Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  leading the most beautiful breasts by the hand

  If he hasn’t yet got a bullet in the back of his head step foward, him too

  Let those whom the Zagreb actor

  Jovan Ličina did harm step forward

  Let the tour group from Križevac step forward, the unmarried orphan girls

  from the morning matinee

  And those who ran from the winter to the theater and those

  driven to boredom by just love

  And the acerbic souls in black with gold crosses round their necks and

  abortion as their greatest sin

  And the melancholic prostates of runaway youths and the murderers in

  plain clothes step forward

  Let those whom the Zagreb acto

  Jovan Ličina did harm step forward

  Let the deliverers of pizza at the actors’ coat check, the stage

  hands and coat checkers

  The café cooks using gas-ring burners, the refrigerators

  named Moscow step forward

  And the wig makers, the makeup artists, the pederasts with

  ballet slippers beneath their noses

  Let the drunk prop masters and their mournful

  lovers from Borongaj step forward

  Let those whom the Zagreb actor

  Jovan Ličina did harm step forward

  Let the hermaphrodites in the roles of headmasters,

  hysterical divas with bleached souls

  And their husbands dawdling as if from Mostar

  step forward if they know God

  Let the third-string heralds and esquires, the manicure assistants

  of the baroness of the Castle

  Members of headquarters with speaking parts – Chekhov is a genius, but

  it’s too bad he was Russian – step forward

  Let those whom the Zagreb actor

  Jovan Ličina did harm step forward

  Let the young scenic appearances who’ll play moronic children

  to the end

  And the perverse Slovene producers clothing them in women’s

  garb – let them step forward too

  Let the retired principal players of Croatian theater,

  performers who loose their bellies low

  And pass gas during scenes with princely deaths to

  entertain each other, they should step forward too

  Let those whom the Zagreb actor

  Jovan Ličina did harm step forward

  Let professors of stage direction and famous directors step forward

  Who speak wisely on the phenomenon of the Zagreb school and

  journalistic insults against the actors’ guild

  Let the academicians rising up from Grandpa Vidurina’s peasant sandals,

  the hagiographers of Krleža with the letter U on their caps

  Let even those doing research on when and how often Matoš

  spoke about Serbian depravity step forward

  Let those whom the Zagreb actor

  Jovan Ličina did harm step forward

  Let the youth who played Hamlet beneath Pavelić’s picture

  in Cleveland

  and waited for the applause of the three present, perplexed metal

  workers from Brač – O step forward

  Let the kinsmen at the premiere, and the classmates, and newspaper

  critics, hired applauders

  and the models with flower baskets and touching tears in their eyes

  first ladies of the scene, alas step forward

  Let those whom the Zagreb actor

  Jovan Ličina did harm step forward

  While the two of us joyously drain our chalices

  toasting him in death

  A Calendar of Everyday Events

  Fictions

  Christmas with Kolchak

  Cold and snowy winters followed the war. The snow would fall around All Souls’ Day and would not melt until the middle of March. There was no one to clear the streets, though Marshal Tito Street and some of others in the center of town were cleared by prisoners from Beledija and the central jail, as well as by POWs while they were still around. The rest remained covered and snug, as if under a great quilt that had been spread across all of Bosnia, the people tucked beneath it, resting after the years of horror, and it didn’t feel quite so cold underneath it, nor did the pantries, larders, cellars, meat dryers, lofts, and bread ovens feel quite so empty.

  In all the years of starved, snowy winters, the winter of 1950 arrived earliest. In his Calendar of Everyday Events, Income, Expenses, and Meteorological Conditions, Karlo Stubler notes that the first snow fell on September 11, and that “it was heavy and thick, and under its weight broke the old cherry tree and several branches of the summer apple,” but by the next day at noon it had “melted and left behind a lot of damage around the yard.” It snowed again on October 5, then ten days later, on Sunday the fifteenth, the first true winter snow began to fall, continuing for the next three days, and “by Tuesday afternoon it had reached the height of the window, one meter and seventy centimeters to be exact, the highest snow since we arrived in Bosnia in 1920 and since, in 1935, with God’s help, Vilko and Rika built this house.” (Note: as recorded much earlier, Opapa Karlo Stubler was a completely nonreligious person, he did not believe in God, nor was he superstitious, but in his journal he regularly used phrases such as “with God’s help,” whether for stylistic reasons or for purposes of propriety.)

