Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Stjepko Falatar had originally been from somewhere in central Bosnia, from Jajce or Varcar. He’d quarreled at a young age with his father and left home. His father had summoned him back home, threatening to disinherit him, but Stjepko didn’t respond. He was young, full of himself. He had a gift for learning, the friars wanted to educate him, but only if he made peace with his father. He did not want to do that so studied to become an engineer. Austria was just then looking for local people to work on the railroads, and he took advantage of it.

  Thus was Stjepko’s life shaped at a very early age.

  He brought the Hungarian girl from Sombor. It did not bother him that she limped, nor did he care what people might think. He did it out of love and defiance of the world. He continued to be defiant for a time, but then the Great War came, hunger and poverty took their toll, his children were born…

  To feed his children, Stjepko Falatar took up beekeeping. Perhaps his kids were healthy and strong and were untouched by disease because they were raised on honey. On greens, nettles, roots, rotting potatoes, which had always been around, but then also on vast quantities of honey, which was abundant in the Falatar household. During the early years he maintained his hives in secret, built nests in the woods, came up with ways to prevent others from stealing the honey, and he thought up some fine ones. People were afraid of Falatar’s bees. It was said that he trained them, taught them to attack anyone who drew near to a hive uninvited. He himself might have spread this rumor.

  Nevertheless, there was something to it. Bees grow accustomed to the scent of the beekeeper’s sweat. They recognize it and if someone strange comes close, they grow nervous. They do not handle human sweat well – it drives them crazy, and they make suicidal attacks on its source. But they grow accustomed to the beekeeper – they have known him their entire lives, passing on the knowledge of him from generation to generation.

  They met because Franjo had heard from beekeeping friends that Stjepko Falatar talked with his bees. Whether they really believed this or were just kidding the poor guy, Franjo did not know or care. He believed that someone somewhere existed, or in the several thousands of years people had engaged in beekeeping, someone had existed who spoke with the bees.

  And so, little by little, they became friends. The two of them only ever spoke about bees and honey.

  Falatar kept bees to feed his children; Franjo to be alone. Though their reasons were different, the story led them to the same place. Falatar’s children were no longer little when, in the fall of 1934, his affliction came upon him. His eldest son Josip would soon be employed by the railroad, his youngest Ilija was studying at the gymnasium and singing in the church choir, all three daughters, born one after the other, had started school, and it seemed that everything would soon get easier.

  But then Falatar saw a pair of shoes in Šnehajm’s shop window.

  Black lace-ups – exactly like those worn by hundreds of Sarajevo residents, municipal workers, high-level postal and railroad officials, journalists, artists, and actors. There was nothing extraordinary about them, but they were the sort of shoes Falatar had never imagined on his own two feet and they captivated him, evoking a spiritual crisis that all his years of hunger and poverty had not.

  He thought about how life had no meaning and every torment was futile when one knew that he would pass by these shoes his entire life and never have the money to buy them. He did not tell anyone this, not Rozalija, not his colleagues from the railroad, not Franjo.

  On Sunday, when they gathered at the Želeće hives, for the first time Falatar was not up to talking. He worked dejectedly. He said his stomach was bothering him.

  Once all the preparations for winter had been made, the time of bee inactivity arrived. It was the beginning of November when Franjo went to the Bistrik station to ask about Falatar’s work hours. They told him he had pneumonia. He was in bed at home. Franjo came looking for him again several days later. They said things had got worse and Falatar was in the hospital.

  He grew worried and decided to visit him.

  He brought two oranges so as not to arrive empty-handed. But he knew that Falatar didn’t eat oranges. He had never seen him eat anything but bread, lard, onions, and honey. That was what he ate at all times of the year, whether it was freezing cold or roasting hot. Whenever Franjo offered him cheese, salt pork, or Wiener schnitzel that Olga had made him for the road, Falatar would refuse.

  He said that one mustn’t get used to things.

