Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  In spring 2007, I moved with my partner to a house in a village on a hill from which, some twenty kilometers away, one can see Zagreb. I had never lived in a village, and all that silence surprised me. As did the neighbor’s neurotic rooster, which would begin crowing at about one in the morning. Here I found a sort of peace in which everything was different from all my previous life in the apartments I’d passed through, closing the door for the last time – in most of them – without the slightest regret.

  We inhabited our house without any conception or knowledge of the strategy of making order out of a living space. We established our household, and continued to establish it, slowly, one little thing at a time, whim by whim.

  Let me describe the workroom in the attic, so you might begin to understand what I’m trying to say. Against the wall, opposite the window that looks out on Zagreb, there is an extended couch covered in green leather; an attractive replica of an ottoman from the thirties. To the right of it, across the whole wall, stretches a bookcase, handmade by the craftsman Milivoj. Against the wall to the left side of the couch, one next to the other, stands a secessionist chest of drawers, which my friend Vojo brought from Sweden, and a Biedermeier writing desk with an accompanying chair of the sort that not so long ago was found in nearly all of our city’s homes. There were big desks for big, rich halls, smaller ones, still smaller ones, and then the smallest of all. Ours is among the latter.

  Next to the desk there’s a wall and a window. On the wall there’s a photograph of Sarajevo’s main street in 1937. When I am trying to remember something while writing or just daydreaming, I look at that picture. That past is my home as well, even if I didn’t experience it firsthand. It’s one of the reasons I write: I can take up residence in a time when I physically did not exist. Above this photo is a portrait of my grandfather Franjo Rejc, sketched in 1942 on the back of a “Traffic Notes” form of the Croatian state railroad. It was drawn by Ico Voljevica, the school friend of Franjo’s son, my deceased uncle Mladen; Ico was then a Sarajevo high school student and later became a Zagreb cartoonist. Below it is a photo of the stećak necropolis of Radimlja near Stolac, with a little donkey grazing next to it. Tošo Dabac took this picture in the fifties. A little farther down, at my eye level, hangs a linocut, the third of twenty printed sheets entitled From the Woods of Bosnia.

  The last time we were in Belgrade, we went into an antique shop on Knez Mihailova Street, where we go regularly. We were looking at the books and plastic-coated topographical maps, panoramas of cities from the nineteenth century, photographs of King Alexander and the Karađorđević family, clippings from Viennese fashion magazines, and other such things that look nice and aren’t expensive to frame. Flipping through the pages, two sheets protected in a plastic envelope jumped out at me, I recognized the signature from my childhood, from school trips to the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina – Daniel Ozmo.

  Daniel Ozmo, a Sephardic Jew born in 1912 in Olovo, near Sarajevo, was a painter and intellectual of the Left. He sketched and painted landscapes from his native region, certain of the mission and meaning of socially oriented art. He had a divine gift for seeing what was important and leaving a clear trace of it on paper. He was sent to the Jasenovac concentration camp in 1942 and killed.

  Daniel Ozmo does not have a home of his own, and his paintings are worth very little to those who have a homeland. To me they are priceless.

  Mejtaš: Description of a Place

  Mejtaš is a square above the city. One can see Sarajevo from it, or what Sarajevo was in the 1970s and ’80s. It got its name from the square stone on which the coffin was laid during Muslim funerals. A mejtaš is a stone for the dead.

  But the graveyard was not here on the spot where you’re standing. It was located on the hill slope to the left, at the top of which they built the Scouts Association building and the observatory. Several tombstones are preserved there even during our own day. But the mejtaš themselves have been missing for a long time, and it is not known what happened to them. Probably they were broken up into smaller stones and used for the walls of houses.

  Mejtaš extends width-wise from Mehmed Pasha Sokolović Street to Nemanjina. You get to this square on a hill by way of Mahmut Bušatlija Street, which everyone calls by its old name, Dalmatinska. The narrow Ivan Cankar Street runs parallel with Mehmed Pasha, emptying onto the square and sharing a corner with Miladin Radojević Street. Parallel with that runs Ahmet Fetahagić and beyond that, turning counterclockwise, is another little street called Mile Vujović. This leads to Mejtaš by about twenty steps and then a passageway through an apartment building, which was built in the fifties or sixties and has a supermarket on the ground floor. Then comes Nemanjina Street, then after that Mustafa Golubić.

