Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Veliki Park’s fourth side is bordered by such a tiny, unattractive little street that its name has not even been touched, though it’s located right in the center of town, where the names of streets, and sometimes those of living people, most frequently and happily get altered. Franjo Rejc never took it because it didn’t lead anywhere. Trampina was a dead-end street named after the Trampas family, of whom there aren’t any anymore, the family that, Alija Bejtić writes, provided the khatibs and imams for the Čekrekčija Mosque at the base of Kovači, which was built by the same Muslihidin Čekrekčija who separated off the land for this cemetery.

  Like Mustafa Golubić, Hajji hafiz Abdulatif Trampa was a brave man, and just as alone amid the great European upheavals and rebellions. He was one of the unfortunates who in the summer of 1878 decided to defend Sarajevo against the forces of Baron Josip Filipović. Those days are described, though not the fate of Abdulatif Trampa, by Ivo Andrić in his story of Mara the favorite wife, one of his most beautiful and most impressive prose works, which even today has more of Sarajevo in it than do all of our memories or anything else on earth, but about him, about this last offspring of the Trampa line, someone ought to write at least a story.

  After the rebellion had been crushed, Abdulatif was not killed but was instead handed over for perhaps even greater suffering. He served time in the Olomouc prison, in Moravia, for many years, returning to Sarajevo only when the young shoots in Veliki Park were beginning to take root.

  After the war, a taxi might take you down Trampina, which wasn’t a dead end anymore, driving quickly like on any other street, past the Park Café. And it seemed to you it was all too fast, the road ran right through the dead end, and its history too, and ultimately would be forgotten. By taking this route, from the Obala Vojvode Stepe across Radićev and toward Marshal Tito, then across that wide sidewalk, then down Trampina, then to the right past the old Sloga printing shop and over to Dalmatinska, the cabbies avoided the busy traffic and the eternal delays on Kulovića, as if by their driving they were trying to make up lost time for themselves and for their passengers. But a person gains nothing by rushing down Trampina so fast that he arrives at his destination without uttering the name of Hajji hafiz Abdulatif Trampa.

  Hugo Krvarić’s accomplishment has lasted like little else in Sarajevo. Buildings have been destroyed, Austro-Hungarian villas have burned in the many wars, Turkish homes of adobe have fallen apart amid the centuries of rain, hotels have come down and department stores have risen up in their places, one after another. The face of the city has been made uglier more often than more attractive, to the point that for many both its face and the city itself have disappeared. The Trampases have died out, as have the Krvarićs, but Veliki Park has miraculously remained. Except the bench where one might wait for the start of fall around Velika Gospa, that short beautiful moment in the year when Sarajevo has its reason for being, and when it seems to the kuferaš families that they were rewarded by God, and by the king and emperor – our Franz Joseph – when he sent them to this place.

  The bench is about twenty meters lower now, not where it used to be. But if you know where to look, it’s easy to find the right spot. You can stand there or crouch down to wait for what will one day come to us all.

  Marshal Tito Street: Dream and Memory

  If you were able to describe the streets that occupy your dreamscape clearly enough, you’d start dreaming of a different place in the end, a different city. However simple this idea might seem, it’s extremely bold. It’s hard to describe a city from memory, and with each detail, each street corner and facade, the place is awakened to such a degree as to be erased from your mind. It is a grand undertaking, which could last to the end of one’s life. So it’s better to give up and accept the fact that, as if by some curse, dreams unfurl where you can no longer be, where you are no longer allowed to be.

  Your world, the layout of memory, extends evenly outward along a hand-drawn line, a bit crooked because the draughtsman didn’t use a ruler, from Marijin Dvor to Varoš, where it joins and disappears into the bustle, clamor, and shop windows of Baščaršija. In waking life too, but especially in your dreams, everything else you saw in Sarajevo and in all your future cities, including Zagreb, where you’ve lived the longest, tries to shape and model itself after this one freely drawn line. Zagreb’s Ilica, which is much longer and more meandering, with its narrow sidewalks, constrained road, and the two sets of tram tracks, is in dreams an imitation of this Sarajevo landscape, which was officially called Marshal Tito Street. Tito has completely covered over and swallowed up Ilica, just as it does all other streets, real or imagined, those that once existed and those that will one day come into being.

