Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  At the time Bosnia was a rather sizable land. Each locality, district, or village exhibited its own identity, nation, and culture. Every hamlet had a distinct historical memory depending on who was fighting against whom and when. The boy could not know how he needed to behave with everyone but adapted, testing, scrutinizing a hundred times over before setting forth. To get to Ljubljana from the side he started out on, one had to pass through Serbia in those months. Or so it seemed to him. Or maybe he took into account the fact that he had an aunt in a town in western Serbia and thought she might be able to help him on his journey. It appears, in the end, when he reached her, that she didn’t help him quite as much as she could have.

  He made it through Bosnia safely. It took him weeks to get from Zenica to the bridges on the Drina. When I’ve asked him how he stayed alive without getting thrown into prison or made into a soldier, he has always answered me willingly, telling the story as if it were a normal thing to pass through the angry Bosnian soldiers, through a thousand and one instances of fury, despair, and wretchedness, across half the land – the half to which Ivo Andrić devoted nearly his entire literary work – innocent and inexperienced, his pockets empty, and with kind and honest intent, heading toward his aunt in Serbia to eventually reach his brother in Ljubljana. What could never be normal to me in my life with my notions of what is real and possible was his life and his mature human resolve. My cousin is not an eccentric young man. He is a simple person, today with a family of his own. He doesn’t have a talent for extreme sports and is not inclined to any sort of adventure. It would never enter his head to do any of the things that so many people do during their summer vacations. He isn’t an adrenaline junkie. He was just going to see his brother in Ljubljana.

  If you were to ask him, I think he would tell you he still doesn’t see why his journey is of such interest to me. It’s been sixteen years since the war, and he’s now twice as old as he was then. Between the two of us there is one major difference: what was life to him can be only literature to me. What he experienced I can write, not in such a way that I am simply listening to and reconstructing his story – I reinvent it. His would be merely the departure from Zenica and the arrival in Ljubljana. Of course, his would be the route and – the most important thing – the time. It took him four and a half months to reach Ljubljana.

  My cousin will never write his story. He doesn’t believe it is worth telling. And just as I would never have the nerve to set out on such a journey, he would never write such a story. I could be wrong, but it seems to me possible to divide people into those who at sixteen set out from Zenica to Ljubljana across Serbia and Hungary, through war or peace, without money or documents, and those who instead can recognize in this a great story. I’ve met some who seemed to combine both traits but who turned out to be liars and dreamers. In stories as in life, lies function poorly. Lies demotivate. Lies destroy enchantment.

  In war-torn 1993 my young Bosnian cousin, alone and without documents, crossed the country of Serbia and managed to get onto a bus that took him through Hungary to the Slovenian border. This took a long time, months. He was guided by some unrepeatable impulse of life that, I imagine, he would never feel or experience again, thanks to which he managed to pass through the Chetniks, Ustaše, and mujahideen, as well as the Serbian and Hungarian border guards and police officers, good and bad, responsible and not, encountering people who, like me, found it striking that a sixteen-year-old boy would travel east in order to arrive west to his older brother in Ljubljana. If this were a novel or a film and not life, many would be called upon to testify to this impulse of his. Those who understand it and those who do not. Or to put it better: those who feel it and those who do not. They fail to feel it not because they’re not musical, have no ear, or aren’t endowed by God with something that might allow them to feel the story, but because he gave them something else, perhaps more beautiful and more important. But in all this, feeling is the most central thing. Along with the respect they have toward someone else’s great life inspiration. If that did not exist, perhaps my cousin would not be alive today. Nor would he be alive if he had tried to be bigger and braver than he actually was at seven years old. The miracle of life, like the miracle of story, consists in a person’s recognizing his inspiration.

  Our lives flow at the cleft between living and telling. In vain might we choose to pull away from life, for wherever we run in the world, reality will catch us. And typically everything we most fear and imagine and excuse ourselves for in advance comes back to us, perhaps in our most vulnerable moments. And of course no one would be there to help us because when we pull away from life, people think we are pulling away from them too – they take offense, grow distant, and are no longer there. They don’t understand that we tell so we don’t have to live, so we can step to one side, anesthetize ourselves, and that the telling is a symptom of some sort of emotional weakness, powerlessness, mental illness, the sort of thing for which other people go to a psychiatrist. If all the weak and powerless, if each person uncertain in spirit and frightened before every coming day, were able to leap across that cleft, that fissure that takes one from storytelling into life, then the psychiatrists would have no one left to treat. Or they would treat only savages.

  But if the ones who tell stories were no more, not only would all tongues except computer languages disappear, we would no longer know what was happening to us. Who knows, perhaps this will indeed come to pass. They’re already portending the fall of books, the end of literacy and the civilization that rose up from the stories of A Thousand and One Nights. If it happened, it would not be true for everyone. Writers would tell stories and books would be published in the richest and the poorest nations. In the first, because they would have been conscious of the results of literacy’s demise. In the second, because the news that the book had to die and only the weak and the powerless invented stories would have arrived too late. And outside these fortunate rich and poor peoples, I imagine, would rise up a new civilization of masters and slaves, communicating in some animal computer language, and among the masters there would be eternal war, for by their very nature riches and wealth exist in eternal war, whereas story is nonexistent, or at least the illusion of something worth more than that. Neoliberal capitalism cannot stand such an illusion, and this is why fairy tales and dreams are so bothersome to its defenders, getting on their nerves and interfering with productivity.

