Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Besides the armfuls of flowers, we’d also bring a pail for water, along with a small broom, rags, and detergent. Nona would sit in front, next to the driver, and I would sit in the back, covered in flowers, a big travel sack with the cleaning gear between my knees.

  The trip to Bare was short, much shorter than when you last drove around these parts in your blue bug at the end of the eighties. There were fewer cars, the settlement at Ciglane had not yet been built, and the wide roads heading out of town were empty. At the beginning of March, the natural world in Sarajevo was still dormant – the trees leafless, the meadows gray – as the two of you set out on your mission.

  Just as people go in the early spring to air out their summer houses and their country residences, so Nona decided on the first Saturdays in March to open the graveyard visiting season.

  We’d visit Nono’s grave first. Although Vesna’s grave was on the way, we would come back to it after. The winter snows, smog, soot, and mud would make the black marble plaques impossibly filthy. The scrubbing and rinsing of the headstones took an hour. Nona scrubbed, cleaned, and polished, while I went for water. The fountain was down the hill, beyond the chapel, at the bottom of the Catholic parcel, so it was a long trek. But I didn’t mind it: a lot of things happened at the cemetery, quite a few people showed up, we were not the only ones welcoming springtime, others were there to open up their crypts as if they were summerhouses, cleaning them and airing them out for the coming season. Some of them I know, old men and women, I greet them, they ask about Nona – Is Grandma up there? Did Mrs. Rejc come? Say hello to your Nona! Stop by on your way back! – while others I know only by sight. There are few we don’t know, we’ve been coming here for years after all, every March, since 1973, when we had only one earthen grave, around which Nona planted pansies, and it would be that way as long as our above-ground family was there to take care of our below-ground family. Here we all know each other, we smile at each other while standing in line for water, buying wax candles, which are more beautiful than the stearic ones but burn more quickly, we make each other laugh while performing our graveyard rituals and so announce the beginning of another Sarajevo spring. There will not be many more such springs for us, but we don’t know that, nor do we think about how many graves there are already or about how our familiar world is gradually moving away from this city into the world of the spirit.

  After Nono’s headstone – in our conversation it is a memorial; only on paper and in books is it a headstone – has been washed, dried, and tidied up, and after the yellow flowers have been placed into two vases, Nona uses a match to light a candle that’s been placed on a special metal stand. If there is no wind, which is usually the case in March, the candle peacefully burns down. If there’s a breeze from the north, the little flame goes out but the next person to come around to Nono’s grave will light it again.

  It is the 1970s, everyone is still alive and strong, the railmen, beekeepers, card-game friends, and their wives are all alive, with armfuls of flowers and pockets full of candles. They know where Franjo lies, his grave is in a beautiful spot, just off the path, easy for anyone to get to, and when they come to see their own, they call on him as well, straightening out their candle and ours too along the way, relighting it if the wind has blown it out.

  And so every candle on our memorial burns to the end. Lit again and again, the candle too attests to the fact that we are remembered, respected in this city, talked about…

  There had been nothing left of Nona’s faith for a long time. She was manifestly nonbelieving, she had long since discarded the rituals of the Catholic Church and celebrated Christmas only for the sake of her family. You don’t think about this, for it has been going on for as long as you remember, you have enjoyed going to the cemetery with her your whole life, for every visit is a great story laced with a number of smaller ones, and nowhere do you hear so many stories about people you have never met as when you go to the cemetery. You don’t yet know that all cemetery ceremonies are linked to belief in God or to believing that something exists beyond this life which must be enhanced with flowers, candles, and a forever-clean marble marker. And when you first come to understand this, at the end of eighth grade or in the first years of high school, you don’t associate it with her. Other people go to the cemetery because they believe in God, but she does it for a reason you don’t think about. If you asked her about it, she would not tell you the truth. I know what she would say: Graves need to be cared for because that’s the way things are done! This was her response to everything she wanted to remain silent about: That’s the way things are done!

  * * *

  —

  Next followed the tour of the other graves.

  To describe that route I would need to follow it once again. Touring today’s Bare would be like walking amid ruins, conversing with ghosts. That cemetery is a living world and such must it remain. One solution to this could begin with a precise sketch of the cemetery, a plan of this underground city in which all the graves were registered with all the headstone inscriptions. The plan could be laid out on a sheet of white packing paper, three meters wide by four meters tall, on which I would then trace in red pencil our route through the cemetery after Nono’s headstone had been washed, tidied up, and decorated, along with Nona’s still-empty plot.

  One can arrive at such a drawing after precisely photographing Bare, the way all the larger cities are photographed for the use of satellite navigation in cars. In the next phase, after recording the route, the plan would need to be copied in a reduced version so that it could be placed across the fold on the inside cover of an eventual novel. The book’s length is impossible to foresee, but probably about five hundred pages would be adequate for narrating from memory and reconstructing the biographies of those whose graves Nona and I would make the rounds of on those first Saturdays of March. Each gravestone would be its own chapter, graves we passed by for years, beneath which lay people we did not know and who had no connection to the Stublers or Rejcs but whose stories were similar to ours.

