Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “The rabbit! The rabbit is gone!”

  We had never seen him in such a state. He was agitated, as if he had suddenly lost his bearings or his wits and now had no idea what he was saying, stooped over and old, staring at the open cage in which, just the night before, there had been a fat white rabbit whom we had named Göring. This fat, blue-eyed rabbit had reminded us of Hitler’s Reichsmarschall, and it was not only from Opapa that we had to keep this a secret, it was from Omama too, and everyone else, for we would have never heard the end of it if they discovered we had named a rabbit after such a criminal.

  We were even afraid the rabbit would be the first to pay for this and we’d be eating him on Sunday if it came out that we’d given him the war criminal’s name. Göring was not hard to find. Although the garden was frozen over, the thieves of our fat bunny had left tracks behind. Either they had not been careful, or they had wanted us to find them.

  We set out together as a group to the apiary, following the tracks that led across the deep frozen expanse.

  Opapa Karlo was not worried about giants or colossi, he was not afraid of anyone anymore, his strength had returned. He was angry and ready to settle things like a man with the rabbit thief, if he could only find him. Filled with wrath, he proceeded at the head of the group. His breath failed him, he stumbled, then recovered, and suddenly it was all funny – we knew we’d find Göring. Whenever Opapa was that angry, whenever he became a real Swabian and took to discipline and reckonings of the cosmic order, we all felt confident, for we knew that nothing bad could happen anymore. We smiled to ourselves and followed behind him as the tracks led us to the apiary. They ended right at the wooden door, as in some black-and-white silent film, and the tracks at the door’s opening and closing were visible in the snow. There was no doubt that someone was in the apiary. Opapa stiffened, straightening himself as if he wanted to appear taller, and took decisive hold of the doorknob.

  The apiary was actually an elongated hut, about fifteen meters long and three and a half meters wide, which Karlo Stubler had built himself in the summer of 1940 after the old apiary had turned out to be too small and inadequate for all his bees. He had bought the fir planks at a sawmill in Olovo, which he described in the Calendar of Everyday Events, Income, Expenses, and Meteorological Conditions in the following note (like all the citations from the Calendar this was translated by his son Rudolf): “On March 27 of this year, we set out on the morning express train for Zavidovići and then transferred to a local narrow gauge for Olovo to pick up the treated wood materials for the apiary, which had been cut according to the design I drew up and sent by mail to Mr. Konstantinović. We arrived safely in Olovo at 13:57 (a delay of twelve minutes according to the train schedule), where Mr. Konstantinović and his workers were waiting for us. Loading was orderly, as was transfer in Zavidovići, and we returned to Sarajevo at 21:12 (a negligible two-minute delay on a composite train from Zagreb). The materials were successfully brought to Kasindol the next morning by truck…”

  Karlo Stubler put together his very precisely designed structure in one day. It took him longer, with the help of his neighbor Aleks Božić and his son Rudi, to cover it with tiles, then brought in nine hives that had previously been in the mountain shelters above Fojnica. And so, according to Opapa’s Calendar, on August 1, 1940, the new apiary of the family Stubler was solemnly established. Before autumn arrived, Opapa would coat his construction with his own mixture of railroad grease that was to preserve the wood and prevent rot, but quickly, within two or three days, its smell had begun to bother the bees. They drowsily hummed in the garden and courtyard, and Opapa would stand to one side anxiously following them with his eyes and ears, until at last they calmed down and accepted their new home.

  For the next ten years beginning in the fall of 1940, the apiary lived its orderly, apiarian and Stublerian life, according to Karlo’s implacable calendar and strict apian ritual, which was the same everywhere in Europe if not the world, resting on the same precise orderliness as the railroad. Where the beekeeper was more exact, where he took better stock of the changes in weather and the seasons, there the honey was of higher quality, the bees more satisfied, and life steadier. The same was true of trains, timetables, and tracks, as it was with a railroad headquarters, which resembled a large beekeeping establishment. Except in this establishment the bees had to do all the work, for – in his way of thinking – they lived and worked without a beekeeper, although half the Stublers believed that even at the headquarters there existed a higher-order keeper, in the all-pervading, ever-present person of the good Lord.