  But even then, I’m convinced, my cousin would have managed to set out east in order to get to the west.

  Christmas in Zenica

  My mother calls from Sarajevo on New Year’s Eve. I’ve got a story for you, she says, a Christmas story. She does this sort of thing. Something interesting happens, someone mentions something in passing, or – more often – she remembers something from her childhood, or even better, from a time before she was even born, and calls me up to tell me about it. She really enjoys this and sometimes it’s a shame that I’m not recording these conversations. I use some things from these stories of hers, but most remain between us, just something to be remembered.

  Here then is what she told me that New Year’s Eve.

  Just after the war, her brother, my uncle Dragan, studied metallurgy in Ljubljana. He returned to Zenica in Bosnia as soon as he received his degree, where, upon the foundations created by Austria-Hungary, the Yugoslav metallurgy industry was built up. Zenica steel would reinforce Belgrade and Zagreb, resolving the question of Croatia versus Serbia. Yugoslavia’s famous shipbuilding industry would be based upon that steel, and from it would be fashioned all those slender bridges across the mountain streams and gorges of that beautiful and accursed land. And from that steel would be forged, in the end, the weapons and implements that would destroy Yugoslavia, first killing Vukovar and then all of Bosnia. My uncle was not lacking in enthusiasm for such great undertakings and ideas, though he was by nature more of a curious hedonist than a believer and missionary of a better future. T. S. Eliot said
that tradition is not inherited but acquired, and the tradition he acquired in his home was in no way filled with faith that the future would be better.

  Zenica in the late thirties and the forties was a city in which new arrivals from different times and kingdoms mixed freely – Polish and Czech officials and teachers, German engineers, Austrian smiths and blast furnace specialists, some Hungarians, and some surviving Jews, with domestic, pronouncedly eastern Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox features. The majority of this colorful population circled around the iron works and the neighboring mines of Central Bosnia. Either they worked in them or depended on them for their work, such that the city, regardless of all the differences in status and education, grew unmistakably proletarian. All these people were from the working class. This Zenica proletariat sometimes played an unusual role in conjunction with the city’s traditions, which all the Franz Joseph kuferaši from the North Sea, Kraków, Galicia, Prague, Vienna, Graz, and Ljubljana brought with them and preserved. Perhaps the Party suspected some sort of danger in this, or perhaps one should not attribute such astuteness to it, but the fact is that social constraint held Zenica together. The simple truth was that one went to prison much more easily in Zenica, and prison was never far off. Even today there it is, practically right in the center of town. At the time, the prison was still full of Ustaše and Chetniks, officials and worshippers of Independent Croatia, and just before my uncle Dragan returned from Ljubljana, some of my own relatives on my father’s side were toiling away there. For them it all boiled down to the fact that loving one kingdom too much would get you punished in the next one.

  In terms of its identity and traditions, and not just professionally, Zenica must have been an ideal place for Dragan. By heritage he was a mixture of the homegrown and the kuferaši, with a half-Slovene, half-Bosnian father and a mother who was half-Swabian and half some mysterious blending of equal parts Mediterranean and Eastern, which the provincials in small countries wittily refer to as Mitteleuropa. As his father, my grandfather Franjo, was a rail man, Dragan was born and grew up in little towns along the tracks before ending up in Sarajevo. He had a grandfather who insisted that German be spoken in the home and a father who wanted all his children to know Slovene and be conscious of the fact that their first homeland was in the Slovenian town of Kneža, near Tolmin, the same father who, when there turned out to be no Catholic instruction in his son’s public school, didn’t want his boy separated from the others when they studied God in the Muslim “maytaf” (as he incorrectly called the maktab). In the end, it really was as if God had created the boy precisely for Zenica.

  He brought his young wife from Sarajevo, Aunt Viola, the most beautiful woman of my childhood, who would not lose her good looks even in her oldest and most difficult years. She too was from a mixed kuferaš and local family from the city. In his old age, her father had painted sea panoramas and Bosnian landscapes for the good of his soul. He was a small, kind, warm old man, fascinated like so many of the kuferaši of his generation by Bosnia and Dalmatia, regions their destiny had presented to them as gifts. Viola’s brother Robert had ended up in Jasenovac when he was an advanced middle school student. He managed to survive, but the camp left him scarred for life. I remember him as a withdrawn, expressly apolitical, and, by his own choice, somehow completely thinned-out person. When I think of concentration camps, he’s the first person I remember.