  The more you get used to them the more your needs grow.

  Good for the children to eat cheese and buttermilk.

  They need it for their bones, to get stronger.

  Who knows, thought Franjo, maybe one can live on bread, lard, onions, and honey. Once, many years later, after Falatar had long since died, he would ask my father while they were playing preferans how long he thought a man might live on only bread, lard, onions, and honey.

  It depended, my father responded, on how strong willed he was. I had never heard him talk about strength of will or any such metaphysics; it sounded more like the speech of a priest or psychiatrist.

  There was no record of Stjepan Falatar in the pulmonary ward.

  Nor was there any in internal medicine, infectious diseases, cardiac care, or the liver or kidney treatment areas of Koševo Hospital.

  Franjo found him in the psychiatric ward. He was lying in a dimly lit room, whose sole window looked out on the wall of another building a couple of meters away, and he was crying. It was a room with twelve beds in it. His was the closest to the door.

  The other patients barely made a sound, wrapped in their medications or heavy, sick slumber; the half-dead lunatics breathed quietly. They aren’t lunatics, Olga shouted, they’re unfortunates, spiritually afflicted. It can happen to anyone! All right, it can happen to anyone, Franjo shot back nervously, but then repeated that he had found Falatar crying in a room with twelve beds where the light of day was barely visible since the only window looked onto a wall.

  Well, what’s wrong with him then? she asked.

  He shrugged.

  Did you ask the doctors?

  Doctor Besarović said they didn’t actually know what had happened to the patient, except that he had experienced some form of breakdown.

  In the shop window of the shoemaker Jakob Šnehajm, on Alexander Street, he had seen a pair of shoes he liked. And instead of buying them, though they would have cost half his monthly salary, Falatar had experienced a breakdown. But not because he had never in his life bought a pair of shoes, for himself or for any of his five children – he had had to buy orthopedic shoes for his wife every two years, and those were the only shoes ever purchased in the Falatar home – that was not what had shaken him. It was the thought that his whole life would pass, and that never ever would he put on a pair of shoes from Šnehajm’s display window. And when he realized this, the world around him suddenly began to crumble.

  If it weren’t the shoes, it would have been something else, said Doctor Besarović. The human soul is a deep dark well, he said. We may be able to sense when somewhere deep down the bucket splashes into the water, and on the basis of that sound attempt to guess what might have occurred or shifted.

  A pair of shoes.

  A deep, dark well.

  Franjo was worried about what would happen to Falatar’s bees.

  The following week when he went to Ilidža, he visited Falatar’s hives, which rested on Balijan’s land, on the fallow ground facing toward Butmir. It was quiet, the bees were wintering in peace. Falatar had left them enough honey, having prepared the hives for the cold weather, as one shutters the windows of a seaside house at the end of summer.

  This calmed him.

  By spring Falatar will have recovered.

  But that wasn’t what happened.

  They let him go home before Christmas. They gave him some medicine, told
him to walk as much as possible, to rest, and not to fight with his wife. But doctor, he said in surprise, I never fight with my wife. Good, good, just listen to what she tells you, Besarović answered without interest. He had too many such cases in his department. This was in 1934, and the psychiatric ward was filled with men and women he didn’t know what to do with. When his division filled up and every bed had contained two patients, the doctor ordered a great purge. Usually this was on Monday and Tuesday. Over two days he would evaluate which cases were most serious, who was creating disorder, drinking rakija, fighting, or, God forbid, slitting their wrists, and all these he would send to mental hospitals. His former patients were all over the place by then, from Zagreb and Popovača, across the island in the Šibenik archipelago, to Montenegro, Kosovo, and Serbia.

  This was why his patients were so afraid of the great purge. They would grow calm and quiet, shrinking so that even a bed with two people in it seemed empty, and they would pray to their respective gods for the frightening diagnosis to pass them by.

