Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Ignjatije was thinking about this, as if dreaming, at the instant when the third German, thin and long armed, like a spider in a green uniform with a helmet on his head, jumped out from behind the haystack and took his first step. In perhaps two more steps he would have been able to throw himself down among his own people.

  Ignjatije was fully aware of the instant he pulled the trigger, in which a perfectly straight line was traced between his muzzle and the man’s neck. As in geometry, a tangent touching a circle and then going off into infinity. Perfection contained in the question as to whether there is an idea worthy of the death of this very human being. Jakov Matić had not emphasized this part, and here he had unintentionally deceived him, this human being. As the young man fell, his helmet flew off, he was fair haired – perhaps a true German? Ignjatije was already in a hell from which there was no exit. There was no idea for which it had been necessary to kill him. Someone else perhaps, but the one lying now on his back in the dust, grabbing his throat to try to stop the geyser of blood, gagging in his death throes, he should not have been killed.

  This was the second and also the last shot.

  The Germans did not look up from behind the wall.

  The Partisans did not fire anymore.

  Not even Perica.

  I had their asses in my sights. Both of them. I couldn’t see their heads, or their legs or arms, just their asses. And I didn’t shoot. How can you shoot a man in the ass?

  This was what the peasant Perica said, who had not killed anyone. After the war, he would quietly go back to Andrijevci. And he’d drunkenly boast that he had killed a German. His grave was over there in the little German military graveyard. Judging by his name he wasn’t even German. But maybe Germans had names like us sometimes.

  As soon as he sobered up again, however, Perica would say Ignjatije killed the German, the priest who after that day never spoke a word. And then he disappeared from the unit. He must have deserted. Or just vanished.

  When the wounded man stopped gagging and grew suddenly calm, becoming a dead thing and a dead object on paper, they jumped up from their cover and rushed toward the corn. Jakov Matić and the peasant Perica. Ignjatije walked slowly, his palm against his forehead as if in the next moment he would wipe away the sweat. Had they only peeped out from behind the wall, the Germans could have killed him.

  At the end of 1949, Father Ignjatije Prpić was living in Innsbruck, caring for Serbian refugees, runaway officers from the former royal army, Montenegrin and Bosnian Chetniks. He did not ask who did what in the war, just sent them across the sea. He provided them with false documents. Asking no questions, he would also help the odd Ustaša or lost Home Guard colonel. He did not ask them for money or about what they had done in the war. Neither the just nor the guilty would tell the truth.

  All the while he had one thing on his mind: by saving criminals and butchers, he would save at least seven innocents, who would have been executed if not for his intervention. Seven innocents could testify before God for him. God existed, that Ignjatije knew, for he had seen him in the bullet-pierced neck of that soldier. His bullet.

  The money for this operation was vouchsafed to him, as he writes in Recollections of a Hermit, by Fra Krunoslav Draganović, directly from the Vatican treasury. Draganović was busy saving Ustaše criminals and, occasionally, an innocent man. He is known to have saved Chetniks too, and people from the puppet regime of General Nedić. God only knows whether there were innocent people among them, but Father Ignjatije was forever grateful to Fra Krunoslav. He did not pass over him in silence in his book, nor did he ever deny having received help from him. Had it not been for Fra Krunoslav, Father Ignjatije Prpić would have gone mad before the image of the neck from which blood spurted.

  While in Innsbruck, Father Ignjatije Prpić gained an unsavory reputation in Yugoslavia. And anyone who became notorious also acquired a detailed and substantial dossier compiled by UDBA, Yugoslavia’s National Security Agency. His probably still exists today, somewhere in Belgrade, in an archive or perhaps among someone’s private store of documents. Very little, I believe, is as valuable as these files and reports – at any rate as I imagine the dossier of Father Ignjatije to be – and if it were possible, though it isn’t, and if I could place an ad in the papers, I would sell my soul to the devil and pay pure gold for UDBA’s dossier. Those papers alone would amount to an enormous book, much bigger than Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, the original manuscript of which just recently, at the end of summer 2013, was presented by the Russian secret police, heir to the KGB, at a press conference and made available to researchers and the literary public. (I write this, spoiling my story, in the sheer hope that the person who holds Ignjatije’s dossier might make himself known to me by phone or email…)

  We cannot determine what inspired the dark and nameless UDBA chiefs – for this is about them rather than about real people such as Aleksandar Ranković or Svetislav Stefanović – to send killers to Chicago, where after his Austrian adventure Father Ignjatije was living in peace, prayer, and austerity, not taking part in any public or ecclesiastical work. If his crime was having saved Chetniks and Chetnik butchers who had escaped from Yugoslavia, ministers of Nedić’s government, and a few Ustaše, it is odd that an UDBA assassin did not take aim at his patron, Fra Krunoslav Draganović, who was freely traveling across Italy and Germany, taking part in public events, lecturing, and holding mass, and who could have easily been assassinated.

