Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Zehra’s husband disappeared the same way thousands of Croats did, soldiers and civilians, minor officials and major ones, the notables of Independent Croatia. There is an additional irony in the way the event came to be called: “the Way of the Cross.” The driver Orman from Soukbunar disappeared during the Bleiburg massacre on the Way of the Cross as he was trying to feed his five children.

  The only thing Zehra had in 1945 was a kind and self-sacrificing mother-in-law, who helped her with everything. She supported her, too, in the terrible choice that had to be made. As the wife of an enemy of the people, an Ustaše driver, she and her five children were condemned to ruin. She believed in God, trusted in him and his greatness, and did not shed a tear for her husband, but still she removed her veil and headscarf and went out to the site where she labored as a construction worker. Alongside the men, she carried pails full of cement on her shoulders, that tiny, nearly invisible woman. When she finished her work, she would put her headscarf and veil back on and return home.

  They slandered her on Soukbunar Street, the neighbors and the others. This was before the time when it was forbidden for Muslim women to cover themselves and before the time when women would go out on the street with their faces bare.

  Oh, Olga, I feel naked before you, she complained.

  It was indeed rare for her to complain about anything. She was always smiling, kind, well disposed, and certain that everything would turn out well, and what seemed to us nonbelievers to be turning out poorly, the suffering and death of loved ones, that was all God’s will and some deeply serious plan of his.

  There was a time when there were no stores and nothing that one might have put in stores. People lived by coupons and tokens that were acquired partly according to need and partly for services rendered. Zehra and her family got what they could, along with fruit from the Stubler garden in Ilidža and the slim pickings brought from Kakanj, but it was all too little.

  Olga went to Soukbunar, bringing Zehra ground and powdered barley mixed with coffee. There wasn’t any sugar, nor would there be for years. Olga also brought her little daughter, born during the war, even though she swore to Zehra she wouldn’t have any more children. But abortions were punished by death in the Ustaše state. The small, blond-haired girl was frightened when she went into the house. Everything was different from what she was used to. The smell was strange. Her eyes were large like those in a Bruno Schulz drawing. Zehra hugged her, though she tried to slip away.

  Salko was a little younger than Javorka, so she could order him around. He did everything she told him and seemed pleased. He laughed. Olga and Zehra sat drinking the barley coffee and talking for a long time. They didn’t even look at the children. In that moment, they saw only each other.

  Okay, now you tell me what to do, Javorka said to Salko. But her mom got up at that point and they went home.

  Seven days passed. Olga took Javorka by the hand and they went to Zehra’s on Soukbunar. The little girl said nothing, but was pleased.

  When they got there, everything was the same, the strange smell, the dark room. But someone was missing.

  “Where’s Salko?” the girl asked?

  And Zehra answered her calmly: “Ah, my child, Salko died.”

  That was the first time Javorka encountered finality. And only then was it so peaceful. Zehra’s eyes remained dry for she believed that somewhere somehow everything was as it ought to be, by God’s will. Before Salko the youngest, Azra. That too she had endured calmly. Zehra’s children died of poverty and hunger. It is difficult to discuss such things today. One would need to return to that time in order to see how things were: one day you’re drinking barley coffee with your friend, your daughter playing with her son, and seven days later the child is gone.

  Three of her children remained: Mehmed, Nadja, and Munira. Her daughters became dressmakers. Her son worked as a porter. She managed to put them on track. Sarajevo’s mayor, the former Partisan Dane Olbina, took pity on her and helped by finding her a job as a cleaning woman at Sarajevo’s National Assembly. Fortune smiled on her. She came back to herself.

  And only when she had completed one thing after another, in those May days of 1966, when the little girl who had played with Salko gave birth to a boy, did Olga’s Zehra grow ill. Liver cancer. Javorka’s husband, the boy’s father, Doctor Jergović had Zehra placed in the very best room of his ward. She was so grateful that she never stopped smiling. They would visit Zehra in the hospital that summer and fall, until Olga and Franjo moved with their newborn grandson to Drvenik because of Franjo’s asthma. Olga visited Zehra for the last time on a Friday at the end of September. It was not easy. Zehra smiled and said, “You, my friend, you’re headed to the seaside, but now’s the time when everyone else is coming back from there.”

