Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Olga’s Zehra

  She was pregnant by the time they moved to Kakanj in the spring of 1926. Franjo’s transfer came all of a sudden. This was how it happened on the railroad: an express would arrive with the posting notice that said on the fifteenth of the next month one should report for duty as the station chief at the location indicated. Mladen was three, a quiet, levelheaded child. He was expecting a sister. He would be disappointed when, three months after their move, his brother was born. If we had stayed in Usora, his father said, it would have been a girl.

  Kakanj was different from Usora, and from Doboj, where they met, got married, and conceived their first son. Or perhaps the order was rather different? But this wasn’t talked about. It was a small mining backwater that took root around the coal pits and was populated by proletarians from various parts of the fallen monarchy, artisans, overseers, low-level clerks in the mining offices, machine operators and electricians, until people started arriving, the Muslims and Catholics from the neighboring villages, unchanged for centuries before the arrival of Austria, for that most basic of all mining work, which required no schooling whatsoever. They had lived there among the legends recalled since the times of the Bosnian kings and the Turkish invaders, and little of it was true. Surrounded by a wondrous natural world that, like them, had remained the same, untouched by civilization, and boiled down to the turning of the seasons, these people for a long time had little understanding of their own poverty. But once the Swabian had opened the mines and Kakanj began to rise up around them, the people from the legends had something with which to compare their lives. They greedily grasped how that other distant world lived and started heading down into the pits. They began to trade their clean, undefiled want for something they knew nothing about. This was how the miners of Kakanj were in 1926.

  A pregnant Olga walked through the little hick town, leading Mladen by the hand. She looked around, went into the mining colony, past the small houses surrounded by rose gardens, and farther up the hill, toward Šumonija Spring. Franjo was never overly friendly and was certainly not in the habit of bringing someone home for lunch to make her acquaintance. And so Olga didn’t know how to do this on her own: she’d grown up with two sisters and a brother in Dubrovnik where the house had always been full of people. They went in and out, speaking various languages, stopped in at friends’ houses, but only in the course of a walk down Stradun, where again people spoke various languages, and everything seemed so close, because the conversations reached wide-open spaces from Cetinje and Boka to Vienna and Venice and really the whole world as they made their way along Stradun several times like sailors circumnavigating the world. Olga’s arrival in Bosnia, to which she was actually returning as a sixteen-year-old, having been born in the town of Konjic in 1905, an event she of course did not remember, was an entrance into silence and solitude, and a very constrained place, where everything took place in a circle of a few hundred meters, the marketplace from which these people had never emerged, and their closest neighboring hick town was a distant foreign land. They had said goodbye to Usora on their way to Kakanj with tears in their eyes, as if they were heading off to a faraway land and would never see each other again. And it was a faraway land. And they never did see each other again.

  Franjo was by nature closed off. He didn’t need social connections, especially not of the sort one might gain around the railroads and administrative offices, among the kuferaši. Or, in Kakanj, among the miners. As the child of a drunk, he detested the society that gathered around rakija. All around him were drunks, ruined, disillusioned people. Out there they drank out of sorrow for the cities of Kraków or Katowice, over here it was for the towns of Zgošća and Kraljeva Sutjeska. You didn’t know who was drunker or whose nostalgia heavier. Was it farther from Kakanj to Kraków or from Kakanj to Kraljeva Sutjeska? Kraljeva Sutjeska was farther. You couldn’t get there anymore, and so you drank.

  He was happier taking care of his books in peace or, later, his bees, than talking with people.

  It seemed she needed to be responsible for connecting with others, if others were in fact needed. And it seemed that they were because it wasn’t possible to forever be a lone wolf. You always needed someone.

  Olga met Zehra just before she gave birth to Dragan.

  Olga was twenty-one; Zehra, fifteen. I don’t know how it happened, but it was probably the most important meeting of Olga’s life. Zehra was the person she trusted the most, the only one to whom she told everything. She knew Zehra would keep what she told her to the grave and never tell anyone else. She also knew it was impossible to shock her. Zehra wouldn’t be scandalized by Olga’s longings or sensations, nor would she push her away because of them. She would always listen, following every detail to the end.

  Zehra didn’t go to school. She could barely read, but she was very smart. She was capable of imagining anything and empathizing with everything. Her exuberant imagination was completely under control. In her home, which Olga visited more and more often – though this was not customary, as the Muslims and Catholics of Kakanj did not mix together – the floor was of wood and the walls of adobe. Zehra’s mother was proud of her floor and washed it every day so it was polished like a gold piece. For a long time their floor had been of packed earth, but then, thank God, they had got the wooden one, which would last for an entire generation.

  Zehra wore a veil. All the Muslim women in Zgošća – for Kakanj was still Zgošća in terms of domestic life – did the same. It was very rare that they would take their veils off in the presence of Christian women. They didn’t show their faces out of fear that the other women would describe them to their husbands. This was the same as the husbands seeing the Muslim women with their own eyes. Zehra took her veil off in front of Olga from the very start. She would do the same before Franjo when she came to the house one day. He didn’t know what a wondrous thing this was, for at the time he was completely taken up with his bees, books, and useless study.