  Opapa turned the handle and gave a decisive shove to the door. The door opened with a bang and he stood at the threshold, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  There on the straw in the depth of the apiary, hiding from the light and our searching eyes, behind the last hives, sat an old man and an old woman, holding our white rabbit on her lap.

  “Kolchak, good God, is it you, admiral? And Natasha, heaven be praised, what a wondrous meeting!” Opapa rushed forward as if he had suddenly grown young and kissed the old woman’s hand.

  “And is that Nikolai, dear Natasha, a grown boy, wow, who would have thought! And here I remember as if it was yesterday how with God’s help you brought him into our confused and unhappy world!” Opapa babbled on, caressing our white rabbit as if it were a child and not one of our farm animals.

  We turned around and rushed back home. Opapa’s son Rudi, our Nano, tried to stop us, he laughed and said everything was fine, that we too should greet General Kolchak and his Natasha, and that it would please them if we caressed their son Nikolai, but we were running and screaming as if the skin on our backs was being torn off, certain that Opapa Karlo Stubler had finally lost his mind.

  It was just over an hour, and when we heard him coming in, we went into hiding. We were in a panic, afraid of our very own Opapa, and, peeping from under the couch, from the closet and the attic, from the shadow of the winter garden and the double locked bathroom, we listened as he was cheerfully telling to Uncle Vilko and Aunt Rika that Admiral Kolchak and Madam Natalya had come back, and that it was going to be a lovely Christmas with them and their little Nikolai.

  It was the most unusual Christmas Eve in the Stubler home and in our collective Stubler history. Opapa trimmed the tree, jollier than we had seen him for a long time. He took great pleasure in preparing for the Christmas meal, insisting the dining room table be extended for there would be more of us than usual, as the admiral and his madam were coming…

  That night we dreamed our scariest children’s dreams ever, imagining Admiral Kolchak, Natalya, and our rabbit, now a baby named Nikolai, sat at our Christmas table exchanging craziness with Opapa Karlo.

  Promptly at one, as on every Sunday in the home of Karlo Stubler, as on every Christmas Day, we were all at the festive table. At its head sat Opapa and Omama, dressed as if they were going to the theater, and at the opposite end, Mr. and Mrs. Kolchak. He was in a tsarist colonel’s uniform, moth-eaten and timeworn, and she was in a white dress that looked like a wedding gown made from drapes, holding in her arms our rabbit, her son Nikolai.

  We were all silent, our noses buried in our plates, as the adults talked about wars, weddings and funerals, children’s ailments, building houses, the climate differences between Saint Petersburg and Sarajevo, about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the sickly Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who composed the most beautiful music in the world (Opapa was lying, lying like a dog, he didn’t like Tchaikovsky), and amid all these stories Admiral Kolchak and his wife behaved normally and rationally, they were even a bit tedious, the way all officers in the world are tedious, and probably they were lying a little too, to please their hosts.

  That was our only Christmas without rabbit meat. Two stringy old hens from the yard paid with their lives for the first appearance of the Kolchaks in our house. For as we listened to this ordinary, grown-up, intelligent M
rs. Kolchak and her husband, to our amazement we began to notice a change: our Göring was no longer Göring, nor was he a rabbit, but instead he had become a proper little Russian, a young boy child, a noisy babe, the newborn of this old woman and her husband.

  This was how our Opapa Karlo Stubler spent the last Christmas of his life, the Swabian from the Banat, the Austrian Marxist and union leader, who had supported a railroad strike in Dubrovnik when he was its station master and was fired and driven into Bosnia, where we would all be born as Bosnians to await our own exile into some other, still deeper and more hopeless Bosnia.

  After Mr. and Mrs. Kolchak disappeared arm in arm into the frozen Ilidža twilight, down the snowy path across the field that led to Butmir, we never saw our fat white rabbit again. Nor did we ask about it. New rabbits were soon bred, Göring’s cage was once again inhabited, and life went on. We did not see the Kolchaks again.

  Years after Opapa’s death, the story was told in our house that we never believed but that deserves to be noted, about celebrating Christmas with Admiral Alexander Vasilevich Kolchak, Madam Natalya, and their son, who was named after the Russian tsar Nikolai, who, God willing, would one day be his godfather.

