Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  That was what one of the nine testified, dying immediately thereafter.

  The lawyer Jakšić went with the two other witnesses to Risan, where they found Frane Bogdan, who instantly confirmed what the deceased had said. He added, moreover, that he was prepared to testify before any ecclesiastical or secular court, for his life too had been ruined by the affair. The lawyer took his stenographic transcript to the bishop of Dubrovnik, who begged him not to make the matter public. This was in February 1941, even as Ignjatije’s right ear floated in a dusty jar of alcohol in a bar in Pile. The innkeeper Jozo Novokmet would brag to every customer how he had personally taken his razor to that human vermin and beast, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and then, waving his right hand in a wide arc, he would cross himself at the end of the story.

  At the end of March, a day or two before the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s accession to the Tripartite Pact, a secret delegation of the Dubrovnik diocese set out for Trebinje, where they stayed for a brief time in the rector’s house before continuing to the D. Monastery with the rector. It is not known what offer they made to Ignjatije, or whether they arrived with a humble apology, or simply made some sort of settlement. Nor is this meeting mentioned in Recollections of a Hermit, or corroborated by the diocese. All that is known for certain is that the meeting took place. There is even a photograph of the emissaries, taken with the rector seated in front of the hotel under the plane trees. Many years later, the rector confirmed that he escorted those people to the D. Monastery, but he would not say why he had taken them or whom they had gone to see. “Know one thing,” the rector told those who were questioning him, “a part of the shame belongs to everyone, and if you continue to force me to talk, the serpent will poison anyone it pricks!”

  “They entreated me to come back once they discovered that the shame was theirs and not mine. But I did not want to, since I had given my heart to the true faith, to Jesus Christ, and to the brothers who saved me.” This is what he writes in Recollections of a Hermit, but he does not say who issued him the invitation or when. Nor is it clear whether he would have returned to the Jesuits or to Dubrovnik.

  As is customary in our part of the world, matters that are kept silent are the ones people know the most about, so it was that everyone in Dubrovnik knew about the affair. Jakšić the attorney refused to comment, and the two witnesses disappeared: one died suddenly, the other moved to Split. Even so, all was known, and all was kept silent. In the meantime war broke out: Italian forces took over the city, the Ustaše turned up, and the period of terror began, when no one dared ask questions. They tried to kill Jakšić, but he managed to escape to the Partisans. With him came a panicked fear that everything might become known. By the end of 1941 all five of the false witnesses regarding Don Emanuel’s sin, those still alive, had been transferred to Zagreb or Rome.

  As dead mouths don’t speak, the only person left to silence was Father Ignjatije.

  By the time the Ustaše arrived at the D. Monastery, he was no longer there. They had threatened to burn down the monastery and kill everyone inside, unless the renegade was handed over, but it was futile. They turned the monastery inside out, looking for him in drawers and cabinets, as if Father Ignjatije had shrunk to the size of a porcelain figurine that had to be shattered, but to no avail. He was not there.

  What is he to you? Why are you hiding him? the Ustaše commander asked the prior.

  He is our brother. But he would not let us hide him and have us and this house of God suffer. He is not here.

  His ear is still on display in Jozo Novokmet’s tavern in Pile, the Ustaša taunted. Maybe he’s gone to retrieve it.

  The prior did not respond.

  They left without burning down the monastery. There would be other opportunities to do so. Long would the time last when buildings were freely set on fire and people murdered.

  When he thought the Ustaše had gone, he came out of his cave, climbed up the hill and looked in the direction of the monastery. Clean, white smoke puffed from the chimney. They were cooking lunch. The brothers were bustling around the courtyard, just like any other day.

  In an empty place in Father Ignjatije’s heart, in place of the Jesuit Don Emanuel, an avenger appeared. He told his brothers he would not wait for the Ustaše to come back to slaughter him in his sleep. He did not want to expose them to his fate but would settle matters with them on his own. The prior told him to watch out. It was easy, even for right reasons, in the name of goodness and truth, to go over to the side of evil. A man was not perfect, remember that, he told him. He also told him how things were sometimes not what they seemed. People got carried away by anger and then cooled down. But it was often too late. The worst was when anger fueled more anger. Ignjatije heard none of it. The prior’s words were a rustling of dry leaves in a late summer breeze. The rustling is forgotten.