  There were no rules there. Besarović did not look at their charts; he did not care whether someone had been in the ward for six months, was a returnee, or had just shown up the day before a purge. If he found a concealed bottle of rakija or heard someone talking loudly, he would send him off to Sokolac, even if he was the most normal of normal. And anyone who ever entered Sokolac went crazy, they said, though there were no witnesses.

  It was said they had once mistakenly picked up a monk as he was on his way back to his monastery by train, somewhere in southern Serbia. He resembled a certain unfortunate by the name of Simeun, a drunk and an eccentric, who spoke in a confused jumble and anyone unstable listening to him went over the edge in a second, so Simeun was kept in strict isolation. But it was hard to keep him there, for Simeun would squeeze through the keyhole. If you locked him in a room with a keyhole, you could be sure that Simeun would vanish in minutes. He had run away from Sokolac twelve times, they said.

  This particular time, the story goes, the gendarmes caught the runaway student, which is what they called Simeun because of his education and beard: they had a photograph of him and they recognized him sitting quietly, dressed in a monk’s habit, looking out the window of the train from Sarajevo to Višegrad.

  As they recognized him, sprang on him, and put the unfortunate monk in chains, and as he tried in vain to tell them they were mistaken, he was a man of God returning to his home, the more certain they became that they had in their hands Simeun the student. Besides, they looked as alike as two peas in a pod, Simeun and this unfortunate monk.

  They say it only took two weeks for their mistake to come to light. This was all it had taken for the real Simeun to drive half the Banja Koviljača spa-goers crazy with his stories and get himself arrested.

  If this was Simeun the student, they wondered in Sokolac when he’d been brought in, then who was it they had in the cell?

  Could he really be Sava the monk, a man of God from the Mileševa Monastery?

  They called up the postal station in Pale, from which a telegraph was sent on to Prijepolje so someone could be sent over to Mileševa to ask whether they might be missing a monk by the name of Sava, who had gone to Sarajevo to visit his dying mother. That was what the man had said when they brought him in, chained up: he’d gone to Sarajevo to visit his dying mother.

  At Mileševa they said that two weeks earlier they had reported the disappearance of one brother to the police. He had embarked on the train for Višegrad and disappeared somewhere along the way. Murder was suspected.

  It took another three days for the news of the missing monk to reach Sokolac and for them to realize who Simeun the student’s look-alike was and whom they were holding in the cell without a keyhole.

  They kissed Father Sava on the hand and apologized to him in their choicest words. The hospital’s director knelt before him and prayed for him to pull himself together, but the man was clearly insane. Seventeen days in the Sokolac mental hospital had been enough for the monk to go out of his mind. All their prayers were in vain, in vain was all his faith and composure, in vain his understanding of the temptations God placed before a man devoted to him. At Sokolac a few days were enough to drive even the most normal of men out of their minds. Even the Almighty went crazy there!

  So the story goes. This was the point at which someone’s right index finger would rise high into the air above a table covered with glasses, bottles, and ash trays.

  Falatar, therefore, was fortunate. They let him go home before Christmas, and on Christmas Eve Besarović conducted a great purge. If he had not been let out the day before, who knows what might have happened to him.

  He grew calmer when he saw his children. The Hungarian woman brought him some bread and lard, he would prop up a big jar of honey between his knees so he could take up the honey with slices of onion, peeling it all the way to the green center of the seed-bud. He would bite into the bread and lard, taking up the honey with the onion, until he finished off a third big, healthy, red-onioned head, which, according to the testimony of everyone who visited, brought Falatar back to health and mental soundness. He was constantly hungry, but he would he eat nothing other than bread, lard, onions, and honey. Habit leads to one’s ruin, Falatar would say, one must not become accustomed to good things.

  He did not mention the shoes, but it was palpable that they were all he was thinking about.

  He held out like this until the end of February, and then it grew suddenly warmer as if it were already May – the gardens along the steep slopes of the city began to bud, old people shook their heads in worry while the young rejoiced – until, as recorded in the notebook, a severe frost fell in April.

