In one of the horrid family photographs from Franjo Rejc’s funeral taken by the photographer my father had hired, in the third row behind Nona, whose mouth is covered by the black shawl she purchased in Moscow, and behind my mother and father, who were again husband and wife for the occasion, stands a white-bearded old man, slightly elevated, perhaps standing on a neighboring grave marker atop the decayed bones of someone else: it was a very old Gentleman Fabiani, Ćućo, Tolstoy.
I have taken up a magnifying glass more than once to try and make out whether his eyes are glazed over with Italian tears. But it’s impossible – the shot is bad, the resolution unclear.
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Ilidža 1936. No. 3 has 14 frames on May 22.
I looked for the queen in the sixth frame (this one inserted ten days earlier for breeding of the queen). She’s not there, nor is the queen cell. Next to it is the seventh frame, rather weak and empty. Rusty condition. Found queen in frame 9 surrounded by bees. I opened the cluster – queen is very old. Closed the hive. Must examine on May 24, ’36.
24 V 36. Checking.
No queen. Took the added frame on May 12 with brood to hive no. 4.
25 V 36. Checking.
Removed one empty frame, took it to hive no. 1, from which removed one frame to place in the middle of the bee quarters, to raise a new queen in this (worn) frame.
30 V 36.
On May 25 the bees had not used the added frame to draw out a queen cell. Probably because there is no young community. Decided to raise a new swarm (read hive 1) and to join it to this swarm with a fertilized queen.
To this end on June 2 placed two honey frames into a special case to add the queen cell on June 4.
3 VI 36.
Yesterday set aside two looted honey frames; found queen cells on the path inserted on May 25 and left them.
15 VI 36.
Queen fertilized. New queen cell.
Examined back of four frames. Bees agitated, lots of buzzing and stinging. Closed the hive. The movement of the drones is noticeable as they take off. More animated than that of the workers. These on taking off move slowly, as if searching for something. Bringing exceptional amounts of pollen.
20 VI 36.
No queen. Only old bees. Added two frames from no. 2 to the center to help raise the queen on June 30. Found closed queen cells in frames added on June 20. They have a big stockpile of honey.
8 VII 36.
Found the queen swarmed under. Freed her. She had only one pair of wings. Annulled it on July 14, shook the bees onto the grass, extracted the honey.
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A bee sting is healthy, Franjo said proudly, it helps with rheumatism, protects against all sorts of ailments, serves as an antivenom, and heals the soul. You are startled awake when you are stung, he’d say, it hurts but you are reminded that you are alive. Like coming up for air from deep under water. The moment you breathe again, you feel alive.
He wasn’t aware of what he was saying. He didn’t suspect he was tempting fate or announcing the illness he would die from. Or he sensed it already, that illness. The first time he had begun to suffocate at night was in that bitter cold winter of 1943–44, the first after Mladen’s death. Hungry and wretched, they would stoke the coal dust that would smoke and the smoke would smother the flames in the stove, the chimney would clog, and the smoke would back up into the cold room, and they would all choke from the hellish, sulfurous stench.
That was the first time Franjo couldn’t breathe, but he thought it was just from the smoke.
Or perhaps it was the grave in Slavonia, the earth settling in, penetrating the tin cover of the coffin and pressing against Mladen’s chest. And choking the father with guilt for having listened to Mladen’s mother when she’d maintained with great certainty that their son would be safer in a German unit than a Partisan one. He hadn’t yielded to her. He had known since 1938 that nothing in Hitler’s hands could be safe and said as much to Ivica Lisac after the Germans had invaded Czechoslovakia.
That idiot is going to lose the war, he’d told Lisac as they sat in the darkroom of his photography studio. And cautiously and rationally, Lisac, the photographer, had responded, but we won’t be around anymore.
Franjo had not heard him in his selfish rage. He had wanted to lash out against Hitler, the wretch! But he hadn’t been able to protect his own son, letting his wife decide, because peace in his home had been more important to him than Mladen’s life. Or had he been afraid of taking responsiblity?
