Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Rudi had not read Krleža. He feared him as one might a strict professor. He sensed, without knowing it, that Miroslav Krleža was poisonous to the Zagreb that Rudi had looked down on from the height of a provincial Bosnian who had studied for a good decade in Vienna and Graz.

  Unlike Krleža, his critic and co-polemicist, the great Zagreb and Croatian chronicler, the feuilletonist and piteous European liberal Josip Horvat, found himself that August 1, 1939 at the Mirogoj piano recital of Maksimilijan Stinčić. He actually described the event in retrospect, remembering it during the winter of 1942–43, while the debacle of Stalingrad was underway. In Zagreb there was a shortage of anything and everything, Pavelić, with German assistance, was cleansing the last of the Jews from the city, and the municipal police force built and trained by the great war strategist Dido Kvaternik was making early morning rounds in search of Masons and suspected communists for interrogation and internment at Jasenovac. Horvat was terrified that they would come for him too, and for months, mortified but collected, he had prepared himself for this eventuality, searching obsessively, largely in his own soul, for the source of all this evil. In Horvat’s memoir of those years, he brightly and somewhat nostalgically tells the story of the Mirogoj recital. He did not receive the mailed invitation either, although, unlike Krleža, he was close to Maks Stinčić and Bosa Kamaufova. Actually, the two of them wanted to be close to him: he impressed them as a social and cultural critic, an author of biographical novels about many famous Croats, a top-notch journalist who had no use for scandals and about whom it was rumored that he was a Mason. They were both terrified of Masons, believing the words of Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, who claimed Masons were devils sent to the earth, enemies of Christians and Croats, but whenever anyone was referred to as a Mason – and in those years, at the end of the thirties, after the short-lived rule of Milan Stojadinović, it had become fashionable to talk about prominent people as Masons – Maksim and Bosa felt a thrill, a sense of forbidden adventure, a desire to look into the Mason’s eyes, make his acquaintance, sit beside him shoulder to shoulder at a concert of the Music Academy, and dream about Masonry as if it were an infectious social disease spread by going to concerts and theater performances or by reading books that had been touched by Masons. Besides, Josip Horvat was a European liberal, it was even whispered that he was English, and the English, however treacherous and haughty they might be, represented a higher race to them both, before which one ought to be humble. After all, one could never be sure that Germany would be victorious in this and every future war, and it was in no way out of the question that the Perfidious Albion might end up the victor.

  Even so, they did not send an invitation to Josip Horvat. Horvat does not get worked up about this in his memoir. It never occurred to him that he ought to have received an invitation to such a public event. To the very end he was unaware of his position in small-town Zagreb. Besides, he didn’t know the important detail in this story: that the grave was empty.

  Horvat describes how he ended up at Mirogoj that day: the first of September was the anniversary of the death of Miroslav Albini’s mother, who at the beginning of the thirties had moved to Latin America where he traded in coffee. Before leaving Zagreb, Albini had requested in his will that, if his friend Horvat was in Zagreb, he stop by the grave to leave gladiolas and light a votive candle. How serious Albini was about this request Horvat didn’t know. The promise had been easily made, without much thought or certainty that he would actually go to the Albini tomb every first of September. But the following year on the first of September, Horvat remembered Mirek Albini and that same afternoon he went to light a candle at the headstone of his deceased mother. He continued to do this every year, and the outing to Mirogoj became for Horvat a private ritual, inaugurating the onset of autumn. And so it happened that by pure chance, Horvat attended the important social and cultural Zagreb event that day in 1939.

  He describes his discomfort at Stinčić’s playing. “It was as if the piano had gone out of tune, the hollow marble enclosures swallowing up the sound, and it was creepy and ominous. And worst of all, it made one want to laugh.”

  It is not likely that Josip Horvat laughed. He was too decent for that, but perhaps a chuckle or a slight grin ran through the crowd of invitees and those who had an ear to hear how Stinčić was playing that day at the cemetery, as the beginning of the Second World War was announced.

