Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  He returned to the bar in vain, asking about his lost pen, telling the waitress a story of how it wasn’t just a question of a fountain pen, it was something much more important. She listened to him the way polite people listen patiently to old folks.

  But she did not remember his story.

  Sarajevo Dogs

  I got to the room late.

  A cramped hotel, adapted from a rather large family home, at the top of Baščaršija. The polite receptionist, a psychology student – I could tell from the open book on the counter, which was underlined in different colors of pencil, green, blue, and red – told me how to get to room number 17. Breakfast was from seven thirty to ten, she said. She did not recognize me, which was good.

  I tried to turn off the heat, at least for a half hour. I twisted the knobs on the radiator left and right, first in one direction then in the other. They spun around like endless tape reels, without meaning or effect, but the air in the room stayed as warm as it had been. Hot and dry, fifty degrees centigrade, by contrast to the twenty degrees it was outside.

  When I opened the window, the frozen air rushed in, but as with a broken shower nozzle, it did not mix with the hot air in the room, so I sweated and froze at the same time. The cold air went in one nostril, the hot air in the other, and half of me cooked while the other half congealed. This corresponded perfectly, in a certain paradoxical and unnerving manner, to my life’s circumstances at the moment.

  Besides this, whenever I opened the window, the barking entered both the room and my head. Not just of one, two, or three dogs, but of the hundreds and thousands of them up in the mountains, in the valley with its dirty little river, in the famous city at the edge of the world, the city where I was born and where I was sleeping in a hotel for the first time.

  I don’t know how or when I dozed off. I don’t know whether I had in fact dozed off when, very clearly and vividly, a dream woke me. I’m not sure if it was an actual dream or a hallucination suddenly erupting in parallel with the hot little room in this tiny Sarajevo hotel.

  I’m sitting in an armchair, reading Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories. A huge, difficult book that makes my arms hurt. I’m in my Zagreb apartment, sheltered by its care and patience as snow falls outside.

  The telephone rings. My mother. I answer, scared, and she tells me from the other end, in an accusing voice, that by some medical error she’s been buried alive. They did something wrong, miscalculated the therapy, the cytostatic drugs didn’t work, we didn’t have enough money for the entire treatment with those so-called smart drugs, and they ended up killing her. She’d been buried quickly that afternoon.

  Okay, but why didn’t anyone call me? I ask.

  How am I supposed to know! she says and starts crying.

  Where are you now? I ask.

  In the grave, under Nona. Do something! she shouts.

  What can I do?

  Call someone. Dig me up. You can at least do that much for me!

  Okay, I say. I’ll call back when I’ve got things worked out.

  Hurry, she says. I’m running out of air. The coffin is shut tight. It’s like I’m inside a jar. I’ll suffocate, she says, crying.

  I place a bookmark with “Dubrovnik” written on it between pages 178 and 179. She comes in from the kitchen and asks who called.

  No one, I lie.

  I can’t tell her the truth because if I do, the horror won’t just be shared between us, it will be multiplied. That’s why it’s better if everything stays with me. But how? My mother will call again, and I don’t know what to say to her, how to put off things until the moment when she’ll be just as dead and in her grave as the doctors foresaw.

  There isn’t anyone in Sarajevo I could call to dig her up. There aren’t any phone lines to Sarajevo, besides this one to the grave in Bare.

  I know my mother will suffocate in her grave even if this very instant I get into my car and head for Sarajevo. She’ll suffocate by the time I’m nearing Derventa or Doboj.

  Morning came before the telephone could ring a second time for me to once again hear her tearful reproofs. The same heat enveloped the room. Through the thin plywood door I could hear the voices of people leaving their rooms, driven forth by the savage climate.

  I got dressed and went out quickly. At the reception desk there was a different staff person, smiling, just as young as the last one, probably a student. She asked if I had slept well. I answered in the affirmative. I was in a rush, and even if I hadn’t been, what was the use of explaining? It was too late.

