Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  As I had listened to him, I could see Grandma Štefanija going to Saint Ante’s in Bistrik three times, serving as witness three times for the baptism of each of the newborn Antuns, the sons of a single set of parents, all three of whom would die before they learned to talk or walk. The first had become Ante on the wave of national enthusiasm for Ante Pavelić. The father had named the second Ante so as not to betray his fatherly responsibility toward the first. And the third had acquired the same name because of the first two. In this story of Balo’s, in which there was nothing true whatsoever, for such stories are always made up in Sarajevo, the unhappy mother and father were not Ustaše but poor folk, sad mournful Sarajevo Catholics, janitors, waiters, and bodies to be slaughtered, carried away by that April of 1941, and later they had not known how to turn from what had carried them away, but had given each subsequent son the same name, the name of the Immortal One who even today lies so life-like in Madrid, in a casket of gold, waiting for the hour of his resurrection. It has been twenty-two years now since his Croatia was reborn. But however made up the old man’s story might have been, my grandmother was not made up in it. Everything around Štefanija was false and fantastic, but she herself was truth, while in the moment of her epiphany, thrice, like the three raised fingers of Jesus Christ at the top of Sarajevo Cathedral, and the three raised fingers in the Poglavnik’s oath before God and the people, and the three divine parts of the godly unity, Štefanija bore witness to the birth of a new Ante.

  And as I thought about the three Antuns and Balo’s invention, I quickly sank into the passersby on Ferhadija, unnoticed and anonymous.

  In the hotel room I again tried to shut off the heat. When I got tired, I fell across the bed. I wanted to relax and rest, but sleep tricked me. I slept rigid, without dreams and without consciousness of the passage of time. Only occasionally, when my sleep grew shallow, the same idea would come to me that sleeping was healthy and that, by sleeping, I was growing healthy. But I didn’t know what I was ailing from. I didn’t know anything in my sleep, and this made things easier.

  Things grew so much easier that the first clear, waking ideas were a shock, when facts began to organize themselves and my working memory loaded up, and the world on my shoulders grew all the heavier. I got up from bed, hunched over like the Atlas who carries the balcony of that Marijin Dvor building on his back. Sweat was pouring down mine. I remembered everything I had forgotten while I was asleep: why I was in Sarajevo, why I was sleeping in a hotel, not in the house where I had lived…I knew it all, and there was nothing good and there could be nothing good in this knowledge. That was my illness.

  It was past five, and I had promised my mother I would be at her place by five thirty at the latest.

  There was no one at the reception desk – just the psychology text – so I couldn’t tell anyone it was hot in my room and I couldn’t turn the radiator off. I rushed to the taxi stand at the top of Baščaršija. The icy air burned my lungs, mixing with the scents of coal smoke, ćevapi, fresh-baked somun, cat piss, and dog shit. Zagreb was without scent, I thought, and for the first time in the twenty years since moving to that cold, Catholic city, I was moved by the hungry cur of nostalgia. I wanted to be there, where there was no odor, color, or scent, and where I didn’t yet know anyone.

  I got into the first taxi in a long colorful line of cars waiting for customers. It was an almost brand new Mercedes with sheepskin-covered seats. Instead of Islamic prayer beads, a soccer club banner, or a picture of Marshal Tito, from the rearview mirror hung the most ordinary air freshener – a little green pine tree with the scent of Zaostrog on an early fall day in 1975. The driver, a heavyset older man of maybe seventy, had an unhealthy yellow complexion and an expensive Rolex on his wrist.

  It’s real, he said, and I realized I’d been staring at his watch.

  Sorry, I didn’t…

  It’s okay. That’s why I wear it.

  All sorts of people have them.

  All sorts? That’s not a good word. I’d say no sorts!

  Well put.

  I earned the money for it in Germany – he said, showing off the watch – and I made enough for lots of other things in Germany too, in Rostock. That used to be GDR, the German Democratic Republic, as it would be called officially.

