Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  I called old people who remembered him on the phone, but they too had forgotten him. They were usually suspicious. In the best of cases they thought I was an impostor and was planning on robbing them and abruptly hung up. But many did, meanwhile, remember who Franjo Rejc was and would tell me all about him.

  In Zagreb’s Lavoslav Švarc Home for Elderly Jews I found Đorđe Bijelić, who on January 17, 1937, had been appointed to the steering committee of the Society of Beekeeping and Honey Producers of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Their meeting had been held in the Workers Hall in Sarajevo. Franjo Rejc had been responsible for keeping the minutes.

  It was raining and unusually cold for the start of September.

  In front of the building, which was hidden in thick foliage in the eastern part of town where it would not bother anyone, stood a statue of the communist underground agent and martyr, translator of Marx’s Capital and academic painter of the Munich school Moša Pijade, which had been displayed at an important Zagreb intersection before the war in 1991. Instead of dynamiting it into smithereens – which would have upset the inhabitants of the neighboring buildings – the blackshirts had politely offered to the local Jewish community to have Moša moved to a property where he would not be visible to the indignant public or offensive to the Catholic majority. The grateful Jews had the statue moved to a spot in front of their home for the elderly. No one noticed it there.

  It was not lunchtime, but the old people were seated around a common dining table covered with a white tablecloth. Some were drinking tea, but most were not drinking anything. One woman with freshly permed hair wore an oxygen mask.

  At the head of the table sat a corpulent, middle-aged woman with a familiar face. A famous opera singer, who had performed for years at the Met in New York, was moving slowly to the rhythm of an invisible orchestra, pressing her chest to the edge of the table, then leaning back into the chair.

  She was singing an old song: “My thoughts fly to you mother, across mountains and plains, carrying you a greeting from your only son…”

  The old people were opening their lips with her, mouthing the words, but their voices made little sound. The permed woman, too, opened her mouth under the transparent plastic oxygen mask.

  Đorđe Bijelić was sitting in a wheelchair.

  Georg Weiss, son of Joseph Pepik Weiss, professor of mathematics at the Main Gymnasium, was born on January 1, 1901, the first day of the new century. He enrolled in Belgrade’s School of Agriculture as Đorđe Bijelić. That is how it is recorded in the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia published by the Lexigraphy Institute of Zagreb. He taught at the same school for several years after graduating. It was anticipated that a great scientific career awaited him. He was a visiting faculty member at the Sorbonne, where in 1933 he delivered the famous lecture “Christianity and the Soul of the Bee,” only to suddenly return from Belgrade to Sarajevo two years later. He abandoned his university career, was quickly forgotten in scholarly circles, taught biology in the very same Main Gymnasium, and in his free time occupied himself with beekeeping. And so in 1937 he was selected to serve as the sole Bosnian on the steering committee of the Society of Beekeeping and Honey Producers of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He remained on the committee until the beginning of the war, when the society was disbanded, and Đorđe Bijelić fled from the Ustaše to Dubrovnik and then on to Italy. After the war he returned to Sarajevo, where he taught biology in middle and elementary school until his retirement in 1966. He refused a job at the newly founded School of Agriculture but took part in some scientific projects, on his own or in collaboration with Professor Ignjat Pobegajlo, author of the book Bee Plague (Larva pestis). In 1976, ten years after his retirement, in an edition put out by the Sarajevo publisher Svjetlost, his life’s work was published, the magnum opus of Đorđe Bijelić, and one of the most unusual books of Yugoslav culture, Plague and Exodus. This three-volume edition with all of its two thousand pages evoked heated discussion in all quarters, and the editor was quickly replaced, while Bijelić’s book was declared a publishing failure at a meeting of the Party steering committee, and it was stressed that the responsibility of individual comrades and links in the chain of worker self-management would be discussed later, but the issue would not be resolved with a simple replacement of the editor in question.