  Zehra died in December. Olga’s little sister had died earlier that year, in March. I took Zehra’s death harder than Rika’s, Olga once said. If she hadn’t been there, I would have killed myself.

  The Frančićs: Joža, and Muc

  Josip Frančić worked as an electrical engineer in the mine. He was there by the time Olga and Franjo arrived in Kakanj. He was sincere and outgoing, always talking with the miners and the ordinary, unlettered people of Zgošća. He did not immediately stand out as a gentleman, but a gentleman he was, having completed all his schooling in Graz and Vienna. There too he met his wife, who came with him to Kakanj and stayed. Her name was Marija, but no one called her that. According to Kakanj customs and Bosnian speech patterns, her nickname was nearly unpronouncible, but everyone agreed to try, even the poorest of people, out of respect for the engineer. They called her Muc.

  Olga and Franjo grew close to them very quickly, but no one remembers anymore how that happened. Joža was one of the rare men among the miners who didn’t drink. Muc would bring fashion magazines from Vienna, opera-length gloves and hats, romance novels, books by Karl Kraus and Stefan Zweig, crystal services and other things that Olga was interested in, and so, rather naturally, as Joža put it, a “symbiosis” occurred between the two kuferaš families. What Olga found in Zehra touched her emotional and spiritual world, as well as her femininity, while what Muc brought was culture and a spirit of Viennese false luxury. When she thought about Rudi’s long years of “study” in Vienna and Graz, Olga envied him a little, so that Muc came to occupy the place of what she might have had herself, had she not got married so early and had children.

  * * *

  —

  Muc had a completely clear, intimate, and adopted Kakanj manner of speaking. The language of the kuferaši overflowed with Germanicisms, so hers did too. But as a born Austrian who had not known a word of the local language before coming to Kakanj, she pronounced even the Germanisms as they did in Kakanj. As if they weren’t her words and it wasn’t her language.

  She behaved toward the local women in accordance with her nature – capriciously, such that some of them called her the crazy Swabian. They shut their windows when she went through the marketplace. They covered up their children so she couldn’t give them the evil eye. But she made others laugh, the Catholics mostly and some of the Muslims. They found her silly but nice. And they didn’t mind if some of her silliness was imparted to them or their children. Zehra said of Muc that even the good Lord was surprised at the miracle when he saw someone like her and heard her speak.

  Muc would give birth to two sons in this backwater at the edge of the world.

  In the peace and screaming of a birth at dawn, exactly like the women of Zgošća give birth. And never would it enter her head among all her fashion magazines that she might be missing something by not giving birth as they did in Vienna. The eldest son would be called as the eldest son was always called: Josip, like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. The younger son was Branko.

  Joža had an engineer’s mind, Franjo said. Politics did not interest him.

  He paid no heed to king or
country.

  He could talk about everything, just not politics.

  As the years passed, and everything happened that had to happen along with much that did not, Franjo would go on about why Joža pretended to be an idiot whenever he mentioned Stjepan Radić, Comrade Lenin, or Benito Mussolini. He’d look off to one side, yawn, or asked Franjo in surprise why he was worried so much about things over which he could have absolutely no influence. It was better for him to take care of his bees and the railway schedules. Let other people make the revolution. There were two kinds of fools in the world, Joža said, the ones who set fires all around in order to make people happy, and the ones who put them out. You know how they put out a fire in Dalmatia when the north wind has brought it roaring toward the olives and grape vines? With a counter-fire. They spill benzene on the underbrush in a long line to light it. When the two come together, the counter-fire usually overpowers the other.

  Franjo remembered the story, though it didn’t turn him away from politics. Why did he tell it? To spare him from something?