This, he believed, was what was choking him.
He would take Valerian drops to calm himself and be able to sleep peacefully. They helped at first but then it got worse again. He dreamed of drowning in the sea. He dreamed he was in a hermetically sealed box, in which the air was growing thinner. He dreamed of a soundless room in which no one could hear him while he screamed that he could not breathe. Fifteen years would pass before Doctor Rittig diagnosed him with asthma. He needed to quit smoking. But he couldn’t. What would he have after they took his cigarettes away? Besides, while he was smoking he didn’t feel he was being smothered. He didn’t think while he smoked. Then they diagnosed him with cardiac disease, chronic weakness of the heart. The pump was not strong enough to push the blood into his lungs. That was what choked him. The hydrodynamics of the human body. All this is very simple, Mr. Rejc, very simple. The soul is a material thing, the soul is the strongest muscle of all in the human body, said Rittig. When the soul is ailing we call it cardiac asthma.
Doctor Rittig interrogated him about his childhood, asking what illnesses he had suffered from as a child, whether anyone in his family had suffered from heart disease. Yes, said Mr. Rejc, his father-in-law. Doctor Rittig laughed.
Mr. Rejc, he said, keep your bees. It’s good for the heart.
That was the only good thing he told him. Everything else he said was wrong. Franjo had hoped the doctor would tell him his heart had collapsed because of great suffering.
But bee stings are certainly healthy, he repeated.
Let the bee sting you, it’s healthy.
Olga was allergic to bee stings. That was why she did not dare get close to the hives. And why he was sure he would always be alone with his bees.
Sometimes the bees would smother the queen. This happens often. They gather around her, paying tribute to their sovereign, each trying to get close, and they turn into a ball that can’t be disentangled. If anyone tries to move away from the queen the ones on top of her will not allow it. A person can break up the ball, separating the bees from the queen with a thumb and index finger. They won’t sting. The important thing is not to be afraid while doing so. In general, it’s important for beekeepers not to be afraid of bee stings. Fear makes people release a hormone that drives bees crazy, and then they sting. Or else human fear insults them. A beekeeper cannot be someone who fears bees.
Franjo wasn’t afraid of them, but their stings made him sad. They stung when they lacked confidence in him. They stung when he had betrayed them. Or they had betrayed him. Both made a man sad, and then he decided that bee stings were healthy.
Each sting is a death.
After a bee stings, a bee lives for only a few seconds.
How long is that in their measure of time? Human time and bee time are not the same. A person lives thousands of bee years. In the bee Holy Writ, people are thousand-year olds. Bee Holy Writ is inscribed in honey. The top shelf in the pantry on Sepetarevac, where we kept the samples of Nono’s honey, was the Alexandria Library of bee civilization. We ate it, for there was no longer anyone who would learn apian speech and writing.
It was a missed opportunity for humankind. One of the last missed opportunities for humankind.
When the telegram about Mladen’s death arrived, Olga sat on a chair in the kitchen and said nothing. No one remembers how long she sat t
here. Aunt Doležal hurried over and took the little girl away with her. Javorka was seventeen months old. She could not understand anything yet, but Aunt Doležal took her away to protect her.
I took you away so Olga would not harm you in her despair.
This was what she said to Javorka when the moths and the Alzheimer’s were eating away at her in her last months of life. She spent an entire afternoon obsessively retelling the story of the day when the telegram about Mladen’s death arrived. No one had prompted her. Javorka had not asked, but Aunt Doležal could not stop. The next day she remembered nothing. Not the telegram, not Mladen, not Mr. and Mrs. Rejc, to whom a military letter carrier of the Croatian Armed Forces, a young boy, an unpledged Ustaša, a Muslim, proud of his work and his Croatian homeland, certain that all who died on God’s path would become martyrs, and that Allah and Croatia were secure on the same path, had delivered his telegram as one delivers an award or a medal.
