Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Simple human kindness was more distinctive from any angle in their natures than faith was.

  This was what Don Emanuel wrote in his autobiography, and for years this apparently simple sentence was the subject of discussion at church gatherings, from the pulpit, and in monastic gathering places, until both the priest and his statement were forgotten and the two Prpićs had long since been laid to rest in Stup Cemetery.

  Marko had just turned five when he finally gathered the courage to leave the house, cross the street, and knock on the monastery door. An elderly nun opened the door, and he asked her by what right the wall stood in front of his window. She did not understand and frowned, and the boy explained that it was evil and wrong for the monastery wall to stand in front of his window, blocking the sun from shining on it.

  She asked him to follow her. She led him into the kitchen, where she cut off a piece of bread for him and sprinkled it with sugar.

  But I want to know…

  The boy was persistent.

  From that day on the boy would cross the street every day and knock on the monastery door. At first it was to ask a question or two, and then simply to visit. The nuns and the priests began to expect the boy’s visits. They grew worried oncewhen he did not show up for two days – Mara had got a leave and went with Marko to Otes. Among themselves they called him Komšo, “neighbor boy.” This nickname would follow the boy through his young adulthood, remaining with him until he was ordained and had long since left Sarajevo.

  It took his mother and father several months to discover what the boy was doing when they were at work. They were upset, tried to stop him from going across the street, but it was too late. Marko knew what he wanted and was well liked at the monastery. The day was long in a community that devoted itself to God; all was regulated to the hour and the minute, which strengthened the subjective experience of time and lengthened it. Monks’ time and children’s time were almost of equal length. In this, priests resembled children more than they did adults.

  We’ve grown accustomed to him, Mr. Ilija, let him stay with us while you’re at work. We’ll care for him and feed him, and perhaps he’ll learn something useful.

  That was what don Izidor Štok said to Ilija Prpić, and Ilija agreed. This removed a great burden of worry from the boy’s mother Mara.

  From then on, everything proceeded as if anticipated.

  The boy proved to be unusually intelligent and gifted in many ways. Everything interested him, and he acquired knowledge with ease. On Banjski Brijeg he was surrounded by the care and love of those who could not have children of their own. He went through elementary school effortlessly; he never experienced the cruelty of his peers. There was nothing to learn there, for he had long since known everything. He would pass through the Travnik gymnasium and the seminary in a similar way, finding himself at the gates of Rome before he realized he had not made a single important decision in his life – everything had happened on its own, according to some previously designed order, which neither he nor his family had resisted.

  Don Emanuel never told his mother and father that he would be ordained as a priest, nor had they ever thought that it would be otherwise with Marko. He’d been born, lived in a dark basement, and crossed the street to knock on the monastery door, all in order to become a priest. Ilija Prpić, the janitor at Sarajevo’s Main Gymnasium, and Mara Prpić, née Pamuk, had not thought their son would continue their line. It would end with them and continue in heaven. If there was a heaven above the two of them.

  We shall skip over the part about don Emaneul Prpić’s schooling and his particular interest in dogmatic theology, for doing so could cause the story of the bee journal and the gray notebook found in the basement on Sepetarevac to slip away for good. Emanual Prpić prayed for five nights and six days for the health of Adrian, Maximilian’s son. Maximilian Seghers-Stein had been waiting for Karlo Stubler when he arrived in Dubrovnik and bid him a sad farewell when Stubler was banished. He and his wife Gertrude Seghers-Stein taught music to Karlo’s children. And so one day at the end of June 1943 Home Guard Second Lieutenant Rudolf Stubler received his father’s letter in Bijeljina, in which his father asked him to visit Maximilian’s widow at his earliest opportunity to provide her with as much money as he could. In this story, don Emanuel is just one circle in its expansion and in the long search for an answer to the question of why in spring 1937 Franjo had tried to save one queen bee from a hive infected by the plague and all that this action of his brought about.

