Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  With warm regards,

  Your Nano

  * * *

  —

  And then, a line below:

  * * *

  —

  Dear Rika, I arrived without complications. I had to spend the night in Šid. The conditions here are not nearly as good as they once were. Everything is expensive or impossible to find.

  Regards to you and Vilko,

  Rudi

  * * *

  —

  By contrast to Mladen, Nano tries to use the newly introduced root-based spelling system, and he does a good job of it. He was interested in such matters and understood the etymological roots of words, the formations of sounds, grammar, and orthography. He had taught these, as well as mathematics, to generations of Stubler children. Whoever started school acquired Nano as a tutor for the subjects that were not going well: math, physics, chemistry, grammar and orthography, solfège and music reading, Latin, Greek, and German, botany and zoology, pressing plants for the herbarium.

  Mladen writes exactly as he did at the gymnasium. There must be a reason for his stubbornness. In his military trunk from Stockerau he carried a book with him that several months earlier he had asked be sent from home. The author: Antun Bonifačić. The title: Paul Valéry. The Valéry monograph is one of the few possessions of Mladen’s that Olga would not hide, throw in the trash, or burn. It would be waiting for me in the library at our home when, as a thirteen-year-old, I became interested in French poetry, in Valéry, and in my uncle who had died as an enemy combatant. In the upper-right corner of the title page, written in green ink, is “Mladen Rejc 1943.” He wrote his first and last name so his comrades wouldn’t steal the book. In the year 1943, at Stockerau near Vienna, the Bosnian soldiers in the SS unit composed of Volksdeutsche and kuferaši were reading Paul Valéry. But why had he written the year next to his name? Could he have had a premonition that this was the year he was destined to die? Perhaps so. On every available scrap of paper, in his letters and in his books, Mladen wrote the date with the year. After the war these numbers would be magic. 1943. That number meant more than any word of the Croatian language. Of the Serbo-Croatian language, whose rules of orthography he had studied, as I would.

  Nano too was interested in Valéry, but not for the same reason as Mladen. Nano had no interest in politics. Or he was afraid of politics, the way every minority member or misfit fears politics, if he is aware of being a minority. And Nano was very much aware of his minority status, which was why he would write “Croat” on Opapa’s death notice under nationality. This would happen after the war, and thus would Karlo Stubler become in death someone he had never been. Reflecting on the summer of 2013, with the approach of another long winter without them all, it seems to me that grandfather and grandson traded places in death. Mladen died as a German, Opapa as a Croat, while in life Opapa was the German and Mladen was the Croat.

  Mladen was not afraid of politics.

  We have sold our flag.

  He wrote these words in a letter he sent from Vienna after visiting Aunt Dora. The letter did not pass through the military censor. Olga burned it along with all of Mladen’s other letters after the war, but they remembered this sentence of his. Jovorka would repeat it to me on her deathbed, when I asked about her brother.

  No one knew what flag Mladen had been thinking of. But it was clearly understood that the sentence concerned politics. Out of all the letters Mladen had written to his parents, this was the one phrase that endured. All the rest burned up, or died along with those who might have remembered them.

  In late spring and early summer, Rudi was in Bijeljina. Željko had not yet been transferred to Rajlovac but was in Šid and Fruška Gora for training. Mladen was in eastern Slavonia, near Županja.

  They were near to one another but did not once meet.

  Nano’s letter to Nevenka arrived first:

  * * *

  —

  Dear Nena,

  I received your card today. Thank you! You made me very happy. I was glad to read your news. It’s been raining here, I can’t go out. It’s hard because I don’t have anyone close. It’s evening. I’ve lit a lamp and am talking with you, even if by the post. When I can I look for lice, for I’ve got those here. I’ve only just arrived here and can hardly wait until I’m back home again. How are you? Do you go to school? Are you studying hard? Are there soldiers at the school? How are my bees, are they getting along without me? Has there been any plague? It would make me very happy if you wrote again. If I can, I’ll send you something so you can buy yourself some cherries. Say hello to your papa and mama.

