Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  They did not move.

  “Joška, child, where in the world are your shoelaces?” she asked, not knowing what else to say.

  Maksimilijan Stinčić was silent, staring obtusely ahead as if he were waiting for all this to be over. And how could the son of the greatest Croatian pianist be tone-deaf, unless this pianist, along with the whole, ancient and long-suffering Croatian nation, was just as tone-deaf as he?

  And while Maksimilijan Stinčić waited, his face contorted into a grin, a drunken pub keeper’s guffaw, for he suddenly understood how funny Bosiljka’s question to her son had been: “Joška, child, where in the world are your shoelaces?”

  “We’re going to a concert of…,” he finally said, then stopped short. He could not for the life of him remember what the young man’s name was – Peričić? Perišić? Perinčić? – who was supposed to be playing Sibelius, and his eyes bulged, as if a fish bone had got stuck in his throat.

  “At the Music Academy they’re performing…” and then all of a sudden he could not remember Jean Sibelius’s name either, the name Grieg was on the tip of his tongue instead. Finnish family names ended with onen, and it was riling him up inside that he could not remember that most famous of onens.

  Only later, when they had reached Gundulić Street, in front of the Music Academy, and he glanced at the placard with the announcement of Perinčić’s recital, did Maksimilijan Stinčić realize why he could not remember: Sibelius’s damn name didn’t end in onen at all.

  The encounter was brief. His mother babbled on about the laces and his father completed only half of each sentence. Words failed him. He couldn’t remember Sibelius’s name or that of the pianist, and Joška Herzl thought that his father Maksimilijan Stinčić had begun to lose his memory.

  This was their only meeting before the war ended.

  For the next three months, the Stinčićs did not leave the villa at Zelengaj though Bosa Kamaufova went out for a ducat or two’s worth of supplies. Until the Partisans’ arrival, the black market was perfectly functional.

  And then came freedom.

  In the first weeks nothing happened. A new army marched around the city, formerly prohibited communist songs could be heard, accompanied by the tinkle of Gypsy violins and the swelling of harmonicas, and everything was like the theater, a stage on which a play by Maxim Gorky was unfolding. Bosa Kamaufova and her husband did not like the theater. Not even the opera. Every theatrical presentation contained something false and exaggerated. Even the sets of productions at the Croatian National Theater were offensive to Maksimilijan. Branko Gavella would turn the stage into a living room, with a table, chairs, a couch and armchair in the background, with a cupboard and pictures of ancestors on the walls, and the room reminded him of their Zelengaj salon. Then actors would enter who would, largely on the basis of a text by Mr. Krleža, subject the scene to ridicule, which they both found insufferable. The theater, they felt, besmirched their own cozy nest, it scorned all those in this city and in this land who lived and behaved like normal people. In whose name was this done? And where did this Krleža live with his dramatic muse?

  The very thought of the theater enraged them.

  They were enraged, as they watched the communists march theatrically through the city and replace their burnt-out Lika and Kozar villages with Zagreb. There was an expression of outright disdain on Professor Bosiljka Kamauf Stinčić’s face. She looked at them from above, those little, meaningless red termites, those red worms, which she could have squished one after another if there just hadn’t been so many of them. Maksimilijan was somewhat more careful. Or perhaps his fear ran deeper.

  It was Friday, June 15, 1945, when they came for him. Two Partisans, unarmed, in neat British uniforms, knocked on the door, for the bell was not working, politely introduced themselves, and led him away. Bosa was utterly lost, not even knowing what to say, her heart in her throat…She was neither enraged nor afraid. It was an undefined but quite intense feeling, which completely deprived her of reason. She let him leave in his house robe and slippers.

  He, meanwhile, did this demonstratively. Let people see how they led him away in his dressing gown and slippers. Let them see what these liberators were like…

  Of course if the two Partisans had ordered Maksimilijan Stinčić, one of our first musical giants, who had commanded the stages of Europe alongside Milka Ternina, to put on a summer jacket and shoes, he would have done so without comment. If they had told him to put on a tuxedo, he would have done that too, but since they had already decided to shame him, he was happy to allow it.