  The next stage is described carefully in Recollections of a Hermit. Let us say that Ignjatije joined up with the first rebel unit he encountered, the Chetnik division of Major Karanfilović. From him the Chetniks wanted a blessing, and from the Chetniks he wanted a rifle. They gave him a dubious looking machine gun, a piece of equipment from the Italian army in Ethiopia that had already jammed several times in battle. No one wanted to use it anymore, they suspected a bullet might explode in the chamber and blow back into the face of the shooter. That was why they gave him this particular gun, while he gave them a sullen blessing. They drank and celebrated and had no idea what they were doing. War for them meant making others afraid of them, making Muslims afraid of them. Ignjatije Prpić found this unpleasant, and as they climbed like a bunch of chamois around the Herzegovinian karst mostly without any purpose, he carried his machine gun on its strap with bandoliers strapped across his chest. Bearded and shaggy, his eyes aflame, he looked like a madman out of a Dostoevsky novel.

  He stayed with the Chetniks of Major Karanfilović for two months and then disappeared. In his Recollections he writes that he left them their machine gun and ammunition. All he took with him was his canteen. And thus he set out for Bosnia. This was in the spring of 1943, during the time of the great German offensives against Tito’s Partisans. He appeared among the burnt-out villages like a holy fool, some saw in him a devil and ran at him with pitchforks, but Ignjatije would simply vanish. Twice the villagers had him surrounded, but when they tightened the circle and stabbed the bush they’d seen him hide behind with their bayonets, he wasn’t there.

  In the mountain villages around Sarajevo they gave him the nickname Pop Avet, the Ghost Priest. Probably the first to do so were the Muslim mountain villagers of Bjelašnica. But word of him and his name spread. The Serbs thought Pop Avet was a Catholic priest who had gone mad, while the Croats from Stup saw in him a mad Serbian priest whose prior had been slaughtered and who was now revenging himself on the people in their dreams. Anyone to whom he appeared would go insane.

  But near Trnov he was captured by a Partisan unit. It was summer, so the first thing they had him do was bathe under guard. Then they shaved off his hair and beard, clothed him, and proposed that he be shot as a class enemy. Father Ignjatije broke into a sweet laugh at the suggestion of the regimental commissar Jovan Bjelobabić Kompanjero.

  Why are you laughing, Reverend? Kompanjero asked in surprise.

  Because I’m a priest, a servant of God, and not your class enemy.

  We shot your kind in Spain.

  What kind?

  Clericals. We shot them because they led the people astray.

  Perhaps that was a mistake on your part.

  The mistake is yours if you think there’s a God.

  Maybe. I don’t say it isn’t. Maybe it’s a mistake. But that doesn’t concern me.

  What then?

  I’m concerned with loving the good Lord and praying to him.

  How can you love someone who doesn’t exist?

  Through faith, how els
e?

  Even when he’s not there?

  I have faith that he is.

  And yet you admitted not long ago that it could be a mistake.

  Lord save us, it can’t be a mistake that I have faith. All I said was that there could easily be mistakes in what I think.

  I don’t have faith and I battle against those who do.

  The first one is right, the second one is a mistake. There is no way, brother, you can win if you battle against those who have faith. Perhaps that’s why you lost the war in Spain. You shoot all those who have faith, and you’re lost, for no one is left. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?

  Do you understand what I’m saying to you?

  I do, how could I not understand you?

  What do you understand?

  That it’s hard for you as now you no longer know what to do with me.