  Perhaps Father Ignjatije’s crime was deeper, older, and more serious than what is usually attributed to UDBA’s victims. The intentions of Tito’s secret police, whose activities no one could be completely familiar with, including the marshal himself, obviously did not concern the physical manifestations of a crime. After he had investigated the facts surrounding Father Ignjatije, Pop Avet, Ostoja the One-Eared, Pop Manojlo, Don Emanuel, Komšo, and Marko Prpić, they understood that they had to kill the man, for he knew much more than others and was acquainted from all angles with the world they defended. They were not afraid he might use this knowledge – they knew that he was incapable of such action and that his soul had been turned inside out and his heart broken seven times over when he killed a German soldier – but they were afraid of what he carried in his eyes.

  That was why the invisible assassin shot Father Ignjatije and cut off his head. The head was never found, so the body was buried without it. As befits Ignjatije Bogonosac, the heart was by some miracle embalmed. When his tomb was opened years later, on the occasion of the old Chicago prior’s burial, his headless skeleton was found with a perfectly preserved heart in the middle of the rib cage.

  On the table, in the little room where Father Ignjatije Prpić was killed, lay the manuscript of Recollections of a Hermit. It lay in the middle of the table, the assassin saw it but did not notice. Even though the book was discussed in Serbia too, after the fall of communism when the story of UDBA liquidations of Serbian emigrants living abroad became widely known, to this day the book exists only in the single Chicago edition.

  Thus ends the story of the Jesuit who prayed for the recovery of Adrian Seghers-Stein, son of the postal director in Dubrovnik Maximilian Seghers-Stein and his wife Gertrude, whom Dubrovnik natives of the time called Mr. Maksim and Mrs. Danica. Adrian was buried at Boninovo Cemetery on Monday, April 5, 1926. He was buried quickly, the day after he died, and no one from the Stubler family was able attend the funeral, though the Ćurlins, Lola and Andrija, were there.

  Lola sent a postcard to Sarajevo:

  * * *

  —

  Dbk. 6 IV 26.

  My dears,

  I’m writing to you all without naming each or sending you each greetings, except for mother and father. Are you well? Mutti, is your heart loping along as it should?

  We were at the burial of little Adrian S-S, who died on Sunday. There was no saving him. The diphtheria snatched him away. A sad occasion. There
was a large crowd. There wasn’t a dry eye. The casket was lacquered, small. Only Maksim was like a stone. He supported the mother by the arm. I don’t know how she managed. They did not have their own crypt, none of the S-S family had died in Dbk, so they buried him in the ground. The sound of the earth and rocks tossed onto the casket are still beating in my ears.

  Everything else you know. A. is working. I’m caring for Ž. It has been hot for April. Who knows how it will be in May.

  * * *

  —

  This wondrously musical and intelligent child had grown up amid the greatest promise and his parents’ expectations. It was clear he would be a musician and would make amends for what both his mother and his father, through the confluence of circumstances, had lost the chance to accomplish. He would write the symphonies Gertrude had not written, play with the greatest orchestras in the world, travel to America, whose heights Maximilian Seghers-Stein had only dreamed of. His dreams had the sharpness and peaks of the towers and skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, which beckoned from inside them, from within the dreams, along with the Statue of Liberty, that wondrous hermaphrodite that all the immigrants saw first on arriving in the harbor that was called America and the island that was called America, where they were examined by American doctors and nurses with cold hands, before whom, luckily, they did not have to remove their clothes lest all their poverty become visible; from within Seghers-Stein’s fatherly dreams the emigrants beckoned too, the willowy youths from Bukovina, the knock-kneed children with big heads whom God had given, the little monsters, a wondrous gift for music, and could therefore go away, escape from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, from Galicia, Belarus, Ukraine, from the small, ugly shtetlach where a great danger lurked, though no one yet knew what kind, and where a centuries-old hatred hovered and the jealousy of their neighbors – why the jealousy? why the hatred? who could envy a knock-kneed midget with a big head if he had never heard him play? Seghers-Stein thought of all this in his dreams, the nighttime composed of all his daytime fears. He wanted the child to become a great violinist, for he had not had the courage to do so. Instead he had continued to live with his everyday fears, as the postal director in Dubrovnik continued to be afraid that someone would at last examine his dossier and read in it what all the ministers and imperial chiefs, the regents and deputies and compulsory wartime directors had skipped over for years. And he was thankful for every historical or elemental storm, war, accident, or Spanish flu outbreak, anything that might distract the officials from examining the first page of his dossier, on which was written his first and last name, his country of origin, nationality, faith, and the date of his entry into the service.

  Adrian’s death seemed impossible to both parents, as if it were an error that might be quickly corrected, for with his disappearance they were left naked before the world, along with the desires of their unrealized life. And thus naked they would go to their deaths, or to Boninovo, before the freshly dug grave into which his casket would be lowered.

  Within the short interval of time that followed, Gertrude and Maximilian Seghers-Stein were deciding what to do with themselves. Dubrovnik had changed from a place of secure refuge, where Mr. Maksim managed to be inconspicuous, to a place of great misfortune. The city had suddenly shrunk, collapsed onto itself and reduced down to a limited string of symmetrically aligned stone buildings beyond which one could not escape. That was when Mr. Maksim understood that the old town had the shape of a labyrinth of the kind English noblemen built for their amusement around their castles. There was no logical exit or path out of the labyrinth. One would have to cross the red roofs, jump over walls, and vanish.

