Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  A beautiful, unusual construction.

  The Church of the Holy Transfiguration was designed in the thirties by the famous Belgrade architect Aleksandar Deroko. As a stylistic model he used the Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in Ras, the oldest church building in Serbia, which dates from the eighth century, meaning from pre-schismatic times. Its appearance evokes Mediterranean sacral architecture of the period and is reminiscent of the most ancient Armenian churches.

  Deroko of course did not want to make a replica, or through some coarse intervention – of the sort that today has become ordinary – make a larger version of the beautiful, harmonious little church. Instead he reinterpreted it. He used it as a theme – in the manner that Béla Bartók used traditional themes or Thomas Mann reinterpreted Holy Writ to make his story of Joseph and his brothers – and designed a completely new, fundamentally fascinating structure. What first strikes the onlooker – to the extent that she might be conscious of what she’s looking at – is how the architectonic idea behind it implies a consciousness of context, of all the buildings and traditions in the midst of which it finds itself. Here too could be the reason the church became the scene of my worst nightmares. For Sarajevo was not Deroko’s imagined context.

  Like in the miracles of holy books, folk legends, and Latin American novels, the Church of the Holy Transfiguration flew hundreds of kilometers from Split, where the stone foundation for Deroko’s structure had already been laid, to arrive here in Novo Sarajevo. The famous architect did not fight it or insist that the project be altered, but the church suddenly found itself outside its Mediterranean context, in a city where, as a new construction, it looked older than the church at Varoš, dedicated to the archangels Michael and Gabriel, which in our lives was known as the Old Orthodox Church at Baščaršija and was built in the sixteenth century on a much older foundation.

  The Second World War had been underway in Europe for a year, and that summer the Germans had trampled over France when, on September 8, 1940, the Church of the Holy Transfiguration was consecrated in Novo Sarajevo. The ceremony was conducted with many people in attendance, including the Orthodox bishop, guests from other faiths, and government representatives, and then followed by a great celebration. Everything still looked peaceful and time-honored then, especially in Sarajevo, as if world wars did not concern us, or – as would be the case some fifty years later – as if we were under the illusion that the reasons for which wars began had nothing to do with us, we were far away, beyond the world and its ways, and that’s why, with God’s help, the war would rumble past us.

  A year later everything would be different. As would everyone’s feelings. People quickly forgot all that they were thinking and hoping for before the war broke out. There were no longer any believers in Deroko’s church, nor would there be any until peace returned.

  Aleksandar Deroko had a long life. He died in 1988, on the eve of new wars, in the ninety-fourth year of his life. He had served as a Serbian corporal in the First World War, befriended Picasso and Le Corbusier in Paris at the end of the twenties, designed the Cathedral of Saint Sava in Belgrade (which was completed after the latest wars), and became a university professor. He was a well-known quick sketch artist: in tremulous, very precise lines he created portraits of buildings that in his drawings appeared to dance. He spoke engagingly about architecture on television shows. His houses were alive. It was as if the Church of the Holy Transfiguration was a living, breathing building.

  I didn’t know anything about architecture when the courtyard of his church became the stage for my nightmares. But I felt buildings the way any child does. That sensation, like everything innate and instinctive, is lost with growing up. The church in Novo Sarajevo was fatal because it was divided from all the other buildings, did not fit its surroundings, was distinct from the other buildings of Sarajevo. This is not about knowing but about feeling. Just as art, when it is successful, and architecture, when it is art, is more about feeling than knowing. Knowledge might help a person to understand what he is feeling. Or it might put him on the wrong track.

  In addition to being isolated from other buildings – company for such a church might be the Euphrasian Basilica of Poreč, which was built at the same time and with the same feeling as the little church in Ras – the Church of the Holy Transfiguration was quite animated. Its threatening nature emerged solely from this. The creations of Antoni Gaudí, especially the Sagrada Familia, would also act in a terribly threatening manner on a child, providing the perfect setting for nightmares, for Gaudí’s buildings are the most animated of all.

  Nightmares aspire to the elimination of the distinction between the living and the nonliving world. Everything comes to life. Everything leads to death.

  As chance would have it, during the time of this story the elder of the temple was one archpriest Jadran Danilović. His first name, which in our language signifies the name for the Adriatic Sea. An Adriatic church in the midst of Sarajevo. It is good to have this building today in my memory, just as it was once awful to dream it.

  Two Graveyards

  For years I entered Sarajevo by road, driving in the late afternoon when the shadows were long and narrow, like Giacometti figures of old men and concentration camp inmates. It’s like this in August. By November it is already dark, the mist and smog thick, the streetlights squint like in an Ivan Cankar novel, and everything is long since dead, though it’s the same hour it was in summer.

  I arrive from either of two directions, by the road through Rajlovac or the one through Vogošća. Either way, I pass by a graveyard. I circle the older one – in which the majority of the Stublers are buried – along a traffic loop that was built directly above the graveyard during the preparations for the Winter Olympics. The concrete half loop joins up with Sarajevo’s widest avenue, which leads to the center of town, narrowing and forking along the way, passing by Baščaršija and turning back along Tito Street. I circle almost the whole Catholic cemetery at Stup, looking at it from all angles, and just before the column of vehicles flows on toward the city, I recognize several humble old Stubler grave markers.