  Isn’t it a little dangerous, with the watch like that, at night?

  Dangerous? That’s another weak word you’ve got there. It’s not dangerous, it’s deadly. But nothing has happened to me yet. It’s been a year and a half since I came back from Germany and started driving, like this with a new Mercedes and a Rolex, and still, nothing. You wouldn’t believe. Last winter, when that big snow fell, I’m driving a guy toward Trnovo. A young tough, strong, packing, with a shaved head, gold chain around his neck, sits in back so I can’t see him in the rearview mirror. That’s it, I’m thinking. Now he’ll cut my throat and toss me into a ditch, into the snow so I won’t be found till spring. And then nothing. Even thanks me kindly for driving him, and leaves me a ten-mark tip. No one besides me, he says, would have driven him in this mess.

  We had already reached Sepetarevac – Stop by that no parking sign, and you’ll be able to turn around toward Kevrin Creek! – and as I was getting out, he said, Goodbye, son, and God willing we won’t meet again! I was a little stung by that, but it was too late.

  I was in front of her house.

  The key slipped easily into the lock, the hinges squeaked in a familiar way.

  Night was falling by the time I made my way back down the street. In the lit up living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms I recognized the chandeliers and kitchen cupboards, and the range hoods and refrigerators purchased in the middle of the eighties, in the golden age of this city, when the apartments and the dreams of Mejtaš and Sepetarevac were being renovated with money earned on construction sites in Iraq and Libya. And while I’d been peering into the homes of my former neighbors, I had failed to notice the pack of dogs following me. Only when I got to Mejtaš, in front of the traffic light, and turned for the first time, did I see them, a few meters behind, waiting for me to cross and continue down Dalmatinska.

  At the front was a Dalmatian with the head of a Labrador.

  A beautiful, graceful dog with large, sad eyes. When I turned toward him, he jumped back in retreat. The ones behind him, five stub-tailed, hungry, muddy desperados, backed up, growling, as if they were prepared to attack if I continued. But they would not take his place in the lead. That timid, uncertain one was the absolute leader of the pack.

  Was I afraid of them?

  I don’t know. Maybe I was, for only after making my way down Dalmatinska near the park, above the observatory where, in 1981, eighty-eight trees had been planted for Comrade Tito, at least half of which had then been cut down during the cold wartime winters, only then did I notice the nighttime sounds of the city. Somewhere in the distance, an old diesel Golf was furiously revving its engines, and this was the only remaining sound of civilization. All around from the hills surrounding the valley could be heard the calls, cries, yelps, and despair of hundreds, thousands of dogs. The people had closed themselves up in their homes, covered their heads with quilts. It was cold. The frigid winter was coming, the autumn mists lay atop the valley, and the night, painful and hungry, belonged to the dogs, who came down in packs toward the center of town.

  Once more, near the development that used to be called the Sun, on a street that had been named after Staka Skenderova, I turn and go toward him. He looks at me just as sadly.

  Good boy, good boy, I whisper to him so no one else can hear me.

  I’m on Tito Street, in front of what used to be a drugstore. My canine pack continues to follow. There are few people out, so I don’t hide my face. Drunk kids, carefree and emboldened by beer, shout at each other from one side of the street to the other.

  Near the old JAT high-rise, which today is called the Vakuf Building, in front of the window
of the Cultural Center of the Islamic Republic of Iran, beneath a photograph of the imam Ruhollah Khomeini, a rather young woman sits bent over on a piece of cardboard from a Rubinov Grape Brandy box. A French beret lies in front of her for handouts.

  I’ve never seen a beggar out this late. They usually scatter at the first twilight or start lurking in front of the best, most popular restaurants, but never, not even in Sarajevo, have I seen someone out begging just before midnight.

  Especially not a woman.