  But their love must have been great for Viola to agree in those times, amid the heat of renewal and reconstruction, to go with Dragan to Zenica. It’s true that it was only eighty kilometers from Sarajevo, but they were eighty long and distant kilometers that at the time one did not cover often and never without good reason. But as one might expect, Dragan made quick progress and had already become the director of the blast furnaces by some time in the ’50s. This was a very high position, one of the highest in the whole of Yugoslav black metallurgy. Of course Dragan had been a Party member by then for some time. It’s odd to think that without it he still might have been able to rise to head of the blast furnaces, but either way his professional qualifications would have been more important. Ideas were important, but ideas didn’t melt steel – what melted it was something other than ideas. I say this because Dragan had a hereditary notation in his file that would have limited his career options in the majority of other jobs and environments: the brother who had died as an enemy combatant. This had taken place barely ten or fifteen years before. In any case, he needed to watch his own behavior, which did not come easily. Whenever Comrade Tito came to Zenica and, as a preventive measure, all the doubtful characters, sacristans, former Ante Pavelić supporters, and bright flowers of the Croatian people were rounded up, my uncle Dragan would show him around the operation. Somewhere in the house, amid the unexamined chaos of former-life relics, there must still be a photograph snipped from a newspaper in which Dragan is showing the marshal the incandescent inferno of a blast furnace.

  In one of those early years of his directorship, maybe the very first, Christmas arrived and Viola was very concerned about getting the tree decorated before the twenty-fifth, rather than for the New Year as the unstated Party rules dictated. And so they managed to decorate the tree very nicely on Christmas Eve, but then something terrible happened: Comrade Saveta Jaroš called to say he was coming for a visit. The two of them were panic stricken, running this way and that, until Dragan picked up the whole tree, all decorated, and dragged it into the bathroom, where he stuffed it into the tub. It was probably only when Comrade Saveta was ringing at the door that they realized the shortcoming of this plan – the toilet was located in the bathroom.

  Čedo and Saveta Jaroš were then and would remain later Dragan and Viola’s best friends from their Zenica days. Čedo was a Czech by heritage, while Saveta was a Bosnian Serb, former Communist Youth member and now a member of the Zenica Communist Council. This might sound scary today, or at least so ideologically charged as to be unlike actual life, but in their actual lives Viola and Dragan got along really well with Comrade Saveta and talked completely openly about everything except the things one did not discuss with others. Today one might not talk with family friends about sex, but back then it was taboo to mention one’s brother who died as an enemy combatant.

  Anyway, either Comrade Saveta had quite a good long sit at the Rejcs’ that day or Comrades Dragan and Viola were so scared that every minute of her presence seemed like an eternity. Every time Saveta took a sip of her rose juice, a cold shiver ran down their spines because with every swallow she got closer to where they didn’t dare allow her to go. Who knows what they talked about. This was forgotten that very day. And who knows if Saveta found something suspicious in their behavior. In the end, everything turned out fine, for their guest did not go to the bathroom and did not confront the ideological aberration of my uncle Dragan Rejc, Director of Blast Furnaces, pride of Zenica’s and Yugoslavia’s metallurgy industry.

  But the story has a sequel.

  My mother often saw her doctor, Šerkan Talić, whom she had known for a long time, and the two of them shared stories with each other every time they met. Like many family doctors, Doctor Talić was privy to hundreds of stories and all sorts of human destinies, happy and unhappy, and miracles from the lives of strangers and people close by, such that when he had the opportunity and was not merely acting as a practitioner of his craft, he could be a chronicler of Sarajevo or at least the several Sarajevo streets and neighborhoods where he practiced and from which people would visit him. But as it is with this dedicated variety of doctor, who experiences his work as a sacred calling, Doctor Talić also treated the people in the building where he lived.

  And so he told her the story of how on Christmas that year he had gone to see his neighbors, an old couple, terribly nice people, truly beautiful people from a by-gone age, well preserved and clear headed. The man was ailing from something, but he didn’t give in to it and the illness didn’t bring him down. Christmas was his favorite time o
f the year. It was too bad it only happened once a year because this was when the two of them brought in their tree. The decorations they placed on it, inherited from his parents, had to be more than a century old. No one had ever seen more beautiful ornaments. They decorated the branches with those candies in shiny perforated paper – you remember, the kind they used to sell some fifty years ago, when there was such poverty that there were no actual ornaments to buy, and it really meant something for the children to take the candies off the tree. No other tree in Sarajevo was as beautiful. And as in every story in which names must be named, Doctor Talić mentioned the names of his neighbors: Mr. Čedo and Mrs. Saveta Jaroš.

  And that was the story my mother told me, a Christmas story, as it were, as if it had been shaped by Frank Capra. Today Mrs. Saveta surely would not be angry to learn that the Rejcs had hidden their morally and politically unfit Christmas tree from her in the bathroom tub. Such were the times and customs. It is not healthy to be prideful about one’s family and wider relations for that is a step toward pridefulness with regard to one’s nation – a much more difficult, hateful, and incurable disease – but still, I am somewhat proud that this story too, was recounted in our family with humor and irony, we were poking fun at ourselves. When in 1998 my uncle Dragan – whom I used to call Tio Dragan – was in a Zenica hospital, he asked me to come see him one more time. It was winter. I traveled from Zagreb by bus. All of Bosnia lay in fog, snow, and mud, and Zenica smelled of thick coal smoke. The iron works were closed. The hospital was like all hospitals. His illness had distorted one half of his face, and he asked, “So do I remind you of Tuđman now?”