  In his “Concerto for Rain and Keyboard,” Irfan Ibrahimkadić did not write a single word about the actual concerto or the excellence of Stinčić’s playing. Only one sentence is devoted to it: “Amid the trampled grass and the scent of rich Croatian soil, our Croatian tragedy reverberated from the fingers of Maestro Maksimilijan Stinčić.”

  What Joška Herzl could tell Rudi about the concert was limited to two or three terse sentences which contained all the grief of a Jewish youth, but it was this part of the story that led to Rudolf Stubler’s obsession with Joška Herzl’s life.

  As we have mentioned on multiple occasions and demonstrated through multiple episodes from his life, Rudolf Stubler was a believer. Chance (or God) had so willed it: the Stublers were divided into deep, true – which also meant naïve – believers, and utter nonbelievers. Regarding God, there was never any misunderstanding among the Stublers, it was just that for some the heavens were blue and for others they were empty.

  Rudi was of the first group, and he believed in everything that a Christian child was supposed to believe to the end of his life. It satisfied his spiritual needs and freed him from the useless and terrible fear of nothingness, and his belief colored his knowledge and convictions. Although he was well educated, rational, and a gifted mathematician, in all aspects of his life he made judgments according to his pure and naïve catechism.

  And so the notion that the horror of the Second World War had grown out of Maksimilijan Stinčić’s fraudulence unconsciously entered his mind. It was like a story in the Bible: a great evil was evoked by the wickedness of one man, perhaps tiny in relation to eternity, but as striking as an Old Testament moral infraction. The world was punished, Rudi sensed, because a father staged his son’s death and then brought people together to watch as he performed Johann Sebastian Bach over his grave.

  And what else could God do but release a great misfortune upon humanity, in which good would be clearly distinguished and separated from evil?

  During the war, in Zagreb, Maksimilijan Stinčić lived the quiet, retired life of someone who had grown senile, weak, and old. He rarely left his Zelengaj villa, and sat in the garden beneath a century-old cherry tree, watching the fruit ripen, listening to and watching the birds.

  That was a Jewish titmouse, poor thing, her call is so ugly.

  That was a thrush, a Nordic black bird, the Grieg among birds.

  That was a sparrow, ah, sparrow, millions of people dying in this war, from Normandy to the distant eastern seas, and like millions of sparrows, no one knew who they were or what they were or under whose banner they perished…

  The once famous musician Maksimilijan Stinčić listened to the birds and philosophized to himself, while his wife, Professor Bosiljka Kamauf Stinčić, taught at the Music Academy, traveled every month to Salzburg, Berlin, and Rome, and once visited Paris, where she lectured the gifted young people on the variety of musical wisdom that was highly prized in a plundered and war-torn Europe and because of Bosa’s lectures, European and American performance halls were dominated by virtuosi in whose tone something evil and heartless could be discerned, an indifference to human suffering.

  How did Joška Herzl survive the war?

  There was no great story or miracle here. After all the other Jews had disappeared, the Nazis lost interest in Joška. For them, as for the ordinary, peaceful neighbors, Joška Herzl had ceased to be a Jew. He was no longer a Jew for the Nazis, but in his own mind and heart, he was more a Jew than anyone else could have been, in Graz, in Austria, in all of Eu
rope. Joška Herzl saw his misery in a larger context.

  In the winter and spring of 1944 everything started falling apart. Homes crumbled, asphalt peeled away from the streets, and the poorly laid village roads turned into muddy rivers.

  As Joška Herzl told his story, Rudi’s eyes widened in disbelief. He knew Graz well – he had studied there for a long time, until his father had ordered him home. After Vienna it was the city he knew best, much better than Zagreb or Sarajevo, and he found Joška’s account hard to believe, that the houses and people had fallen apart, disappearing into the earthly magma, gummy with stench. “I’ve got the smell in my nostrils even now!” Joška Herzl shouted, grabbing himself by the throat.