  It begins at the very edge of the city. Everything beyond it is a sort of suburb, alongside which a new town has sprung up. To one side, where the Holiday Inn stands, until not long ago, the 1970s, was the circus grounds. I suppose there are some who still call it that – people with blinders on who haven’t noticed that some buildings and high-rises have gone up there with the yellow Straussean cube sculptures in the middle, or those who were driven from Sarajevo so long ago and with such fixedness that from their New York, Belgrade, or Vienna perspectives they can see nothing but the empty circus grounds where over some spring night a tent might materialize. An enormous, yellow-and-white-striped tent of the sort that held Sarajevo’s first large movie screenings in 1903 and 1904. In those few seasons the cinema was more of a marvel than the circus.

  On the other side of the street that leads into the world, across from the circus grounds, where the parliament and executive council buildings have risen up, once long ago there was a Muslim Eid prayer site, or Musala. It was out in the open, with an optional mihrab and minbar, used for large gatherings that could not be accommodated inside the mosque. This Musala was an open-air mosque in Ottoman times, with the highest vault in the world, bounded by the hills of Sarajevo, an invisible mosque at the entrance to the city.

  Here, in times of ancient glory, soldiers would bow down before departing for distant battlefields.

  To one side the circus grounds, to the other the Musala.

  These two spots are clearly visible from the windows of the building where the city begins. You have never been inside this building or looked out from those windows, but you can imagine what it’s possible to see from them.

  This is where that line you were talking about begins, to the right side of the building and a bit lower down, at the door to Auntie Doležal’s entrance way. It’s not completely straight as it is drawn freehand. This is where Tito Street begins.

  The route that now runs from the turn into an important little street that bears the name King Tvrtko to Koševski Potok, where Tito grows somewhat wider and more refined, turning into the main street of a city, there was once a street called Gornja Hiseta. At the end of the Turkish era and before the Austro-Hungarian one, when Marijin Dvor was built, this was a sad, peripheral quarter that would disappear with the first wave of modernizing and Europeanizing initiatives under Franz Joseph.

  The poor of Sarajevo were not clearly separated from the well-off. That was true in your own time there as well. Unlike Zagreb and Belgrade, Sarajevo did not have its own residential districts, so everyone lived on top of each other as if in some sort of a Gypsy settlement. Sarajevo was no metropolis, for a metropolis has its Versailles and its favelas, while what Sarajevo had was the compactness of a provincial Turkish town. The last to raise a monument to this culture of mixture, after Samokovlija and Andrić had already described it earlier, was Emir Kusturica, who mythologized the Gorica of his youth.

  And so Gornja Hiseta did have its wealthier and even perhaps prettier side. In those same Turkish times, one of the wide streets that led toward the center of town was called Podmagribija, or “Lower Magribija,” after the tiny, nimble district where the Magribija Mosque was located, which swelled up like a little tumor outside town. Here, across the
street from the mosque, was an office of the Privredna Banka, where you would open the first bank account of your life. You would come here regularly until the war to verify whether you had been paid your royalties. And this was where, when the war began, you forgot about several thousand Yugoslav dinars or less, not very much money, paid to you for the rights to publish some of your poems, translated into Hungarian, in a magazine in Vojvodina. That money slipped away, spilling into a crack in time, and disappeared. It would be interesting to follow its disappearance as the last bureaucratic trace of it was erased…During the war, from the fall of 1992 to its final spring, you would see heaps of savings account passbooks, which the soldiers had thrown out the windows of emptied-out offices, usually of former banks, where their staffs were headquartered. In that first year of wartime enthusiasm, Sarajevo was filled with headquarters. The discarded passbooks contained our stylized prewar biographies. Lives transformed into money streams, people rendered metaphorically through savings accounts. The history of each savings account is one human history, which of course ought to be written down. However many of those passbooks were turned into garbage, their contents remained precious. You were not aware of it, but your entire prewar life was transformed into heaps of garbage that would soon become precious.

