Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  You’re saying they won’t attack me? he asked as he was leaving, half-joking, but half-serious.

  They won’t. I told them not to, Falatar answered.

  In fact, Falatar’s bees were more patient and considerate with Franjo than his own. When they flew around him, they were careful not to let their buzzing unsettle him. If he was hot, they created a little breeze with their wings. If he was cold, they would alight onto his hands to warm him.

  When Franjo talked about how in the spring of 1935 he realized that the steam locomotive engineer Stjepko Falatar, an impoverished Sarajevo resident, had spoken with his bees at a distance, Franjo was dead serious. Some thought he was joking and laughed at the story of Falatar, others took him seriously.

  Stjepko Falatar slowly recovered after a long stay in the psychiatric ward. He stayed in the hospital until the end of summer 1935, when he was released during one of the great purges. Instead of sending him to Sokolac or Popovača, the doctor sent him home.

  Besarović was certain Falatar would come back, but it did not happen.

  He was given a pension for the disabled, and continued to look after his bees. His children grew up and married. The youngest daughter, not a great beauty or especially intelligent, and not diligent or good at housework, ended up in acting school in Zagreb. After the war she married a famous Belgrade director, acted in the Yugoslav Dramatic Theater, was a star of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, playing the best and widest ranging roles, from comic characters in the plays of Marin Držić and Branislav Nušić to Brecht’s Mother Courage, which she would play until the end of her life.

  Falatar lamented as they sat, each on his own stump on the Glavatičevo meadow in the early fifties, with the hum of bees all around.

  By then he was old and considered demented – what else would he have been since they had retired him early and he wasn’t missing any legs or arms? – he was just silent and whenever he spoke, people got out of his way.

  But Franjo understood what he said and turned Falatar’s words into familiar sayings.

  The devil offered me a pair of shoes for her life! my grandfather Franjo Rejc would say, whenever he had seen a really good actress at the movies or the theater.

  Franjo, my friend, he pronounced one evening at the Kostanić’s in Drvenik, the devil offered me a pair of shoes in exchange for her life! They were watching a program on the life and sudden death of the great Serbian actress Marija Falatar Belović.

  While he was alive, Franjo fought against allowing a television to be brought into his home.

  In it comes and out I go! he would say tersely to every suggestion of buying that devil’s machine that “doesn’t let a person read, study, or think,” and if there were any further questions, he would suggest we purchase a TV as soon as we had buried him.

  If the funeral’s at three, he said, you’ll have time to get it before the store closes.

  Just one time did he go with Olga and me to watch TV at the Kostanićs’. It was winter, December 1971, the day after Catholic Christmas, which in Partisan Drvenik in those years was not much celebrated, the strongest storm of the season was blowing. Grandfather held my hand as we made our way to watch the show about Auntie Mari Falatar. He held my hand so the storm wouldn’t carry me out to sea toward Hvar, to Sućuraj and farther on, to Italy and Vittorio de Sica, a great director and the only one, Franjo Rejc said, who could have told the story of Stjepko Falatar, a man who had spoken with bees and lost his mind over a pair of shoes.

  * * *

  —

  7 VI 36. Removed two frames with honey and a few bees, and from one frame shook out a full brood into a separate hive that the day after tomorrow I’ll use to start a new one with the help of a queen cell I’ll get from Mr. Fabiani from Dovlići (see below under hive no. 3).