  After he had mesmerized the professors and monks in Rome as well, and had been accepted among the Jesuits as a miracle born only once in a century, Don Emanuel Prpić made his first big mistake. Instead of obediently accepting the decision of his superiors to take up service in Madrid, he resisted it so strongly that he was transfered to Dubrovnik instead. Perhaps they decided that there was something not quite right with the young man, that behind his enormous erudition and imagination and his pure and rather naïve Oriental devotion, which the study of dogmatic theology should have rectified, or even developed into a creative cynicism, there was mental deficiency lurking, a hereditary disorder that manifested itself as genius. All this, they thought, is just a lucid interval, but before the deterioration continues it would be better for him to be as far from metropolitan affairs as possible. Let him be, for instance, in Dubrovnik, where they knew how to hide and treat the sick.

  We don’t know of course, unless one day the Dubrovnik church archives are opened, what sort of messages arrived from Rome in the sealed letter that Don Emanuel carried with him. He was told that the letter was important and that he must deliver it by hand before he sets foot in the Church of Saint Ignatius to pray. He found this a strange instruction, smelling of superstition or conspiracy, and it was unclear which of the two was worse: that the church fathers in Rome were superstitious or that they had used him to send a letter that condemned him.

  Several times he had the letter in the palm of his hand, as if holding a fistful of desert sand, and he looked at the seal of red wax into which the symbol of the Jesuit order had been pressed. If he broke the seal, opened the letter, and read it, he would know all he needed to know and could act accordingly. But he would be betraying the secret entrusted to him, and this secret would not make it to Dubrovnik. This is what Prpić writes in his Recollections of a Hermit, a book published by the Serbian Orthodox Society of Chicago: “If I had only found a piece of red wax in my pocket then, I would have given in to temptation, opened the letter, then sealed it again, and acted in harmony with what I had read. And probably my destiny would have been different. But who would ever think of carrying a piece of letter-sealing wax around?”

  Thus did Don Emanuel Prpić complain, while fifteen years later and some three hundred kilometers to the northwest of Dubrovnik, Franjo Rejc carried two pieces of letter-sealing wax in his beekeeping bag everywhere he went. What purpose did that wax serve?

  Don Emanuel was received in Dubrovnik with pomp, with the smiles mandatory among the Jesuits. There was something overly theatrical in Don Emanuel’s brothers. They received him all too exuberantly.

  After they had given him a good dressing down, the Jesuits assigned this Roman PhD in dogmatic theology to direct the diocesan boys’ choir. Whether there was a devilish intention in this is hard to say today, but in a photograph published in Dubrovnik, Centuries of Culture and Patience, a 1995 edition of the authors collective Matica Hrvatska, in which we see Don Emanuel Prpić enthusiastically conducting three rows of young boys in white shirts, their mouths wide open in song, one can sense what will follow.

  At the time when don Emanuel Prpić cried tears of blood after having prayed five nights and six days for the recovery of Adrian Seghers-Stein, this business had not yet erupted among the Jesuits. And by then don Emanuel had already been given the Serbian Orthodox sounding nickname Pop Manojlo, with which the next phase of his suffering began. It is unknown whethe
r they called him this because of his Sarajevo accent, which probably reminded them of the Vlah tribes on the other side of Mount Srđ, or for some other reason, but there is no doubt whatsoever that with it they intended to insult him. He didn’t mind. He even let the children in the choir call him Pop Manojlo.

  Regarding the conditions of Don Emanuel Prpić’s exile from Dubrovnik, little is known. If we set aside the gossip and pornographic fantasies of those who banished Don Emanuel, the citizens of Dubrovnik, and certain church higher-ups, one could say that nothing is known. Except for the name Frane Bogdan, a fourteen-year-old orphan, cared for by his uncle, a retired ship’s captain by the name of Lazar Vuk Paštrović.