  I can’t see her face. She’s leaning forward, nearly touching the cardboard she’s sitting on with her nose, mumbling Arabic prayers for peace unto us, her speech filled with shame. After I pass, about twenty paces later, I hear her hiss, “Get lost, mutt –”

  And then the dogs start growling in the pack’s harmonious multiple voices. I don’t turn around, but I know the pack’s leader – the Dalmatian with the Labrador head, all timidity and goodness – has not started growling but perhaps just jumped to one side at the harsh, leaden human curse.

  They follow me to the end of Ferhadija. Then at Slatki Ćošet I turn around again. The pack is gone, but he is still there.

  His glance seems familiar to me now. I can’t remember whose eyes those are, who looked at me like that, but it’s a memory from Sarajevo. Those are not eyes from any other city, any other place I’ve traveled to by train or car.

  I suppose I made some movement as if I was going to approach, or I just looked at him longer than I should have. The dog again jumped back, then turned around and went back down Ferhadija toward town. I stood and looked after him.

  I turned back.

  Once more.

  And again.

  I had turned around four times before he disappeared in the direction of the cathedral.

  We would not see each other again.

  This saddened me at the moment, but as I continued my way along the empty Sarači, I developed in my mind a story about what would have happened if the dog had not gone away forever like that.

  I would have taken him back to my room at the hotel. They surely would not have allowed him into the room with me, so I would have spent the night with him in the courtyard outside the building. It was sweltering in the room anyway and impossible to sleep. Or I would have paid just to have them put up him for me. In the morning I’d have taken him to the school of veterinary medicine – I think I could have found a cabbie in Sarajevo who would have allowed the dog in the car – and there they would have examined him and vaccinated him, printed out the necessary documentation and permission to take the dog across the border into Croatia.

  And if he hadn’t run away, he would have been my dog.

  * * *

  —

  Before the Sebilj was an open market. In front: bananas graying from the cold, pale Spanish oranges, okra pods, and two crates of dark red apples.

  I went inside. The small glass-enclosed space stank of gas. A young woman, her hair covered in accord with Islamic custom, handed me two small bottles of water – “Bosnian mountain spring water” – and gave me my half-mark of change. She didn’t say a word. This was good. If I lived here, I would come to this shop every day.

  It was the first time since arriving that this phrase had even occurred to me, if I lived here…

  It was so hot in the room I had to open the window. I stood with my elbows on the sill, looking into the pitch darkness at the wall of the neighboring building, probably built after the war. Nothing was visible, but I knew what that wall looked like, as well as the little courtyard, its cobblestones perfectly smooth from centuries of rain.

  I imagined what those stones would feel like against my palms. I heard the barking of dogs from every direction. I drank in the darkness, my eyes wide, not seeing anything but the darkness. I enjoyed it, enjoyed the fact that, like the blind man in Abdulah Sidran’s poem, I had opened my eyes wide and saw nothing but the darkness, the darkness of the city in which I was born, for it was precisely here, two kilometers to the southwest, in the hills, that the woman who’d given birth to me and whom I had come to see for the last time was ailing. The night’s darkness was majestic, wondrous, and deep. If death in Sarajevo was the darkness in which dogs were audible from all directions, thousands, a countless multitude of dogs barking like the angels on the Day of Judgment, all of them flapping their wings, if this was death, then one could without the slightest fear or sorrow die on this night in Sarajevo.

  Suddenly and unexpectedly I felt a sweet affection for Sarajevo. I nearly collapsed from this sensation. There is no place for death in the world as gentle as Sarajevo, no other darkness is the darkness of death, and nowhere else does one hear the dogs barking, the angels’ wings fluttering…

  * * *

  —

  From morning to afternoon the guest didn’t come out from room number 17. At 12:30 the clerk at the reception desk, Almira H., a student of psychology at Sarajevo University, knocked on the door with the intention of informing the guest from Zagreb, the Croatian citizen M.J., that according to hotel policy he would need to vacate the room or, in the opposite case, be charged half the cost of an additional night’s stay, and if he did not leave before 16:00, an entire night’s stay, but the door did not open and there was no response from the guest. The reception clerk waited until 13:45 and then used the spare key to enter the room. By doing so she injudiciously violated the terms of service. She ought to have summoned the hotel manager and entered the room in his company or, if the manager so determined, call the police to officially be present during the entrance to room number 17..

