Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “Go after him, why not. It will probably be nice for him. He hasn’t met anyone from Yugoslavia for some time.”

  Rudi later had no idea why he’d listened to the ticket clerk. He ran outside and almost collided with Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had barely made it a few steps down the street.

  “Excuse me, maestro…”

  The conductor took him afterward to a teahouse, just around the corner, in the building where he stayed when in Berlin.

  They sat by the window, drinking Russian tea.

  He told him he would soon be going to Baden-Baden. His joints plagued him and the bathwater and climate would help. Furtwängler insisted that suffering in no way proved that a person was alive. Only music can demonstrate that there are signs of life among these crags, Furtwängler said. But even if it isn’t so, even if there is no more music, one mustn’t be sorry. At least you Yugoslavs have no reason to mourn Beethoven. You have the sea. And in the late summer, the wind comes up before dawn, and the waves wash against the cliffs below the Dubrovnik Hotel, and the sound is worthy of Beethoven, though devoid of musical form and harmony. It is a shame that Arnold Schoenberg – you have heard of his work – did not spend his summers in Dubrovnik. If he had, he would have realized his music was superfluous next to Beethoven’s, like the waves that beat against the Dubrovnik stones, producing that completely atonal sound. This is the reason, Maestro Furtwängler said to Rudi, as they sat in the corner teahouse drinking Russian tea, why you Yugoslavs should not mourn Beethoven.

  And as for the oboist, the bassoonist, and flutist, I did what I could, Furtwängler told him, but I do not say my conscience is at peace. Only scoundrels refer to their peaceful conscience. And I am sorry for your nephew. So many young people, Furtwängler said, paid with their lives…I can only feel sorry, that is all.

  And then he told him the story of Karl Holbein, an extraordinarily gifted youngster, the impoverished son of a Jewish baker. There’s that Jewish sense of humor, Furtwängler said, so many poor people taking on such last names. Karl Holbein had perfect hearing: the sound of a mosquito buzzing in the next room would wake him. He was ideally suited for music: he could hear it beyond set tempos and compositional directions, as it had never been played before and as it could be if we all had perfect hearing and musicality, and he also had something greater and more important – he had imagination.

  The Jews are more musically gifted, Furtwängler said, because Jews in general have greater imaginations.

  Young Karl Holbein imagined Beethoven. And Tchaikovsky, and poor Gustav Mahler, and sweet Mozart…But he had a different ambition. He did not want to become a great conductor. He wanted to play first violin in the Berlin Philharmonic.

  He was my student and my protégé, Wilhelm Furtwängler said, but I could not protect him. I told him: Son, go to Switzerland, or America, wherever your legs will take you, you’ll earn bread anywhere, you’ll be a famous, great violinist, and once you’ve grown up you’ll realize that there is something besides the violin for you, but leave this place, Germany is not for you.

  And is it for you? he responded impishly.

  Germany is for me, yes, but it isn’t for you, the famous conductor shouted at the young man, and he shouted at Rudi too, as he was telling him the story.

  I don’t want all that, Holbein said calmly. All I want is to be first violinist in your orchestra. If you go to New York, or become the musical director of the London Symphony, if you go to the moon, I will follow you…

  But Furtwängler did not want to leave Germany. He conducted with Adolf Hitler seated in the front row, surrounded by a suite of select German criminals, and the maestro understood how all this would end, acknowledging his sin, but he did not want to leave Germany. He believed that only in Germany would he be able to conduct the Ninth Symphony as he wanted, outside the instructions and accepted conventions of the lax musical spirit of a corrupt Europe. In Europe and America, Arturo Toscanini had been in control for decades, and he was not a conductor but a metronome that waved its arms from the podium just so the musicians wouldn’t lose their place.