  This is how the story came to light, and though it is superfluous given the story just recounted, it needs to be told in accord with the ethics and ritual of narration established by Karlo Stubler in the Calendar of Everyday Events, Income, Expenses, and Meteorological Conditions: when the wave of Russian emigrants was washing across the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and when, thanks more to the kindness of the House of Karađorđević than to the fanatical anticommunism of the regent Alexander, all the unfortunates, both well-off and poor, the university professors, generals, writers, musicians, ballerinas, and pharmacists, but also the good-for-nothings and thieves, the reckless, the provincial cobblers, locksmiths, and tailors, were being welcomed in Sarajevo, Mikhail Karlovich Shtark-Kempinski appeared in the uniform of an infantry colonel, along with his wife Natalya Alexandrovna Kruchonykh. The two were lunatics and it was a miracle that they had managed to get there from Saint Petersburg, crossing half of Europe to the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and Sarajevo.

  Thus did Colonel Shtark-Kempinski and his wife, whom everyone for some reason called by the Latin “Dona Natasha,” remain in the city, whose authorities provided them with a small but sturdy little house in the Gypsy settlement of Gorica. And the Gypsies being Gypsies, easily got used to them and accepted them as their own, despite the colonel’s aristocratic and steadfast, one might even say rational, hatred for – Gypsies.

  This hatred drove him and Natasha into town, among the city’s inhabitants and merchants, where he would pour out his misfortunes at their feet. Dona Natasha had found a child’s doll somewhere and would carry it around, saying, “This is Nikolai, my son, after all this is over the tsar will be his godfather! That is why we haven’t baptized him yet!”

  On another occasion she had found a mangy wandering dog – her son Nikolai.

  Then a dead pigeon – her son Nikolai.

  A blind cat – her son Nikolai.

  During the days when all of Yugoslavia was mourning King Alexander, who had been murdered for the greater glory of God, Dona Natasha was going around with a rather large log held up to her bosom – Look at my Nikolai!

  The colonel meanwhile fondly supported her by the arm, for he loved her more than his son Nikolai.

  Whether Mikhail Karlovich Shtark-Kempinski and Natalya Alexandrovna had ever given birth to their own son and subsequently lost him no one knew. But it was strongly believed at the time that Nikolai had once existed, and that this was how they had lost their minds. Whether he had died or disappeared in the flames of revolution, or had been killed by the Bolsheviks, or had met his end in that baby stroller that to this day keeps tumbling down the steps in Eisenstein’s film, or whether something even more hideous had happened that in the very same instant had shattered the spirits of the two parents, everyone had his own theory, and everyone could let his imagination run wild, for it was known for certain that the truth would never be known.

  For Sarajevans from before the war, Colonel Shtark-Kempinski and Dona Natasha were creatures of the imagination. Their actual human destinies, their human pain, touched very few people.

  At the beginning of the war, in April 1941, it was as if the earth had swallowed them up.

  They vanished, no one had seen or heard from them. The Gestapo had taken them away, or the Ustaše had slaughtered them as Orthodox believers at Vraca…And that was that.

  And then they appeared in our apiary on Opapa Karlo’s last Christmas, in the year 1950. The day our white rabbit Göring disappeared. And the next day, at lunch, in Aunt Natasha’s arms we saw the little newborn child Nikolai, whose godfather would one day be the Russian tsar himself.

  The Match Juggler | Furtwängler

  “If we had known the train was going to be standing here for such a long time, we could have taken a little walk to Medulić or the City Café for a coffee and a croissant. Is Medulić open?”

  “I think so. I don’t make it to those parts of town much. When I first got to Zagreb in 1944, it was prohibited and dangerous, and by the time the war was over it had become a habit not to go there. I stick to my neighborhoods in Trešnjevka and Knežija, sometimes go for a walk along the Sava and across to the other bank, to Remetinec, Blato, Hrašće. Have you heard of Knežija?”

  “Of course! I lived in Zagreb for a whole school year in 1929 and ’30. That was a good time. Youth…”

  “Right, youth. And you think we’re old now?”

  He looked back askance, and Rudi had no idea what to make of him. One moment he seemed sneaky and dangerous, the next like an ingratiating child. Like a good, faithful puppy. A skinny, hollow man with a large, fleshy nose bent so far down that it practically covered his upper lip. He’d said his name was Joška Herzl, offering his hand as he entered the compartment. The first thing Rudi had thought was: a pickpocket. One of those authentic prewar pickpockets. He hadn’t seen any of them for years since pickpocketing had become an offense for court-martialing. Nor had they reappeared at the end of the war, as if they had all mended their ways or grown old, or as if, God forbid, all the pickpockets of the Yugoslav royal railways had ended up at Jasenovac and in mass graves.