My condolences, he said, Your son, a German knight, has fallen in heroic battle with the united nations of Europe, under the leadership of the great Führer, said the young Sarajevo Ustaša, reciting his memorized text.
But Aunt Doležal did not remember anything the next day. What she had known the day before in the greatest detail had evaporated.
Some demon, she’d said, drew me out into the hall just as he was declaiming his text to Mrs. Rejc:
My condolences. Your son, a German knight, has fallen in heroic battle with the united nations of Europe, under the leadership of the great Führer!
At that instant Olga did not understand what was happening. The text meant nothing to her, for she didn’t understand the word fallen. One expressed this differently in her language – perished, killed, lost his life, died – and none of this went with a German knight. She would never have linked that description to Mladen. An armored Teutonic fighter with a lance in his right hand, from a book printed in Gothic script could not have been her son. Anyway, Mladen wasn’t German. He spoke German in two very different forms. One that was literary, the language of Goethe, of Buddenbrooks and Professor Hugo Elsner-Rosenzweig, of the Upper Gymnasium, who said he could not evaluate the young master Rejc because the boy knew German better than he did, as a native speaker from Prague. He has a feeling for its grammar! he had said to Mrs. Rejc, and the mother was proud. But midsentence, when Opapa came into the room, Mladen would exchange the language of Goethe for the language of a Banat peasant, still German but different and distant, a language that would never be equal to Hochdeutsch, the language of his grandfather.
But still, there was no way he could be a German knight, who fell from a horse…
And then, with a sharp gesture, the young letter carrier shoved the telegram into Mrs. Rejc’s hand.
When she saw what was written there, her face changed. It was more than a grimace, it reflected a very deep feeling. Her face was altered and would remain altered. Aunt Doležal could always tell when one of Olga’s pictures had been taken before or after Mladen’s death.
It was the face of a different woman, she would say, as the only witness to the moment the transformation had occurred.
But all I could think of at the time was to take hold of you and get you away, so your mother would not harm you, she repeated to Javorka.
She had run past Franjo, who did not know yet what had happened. He had looked in confusion as Vilma Doležal took hold of the little girl, lifted her into the air, and took her away.
He was holding the paper, and his glasses had slipped almost to the tip of his nose. His jaw dropped. He was about to say something.
Olga sat on a chair in the kitchen and said nothing.
Her eyes were dry. The window was open onto Tašlihan Street, a small, narrow window through which one could not jump out.
He shouted: Revenge, revenge, revenge…
What this meant, against whom Franjo intended revenge that early autumn afternoon, no one would ever learn. No one ever asked him. Mladen’s death was never discussed. Surrounding it there was either complete silence, or, in moments of intense despair, mutual blame.
Mladen had been killed by a Partisan. No one had to say it, it was immediately clear. But Franjo did not want revenge against the Partisans, except perhaps in that instant. He did not believe in God, just as the Partisans did not. He found the Church’s fearmongering repulsive. There was no hell, nor could it be imagined out of the emptiness to come, from the heavens above, or Mladen’s grave in Slavonia. The Partisans fought for freedom, brotherhood, and equality. This was close to his heart. And they fought against Hitler. He had nothing against the Partisans so not even in that instant had he been likely to cry out for vengeance against them.
Did he want revenge against the Ustaše? Against the Germans? Against whom did he want it?
He took up his revenge, until the very end, against Olga. Just as she did against him. She was to blame for Mladen’s death, for she had believed her son would be safest in the German army. He would do a little training there, learn some military skills, like marching and saluting, and before long the war would end. But the Partisans tramped around the woods, rarely washed, their kidneys suffered from the humidity and the cold, they died like flies rushing into a candle flame, so she would never have been at peace if they’d let Mladen join the Partisans.
You want your son to fight for what you don’t have the courage to do yourself! That’s your problem, she said to him. You want Mladen to join the Partisans in your place.
This, it seems, had been the final argument, with which Olga had overruled and outtalked him. Mladen reported for military service.