  A big kiss.

  Your Nano

  Second Lieutenant Rudolf Stubler, I Section Verification Bijeljina

  * * *

  —

  Nano complains to his little niece, telling her that he exterminates lice when he has the time. That was his way: he spoke about whatever was hard for him, by contrast to Mladen, who was heroic. Everyone was proud of Mladen, and in their pride they forgot about the war and who was fighting whom. Nano was fearful, and so his part in the war was not taken seriously. It was as if Mladen was sending his letters and postcards from some distant future time, which they still had to live through. He did not talk about hunger or lice. Perhaps German soldiers did not have lice.

  When the rain had let up, the Croatian Home Guard under the command of Second Lieutenant Stubler dug trenches in the plain, cleared the stubble so the enemy could not sneak up on them, and reinforced the defenses of the main city of Semberija. Bijeljina was vulnerable from all sides and difficult to defend. Then it started to rain again and the second lieutenant withdrew them to their barracks. The trenches filled with rainwater, which flooded in from all sides, and large, well-fed lice came out of the straw to tuck themselves away in the soldiers’ chests, in their armpits, between their legs. They shaved their heads, not out of military discipline but because of those accursed Serbo-communist lice that swam through the trenches from the east, crossing the Drina, the Danube, and the Sava as they moved toward Bosnia to consume their souls. Second Lieutenant Stubler did not need to be shaved like the majority of others. He’d been twenty-two and twenty-three when he lost his hair. At first it had turned soft as a baby’s, and then, slowly, in the course of a year, he went bald. He shaved off what remained on his crown, and it did not bother him at all to appear before the beauties of Graz and Vienna without hair. Nor did it bother Dora Dussel, the aunt who visited Mladen when he was in the barracks, and whom he would visit in Vienna whenever he had a free day. Rudi had fallen passionately in love with her though she was his cousin. Rudi was nearly thirty and by then had spent his youth in cafés, nightclubs, and bordellos, never finding time for his studies, when the news that he had taken up with Dora reached Karlo Stubler in Ilidža. Karlo wrote him a letter ordering him to come home immediately. He had no choice but to obey. It was a great big scandal, although they were not such close relations that were they to marry it would be against the law.

  Rudi had shamed him, but this subject was never discussed, though everyone knew about the affair that ended Nano’s education. Probably Mladen did too – it was impossible that he could not have – when he went to visit Dora at her apartment to take a shower and wash off all the military filth. Did he picture Dora as Nano’s lover? What did she look like then? Not fifteen years had passed since the affair, so she could not have changed all that much. Like Rudi, Dora Dussel never married.

  While exterminating lice in the barracks which stank of kerosene, wet wool, dirty socks, and men’s bodies, Rudi thought about his cousin Dora. It was impossible for him at that moment not to think about her. Dora was the first of two women Rudi fell truly in love with. With the second, a Muslim woman from Mostar, he fell in love, and fatally so, in the middle of the thirties. He wanted to marry her and went to Mostar to propose, but her family wanted to kill him as he was of a different
faith. As far as love was concerned, that had been the end. For a long time after the war he did not travel to Mostar. At the time, on that rainy June afternoon of 1943, he still believed he would never again go to Mostar. He did not want to think about that woman, whose name we don’t know. He committed himself to celibacy. Never again, never again, for he could not bear the thought that she had rejected him in the end. He proposed that they run away, live somewhere far off, free from family. She did not want that. She would rather die.

  This was why he thought about Dora. He had been a disgrace at Ilidža, for a long time he could not look his father in the eyes, but now there was no longer anything to be ashamed of. While exterminating the lice in the Bijeljina Home Guard barracks, which smelled of kerosene, wet uniforms, and men’s bodies, Rudi talked with Dora Dussel. He complained to her, his eyes filling with tears. He shouldn’t have listened to his father and gone back home. This was his and Dora’s life, regardless of how angry Opapa might have been. With courage, they could have lived their life.