  Instead, Almira H. on her own came face to face with the dead, already stiffened, body of the hotel guest M.J. She found him leaning on his elbows against the window frame. It looked from behind as if he were alive. He had woken up, opened the window to air out the room, and remained there lost in thought. But one detail led the girl to the suspicion, the certainty, that she was looking at a dead man.

  On the head of the individual, in his long, disheveled hair, stood a gray Baščaršija dove, lazily pecking at the dandruff.

  That’s how the doves landed on the bronze heads of the honored Bosnian writers in the park across from Svjetlost Bookshop, she thought. On Branko Ćopić, Isak Samokovlija, Meša Selimović. In this run of quick associations down the line of cast busts of dead authors, which had been set off by M.J., for he too was a writer, once Bosnian and then Croatian, and later no one’s, the reception clerk at that moment understood that he too was dead. The dove was a symbol of his death.

  At that instant Almira H. screamed.

  Her scream, clear and penetrating, had no one to hear it. They were the only people in the hotel. It was a small hotel, a quiet time of year. She was alone with a dead man.

  Word was sent to the Croatian embassy. Then someone phoned the writer’s mother. The woman who was taking care of her answered. Then another woman, who watched over her at night. Then her friend, a visiting nurse, and a nun from a nearby convent. Each of them was told the same thing: M.J. had died, it was unclear from what or how, and someone would need to tell his mother.

  To each of the five women this telephoned news seemed strange and impossible. Just last night he had been there, talking with the sick woman, interrogating her about her childhood, confessing her in some insensitive, foreign manner of his own. As if he were not her son but an author. And now this. Now everything was returning to some set framework of human destiny that was always frightening, unbearably horrible, but every time it seemed we had heard about this destiny before.

  The mother was dying of cancer.

  The young, healthy son who had traveled from far away to visit her had died suddenly, without suffering.

  We had heard it many times. This was why it sounded so improbable. These women did not know about commonplaces in literature, but commonplaces in life they knew quite well. Those were words that were never tru
e even when they were accurate. These kinds of events that were impossible even when they occurred.

  So they didn’t know how to tell her. They searched for some sort of evidence, something new.

  Or they thought how in that long exertion, that cheating of life that came with a heavy and incurable illness, in the deception by which they were easing her departure, it would not be too much extra to withhold from her the fact that her son had died. To say he had called, he had to get back to Zagreb immediately, he’d been notified that he was being awarded some great literary prize. But how to excuse the fact that he did not call again? This they did not know. They didn’t have the heart to lie to her and say her son had suddenly given up and was no longer able to bear her suffering as his own and decided to forget her. It was easier to tell her he had died.

  A writer had suddenly died in a Sarajevo hotel, a Croatian citizen, quite known but not particularly beloved in the official circles of Zagreb, which was, of course, a nice subject for an official ceremony, useless and irritating like an opera production with lousy singers.

  Before the body was transported to the Pathology Institute of Sarajevo’s Central Clinic, police detectives were on the scene, as well as the Croatian embassy’s first secretary Domagoj Antun K., and a woman from the Sarajevo mayor’s office, who was also a friend of the deceased’s mother.

  They were crammed into the room, which suddenly seemed smaller than a pantry, while M. J., dead, stayed in his place, bowing before the window frame. It was as if they were waiting for some sort of forensic inspection team, but there was no way anything like that was coming, since those only appeared in Sarajevo on TV screens in American crime dramas.

  But what was there to do, how were things to be moved forward “from this dead end,” as the man from the Croatian embassy put it, a very unlikable, thick-set youth with feminine, dainty movements and a pronounced east Herzegovinian accent, who spread around him the strong scent of Gaultier eau de cologne, which made everyone present choke. The room was unbearably hot, despite the open window.