  Karl Holbein did not play the bassoon, or the oboe, or the flute, so all was in vain. He was merely a student of Furtwängler, who procured false documents for him with the name of an Aryan boy who had died in a traffic accident. He walked through Berlin without the mandatory Star of David symbol, until someone recognized him and reported him to the Gestapo. Furtwägler begged them to spare him, insisted he had never had such a gifted student, telephoned Goebbels, but he did not answer his phone. It was in vain because Holbein did not play the bassoon, the oboe, or the flute, so Beethoven could be just as perfectly rendered without him.

  If anyone else had hidden a Jew and procured false documents for him, in the best of cases he would have ended up in a camp. No one in all of Germany besides Furtwängler was allowed to hide Jews with impunity.

  This was what Wilhelm Furtwängler was told, which he, word for word, conveyed to Rudolf Stubler, who would in turn relate the story during family gatherings, weddings, and funerals. Among the Stublers, as has been recorded and as the finale of this family history confirms, there were many more funerals than there were weddings.

  They even allowed him to be alone with Karl Holbein – or Judah Israel Holbein, as his name was entered in the official documents – but the only thing he was able to do was take a sheet of paper from his briefcase and write on it in black ink the announcement that Karl Holbein was appointed concert master and first violin of the Berlin Philharmonic.

  The next morning Karl Holbein was merely one among thousands in a cattle car taking people east. Karl Holbein ended up in a camp, Furtwängler did not know which one, and the maestro would spend many fruitless days begging Goebbels, Göring, and anyone close to the Führer to do something to save the German musical genius. Maybe he was a Jew, Furtwängler had said then, and now to Rudi in the little Berlin teahouse, maybe Holbein was a Jew, but the music Holbein imagined was German music. The greatest German music of our time. That was what Furtwängler had said, but there was no one to hear him. The innocent youngster who dreamed of becoming first violinist in Furtwängler’s orchestra would forever be on his conscience. For that dream the child had been prepared to die.

  Had Wilhelm Furtwängler been prepared to leave Germany, which, after all, is what all of cultured Europe expected of him, Karl Holbein would have remained alive, for he would have followed him. But then an oboist, a bassoonist, and a flutist might have ended up in a camp…

  “But I’m going to tell you something, dear sir. I’ve thought about this for a long time, and now I know: Karl Holbein died happy, for his dream was realized in the cell of his Berlin prison. He became the first violinist and concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, and this order was personally signed and verified with artistic honor by Wilhelm Furtwängler. His dream was realized. All that may be small, insignificant, but we as human beings don’t really know what the big things are. This is why Karl Holbein died happy, the moment before he would have grown disillusioned with his dream…”

  As the train crawled slowly through a ravaged, divided Europe, it occurred to Rudi that perhaps it had all been a huge deception. The old man might not have been Wilhelm Furtwängler – after all, would the great conductor have invited him to tea to tell him about his life? Maybe he was an impostor, a liar who had spent a lifetime lying about himself. A good-for-nothing tramp who changed roles and masks, taking up the identities of famous people, living off their genius, suffering, and sacrifices for the homeland. The old impostor had played this last role masterfully, Rudi thought, traveling in his empty compartment on the Munich-Salzburg-Vienna line, explaining to people what Wilhelm Furtwängler should have explained to people.

  The one thing that did not fit and that plagued Rudi about the entire affair was that the old man paid for his own and Rudi’s teas. You are the traveler, Furtwängler said to Rudi. It’s not your
place to pay. When I’m the traveler, you can buy tea for me.

  The Bee Journal

  In the basement of the house on Sepetarevac Street, among the things that remained there after our move, was a little moth-eaten wool bag, a so-called zobnica, found in the summer of 1998, and in it a pencil – the only thing untouched by time and the basement’s humidity – a rusty benzene lighter, two pieces of red wax for sealing letters, and a notebook.

  The bag, lighter, and wax ended up in the trash – who needed wax for sealing letters anymore? – the fate of the pencil is unknown, but the notebook I kept, because I thought it might contain an answer to the question as to whom this bag, which resembled a horse-feed sack, from which its name is derived (zob meaning oats), had belonged and for what it had been used. Where it had been sewn together was hard to say, for its colors and ornaments had been lost to rot and filth, and such bags were used all along the Dinaric belt, from the Karst Rim to Istria, across the Velebit, Dalmatia and Herzegovina, all the way to Albania, wherever there were sheep and men who tended to them.

