Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Anyway, even if she had wanted to talk with him, Joška Herzl wouldn’t have known what to say. For days he had circled the post office, looking for a way to pop inside and ask some kind soul to make just that one phone call, he had on his mind to ask Papa Maks, a famous pianist who had once performed before Marshal Hindenburg – a fact confirmed by the framed photograph that, in Joška’s early childhood, hung above the fireplace at the Zelengaj villa – to urge the German authorities to let Aunt Ružica and big Doroteja go, since it was all just a big mistake, neither of them had done anything wrong, but once he made it to the phone he understood how senseless his plan was, for Papa Maks would never have done such a thing for them, nor would the Germans have listened to him.

  While he yelled into the receiver and Mama Bosiljka did not hear him, Joška Herzl experienced for the first time a guilty conscience. He was to blame, not any SS men or Hitler, for the suffering of the two human beings closest to him: his cousin Doroteja and Aunt Ružica. He was to blame because he had no musical ear, for if he’d been musical, if his soul had been capable of discerning that greatest of all artistic forms created by man, he would not be a Jew today but a devout Catholic, and a pianist like his father Maks, and he would have saved Aunt Ružica and big Doroteja himself. He could not sing, that was his transgression, but would Joška’s soul have grown hard like Papa Maks’s, and would Joška have allowed the SS to take the two of them away the way Papa Maks had? He wondered if he would feel less guilt, but in vain.

  Once he became aware of his guilt, Joška Herzl reached the height of his match-juggling talent. With eyes open or closed, he flicked unlit or lit matches into the air and caught them with the tips of his fingers, tossing them into the air for as long as he wanted or as long as it took for them to turn into smoke. There was nothing left in the world, nothing in Joška’s soul, to stand between him and the matches landing on his fingertips and then returning into the air – there was no gravity, no fear of a slip-up, no awareness. He was free of such thoughts, for since the very beginning of humanity and its ability to feel blame, no one had been as guilty as he, Joška Herzl, was for the suffering of Auntie Ružica and his cousin Doroteja, and for all the Jews of Graz who had vanished with them. Joška was to blame because he had been allowed to live, and there could be no greater guilt than that. If he had thought about it, he surely would have gone mad. And so he did not think, and when a juggler does not think, he has reached perfection.

  On Friday, September 1, 1939, the day German troops crossed the Polish border and the Second World War began, a concert was held at Mirogoj, at the tomb of the composer and organist Antun Svetolik Stinčić, by his son Maksimilijan, the famous Croatian and European pianist, who had long since retired from the world stage but who was performing in memory of his forever inconsolably lost only son Josip.

  The day before, on Thursday, a baby grand piano had been delivered by truck from the Music Academy, which was unloaded and then carried into the cemetery by five strong Serbs from Lika hired at the train assembly station. Until the next afternoon at five, when the concert was scheduled to take place, the instrument was watched over by students of Professor Bosiljka Stinčić: Irfan Ibrahimkadić from Banja Luka and two natives of Zagreb, Josip Pepi Mrak and Đorđe Steiner.

  Before evening it suddenly grew overcast. Heavy, wet, gray-black clouds gathered on Mount Sljeme above the city, lightning flashed up beyond the hill, and it looked as if it would begin to pour at any moment. This event is exceptionally well described in the book Recollections of a Musician, by Irfan Ibrahimkadić, published by the Munich-Barcelona based Knjižnica Hrvatska Review in 1981. Joška Herzl in 1954 could not have described things in such detail to Rudi, for he knew only what someone in Zagreb had told him in passing after the war and what he later read in a bound version of the issues of Obzor for September 1939, at the home of a friend who worked as a compositor at Vjesnik, but we, in this lament of ours on a travel episode from the life of Rudolf Stubler, cannot resist threading into the story what we read about Maksimilijan Stinčić’s performance in Recollections of a Musician, after Rudi and probably Joška Herzl too, was no longer among the living.

  But let us return to that night between August 31 and September 1, 1939, carefully recorded by Ibrahimkadić in a long and inspired chapter entitled “Concerto for Rain and Keyboard.”