  The Frančićs stayed in Kakanj for several years after Franjo and Olga left. They moved to Mostar before the war. The bond between them did not weaken, though now they only saw one another rarely. They exchanged letters and Christmas cards, but none of that was preserved. After Mladen’s death Olga took pains to eliminate this correspondence too. As if she feared that someone might collect all those papers and reconstruct their own story against her will, from the days when she’d first met Franjo to the moment when the unknown Partisan sighted his rifle and pulled the trigger as if he were shooting a wild pig. Or perhaps she thought she could simply wipe away her memory by destroying all the papers and photos.

  The last time Franjo and Joža spoke was by phone on April 6, 1941.

  He was sitting in his office at headquarters when around ten in the morning someone announced that all the phone lines were cut and another wave of German bombers was expected. He wanted to verify whether this was true, so he opened his notebook with phone numbers and called Joža Frančić. They exchanged a few words, not knowing what to say to each other, and that was that.

  How many months would pass before the Ustaše discovered the illegal communist group whose leader was the engineer Josip Frančić? Time passed differently during the war. The logic of war time is such that soon a person no longer knows when things happen, so neither Olga nor Franjo could be sure when the news reached them that Joža had been condemned to death and was gone. It surely took place before Mladen’s conscription into the German army. Olga was convinced that the only important thing was that Mladen remain as far away from the Ustaše and their courts as possible, which meant in the German army. Franjo thought the only place to run from a fate like Joža’s was to the Partisans.

  He was bothered a little by the question of why Joža had pretended not to be interested in politics all those years. Could it have been the notorious Party secrecy? Or did he have doubts about Franjo’s trustworthiness? This sort of thought offended him, and he would grow angry at the executed man Joža Frančić, to whom, were he able, he would explain how wrong he had been by being friends with someone for so many years, visiting him, playing with his sons, while at the same time seeing him as too untrustworthy to confide his faith. It was pathetic, he would have said, but he couldn’t. Because Joža was no more. He had believed more in the miners than Franjo. Now this was as clear as day. He had been agitating among the miners all that time. He’d had more faith in the poorest illiterate villager. And Franjo had thought Joža was his friend.

  “He protected you,” Olga told him.

  “From what?”

  “From your own craziness around Kakanj and your loose tongue. Joža wasn’t pathetic. He saved your neck while you didn’t even know who or what he was.”

  Muc stayed on her own in Mostar with her sons. Toward the end of the war, they were mobilized, one after the other as they reached the legal age. Joža and Branko would find themselves in that endless column of the Croatian Home Guard and Ustaše, office workers and the occasional disguised cutthroat, the same one for whom the Sarajevo taxi driver Orman was behind the wheel of a black Mercedes. They would cover the long route described by the arch of their march, which would in its sense and content remain incomparable in their existential and emotional experience. And the hardest thing was that if they lived through it they would take a lifelong vow of silence about what had happened to them along the way.

  They let Branko go first. He was seventeen. Pavelić had dressed him up in the uniform of the Croatian armed forces when he was a student, the same uniform worn by the most hardened Ustaše, the butchers of Jasenovac, in order to assimilate him and the entire generation of children born in 1927 with those murderers. This was how Pavelić led the children under a collective Croatian destiny, driving them forth like lambs into the anger of the war’s victors. For the most part the Partisans simply turned away the generation of 1927, stripping them of their uniforms and sending them home.

  By contrast to his brother, Joža crossed over from the south of Austria, where he had been imprisoned, to the south of Serbia, where, as one of the rare survivors, he was at last set free, and not even because they’d figured out that he hadn’t done anything wrong. It would have been a sin to kill him after he had managed to get to Niš in one piece.

  His mother asked, “Did you tell anyone what happened to your father?”

  “I had no one to tell.”

  “How come?”