  I was curious to find out to whom the bag had belonged. I often think about lost possessions, searching for answers to questions left over from the past, or trying to reconstruct events witnessed by those no longer with us. I torment myself this way, especially when I’m sitting in waiting rooms, or bored, or lying in the dark with a headache, and I develop theories about everything and everyone. Nothing good comes of this, no literature – only torture without meaning or end. Wittgenstein was lying when he said what cannot be imagined cannot be thought about: oh, yes, it can. Such thoughts hurt at first, then lead into obtuseness and torpor.

  I wanted to forget about the bag, so I tried to discover who its owner had been.

  Besides, I was thirty-two – the following year I would be the age Jesus had been when he died – and it was too late to change professions. But researching the contents of a bag found in a basement, reconstructing the historical moment from seemingly ordinary objects explained by jottings in a notebook, after having spending years rummaging through archives and traveling to places where the unknown actors in this story lived or visited, I began to piece together the sense behind minor histories – the most interesting of scholarly genres – but also the sense behind the practice of scholarship, a practice I unfortunately shall never undertake, for I will remain to the end of my life a journalist and fiction writer who invents things and tries to arrive, by shortcuts, at what scholars get to with much greater certainty. And this being the case, at least this once I should research an object of interest and remove from it all doubt and speculation.

  After I had cleaned off the deposits of dust and mold with a small rag, a gray-blue leather cover with simple narrow decorations along the edge appeared with a now barely visible inscription in the lower-right corner. In handwritten letters, with a line underneath as if for a signature, the word Notes was printed. Though both the inscription and the decorations, which looked as if they were linked together by staples, were by now barely discernable. Under careful inspection, it was possible to see the traces of gilding in the grooves, and the decorative aesthetic and shape of the letters were consistent with art deco.

  The notebook could not have been expensive.

  It measured 10.3 centimeters by 15.8 centimeters, and contained forty-four hand-numbered pages, of which two, between 32 and 37, were torn out, and two others were the unmarked front and back pages.

  It was filled with writing from this page to this page, then again on pages 21, 25, and 27, all in pencil. The handwriting was minute but clear, except where it had faded with time as the graphite dried and turned to dust. But those parts too, which did not compose more than a quarter of the text, could be reconstructed with a little effort and a magnifying glass. Each record in the notebook had its own entry date, from the first, on July 18, 1935, to the last, on this page, dated July 14, 1937.

  On the inside of the first blank page was an “abbreviations and symbols” legend.

  M = queen

  D = drone

  W = worker bee

  C = colony

  B = brood

  SB = sealed brood

  E = egg

  ← = back

  → = front

  O = middle

  = swarm

  The handwriting was the same from start to finish, and instantly recognizable, flowing and distinctive, controlled, small. While it was possible to tell when the notebook was held in the palm of the writer’s left hand and when it had rested on a firm surface, the handwriting was never unsettled, nor was any letter ever larger than its delimited space, the so-called cubelets of a mathematics notebook sheet, which had probably conditioned the self-control and balance of the keeper of this unorthodox journal.

  Only one sentence was written in a different hand, in equally small letters, on the inside of the second blank page. The sentence read, “Saturday, June 7, Mina visited.” As the seventh of June fell on a Saturday only in 1941, the sentence had been written after the notebook was no longer used, although there was a slight possibility that Mina had come on Sunday in 1936.

  That sentence had been written by Olga Rejc.

  All the rest had been written by Franjo Rejc.