  At first Bosa Kamaufova did not know where her husband had been taken.

  For days she searched for him, making the rounds of the offices on Petrinjska and Zrinjevac, asking people – professors and musicians – who she supposed were close to the communists. Some did not know; others turned her away with contempt. And then she had a life-saving idea: Joška! She would find Joška Herzl, a surviving Jew, whose destiny would open all the doors in Zagreb to her.

  Joška meanwhile had also been detained.

  They had arrested him at Zagreb Station at the end of May in a raid that was aimed at remaining smugglers and black marketeers, though possibly their net might also ensnare a disguised Ustaše colonel, a Jasenovac butcher, or a priest who had blessed the pistols and bloody knives across Lika and Bosnia.

  Joška had just started demonstrating to two elderly citizens – one was a plainclothes Partisan agent – how to juggle lit matches. Someone grabbed him by the collar, the little flames flew in all directions, his nostrils filled with the strong scent of phosphorous, adrenaline rushed into his blood stream, and Joška Herzl went to prison.

  Everything he told his Partisan interrogators seemed fantastical and unlikely.

  At first he was not afraid; he thought the misunderstanding would be quickly cleared up. For God’s sake, he was a Jew, and the communists, the Yugoslav Partisans, protected the Jews, the whole world knew this, and the Partisan units were filled with Jews, the Ustaše press had trumpeted this, Croatian bishops and priests had told stories about it, and it just wasn’t possible that all this wasn’t true and that he, Joška Herzl, might die for being Jewish…

  After he had finished his sad story of the old aunt and the half-wit sister taken from the house while he was playing with matches, the interrogators – purely from pedagogical motives for they were certain he was a liar and a stupid liar at that – gave him a thorough thrashing. They thrashed him good-naturedly, as one might a child, with belts and shoelaces, careful not to harm him more than was seemly. Perhaps they’d been touched by the naïveté of his story, or they believed he was mentally retarded, or maybe they actually weren’t sure whether there might not be something more serious behind it, something one ought not touch.

  Whatever it was, they struck a deathly fear into him. He screamed as if they were ripping the skin off his back. Joška Herzl had long since been ready to die. But he could not bear the thought of being beaten without any intention of finishing him off.

  Besides, he did not know how to make them believe him.

  And so he decided to tell them the whole truth.

  He then had to repeat his story before a higher officer. Then once more before a psychiatrist, who was probably also a Jew. And then three more times before people who came to listen to the tale of the child whose parents denied him because he was not musical, sending him to his Jewish aunt in Graz, who turned him into a Jew.

  The last time, the seventh or eighth, Joška Herzl told his sad life’s story to Davorin Gubijan, a prewar communist and at the time, in summer 1945, the best-known Partisan prose writer, whose novel The Bloody Year had just been printed and would be released in late summer. In that first postwar publishing season, Zagreb was parrying Belgrade, where at the same time two novels by Ivo Andrić, A Bosnian Chronicle and The Bridge on the Drina, were both published. Although there was n
o competition, the one who had written his book in the mountains of our proud land rather than in the rented room of a Belgrade apartment, not far from Hotel Moskva, held a great advantage. But let us leave that for another occasion, perhaps a literary historical survey…It might be worth noting that Joška Herzl had never read either Gubijan’s or Andrić’s novels – in fact, he hadn’t read anything since his school days, for if he had, he wouldn’t have seen any sense in match juggling, or have had the time to perfect it – while Rudolf Stubler was a very careful Andrić reader, loved the author, and kept his books among the German originals of Broch and Thomas Mann, considering him their equal, while he avoided Gubijan like the plague, and never touched his novel The Psalm of David, published in spring 1948, whose entire remaining print run was confiscated and destroyed after Davorin Gubijan, that same summer, positively and aggressively refused to comply with the Cominform Resolution of June 28. He was imprisoned at Goli Otok, where he served time twice, almost without a break in between, until the end of 1959, after which his work would for a long time be prohibited and later forgotten. Davorin Gubijan would then self-publish The Psalm of David in Belgrade in 1991, but it attracted no attention. Two years later, alone and embittered, this Partisan author and martyr of Goli Otok would die in the ninety-third year of his life.

