Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  They started coming in 1933 or one of the three years that followed and continued to visit until the late seventies. The world turned on its head during those forty years. Karlo, Johanna, and all their children except the youngest, Olga, died, and the most beautiful love story of the family’s history took place.

  Erich and Erwin studied and completed degrees in architecture, from which they would derive a good and stable living. Neither had great professional ambitions. Their profession served as a way of satisfying their thirst for pleasure and everyday indulgences. They had no pretensions toward eternal greatness. So they were not interested in politics, and the arrival of Hitler in power, the Anschluss, and the beginning of the war in the Dussels’ homeland was experienced at first as something that didn’t especially concern them and later as some sort of uncontrollable act of nature, a storm or catastrophic earthquake that needed to be simply lived through without excessive grumbling and theorizing. In this attitude, the Dussels were typical Viennese petit bourgeois.

  And being such, they ended up in the battle for Stalingrad.

  How they managed to get out of there, what saved them, and by what miracle they avoided a Soviet prison – about these things they never spoke. As a rule, one did not speak with the two of them much about misfortune. In the home in which a son was lost in the war – Karlo’s grandson Mladen had died as a German soldier – the war was not spoken of. And never was how someone survived discussed. A story about such miracles of salvation only served to sadden those who had not experienced them.

  It was years after the war before it was possible to freely acquire passports and for the Stublers, their children, and grandchildren, to head once again toward Vienna. But Erwin was visiting his family in Sarajevo by 1951. And this is where the story would begin if it were possible. On the street, somewhere around Ilidža, he met a woman who looked as if she were not from this world. She looked that way to Erwin, but perhaps not to others. They told him she was a singer at the radio station. What was her name? Munevera Berberović.

  He returned to Vienna. He traveled by train across the devastated, destitute country, across the homeland of his eastern relations, and if until then he hadn’t understood them, if on any occasion he had thought that they were living for no reason in the obviously unhappy and pitiful country of Bosnia, from which they would one day have to leave, now his heart was torn as he returned home. Erwin Dussel could imagine the rest of his life clearly on that early fall day in 1951. He would live and die unfulfilled, and as pitiful as Bosnia, for something had happened to him that probably only happens in songs from that land: he had seen a woman, had not approached her, but instead set out on a journey away from her, and now could do nothing but think back to that first glimpse.

  He came again the next summer. And then again. And again. By 1954, before even the first Stubler could travel to Vienna after the Second World War, Erwin Dussel had settled in Sarajevo. There he lived a full three years, in Ilidža, employed by some architectural firm, but never would he learn our language. He understood it very well, but could not speak. He would be quiet, listening. And then he would say something in German. During those three years he painted hundreds of Bosnian watercolors. He painted landscapes and cityscapes of old Sarajevo. Typical of the genre paintings of European travelers to Bosnia. Erwin was probably one of the last such travelers.

  We didn’t know, nor would we discover, what the love story of Erwin Dussel and Munevera Berberović was like. He was silent about how they met, when they saw each other, what drew them apart. Free from the surrounding life, from all that was ugly and unpleasant, from complaints about differences of faith, nation, and language, from the gossip of loose-tongued neighbors, family scandals, children born out of wedlock and abortions, this love of theirs, until the end of the Stublers and Stubler memory – which took place with the death of the last one to remember Erwin and Munevera – evoked a strange inner light in anyone who recalled it. Though it didn’t last long and was ended by their own decision, it was a complete love. So complete as to be impossible to write about.

  Later Munevera Berberović went on to sing for our guest workers in Germany and Austria. But she never sang in Vienna. There was no anger or sorrow in this. Whenever she would meet Olga, Rudi, or Franjo in town, or when she met Javorka, who was still very young, her first question was always, how is my Erwin doing? And he would ask the same about her during every telephone conversation, at every meeting. But when he came to Sarajevo, he would not try to meet her. Everyone knew this, and no one tried to convince him otherwise.

  Rudi, Javorka, and my father Dobro traveled to Vienna in 1970. Rudi took them on a tour of the places of his youth. They went to southern Germany, visited Strasbourg, but Vienna was the most important. Here Rudi had studied, fallen in love, and, indeed, had an affair with his cousin, for which he was ashamed his whole life. Javorka and Dobro were no longer together, having officially divorced, but they pretended they were. Rudi would have liked things to be different. He wanted to get them back together. He was impressed by the fact that Dobro was a physician. Besides, he was a good man to have as a friend – kind, and it seemed he would be an ideal husband and father. Why this was not the case is a long story. It would take as long as telling how these two newly divorced people found themselves on such a trip that seemed more appropriate for newlyweds.

  Rudi convinced Erwin to meet at one of the cafés where he had caroused as a youngster. Even though forty-five years had passed, he would have been able to find his way around there with his eyes closed. He’d been a daily visitor. He knew Vienna better than Sarajevo. He was at home in Vienna.

  Erwin arrived. They had a beer together, then went to Erwin’s. A large, old Viennese structure in which he’d had an architect’s design studio built in the courtyard. Everything was very expensive and luxurious. Erwin was married to Monika, the daughter of a Swedish industrialist.