Aunt Doležal remembered believing that day that Mrs. Rejc might harm the girl in her despair. The window in the kitchen was small and narrow, a grown person could not jump through it. But it was just large enough to push a child through.
And perhaps the truth was that Olga would have murdered her little girl, who had been an unwanted child, conceived during the war when her mother was already pushing thirty-five and abortion was punishable by a death sentence before the Ustaše court and eternal damnation of the Vrhbosanski archbishop Ivan “the Evangelist” Šarić.
Then this history would have unfolded differently. Someone else would have found the bag with the lighter, the two pieces of letter-sealing wax, the pencil, and the notebook in which the journal of the Ilidža bees had been kept for the years 1935, ’36, and ’37, or there would no longer be any bag, or lighter, wax, pencil, or notebook. There would have been no story about the Stubler line’s extinction, the extraction of its shallow Sarajevo roots, which ended with the new century, when the descendants of that Ustaše letter carrier plucking the last of the kuferaš weeds secured for themselves a rose garden for the long centuries to come. There would have been no Javorka or the person who completed this story in the summer of 2013, in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of the bee journal.
How did the bees experience Mladen’s death?
Who cared for the bees and closed the hives after that fall of 1943?
There is no information about this, though it is likely that the Ilidža hives were in the care of old Karlo Stubler, while the bees at Želeće probably went wild, dispersed into the woods and disappeared. The following spring, Franjo did not keep bees at Želeće, or pay the pollen rent to Dušan Zlatković.
I had believed Mladen’s death was the reason for this rupture, but then, again by chance, leafing through a list of the dead at Jasenovac, I found the name of Dušan Zlatković, occupation railroad switchman, born in Želeće near Žepče, who had landed in the camp in November 1943 and been killed two months later, on January 17, 1944. It is entirely possible for two people in one village to have the same name, but not likely that two Dušan Zlatković’s lived at the same time in Želeće and worked as switchmen for the railroad.
And so the owner of the Želeće land where Franjo had kept his hives died at the beg
inning of 1944. Butchered by an Ustaše soldier, killed with a hammer or a stone, chopped up and tossed into the Sava, liquidated in a manner inconceivable to human reason, an insane manner, for the Independent State of Croatia was keeping careful tabs on its spending. Vlach, Jewish, and communist wretches were not worthy of expensive Croatian bullets.
Franjo Rejc would never return to Zlatković’s meadow, though he did renew his apiary in Želeće after the war, but on the other side of the tracks, on a meadow owned by Sava Čekrk, a postal worker from Žepče. He paid him rent in honey too, but he didn’t call it “pollen rent” any longer. That name, which sounds like the title of a pastoral novel that ought to be written in memory of Dušan Zlatković, was linked to the man who had first uttered it, and Franjo, whether out of superstition or respect for the dead, did not use it in connection with other people he rented from. Nor even in his own home did he use it except in connection with Dušan Zlatković. It had been that man’s expression, and it died, as was proper, with him, in Jasenovac, under circumstances that are not recorded in the book of the Jasenovac dead.
Dušan Zlatković’s sons – there were five surviving after the war – sold the land in Želeće at the beginning of the fifties along with all their patrimony, including two houses, a farm, and barns, and moved to Belgrade. It is possible to follow their individual destinies thanks to The Serbian Orthodox Zlatković Kinsmen of Žepče and Maglaj, a bound compilation of the Smederevo Glas pčelara (Beekeepers’ Herald), and the memoir Tito’s Guardsman, by Milorad Zlatković, a joint edition published by Rad in Belgrade and Otokar Keršovani in Rijeka. I met one of his sons in Belgrade in 2001, about which there is more below.