  Then he took a postcard and wrote: “I’ve lit a lamp and am talking with you, even if by the post.” He wrote to little Nevenka, not to Dora. Rudi’s letters to Dora Dussel, which must have been numerous, were likely destroyed. Even if they happen to exist, they are probably in the possession of some tradesman who deals in military letters from the Second World War. Written in German, a language better suited to the sort of sentimentality to which Rudi was inclined, these letters would be especially valuable.

  Nano was worried about the bees. Like Franjo, he had an idée fixe about the beekeeper and about bee civilization. The beehives were nations of their own, nations that belonged to human civilization. They had grown accustomed to the bees, to the feel of their little feet on their palms. No two bees were alike, just as no two human beings were. To stop the spread of infection, they would be killed at twilight with gas, burned, and buried in the garden. The longer the war continued, the more this image came to Rudi’s mind. A summer evening, the stench of rotten bees, black smoke whirling into the sky, then a shallow grave, and that would be the end. Whatever was destroyed in the face of the plague, for which there was no cure other than destroying all the bees, always meant the end of one bee civilization. It was as unrepeatable as Atlantis. To save the other bees and beehives from the epidemic, it was essential to destroy the infected ones.

  He asks the girl about the bees, more to complain to her than for her to actually respond. What could she know about the bees anyway?

  “If I can, I’ll send you something so you can buy some sweet cherries.” This “something” is apparently money. But this is a word one does not use in polite conversation. He mentions lice, he mentions plague, but money he refers to discreetly as “something.” Money for the Stublers was a dirty word, which is perhaps why they never had it.

  Karlo Stubler planned the yard at Ilidža according to all the rules of a good and well-ordered garden, beginning with beds in which he planted green onions, beans, peas, snap peas, lettuce, and Macedonian tomatoes, beds with sweet berries, and then, closer to the apiary, beds with black and red currants, raspberries, and gooseberries. Then apple trees, placed according to variety and time of ripening, in military four-deep files, and then a couple of pear trees, several Damson plums, a sour cherry tree close to the fence, and a walnut tree right at the border, so it would belong to both the Stublers and the Pavlovićs. For a half century Opapa nurtured his garden kingdom.

  A thick receipt had been preserved, two and a half centimeters wide and the length of a postcard, the date June 15, 1943 on the seal, the place-name: Bijeljina. “Receipt may be removed,” and beneath that, “Remittance due,” and then in green ink: “100 Kunas.” Payee: Second Lieutenant Rudolf Stubler, I Sec. Verif. Bijeljina. It is interesting that on the postal seal and below is written Bijeljina. On the back of the receipt, “Space for message”:

  * * *

  —

  Dear Nena, I received your letter and it made me very happy. And the picture is nice! Here I enclose something for you to buy cherries.

  Greetings to you, your father and mother

  For now we have no bacon, nor can packages be sent.

  Your Nano

  * * *

  —

  The rains continued throughout June, and the trenches and ditches dug one day filled with water the next. The mangy, coughing, lice-infested Croatian Home Guard in their muddy uniforms dragged themselves through Bijeljina, attracting sympathy. Looking more like camp inmates than soldiers, with their shaved heads that made it seem as if they had all suddenly emerged from a collective womb. At the start, the local people were afraid of them, especially the Serbs, of whom many remained in the town, but that fear quickly waned and was replaced by indifference. And then people started to feel a little sorry for them. These Home Guard soldiers had appeared in town as if they had no fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, but had instead been born to serve in the army of the Independent State of Croatia, digging trenches around the town and living there in rotten wooden barracks inherited from the army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It seemed as if these unfortunate Home Guardsmen would one day vanish along with the rest of the country.