  30 VI 36. Chamber half full of honey. Swarm very strong.

  7 VII 36. Adequate honey in chamber. Added one empty frame. In the next to last brood chamber full of honey.

  14 VII 36. Extracted honey.

  * * *

  —

  Lucio Fabiani, whom people called Ćućo, worked as a court reporter. And occasionally as a sketch artist, when the judge allowed portraits to be made of the sides in proceedings that were of interest to the public. These sketches came out in all the papers, which made Ćućo Fabiani as happy as if he’d had an exhibit at the Louvre. The additional work was of course not paid, he did it for free as part of his duties as the court employee, but in most cases his portraits in Belgrade’s Politika and Sarajevo’s Večernja pošta would be signed at the bottom with his name. He would buy ten copies of the papers to send to relatives in Italy, his godfather in Ljubljana, friends in Belgrade, so that every time the judge allowed sketches to be made of a defendant, his wife Anđa would wring her hands and scream. It was rumored she once went to the door of Judge Fahrija Kahrimanović to tell him that her children were starting school, that she needed to buy coal for the winter, and she didn’t know how they would get by or what she would do if his honor continued to encourage Ćućo in his money wasting.

  At first Kahrimanović did not understand. What money wasting? And what did it have to do with him?

  But when he understood what the woman was talking about, he laughed his head off.

  And he ordered that an exhibit of court portraits by Ćućo Fabiani be set up in the entrance hall to the courtroom and he be compensated twice his monthly salary in payment.

  Who knows how much of this story is true, except that the court reporter Lucio Fabiana certainly did have an exhibit space in the court’s entrance hall, the various dailies reported on it, and the Sarajevo painter and communist Vojo Dimitrijević published a very positive critique of the work of this unusual autodidact. In this account he refers to him several times as “Gentleman Fabiani,” and as a result Ćućo acquired a new nickname among Sarajevo’s rough and tumble, which his friends would soon adopt. It started from petty rivalry and envy but eventually the name Gentleman Fabiani had grown so much and was so accepted that Ćućo had started signing his caricatures that were occasionally published in the union messenger at around the time when he was to bring the queen cell for Franjo Rejc’s hive number 3. And this work would cost him quite a bit, much more than the newspapers in which his courtroom portraits had been published.

  How Lucio Fabiani had arrived in Sarajevo no one seemed to recall. My dying mother could not tell me and maintained that neither Nono nor Nona would have known either. People did not ask each other about such things in those days, for it was only natural that some official, rail man, postal worker, or even coffeehouse keeper would arrive in town, not knowing a single word of our language, having moved from the other side of the empire to live here. Lucio Fabiani had not even been born a citizen of Austria-Hungary but was Italian, from Umbria, where he had many relatives, seven brothers and sisters, and a mother who would live to be over a hundred and whom Ćućo would mourn when he was himself an old man, while the beekeepers would console him by saying it wasn’t even proper for a man of his years to have had a living mother. A man needed to live with the idea that he once had a mother and not die right after her. This was what they told him, but in vain. He had to mourn his mother the way it was believed an Italian did. When my mother died at the beginning of last December, I thought about Gentleman Fabiani and the story of his tears. The time for crying had passed long ago.

  The name of the union messenger is not remembered anymore, perhaps it was called just that, The Union Messenger. Not even the name of the editor is remembered but what is known is that the outlawed Communist Party of Yugoslavia had been behind it. Of course, articles were published under pseudonyms or initials, except for the ones signed by Veselin Masleša, Otokar Keršovani, or some of the other intellectual leaders of the workers’ movement. Lucio Fabiani, too, was alerted to rules of authorial anonymity, nevertheless he chose to sign his caricatures as Gentleman
Fabiani. They told him that was no pseudonym, all of Sarajevo knew it was he himself, and besides, newspaper illustrations were not supposed to be signed. But then why would Ćućo publish his drawings if no one knew they were his?

  Amazingly, he had no problems at the courthouse regarding his collaboration with the communist papers. Everyone must have known that Lucio Fabiani was not a communist but rather an ardent and orderly court reporter. Not only was he not a communist, he did not really know what the communists stood for or wherein lay their sin, except for their not believing in God. He did not follow or understand politics. He did not understand what anyone might have against the king, or what the Croats had against the Serbs – when they spoke the same language, with which he would struggle to the end of his life – but also what both had against the communists. At the heart of everything, Lucio Fabiani believed, lay a great misunderstanding. Politics existed only because of this great misunderstanding, in which he did not have to take part, for as an Italian he had nothing against the king, or against his blood enemies. This was how he thought, and for a long time this was how others understood him.