  This would be the word-for-word disclosure of Jovan Bjelobabić Kompanjero, who in 1950 was proclaimed a hero of the people and ten years later ended up in Lepoglava Prison, for enemy and counterrevolutionary activity. At a union of fighters congress he stated from the podium that he would have personally shot Tito and Stalin in the war, and every one of the present communist leaders, because of how they were acting now, in peacetime. Then he went on to spell out the reasons why he, hero of the people Jovan Bjelobabić Kompanjero, would have shot Tito, but before he had finished his exposition, the organs of orders appeared to arrest him. They offered him the opportunity to be pronounced mentally incompetent, due to head wounds suffered during the war. He refused: he was not wounded in the head but in the chest and in both legs. They proposed that he emigrate, upon which he said that would not be seemly for a national hero to leave the country he had helped create. They took away his designation of national hero. He laughed, saying that was not something that could be taken away, either one was a hero or not. In the end he was sentenced to life in prison, which was commuted to twenty years hard labor, for conspiracy to assassinate Comrade Tito. “You might as well have shot me,” he said, disappointed. “As a class enemy,” he added, and laughed. No one knew why Kompanjero was laughing. They thought he was insane.

  Jovan Bjelobabić Kompanjero was obviously obsessed with shooting.

  Ignjatije Prpić, in his Recollections of a Hermit, writes that he investigated, as much as was possible, whether Kompanjero had ordered and carried out executions during the Spanish Civil War or the People’s War of Liberaion in Yugoslavia. He did not find a single verification that he had. Except that all the witnesses confirmed that Kompanjero, both as a divisional commissar and later as a divisional commander, was constantly threatening to have people shot. But he kept as far as possible from all trials, saying he was a soldier and imperfect student of French language and literature, not a lawyer.

  Perhaps he enjoyed witnessing people’s fear.

  He looked the man he was going to kill directly in the eye. He had done this countless times. People reacted in different ways. It is a shame Kompanjero did not become a writer, or at least that he did not write his memoirs when, in 1977, having served seventeen years of his sentence, he left prison – though a more interesting book would have been one containing the record of their names and what happened to them afterward, or a description of what the eyes of a man look like when he has been told he will be shot. No one knew this better than Kompanjero did. And after the collapse of an entire world and order, after the destruction of the ideals for which Jovan Bjelobabić Kompanjero had fought, if anyone was interested in what this man had actually been doing for all his life, it would be accurate to say that he had persistently dispensed false assurances to people about their mortality. And all of them, as it would become clear in the end, had been immortal.

  Father Ignjatije spent the summer of 1943 with Kompanjero. The dire circumstances around them didn’t seem to touch them. Kompanjero followed Father Ignjatije around, trying to make him change his faith. There was no God, there was no God, there was no God, he repeated to the rhythm of his confident steps, and with time something of his audacity passed over to Ignjatije.

  If there is no God, then there is no death either, he said, to tempt him.

  Well, there you have a nice thought, said Kompanjero, contemplating it.

  The life of the novice and martyr Ignjatije Prpić, who alternated lives and names and who, because of his companionship with the Partisan commissar, gained the nickname the Spanish Priest, would have gone off in a different direction if, when they were in the vicinity of Tuzla near the famous village of Husino, Jovan Bjelobabić Kompanjero had not been summoned to Ozren to take up a divisional command, from which he would later be dispatched to the high command. They parted like old comrades, and Father Ignjatije continued on alone.

  The group of Partisans crossed the Sava and arrived in Slavonia. Flat land, rich and menacing. The Ustaše still held positions, the cities were secure, the people there loyal to the regime, the Partisans few. There was no Partisan warfare if you were looking for cover in corn stubble.

  It was the end of September, and the long, beautiful Michaelmas summer stretched on as God showed himself even to those who did not believe. The spring had been heavy and rain soaked, which was why the autumn had to turn out this way.

  Some lay in ambush along a trail where a German patrol would be passing. These actually were not Germans but our own young men, Bosnians, largely from Sarajevo, of German heritage, or else they knew the language, and were enlisted into some sort of fake SS units instead of being sent to the Home Guard. They were told this in confidence by peasants from Andrijevci, Croats, but partial to the Partisans. They would not lie. They said there were around a hundred. Three platoons, one company. Considerable. They had come directly from training in Austria but it was as if they didn’t know where they had arrived. Not a real army. This was what they were told. So maybe it was better to leave them alone.