  While Plague and Exodus was appraised by some as an outrageous concoction, “the product of a megalomaniacal mind,” “a work of provincial learning that suffers from delusions of grandeur,” “one big prank by a collection of idiots,” or, simply garbage, the sort that occasionally appears everywhere as a result of the over-production of books, others, a small number, but more authoritative and powerful, greeted it as an epoch-making book: “the final realization of a brilliant intellectual biography, proof of how the greatest literary works and historiographical syntheses take shape in the solitude of monastery cells, far from university cathedrals and academies, in peace and in silence, with anthropological reach into the depth of our civilization’s subconscious, magisterial cultural and historical ceremony and summation, a disclosure of the human and the apian soul, a theological tractatus on insects and on flowers, which puts man and God face to face, even for those of us who don’t believe in either the one or the other. Plague and Exodus is all of this and much more!” This was what professor of aesthetics Ivan Focht wrote about Bijelić’s book, but all the polemics were halted and all the derision died when Miroslav Krleža raised his head in defense of Bijelić’s work. He was housebound by then, he was old and found it hard to move. He was no longer writing, but he came forward on two occasions, to defend two books: Danilo Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and Bijelić’s Plague and Exodus. Both had been written by Jews. One dealt with concentration camps; the other with beehives.

  With the bloody Easter of 1991, at Plitvice and then with Vukovar and the bombing of Dubrovnik, no one remembered Đorđe Bijelić and his work anymore.

  When the bombing of Sarajevo began and the Serbian ring formed around the city, he was just a barely mobile ninety-year-old Jew who, thanks to his Jewishness, could be transported out of the city. In Zagreb, where no one knew him anymore, he was living in a home for the elderly, where no one visited him. He was a widower without children, his only son Dragutin had died of diphtheria in 1930 in Belgrade. He had been three years old. His wife Blanka, of the Belgrade Albahari family, could never conceive again. She had worked as an English teacher at a school for foreign languages in Sarajevo. She died young, in her sleep, at the end of August 1940.

  This was all I had been able to learn about Đorđe Bijelić.

  I hope as I write this that someone will nevertheless know more and that my story about him might serve as an opening and through it, perhaps, all that has been left untold and unknown in connection with my grandfather Franjo Rejc’s bee journal might be discovered. For this reason it is important that this story touch its readers so that they might spread the word, and it’s important that it be translated into as many different languages as possible, for the world of Đorđe Bijelić, the world of Sarajevo’s Jews and beekeepers, was scattered across the earth, and their descendants have been scattered three times since, so it is likely that the person who knows the whole story lives somewhere far from Sarajevo and this language, which I call again, in spite of all, Serbo-Croatian. If you hear me, please be in touch!

  When the song was over, I asked him whether he remembered Franjo Rejc.

  He looked at me, smiled kindly, and nodded.

  He did not remember him.

  I asked about the members of the steering committee of the Society of Beekeeping and Honey Producers of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1937, whether any of them were still alive.

  He didn’t understand.

  “You know, old Đorđe suffers from Alzheimer’s,” said the nurse kindly.

  “Yes, yes, Alzheimer’s!” the old man shouted, as if remembering a word that had been on the tip of his
tongue.

  After exchanging a few words of small talk, promising I would come back to see him again, and acknowledging that I too was from Sarajevo, though I had felt estranged from it for some time, I made my way to the exit.

  And then a question occurred to me, and it seemed important to ask it.

  “Mr. Bijelić, why would a beekeeper have taken a queen from the hive in Ilidža in 1937?”

  The old man straightened, looking at me as if I had just woken him.

  “For sentimental reasons, sir, only that. I can tell you what he would have done afterward. He would have waited for the sun to set, then poisoned the bees with gas, buried them on the spot, and burned the hive.”

  I didn’t understand, I thought the old man was raving. Only several months later, when I had acquired a collector’s edition of the 1933 book Bee Plague (Larva pestis), by Ignjat Pobegajlo, published in Belgrade, in the used bookstore Brala, across the street from the botanical garden, and had read about the procedures for dealing with American foul brood, did I understand what the old man had been talking about. But by then it was too late to ask any other questions, for in the spring of 1998 Đorđe Bijelić died. The news was reported only in the culture supplement to Belgrade’s Politika, along with an essay by Muharem Pervić on the book Plague and Exodus and its influence on the intellectual movements in Yugoslavia at the end of the seventies, and in Zagreb’s Bee Messenger.