  When you were growing up here in the seventies, at the top of Dalmatinska there was a small pumping station for fuel oil that had two pumps, one of which was always broken. Oil was cheap in those years, or heat pumps had become popular, so most of the Mejtaš area was heated using oil. It was purchased in plastic canisters of five, ten, twenty, and twenty-five liters. Whole families usually came out: the girls carried the five-liter containers, the boys the ten-liter, while mothers brought the twenty-liter ones and fathers the twenty-five. Sometimes they had to wait in line up to half an hour before they could fill up.

  It would often happen that winter arrived overnight in the middle of September, the weather turning suddenly cold, and no one had bought fuel in time. Early the next morning, before work, at six or six thirty, the families would come down the hill toward Mejtaš with their containers. The fathers would cough, a cigarette between their lips, the mothers would keep their kids together along the street, and the sounds of empty plastic containers knocking against each other to the rhythm of the children’s step would make their way through the closed windows to the sleeping people. It was the sound of fall.

  When things were good and frozen in winter and Miladin Radojević Street was like a polished iced-over luge track, it took skill to carry the containers up to the top.

  It was probably at the beginning of the eighties, when the world was suffering from yet another oil crisis and the price had gone up, that the people went back to wood and coal, and in the lead up to the 1984 Olympics, Sarajevo was at last completely converted to natural gas. After Tito’s death there were few heat pumps left in the city.

  Two prodigious poplars, sprouted long ago during the time of the Ottomans, grew above the pumping station. They could have been planted by some pauper who looked after the graveyard for a living. Or perhaps it had been some young people who were running around near the Dudi-bulina Mosque, having a great time whipping each other’s bare legs with the thin, flexible switches. They toughened themselves up this way, growing up into future loafers, outlaws, and arsonists, or future janissaries who would defend the empire’s borders and perish in Galicia, Slavonia, and Hungary, defending the land from Christians and infidels. And when they had whipped each other enough, when it was time for evening prayers, without thinking what they were doing that spring day, they drove the switches into the warm, damp earth. And the two enormous poplars sprouted from those switches, healthy and strong, and during summer storms they would often be struck by lightning. It was said they attracted the lightning because they surely grew atop a good water vein.

  Toward the end of the Mejtaš oil pumping station’s history, the poplars began to dry up. Probably the weak cement tank sprang a leak, the ground was saturated with oil, and the two impressive trees were poisoned. The utilities people came with trucks one summer at the beginning of the eighties and spent a long time cutting them down, days and weeks. When we came back from the seaside, the view was empty and deserted, like the mouth of a toothless man. The poplars were no more. Their story was gone too. The children who grew up near Mejtaš in those years are now in their thirties and do not remember that poplars used to grow there. Those poplars exist in the subconsciou
s of our elder brothers and fathers. They will sprout again on Judgment Day.

  One other poplar still stands at the summit of Ahmet Fetahagić Street. Enormous and magnificent, an Ottoman monument, it is a tombstone among the trees.

  One day at the end of May last summer, it was clear and sunny without a cloud in the sky, then suddenly in the course of a half hour the sky grew dark, and lightning struck the top of that poplar, burning out all the appliances in the neighborhood. It killed my mother’s computer, though she could no longer sit at it anyway. A technician came and took it away for repair, so it would be there should she get better. The computer was returned ten days later, fixed. She had died meanwhile and would never turn it on again. Lightning would never strike our poplars again, for we would no longer be there.

  The largest, most beautiful house on Mejtaš, which stands between Mehmed Pasha Sokolović and Ivan Cankar, is a gray, two-story building with plaster decorations in the shape of a menorah and the script of King David. This was one of the seven Sarajevo synagogues, Kal di la Bilava, which was built by one of the Sephardic charity organizations for its own use shortly after the arrival of Austria-Hungary.