  Without recontructing the contents of those passbooks, without that persistent sifting through of the garbage, the landscape of your dreams will never change.

  The short but very wide thoroughfare from Koševski Potok to Veliki Park, which in Turkish times had the width of a square, was called Gazilerski Way. It was named after two heroes, or gazija, Ajan and Šems, from the early days of Sarajevo, whose memory wandered and changed over many years among the songs of the people until in the end it disappeared completely.

  If you went on from there, you often crossed over, from the descent of King Tomislav Street, then along Tito, beside the Parkuša, along the walkway that covers the distance from the old Oslobođenje printers, beside the traffic from the Belgrade-based Politika, a large, luxurious toy store, the Olomom sweets shop, and the Narodna Banka, all the way to Čeka, the spot where Dalmatinska finally led down into town. That part of Tito Street was called the žabljak, or “frog pond.”

  Here until the arrival of Austria-Hungary was the Hadži Idrisov Quarter, where it appears the people were neither happy nor well-off. The morass of the žabljak was in fact a place for the poor. It was from this quarter, as might be imagined from its nickname, that epidemics of a variety of diseases spread through Sarajevo, as did the misery of the people who found refuge in the swampy backwater among the frogs and tadpoles, a fact the neighbors mocked by giving the quarter its nickname. It was probably only in July and August, during the hottest, driest time of the year, that one could live normally here.

  The frog-infested swamps arose out of Buka Creek, which before the Austro-Hungarian regulation of all the Sarajevo waterways, emptied down the course of Dalmatinska Street, while up in the hills above, you recall, it was known by a different name, Kevrin Creek.

  There may be no stream in the entire world that had less water in it, but still this one had two names: closer to the source it was Kevrin, and farther down, Buka.

  It was such a poor little creek that it didn’t have the strength to cut its way through and flow down into the Miljacka. Instead, as it came downhill it trickled off into the frog swamps. Which you remember as the most beautiful part of Tito Street. The part of the city that etched itself into your mind such that you cannot read the word city, any city, experienced for the first time, without thinking of it like Tito Street between Parkuša and Dalmatinska, and a little farther down, toward the Eternal Flame.

  After crossing Dalmatinska, you can continue without looking where you’re going. Your eyes closed, the pebble stuck in the sole of your right shoe tapping against the stones, you point with your raised left arm, while all around you there is no one, for everything is empty in dreams, and all are dead: the Café Unima, shop windows filled with gray, embarrassing socialist clothing, from the time when everyone was running off to Trieste for skirts and jeans, or to the commission shop on Vaso Miskin; the courtyard with Café Lisac in it, where you never went because it was a metaphor, not a real place, having sprung up on the spot where the photographer Ivica Lisac had his studio. All the black-and-white photos of the Rejc and Stubler families were taken with his photographic equipment. Nono, as he crossed the square in front of the theater, smiling at the familiar eye looking at him through the lens. Nono in 1942 in the middle of Ferhadija Street. The only remaining picture of his eldest son Mladen, killed in 1943, taken in one of the classrooms of the gymnasium – Nona destroyed all the others, but this one was hidden away in a book, so she didn’t find it – and all our other lost, destroyed, and living pictures, taken in Sarajevo before 1945.

  Lisac was a friend of Nono’s. It was with Lisac that he carried on his conspiratorial discussions regarding politics. The two of them would sit in the dark room, Ivica fussing with his developing agents. and they could speak freely about what they otherwise would not have.

