Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Doctor Rittig had a country house near the train station in Herceg Novi, purchased before the war with money from a Zagreb inheritance. What inheritance, from whom, how much – he did not talk about these things either.

  He spent winters in Herceg Novi from the time of his retirement in 1960. In summer he’d be back in Sarajevo because it was cooler.

  So it was while strolling at Herceg Novi by the sea and along the tracks – it was amazingly beautiful – that he met Ivo Andrić. The writer, who as yet had not won the Nobel Prize, was often approached with questions on the streets of Belgrade, so he had retreated to Herceg Novi. It was peaceful there, in the little places by the sea where the people did not pay attention to strangers walking and thinking, and just met them with a friendly greeting. Responding in kind was not hard for him. And so on their walks they started to exchange greetings. The path was narrow and people were few, especially those whose faces one recognized. Both of them were grayish pale, as if they had adopted the autumn colors of the Sarajevo valley, a sky that remained gray for half the year without ever turning blue. At last they were actually introduced, courtesy of Don Niko Luković, their mutual friend and Rittig’s patient for a time. From then on they did not pass by each other but set out together, making their way from one end of the bay to the other. What they spoke about, or whether they spoke about anything, we don’t know. The people of Herceg Novi saw them walking together for years – supposedly a photojournalist from a Dubrovnik paper took a photograph of them from a distance, but I was not able to find it even after years of searching – and then, one after the other, six months apart, they died. Andrić in Belgrade at the end of winter 1975, Doctor Rittig in Herceg Novi, in the middle of August that same year.

  The music teacher Abela Rittig, who lived in his Sarajevo apartment, disappeared in May 1992. She did not pack up and leave. Her Yugoslav passport was found in a drawer of her desk, and she did not take her Bosnian one. No one could say when she left her home. The neighbors could not remember the last time they had seen her. It was presumed that all she had with her was her identity card. Of her possessions in the apartment, during the police search, the only object found missing was her violin. It was not a Stradivarius or Guarneri but an ordinary, quality violin made in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, which Doctor Rittig had given Abela as a gift when she graduated. Where would Abela Rittig, an old woman, have gone with her violin in the days of the city’s heaviest bombardment? For years she had not been performing, and now she had suddenly left with her instrument? But the police were not interested in such details. Perhaps they didn’t have time. Soon Abela Rittig’s neighbors forgot about the violin and the intrigue that revolved around it. So as not to dwell on it too much, it was said that Abela left the city with a Jewish convoy. After telling this story so many times, people started to believe the lie and it soon became accepted that Abela Rittig had left Sarajevo with the Jews. Didn’t her name sound a bit Jewish?

  Time passed, the destinies of those who were no longer living in the city faded, and the local population, those whom Franjo Rejc used to meet at Baščaršija back in 1936 and among whom he felt like a foreigner, quickly got used to the idea that no one other than they had ever been in Sarajevo. While their solicitous wives washed the windows hanging above the abyss from the facades of old Austro-Hungarian structures, they wiped the faces from behind the glass where those people had lived. Soon all the windows in Sarajevo had been cleaned, all the faces wiped.

  There are two notes on the desk calendar for 1966, in the margins of a page for the week of May 23 to 29. Both were written in fountain pen ink, probably with Franjo’s Pelikan, in blue. The first, from Tuesday, May 24, reads, “Gave Doctor Rittig a 2 kg jar of honey from G[lavatičevo] to take with him to I.A. in H. Novi.”

  The note for Saturday reads: “Javorka gave birth to Vuk at about 11.”

  There for the first and last time I was recorded as Vuk.

  But the Saturday note is less important since it does not touch upon Doctor Rittig. On Tuesday, May 24, 1966, Franjo brought Rittig a jar of his Glavatičevo honey, medicinal, strong, fragrant, from the very border of the continental and Mediterranean worlds, which Rittig then took to the author Ivo Andrić. He had told him about Franjo’s honey, and Andrić wanted to taste it. I’m not a honey fanatic, for it’s hard to find better honey than the honey made from Herzegovian heather, and heather is here at hand, but as you are telling me about that beekeeper, the railroad man, and about his honey from Konjic, from the parts closer to the Neretva’s source, and I somehow feel those places and hear people from a different time, the start of the Austrian administration in Bosnia. And I think that this honey might help me remember them. So if the beekeeper has a jar of that honey, I’d be very grateful to him. That was what Andrić supposedly said to Doctor Rittig. He conveyed these words to Franjo Rejc, who was of course pleased to hear that the great writer expressed interest in his honey.

  In the end it was a jar from one of Franjo’s last beekeeping years that made its way to Andrić. On Saturday his grandson was born, and he disposed of his last hives. For a time people said he did it because of me, but then the stories changed, grew quiet, and stopped altogether, so that their end was never reached. He perhaps believed he had given the bees to others so he could spend time with his grandson, though the real reason was that he no longer had the strength, his asthma was crushing him, his heart pumped blood ever more feebly, his lungs filling with water, and Franjo was nearing the grave. There was less and less air around him.

  * * *

  —

  Ilidža, 1937. Number 8.