  In prison in Zrinjevac, it took Joška Herzl no more than two or three hours to tell Gubijan his life’s story. He asked for a box of matches to demonstrate his artistry to the famous writer, but the jailers did not grant his request, lest the prison catch fire.

  In the end, he put Joška’s entire story, faithfully and with no digressions of any sort, directly into his novel. He only changed the name of the protagonist: Joška thus became David Šlomo. And of course he changed his profession, but not altogether: instead of a match-juggling, unmusical son of a famous Zagreb musician he became a three-matchbox swindler. In Davorin Gubijan’s novel, he used his matches to swindle naïve travelers in stations across occupied Europe. He rotated his three matchboxes on the platforms, and somehow the little ball was always under the one no one discovered…

  The Psalm of David was scandalous even in that final spring of Yugoslav Stalinism. The dark manner in which Gubijan ridiculed the Croatian petite bourgeoisie, intelligentsia, and Zagreb gentlefok sharply contrasted his depiction of the proletariat in the city’s suburbs. Most terrifying was the end of the book, when David Šlomo, after the war, is reborn in a Zenica work-rehabilitation center, where he learns to be a carpenter, a worthwhile worker, a socialist citizen, a husband, a father…The story ends with a meeting at which a proud David is accepted into the Yugoslav Communist Party, as he rapturously declaims sentences from the Communist Manifesto. This is why the book is called The Psalm of David.

  When they no longer knew what to do with Joška and were convinced he was not an enemy, German collaborator, Ustaše member, smuggler, or pimp, but simply a habitual liar, a beggar with a Munchausen-like imagination, they set Joška Herzl free. Let him go on his way, wherever it might lead him.

  This was at the end of August.

  By then Bosa Kamaufova had come to terms with the fact that her renegade son had disappeared – he was no more and could not help her. She sought help from Zagreb’s musicians, Partisan sympathizers, Serbian and Jewish, who could guarantee that Maksimilijan Stinčić was innocent. Not only was he innocent, but it was well known to everyone in Zagreb that during the quisling Independent State of Croatia, the most famous Croatian pianist had not given a single public performance. This had been his way of resisting against the occupier and its collaborators. And what else, I ask respectfully, had been available to an elderly man? Should he have taken up a rifle in those times, rushed into the woods, and started shooting? Let us be clear, good people, Maksim was at least ten years older than Comrade Vladimir Nazor, who deserved every honor!

  And so, on August 31, emaciated and gray, Maksimilijan Stinčić was released from his Zrinjevac cell. Perhaps all that had separated him from Joška Herzl was a wall. If so, he did not know it at the time.

  Before long, Bosa Kamaufova began teaching at the Music Academy and, soon after, through some diplomatic intervention, was given permission to travel to Salzburg as a visiting professor. She would make amends for all that she had failed to do during the war, and her method of musical instruction, amoral, cold, and mathematically precise, would dominate Central European universities and music schools.

  Maksimilijan Stinčić sank ever deeper into his alcoholic melancholy, already resembling the bronze bust that would one day stand in the Music Academy’s auditorium. He did nothing and spoke to no one. After his release from prison, the once-celebrated Croatian pianist had not uncovered his old piano or touched a single key. When one or another of Bosa’s talented students would come to the house – Vojkan Milić, the future director of the studio orchestra of Belgrade Radio and Television, or Husnija Beglerbegović, today a famous Sarajevo pianist and composer, the author of the Siege Symphony, which held countless performances around the world in 1993 – Maksimilijan would set aside his newspaper, get up from his armchair, and leave the room with a sigh.

  She asked him what was wrong.

  He replied that music was no longer to his liking. As if they were talking about a dish that was hard on his stomach.

