far south, at the end of the narrow gauge that completed Franz Joseph’s tracks down on the shores of the warm sea. Its finale was like something in a dream – until that bit of track was definitively closed in 1968, the train crossed the boardwalk, passing along the coast before arriving at the final station, right beside the beach where tourists sunbathed, while children with inflatable tubes around their waists hopped back from the locomotive’s puffs of steam before saving themselves by leaping into the sea at the last second. From 1904 or 1907, when that part of the track was opened, until 1968, no one was ever killed by the train in Zelenika, though the people sunbathing on the beach would be sprinkled with coal dust from the locomotive’s engine. Today this would be considered neither healthy nor ecologically sound.

  My grandfather Franjo Rejc’s native land extended from Kovno to Zelenika. Though the Austro-Hungarian state no longer existed and the governmental, administrative, and cultural institutions that would have borne its name were no more, and although all of Europe looked on it with disdain and condescension after the fall of Kakania, the most important thing that defined my grandfather’s emotional and cultural identity still did exist – the network of complementing, logically linked railway lines of the Habsburg monarchy, as well as his feeling of responsibility and strong emotional attachment to the people who maintained that network. I know of no more precise definition of the concepts of homeland and patriotism than how my grandfather, the chief inspector in Sarajevo’s head office, lived his life. I somehow imagine that the other chief inspectors must have resembled him.

  My grandfather Franjo Rejc knew the following languages besides his native Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian: German, which he spoke without an accent; Italian, which he learned in an Italian detention camp during the First World War and would remember for the rest of his life; French, because it would be a pity not to study French if you already knew Italian; Hungarian, which he studied and learned well during the last gasps of the monarchy in which all the better-educated Southern Slavs knew Hungarian, too; Romanian – I have no idea why he studied that language; and as a seventy-year-old, having concluded that English was the language of the future, he took up a grammar book and a dictionary and began to study them. I had already been born by this time. He would walk around the house, refusing to communicate in any language but English. Everyone found this funny. Go ahead and laugh, he would say, but this was the only way to learn a language. (As I write this, it grieves me to no end that I did not inherit his gift for languages and even more his courage to attempt to speak in a language one barely knows…)

  All this was somehow natural and normal. In the world into which my grandfather was born, it was not strange to know a handful of languages – particularly for people from the border. My grandfather was born in 1896 when his father, a Slovene by nationality, was a guest worker in Bosnia. It was a time for big construction projects, and he came from Tolmin, an area of extreme poverty along the coast of what is today the frontier between Slovenia and Italy. He did the metal work for Sarajevo Cathedral, which was then under construction. The door handles and locks of this church were forged and installed by my Slovene great-grandfather. Besides being a good smith, my great-grandfather had six children and was an alcoholic his entire life, a difficult man, and abusive to his family.

  Having run away from such a father, my grandpa Franjo connected with his numerous relatives who were still living in Tolmin. He studied at the famous Jesuit gymnasium in Travnik and spent his vacations with them in Slovenia. Even though, from the standpoint of his native land, he was a Bosnian and his true homeland was Austria-Hungary, my grandpa Franjo was a Slovene in terms of nationality. He wasn’t happy when, after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy, the border between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes cut right through the homeland of his relatives, slicing it into two pieces, the larger part falling to Italy.

  And of course, as it was the European custom of the time to give one’s life for one’s language, homeland, and culture, my grandpa’s kinsmen turned toward clandestine organizations. At first they sought their right to be what they were, Slovenes, but as that didn’t go over well and the Italians were unwilling to allow them to open schools that taught in Slovene, the demands for cultural and educational autonomy expanded into militant political and irredentist strategies. Thus did my Slovene ancestors, the close kinsmen of my grandfather, turn toward the battle for something that small, European nations would fight for throughout the twentieth century, in different ways and with differing emotional commitments and existential roles, people whose villages and homelands were divided and ploughed through by the borders of newly formed states. The methods were of course always the same: assassination, terrorism, sabotage, concealed explosives.

  The largest Slovenian revolutionary organization, which was created by my grandfather’s relations and compatriots, was called TIGR (for Trieste, Istria, Gorizia, and Rijeka). As with all true revolutionaries, they chose a quite sentimental name for themselves. The abbreviation spelled out the Slovenian word for tiger. I don’t bring it up in order to express pride about my grandfather and his relations, but they were in fact the first secret antifascist organization in Europe, for they were formed immediately during Mussolini’s rise to power and their program was consistent in its antifascism and irredentism. They printed leaflets, issued proclamations, and shot and threw bombs until the beginning of the thirties, when they were annihilated, driven underground, into the woods, or forced to emigrate to Yugoslavia under the pressure of Mussolini’s own state terrorism. Then as now, state terrorism was stronger and more successful than revolutionary, individual, or conspiratorial terrorism. In Italy, several TIGR members, including one of my grandfather’s closest relatives, were sentenced to death and killed.