  He didn’t know how to explain to his mother that in the thousands of kilometers he had walked, attended by the rifle barrels of the liberators, he had not found a single person to whom he, Lance Sergeant Josip Frančić, could have explained what had happened to his father, the engineer Josip Frančić, in order to save himself.

  After the war Muc came with her sons to Sarajevo. She brought them both to Olga and Franjo to tell about what happened to them. This took a long time. They came in the afternoon but didn’t leave until the next morning, when they took the first tram. The two boys did not complain – what could they have complained about and to whom in liberated Sarajevo in 1947? They would not recall it anymore. Probably never again.

  Marija Frančić lived as a retiree in Sarajevo.

  I remember going to visit her with Nona at the beginning of the seventies. When the world the two of them had lived in was gone, Olga stopped calling Marija Frančić Muc. She quit using the name because it had become funny. Or it reminded her of something. In this way, Muc became Frančićka, or Mrs. Frančić. A loud, cheerful woman, she held herself very straight and was a bit loony in her own way. She could not do without men, which made Olga shudder. And when it didn’t make her shudder, it made her laugh. She had one boyfriend named Stojan, a farmer from Herzegovina, who would visit her in Sarajevo. She told Olga about him as if she were an eighteen-year-old in love. Olga would watch her as the story unfolded. When it stopped, she would be quiet, waiting for it to continue.

  This sentence, which Olga pronounced after Zehra’s death, she said only once, and it was in front of Mrs. Frančić: “I took Zehra’s death harder than my sister’s. If she hadn’t been there, I would have killed myself.”

  And for me it would have been easier if both my sons had suffered, as long as my Joža lived, said Muc, surprised that they were even talking about such things.

  Then she sighed deeply, looking at Olga, then at Javorka, and started up again happily, “Now my Stojan…”

  Marija Frančić died in the midseventies. She was buried at Sarajevo’s Bare Cemetery.

  Erwin and Munevera

  My great-grandmother’s mother Josefina Patat, a poor woman from near Udine, gave birth seventeen times, to be left with only two living children. Despite so many deaths, the Patats were one of the longest, most lighthearted and beautiful family connections of the Stublers, especially Josefina’s sister’s grandchildren. The brothers Erich
and Erwin Dussel were, like their parents, Viennese by birth, and besides the thin kinship through their poor Italian relations, nothing visibly connected them to the family of Karlo Stubler, a kuferaš rail man from Bosnia. But invisible ties between people can be stronger and more important than visible ones, and we had no better or more devoted relatives than them.

  Erich, Erwin, and Aunt Dora, with whom Rudi had an incestuous affair during his long years of study in Vienna, were our link to Austria, to Vienna, and to what Karlo and Johanna, and so their children too, experienced as their cultural and linguistic homeland. The Dussel home, whose door was always open to the Stublers, in a manner that was surprising even according to Balkan customs, was an important place should there be any need – if someone had to leave Bosnia, if anyone needed somewhere to go for a time. No one ever took advantage of this opportunity, but it was important that it existed for nearly the entire twentieth century. So important that one could say the Dussels were a principal guarantor of our civic stability. We had someone to turn to if we were driven away.

  The Stublers often went to Vienna before the First World War, when Karlo had a high-ranking position as station chief in Dubrovnik, and continued to do so between the two wars, such that the drawers, photo albums, and shoe boxes contained dozens of black-and-white photos in which Karlo’s daughters were strolling about the Ring, posing in front of Vienna cafés in all seasons of the year, all dressed up and behatted like the heroines of silent film comedies.

  And so the three of them, Erich, Erwin, and Aunt Dora, started coming to Sarajevo too. Our journey to Vienna was long, but theirs to Sarajevo must have seemed much farther. They were headed to meet their cousins in the Orient, in a great city filled with fatal passions, doom, and dark inclinations that in their imaginations hinted of jasmine, cinnamon, and a thousand unfamiliar eastern scents. The fact, moreover, that this was the city where the Habsburg prince had been killed did not act as a favorable recommendation. But they were curious and did not want to offend their dear relations.