  He asked how their trip was. Javorka said she got lice on the train. We’ll fix that, Erwin said, laughing. And before they could run over to the pharmacy, for the best anti-lice medicine in the world, which Javorka would talk about to the end of her life, he asked, “How is Munevera?”

  There was nothing melancholy in the question. He did not ask as someone who had missed some opportunity in life or had lived in vain, not having returned to the woman he had fallen in love with. Erwin returned to Vienna, having lived out his love story with Munevera, and the fact that it wasn’t lifelong took nothing from the sense of fulfillment. Such a three-year love was enough for one person’s life.

  Munevera Berberović never married and did not live long. Her name is recalled from time to time in the newspapers. Her voice is preserved on audiotapes of Radio Sarajevo, and some of her pictures have even appeared on the Internet. When I listen to the tapes, I try to imagine the woman my distant relation Erwin Dussel fell in love with. I met him one summer in the midseventies, at my father’s vacation home on Trebević. On my way back, as always, I had a fever. The air in my father’s gray Renault 4 was a mixture of gasoline and Erwin’s cologne. They were discussing something heatedly in German. I didn’t understand them. I just wanted to get home as soon as possible. The fevers were short lived.

  The Croat

  For years I told her to collect the documents and submit her request. It would take at most one morning, and then she would be at peace. It was a precaution. She promised me she would today, then tomorrow, but both of us knew she wouldn’t. The one thing we weren’t sure about was why. Maybe during the years when she was in good health and all around there was peace, she just didn’t feel like going from office to office. In those first years after the war, Sarajevo had become her city, a little crazy, collapsed in on itself, intimate, just as she was crazy, collapsed, and happy, so much so that perhaps she could not imagine the conditions of misfortune and evil in which she would need Croatian citizenship. She was afraid it might be seen as a betrayal, as if she might tu
rn out to be some sort of traitor to herself by taking up that foreign passport and, along with it, like a school report card, that thing they called a certificate of domicile. Half of Bosnia and a good part of Sarajevo’s inhabitants, of different faiths and nations, had managed to acquire Croatian citizenship. Even President Silajdžić’s minister of foreign affairs had it, along with who knows how many others about whom we just didn’t know, but somewhere in a linen drawer, beneath their socks and underwear, they kept their Croatian documents. Everyone knew this, but still for some reason she resisted. She felt more secure with her one identity card and her long-since-expired passport of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Whenever anyone might say something to her, then she could tell them. That’s how she always began: whenever anyone says something to me…

  When she got sick, the question of the papers turned serious. She underwent one operation, then another, and it suddenly became almost certain that she would need to go to Zagreb. And so, at the moment in which her life was breaking down, she became a foreigner. Even though this wasn’t the first time she’d experienced it. Her parents had lived mostly as foreigners in Bosnia, her grandfather having been driven out of Dubrovnik to Bosnia as a foreigner; her brother had died as a soldier in a foreign enemy’s army; and all of life was the experience of one long foreign journey passed on from generation to generation. But only now did this fact hit her with all its intensity. Being a foreigner meant being a person whose right to existence was protected in some other place. Where was that place? In Sarajevo, the city where she was born, she did not want to get a Croatian passport unless someone said something to her. This is the sort of feeling that is experienced only by someone who feels herself a foreigner in her own city. And because she was a foreigner in Sarajevo, she was condemned to be a foreigner in Zagreb too.

  In the consular section of the embassy of the Croatian Republic in Sarajevo, on the fourth day of June 2012, a report with reference number 521-BIH-01/03-EP-12-02 was filed on the acquisition of Croatian citizenship. The report was begun at 1200 hours and completed at 1255. It was a Monday, a sunny, very pretty day of the sort that everyone knows comes along in May and June in Sarajevo, especially when a person is ill or separated by some other misfortune from the comforts of life all around. By then she was having a hard time getting around, but she had good people around her, male and female friends, cabbies from Mejtaš with whom she had maintained close ties since before the war. She knew them all by name, what their lives were like, how many children they had, their life’s main anguish, the one they told their first customer about every morning. As a rule, the people who lived on steep streets got close to their cabbies after the war. This surely had some connection to the affordability of the prices.

  What happened at fifty-five minutes after the hour in the Croatian consulate at 17 Skenderija Street? It would be easy to reconstruct, for everything is still fresh. We know it well. We know what she would have said at that moment, how she would have captivated the attention of her interlocutor as she took up her place at center stage. But the event itself is not important. More interesting is what was happening inside her head and soul, to which we no longer have access. More interesting is the part we cannot even surmise, no matter how well we knew her, and no matter how much we might recognize some of her motives within us today. How did she feel when she was giving her conscious assent to something she had avoided all those years? She was ill and wasn’t thinking about what someone else might say to her about all this. When she was getting her Croatian citizenship, she was feeling that I would be taking her away to Zagreb, to the best hospitals and the best doctors, who did not merely treat people but rather performed miracles. Sarajevo doctors treated people, sometimes even mistakenly, but in Zagreb there were miracles. And this would be hard without citizenship, because getting treatment in Croatia as a foreigner was as expensive as it was in Switzerland.