  Had drones at the start of April. It was raining from the second half of April to the end of May. Stock of honey almost full, and pollen completely expended. Drones driven out around May 15–20. In that time I fed them sugar. The hardest rains had stopped by the beginning of May, pasture improved enough so that on June 11 I put an extension of five frames from the brood chamber, in place of which I put an empty comb into the chamber. Placed the empty comb into the back of the brood chamber, while placing the chamber frames into the front honey chamber.

  * * *

  —

  By June 11 it seemed everything would be okay. But actually the spring had brought ill forebodings. It was April. The rain would not cease, as if it were monsoon season in India. After the mild, slimy winter of 1936–37, without snow or ice, which would have dried out the rot and cut back the dying vegetation from the preceding year, came the rainy spring, transforming the meadows toward Butmir into a bog exuding the stench of decay, as the earth could not absorb so much water.

  Mladen, who usually didn’t get sick, had ended up in bed with a high temperature. What’s wrong, my child? Olga had asked, concerned. I can’t move my head, he had answered. It hurts. The glands in his neck had been swollen since the morning, and Doctor Sarkotić had come and said – mumps. This was not good. The child was at the worst possible age, when his sexual glands were developing. He could be left impotent. This was in March 1936. Olga paid for a mass to be held for Mladen’s recovery at Sarajevo’s Church of Saint Ante in Bistrik. She was afraid Mladen would not be able to have children and his good nature and abundant talents would die with him. This was the last mass for the living or the dead Olga would ever request. She went in the evening to Bistrik, knelt in the half-empty church, staring at the child above the altar, and listened to the priest pronouncing the name of her eldest son.

  Before long her younger son Dragan also grew ill. But for him it wasn’t as serious for he had not yet reached the age of ten and was in no danger of becoming sterile. Besides, Dragan had never been as loved as Mladen. In addition to not being the first born, he was not equal to his brother in looks, intelligence, and especially talent. This was clear even then, while everyone was still alive and all misfortunes were small. Later the differences between the dead and the living son would grow to monstrous proportions. The d
ead son would be better in all respects than the living, and the living would have to cope with the fact that someone now dead had been so much better than he was. He could achieve it only by dying, but there was never anything suicidal about Dragan. He wanted to live, good and innocent, a lover of women, a frequenter of prostitutes, a kind and an unfaithful husband, as cruel and tender as a child. He would forever remain the younger brother who learned through personal experience that nothing in life could be as perfect as death.

  As soon as he was better, at the beginning of April, while the rains fell on Bosnia without respite, Mladen was taken to the doctor. First to Doctor Rittig, who would know what to do next. He told them not to worry, but their concern grew. He said the mumps were not such a deadly disease, there were far more serious childhood diseases, and then he picked up the telephone and called Doctor Damjan Hadžidamjanović. He received Mladen, led him into a room painted from floor to ceiling in shiny white, told him to undress, sat on a chair in front of him and for a long time poked around in his testicles with the fingers of his right hand, as if weighing them on his palm.

  I don’t think it’s a case of testicular inflamation, he said. Are you sure? Olga asked. I think I am, he answered. Her worry lasted until the very end, when something much worse took its place. From spring 1936 to autumn 1943 they were worried about whether Mladen might have been rendered impotent. Then the time of his death came, and that would torment them as long as they lived. Mladen’s death continues to hang over us to this day.

  Clearly the mumps were a result of the mild winter. Other children’s diseases spread through Sarajevo in those weeks, and adults too fell ill from the flu and other inflammations, of the lungs, kidneys, brain. At an earlier time, such a winter would have brought out the plague, which during the rainy spring would have killed off half the city. Even if Bosnia was at the end of the world, and Sarajevo a byway, the epidemic would have found a way of making it to the city. The last plague had afflicted Bosnia some three hundred years earlier. Numerous families had disappeared, and along with them several old family names of the city, but all that transpired before Austria had arrived in Bosnia and with it the “light of civilization.”

  For seven long years Olga would worry about whether the mumps had left her son impotent. And then she stopped worrying.

  In the forty-three years that she survived her son, Olga destroyed all his school report cards, identification documents, photographs, school composition notebooks, books awarded to him as scholastic prizes, and everything else in the house that was a reminder of him.

  When in the summer of 1969 we moved from Madam Heim’s building to Sepetarevac, she sorted every paper, examined every object, and threw into the trash whatever might have reminded her of him.

  She did all this in silence. She did not speak, nor did anyone question her. I never said a word to her about Mladen. No one forbade me, nor was there anything ever said about not speaking of him. It was understood. I learned that one did not speak of Mladen, as one learns the words for home, stone, face, hand, tree, building, sky, flame, knife, gun, earth, death…I don’t know when I pronounced any of these words for the first time (really, when was the first time I uttered the word death?), but each one entered my speech unobtrusively, along with a story that could not be remembered, a story that does not exist, though clearly it once had to exist. The closing idea for an autobiography would be to find each of these stories about words, reconstruct them, and write them down. To write the story of Mladen, a boy whose name was never uttered aloud.

  Several years before Javorka’s death, I received a batch of letters on loan that the Stublers of Ilidža had written and received from Mladen, after he’d been sent for training in Stokerau. Mostly they were to his cousin, my aunt Nevenka, who was eight years old and had just started second grade at the time. The fact that he was writing to a child is clear from the tone of his letters.

  They are dated from the end of 1942 until August 1943. Along with Mladen and Nevenka’s correspondence there were letters that Aunt Rika, Nevenka’s mother, to him and his responses to her. A few postcards were also included from Nevenka’s uncle Rudolf Stubler, a lieutenant in the Home Guard, which he sent from the barracks in Bijeljina and then from Šid.

  Mladen wrote all his letters in green fountain pen. He was making an effort to write in clear handwriting because Nevenka obviously was not able to read the cursive of adults yet. The postcard he sent to Rudi in Bijeljina at the end of the summer of 1943, though neat, was written in a very different hand.

  In most of the letters, those he received and those he sent to Kasindol Street, the traces of the military censure are evident: a pale blue or penciled line from the upper left to the lower right corner, the kind of mark writers use to cross out an entire page of a manuscript.

  It is Wednesday, March 24, 1943.

  Mladen writes:

  * * *

  —

  Dear Nevenka,

  Here I am responding to your letter right away. Hearing from you always gladdens me. We too are enjoying fine weather. In the morning, as soon as we get up, we go outside to run and exercise without our shirts on. Then we sing the Erika March. Then we take our rifles and machine guns and shoot paper Russians and Partisans in the woods.

  Like you, we have school, except that in our school one mustn’t fail and so there is no homework.

  It will soon be two months since I was last at Tante Dora’s. One week we have exercises, the next we don’t, so I don’t know when I’ll get leave. But the next time I go to Vienna I’ll tell Tante Dora that you’re studying your Gothic script diligently and that you will write to her.

  The radio plays all day long here, but I can never hear it because of the work we do. And just like you, we eat cakes here as if every day was our name day. I miss cornmeal. Once in a while they make a pudding out of it. I’ve had enough potatoes, we have a lot of those every day.

  Maybe I’ll get a leave after Easter and come home, and maybe I won’t. Maybe the war will end quickly and I’ll come home for good, and maybe it won’t.

  But tomorrow for sure I’ll load the machine gun onto my shoulders and get good and sweaty.

  Now I must write to Željko.

  Greetings to your mother and father, and to Omama and Opapa, and Nano.

  With much love,

  Your Mladen

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, again Wednesday, Nevenka answers. (Curious how in all their letters and postcards, they write out the full dates without exception. In Franjo’s bee journal the entire year is rarely included, instead he writes just the last two numbers of the year. Here that doesn’t happen. The dates are emphasized as in history textbooks. Perhaps this is accidental, perhaps only a detail of the generally accepted manners or modes of the time, but it may also be that there is a feeling of the historical moment. Or does that ring with too much pathos? Perhaps a feeling that their deaths were imminent and that in the next instant they could cease to be, as in the bursts of machine gun fire the paper Russians and Partisans ceased to be.)

  * * *

  —

  Dear Mladen!

  I received your letter. It made me happy because you had not written in a long time. Soldiers came our way. A dreadful division of Germans. The fields were filled with tents, cars, and horses. A major slept at our apartment. Javorka is crawling and by summer will be walking. We’re preparing a school assembly for April 10 and I’ll be doing a little presentation. We are all well, Mama, Papa, Omama, and Opapa, but Nano was a little under the weather. We’re working in the garden but we miss you. I’ve got a cold but am otherwise well. Nano already has a job in the locomotive repair shop. He’s received his first paycheck. It’s snowing today, but the sun will come out by tomorrow. The sparrows are twittering under our kitchen window.

  Sending you all my love and kisses,

  Yours, Nevenk
a Novak

  Are you still singing and playing the guitar?

  * * *

  —

  Nevenka Novak, whose married name was Cezner, had rheumatic fever as a child. This damaged her heart. She later became an architect but did not end up designing a single important building. She had a gift for such work, but the times did not favor it. She did not complain much about this. She gave birth to two children who now live in Germany. She was moderately religious, never a Party member. She lived through her second war, the one that began in 1992, under Serbian occupation in Ilidža, on Kasindol Street, in the same building where her grandfather Karlo Stubler had hidden his Serbian neighbors from the Ustaše patrols. She died several years after the war, from a heart that by then had given up. Her heart valves were hanging by threads, the cardiologist said. He may have invented this, but one remembers such a colorful diagnosis. Until the end of Nevenka’s life, a wooden apiary that Karlo had built by hand for four or five hives had stood in the Stubler yard. Coated in carbolineum, used to protect railway trusses, it survived two wars and stayed in the same spot for over seventy years. For its last twenty years there were no longer any bees in it. Franjo Rejc had added the carbolineum touch. He had purchased it at the railway works, and asked for a receipt. There were those who took railway materials, including tools, wooden trusses, and even rails, and brought them home without paying for them. That was why Franjo asked for the receipt, which for a long time rested in an envelope in one of the thousands of little drawers and side tables of the house on Kasindol. Perhaps the receipt still exists today, though the apiary is no more.