Milorad Zlatković, the eldest of Dušan’s boys, was born in 1923. An early resistance fighter since the fall of 1941, he participated in the battles of Sutjeska, Neretva, and Drvar as part of the High Command’s escort regiment and ended up with Tito on Vis. On his arrival in Belgrade, he was awarded the rank of colonel, though he had only completed middle trade school in Sarajevo. He wanted to study medicine but was not allowed. That was his first clash with his superiors and his first disappointment in the ideals of communism. He was demobilized in 1950, having announced he wanted to take up writing. In 1953 he participated with Milovan Đilas in the founding of the journal Nova misao (New Thought), whose editor was Skender Kulenović. A year later, when Đilas fell into disfavor with the Party and ended up in prison, Zlatković did not reject him, instead writing the roman à clef The Man They Were Ashamed Of. He was jailed for a short time but was not put on trial. From 1955 on he lived in his apartment on Obilićev Venac, not publishing anything or maintaining contact with anyone. When he went out, he strolled in front of the café at the Mejestić Hotel, where the Yugoslav literary intelligentsia and members of the State Security Services sat at the same tables, but he did not go inside and did not greet anyone. He was suspected for some time, then thought of as a crackpot, and forgotten. In the sixties Milorad Zlatković discovered God. He left Belgrade and went to Mount Athos to become a monk. They would not take him; they were suspicious of his communist past – he could have not disclosed it – and considered him as a spy for Tito’s secret police. Instead of returning to Yugoslavia from Mount Athos, Zlatković stayed in Thessaloniki and opened a smoke shop, a kiosk of three and a half square meters, where he would sit the entire day, communicating with the world through a little window. When he had no customers, he wrote poetry, ghazals, prayers, and short, standalone works of prose, which would all go into his book Winter of the Stylite, published by Svjetlost in Sarajevo a month or two before the beginning of the nineties war. In the middle of the eighties, he happened to cross paths in Thessaloniki with his wartime friend and fellow escort regimenteer Kazimir Finci, a musician, and translator from Spanish and Hebrew. What are you doing here? I’m writing poetry and selling tobacco. You are selling tobacco? Yes. Finci tried to convince him to go home, the century was growing old, he had no one in Thessaloniki – I have God! Let it go. You’ll have God back home too – and in the end Zlatković let it go, returning to Belgrade in the summer of 1986. After thirty odd years, he met Đilas on Palmotićeva Street. What they spoke about is not known, for though Zlatković carefully described in several of the concluding segments of Winter of the Stylite, Đilas’s home, his desk and chair, the decorations and ornaments on the Turkish rug, the mounds of books rising behind Đilas’s back and above his head, and the gray, vacant, void ceiling, where there was still no God, about their conversations he had nothing to say. In autumn 1987 Slobodan Milošević made his appearance at the Eighth Congress of the Central Committee of the Serbian Communists Union, and Zlatković paid for a memorial service to commemorate the Partisan fighters who fell at Sutjeska. By then Winter of the Stylite numbered five hundred pages. He approached Nolit about publishing it, but they said such literature had no appeal at the time. Everyone was reading memoirs of communist penitents, and he, Tito’s guardsman, had not repented. I am a Christian, Zlatković told the poetry editor, and a Christian does not repent before the devil. He made a trip to Jasenovac, to Bogdan Bogdanović’s Stone Flower, with two monks from the Dečani Monastery. They were arrested in the middle of a prayer. The Zagreb papers reported on the latest Serb provocation. He said the same thing to the investigators in Zagreb that he had said to the editor at Nolit: The devil is among you, but you don’t recognize him! They let him go, and he left for Belgrade with the two others from the Zagreb railway station. On seeing the monument to King Tomislav, he said: Only a wicked man could raise a horse onto such a high pedestal – horses, like children, don’t like heights. When Milošević gave his Gazimestan speech in summer 1989, Zlatković told Đilas the man should be killed. The man who knows how but doesn’t do it will go to hell, he said. Đilas answered that they were both old. We’ve killed too many, he said. I haven’t, Zlatković said bleakly. He died on December 28, 1991, in his rented Belgrade apartment, on Charlie Chaplin Street, number 36. He had shot himself in the temple.
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