  I caught a taxi at the end of the street.

  It was an old, nearly decrepit red Fiat. The driver asked me how things were in Zagreb and then, without waiting for a response, started telling his story. There wasn’t any snow yet, he told me, but there would be soon, any day. It always came down when the snow service didn’t expect it. The snow service and the beginner drivers. If you asked him, there should only be professional drivers. Those others should have their licenses taken away. Then there wouldn’t be any more accidents or afternoon jams, and the cabbies could make good money…

  His story wasn’t making me feel better, but I wanted the drive to last as long as possible, so I could put off the moment when I’d see her and she’d surely begin to cry. She was alive and unburied. In the morning, when I’d first woken, that first moment I’d felt grateful that this was the case. I had come in time, I thought.

  The old Fiat could barely make it up the street where I had grown up. But this did not interfere with the driver’s story in the least. His daughter had passed her driver’s exam, but he would never let her drive his car. Hell, so she could wreck it? And then what would we all live on? This was his means of production, he said, proudly emphasizing each word in the old Marxist phrase, and then he reminded me that we’d been in the same philosophy class. I hadn’t recognized him.

  On the way back I walked down the street, feeling a boundless joy that all of it had gone by quickly. I rushed, crashing and tumbling down Sepetarevac, and then along Mejtaš and Dalmatinska, passing by familiar buildings that in the meantime had grown dilapidated, falling in on themselves and emptying out, where no one lived anymore who used to, my schoolmates, their drunk fathers, and old Bato Narančić, who’d fallen down the elevator shaft and survived. I ran, sped into the valley so as not to meet them if it turned out they were still there, happy as if it were the end of the story and there wouldn’t be any continuation and from now on everything would unfold much more happily.

  The sky was gray and low. The valley was filled with mist and smoke, rusty and dense heavy metals, and 250,000 human bodies, sweating in the heat, evaporating and stinking. The familiar stench of burnt Bosnian charcoal in the stoves of 250,000 people, as it had once been, when I was one of the 250,000.

  It was daytime and the dogs were dozing, balled up in front of building entrances or stretched out in the middle of sidewalks. Passersby patiently avoided them, stepping into the street to continue walking up the hillside.

  Now I’m on Tito Street, where one, two, three, four cars zoom by at dangerous speed as if it’s a race. Rickety old jalopies from before the war. Backfires resound from their rusty, sunken tail pipes, but no one is disturbed. No one turns, ducks, or speeds up their pace. In the distance, from Veliki Park and the Public Health Office, their firing carries a nostalgic ring from the good old days.

  It’s November 7, 2012, the 105th anniversary of the October Revolution, I rush along Tito Street as if I’ve got some sort of work to do, trying not to see a single human face. I aim my eyes at chest level, but my glance, agitated by the open shirt front of some beggar, drops down to their knees, and when it can go no lower, slowly comes up, from some wide women’s hips, across half-open flies and the flow of belts and straps, up to the men’s bellies, yearning for life, and I rush forward like that, trying not to meet anyone, for if I meet someone, if someone cross
es my path, puts a hand on my shoulder, calls me by my first or last name, or, God forbid, hugs me, I’ll have to talk, say how long I’m there for, until what day, whether I’m there for work or just personal reasons, and then, probably, they’ll ask about her. And if they ask me this, I won’t know what’s behind the question – whether they know that last night in my overheated hotel room I dreamed she had called me from the grave, whether they know she’s terminally ill and are checking up, enjoying the experience of asking and their own condolences, or whether it seems to them that they just saw her yesterday and had a good chat with her, they asked about me and she told them, that it was so nice to see her, that they invited her for coffee but she was in a hurry, that she said next time, when in reality there was no next time and would not be a next time in this world, unless they hurried, had their coffee beside her sick bed, with the joking that humans have used in this town for some five centuries to make themselves laugh, that put off every pain and every thought of death, and that was better than morphine, which, thanks for asking, she hasn’t yet started to take but will any day now.