  My grandfather Franjo Rejc had nothing against Italians. One could even say he loved both them and their language. He looked at the years he spent as an Austro-Hungarian soldier in an Italian detention camp (from 1915 to 1919) as the most beautiful years of his youth. He made friends among the Italian guards with whom he would correspond to the very end as one by one they passed on to the next world. I suppose he didn’t discuss his relatives with them, or the idea that Istria along with Trieste, the Karst Plateau, and the coast to the south, might be split off from the Kingdom of Italy and attached to the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which in 1929 was named the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His Italian friends were, I believe, also antifascists, for why would Italian fascists correspond with a Slovene from Bosnia, but, even so, they would not likely have supported the idea of snipping off pieces of Italy, especially since some of them were from Trieste and Istria. How did my grandfather reconcile his devotion to his Italian friends with his loyalty to his Slovene relatives? How did he reconcile his belief that the portions of Italy populated by a majority of Slovenes should be part of Yugoslavia with his cooly acknowledged belief that the Itali
ans were nobler, more cultured, and better educated than we, their South Slav neighbors? How did he reconcile terrorism as a method of struggle for Slovenian freedom with the freedom and right to life of his Italian comrades? I know nothing of all this, having been just six years old when he died and having never had the chance to ask him.

  The relation of the Yugoslav authorities to the members of TIGR was strategic. When relations with Mussolini’s Italy were bad, they let those people loose and even encouraged them to commit acts of terror. But when at the end of the thirties Milan Stojadinović, who had found in Mussolini his political ideal, became premier in Belgrade, however, the Tigers found themselves under the full force of law. It was even worse at the beginning of the Second World War. The Quisling authorities of the Independent State of Croatia, as well as the occupying German forces in Slovenia, persecuted and killed them, and Tito’s Partisans did not have much faith in them. One of my grandfather’s relatives, an important leader in TIGR, was even shot by the Partisans. In the battle for the proletarian international, the communists were happy to use terrorist methods, but what they hated more than anything was when someone else was fighting for the same cause they were.

  During the war, besides creating railroad timetables and worrying about possible train accidents, my grandfather hid TIGR members who made it to Sarajevo as they fled persecution. He also kept an important part of TIGR’s secret documents. Fearing a search, he buried the documents in a field, which was later paved over, so it’s not known whether the papers were destroyed or whether they still lie somewhere underground, wrapped in a rubberized tarp or tucked away in metal boxes. They await some future archeologist to discover them by chance and bring them to light. This is how the story of our family’s terrorism comes to an end. After the fall of communism and the creation of an independent state, several books about TIGR were published in Slovenia. One was by the widow of my grandfather’s closest relative, whom everyone called Uncle Berti.

  My grandfather Franjo Rejc would often come to mind when the story of a unified Europe still held a romantic attraction for those of us just coming out of the bloody wars that had begun in 1991 and only ended in 1999 when NATO completed its bombing of Serbia. Though he’s been dead for forty years, this sort of united Europe was my grandfather’s true homeland. It won’t change anything in my life, nor will it become my native country – by contrast to my grandfather, I am a Balkan native, someone who doesn’t like to travel and looks at everything from a distance, askance, through books, films, and newspapers. He knew many of its languages and would have learned all the rest if he’d had time. He was a true European, for he created Europe and simultaneously destroyed it. First he worked for keeping the harmony of his tracks, then he helped his relatives in their revolutionary aspirations. Thus did his life unfold in a completely European rhythm of building up and tearing down. Of all this I have only his memory. I have the stories he told me, or the stories about him that others told me, or that I learned from the letters he received from friends, preserved in the back of a Sarajevo closet. His Europe was the “native realm” of Czesław Miłosz, while mine is just the recollection of that other Europe that was his, and probably for me it can be nothing more than that.

  My grandfather Franjo Rejc was a more completed European than I. Although I am seventy years his junior, was born in a time of televised, quickly transmitted information, and was formed through and through by the époque of a computerized, virtual, and altogether globalized world, in a figurative sense I am centuries older than he was, less prepared to adapt, more distant from the ideal of a unified world that would stretch from the northern seas to the southern. But I recognize both his railroads and his sympathy for the terrorism of our Slovene relatives. I have a recollection of Europe, but only a recollection.