  The record of her declaration reads as follows:

  * * *

  —

  This request for the acquisition of Croatian citizenship is based on the fact of belonging to the Croatian people. On the occasion of this request I have compiled documents proving my and my family’s belonging to the Croatian nation. I declare that I am a Croat and that I feel myself to be such, which is clear from the attached declaration and its appendices. It can be concluded from my conduct that I observe the legal order of the Republic of Croatia. I know and employ the Croatian language. I follow cultural events in the Republic of Croatia. I have appended an original work notebook to this request, which I hope will be returned to me at the end of the process. Given that I have problems with my health, I was not in a position to collect additional documents to show that I have consistently self-identified as a Croat. All the appended documents show without a doubt both my heritage and my feeling of belonging to the Croatian nation. Until my retirement I worked at the university’s School of Education as director of the accounting department. I thank you in advance for this request.

  * * *

  —

  Kind people were with her. The first secretary at the embassy, who “entered the statement into the proceedings,” was kind too. But every time I read these words, I am overcome by a feeling of distress, which immediately turns to anger. Nothing ever changes this, despite the passage of time, and soon I would know by heart the pattern according to which the melody would rise or fall by half-tones upon each subsequent repetition in the theme and variations of her Croatianness before the institutions of a foreign country, before God, and especially before an entire lived life and that of several generations past.

  Was she lying? It depends on what one considers a lie. She was a Croat – this was known even by the Bosniak-Muslim poet who, in a drunken tirade outside the Dva Ribara restaurant ten months earlier, before the tumor was yet visible, cursed out her son by referring to his Ustaše mother – and when she spoke of feeling herself to be and self-declaring as a Croat, she touched on her own feelings of guilt. She had not sought out this Croatian citizenship for such a long time precisely because she felt guilty for having a right to it.

  When did she become a Croat? Perhaps it was the moment when her uncle Rudolf Stubler had the death certificate of his father Karlo made. It was April 1951 and the time of hardline Yugoslav communism, Sarajevan “brotherhood and unity.” When the clerk asked for the nationality of the deceased, fear washed over Rudi telling him to be cautious. Opapa was dead, he didn’t care anymore. He said – Croatian. Thus did his father, a German throughout his life, become a Croat upon death. There were Croats among her ancestors, and there were other emotional, cultural, and faith-based reasons why a kuferaš in the Sarajevo of the day might have felt herself to be a Croat, but her Croatianness was marked by the Stubler shame. In 1945 the Partisans were leading Karlo off to a concentration camp as a member of the German minority when he was saved by his Serbian neighbors from Kasidol in Ilidža. Here six years later he had become a dead Croat.

  Everything in her family that was unhappy and accursed, everything confused, left out, foreign, and rotten, was Croatian. Croatia had made its appearance a year before her birth. Croatia had dressed her brother in a German uniform. And then Croatia had killed him, disappearing from Sarajevo in 1945 and leaving her to live with her Croatianness. So, really, who could better belong to the Croatian nation than she?

  She had been a member of the Slovene cultural society Ivan Cankar. Through her work there, she could have acquired Slovene citizenship from her Slovene father, who had actually once been an Italian citizen as he was a native of Kneža near Tolmin. She’d spoken the language a little, having attended some courses and made friends. Just as she had made friends with the members of the Croatian mountain climbers club. She had a good singing voice and was a good storyteller. On one broadcast of Radio Vrhbosna she told the story – in a quite thrilling manner – of the fate of a certain German family in Sarajevo…

  She was in no way lying before the offici
als at the consulate when she repeatedly claimed her Croatianness, she was just silent on certain points. Many people are silent on certain points when they claim citizenship, or they attempt to boil down their various kinds of belonging to just one. She had no one before whom to pronounce this final truth, which I will pronounce once more in her place. Everything in her family that was unhappy and accursed, everything confused, left out, foreign and rotten, everything born in Sarajevo only to disappear from Sarajevo, was Croatian.

  How difficult this sentence was for her: I have appended an original employment record book to this request, which I hope will be returned to me at the end of the process. Still today, somewhere in some drawer of the consular section on Skenderija, sits her little workbook with its gray canvas cover and the embossed coat of arms of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the chimneys from which smoke constantly winnows. The day awaits when it will be tossed out and recycled with the other documents that have reached their expiration date, with the old registries and files, the last remnants of the pre-computer age. Although she didn’t work a single day of her forty years in the labor force in Croatia, this document will be destroyed along with the historical memory of her dedication when a Croatian institution determines that it should be.

  And a second sentence: I follow cultural events in the Republic of Croatia. All the rest is simply filling out a form, using repeated phrases that others have uttered countless times around her, but this sentence is completely hers. Who else would say that they follow the cultural events in Croatia while asking for citizenship? But not even she, someone who really was interested in culture, wanted to say that. She wanted to say something else. Something that could not be put into the record but in which she had the greatest hope. She wanted to mention her son and did it by means of this unusual allusion. She believed he would help her.