  We would sometimes visit other cemeteries, for in them Nona had other forgotten relatives and friends from childhood. It would also be worth telling the story of Zehra’s grave, which we look at from a distance in one of Sarajevo’s Muslim cemeteries, never getting too close, for that is not the custom. Unlike us, Muslims do not walk through cemeteries to visit their dead. Among them, she’d say, this is practically forbidden, lest the dead be disturbed, or God – in whom Muslims believe, by contrast to us for whom God is just a story – cease to show pity for those who are no longer on this earth. This could anger him, for it would show that we don’t have faith.

  Thus would Nona, staring at Zehra’s lopsided tombstone from a distance, unfold her theory of Islam. She knows very well she has told you this before. And you know that she knows, and that is why you listen and wait for the story to come to its usual end.

  Even today I don’t know why she told that story over again and why she extolled the relation of Muslims to their graves and graveyards. In part, over the years, she had inadvertently invented and elaborated on something that, at its base, had been true. In Muslim cemeteries candles are not burned, and there are no flowers, nor women in black. Overgrown with grass, they had once constituted Sarajevo’s natural architecture of meadows and untilled land, sweeping above the city, older than any cemetery and even any idea of one. They had no Latin inscriptions, only white ornaments with Arabic script. This gave her pleasure, for she thought Muslims had something that took the place of visiting graves and telling stories about the deceased. Instead of hating them and seeing them as unbelievers – which was common in her time among the adherents of various faiths, and which today has at last found its legal expression in the reign of terror of the dominant majority against the ever-shrinking minorities – she looked longingly to their faith, the Muslim faith, as a kind of outlet. Besides, she had loved Zehra more than anyone else in the worl
d.

  But the novel would not need to end with Zehra. The effect would be tendentious, false, and sentimental. Our reality, especially after it crosses into the past and after it has been crushed by history, often has the effect of being tendentious, false, and sentimental. That is why the novel ought to go on a little longer, ending at Bare in the afternoon, when there are few taxis at the entrance and Nona is not able to choose a comfortable vehicle but instead we take the first available Fiat 1300 back to town. Our hands are empty, no longer filled with yellow cemetery flowers, narcissus, and gladiolas. Our palms tremble from a great disburdening.

  Aunt Finka at Saint Mihovil’s

  Aunt Finka rested in Saint Mihovil’s cemetery. She’d never married, and her connection to our family was vague. One could have written several novels about Aunt Finka: she was witty, cheerful, and obsessed with sex, but in an old-fashioned, once-upon-a-time manner, when one did not use the exact names for things but spoke instead in metaphors, and distant – but not the least bit scurrilous – allusions.

  She died several years before you were born. While Karlo Stubler’s children were still alive, people came to Ilidža every week for a Sunday meal and an outing, and in the summer everyone gathered at Aunt Lola’s in Dubrovnik. Aunt Finka was a lively figure in every conversation. People told stories about her, real and invented, jokes, and anecdotes; they even imitated her voice and her speech defect: a gurgled, so-called French r that made her sound foreign, as if she were from Zagreb, though she was a born Sarajevan. She would be dead for many years before Krešo Golik’s film One Song a Day Takes Mischief Away came out. Everyone went to see it and said yes, that film was about Aunt Finka! The writer must have heard her life story from someone. And you too would be told, the first time you saw the film on TV: See, that’s about Auntie Finka!

  Legend had it that she had purchased the burial plot at Saint Mihovil’s before the war. She was in her forties or fifties. She had no one of her own, though she was an aunt to us all, and she purchased a plot for herself and built a nice memorial marker out of cement and stone in the fashion of the day. She would visit it on All Saints’ Day, when everyone gathered at the cemeteries, and in the springtime, when it was necessary to wash and tidy up the headstones, and she would sweep around her future resting place, then light a candle and place a bouquet of gerberas in a vase. Gerberas were Aunt Finka’s favorite flower. Even today whenever anyone mentions gerberas, you think of her. And you think, God, does her headstone still exist in Sarajevo’s Saint Mihovil Cemetery? The last time you went was with Nona in the early eighties, when they were constructing the new road, which ran over a good portion of the neighboring cemeteries of the Holy Archangels George and Gabriel, and passed right through the bones of Sarajevo’s Orthodox, whose posthumous suffering and oppression would be passed over in silence.

  Saint Mihovil’s was almost part of a suburb at the time Aunt Finka purchased her plot. It had been built in 1884 according to the design of one Josef Rekveny, who is himself buried there. In this cemetery, separated from the Orthodox cemetery by an invisible but clear demarcation, all of Sarajevo’s Catholics were buried until 1966, mostly immigrants, often of foreign origin: Germans, Poles, Czechs, an occasional Catholic Hungarian, rare Italians, Slovenes, and Croats, the domestic ones and the ones who had been resettled through royal and imperial edicts, from Zagreb, Dalmatia, Slavonia. Nona took you to this cemetery because Finka did not have anyone else in the world to visit her grave. At the cemeteries of Saint Mihovil and the nearby Saint Josip the headstones, the expressions of eternal consolation, recommendations to the good Lord, and sometimes nostalgic recollections of distant countries and homes were inscribed in nearly all the languages of the old monarchy, especially German. It was here that, at a very early age, you got an idea of those who had once lived in this city, who had built it and raised it from the ground, and to whom Sarajevo truly belonged. You had an illusion of belonging to that city, to that forgotten world in which others once lived. When the illusion dissipated, when time swept it away like a fog, the memories turned into fiction, and the city in which you were born was transformed into a fictional phenomenon, a place that existed only in books and dreams.