  Second Lieutenant Rudolf Stubler inquired among the Serbian peasants regarding the availability of smoked bacon. They said there wasn’t any. They would bow low and make themselves small in front on him, smiling politely, and repeating over and over, there isn’t any, there isn’t any, there isn’t any…He thought that there was some, that hams and sausages were hanging in their attics and smoke shacks and the villagers were lying – they wanted the soldiers to die of hunger! If they acted like this with him, how on earth would they respond, Rudi thought, when the Ustaše asked them about bacon? There isn’t any, there isn’t any, there isn’t any…

  Rudi did not know anyone in Bijeljina. There were hardly any Catholics in town and no acquaintances from the railroad or the post office, but at the end of June 1943 Opapa asked him to visit Mrs. Gertrude Seghers-Stein, convey his best wishes, and leave her with as much money as he possibly could. He would reimburse him for this at the earliest opportunity.

  Rudi hadn’t even known that Mrs. Gertrude was in Bijeljina.

  He had not thought about her for nearly fifteen years.

  On his first free day, when the rain made it impossible to dig trenches, he set out to visit her.

  Gertrude Seghers-Stein was the widow of the Dubrovnik postal director, Maximilian Seghers-Stein, who had been there to meet Karlo and his family when they relocated to Dubrovnik, showing him the city in which he would live the best years of his life. Seghers-Stein was a tall, powerful man, with a roughhewn face and bright blond hair which his hat would barely cover when he went for walks down Stradun on Saturday afternoons. Saturday afternoon was not exactly the time to be strolling down Stradun, but Seghers-Stein had his reason. As with everything else, he had secret reasons, about which no one asked for they knew he would never tell. If someone actually did ask, he would just smile, shrug, and say, “There are all sorts of idées fixes, my dear; it’s not worth asking. There are as many idées fixes as there are people.”

  Maximilian Seghers-Stein was an utterly distrustful person but at the same time quite convivial. He knew everyone, frequented pubs and inns, and took part in social gatherings, of which Dubrovnik traditionally had more than other towns of the monarchy at the time. These two characteristics combined in a strange and unexpected manner. Dubrovnik’s inhabitants respected him and loved him in a way. Mr. Maksim was as straight as a mast in his bright hat with which he tried, in vain, to cover his unruly hair – a Viennese eccentric dressed in the clothes of a Croatian dignitary. The former pleased them while the latter impressed them. It flattered them that the emperor and king Franz Joseph had sent such a representative to Dubrovnik. They perceived him as a personal emissary of the monarchy, though any intelligent person would have known that the emperor did
not personally appoint postal directors.

  In his free time, and there would be more such time at the beginning of the century than at any point later, Master Maksim played the violin and the cello. At first he performed only in shows put on by nonprofessionals or when accompaniment was needed for visiting guest soloists from Zagreb and Vienna, for he believed that a postal director shouldn’t be too ambitious in his artistic endeavors. What would a citizen whose letter to his son in the army that had been lost in the mail have said about the postal director’s musical activity? What would they have said in the Viennese ministries or the head offices of the imperial postal system when the word got around that in his free time he played the cello? With the years this concern passed, or perhaps he received word from Vienna allowing him to take up such artistic work and music making more seriously, for in 1910 he held his first solo concert in Dubrovnik, and afterward he continued to perform at state festivals and religious celebrations in nearby cities. Over the next two years he was invited to perform in all the larger towns from Zadar and Split to Mostar, Kotor, and Cetinje. These prewar concerts, where he played from Vivaldi’s or Mozart’s violin concerti, to the folk or religious repertory, to modern German and Italian love songs, would end up having a major impact on the life of Master Maksim, his Gertrude, and their four children. In fact, when 1918 arrived, and one empire collapsed only to have another rise up in its place, Maximilian Seghers-Stein did not experience the fate of the other directors, chiefs, and officials who had been appointed by imperial decree, nor would he be in any way demoted. Instead the new authorities renewed his position as postal director, for in all those early years, from the moment he gained the courage to perform on his own, he had played by invitation at all the Serbian religious and national celebrations, just as he had when invited by the Croats and Catholics, and for that matter anyone else who had need of his musicianship.