  When I had understood by reading Pobegajlo’s book that Franjo’s Ilidža bee journal had cut off when the plague had appeared in his hives, I went to the university library to search the bound periodicals for May and June 1937 for news of an epidemic of bee plague in and around Sarajevo. I leafed carefully through Politika, Obzor, Jutarnji list, Večernja pošta…But nowhere was there any mention of the disease. At the time I felt resigned, was ready to give up the search, and believed that any further effort was futile and I would never learn what had happened at Ilidža and why Franjo Rejc had taken the queen from the hive in his cupped palms, while all around he smelled the foul, sour stench of bees dying, more frightening to him than the odor of a mass grave or any human suffering.

  I probably would have given up if I had not happened to find, in a Sepetarevac drawer, a letter Mina Jelavić sent on May 23, 1941, from Dubrovnik in which she inquired whether Olga thought it was a reasonable idea, under the circumstances, to have consultations with doctors and travel to Sarajevo, for an exam set for Friday, June 6. At issue were “those things,” from which it was clear that Mina had an appointment with a gynecologist. Although the letter was addressed to Olga and marked as confidential, there was no doubt that someone other than she could have read it, so about those things Mina wrote cryptically, in code and metaphors, and it was impossible to know what illness she might have suffered from. The simplest conclusion to draw would be that she was being treated for infertility, and this would serve well in some short story or novel, but in reality Mina was unmarried and would remain so, along with her older sister Franica, until the end of her life.

  The two Jelavić sisters lived in Dubrovnik’s Lapad district, in a ground floor apartment with a spacious Mediterranean garden filled with cactuses and fragrant vegetation, among figs, lemons, and oranges. It was there I first saw garden gnomes, as a three-year-old in the summer of 1969. I recall thinking that someone who had such objects in their garden must be very rich. They were much more valuable, in my estimation, than the monuments to Comrade Tito, the bronze king at the Zagreb station, and all the other monuments I had ever seen. Nothing looked to me as priceless as the gnomes in our Aunt Mina and Aunt Franica’s garden.

  Mina and Franica weren’t technically our aunts, they were distant relations, but Olga, her sisters, and my mother had looked after them their whole lives – from the end of the First World War until the mideighties, when they all died quietly, one after another. The Jelavić sisters were laid to rest beneath a marker in the Boninovo Cemetery, leaving no trace behind them. Soon Olga would die too, the last of Karlo’s daughters, and in the span of just a few Dubrovnik summers they were all gone.

  The second page referred to the Saturday that fell on June 7, 1941, the day that Mina had visited. The day before, she had been at the gynecologist for an exam and the next day had appeared at Olga and Franjo’s.

  It was the end of the school year, Mladen was in his final week of high school and Dragan was preparing for his high school entrance exams. That summer Olga would become pregnant again and the following May give birth to a daughter. The war was just beginning, in Sarajevo it had not been felt except that the Jewish-owned stores had been assigned trustees: Croats, Aryans, mostly Ustaše or Ustaše sympathizers, but it was not yet awful. Not that awful – except that several people had been slaughtered in front of the Orthodox church in Varoš and that someone had smashed bottles at the Cucić liquor store and poured out all the šljivovica so that King Alexander Street had stunk of brandy for days. Everything was normal. Except that King Alexander Street was no longer Alexander, it had been renamed after Doctor Ante Pavelić. And you had to speak slowly and carefully to avoid calling the street by its old name. Not everyone had heard of Doctor Ante Pavelić yet, and there were some old folks living in apartments in the tall, dark Austro-Hungarian buildings in the center of town who believed Doctor Pavelić was a physician who lived nearby. But the healing seemed to have not yet begun. And it was not yet awful, not that awful.