  My grandfather Franjo Rejc was not an especially brave man, but he liked to gossip. Ivica Lisac was eloquent but not chatty. He looked at the world through pictures, not ideas. He was horrified when he saw a photo of a demolished Jewish shop taken somewhere in Germany in Belgrade’s Politika. He said it would not turn out well. Later, when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, it was to Ivica Lisac that Nono first uttered the phrase that would be repeated for years: “That idiot will lose the war!” Lisac probably glanced at his as yet unsmashed displays when he responded, “But we will no longer be around then…”

  They both survived Hitler’s defeat, but Ivica Lisac was in a sense correct that neither of them were there anymore.

  It was at Lisac’s shop that Franjo Rejc listened to the soccer broadcast of the 1952 summer Olympics from Tampere, Finland. Emir Kusturica masterfully threaded this match through the finale of his film When Father Was Away on Business. Fifteen minutes before the end, Yugoslavia was leading five to one, but the Soviets came back to tie it. Those four goals changed history. Yugoslavia found itself at Stalin’s feet but in the rematch rose up to win three to one. Ivica Lisac cut out a sketch by Zuko Džumhur from Politika, framed it, and hung it on a wall in his shop. Deathly furious, Stalin sits propped on his elbows, holding his forehead. Beside him is a radio split open with an ax.

  What would it be like for you to go into the café that replaced his photography studio? Though you were born at a time when Ivica Lisac had begun to shut the doors of his shop, and in your youth, until the beginning of the war, people were going to the café that his son Damir kept, and the place had become important in the lives of the people of Tito Street, for you the time before your birth was what mattered.

  Here amid the violet light of the darkroom Franjo Rejc sat on a wooden stool, blowing out a puff of smoke, furiously pronouncing, “That idiot will lose the war!” And Ivica Lisac answered a little absentmindedly as he fished a picture out of the developing tray with a pair of wooden tongs: “But we will no longer be around then…” Later, you would no longer be around either.

  The Landesbank building, which when you were growing up was the Social Services building, in front of which burns the Eternal Flame – in memory of the city’s liberators in 1945 – divided the street like a split end into Vaso Miskin, which turned to the right, and Tito, which continued to the left. This part of Tito Street, all the way to the Gazi Husrev-beg baths, was the famous Ćemaluša: a street and a quarter in which people lived better and more joyfully than in the morass of the Hadži Idrisov Quarter, and where the culture and literature of the constrained Turkish provincial backwater would be born, at a time when that backwater was being transformed into the easternmost Habsburg city.

  During your childhood the notorious Hamam Bar was located at the Gazi Husrev-beg baths. On Sepetarevac people called the Hamam Bar a bordello. This was what the
worried mothers of boys entering adolescence said, as well as strict female teachers who saw Hamam Bar as a place of corruption for socialist youth, a place where the soul was sold to the devil, a place of waywardness for all men and some women. The Hamam Bar was like a sink that someone had once left unstopped overnight such that all of Sarajevo was being sucked down into the pipes to disappear. There would be nothing left in the morning.

  This was how the apocalypse was imagined on Sepetarevac in the midseventies.

  Blessed are those who died before 1992, certain that Sarajevo would become something resembling Hamam Bar. Even hell was beautiful to those who only imagined evil.

  From the baths to Abdulah Efendi Kaukčija Lane, the street was called “Beyond the Baths.”

  And after that began Varoš, the Serbian part of town, with the old Orthodox church at its center. On a small bit of the facade that still holds together on an outside wall of one building, though it seems it could fall away with the next downpour, there is a prewar ad for the Uglješa Cucić distillery. Once this facade is no more, and the name of Uglješa Cucić has disappeared, so too will pass the remembrance of the Serbs of Varoš, leaving only the old church, as a souvenir of something that ceased to exist long ago. Souvenirs, souvenirs, souvenirs…

  The line you are discussing was first drawn after the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. It was then that Tito Street became one. On November 4, 1914, while the Austrian troops were pressing across the Drina in a punitive expedition, and the Great War’s glorious battles were in preparation, the most beautiful part of Tito Street was named after the assassinated crown prince, the extension after the duchess Sophie, and the part from the baths to the bazaar after the provincial governor, Oskar Potiorek.