  18 IV 35. Frost on the 15th, 16th, and 17th. All the flowers and blossoms destroyed. All swarms well supplied with pollen and new honey. Nests spread across 7-12 frames. Drones have hatched. Numbers 1, 2, and 3 received extensions. The pasture has emptied.

  2 V 35. They bring less pollen (two illegible words). The supply of honey strikingly reduced. Drones driven out from hive no. 6.

  * * *

  —

  On one of those days, between winter and spring, they took Falatar away. He was beside himself. He was screaming, talking with someone others could not see, and the conversation was frightening.

  A very tall gentleman in black, as handsome as Jesus Christ, with long fingers and a ring on his left ring finger with a sizable ruby in it, was offering him the shoes from Šnehajm’s shop window in a quiet, calm voice. And they were free. All Falatar had to do was nod his head, say nothing, and the shoes would be on his feet. When he nodded, his youngest daughter would die. This was the contract, this was his generous offer: this daughter of his was not hardworking or especially intelligent. She was ugly. No one knew who she took after, for Falatar was not ugly and the Hungarian woman had been born such a beauty that she was hard to marry off. If he nodded and let the girl die, Šnehajm’s shoes would appear on his feet, the most beautiful shoes in Sarajevo.

  Poor Stjepko Falatar shouted, struggled, waved his arms, pushed the gentleman in black away, in deathly fear that he might accidentally nod his head and his child would die. This was not accidental. Something was pushing him to do it, telling him it was necessary, reminding him of the beauty and happiness he had never experienced and probably never would, of wearing a new pair of shoes.

  All he had to do was nod and let his child die.

  The hospital attendants could barely control the wretch. Besarović ordered him to be strapped to the bed, and that night for the first time they tried electro-shock therapy on the patient Stjepko Falatar. Besarović deluged him with electric shocks, though he did not believe they would be any use. Doctor Besarović did not believe that any serious mental illness could be cured, but it was only proper that new treatments should be tested in the ward. And this would also send fear into the bones of the other patients.

&
nbsp; The next morning Falatar was calm.

  He did not remember anything. Or he was lying that he did not remember.

  He responded reasonably to every question put to him.

  The doctor decided against sending him immediately to Sokolac.

  He was at his bedside when Franjo came with the two oranges.

  You know I don’t eat that, Falatar said. It’s not good to get used to good things.

  I know, he answered, but it is a courtesy to bring something to a sick person.

  Am I a sick person?

  Yes, you’re in the hospital, aren’t you?

  The hospital is not just for sick people. There are fools too.

  Well said. There are those too.

  As he listened to their conversation, it seemed to Doctor Besarović that the two were equally crazy and equally sane. He had known Franjo Rejc for years. He used to play cards with him and was certain that he was not mentally ill. But until recently he had still wanted to send Falatar to Sokolac. And he would have done it just so as not to have to think about him anymore, but he was uncomfortable because of Franjo.

  And so the patient Stjepko Falatar stayed for the next two months in his bed in the psychiatric ward of Koševo Hospital. In that time two great purges rumbled through, many ended up in mental hospitals across the monarchy, from Vrapče to Popovača, across the Adriatic islands, all the way to eastern Serbia, but Falatar stayed put. He would cry for days at a time.

  * * *

  —

  In March, before the heavy frosts of April 15, 16, and 17 killed all the blossoms, Franjo came to visit Falatar at the hospital to tell him respectfully that he feared for his bees but that he didn’t want to be responsible for letting them go into the wild to die.

  There was nothing to be afraid of, he answered, he should treat them as he treated his own. Do whatever he did for his own bees, so the poor things don’t feel abandoned. As he said it, his eyes filled with tears. Then Franjo’s eyes filled with tears. There was nothing crazy in these tears. They were both thinking of the bees, and this made them feel like crying. And that is normal among beekeepers.