  A woman I know is selling newspapers in front of the market. I turn my head to the other side and increase my pace. She sees me but is just then taking money for an Oslobođenje and returning the change and she doesn’t manage to call out to me. Then I almost run into a tall toothless old man, as dried out as a locust tree, and when I try to escape he stops me.

  I know you! he says, brightening, and taking my arm.

  Now I think he’s going to ask me for money, a mark or two, say he’s hungry, cold. But he doesn’t.

  I knew your father too. And Madam Štefanija, your grandmother. She was godmother to my Antuns.

  And on mentioning the Antuns, the old man cries out, tears run down his cheeks, and I no longer know what to do.

  I’m standing in the middle of Ferhadija, a street that in my time was named after the underground Partisan and union activist Vaso Miskin, face to face with a man in tears, a head taller than I am and almost twice my age, and I feel everyone’s eyes fastened on me. They pierce me from right and left, but especially from behind, like a bullet in the back of my head, and it’s only a question of the moment when someone will recognize me…

  Upset, I invite him for coffee.

  I drink tea, says the old man through his tears.

  I find the most hidden place, a table in the corner of the empty Ćumez, the eternally smoke-filled coffeehouse where we went after school as high school students. Here, I hope, no one will find us.

  The old man orders a mint tea. A cloud of steam rises from the boiling little pot, enveloping the frozen surroundings. Only then do I realize how cold it is. Ćumez isn’t being heated since there are no customers. The waiter is the same one who’s been here for the last thirty years: Nune. But before he was just the waiter, now he’s the owner. He stares at me. I seem familiar to him, or he’s waiting for me to say hello and is angry that I haven’t.

  Your grandma Štefanija was a spiritual woman, the old man begins, while the tears dry on his cheeks or in the deep dark wrinkles, sinking somewhere under his skin, a spiritual and proper Christian. There were few like that in Sarajevo. This was never our city – he grows darker as his says this – it was all Turkey, the Orient, halva, salep. Sweet poison! And she saw this, you know. She felt it, my dear sir…

  I listen to him talking about Grandma Štefanija, a frightening woman about whom I’ve written on more than one occasion, without the least bit of joy, and try to decipher who this man might be, where I could have met him. He did not introduce himself, probably assuming we were already acquainted, and as usual in such situations I am embarrassed to ask and instead just kept pretending we know each other.

  When my Antun was born, the first Antun, it was 1941, springtime in Sarajevo, the twenty-second day of May, everything was sprouting, blossoming, people pouring out from their homes with naïve, foolish purity. And what name should I give my son but the one that was being pronounced so often then, from the purest Christian love? Let him be Ante! Not Ante Padovanski, but our Ante, the one from that time and our kin, the springtime one. We had the friars baptize him at Saint Ante’s, in Bistrik. And your good grandmother Štefanija was Antun’s godmother. The little boy was three months old when he died. In his sleep. He just stopped breathing. I touched his little face with my index finger and it was cold. His cheek was cold and moist like an inkblot. We buried our Antun in the cemetery at Saint Josip’s.

  After that my wife could not conceive because of the fear. How she had found her dead child was always on her mind, the poor woman. And how easy it was for a living creature to suddenly stop breathing, without any visible suffering. It was in her head and on her soul, and there was no way for her to conceive again. But your grandmother Štefanija consoled her, called for blessings upon her, gave her prayers, recommended her womb to the Holy Virgin, until my unhappy wife conceived and gave birth, again in May, in the year 1945. And again it was spring, again everything was sprouting, blossoming – people rushed outside, joyous and singing some new songs just as naïve and pure and innocent.

