Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Sava Zlatković, the second oldest brother, born in 1927, leaped from a train that was heading to Jasenovac at the end of 1943. It was not the same transport that had taken his father Dušan. Some five hundred Serbian youths from Zenica, Maglaj, and Zavidović had been rounded up and told they were headed to Slavonia for work. They would have room and board, and maybe they would make a little extra money. Sava was the only one who didn’t believe it, and said he would jump from the train at full speed. You’re crazy, said Todor, a young deacon from Zenica. God knows I might be crazy, God grant me that I might be more afraid of work than death. They laughed at him, but they did not hold him back. Soon they would not be among the living, their grave site unknown, and none of their names would be in the lists of the Jasenovac book of the dead. What is known of Sava Zlatković tells us that he used up all his happiness in the leap from the train. On Mount Motajica, a hideous, deformed hill near the Sava River, where Sava had somehow managed to run, he ran into the Chetnik major Stevan Sremčević. He stayed with him. He did not dare go back to Želeće, and any direction he turned would have landed him again on a train rushing to Jasenovac. The others believed they were being taken to Slavonia for work, but Sava had faith in the slight possibility that, once he had thrown himself through the little hold in the train floor and fallen onto the rails, his arms and legs would not be crushed under the wheels and he would not bang his head against one of the wooden ties, cracking open his skull and spilling his brains across the black carbolineum primer. He was lucky that one time and remained whole. And so he stayed with the Chetniks of Major Sremčević. Bashi-bazouks with scythes and ropes, peasants whose harvest had been burned by the Ustaše, village hoodlums, city informants and spies, a few kind simpletons, a few born murderers, the kind who only ever had an orgasm when, late in the fall, they held under their arm the trembling piglet whose throat they had just slit with a sharp knife – these were Sremčević’s Chetniks, independent of any command structure, alone and free, they rushed into Muslim and Catholic villages, plundered and burned, but without any goal. They didn’t even know who was leading them in their battle. What kept them together, it seemed, was the fact that none of them had anyplace to return to. Men with no families or patrimony, whose birthplaces no longer existed on the newly drawn maps, members of vanished armies, runaway idealists roaming through Posavina in those months, afraid of returning to the Bosnian forests and even more afraid of crossing the river. By the summer of 1944 there was talk about escaping across the border, to the English and American allies, who would be coming to settle scores with the communists. They’d been expected since the fall of Italy but had not come. Sava Zlatković did not have any thoughts on this matter. He was fine as long as there was kasha and cabbage. He would drink a bit too. The rakija went down easy and warmed the seventeen-year-old, making him sure he would come out in one piece even if he crawled through the floor of a train a second time. The rakija made him brave, but only until he sobered up. In April 1945, Major Sremčević was in negotiations with the Ustaše lieutenant Ljubo Miloš, who had guaranteed him and his people the safety and defense of the armed forces of the Independent State of Croatia. Together they would break through to Austria, according to the agreement, where they would join forces with the Allies and take part in the Anglo-American attack on Tito and the Partisans, and the decisive battle against the Red Army, which would take place somewhere on the Slavonian plain or, if they were lucky, on the Danube and the Drina. Again this time Sava Zlatković did not believe the Croats and slipped out into the darkness that same night. And that was the end of his story. Stevan Sremčević proclaimed him a deserter the next morning and sent men in pursuit, piqued that the little peasant would spoil his agreement with Ljubo Miloš, and perhaps behind this he concealed his own fear of a possible Ustaše betrayal of the agreement. The search party came back from its assigned task. Sava Zlatković had disappeared without a trace. No one ever saw him again, nor did his family ever learn what happened to him. He probably died on one of those last days of the war, but it would never be known by whose hands or from which army.

  Dušan Zlatković’s third son, Aleksandar, was born in 1932. He was eleven when the Ustaše took his father away. He was standing in the doorway, mute, looking right in the eyes of the leader, a boza maker from Zavidovići named Meho Ciganin. What are you looking at, kid? he said, swinging his rifle, as if, having no hammer, he was using it to drive a nail into a wall to hang a crucifix. He struck him hard with the gunstock, and there was a dull thud, as if the nail had broken through a soft shingle of the wall just barely covered with mortar, except that Meho Ciganin had not struck the wall, he had struck the teeth of Aleksandar Zlatković with the butt of his rifle, after which he was permanently mute. He lived mute and without teeth in Rakovica, near Belgrade, and worked as a carpenter. He was married to a Catholic woman named Bosiljka from Bačka, and she gave him five sons and not a single daughter. He died of heart disease in 1996, uttering not a single word since the day Meho Ciganin struck him with his rifle butt, as if he’d been driving a nail into the wall to hang a crucifix.