  On every corner of this suddenly shrunken Dubrovnik, in every alley in the old town, but also in Lapad and in Gruž, he saw Adrian. Here the child was playing, there his mother was taking him by the hand so he would not fall into the sea, here she was taking him to see the fish in the city aquarium, there the Ćurlins lived, Lola and Andrija, up those steps all the way to the top, and he climbed them because he did not like to be carried. He’d been three years old then. Later he would go on his own, with his violin, to visit Uncle Andrija and play a concert for his name day. It was cold, the end of November, the bora was howling. It took some time to warm up his fingers, but he didn’t want to wait. He was impatient. And he despaired when his violin squeaked beneath his bow. He broke into tears. He thought he didn’t know how to play anymore.

  That was what Mr. Maksim remembered.

  And there was no place in Dubrovnik that did not remind him of the child.

  He considered putting in for retirement and moving. But he could not go back to Vienna.

  Then he reached the time limit before the next misfortune arrived. And with it the final collapse.

  Wolfram Justus was named after the famous Wolfram Justus von Barsewisch, who had died on the day he was born. Gertrude had earlier proposed the name Nicolas. The child’s father did not feel strongly one way or the other, though he didn’t want his children’s names to stand out too much from the ones around them.

  With such a name he could become a bishop, he said.

  She seemed to sense disappointment in his voice.

  Or an organist, he said more cheerfully.

  Wolfram Justus Seghers-Stein was not, in the meantime, destined to become a bishop or an organist. Vuko, or Vukota, as he was called in Dubrovnik, was a tall, strong, guileless boy, built like an athlete. He was not without intelligence, he even sang beautifully and played the guitar. He did well in Latin, learned it easily and quickly, and he would have done all this learning and playing and singing well if only he could have done them all on the move. Or while swimming to Lokrum and back, or while walking along the walls around the city. There was something in him that prevented him from standing still. He had to move.

  It was the first warm, sunny day of June in Dubrovnik, though still too early for swimming. The gentlefolk from the interior had not yet begun arriving by train from the interior to open the shutters and windows of their villas and summer apartments. The Gruž station was deserted. The only visitors were Herzegovinian cheese and milk merchants, small-time tobacco smugglers, the occasional district inspector, a gendarme, a spy, a Czech poet in the final stages of tuberculosis…Wintry frost coated the stones, moisture dripped from the walls, and Dubrovnik emerged from its slumber. With the arrival of Austria, it had become a summer city, and would remain so for the next hundred years.

  Wolfram Justus begged his father to take him for the first swim of the year at Banje Beach. If it had been the middle of summer, if Wolfram Justus had not suffered all spring from a bladder infection, if Doctor Karel Karel had not said that it would be dangerous if it spread to his kidneys, and – above all – if it had not been for Adrian’s sickness and death, Maximilian would have let his son go swimming on his own. He had gone swimming on his own the summer before, all the way to the middle of November. Perhaps this was how he had got the infection.

  The day before, Maximilian had taken an afternoon nap. Maybe he was only asleep for a few seconds, when he felt something like a stone column pressing against his chest. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and the ceiling spun around his head, as he opened his mouth in a vain attempt to call Gertrude. He thought he was going to die. And then it stopped in an instant. He jumped up from the bed. He paced around the room. He went into the hall to examine himself in the mirror. What happened? she asked. He said nothing. If she asks again, he thought, he would tell her he’d had a bad dream.

  This was why he didn’t want to go swimming with Vuko and instead sat back in a deck chair under an umbrella and immersed himself in a book. The book, A Short Lexicon of the Post, Telephone, and Telegraph, published in an edition of Belgrade’s Knjižarnica by Professor Dimitrije Mita Maksimović, which had been released just a few months before, remains to this day the best and most comprehensive historical compendium of the postal service in our region. The lo
ng-serving director of Dubrovnik’s post office was captivated by it, for many people he knew were mentioned in it, as was he himself. His vanity gave him no peace, and as he leaned back in the deck chair, he proceeded to count how many mentions there were of the directors of post offices in Sarajevo, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, as well as his friends, current and past postal ministers in the capital and in the metropolitan areas of the former monarchy in order to compare them to himself. He was pleased that he came out quite well in these comparisons. He was mentioned in more places than any other postal director in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. This distracted him from darker thoughts, from Adrian and his death, and from Wolfram Justus, his Vuko, who was swimming from one horizon to the other, having made his way out toward Lokrum and half way back…

  He looked up and saw a ghostly empty sea.

  His heart seized up worse than the day before.

  It stopped short in a way that promised it would not stop once and for all, he would not die.

  Instead he would live forever in that bleak horizon.

  Guilty for Vuko’s drowning.

  What happened, Dad? Vuko asked, as he approached, all wet.