  From Vogošća and the village of Kobilja Glava, I pass by the glazed votive mosque, from a modern Bosniak benefactor, beside partially industrialized settlements that rose up in the sixties and seventies, during the time of targeted industry, the production of armaments, which were naïvely concealed beneath pressure-cookers that were probably produced in the same operation as artillery pieces, and proceed toward Bare.

  Novo Sarajevo’s Bare Cemetery was designed, built, and opened shortly after New Year’s Day in 1966. It was the first unified Sarajevo cemetery where, in separate, clearly demarcated sections, adherents of all faiths and life philosophies would be buried. It was designed by the architect Smiljan Klaić, while the murals along the porticoes and arcades of the Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, and Jewish chapels were painted by the Sarajevo artist Rizah Štetić. If it were ever possible to visit Bare for other than a mournful occasion, one could see the great patience and skill, cultured understanding, and respect with which Rizah Štetić carried out his assigned task. He was a good painter, a prewar Zagreb student of Maksimilijan Vanka, Vladimir Becić, and Marino Tartaglia, and a printmaker and sketch artist of Bosnian landscapes and genre scenes with a social orientation. He worked as a teacher at the School of Applied Arts. Quiet and withdrawn, disinclined towards the artistic fashions of the day, probably lacking in self-confidence, but with a powerful artistic and intellectual curiosity, this native Brčko painter is of importance in Sarajevo and Bosnia. The reason does not lie in his work but rather in his meager social ambitions, in the fact that he buried himself in provincial life without the least desire to measure up against the greats of Yugoslav painting. Štetić was an invisible painter, just as his murals on the burial chapels are invisible – burdened with burial ceremonies, we could never really see them.

  A website notes that “with thirty-thre
e hectares of surface area, Bare Cemetery is among the largest in Europe, while its terrain and landscaping make it one of the most interesting and beautiful of the large-scale resting places in this part of the world.” Sarajevo is not a large city. Neither was it large when the cemetery was built, nor was it anticipated that the city would grow significantly. Limited by the valley in which it emerged and by its position in the middle of Bosnia, Sarajevo is nevertheless as great as any city according to its number of dead and their disposition. The decision to recognize this fact through the construction of a great cemetery was in this regard quite rational. At Bare, in the world of the dead, Sarajevo grew mixed and unified for the first time in its history, perhaps only for a short period. Before Bare, every group had its own cemetery, the dead were kilometers apart from one another.

  A period of accommodation lasted from 1966, when Novo Sarajevo’s Bare Cemetery opened, until the beginning of the seventies, during which the authorities obliged people, mostly by repressive means, to be buried together in the historic unity to which survivors would proudly refer, mostly in conversation with tourists. All the Muslim graves thus came down from the hillsides above the city to be collected here, in the central and largest parcel, while the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox graves, were displaced from Koševo, their traditional resting place since Austro-Hungarian times. At the beginning, it was still possible for people who had leased plots or held family tombs to be buried at Saint Mihovil’s, Saint Josip’s, and Saint Mark’s, but in 1971 this was forbidden, and everyone needed to be buried at Bare.

  At the time when your Nono was buried here in October 1972, Bare was still almost completely empty, so your people had easily acquired a plot some two hundred meters from the entrance, just a short walk during which the old men in the funeral procession did not even get tired. Two plots were purchased at the time, and there was a consultation about whether a family crypt should be built, instead of leaving Nono in the raw yellow clay, where, if everything went according to plan, Nona would lie beside him.

  A crypt is a small, underground room, made of stone or concrete, usually with six niches, for six caskets. It belongs to the Christian, mostly Catholic and Mediterranean tradition, and is linked by name to a family. As a rule, crypts are familial, often bearing the name of the person who built them, the family patriarch, and in the six caskets many more than six people are kept, for there is always a body that has completely decomposed, having turned to dust, with only a couple of solid hip bones, an open-jawed skull, and a few stray vertebrae remaining…All this is put to the side for the varnish and lacquer of a new coffin, where a body will need twenty, thirty, sometimes as many as fifty years to reduce down to two solid hip bones, a skull with a few black fillings, a spine breaking into vertebrae, into the gravel and stones at the beach in Drvenik…

  Nono lay in the clay as these conversations about graves and crypts were going on, when Nona at last decided – they would not be building any crypt! But not because building one would be outrageously expensive, or because, already by that point in 1972, it was hard to see the sense in a family crypt given our family’s ever-shrinking size, one could sense the day when none of us would be left in Sarajevo, and those six sepulchral niches would be too many for us. It was not this that was on Nona’s mind. It was having seen, several years before, in a flooded open crypt in Stup, the remains of someone’s life floating in the water. She looked into it and was told that Bare was located on a pronounced floodplain and her crypt, too, would quite probably be constantly under water.