  Gradually, as time went on, they started to introduce Joška Herzl into their conversations. They mentioned him with pity, shrugging and sighing demonstratively, as if they were talking about Mishka the fool. They didn’t care that he was living somewhere in the vicinity, God only knew where, maybe in some Vlaška Street basement, nor were they concerned that he might tell someone his life’s story and that they might believe him.

  In the end, the war had sliced every person’s life in two, and what was left over from before the war did not seem to hold any importance any longer. Responsibility had disappeared, debts and loans wiped clean, but few had been as liberated by this break as the Stinčićs. They stopped lighting candles on the empty grave of their only son, they went to Mirogoj only on All Saints’ Day, during the Zagreb-wide cemetery parade, but not even then did they feel the need to show people the sadness and despair they might have felt for their progeny.

  This is what we know of Joška’s parents, what was reported in the Zagreb papers of the time or what witnesses reported in their memoirs. Of course some of it has been added to, invented – Rudi had been the first to add to it, in the countless versions related between 1954 and 1976 to the Stublers and their descendants, friends, acquaintances, and guests at the house on Kasindol Street, and then, more generally and perhaps more tendentiously, the storyteller himself has added to it and reshaped it, and the presumed atmosphere of the Zelengaj villa transported him to such a degree that he wrote dozens upon dozens of pages devoted to the marital conversations and silences between Bosiljka Kamauf Stinčić and her husband, which would eventually end up in the depths of the recycling bin.

  Joška stayed on in Zagreb. He lived like a bum, of which there were not many in Zagreb in those postwar years; most of them, like Mishka the fool, were mentally deficient or psychotic, for otherwise the authorities would not have tolerated them. In those years, during Stalinism but also later, once Tito had dealt with its dark spirit, the police had a paranoid aversion to any vagrant, for in every poor wretch they saw a potential British or American – and later Soviet – spy, who surely had a clandestine radio device hidden in his den, by which he was feeding secret information about conditions in Yugoslavia to his superiors. Secrets were everywhere: from the price of bread at the store to the results of the weekly soccer matches, for it was impossible to know what the enemy might be able to use against us. And so it would remain until the end of the fifties, perhaps through the sixties, until the day the Yugoslavs had freed themselves from their ancestral sin toward the Soviet Union and begun to forget the warning that had once been inscribed on every official telephone: “The enemy never sleeps.”


  Of all these Zagreb urchins, bums, and down-and-outs – of which there could have been four or at most five at the end of the forties – only Joška Herzl was both mentally and emotionally normal. Or so it seemed to him; perhaps on Petrinjska – the Zagreb police street where officers, spies, gendarmes, monitors, and militiamen had had their seat since the days of Franz Joseph – he was considered just as crazy as Mishka the fool.

  In any case, whoever had seen the match juggler in action even once would have understood that only a deranged person or genius could flip ten miniature torches on the ends of his fingers until they turned into smoke and ash while the fingers continued to move through the air…

  “In any case, whoever had seen the match juggler in action even once understood that Joška Herzl was either deranged or a genius!” Rudi would say, relating the story of his trip to Berlin to the Stublers.

  “In any case,” he said, raising a hand into the air, “whoever had seen the match juggler in action even once was left wondering whether Joška Herzl was insane or a genius!” This was Rudi on November 29, 1970, at the table during Sunday dinner, at the house on Kasindol, this time addressing, in German, Doctor Werner G., to whom Branka Ćurlin, Lola’s daughter, had just been married and who was visiting his in-laws for the first time, where this story had to be related to him.

  “In any case,” Rudi sighed, “whoever saw Joška Herzl juggling matches even once was left wondering if the young man was crazy or a genius!”

  This was in the summer of 1976, in the cool shade behind the apiary, as he dealt his last hand of preferans with Isak Sokolovski and two other people now forgotten. What preyed on him, and what was on his mind each time he pronounced these words, was the fact that he, Rudolf Stubler, had never seen Joška Herzl juggle matches.