  And so for days, they watched them coming and going from the ambush. They took aim at their heads, the point between their eyes, their chests, and their backs. But they did not fire. Such were their orders. And perhaps it would not even make sense. You could kill all three platoons, and then what? This isn’t forty-one anymore, the platoon commander Husnija Mehmedagić said. It doesn’t make sense now, right, Spaniard? he asked, and the Spanish Priest nodded. It was true, he believed, it made no sense to kill a German soldier who maybe was not even a German soldier.

  Just as the German patrols that used the same trail were shifted, so were their ambush counterparts. On a particular day, whose date is no longer remembered, it fell to Ignjatije Prpić to go to the ambush with two Bosnians and Jakov Matić, a Split native and prewar communist who had not completed his studies in philosophy, along with a certain Perica, a local youngster from Andrijevci, who would sometimes spend the night with the unit and sometimes go home. And it all again looked not particularly serious.

  Perica lay down on one side of the path the Germans would approach from, and the other two lay down on the other. They took up their positions together because they had things to talk over, while with Perica there wasn’t much to cover, except for pigs and the differences between oak and maple wood.

  And so the time passed, maybe the Germans were a little late, and Ignjatije had started up a conversation with Jakov of the sort one usually starts with a stranger on the train or a person in a railroad waiting room reading a book and, instead of nosing up to see the book, asks what the title is, and then the story starts.

  Schopenhauer, Jakov whispered.

  Ignjatije laughed quietly. It would be more appropriate for some swaggering gymnasium student to be praising Schopenhauer than a person of your age, and you, a communist to boot.

  You say that because of the faith issue, of course. Schopenhauer’s pessimism doesn’t accord with faith.

  No, he’s a believer. Pessimists are believers, but he’s a child’s philosopher. A good chil
d’s philosopher. He’s not for adults.

  I have a question for you.

  Go ahead, Matić.

  Is there an idea that is more valuable than a human life? Or even the life of an earthworm? Think about it and tell me.

  I don’t have to think about it.

  No, I insist. Think first.

  What happened next was as if in a dream, and it lasted for a long time. At least this is how Prpić presents it in Recollections of a Hermit. The next thirty seconds he describes over twenty-seven pages of the book, longer therefore, than he needed to describe his entire wartime journey.

  The moment the German patrol arrived, the rifle of the peasant Perica fired. He later maintained that the rifle did not go off accidentally but rather one of the Germans saw him – the one who would later perish – or that he accidentally turned his weapon toward him, and Perica fired. He did not hit anyone, though it was barely five meters to the German patrol. (For the majority this was proof that his rifle had actually fired accidentally.) At that instant, Jakov Matić had not yet completed his sentence:

  You cannot know whether there is an idea more valuable than a human life until you have killed a person. Looked him in the eye and fired.

  The villager’s shot covered Jakov’s last words.

  Ignjatije thought Jakov was the one who had fired.

  The Germans, the three of them – sometimes they patrolled in fours but not that day – jumped back like a buck surprised by a hunter and scampered for cover. The first two ducked behind a low wall that had once fenced the courtyard of a master house. There was no longer any building or any courtyard, only this wall, next to which there probably had once been a wooden fence.

  The third German, the one who had been bringing up the rear, threw himself behind a haystack.

  From the stack to the wall there were no more than four meters.

  All of it was close, or it seemed to Ignjatije that all was close and that they were close to the others. A German behind the wall shouted. The word was in our language, but Ignjatije, probably from the excitement, didn’t understand. It was a fairly common Serbo-Croatian word he recognized, and even the accent was familiar. That swallowing of the vowels, that hard, sharp sound with which he had been born and raised. Only in Sarajevo did they speak that way, nowhere else. But he could not decipher the word. He heard it clearly and could have even repeated it, but his heart was pounding in his ears and he was in no condition to grasp what the word meant. This unnerved Ignjatije, and at the same time he could not stop thinking about the question Matić had asked, before he had interrupted Ignjatije and answered himself.