  She did not believe in life beyond the grave, felt that death was the end, and ultimately had no one to confess to that June 6, 1986, but at the same time she had a very unusual attitude toward the destiny and decay of her body after death. She was horrified by the thought that she might be swimming around in her coffin as in some kind of Noah’s ark, rotting like the bodies Nono had seen floating down the Sava near Slavonski Brod – many years would pass before he realized that Brod was downstream from Jasenovac and that those were the bodies of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, or Croats who had been faithful to brotherhood and unity among peoples…She wanted no crypt. It was more convenient, more humane, to disintegrate into the earth, she thought. But one other thing made her uncomfortable: she had a fear of suffocation, and one cannot breathe underwater. Even dead, she would need air, and in the earth she would still have that. Beyond this, thank the Lord she did not believe in, she didn’t know that fourteen years later she would be suffocated by a tumor in her throat.

  Thus was it decided that Nono would not be disturbed and disinterred for the construction of a crypt but that she too would be buried in the ground and in the meantime a nice, recumbent, two-part grave marker would be constructed.

  It is in black stone, with Nono on the right and, since 1986, Nona on the left. She asked to be lowered, when she died, carefully into the grave, for the marble frame was narrow. The grave diggers should be well compensated so that she would not, God forbid, be placed upside down. She was not indifferent, even if she did not believe there was anything left anymore.

  After her death, the next time I would come to this grave was after the death of Franjo and Olga’s daughter – my mother. In the meantime, I did not visit for a full twenty-six years. I saw the graveyard from a distance, driving toward town along the Vogošća road, and it seemed to me I could see their graves from the distance.

  From whichever direction I traveled to Sarajevo, I had to pass by one of our two graves. Sometimes, descending the Stup slope towards the city’s main avenue, among the cemetery’s visitors on the rare occasions when there were any, I recognized, I wanted to recognize, a thin, straight-backed woman in black and beside her a child. The woman was Nona, and the child was you, who in the interim, according to the logic of time’s distension and the grammar of one’s native tongue, have become I. You are dear to me as I look at you across the distance, which has grown insurmountable but whose essence is not in the time that has passed but rather in the sense that this city and this graveyard through which I pass in my thoughts are not for me now, nor can they ever again be what they were for you. I am surprised when an office worker asks dryly from her window: Place of birth? And by my response: Sarajevo? Is that really still possible?

  In Springtime When We Air Out the Graves

  From the early spring until the first snows, we went once a month to the cemetery. The bus stood at the bottom of King Tomislav Street, and next to it was a flower stand where Nona would buy yellow flowers, narcissus, sometimes even gladiolas. She’d buy red roses too, which were the most expensive, but only for Nono’s and Vesna’s graves. The other graves were not as important to her. Besides, there was something a little buffoonish about red roses. And if anyone saw her leaving a rose on the grave of someone who was not her deceased husband or her deceased nephew, they were liable to think just about anything. They might even say that this someone had been, heaven forbid, her lover. In her experience Sarajevo was just such a place: someone was always seeing something they ought not to see, and the rumors spread across the whole town, passed along by acquaintances and strangers alike, such that people often came to know each other by means of little bits of gossip.

  You liked going with her to the cemetery. After you stopped going to the theater or to the Markale market together, you still went with her to the cemetery. You would continue to take part in this monthly ceremony even after graduating from high school, until the last day of July 1984, when you started your military service. I don’t remember when you went together to Bare Cemetery for the last time, probably in June, or maybe July, after school was let out.

  By the time you came back from the army, she would be old.

  During those fourteen months she had no one to go to the cemetery with and so she stopped. It was simpler to call herself old than to admit to herself and then to her daughter – your mother – what was at stake. She did not want to walk through the graveyard alone, with no
one to listen to her stories or to share her silence.

  Your next visit to Bare would be on June 8, 1986. They would be burying Nona.

  Each year, in the early days of March, around the eighth, when the fog rose momentarily above the city and the earth atop Sarajevo’s graves had thawed, she would call and propose we go to the cemetery in a few days. That initial undertaking was different and more complicated than all the others during the course of the year. Instead of taking the bus, we would take a taxi. Nona would buy flowers at Markale on the Friday before, tons of flowers, which she’d place overnight in all the vases she could find in the house, and my mother would get a migraine from their scent.

  We would dress warmly on that first Saturday because we knew we’d be standing out in the cold for a long time. Nona would wear her black wool suit – her entire winter wardrobe had always been black – and her light black coat, purchased in Moscow when she had gone to visit her son and daughter-in-law there in 1970, and around her neck she would wrap her fur collar, which we all called fox but was actually more like weasel. The collar had a head with a snout, two glass eyes, and a fastener in the shape of a jaw that would bite the tail when Nona threw it around her neck.

  By eight thirty Nona would dial the number of the taxi service to order “a comfortable vehicle.” The service was punctual, one waited exactly half an hour for the taxi. Then a black Mercedes would arrive, reconstructed from a 1970s model, or the model you loved most, an old Mercedes Ponton. Or maybe a white or burgundy Peugeot 404. In any case, if she ordered a comfortable vehicle, that was what would come. You would be full of admiration as a young boy, and later as a grown man, for Nona’s natural authority – what she set out to get for her money, she got – and for a long time you believed that you too would command such authority.