  My grandpa has called to my mind a unified Europe – that is, the European Union – whenever its conception has awakened for me those early romantic and idealistic notions characteristic of people from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia when they were still certain that a unified Europe would be a community of cultures in which the rights of individuals, their basic human rights, would be the basic reason for its existence. Never was Europe so beautiful and exalted as to the wretches of Eastern Europe, to the Yugoslav peoples and the nations ravaged by their brotherly, civil, and nationalistic wars. They honestly believed Europe would return to them their human dignity, that it would heal them of their nationalism, and that by some marvelous enchantment it would make them better and happier. The energy of their disillusionment would be the same as that of their hope. The positive force of Eastern Europe has not been used up, but the effects of the force of disillusionment will continue to be felt for some time to come.

  With time I, like others, have come to understand that the European Union is above all an economic corporate entity – a sort of Deutsche Telekom, British Petroleum, or, more precisely, a network of global banks with credit lines, interest on arrears, and marketing-oriented packages of financial services for governments and citizens – and that it is a community of cultures only to the extent that this improves the business of banks, the prosperity of telecommunications companies, the survival of European oil companies in the brutal world market. Just as every large bank publicly boasts of its humanitarian funding and expenditures on culture and ecology, so can the European Union boast of its status as a community of cultures. But the worst and most painful thing is that the basic human rights of a citizen of the European Union depends on having been born in Germany, the Netherlands, France, or, perhaps, Greece, Hungary, or Italy.

  How could I have come to see my grandfather as an ideal European? Was it just that he knew so many European languages? Well, today on our computers we have Google Translate, which knows all the languages of the world, in a superficial way. Or was it the Austro-Hungarian railroads and the worry of a chief inspector in the face of possible accidents? How could globalized railroads make someone a European when airplanes have already crisscrossed the sky? Actually, for this Europe of banks I am incomparably better prepared than my grandfather – he lived and died for Europe as a community of cultures, for a Europe of human rights and dignity.

  My mistake lies in imagining a unified Europe as a completed and modernized Austria-Hungary, the land in which our kind old king and emperor deemed on principle that he should know all the languages of his monarchy. And his nephew, Franz Ferdinand, whom we would kill in Sarajevo on Saint Vitus Day, June 28, 1914, stated that before ascending to the throne he would speak our own Serbo-Croatian fluently. However much we might ridicule it, Kakania was a community of cultures. And it fell because it could no longer function as such a community. If it had been formed as a capitalist corporation, perhaps it would have lasted until our own day, for in that case it would not have even entered the minds of its small nations to struggle for and win their basic rights to culture, language, and identity. The established illusion of Austria-Hungary as a community of cultures passed through the years and generations of the nineteenth century. When at last everyone believed in it, they took to destroying it. And this was how the shots fired by Gavrilo Princip marked the start of the first World War. Afterward, some Slovene kinsman of mine began shooting at the customs guards and carabinieri in Trieste, for he was fueled by the belief – acquired before the collapse of the great multinational monarchy – that he had the right to his own language, homeland, and culture. And ultimately, that he had the right to his own country.

  The Path Through Fury and Despair

  The children used to play in the elevators then. Their parents fought with them, threatened them, but they still found some way of going up and down. My cousin was seven and was playing in the elevator with a friend from the building when it stopped between two floors. The space between the doors seemed just enough to be able to crawl out. His friend went first, and at the moment when he was halfway out, the mechanism started up again. Afterwards I could only remember my cousin
through that event, especially when we grew up. How could he go on with his life after he came out of the elevator? How often did it flash through his head that he could have been the one to crawl out first? Perhaps his friend was braver or wanted to show off? Maybe he wanted to get out because he was more afraid of getting thrashed by his parents, or perhaps he wanted to do something important? I think about it often because it occurs to me I would have gone crazy in his shoes. And I marvel at how calm and stable he is, how smiling and full of respect toward those he considers more intelligent than himself.

  The other big event that took place in his life was when he was sixteen. It was 1993, during the war in Bosnia, inside which there was a second war, between the Croats and Muslims (later Bosniaks). He was living in Zenica with his half-Croat, half-Slovene father and his Serb mother. It was hard, hopeless, so much so that the boy decided to go to his brother in Ljubljana, and his parents had no way of stopping him. They didn’t know what would happen to him if he stayed, and they didn’t know what would happen to him if he went. They didn’t know which of the two was scarier so decided not to interfere in his destiny. With his Zenica personal identity card and no other papers or documents of any kind, he headed across the front lines, the customs borders, and the check points through the soldiers and the war. He used by turns his father’s then his mother’s ethnicity whenever one or the other served him as an introduction or a justification. When neither of these helped, perhaps his place of birth would be of service. If it looked like he might be conscripted by the Serbs, he said he was a Croat or a Slovene, reasoning that it was better to be beaten for being the wrong ethnicity than end up with a bullet in a ditch. He did the same on the Croatian side. Actually the Croats and the Serbs didn’t hate each other that much, they were unified in their mutual hatred for the Muslims.