  Nevertheless, he wasn’t pleased to see the stranger. He checked to make sure his wallet was tucked away securely, and thought about how he wouldn’t be able to sleep all the way to his transfer in Vienna. That is a long way when one is tired and sleepy.

  But then he thought better since pickpockets don’t say their first and last names to people they are planning to rob. Though the name could be fake. What did he say it was?

  “Joška Herzl!” he repeated, removing a speck from the end of his nose with his tongue – “in case you forgot, Joška Herzl. Yes, I am of Moses’s faith, though I’m actually not a believer. I hid my name for a long time, but now I sort of like saying it. A name like any other, nothing special, Pero, Ivo, Haso, there are all kinds, all more or less the same. Names and more names…And you, sir?”

  “Rudi. Rudolf Stubler.”

  “Not you too…?”

  “No, I’m a Catholic. From Sarajevo. A Swabian sort of…I work for the railroad actually. I’m a railway official.”

  “So you must have a free ticket! You can travel to your heart’s content. Did they give you a passport?”

  “Yes. I’m traveling on business.”

  “On business, how extraordinary!” Joška Herzl made a little jump and repeated the movement with his tongue. It wasn’t a speck, he seemed to have a tic. Something inside the man was making him do it. Disgusting, thought Rudi.

  “And you? Do you have a passport?”

  “Yes, I went to Petrinjska Street to apply for one. ‘What for?’ asks a guy in a militia uniform. ‘Just a moment,’ he sa
ys and leaves with my identity card. Joška, you poor devil, now they’re going to take you in.”

  “And? Did they take you in?”

  “No, the policeman was away a half hour or an hour at most. He came back, kindly returned my documents, and said I should come back in three weeks for my travel document, as they call it. I couldn’t believe it. Can this be true? I asked myself?”

  “And now you’re using it?”

  “Yes, unbelievable. Take a look.” He pushed the little booklet onto Rudi’s lap.

  Rudi opened the passport. It was the real thing: Joška Herzl. Height: 173 centimeters. Hair color: black. Eye color: brown. Distinguishing marks: none. He looked bloated in the photograph, as if he was about to burst out laughing at any moment.

  The train was still standing at Zagreb’s main station. There was no one on the platform, but once in a while, at regular intervals, every ten minutes, a switchman with a cigarette butt between his lips made his way from one end of the train to the other. It started to rain, a fine autumn drizzle, though it was the end of August. It was 1954, and Rudi was traveling abroad for the first time since the war. He was being sent to Berlin. In his pocket were two letters: one was a pass, the other a recommendation, both having been processed and signed at the Ministry of Railroads in Belgrade. They were sending him to verify whether an order might be possible for steam locomotive burners for the narrow-gauge line from Sarajevo to Ploče. He had been selected for this mission because he knew German, but he was also going to Berlin for a reason of his own that he had not mentioned even to those closest to him.

  Rudi’s luggage consisted of his leather student suitcase and a medicine bag, both purchased many years ago in Vienna after an especially successful night at cards, when he had won at preferans the equivalent of at least three months of allowance from his father. In his suitcase was a black suit, the only one he owned, for the theater and concerts, three white shirts, washed and pressed before departure, seven pairs of socks and a gray bow tie with red polka dots, a birthday gift from the young baroness Christine Vogel von Steuben, whom he had known briefly and to whom he had pledged his eternal devotion in his second year of studies at the polytechnic institute in Graz. In his toiletry bag, inherited from his father, were his hygienic necessities: postwar American humanitarian-aid soap, which had sat for years in a closet and retained the smell of sheets and pillow cases; a razor and shaving cream brush; a small bottle of aspirin for headaches; bits of medicinal coal in a paper sack, in case of stomach upset; a toothbrush and toothpick; and some prewar eau de cologne. Next to the toiletry bag, at the top of the suitcase, were two books: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Ivo Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicle. He was bringing the Andrić just in case: the customs officials might wonder why he had a book in German with him and what sort of book it was; he planned to tell them that Mann was the German Andrić.