  Petar and Miloš were twins born at the end of September 1939, sixteen years after the firstborn Milorad. Their mother Jelica barely survived this; she did not expect to have any more children, but at the beginning of the war, before turning forty, she conceived again, and in the winter of 1942 gave birth to another son Đorđije. After Dušan was taken away, she was left alone with three young children and the mute Aleksandar. Sava was able to look after them for a little while, but then he too was taken away. His mother discovered he had ended up with the Chetniks of Major Sremčević only after the youth’s disappearance. She would hope in him for as long as she lived, waiting for him to reappear, certain that her Sava was alive. For if he had managed escape from an Ustaše train, how could he not save himself from the Sava River marshes and willow trees? Her motherly hope continued to grow until it had developed into a form of insanity after, with Milošević’s rise to power in Serbia, a new kind of Chetniks appeared. The tears came when on the screen of her black-and-white TV in her apartment at the top of a New Belgrade high-rise, she saw on the daily news, the Chetnik governor, Mirko Jović, and his followers in Nova Pazova. Now my Sava! And she pressed her nose to the screen to look for him in the back rows of the demonstration. Sava had always been modest, he was somewhere in back, letting others stand out…Her son Đorđije, a famous Belgrade cellist, music critic, and one of the leaders of the antiwar movement and the citizens’ opposition to Slobodan Milošević, cared for his mother Jelica and visited her daily in her home beneath the sky. At first he tried to see the change in his mother’s behavior with humor. Unlike his eldest brother Milorad, Đorđije remained a cheerful person, one made uncomfortable by excessive emotion and sorrow. So he avoided thinking of his lost brother altogether.

  “Anyway, I’m trying to be a good person, not do evil, and also not have to share bread with evil people,” he told me, in an interview I conducted with him for the Zagreb paper Globus in 2002. We were sitting on the terrace of his beautiful, spacious apartment, in a villa in the Senjak neighborhood of Belgrade, talking about music, his deceased brother Milorad, and a little about Želeće, about the meadows Đorđije did not remember, and where my grandfather Franjo Rejc had kept hives, paying his father Dušan Zlatković in pollen rent.

  This was when Đorđije told me the story about his mother.

  After the first Chetnik gathering in Nova Pazova, when her son Sava had not appeared on the television screen, Jela began wandering across Serbia, then Bosnia and Herzegovina, wherever the awakened spirit of Serbian nationalism had spread, in search of her missing son. Two years before the war’s outbreak in 1989, she was a well-preserved eighty-seven-year-old woman. There were stories about her in the papers. Dragoš Kalaić published a four-page piece about Jela Zlatković entitled “Our Mother” in the biweekly Duga. In searching for her son Sava, Mother Jela was in search of thousands of our sons who di
sappeared in 1945 toward the end of Tito’s reign of terror and the de-Serbianization of the people. The mother was searching for Jovan, and Milan, and Dragan, she was searching for Dimitrij, and Stevan, Radivoj, Petar, Dušan, and Bogoljub, she was searching for Dobrosav, Milisav, Svetislav, and Dragoljub. Mother Jela was searching for her Serbian flower and, along the way, justice for the Serbia that once had a right to every one of its names but which lost that right in agreeing to the most frightening of all 1,717 devil’s names known in Jewish Gehenna, agreeing to a name foisted upon it amid the cold of the Vatican’s ramparts, in that deep freeze of human hearts, but also of all human intelligence, a name from the Ottomans, from Tehran, from Kumrovec and Kupinec, a schismatic, godless name, a name beaten into our ears with the tip of an Ustaše blade, a name that for seven billion years to come would be anathema in the Serbian language, the shameful name – Yugoslavia. Once she found her son Sava, Mother Jela would find thousands of her sons, then would Serbia’s heroes be reborn from their decaying bones, dispersed across the Aegean Sea, the Slovenian mountains, and the Austrian plains, then would Serbia be reborn even where it had never been before, and all that remained unappeased inside us would find peace, and we would be reassured as people, when Mother Jela found her sons…

  That was what Kalaić wrote in Duga, and along with the article there were pictures of Jela Zlatković, a straight-backed, worn-out, kerchiefed old woman, wearing black clothes and a Chetnik cockade, pinned to the left side her chest, just above her withered breast.