  The snowfall from October did not melt in November, there were frequent winds from the south with heavy morning frosts that made it hard to clear away the snow and beat foot paths around the buildings down to Kasindol Street. The weather turned the snowy mass into ice, the soft quilt grew hard, like an Ivan Meštrović sculpture, and it seemed that we too would turn to stone, becoming memorials of our people’s destiny, the pain and suffering before the country’s numerous battles. After defending it from the Nazis and the fascists, the homegrown traitors, the Ustaše, the Chetniks, the Albanian nationalists, and the Slovene Home Guardsmen, after Tito, alone in the world, had pronounced his decisive No! to Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, and after, while hungry, naked, shoeless, and still numb with fear, we had repeated that No! to Stalin and the misled international proletariat with the great Soviet Union at its head, here we were left to turn into a monument, Yugoslavia becoming a sculpture garden for Europe and the world, a land of tourism with no people and no life.

  Opapa Karlo would not let himself be turned to stone with the rest of us. He was German, and though old and sickly, he was out breaking the ice in front of the house each morning. As usual he was the first person up, and his quick rhythmic blows with the metal pole against the icy path that led to the rabbit hutch entered our dreams, shattering them, and one by one we got up from our beds.

  Opapa waited until the snow melted and died shortly after, in 1951, in the middle of April amid the spring rebirth when the grass had turned his entire garden green. In his ritual of morning snow clearing and ice breaking there existed some primordial fear and belief, which had grown deeper the older Opapa got, that he would not live through the winter but would instead die when the days were at their shortest and coldest, and his hope was at its thinnest. Those who believe in God – and the Stubler home was as a rule half-filled with believers and half with nonbelievers – have Christmas, the day of the child’s birth, to safeguard their faith and warm their bones and souls, so they don’t have to go out on a morning of Siberian cold to break the ice on the path to the rabbit hutch.

  Opapa Karlo loved rabbits. Rabbits reminded him of Bosowicz, his home village in the Romanian Banat, where every Swabian house had its hutch, and all the houses in Bosowicz were Swabian, and there were at least twenty times the number of rabbits as people. When we moved to Ilidža, ev
en before Uncle Vilko and Aunt Rika had started to build their house, Opapa mapped out his model homestead on four acres with fruit trees, a vegetable garden, a chicken coop, and a stable with two cows, a pig, a pigeon loft, and an apiary, but in all this the rabbit hutch was the most important. The greatest number of stories were associated with it, for it wasn’t just rabbits that lived there, Opapa’s life was there too, within its straw-laced cages, all his memories, as well as his great pangs of conscience.