  And so, when the clouds had gathered, and the first two or three large drops had splashed on the black veneer of the piano, Pepi Mrak, the youngest of the three but the most enterprising, rushed to the first villa along Mirogoj road to look for something with which to cover it.

  He came back with two military tent covers, a part of an officer’s war kit, which Colonel Simović, deputy commander of the city, a Serb from Belgrade, had kindly loaned him. (By including this fact in his work Ibrahimkadić feigns a European sensibility and a lack of national prejudice though he was a rigid Croat…)

  They covered the piano but knew it would not be of any use if there was a storm or a big downpour. So Pepi Mrak went to the Music Academy, but no one was there. He knocked on the door of the director, Boris Papandopulo, and, in despair, he went to the Stinčićs at Zelengaj, where someone finally opened a door. Professor Bosa Kamaufova – that was what her students called her – calmed her distraught pupil, assuring him that the three of them could in no way be blamed if the rain damaged the piano. The piano was expensive – a personal gift of Prince Paul to the Music Academy – and they would not have sufficient funds for a new practice instrument, which would probably just be a small one, but whatever happened, the students who had volunteered to safeguard the piano overnight at Mirogoj could in no way be held responsible for meteorological conditions.

  But this did not mean she was not upset.

  Maksimilijan Stinčić was of course not at home. He was probably with friends at some pub drinking rakija and stuffing himself on pork rinds with onions, and likely had not even noticed it had grown cloudy.

  Night had descended on the cemetery, lightning was flashing further off, and thunder rumbled from the Turopolje plains. One speaks of miracles only if your piano finds itself under the open sky or if you’re getting ready to repair the cracks on the roof of your house. Then the story becomes great and grows to the fifty pages of “Concerto for Rain and Keyboard,” that unexpected prose piece by the minor Croatian musician who spent the bulk of his career playing in Buenos Aires nightclubs and at commemorations of the April 4 invasion of Yugoslavia by the Germans. Ibrahimkadić would be a dedicated member of the Ustaše during the war, a high-ranking official in the Ustaše Youth, and an active military officer – at the end of 1944 he had accepted a post in the Jasenovac concentration camp – all of which would qualify him for being charged with war crimes, a warrant for which was issued in Belgrade in 1946, but it seems that nothing registered as intensively on his life as that night between August 31 and September 1, 1939 when, with his two student friends, he had watched over the piano on which Maksimilijan Stinčić would musically commemorate his only son. It is as if everything else in his life was a lie, as if he’d maintained himself through lies and lived on them, this failed musician and pianist of limited talent, for the entire book, with its ironic title of Recollections of a Musician, in which for the most part he laments the suffering of his revolutionary Croatian generation and the communist crimes against the Croatian people, is a lie, except for that improbable “Concerto for Rain and Keyboard,” which is deeply felt and brilliantly rendered, and in which one recognizes the paradox of an unrealized or unrecognized writer’s talent: he wrote then about something that had truly touched him, that one time and never again.

  Ibrahimkadić and his two friends were terrified of being thrown out of the Music Academy for allowing the piano to get wet. And this fear had been strong enough to inspire Irfan Ibrahimkadić to write prose of a surprising power.

  What Irfan Ibrahimkadić did not know was that the only thing inside the tomb of the orga
nist and composer Antun Svetolik Stinčić was an empty casket. A small child’s casket with a bag of dirt from the Zelengaj garden.

  That night, while the German troops marched into Poland, and before Radio London announced the news, the three students of the piano department at Zagreb’s Music Academy stared into the dark starless sky above Zagreb. All night long it was overcast, lightning flashed, thunder rumbled, and once in a while two or three large drops fell to reawaken their fears, only to turn into a clear morning, as if someone had wiped off the glass of a steamed-up window.

  Đorđe Steiner was mortally afraid, and a man who is afraid finds it hard to call to mind ideals greater than his fear.