  At that time, across the way, where the supermarket is today, the Dudi-bulina Mosque still stood. It was old and rundown, a humble mosque without cultural or historical value, but important in the life and standing of one of the city’s quarters. Later it suffered in fires several times, decaying further until, probably during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, it disappeared.

  The synagogue remained here until the Second World War. Then the Jews of Sarajevo, one name after another, moved to the other side of the Miljacka, to a beautiful, sad monument in Vraca. We were taught in school that the Ustaše and Germans killed them, but the pitiful truth is that Sarajevo’s Jews suffered among other things from the great love of their neighbors too.

  In the seventies, the former synagogue was used for city services and apartments for the poor. One boy named Slavenko, who was two years older than us, had a window above which there was Hebrew script carved into the frame.

  There is a telephone pole on the corner of Ivan Cankar Street, in front of the synagogue, where death notices were put up with pins. There were notices in green, black, and, saddest of all, blue. The green ones were Muslim, the black were Christian and atheist, with a red five-point star, and the blue were for young people.

  An elongated building constructed during Austro-Hungarian times stands between Miladin Radojević and Ahmet Fetahagić. The entrance gate leads to a ground-level apartment where my school friend Behadin, the son of the old white-bearded hajji, lived with his many brothers and sisters. To the left of the gate, by Behadin’s windows, was a cobbler’s workshop, where everyone had their shoes repaired or their soles rubberized. The grocery Aljo was in front of the cobbler’s place. While it was under so-called collective ownership and belonged to a company from Kiseljak, the shop was identified with its managers. Aljo was a graying, skinny man in a blue workcoat who had all the best fruits and vegetables, better than those of any of the other grocers in the area. Or was this merely believed to be the case on Mejtaš? Perhaps across Sarajevo in those years people believed their own greengrocer had all the best produce in town?

  You went to Aljo to buy things and to stand around. The Markale market was a once- or twice-a-week destination, usually on Fridays for storing up, but people went to Aljo every working day, for a kilogram of apples, two or three carrots, some okra…The standing was done by women in housecoats, with kerchiefs on their heads and plastic pink and blue curlers poking out, and also by a variety of men collecting early disability pensions: depressives, moderate alcoholics, low-level clerks with kidney ailments. They talked with Aljo about their health, complaining about how the prices kept rising on “store-bought goods,” as the people who had moved from economically depressed areas said. At the grocer people recounted the most harmless bits of gossip – who had died, who had moved away, who had broken a leg on the ice, and they would learn how some former neighbor had written from the distant part of the world where he had moved to long before, from Alipašino polje across town, or from Belgrade or California. It didn’t matter from where, because at the time it was enough to move from Mejtaš to Alipašino polje for years to pass between meetings and decades between visits back to Mejtaš.

  Sarajevo was a city that had since olden times reached downward toward its own narrow river valleys. All of it was uphill, you got winded even just thinking about how high up Podhrastovi was, where there was only Sedrenik Street and Jarčedoli, so people as a rule didn’t go back to the part of town they had moved away from. They didn’t have anything to go looking for there, and no one strolled uphill because it wasn’t strolling, it was mountain climbing, and why would anyone go mountain climbing around town? At least this was how it was in the seventies and eighties. I don’t know how it is today. Back then everything we needed – schools, banks, shops, clinics – were located in our own valley.

  The supermarket opened at the beginning of the seventies. Grand, light, and luxurious, with cashiers sporting new hairdos and work coats that were white as snow. They looked like doctors. About a hundred meters farther on, at the start of Nemanjina Street, the first mini-market opened soon after that. They called it a mini-market when it was larger than a bodega but smaller than a supermarket. The first news kiosk was placed in front of the supermarket in the early eighties.