  Frane found himself alone with Don Emanuel in an unheated classroom at dusk on a winter evening before Christmas, when a storm was blowing so hard along the city walls and off the red roofs that it seemed they would be carried out to sea, and no one so much as peeked out from under their comforters, let alone left their houses, unless the need was great. When the door to the room suddenly opened, the candle flames flickered and a puff of wind blew one out, leaving the smell of the wick and partially burned tallow behind. That scent would forever remain in the nostrils of the witnesses, and each time they smelled it, what they had seen before their eyes would come back to them. But we do not know what they had actually seen, for the accounts differ in accord with their individual erotic fantasies. Those who were not present at the instant that the door opened, the candle flames flickered, and one went out would add something of their own to the sight, to compensate for something they did not see themselves. That is understandable. But how to understand the fact that the people standing at the door saw such different things? One said Don Emanuel was standing, staring upward, and little Frane was kneeling before him, his hands clasped together as if praying to God. Others said that Frane was standing, and Don Emanuel was the one praying. A third saw the priest – Manojlo – leaning over a bench, as if reaching for a prayer book that had slipped behind, and little Frane had approached him from the back to help. A fourth said little Frane was the one reaching for the prayer book, and it was proper for him to be the one to do this and the priest to help him…

  They cut off one of Manojlo’s ears, which an innkeeper from Pile by the name of Jozo Novokmet kept for years in a jar with alcohol on his bar. When the Partisans liberated Dubrovnik in 1944, Jozo was executed for having collaborated with the occupier, and a Montenegrin, just to show off, drank the alcohol in the jar in a single chug, chewed up the priest’s ear, and spit it out. Thus did the last remaining bodily trace of Don Emanuel Prpić disappear from Dubrovnik.

  Years afterward, the one-eared wretch, a vagrant, lunatic, and hermit, wandered through eastern Herzegovina, sleeping in caves, crawling into karst crags to pick through the bones of animals and humans, living off the charity of a people widely known for their lack of charity. The news of Don Emanuel and his sin had of course spread far and wide. They recognized him as Ostoja the One-Eared – his nickname in the new chapter of his life’s novel – and beat him up in Trebinje, beneath the plane trees, in Ravno, and at the railway stations along the track leading to Čapljina. The figure of Ostoja the One-Eared, censored, rewritten, and somewhat consoled appears in several short prose works of Mirko Kovač, and his novel Womb’s Gate. He also appears in the pages of two other Belgrade writers. It is not certain whether these two – both of whom were, like Kovač, of eastern Herzegovinian heritage – ever met Ostoja the One-Eared, or just heard stories about him.

  In his wanderings, say those who know, Ostoja the One-Eared would go all the way to Foča and Višegrad, and then down to Bileća and on to Nikšić, returning all the way back to Mostar, but he did not cross the Neretva River. Why he did not cross is unknown. There is no mention of this in Recollections of a Hermit, only the following: “This was a time in which the Lord tempted me and when I myself, human worm that I am, tested him, doubting in God’s existence, only to have the Lord then appear to me in all his greatness.”

  Utterly exhausted, he was taken in by the monks of the D. Monastery near Trebinje in winter 1939. He was feverish, coughing blood, and raving, and they were simply waiting for him to die. When he had appeared at the monastery gate, the monks knew who he was. The story of the Jesuit Don Emanuel Prpić and his hideous sin with the boy Frane Bogdan was known to them. They even knew the boy’s name, as the story had come to the monastery almost daily several years before, in its numerous versions, according to different witnesses (let us say, in the end, nine witnesses – seven monks and two laymen – who said they had witnessed the sight of Don Emanuel and Frane with their own eyes), spread by turns as if the devil himself had sent them, first one version, then another, then a third, until there were nine, and then it started over. The monks consulted briefly, the prior asked each to be certain and willing to accept the wretch under the monastery roof. If even one refused, they would turn him away and let him find some other place to die in. That was a wise decision on the part of the prior, for no one dared put his own conscience to such a test, and so Ostoja the One-Eared was allowed to live and die in the D. Monastery, as was God’s will, with the approval of each and every member of the community.