  * * *

  —

  Some fifty paces farther on from there, or so it seems in your memory, is the grave of Ivo Andrić’s mother. This is not an irrelevant piece of information. You never visited Finka’s grave without passing it and remembering how Ivo Andrić had been in love with Finka in high school, and how many years later he’d gone looking for her when he visited town. It was 1960 and he rang the doorbell of her house, but she was not home. She was at the pedicurist. He wrote a note on a small piece of paper and shoved it through the letter slot. Finka died unexpectedly the following year, at the end of summer 1961, and two months later it was announced in Stockholm that Ivo Andrić had won the Nobel Prize. When they cleaned out her apartment, which the city authorities had taken over, no one thought to look for the small piece of paper with his note – that is, if that little piece of paper even existed, and if Aunt Finka had not invented it (many of her love stories were imagined). Today, not a single photograph of her has been preserved, though one certainly had existed, a small black-and-white picture I remember having seen, in which Nona and Auntie Finka are standing on the Carev Bridge, laughing. It has disappeared. Nona did not like photographs of people laughing, so perhaps she destroyed it. In general she did her utmost to annihilate all documents, letters, photographs, and memorabilia, so that no trace of her would be left after her death.

  The one thing that Nona did not take into account was your memory of it all. You nearly forgot Aunt Finka. You didn’t remember her in all these years in Zagreb, or earlier, during the war, or earlier still, when you could have gone out to Saint Mihovil’s to see whether her grave marker still existed. Countless times you walked down King Tomislav Street, passing by the Second Gymnasium and then Koševo without entering the cemetery to see whether Auntie Finka was still there. There is probably a reason for this, just as there is a reason I remembered her a few days ago, just before I might have forgotten her forever.

  It was early in the morning and I was reading a book by the Austrian author Gerhard Amanshauser titled But a Child at Prater while waiting at the Helsinki airport for a flight to Frankfurt. In one of the micro-essays or fragments from which the autobiography is composed, Amanshauser describes his aunt – who ends up drowning in her bathtub – from whom one had to hide any children’s doll that was missing arms, or legs, or a head, because she would have had a hysterical fit if she saw such a thing.

  I was not surprised by this but thought all of a sudden that perhaps Aunt Finka had lived a double life: one in Sarajevo, the other in Salzburg. Here she was unmarried, there she had a husband; here she was funny and a little crazy, there she was nasty; here she died in her sleep, there she drowned in her tub; but the one thing that linked the two lives was the horror she experienced at the sight of headless or limbless dolls, which could be found in every home at that time. Regardless of whether there were small children around, you could always locate a doll without a head, or a little plastic hand with painted red nails, or a plastic torso in a short skirt.

  Everything else in her life had been clear. The intense sexual desire, her loneliness in Sarajevo among her own people, the loneliness of a whole life; her inability to begin something and spool up a ball of time around it, to gather the patience for it, to set the guidelines for her love, rather than merely subsist without direction; her laughter, her collection of made-up lovers – but however charged it may have been her life had remained light, until some headless, armless, legless children’s doll appeared before her eyes.

  How Aunt Finka reacted to such moments no one knows. No one talks about it. They just spread their arms and say terrible, terrible, then return to their story, about how they would hide their dolls whenever Aunt Finka would visit and how the dolls ended up finding their way
out again, even in houses where there had been no young children for fifty years. In any house with a senile, widowed, worn-out, barren old person living in it, some concealed children’s doll would come to light: dusty, bald, and – unfailingly – with no hands, legs, or a head. Or else, God forbid, a doll’s head would surface, one that still blinked when shaken.

  When this happened, and it happened despite the house being cleaned in anticipation of Finka’s visit, they would spend the entire day – usually it was Saturday or Sunday when people came to visit – worried about the fainting aunt. Water and sugar were at the ready, doctors were summoned, Finka was taken for a walk in the park, supported by the arm, in an attempt to bring her back to her normal state, when she would again speak and make jokes at her own expense. After each “attack” precipitated by a sighting of a legless doll, those present would be thrown into a panic that Finka might not ever regain her mind and might forever remain crazy.

  What happened to that woman, what she saw in those dolls, no one will ever know. Those who knew are gone. No psychologist would have been able to get the story out of poor Aunt Finka.

  I suspect that one grave no longer exists at Saint Mihovil’s Cemetery, that of the Sarajevo spinster who was our Aunt Finka. For more than thirty years no one has visited her grave, lit a candle, placed a gerbera into the stone vase. She had done this for herself a full twenty years before she died.