  Karlo Stubler loved rabbits more than people, but he did not give them names. And he would not have been pleased if we had done so. If a certain bunny, through the children and their children’s imagination, had become Konstantin, Eleonora, or Moša Pijade (this was a tiny, quick, black rabbit with white spots around its eyes that looked like glasses), Opapa avoided knowing anything about it, for if he knew the animal’s name, its fate would have weighed upon his soul and his conscience. This was because it was the destiny of every rabbit in the hutch to one day be eaten at Sunday dinner. Served “wild,” or oven baked with fries, or in a goulash, each and every bunny would end up with its hide stretched out on the apiary door, drying for weeks so that one day in a future that would never come it would turn into a fur coat for one of Karlo’s daughters or granddaughters. If not for this, the rabbit hutch would not have existed, especially in times of hunger and scarcity. Anyway, no one in Bosowicz kept pet rabbits, to befriend and give names to. All rabbits were eaten. But then Opapa had been a child and he’d had no problem applying himself with an appetite to one of God’s creatures, until one day. He would watch as his brother and two cousins slaughtered them before Christmas or Easter, the rabbits screaming in fear like crazed children left out naked in the snow, and it didn’t faze him. He had never cut the animals’ throats himself, but he’d watched. Now he couldn’t do that either. Usually, when Uncle Vilko butchered a rabbit on Saturday afternoon for the next day’s meal, Opapa was holed up in his room on the second floor, with the shutters drawn and the light on as he read his Brockhaus Encyclopedia. He would open to a page at random and read the article he’d chanced upon. People said that was how he relaxed. But we knew that was how he hid the sound of the rabbit’s death from himself, yet one more murder for which he was responsible, for it was he who had built the rabbit hutch and populated it with beings condemned to die.

  Immediately after the war, by the fall of 1945, the Yugoslav papers had begun to report on the horrors of the German concentration camps in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, in which millions of people had been killed in just a few years. Opapa had always read all the newspapers he could get his hands on, and in the first postwar years, he would buy Sarajevo’s Oslobođenje and Belgrade’s Politika on a daily basis. He felt obligated, as a person, a conscientious union man, and an old Austrian Marxist, to learn everything there was to know about the suffering of the Jews. Hitler’s Nazis, they wrote in our papers, had systematically liquidated them, exterminated them, turned them to dust, with the massive support of the local German and European bourgeoisie. Opapa was neither a Nazi nor bourgeois, but he was a German. Why should a German from Bosowicz, or rather a German from Ilidža in Sarajevo, feel responsible for what Germans from Germany had done? No, although such an idea was entirely humane, high minded, and altogether proper, it was alien to him. He would more likely feel responsible for the Ustaše and Chetnik butchery, though he was neither a Croat nor a Serb, because Croats and Serbs were his neighbors, his children and grandchildren, sons-in-law, male and female friends, unlike all those Berliners, Prussians, and Bavarians who lived somewhere far away, at the edge of the world. They were Germans, but their German responsibility differed from his German responsibility. That was how he saw it as he read the reports about the concentrations camps.

  But he was by no means indifferent when he read that the German Jews, and Jews from Poland, Czech lands, and Galicia, had traveled to the concentration camps by train. He thought about all those switchmen, dispatchers, station chiefs, and engineers guiding their passengers to certain death. All Germans might not be alike, it might not be the same thing to be a German from Kasindol Street in Ilidža and a German from some godforsaken Pomeranian hole, but all switchmen of the world were alike, whether they worked on a narrow-, regular-, or wide-gauge line of the kind that Stalin had used in Siberia. Their procedures were the same to within a hair’s breadth, they awaited trains in exactly the same manner, checked the switches, tapped the wheels, and after one of the switchmen had led a train of cattle cars filled with Jews to their deaths, all switchmen suddenly had something in common with him when they tapped the wheels and adjusted the switches, and all the trains traveling along all the tracks of the world right then became that first train, that composite of cattle cars that passed among the switchmen to the camp, the gas chamber, the crematorium, the sky. And above the switchman was the dispatcher, and above him was the station chief, and above the station chief was the headquarters, the traffic engineers, directors, quartermasters, and managers who followed the railroad’s strict procedures and traffic rules, repeating the same movements of their hands, feet, and heads, signed the same documents, shared the same fears and anxieties about delays, collisions on open track, accidents, and each of them, Karlo grasped with horror, had guided the hand of that first switchman sending the trains loaded with Jews to their deaths.

  Although by then he had been retired for twenty years, along with all his fellow dispatchers, switchmen, and engineers, Karlo Stubler felt guilty. His guilt was incurable, he would carry it to his grave and into the void. Then, he thought, the Jews would save Jesus Christ, and he would save the Jews by helping all the switchmen move their hands in the opposite direction and instead of ending up at the camp the train would come to a stop on a siding, among the Gypsies, crows, and town’s poor, where it is gentle and good and there was no Hitler and no anti-Semitism.