  A phone booth stood at the corner of Mehmed Pasha Sokolović, beside the synagogue. It was an elongated glass box, at first with a black telephone apparatus in it and a fat phone book that looked like a muffed-up encyclopedia. In the seventies it took coins for calls, and when the economic crisis started a little before Tito’s death, bringing inflation with it, you needed to buy round metal tokens with a hole in the middle. These were later changed to plastic, and then at the end of the eighties phone cards began to appear. Then there were no more phone booths. In place of them were Plexiglas sheets that barely covered the caller. Phone books too had disappeared by then.

  Let’s glance once more and for the last time at all seven of Mejtaš’s streets. Standing in the middle of the square with our backs to the main part of town. The traffic is light with barely a car in sight and not even the taxi stand by the synagogue is there (it will come only at the end of the eighties). There are no traffic lights…

  Mehmed Pasha Sokolović is the oldest and the widest of the Mejtaš streets. It’s the first one to our right. It once connected Banjski Brijeg, or the Nalčadži Hadži Osmanova neighborhood, with the Dudi-bulina neighborhood, which is today’s Mejtaš. In the book Streets and Squares of Sarajevo, Alija Bejtić writes that Mehmed Pasha Sokolović was established in its current route probably for the first time in the sixteenth century. The hillside part was called “Banjski Brijeg” because it passed above the Gazi Husrev-beg bath, or banja. Bejtić writes that the street name was first used in 1931.

  Ivan Cankar is an old, poor street, with small houses made of adobe. These yellow bricks from unbaked clay have thawed out for centuries after every big rainfall but have not crumbled completely yet. A great part of Sarajevo, the oldest and most fateful, was made of mud. The stories told about this town by Isak Samokovlija and Ivo Andrić are stories of mud. One of Andrić’s stories takes place on Ivan Cankar Street, in Mejtaš, near the synagogue.

  Our Miladin Radojević Street was named after a Herzegovinian hero from Stolac, and there’s a nice story about him. An educated man, government official, and member of the then illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia, he organized an uprising on Mount Trebević. He died young, in fall 1941, in hand-to-hand fighting with the Ustaše near Kalinovik. The Ustaše buried him, but the villagers from Šivolji dug him up at night in secret and gave him an Orthodox funeral in their graveyard.

  This was where we moved in the summer of 1969.

  My grandfather Franjo Rejc lived here only three years. He died in the early fall of 1972
. But even during those three years we were only here in the summer, while winter, fall, and spring we lived in Drvenik. In those years, whenever he would come back from town by taxi – he had to come by taxi because of his asthma – and tell the driver his address, he would immediately know whether the man driving him was an old-timer or someone who had resettled in Sarajevo. At the mention of Miladin Radojević Street, an old-timer would respond quizzically, “Sepetarevac?”

  “Yes, Sepetarevac.”

  This was a memory. It was unusually important to my Nono that people remember. He had nothing against the ones who forgot or the ones who came from elsewhere, but it was important to him that there be those who did still remember around him, and he preferred getting that sideways glance from the cabbie who would ask: “Sepetarevac?” to just being driven in silence to Miladin Radojević Street. His life was a patchwork of memories. He had never had a house built for himself, never made a lot of money, nor had life brought him happiness. The present was for the most part sorrowful, the future, threatening. But the past was luxurious and rich with stories. So even the cabbies who knew to ask “Sepetarevac?” were important. They showed that they too remembered and that memory was important to them as well. They were his brothers in memory.

  A rivulet ran beside the Dudi-bulina Mosque that in the spring and fall became a torrent. But in the summer it must have been lovely, beside this shallow, living water, on Mejtaš, in the field, observing the city during Ramadan before lighting the lanterns. The stream was called Kevrin Creek on the hillside, but just a hundred paces farther down the named changed to Buka Creek. Kevrin came from the name Kevra, a famous tinsmith family that had lived somewhere nearby. In 1934 and 1935, during the city’s great communal rearrangements, when other Sarajevo streams were being covered over, such as Bistrik and Koševo, this little stream disappeared, too, and in its place a road was built that until just after the war was still called Kevrin Creek. The other part, below what had once been the cemetery and meadow, below the Scouts Association building, where the stream had been called Buka, would become Staka Skenderova Street.