  In a surprisingly correct phrase, but without any true emotional engagement, Ibrahimkadić notes that Steiner was executed at Jasenovac in 1942. He was a talented pianist, by far the most gifted of the three. He was not a communist, nor was there anything that interested him other than music. He performed many times as a young soloist at the Music Academy in the course of 1940, held Chopin-themed concerts in Osijek, Novi Sad, Sarajevo, and Belgrade, and his last performance was on April 3, 1941, at Belgrade’s Kolarac Concert Hall, devoted completely to Chopin – Emanual Saks spelled this out in a proposal to name a Zagreb street after the musician. The proposal was not approved, but Saks’s text, typed on a machine with uneven spacing in sixteen stapled pages, is preserved in the Croatian state archive. This document also contains the only biography of Steiner, in which it becomes clear the pianist and his entire family perished in Jasenovac and at Auschwitz.

  The war interfered with Pepi Mrak’s musical studies. But if it hadn’t been the war, it would have been something else. Pepi was a cheerful and simple person – good, kind, and obliging, but devoid of any creative or spiritual imagination, without which there is no artistry. Whoever had known him at the Academy or during wartime – when he was in hiding to avoid being recruited, and ended up with the Partisans in 1944 more by chance than intent – would have made some joke or clever quip with Pepi’s last name, mrak meaning “darkness.” In fact, there was nothing dark or in the least melancholy in Josip Pepi Mrak, nor was there anything that would cloud his sunny spirit. One of Pepi’s former teachers at the Academy remarked that “a pianist of such a temperament and spirit could only appear in the circus, as an accompanist to an elephant on a ball or a dog riding a bike, but what do we do with him without our own original socialist circus!?”

  Just after the liberation, Josip found himself in Belgrade among the Partisans, where he ended up in the propaganda division of agitprop. He took part in the founding of the national news agency Tanjug as an editor of a culture column in the newspaper Borba, and then he disappeared. Even amid the optimistic atmosphere of agitprop and socialist propaganda, Pepi’s cheerfulness starkly contrasted with the bleak disposition of the other true believers and Radovan Zogović himself. And so, instead of generating enthusiasism, Pepi’s nature had the opposite effect.

  And so – as would become known fifty years later, from the testimonials of former communist detainees and prisoners – Josip Mrak was reassigned to the state security sector. He worked in Belgrade, then in Zagreb, on the infamous Petrinjska Street. He was on Tito’s prison island Goli Otok, in Sarajevo, and in Tuzla, only to end his career in Pristina in the eighties, where he investigated members of the Kosovo counterrevolutionary movement, Albanian irredentists, and terrorists. He retired quietly in 1987, returned to Zagreb, and somewhere near the town of Samobor had a small house with a large garden full of roses, which he cared for himself, breeding some and buying others from various parts of the world. In 1997, the soon-to-be eighty-year-old Josip Pepi Mrak published the Lexicon of the Rose at Matica Hrvatska, with seven hundred fifty entries on different varieties of roses. Except for one Burmese variety and seven varieties grown in South Korea, Pepi had one of each in his garden and had taken their pictures for his lexicon. Numerous political and cultural figures, including President Franjo Tuđman, Defense Minister Šušak, the writers Šegedin and Majstorović, attended the book launch that was held in the Croatian Journalists Home on April 10, 1997, and the old man was so moved that he could not speak. He just cried and cried.

  On the first day of 2011, in advanced old age, Josip Mrak, world-renowned author of the Lexicon of the Rose, died at Zagreb’s Rebro Hospital. A large crowd turned out to send him off at the Mirogoj Cemetery, and the family of the deceased received telegrams of consolation from the president of the republic, the prime minister, and the minister of culture.

  Josip Mrak’s sunny disposition would be a good subject for a Croatian novel that, as with so many other stories, will remain unwritten. We’ve already strayed far enough from the story of Rudolf Stubler’s voyage to Berlin in the summer of 1954, and of his meeting with the match juggler Joška Herzl while the train stood at the Zagreb train station.

  But, as we have already reconstructed the fates of two of the students who, on that night between August 31 and September 1, 1939, watched over the piano that Maksimilijan Stinčić would play, we are obliged to say what happened to the third and best known of the threesome.