  Gentleman Fabiani did not read the papers or vote in elections, he did not listen to the talk in cafés and barbershops, and he had no opinion about Benito Mussolini. In 1936 when runaway German and Austrian Jews began to arrive in Sarajevo spreading the news of the Nazi terror, he genuinely pitied those people and was prepared to help them. With a jar of honey, some money, lunch in the court cafeteria. But he could not listen to their life’s stories. He grew restless in the face of this avalanche of human misery, which sounded less plausible than a movie melodrama or a romance. Lucio Fabiani did not understand what these people were saying.

  His bees were happy. Much happier than Falatar’s and happier than Franjo’s. He kept his hives in Dovlići, a small isolated village on the far side of Trebević. He would walk all the way, but it was not difficult for him. Nothing was difficult for Fabiani, except imagining another’s misfortune. It was hard for him to read the papers. So he didn’t read them. One should live the way the bees did, he thought, without wishing anyone ill, not taking anything of anyone else’s away, but slowly and steadily, flower by flower, honeycomb by honeycomb, moving toward the winter of one’s life.

  This was what Lucio Fabiani said: the winter of one’s life. With extra vowels and softened consonants, as in Italian, so that winter was a-winter, once was a-once, life was a-life, and the moment Ćućo remarked on the a-winter of a-once a-life, both his eyes would be filled with tears. Only not the kind that run down your face but that particular kind of stay-in-place tears that did not exist in Sarajevo then, or anywhere nearby, on the pastures grazing lands, among the beekeepers, so people called them Italian tears, and anytime someone might remark in conversation about how another’s eyes had filled with tears, they would ask, Italian tears? And then everyone would nod.

  And in this spirit Ćućo would forget reality. He’d forget what he was noting down every day as a court reporter only to have this note taking and commentary slip so far away from real life that when on September 1, 1939, the war ruptured all the borders of Europe it seemed to him he was writing Petrarchan sonnets. Or rather their translation into Serbo-Croatian. All those verdicts of first-degree murder, murders of passion, and murders committed for especially base motives, verdicts of pickpocketing on trams and nighttime holdups, thievery of the postal carriage, of high treason and acts against the king and the state, of communist propaganda and harm to public morality, of cursing in a public place, blasphemy, insults to honor, and everything else for which people were being tried in Sarajevo’s courts, all of it he experienced as a highly artificial poetic form. He would fill up entire sheets of the thick greasy paper, delighting in the lightness with which the tip of the fountain pen slid across it, feeling the security of the watermark, in which the seal of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was visible, with its Cyrillic- and Latin-lettered inscription, and he worked hard to write out the sentences of the court in calligraphy, though for a long time no one had asked him to do this. As the war drew nearer, about which Ćućo knew nothing and felt no concern, his handwriting got prettier and prettier. But then, somewhere in the middle of the term of Milan Stojadinović, the order came down from Belgrade that all court reporting would in future be conducted with the help of Remington typewriters. Most of the royal courts had earlier begun using typewriters, but thanks to Lucio Fabiani and his calligraphy, the Sarajevo court had long resisted modernization.

  Although he was promoted to superintendent of court reporting, Ćućo was disappointed. It did not mean much to him that he was trusted in spite of the fact that he drew caricatures for a suspicious union paper, and had been promoted to an important, responsible position, nor did it please him that his salary was doubled, for all that meant little to nothing compared to the pleasure of the nib gliding across the thick state paper.

  He found consolation in bees and in drawing.

  And then Belgrade was bombed. Four days later came the takeover and the declaration of the Independent State of Croatia, which took fifteen days to arrive in Sarajevo. In advance of the Independent State came the Germans on black motorcycles with sidecars, in trucks, and in Mercedes limousines. When they saw them coming, a raging street mob plundered and desecrated the new Sephardic temple. Olga and Franjo watched it from the windows of their apartment but did nothing. How Mr. Fabiani reacted or what he felt is unknown. Or whether he even knew about the Temple’s destruction, at the time he was in Dovlići with his bees.