  When we went to city hall to record the birth, I didn’t know what name to give him. Then some Partisan named Pavle, seeing me hesitate, says, let him be called whatever you like, brother, all names are nice, Pero, Jozo, Mustafa, just not after that criminal Ante! And as he said it, my first born came to my mind, three-months old, the little angel, when he drew his last breath, and when that Partisan asked me again what name I would give to my son, I said – Ante.

  I suppose he scowled. I didn’t look at his face, but he wrote as I had said: Ante.

  We baptized Antun with the friars at Saint Ante’s, in Bistrik, in July of the same year. He died six months later of diphtheria.

  My wife was insane. I was insane along with her.

  And your grandmother Štefanija sends us letters from her prison in Zenica, comforting and encouraging us, and from her consolations my wife conceived a third time.

  Our third son came in November 1946. It was cold, and snow was falling. I carried him from the hospital wrapped in cloth and bandages sewn together with hospital bed linen. I was happy, not suspecting a thing, not then and not on the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents, December 29, when we baptized our son with the brothers at Saint Ante’s, in Bistrik. That fall your grandmother Štefanija had got out of prison, but we still asked her to be the child’s godmother. It would not have been right or respectful not to. It would have been as if we were afraid, as if we had changed our minds and renounced her because of politics, or scorned her consolation, from which our Antuns were born. And so we named our third son Ante. But by then it was all the same. There wasn’t any Partisan named Pavle or anyone else to be bothered by that name or hear in it the name of a criminal.

  It was the end of February when our Ante died. Again in his sleep and again I touched his little face with my index finger. It was taut and as cold as a knife. By afternoon, taking turns with two grave diggers, Savo Vlaškalić and Nurija Idriza, I had dug a tiny, shallow grave for our Ante. The ground was frozen and stone hard and would not take anyone inside it. All the other funerals scheduled for that day had been canceled. It was negative thirty degrees centigrade, but Savo and Nurija did not want to stop. It was a matter of honor for them. People might have said they could not even dig a single, shallow child’s grave.

  We didn’t have any more children after that. And old age without children isn’t easy. You don’t even have anyone to make you tea and bring you a cup. The old man finished his monologue and greedily started drinking his tea, which in the meantime had got cold. There was not a trace of the earlier tears. He drained his cup, hopped up spryly, muttered some sort of an excuse, and nearly ran out of Ćumez.

  Balo, eh, Balo got you too? Don’t worry. He skins everybody at least once. You didn’t get off bad. You bought him a cup of tea. He might have taken you for some ćevap. Or for
cognac. Before four Balo drinks tea, but after four it’s cognac. That’s his rule. Well now you know, and welcome back to Sarajevo, friend! said Nune, charging for the old man’s tea and my coffee.

  He had said “friend,” which meant he did not remember my name or didn’t remember who I was. Which was good.

  I didn’t ask him who Balo was or what he knew about him, though this would torment me later. As I was leaving, I tried to leave the impression of being a tourist. This probably went off badly because it seemed to me there was something ironic about Nune’s gestures and the way he pressed the cloth over the bar.

  I stepped carefully onto the street, as if shells might come down from the sky, then quickly continued toward Baščaršija. I avoided the faces, looking at the level of the larynx, and then again lower, down to the wide hips of the forever discontented service-window workers, and then lower still, to their knees and the tops of their shoes…

  That toothless old man, that tall, straight twig had swindled a cup of mint decoction out of me, which people here mistakenly refer to as tea. Let him. He had paid for the mint with his fantastic story, which was obviously invented, but there was something in it that still bothered me: how had he known that my grandmother, my father’s frightening mother, was called Štefanija and that she was a God-fearing Catholic? Maybe he had read about her in a book of stories – which again through a swindle and on the basis of false friendship a local newspaper publisher and fighter for human rights from Sandžak had wheedled out of me – sold on the streets by the news venders for two or three marks apiece, but if that were the case, if the toothless Balo had read the story of Štefanija, one had to admit he had inserted his own figure into it with talent and storytelling skill and had made it into his own.