  This was how Mina talked, repeating words and phrases. She couldn’t do it any other way. Just as some people stutter, Mina had to repeat words in order to continue her sentences, to keep her thoughts going, and make the conversation last. If anyone had admonished her in jest, Mina would have shut down and stopped speaking entirely. Those who knew Mina well found this endearing. It entertained our family, all the Stublers, from Karlo’s generation down to me. And when Mina went away, or when we left her large, fragrant garden in Lapad, we would laugh, repeating the words that had served like bricks or stones for Mina that day as she skipped across muddy patches without getting splattered.

  Franjo, whose head was filled with words and different languages, was the one who most appreciated the way Mina spoke. He was even a bit jealous of her and would start repeating words and phrases as she did, though he could not be like Mina. No one could be like Mina.

  And as is often the case, what made us happy and was for us a unique aspect of Mina’s charm, she experienced as a curse and the worst form of spiritual deformity. Olga dear, she would say, my stutter prevented me from marrying. So what, Olga would console her, you sleep more peacefully at night, for by then it was late, the beginning of the seventies; Mina was an old woman, tall and bony, like a dried-up olive tree, and Olga could no longer tell her what she used to say in bygone days, when Mina would complain, Olga dear, my speech defect has prevented me from getting married! Mina, you poor thing, Olga would say, don’t say such foolish things. Men find it charming, and anyway they need to be told things three times before they hear. My Franjo needs to be told everything three times, and even then he doesn’t hear. And then Franjo would pretend to get angry, and everything would end in laughter. And the words and sensations would be frittered away, as if life would last forever, and Mina was held in a pure, bright love.

  Franica was a more serious case. By contrast to her sister, who was tall and thin, she was small and round. She also had a limp. She wore one of those ugly orthopedic shoes, which had always made me feel afraid of her. It gave her a menacing appearance, that shoe.

  But Franica never said a word about not having got married because of her limp. Because as a young girl she’d had Pott’s disease, and everyone had expected her to die, but she miraculously recovered, and that had made her happy. Her limp reminded her of how beautiful life was and how lucky she was to still be alive. But she had not got married because of Mina. She was the elder sister, and had to take care of the younger one. And later, when it no longer mattered who was older or yo
unger, she couldn’t leave her. What would happen to Mina if she got married? First she would forget to turn around the drain tube in the bathroom, and the house would be flooded; then the house would be blown into the air as Mina changed the gas canister; and eventually, Mina would poison herself and, in passing, all of us who had come to visit, for she would have mistaken the hydrochloric acid for the vinegar…How could she leave her alone? How could Franica get married?

  This was how they lived, the two sisters each unmarried for her own reasons, in their crumbling Lapad apartment and their beautiful garden. They would both take care of the plants, pruning them, fertilizing the soil, watching over the lemon and orange trees, protecting them through the winter, and all of Dubrovnik marveled at their garden. Tourists would come up to their lovely wrought-iron fence – which they also took care of, painting it every other year – and stood for a long time before the fragrant old grove.

  When the two sisters died, one after the other, Dubrovnik’s scent changed. For the first time, at the end of the seventies, Dubrovnik’s sewer system could be detected in the air. The papers said this was from the pressure of tourism, the sewers having been planned for a much smaller city. The first time the stench arose it was from the fish market, from rotten shellfish and spoiled fish guts. This was due to laziness, to gabby fishmongers, and the fact that people from the interior, from the other side of the mountains, had started working at the stalls, something impossible to imagine. Or so they said in Dubrovnik. Then the rotten oranges from the park below Pile started to stink, and the cats that had multiplied around the Orthodox church pissed on walls at Karmen and Pustjerna, and there was the rancid oil from the restaurants on Prijeko Street, and the dog shit, and the stagnant seawater in the harbor, and suntan lotion, and dead people at the Boninovo Cemetery – all of Dubrovnik reeked, and people could not understand what was happening and what had changed. And then, with time they got used to it, without ever understanding what had changed.