  Irfan Ibrahimkadić died of complications from an operation for appendicitis, early in the spring of 1990, too early to see the sovereign, independent Croatian state of which he had dreamed and for which he had worked diligently since he left Zagreb in the spring of 1945 as part of the escort of Poglavnik Pavelić. Others grew tired, resigned, gave up, drank, lost their minds, but he persisted diligently, believing and “praying to Allah for Croatia,” as the academician Dalibor Brozović put it in an open letter to the family on the occasion of Irfan’s death.

  But let us take a look at what was happening at Mirogoj that Friday, September 1, 1939, when all of Europe trembled beneath the boots of German soldiers as they marched across Poland.

  The weather had cleared, there was not a single cloud in the sky. From the direction of Sljeme came a light summer northerly that spread the scent of blossoms, burnt rock, wax, and stearin, appropriate at the beautiful Zagreb cemetery, where for decades the dead have met and strolled past one another as if on a promenade: the poor with the poor, the rich with the rich, just as they’d crossed paths in life. Around the tomb of the Croatian organist and church composer Antun Svetolik Stinčić, several hundred Zagreb natives were gathered in a wide half arc – one could attend the event only by invitation, jointly signed by “father Maksimilijan and mother Bosiljka, in anticipation of reuniting once again with their lost son before the face of the Lord.” Some quite inappropriately wandered around the nearby graves, “to see and hear the maestro Maks Stinčić play Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven as he mourned his angelic son.”

  This event in the cultural history of Zagreb, or in the history of everyday life – which might be a more appropriate name for the history of Zagreb’s gossip – is recalled in drastically contradictory ways. The concert itself was not reported in Jutarnji list or Obzor, or written about by any of the musical chroniclers or critics of the time. This performance by Maksimilijan Stinčić, which would turn out to be his last, was not noted by a single historical review of the history of Croatian music, despite the fact that it followed his long silence and that such events, bizarre and outlandish, add spice to the history of European music. The reason for this silence can be suspected: Maksimilijan Stinčić, “with fatherly tears streaming down his face and dropping onto the keys,” played horribly. The way he played made everyone want to forget the event as quickly as possible, for it was not only shameful for him, it was shameful for all who had responded to his kind invitation, all who had ever praised his extraordinary skill at the keyboard. After all, Stinčić has always been mentioned alongside Ivan Meštrović, Miroslav Krleža, and Maestro Lovro von Matačić, as one of the Croatian giants, proof of the cultural and national identity of the Croats, and negative criticism on his account could mean undermining what they had in common – their patriotism.

  Krleža touched
upon the event tangentially in his conversations with Enes Čengić and in a few allusions in his journal (“Oh, the Mirogoj delicacy of the keyboard fingerer Maksimilijan Maksim Maks Stinčić, in whom there is as much artistic truth as in Ribbentropp’s arguments against Poland”), but he was not present that Friday at Mirogoj. No one would have invited him, nor would he have gone to such a thing, though, to be honest, he was curious. In the end, Bosa Kamaufova and Maks Stinčić were characters from his dramas and prose pieces – he met with them on occasion, they got on his nerves, but outside of fiction and theater, he diligently avoided them. Or they avoided him. For until the arrival of Marshal Tito and the Serbian Partisan detachments eager for revenge, Zagreb belonged more to Bosa Kamaufova, the expert of piano fingerings and solfège, who knew all there was to know about music and was simultaneously incompetent enough to tell others all they required, and to the Croatian piano-playing genius, her until-death-do-them-part partner Maksimilijan Stinčić, than it did to Krleža. Serbian cannons would be needed – communist or royalist, truth be told – for Miroslav Krleža to at last acquire importance and become an undeniable giant of Croatian culture. To be honest, Krleža was, let us acknowledge this torment to the endemic Ustašoids, a Serbian-occupation writer for the Croats. He was a living monument to Croatian humiliation, to righteous punishment for the camps at Jasenovac and Jadovno, and the Glina church massacres, and this would be true in Croatia for as long as there were those who understood his writing. When those people had all died out, then Krleža would become a great national writer for all the Croatian intellectuals who had never read him. The teddy bear of Croatian literature, as authentic as Croatia’s Mikado chocolate with rice, as light and fluffy as Croatian chocolate with rice…