  When a tubercular patient coughed up blood, the rule was that death would come soon. There was virtually no chance of survival once the lungs had filled with blood. A man usually died when panic gripped him amid the suffocation, he lost his presence of mind, and no longer breathed with that little bit of the lungs that could still take breath, instead trying to take big gulps that would kill him with his own blood. And Ostoja the One-Eared was burning up from the fire of that disease and was unconscious.

  The next day, around noon, he again started coughing up blood. This repeated several times before evening. The entire bed was covered in blood. Only Brother Arsenije approached him, wiped his sweaty forehead, and tried to help, while the others stood to one side, watching in stunned silence and praying to God for the soul of the unfortunate man. And then they prayed for the Lord to at last take him and cease his torment. This slow death was wearing them out too, they thought they were losing their minds.

  But then the ailing man grew calm. He stopped coughing up blood, and the gurgling and rattling had almost ceased completely when someone said, There it is, he’s departing! Several times they placed a hand mirror before him to see if he was breathing, and each time the mirror grew foggy.

  He woke in the morning.

  What’s your name? Arsenije asked him, to check his state of mind.

  Marko, he whispered.

  You’re not Emanuel?

  That too, he said, as if recalling.

  A Jesuit.

  I was.

  We have one Marko, a man from a village. We don’t need another.

  Marko looked at him sadly.

  No, that’s not what I was thinking. Instead, we shall call you Ignjatije. Just right for a Jesuit.

  Ignjatije was no longer a nickname but a new name and the next chapter of his life’s biography. Don Emanuel Prpić, whose christened name was Marko, at first was Komšo, then Pop Manojlo, then during years of suffering and temptation Ostoja the One-Eared, and finally Ignjatije in the D. Monastery near Trebinje. At first that was what they called him, but then he grew healthy and was miraculously cured, his tuberculosis disappeared, he accepted vows in the Orthodox Church, and took the name of Ignjatije Bogonosac, after Ignatius of Antioch.

  They believed that he did this merely not to have to change his name again. There were those who believed that deep down he remained devoted to the order of Ignatius of Loyola, but looked at from the end of his life and with the knowledge of how the monk Ignjatije Prpić concluded his existence, there was divine intention in this. Whatever they believed in, the name of Ignjatije Bogonosac reversed and redirected his destiny.

  In teaching his disciples about humility, Christ took a child into his arms and said: “Whoever takes the
lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” That child was Ignatius, the future pupil of Saint John the Apostle, and later the Bishop of Antioch. There he introduced the antiphonal manner of church chant. The Roman emperor Trajan, meanwhile, when traveling through Antioch on his way toward Persia to start some war or other, heard about Ignatius and his gift. He tried to turn him away from his faith, offered him the position of a Roman senator, and when Ignatius refused all these worldly honors, he ordered that he be sent to Rome in chains and thrown before the lions. This was done, and all that was left of Ignatius of Antioch was his heart and, inside it, his love for the Lord.

  At the end of 1940, for no apparent reason, the affair resurfaced in Dubrovnik. One of the nine who had seen everything when the classroom door was opened fell ill in bed and announced that none of it was true. He asked for the bishop to come, but the bishop either did not want to or could not come. Then he went before a Dubrovnik lawyer named Jakšić and two witnesses swore that it was all one great ploy they used to get rid of Pop Manojlo. They didn’t expect it to spread, that the story would make its way into town, that the wretch would be banished; they only wanted to blackmail him so he would leave town of his own accord. They had foisted the boy Frane Bogdan on him, who had previously robbed the church donation box, and they told him they would not report him to his uncle if he did what they told him to do. They would not report him to his uncle, and the good Lord would forgive him his great sin of stealing what belonged to the Church.