  Whatever the case, in the early spring of that year, Joška decided on a completely unreasonable undertaking. He set off for Zagreb to find his father and mother, or else perish on the road. The second possibility was much more likely, but he was not in the least concerned.

  He purchased a ticket and boarded a train.

  Although the war was nearing its end, the Partisans were creating diversions along the rail lines, the English had bombed railway hubs to the southeast several times, but in Graz everything was as it had once been long ago: lively, peaceful, and fresh. The cattle cars stank of cow droppings, neatly dressed poor people wandered the platforms in search of a train that might take them to their long-lost homeland, SS officers and local police checked the papers of suspicious characters, examining identity cards, searching for passes, taking people aside…When he caught sight of them, Joška would run toward them, like someone determined to die, digging in his pockets to show them his Jewish identity card, but each time they would sullenly wave him aside, and let him pass, wanting him gone from their sight. Schizophrenia had become an infectious disease in those days, the SS were afraid of crazy people, and Joška’s eyes were those of a madman.

  “Look at me!” he said, staring at Rudi. “Do I look mad? Tell me honestly. I can take it! Those people, see, the whole regiment, at the station in Graz too, and on the train, and we went through three checkpoints at least and they made at least ten passengers get out of each car and took them away, while they ran from me as if I was infected, and not only did no one check my papers but the conductor, who could have easily turned me in as suspicious, barely even looked at my ticket!”

  Aside from the inspections, from which Joška was exempted, peace prevailed on the railway. No one could disturb it, not the SS officers with their checkpoints or the Partisans or the black marketeers, for inside the train and around it in the surrounding areas of the great stations, provincial outposts and blind tracks, wherever the tracks went, strict railway procedures reigned, upon which no one, not even Adolf Hitler himself, could have any influence. In the spring of 1944, before the wartime victors had started bombing intensively and the defeated were pulling back in retreat, the railways were the last secure territory in Hitler’s portion of Europe, where reason, sobriety, and a certain higher order reigned, which it seemed had outlived the tyrant and the two-thousand-year-old faith in Jesus Christ, son of God. Only the railway was spared, remaining exactly as it had been for a hundred years, with the timetable as its sole article of faith.

  There, listening to the familiar clatter of the metal wheels, for a brief moment, Joška Herzl wanted once more to be alive. This desire evoked fear and distress in him, but he quickly forgot about it and continued to offer up his Jewish papers for inspection.

  “So that saved your life!” Rudi exclaimed with joy.

  “What is it you think saved my life?”

  “Well, the fact that you tried to force them to check your papers. It’s simple. It’s too bad for the others who didn’t think of it.”

  “No, you’re wrong. My life was saved by the fact that I was already dead.”

  Zagreb Station had been dirty and full of refugees who mostly spoke in a heavy Bosnian accent accompanied by lots of pitiful nostalgic curses. Ustaše police stood by, preventing them from leaving the station and making their way to town. Why the Bosnians wanted to go to Jelačić Square was hard to know, nor did anyone know who had driven them there. It had once been Serbs, then Chetniks and Partisans, depending on who was around and how harshly they swore, but the truth was – Joška Herzl sensed this as he made his way toward the exit, heading straight for the Ustaše guard who would ask for his papers – that they had escaped from their own hot heads, from something they themselves had caused, most likely because they had embraced Croatian independence too eagerly and allowed themselves to be talked into all sorts of things, and now, well, the times had begun to change and, out of fear of losing those same hot heads, they had come to Zagreb, to Markov Square, to the place where it had all begun, so that those who had started it all would take care of them. But it was too late for them, and before long very likely it would be too late for Croatia.

  The Ustaše guard let Joška pass without questioning him or letting him take his hand from his inside pocket.

  He made it to Zelengaj but was not allowed into his parents’ villa.

  A stranger opened the door. He told him to wait and then came back several minutes later, furious, with a wooden club in hand just in case.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself!” he shouted. “You defile the memory of their only son. Madam said to call the police if you don’t leave right now, and by God I will!”