  Olga was a completely liberated woman. She met everyone in town and walked around Kakanj in her Turkish trousers. Some of the kuferaš women found this scandalous. She didn’t care, and her pride would come out. She despised the world from which she had escaped and which – probably subconsciously – she blamed for her father’s being driven out of Dubrovnik, and this was why she went around in those most colorful Gypsy pantaloons. Franjo wasn’t bothered. Nor did it bother him that the women talked about her. Relatives would come from Zenica and Dubrovnik, Aunt Lola and Branka came to visit, and they’d go to the Bosna River to swim. Someone brought along a camera. In the photo that’s been preserved are Lola, Branka, Uncle Karlo, Aunt Jele, Franjo, Olga, and Dragan. Where is Mladen? Why isn’t he there?

  And then, once everyone had left, Olga was with Zehra again. They were seen rushing across the market square. Veiled and veilless. Black and colorful. By now Zehra was seventeen.

  Why and how Zehra was married to a man from Sarajevo we do not know. Even the name of her husband has somehow been lost with time. We know that his family name was Orman, because for all our lives she was called Zehra Orman, and that he worked as a chauffeur in that relatively early period. And that he was a kind and very dear man.

  Shortly after Zehra went away, Olga prepared to go to Sarajevo in order to see what her friend had been married into. This was just how she put it: what she had been married into. She dressed in the most festive clothes she could – the Dubrovnik outfits had been well preserved – and put on a hat that Rudi had brought from Vienna and that she could not, of course, wear in Kakanj, and, thus attired, in white, high-heeled shoes, she set out for the Ormans, on Lower Soukbunar Street, Sarajevo. She went to visit her before, as would have been proper according to tradition, Zehra’s own brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles came to see her. Olga met Zehra’s husband even before her own mother did.

  What must the people of Lower Soukbunar have thought when, in the autumn of 1929, Olga Rejc, née Stubler,
in all her citified stateliness, appeared in their courtyard and asked, “Where is Zehra?”

  They must have been surprised. And they might have been pleased, for their Zehra was so distinguished that she had brought a friend from Sarajevo the likes of whom was rarely seen even in Sarajevo. They welcomed Olga warmly, honored her, and made her stay for a gathering, then accompanied her to the station. The young and old members of the Orman household waited with Olga on the platform as they sent off a woman whom, though no one had in any way counted on it, they had acquired as part of Zehra’s dowry.

  However much people would talk in later years about living together and other trifles, this portion of her dowry was neither asked for nor required. At any rate, was it not those very people, Bosnia’s Muslims, who had first given the offensive name of kuferaši to that people, letting them know that they would one day leave just as they had come, with Austrian rule, in 1878? The kuferaši later accepted the name, using it ironically for themselves and their expected destiny, but we must not forget how it started. Much later, under socialism, people would live together, even intermarrying – at least during that brief period before the nineties and the return to old ways – but in Sarajevo in 1929, the friendship between an illiterate girl from Kakanj and the Catholic wife of a railway worker, was seen as something unusual, strange, and threatening. Like Olga’s strolling about in colorful pantaloons from the perspective of the kuferaš wives, though for different reasons, it must have been interpreted as a permanent scandal.

  But the Ormans were good people and accepted Olga. They loved her because of their Zehra. In the non-hardheaded world, Zehras will always be more important than tenets or customs.

  The eight years she spent in Kakanj, before the family moved to its final destination in Sarajevo, were the happiest of Olga’s life. She lived a free and full life, raised her sons, found her place among the people, went to swim in the Bosna, participated in the large union outings, played the guitar, and perhaps forgot a little of what separated her from her husband. But the years were happy for him too. He was doing only what he wanted, what he enjoyed. Every summer he went to see his relatives in Tolmin and Kneža, and seemed to be on the threshold of his self-realization with the railroads. He expected to be transferred to Sarajevo, to the main office, as a railway traffic engineer, for he had been the most educated and able of the stationmasters and dispatchers for some time. He wasn’t impatient or in a hurry to leave Kakanj, but when the telegram arrived at last with the news, he was euphoric. Though Sarajevo would always make them unhappy. It would be the city of their deaths – Franjo on Sepetarevac in October 1972, Olga in Koševo Hospital in June 1986 – a city of complete and irrepressible family tragedy, but they were not aware of this while they celebrated the fact that at last they were moving to the capital. She would be able to stroll through Sarajevo in her hats, dressed every day as if for the theater, and she could even go to the theater as often as she liked. This transfer would mark the end of the long banishment – after the court had deprived her father of work in 1921 and driven them from Dubrovnik to Bosnia – and it seemed to her that life was beginning again, or at least continuing from where it had been cut off long before. In Sarajevo he would be taken up with what interested him most, what was really the only thing that rail men enjoyed. Rather than being the chief of a single station, he would have an entire network of stations before him, and this network would be linked with other networks, and all together they would constitute an entire world. He found this world thrilling: locomotives pulling cars from Zelenika all the way to Gdańsk. Was it self-important this rejoicing of his? Or did a person not dare rejoice about anything, only weep bitter tears over what made him momentarily happy?

  There Zehra and her husband were waiting for them.