  In the preceding days, during the bombing, while the sky thundered with the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmidts, he had hugged his hives in fear, trying to protect his bees from the noise and the shaking. He sang them Neapolitan songs, told them silly stories in Italian – Ćućo always spoke to his bees in Italian to protect them from the war and from what was clearly the end of the world. He cared little what happened to other people – or he didn’t believe anything would happen to them – but his bees he tried to protect from plague. And plague would set in if the bees were upset. All the beekeeping books described this; all good beekeepers understood it.

  But the moment he went back down from Dovlići into the city, where the Ustaše were already in control, Lucio Fabiani was arrested and imprisoned. At first he was interrogated in the newly established district police station and then the Gestapo took over. The local police suspected him because of his many years of collaboration with the communist union messenger. He was the only collaborator they had managed to apprehend. Others had gone deep underground, left the city, or protected themselves through impenetrable initials and pseudonyms. Gentleman Fabiani was the only one who had not gone into hiding.

  But the Germans controlled the local Ustaše carefully, for they were not yet sure of their ardor, nor did they want to lose some big fish, a communist plotter or revolutionary – so they picked up Lucio Fabiani. Besides, the case concerned an Italian, which made it all the more interesting. Perhaps they saw in him an underground member of the Central Committee of Italy’s Communist Party, or a spy of Mussolini and their conspiratorial colleague, who needed to be protected from Croatian bungling.

  Ćućo never said what the questioning was like in the district police station or with the Gestapo. He never spoke about those eleven months, from the end of April 1941 to April 9, 1942, which he had spent in the Ustaše and German prisons, and then in the camp at Jasenovac, and it had never occured to anyone to ask him, though they were likely curious to know what Fabiani might have told his interrogators about his communist activity. What could he have said about his Sarajevo court reporting and about the court proceedings against Croatian idealists, sworn Ustaše, or the setbacks to Croatian-biased village mullahs and priests? What could he have told them regarding things he knew nothing about? Or had he suddenly come to political awareness in those frightening moments, in the shadow of the gallows and faced with the threat of the one verdict then being issued by the c
ourt he had been brought before? In any case, one day he reappeared in town. He had traveled by train from Jasenovac. He was thin and drained, a head shorter than before, as if by some magic he had been reduced to his boyhood height, his eyes dry as desert dust. For a long time they would hold no Italian tears.

  What was it like? Franjo asked.

  Fine.

  What do you mean fine? How could it have been fine?

  It couldn’t.

  So what was it like?

  Fine.

  Which means awful.

  Fine.

  Worse than awful?

  I tell you it was fine.

  So even worse?

  Right.

  The only thing he once said, long after the war, perhaps after we had broken with Stalin, was that there were no bees in Jasenovac. It was as quiet as a graveyard, he said. Not a bee in sight.

  He found the hives empty in Dovlići. Sour and decaying, infested by flies, hornets, and other vermin. But this did not upset him. Ćućo had faith that his bees had found their way. They had fled to the woods with the people. He said he would recognize them by their sound, his bees, but he never did. They must have gone very far.

  Only after the war did he renew his hives, again in Dovlići. And life went on for him as it had before. He understood nothing about politics, did not read the papers, and did not mix with the new political order. The communists were prepared to reward him for his conspiratorial work in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which, as we have seen, was not at all that conspiratorial. Ćućo was not interested. He performed office-related tasks for the court until the fifties and then retired. From then on he dedicated himself to bees. After his wife Anđa died in 1955 and his children left for other places, from Pula to Belgrade, Lucio Fabiani moved to Dovlići. He built himself a log cabin, stopped shaving, and was easily recognized by his long white beard. Thus did he acquire his third and final nickname – Tolstoy.