  Over the following months Joška Herzl slept in basements and sheds. He avoided the center of town and the parks, where Jews, if there had been any left in Zagreb in April 1944, were not allowed to step foot, but he soon realized that he was not safe. He did not look like a communist agent. Those people – he would come to understand after the war – were well dressed as a rule. Nor did he give the impression of belonging to a race outside the law. As we have indicated, there weren’t any Jews anymore, and unkempt and filthy as he was, he had the appearance of someone who had come to Zagreb in search of something that belonged to him by right: a lost relative, his human and Croatian rights…He looked like someone before whom one had to lower their gaze, pretending he was invisible.

  Besides, it did not bother him that the buildings were rotting and crumbling here as if they were built of raw potatoes. It was not clear whether Maksimilijan Stinčić and Bosiljka Kamauf Stinčić were aware that it had been their son Josip who called at the gate of their Zelengaj villa that day. It seemed they thought someone was playing a nasty trick on them, mocking them in the ugliest of ways, by reminding them of their dead son. It did not occur to them that he could have made it from Graz to Zagreb alive.

  The first time they saw him, at least so thought Joška Herzl – and this was what he told Rudi in the train that stood at the Zagreb Station in August of 1954 – had been in the early spring of 1945.

  The day was gray and icy, and the air was dry with no sign of snow, though for weeks the temperature had been dropping below ten degrees centigrade, and a breeze from Sljeme sent shivers down the spines of passersby under their coats, which were gray, threadbare, and eaten through by moths and war. For a long time the kuna had been worth almost nothing, the national currency was experiencing a breakdown, the black market reigned, and the authorities were battling against it, mostly without success, by means of court trials and deportations to Jasenovac. As they retreated before the Partisans, who, with the support of the Red Army from the east, were preparing for a decisive spring offensive, the Ustaše once more took the field against smugglers and black marketeers, creating the illusion among the city’s inhabitants that everything was in the best order and the state was standing up for its integrity in the domain where even in peacetime it was most threatened: in the markets, stores, and butcheries. The truth was that, particularly outside of Zagreb, there were no butcheries or stores or markets, but everyone ignored this fact. Anyone who came face to face with it knew the government was counting down its final hours and all the debts acquired in the four preceding y
ears, collective and individual, were soon to be reconciled. But how could we know how much was owed by whom? And who would be in charge of collecting debts?

  The only things still functioning, which supported the illusion of the existence of the Independent State of Croatia that it maintained itself, were concerts, theater performances, and cultural life in general. Music was performed at the Music Academy every week. Independent Croatian State Radio held onto its strict seasonal repertory, conceived years before, when the perspectives for European civilization and nations advanced by the great German Führer Adolf Hitler seemed much healthier…And so, by the end of winter, encouraged by the insane optimism of Croatian music lovers, the Stinčićs one Thursday afternoon started out for a concert at the Music Academy. A young pianist, a certain Perinčić, whose first name they could never remember, would be playing Sibelius.

  They met Joška on a deserted Ilica Square.

  There was no one around. People had closed themselves up in their houses, peeking out their windows, waiting for something to happen. For days, shootings were heard from the suburbs, though the radio said the Partisans were far away, somewhere in dark, deep Bosnia and that Croatian knights were holding them back.

  They thought they were seeing a ghost.

  Maksimilijan trembled as if shaking death off his shoulder.

  “Oh dear God!” squeaked Bosa, and the two stopped midstride as if expecting Joška Herzl to pass by without noticing them, perhaps thinking they weren’t actually alive but that by order of subcommandant Budak, a monument of them had been cast in bronze right there on Ilica Square.

  “Mama!” he said in amazement, though he had been preparing for this encounter for months.

  And then he grew immediately uncomfortable. He had addressed her in a way that he shouldn’t have, that he hadn’t intended. It had somehow been understood that they were no longer his parents and he was no longer their son.