  He kept the journal in the notebook with its gray-blue cover for a single bee colony. At the time, between 1935 and 1937, Franjo managed another community, this one in Želeće, near Žepče, where he had nine hives on a meadow not far from the station. There was surely another journal that accompanied the life of this other community. It has not survived, nor are there any living witnesses to confirm the story of the nine hives situated on a meadow belonging to Dušan Zlatković, a switchman employed at the Žepče station. Franjo Rejc paid his rent for the meadow to Zlatković in honey, or “pollen rent,” as they referred to it, though Zlatković didn’t request it. “It’s great luck, good for any normal human to have bees on the land. God loves bees. God’s love makes honey heal.” That was how Dušan Zlatković talked about bees, according to Nono’s memory, or my memory of Nono’s memory. While he was only a switchman, he was a devout person – not common among the rail men and track workers, especially the Orthodox ones – he read the holy books every evening, went up into the mountain to chant the psalms, and would forever ask, “What would God think of that? How would God look on that?”

  Franjo did not have to pay rent for the six hives at Ilidža, for this bee community was located in Karlo Stubler’s garden. Karlo and his son Rudi sometimes looked after the bees, but in those years Rudi would be playing in the Sarajevo variety theater, and Opapa was ailing – late summer allergies seemed to be giving him trouble, at a time when allergies were not commonly known – so care of the bees fell to Franjo. That was why he kept the journal.

  His need to note and document was pronounced throughout his life. Perhaps this was the expression of some cocooned literary talent or derived from a need to stop time and save himself from oblivion, or perhaps it was the result of Franjo’s bureaucratic orderliness, which drove him to select, analyze, comment upon, and archive everything. He had always kept journals, not just for bees and bee colonies, but for everything else too. He recorded his phone conversations in the table calendar: the date, time, conversation length, whether he had made or received the call. Below that he would note whether any mail had come that day, a letter, a telegram, or a book ordered from Germany. On the little papers he stuck to the worktable he noted what had transpired at headquarters, who had a new grandson, whose boy had graduated from Zagreb, whose wife had died. Later he would file them into a folder, or they vanished on the way to the wastebasket, and no one, not even he, knew what purpose this documentation of reality served. He felt insecure if he was not keeping a journal.

  Karlo once asked him why he wrote down what he would most likely remember anyway.

  He seemed confused at first but then answered very reas
onably: “So people will know what to do with the bees if something happens to me. It would be a shame for the bees to suffer along with me.”

  Karlo didn’t believe him. No one who knew Franjo would have believed that he kept a journal to protect the bees from whatever might happen to him personally. And anyway, when the beekeeper was no more, and when there was no one left to look after the hives, the bees would still have survived. The colony would have changed, the hives would have emptied, there would have been many dead and unborn, the larvae would have rotted in their broods, the acetic odor of death would have spread, but the bees’ line would nevertheless have carried on.

  Franjo knew this better than anyone, but he could not think of a better reason why he kept a bee journal.

  Or why he kept all his other journals.

  So this much I was able to discover quite easily: the bag with the pencil, benzene lighter, letter-sealing wax, and the notebook had belonged to my grandfather.

  And it was time to step back, to forget the notebook in one of the drawers of my desk in Markuševac, where it would remain so long that the graphite would disappear from the paper, leaving the empty, yellowed pages without any writing at all. Thus in the end would all Franjo’s stories and chronicles return to their original matter.

  But I still needed to learn two things.

  Why had he stopped keeping the bee journal?

  And when had Mina visited Olga and Franjo: on Saturday, June 7, 1941, or on Sunday, June 7, 1939? Had Olga entered the wrong day of the week, or had she made the annotation on the inside of the second blank page a full four years after Fanjo had stopped keeping a journal of the Ilidža bees?

  The notebook had probably been in the bag with the pencil, benzene lighter, and letter-sealing wax by that time. Did she take it out merely in order to record the date and day when Mina came? Whom did such an annotation serve and for what purpose?

  In the August 1998 I searched through drawers and old notebooks, poked around the attic of the Sepetarevac house looking for other bee journals. They were not there. They had disappeared, perhaps they had been burned during the cold winters of the war or tossed out as garbage by Javorka, his daughter and my mother, during that first peacetime spring, carried away by the euphoria of a new day.