  He was working as a cabbie by then. This was in the thirties. People were once again coming to Sarajevo from other parts, mostly from Belgrade and Zagreb. Those two cities were competing for the goodwill of Bosnia’s Muslims. One side knew that they were from time immemorial and by emotional makeup Serbs while the other knew that they were Croats for the same reason, and they themselves were measuring and deciding which side they leaned toward, just as people do the moment they believe they have a choice in life. Foreigners were coming too. The Hotel Europa was always full, as were the other shelters, and it was as if the city that had enjoyed its brightest moments during the time of Austria, along with a sweet amnesia regarding its earlier history, was recalling a bit of those distant days. Whatever their reasons for being there, plenty of people were riding around in taxis, and Zehra’s husband had an overabundance of work.

  One after another she gave birth to her five children. There were two by the time Olga arrived in town, and the others were all born while she was there. She told Zehra that she didn’t want to have any more children. This was not an easy thing to accomplish because Franjo was pushy. He didn’t understand about children, only about his male needs. Zehra understood all this. In general Zehra understood everything and was able to reduce any overlong, complicated story to two or three sentences in which everything was simple, easy, and clear. She was not embarrassed by a single one of Olga’s stories – this was important, for her other friends were easily embarrassed – but rather found her way around in each one and managed to say something to comfort her. How was this possible given that Zehra was a Muslim, a very devout Muslim who kept to all the rules of her faith and did everything every day in accordance with it? The answer is strange but simple: Olga belonged to a different world and a different faith. If Olga had been a Muslim, Zehra would have died of shame, run away from her confidences, and never seen her again. But as it was, she not only did not have to run, she could always be helpful. Before Olga’s faith, Zehra was always completely free, just as Olga was free before Zehra’s. Never in the history of this family that is no more was there a friendship that could measure up to theirs.

  They visited one another often in Sarajevo, went to Soukbunar. The Ormans came to Madam Heim’s building, climbing to Olga and Franjo’s apartment on the fifth floor. Zehra’s husband was always available to Franjo in case he needed to go somewhere. As an older, more experienced hand, Franjo would advise him. With time Orman would come to trust him and talk about everything. Franjo listened quietly and spoke of the times ahead, of Chancellor Hitler, who was insane.

  Orman continued driving his taxi during the war. There were lots of customers at the start, German and Croatian officers, Italians, businessmen, spies, and adventurers. He saw it all from his driver’s perspective. Franjo warned him, told him to be careful. Orman didn’t understand what that was supposed to mean. He wasn’t doing anyone any harm, didn’t criticize anyone, so what was there for him to be careful about? Zehra was wiser. But she needed to watch over her children. All five of them needed to be fed, and every winter was harder than the last. The stores were empty, there was nothing at the market, no more peasants were left in the surrounding villages. They had all been dispersed by the Ustaše.

  After Mladen’s death, in the early fall of 1943, Olga and Franjo were in the grips of a definitive collapse. Zehra left her children with her sister-in-law to stay with Olga for five days and nights straight. But there was really no help for it.

  If I hadn’t had Zehra, Olga said, I would have killed myself. And that was the only thing she ever said about Mladen’s death.

  Perhaps it was true. But besides this, there was no help for it. It was not possible to help those two with what was happening in their souls upon losing their son, not even from that outsider’s place that Zehra occupied. For it was not just one death. Others lost sons in the war but were later able to find consolation and peace. This was different. Franjo had been against the idea of Mladen’s accepting the summons to serve and going into the German army, but Olga thought her son would be more likely to be saved in the German army than among the Partisans. She thought Franjo was rooting for his child to join the Partisan forces be
cause of his own political convictions. Never did he cease to blame her, even if only in silence, for Mladen’s death, and never did she manage to ease her own conscience.

  Zehra and her husband continued trying to take care of her for as long as they could afterward. Olga remained mute and closed for a long time, and who knows how much she needed to confess everything to Zehra. In the end, it would be too late.

  As the war drew to its end, fewer and fewer people had money for taxi rides. Even the German officers collapsed and fell to pieces. The high Ustaše and Home Guard dignitaries also disappeared, and all that was left were hooligans and riffraff. The sort who didn’t pay even when they rode in a taxi. Franjo told him now was the time to be more careful than ever, and they just needed to hold out until the war was over. My children are hungry, Orman told Franjo once. Good Lord, said Franjo, let them be hungry as long as they’re alive! The poor man didn’t understand why Franjo was saying such a thing to him. He thought Franjo was talking that way because he had lost Mladen.

  Without asking about anything or talking to anyone, in March 1945 Zehra’s husband made a fateful mistake: leaving behind his taxi work, because for months he hadn’t been earning anything from it, he volunteered as a driver for the Ustaše police. A month later he would find himself in a column headed for Zagreb. He was driving a Home Guard colonel. He supposedly sent a telegram once he got to Zagreb, a day before Sarajevo was liberated. At least that was what Zehra was told. Your husband sent a telegram from Zagreb, they said. She couldn’t tell whether they were just taunting her, since a new time had come, or if he really had done it. I swear on the cross, he sent a telegram, said the source.