  When he showed me the cut-out pages, which I had read back then at the end of the eighties, the famous cellist Đorđije Zlatković, who had hurried over Mount Igman to Sarajevo in 1993 to give a concert and ask forgiveness from the city they were destroying in his name, his eyes were filled with tears.

  That was our mother for you, he said.

  It was futile to tell her Sava would not be coming back. He had been dead for forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven years…Who knew who had killed him. It could have been his own Chetniks. It could have been the Germans, the Ustaše, the Partisans, or maybe he had died on his own. Whatever the case, he had not been around for a very long time, and it was time to come to terms with it. This was what they told her, but she would shake her head, say I know my Sava’s alive, a mother can feel when her baby is alive, and refuse to hear them, leaving the house the very next day in search of her son Sava, following the growing monstrosity that was multiplying by simple division in all the regions of the disintegrating Yugoslavia.

  Jela Zlatković became one of the emblematic phenomena and icons of the Serbian nationalistic insanity from the beginning of the nineties. Mama Methuselah, the emcee of death, dark prophet of evil, old crow, raven bitch, or whatever else she might have been called, appeared in highly unusual places across Yugoslavia. She awakened fear in people, announcing war and misfortune to come. She was in Vukovar two months before the Yugoslav National Army laid siege to it. She came to Sarajevo, to the Serbian Democratic Party’s convention at the Holiday Inn, a day before the great demonstration in front of the parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina. She was looking for Sava, but Sava was not there.

  I asked Đorđije Zlatković whether Milorad’s suicide on December 28, 1991, had been at all connected to his mother. He shook his head. Milorad had long since stopped wanting to know about her. No one knew why. It was just that at a certain point, before his departure for Athos, he had suddenly grown distant from her, like an infant weaning itself and no longer caring. He stayed in contact with his brothers, worried about them, but he never asked anything about her. The human connection to the woman who brought one into the world, Milorad had once said, responding to Đorđije’s insistence that they talk about her, had been overrated throughout history. Much evil had resulted from it. The bloodiest of wars had been fought because sons imagined something more between those old women’s legs than what had pushed them out, along with bloody fluid and internal impurities, getting rid of it all like a foreign body, freeing itself as if from a senseless, benign tumor. The world would be a better place if it finally became aware of this. But that, unfortunately, was never going to happen, Milorad said in 1989, a few days after Gazimestan, when Đorđije had come to him tearful and distraught to ask what could be done about their mother.

  The problem was not with her, just as it wasn’t with the hundreds of thousands of people like her.

  She would disappear when it did. But that was not going to happen.

  This was what Milorad Zlatković had said, and the brothers did not speak about their mother anymore.

  The twins Petar and Miloš occupied themselves with bees and beekeeping from a young age. Petar Zlatković was a professor in Belgrade’s Agricultural School and was the best-known European specialist in the pathology of bees and other insects, while Miloš Zlatković, an art historian, worked with bees as a hobby, though around Belgrade it was said that he knew more about bees and beekeeping than his brother. For years he edited Smederevo’s Beekeepers’ Herald, where, from issue 2 of 1981 to the combined issues 1-3 of 1989, he published the History of South Slavic Beekeeping and Honey Production Across the Centuries, in thirty installments. The Zagreb publisher Mladost announced the publication of Miloš Zlatković’s book under the same title, but because of the war it did not come out. His manuscript probably still exists somewhere today, but the author, it seems, has forever lost interest in its publication.

  After the siege of Sarajevo had begun, and the story of the ninety-year-old woman Jela Zlatković, who followed the Serbian troops around looking for her son lost in the previous war, had made its way to the international press and the best-known worldwide television programs, the twins’ life in Belgrade and in rump Yugoslavia, from which the western republics and Macedonia had separated, became unbearable.