  Then he read further in Politika and Oslobođenje and discovered that the Nazis had taken away the Jews’ right to bear their own first and last names. Every woman became Sarah Israel and every man became Judah Israel. And when they transported the Jews from the ghetto to the death camps, they weren’t called Sarah Israel and Judah Israel anymore but instead had numbers tattooed on the backs of their hands.

  Then Opapa Karlo remembered his rabbits and understood why he had avoided knowing the names that the children had lovingly given to them. Every name whether given to a rabbit or a child, is the first act of love…With a name we become individuals, sheltered by the emotions and morals of a single society. Loading people into cattle cars and killing them because they were Jews required first that their names be forgotten or not heard. That was the only way, for what sort of a conscience could there be, human, switchman’s, railworker’s, or German, that could bring death to so many people? When there were no names, only numbers, thought Opapa, there were no people either.

  All the rabbits were condemned to one day be eaten. Opapa was not stupid, or crazy, or unstable. He was strict and rational, a true German and rail man, and he was proud to be this way, but the comparison of the rabbits and the Jews never left his head. Animals were not people, and he continued to eat rabbit, but he was truly horrified by his discovery of why he had always avoided the rabbits’ names. As the Nazis avoided Jewish names. So why in the world had he built the hutch? For the same reason his parents, and his parents’ parents, and all the people in Bosowicz had always built hutches and raised rabbits. But why had they done this? The people in nearby villages, Romanians and Serbs, rarely farmed rabbits. Only when they were following the lead of their German neighbors. Which meant, thought Opapa, that they did not feel the need to keep rabbits in hutches, in cages from which they would only let them out once, when their time to be slaughtered had come. Was there something in his German language, in his Goethe and Johann Sebastian Bach, in what differentiated him from his Slav neighbors, that had led him to do this? If so, he thought, it was perhaps that same something that had led the Germans to turn
living people into smoke and nothingness. After the war was over, Opapa was not sorry his children and grandchildren were not Germans. They all spoke German well and continued to speak to him in German, but it was fortunate that they were not German. He believed the rabbit hutch would vanish from Kasindol Street when he died.

  The rabbits made him feel responsible for what the German Nazis had done but did not change his position in regard to life and death in the hutch. He was strict and rational, our Opapa Karlo Stubler, and the years were poor and hungry, so every Sunday we continued to eat fresh rabbit. Their hides were saved in the attic, in large and tidy boxes, waiting to be made into fur coats for Opapa’s daughters and grandaughters. But the coats would never be sewn, and the hides were eventually eaten by worms and attic vermin over the decades.

  On December 24, 1950, early on this Christmas Eve morning, Opapa Karlo was out on the path that led to the rabbit hutch breaking the ice with a steel rod. We didn’t venture out into the yard because it was minus twenty degrees Centigrade out there. It was the coldest day of the winter. Convinced that he would not be alive when spring arrived, he was cleaning the path so we would not fall and break our necks when we went out to feed the rabbits. And in case he was not there, he wanted to make sure his rabbits would not die of hunger because we were unable to get to them across the ice in time.

  By the time his fingers had turned blue and his toes begun to tingle with frostbite, Opapa had stopped breaking the ice about halfway down the path. He set aside the iron rod, jamming it into the snow for the next day, when he planned to continue, and carefully tread on the snow at the pace of a snail or an aged tightrope walker, making his way to the hutch.

  “Regina, Regina, my child!” he called in German to his daughter. Aunt Rika did not respond so he switched to our language, trying to get Uncle Vilko’s attention.

  “Vilko, goodness, where are you when I need you!”

  In the end both slid out in their house slippers, along with the children, everyone falling on the ice and causing tremendous commotion at the hutch, where Opapa was repeating hoarsely: