Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  The families Novotni, Misirlić, and Lončarić also found themselves in Prača in the spring of 1941. Rade Džeba, the father of our Sepetarevac neighbor Slavica Šneberger was there too. Josip and Beba Lončarić were friends of Olga and Franjo’s. They had three children. Their son Mladen was named after our Mladen, after he had been laid to rest beneath the earth of Slavonia.

  At the beginning, nothing was out of the ordinary. The trains heading for Višegrad proceeded according to schedule. The Germans were hardly to be seen, and the Ustaše had taken power only to depart quickly. It was a beautiful, rich, yet ominous summer. From the banks of the Drina one could hear bursts of machine gun fire at night. Rumors spread – no one could confirm them – that the Ustaše had burned down and slaughtered an entire Serbian village. They had done this, apparently, out of revenge, but no one said what the revenge was for.

  And then in one day the world shattered.

  The Chetniks poured into Prača, booming and shooting from all directions, and everything came apart with such lightning speed that the railway workers and local Muslim population barely had time to escape, and they fled with empty hands. The small squad of Ustaše charged with protecting the station and the post office building quickly broke down, taking little account of what would happen to the people. The Chetniks were hungry for revenge, and they seemed to take revenge on anyone they could. They fired at the innocent people, who ran along the tracks, which was for many their only point of orientation, since all around was forest. Although many had been in service in Prača since Austrian times, they knew nothing about the forests, the mountains, or how to travel except by thoroughfare, road, or track. They had remained the same city people they were when they had been assigned to live in this heavenly realm, and so they stuck to the tracks, making them easy and entertaining targets for those who had come to exact their revenge.

  Rade Džeba was fortunate; he escaped all the way to eastern Herzegovina, from where it was later easy for him to return to Sarajevo. But he did not live much longer. It was said he was working on a track somewhere, washed his hair, and while it was still wet went to run a handcar. From this he became ill and died. It was 1942.

  Tante Rika and Uncle Vilko set out in the opposite direction, toward Pale. How they fared no one actually remembers. Those who knew the story have all died. The exodus of Tante Rika and Uncle Vilko, in all its horror, happened within the reality of a war. Then it turned into a story the two of them enjoyed telling, then into a family story, which everyone else passed on, and then into a legend. Tante Rika died in 1966, several months before my birth, then a decade later Uncle Vilko died. The legend paled with time, for people were no longer concerned about the Chetnik offense against Prača. Only Olga’s pronouncement would be remembered: “My sister escaped from Prača with a naked fanny.”

  The station chief Ibrahim beg Mulalić did not escape but, calmly, in accord with his old Turkish and Viennese sense of duty, waited for the Chetniks at his railway post in the deserted Prača. Everyone else had run away, and for good reason. The Muslims of Prača escaped before all the rest, because the Chetniks were angriest with them, for it was against them that an entire array of vengeful acts had accumulated in the course of an epoch, recalled with the help of the gusle and the epic ten-line poem known as the deseterac.

  Like an honorable sailor who remains on a sinking ship, Ibrahim beg did not flee Prača with the rest. He calmly accepted it, without ceremony or a farewell, though there was no longer a state. Nothing was left, including those who might have remembered and praised his actions, nor anything that could absolve him of his responsibility to his position. Ibrahim beg could not surrender his charge of honor; he quietly accepted what destiny had determined for him. There was no great story in this, nor would there ever be.

  In their fury the Chetniks rushed into Prača. In this war, people were transformed in accordance with the symbols on their caps. It was a Biblical tempest, but each apocalypse was distinct from the others. Countless family memories were destroyed and it was not possible to record and memorialize all of them.

  But they did not touch the stationmaster. He waited for them in his uniform; they knew his name well, but when they spoke with him, they did not address him by name but like everyone else by his title, Ibrahim beg. He responded exactly as was required. For the entire time that the Chetniks were in Prača, before they were driven out, Ibrahim beg Mulalić performed his duty. If there were no trains, and there could not be any since the line had been cut, he maintained the station so that everything would be ready for the next train, in accord with the railway timetable and the regulations of service, which never changed among employees of the railroad. Once he had been transferred to Sarajevo and later retired from service, Ibrahim beg Mulalić would calmly accept this change too. It was enough for a paper to be signed, countersigned, and registered in order for people to carry out what the most disciplined army in the world could not, let alone an unruly band of Chetniks. The man’s personality had been formed in an unusual blend of Kafkaesque bureaucratic zeal and Oriental calm. This was how Ibrahim beg was in life, and that is how he should be portrayed in the novel that ought to be written about him. His dramatic climax and finale was not the moment he received the Chetniks in Prača, nor in their departure from the place, which would never again be as it had been.

  After the war Ibrahim beg Mulalić and his Polish wife Štefanija, whose family had been driven from their Polish homeland in a way equally horrible as certain people today are being driven from theirs, lived in peace and tranquility among their own in Sarajevo as their final days arrived. And then after Štefanija’s death Ibrahim beg decided to convert to Catholicism. He did this after having lived his life with integrity and in an orderly fashion, keeping to all the rules that were proper to him as a Muslim. But when the end came, it was important to Ibrahim beg that he lie beside Štefanija in the same grave. This was the sole reason he wanted to be christened as a Catholic. He did not want to work through connections and shortcuts, expose his children to risk or burden them with how or where to bury him but instead organized everything so that it would all be according to the law – to the state’s and then to God’s. His desire was satisfied, and he lies in a Catholic parcel in Bare, awaiting the day of his resurrection.

  The last preserved postcard that Mladen sent from Stockerau to Ilidža is the only one without a date. There are two stamps on the paper: a German one dated May 7, 1943, and one from Ilidža dated May 17, 1943. The fact that the post office placed its stamp after the military censor’s examination is clear from the ten days it took for a letter to get from Vienna to Sarajevo in May of that year. The year before the same journey had taken half as long.

  The postcard is made of yellowish cardboard with a design similar to peacetime postcards, with an equal number of lines of the same length for writing the name and address of the addressee but without a designated space for stamps. Instead there is the word Feldpost. No longer are there any sweeping warnings about the rules of military correspondence. Instead, diagonally across the space shared by the address and the message are the words “Entnommen aus ‘Soldatenblätter für Freizeit,’ herausgegeben vom OKW,” and beneath this “Offsetdruk: Bibliographiches Institut AG., Leipzig, Graphischer Großbetrieb.” By contrast to 1942, the printer had made a small addition to his 1943 postcards. In the lower left portion of the obverse a small, seasonal cartoon had been appended. Two German soldiers in helmets and winter coats stand under a smiling sun as an abominable snow monster melts before their eyes. On the right side of the picture, the leaves on a tree reach up into the sky where a wild goose is flying, perhaps returning from the south.

  Surprisingly, the drawing is signed. The artist Hugo Frank, who did the illustrations for both the winter and the summer postcards, was born in Stuttgart in 1892 and died in Gerlingen in 1963. His drawings can occasionally be found on Internet auction sites. Prints of military postcards from 1943, with carto
on illustrations by Hugo Frank, can be purchased for five euros a piece. The content of a postcard does not affect the price.

  * * *

  —

  Dear Nena,

  I’m writing you again because I have time. Tell Nano that I didn’t get the newspapers he sent, but he should send some again. It makes us happy to get the Sarajevo papers. Are you planning to start swimming soon? We’ll soon be going to a great big lake and we’ll be able to swim all summer. What is Opapa doing? What grade are you going into? Say hello to your mother and father, and to Omama, Opapa, and Nano. And Javorka when you see her.

  With much love,

  Your Mladen

  * * *

  —

  He was distracted and not quite up for writing. He writes that he’ll be going with the army to a lake that he’ll swim in throughout the summer. He made this up. He writes “great big lake” because that’s how one speaks to children. “A greeaaat biiiig lake, bigger than the ocean…” When he was in good spirits and could concentrate, Mladen spoke with Nevenka as if she were an adult.

  In 1942 during the first period of wartime famine, the family in Ildiža prepared a Christmas package for Mladen. They acquired special licenses, brought food to Sarajevo, baked hardtack that would not spoil on the road, and in the midst of all this activity, they forgot where Mladen was and what soon awaited him. He would be defending the Great German Reich with rifle and machine gun. Then we would disappear and the war would finally be over. And no one would remember that our Mladen had defended the Great German Reich, shooting at paper Russians and Partisans and marching upon the asphalt trails in Stockerau.

  There had to be enough in the package for Mladen to share with his comrades. In the German military there were strict rules – the rule of solidarity in everything. Franjo would send him two jars, one with honey from Ilidža, the other with honey from Grabovica. The Grabovica honey was from 1940, our last peacetime summer. He would share it in the morning with his comrades, each getting a spoonful of honey as they lay in their bunks, remembering what peace felt like. It was not good for a soldier at war to forget what peace was like. Franjo knew this. He had fought in the last war and been taken prisoner in 1915, thank God, by the Italians. As soon as they had changed sides, betrayed the Habsburgs and gone over to the French, English, and Americans, they had taken him prisoner. He did not hold it against them.

  He wrapped the honey jars in newspaper so they would not break. Mladen unwrapped them on the evening of December 23, 1942. Nothing was crushed or broken. The package had been wrapped in the blue packing paper from which his mother had once made protective covers for his school books and notebooks.

  Mladen unwrapped the jars with honey, but he did not throw out the sheets of old newspaper in which they’d been wrapped. Franjo had wrapped one in the Cyrillic print pages of Politika, from October 23, 1940. Mladen pressed it out with the back of his hand. That evening he would have something to read.

  His father had wrapped a piece of honeycomb in a white handkerchief and sent it to him – it was good for a sore throat. Mladen broke off a sticky piece and put it in his mouth. He sensed the distant flavor of honey and the flavor of the most perfect architecture in nature, more perfect than anything a man could create with his hands. More perfect than the Sistine Chapel and its ceiling paintings, the pyramids of Egypt, the skyscrapers of Chicago, Westminster Palace, Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, even than Sarajevo’s own Vijećnica. Every honeycomb was a perfect structure. Its flavor was a dull sweetness. The next morning little pieces of honeycomb would remain stuck between his teeth, and he would not be able to brush them out for a long time.

  Winter apples, tiny and gnarled, from the Ilidža garden. Mladen smells one. The apple smells of them all, and now he sees them all more clearly than ever. Opapa, Omama, Aunt Rika, and Uncle Vilko, “Uncle Vili,” as they’re now calling him, his father and mother, and the rabbits from the Ilidža hutch, and the bees…The buzzing of thousands of bees envelops the garden on Kasindol. A three-dimensional picture of the garden emerges, in springtime and late summer, when the winter apples begin to ripen, amid the buzzing and the scent of the apples, and before his eyes the figure of a stooped old man with a beard appears, plucking weeds among the strawberry patches. This is Opapa; it is because of Opapa that he is in Stockerau. If not for him, Mladen would not be a German. Just as he would not be a Slovene if not for his father. Nor would he be a Yugoslav if not for the Great Boys Gymnasium across from the Officers Home. On the young king’s birthday, and on the anniversary of the resurrection of the country of the Southern Slavs, they would sit at their desks and sing: Yugoslavia is our mother and our beautiful home…Only two years later everything would change, Mladen would be a Croat, and everyone around him in the Great Boys Gymnasium would suddenly be Croats. The Jews would have disappeared, hiding out in the woods above Betanija and Jagomir, and up on Trebević, or they were not saving themselves: they were simply not around. A year later Mladen is a German. This is the last thing he would be in his life, but this he does not know before Christmas in 1942 as he sniffs the apple from the Ilidža garden.

  On Saturday, May 23, 1943, in the early afternoon, when Opapa was in his deckchair in front of the poplar, leafing through the 1910 edition of the Brockhaus Encyclopedia, a messenger in a Home Guard uniform arrived and asked for Rudolf Stubler.

  Rudi’s eyes filled with tears as he signed the summons.

  He was to report at the assembly point in Butmir on Monday at seven o’clock.

  Sunday was the last day of Rudi’s life. He did not speak to anyone, he just walked around the garden. He called his bees and they came to him. They were not bothered by the scent of his sweat. It wasn’t important now that Franjo wasn’t there; they were parting in their quiet bee way. They touched his palm with their little legs, and Nano experienced it as a special and final tenderness in his life. Self-pitying, wretched, and alone, Home Guard Second Lieutenant Rudolf Stubler was saying farewell to the world. He was saying farewell to the bees who left their pollen along the hollow lines of his life and happiness, which he would pass on to the handrails of the train cars that would carry him to the north of Bosnia. He was parting with the garden and the meadows of Butmir from which the bees had collected pollen, and with his parents and sister and with the rabbits that were even more afraid than he was.

  Nano’s final Sunday, after which he did not sleep the entire night.

  In May, it was still dark at five a.m. Rudi turned on the light and put on the Home Guard uniform that had been issued to him several months earlier. In the interim he had got work at the stokehold, an important responsibility, without which the state could not function, he thought, consoling himself that this work would free him from the army.

  Rudi, my son, his father comforted him, a complete idiot can work at the stokehold. It’s better for everyone if an idiot is not in command of an army.

  I am a complete idiot, Rudi answered.

  Unfortunately for you, you aren’t.

  Opapa worried about Rudi. He was his son after all, but it bothered him that Rudi had constantly been whining since being called up for military service.

  He would be alive at the end of the war. Everyone knew this, and no one believed that anything would happen to Nano. His eyes were filled with tears; Franjo called them Italian tears. They were a sure guarantee that Rudi would live through the war unharmed.

  They were all on their feet before he left.

  They hugged and kissed him, told him to take care of himself.

  Omama.

  Opapa.

  Vilko was in Prača; he was not around.

  Rika.

  Nevenka.

  Nano did not lift her in the air but instead leaned down to kiss her, as if he had grown weak or Nevenka heavier.

  A yellowish postcard with a counterfeit two-kuna stamp with a picture of the Zagreb Cathedral, taken fr
om the eastern end of Tuškanac. The trees of the Archbishop’s Palace on Kaptol are visible as well as two guard towers. The stamp is red to match the braiding that crisscrosses the upper quarter of the card, disappearing beneath the cathedral and then reappearing and continuing to the edge of the card. On top of the braiding, in the left corner, is a Croatian coat of arms in the shape of a shield and above it, the letter U in a more intricate braid, atop which are the words Independent State of Croatia in all caps. The name of the printing press is not indicated.

  Nano writes in blue ink. His handwriting is much more attractive than Mladen’s. He still has the handwriting of a youth – he pays no attention to the rules of penmanship, thin and sloped, thick and straight, but rather writes in a free and unbridled manner. One can tell by the shapes of his letters whether he is in good spirits or preoccupied.

  Nano’s writing is skilled, harmonious, beautiful. Nano wrote the uppercase N in exactly the same manner as Javorka. (They are no longer alive, and I surely look at it now in a way I would not have if they were. I think when she was a girl she saw how Nano wrote his N, copied it, and practiced it for the rest of her life. Many of our letters appear as if we copied them from someone, even when our handwriting is poor.)

  * * *

  —

  Dear Nena, here I have safely arrived in Bijeljina. The trip went well. It is beautiful here, but Ilidža is prettier. It looks as though I’ll be staying here for a long time. The garden will ripen and you and Opapa will have harvested it by the time I return. We won’t be going for a swim in the Željeznica or going for bike rides. Write me sometime if you remember.