Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “How can we move forward from this dead end?” asked Domagoj Antun K. angrily, upon which the woman from the mayor’s office burst into tears.

  “How can you, sir!” she said to the man accusingly through her tears.

  The first secretary, put out, immediately shrank back, as if he had sneezed loudly during mass, though actually it was not clear to him why the woman was accusing him. It wasn’t clear to the others either, but they didn’t show it. Nor were they troubled by it; they were pleased the woman had taken the little carnation down a notch.

  Two coroners broke in on the scene, strong older men in green, dreadfully filthy work coats, who, without asking anyone anything or verifying whether the police inspection had been completed, took hold of the body and lowered it, folded up as it was, onto a stretcher.

  It was so stiff that they could not straighten it.

  Its eyes were open, enormous, grayish blue, like the sky above Makarska when at any moment rain might begin to pour down with a rumble of thunder.

  The woman from the mayor’s office was sobbing.

  The police officers seemed to be snickering. The deceased really did look funny, doubled up like an apostrophe and tossed onto the stretcher.

  The first secretary from the Croatian embassy Domagoj Antun K. mournfully folded his hands in front of his groin. He looked as if he might start crying too. M.J. had been a citizen of his country after all.

  The body was covered with a sheet from the twin bed and then, passing the teary-eyed receptionist, carried out of the hotel. The carriers in the dirty green coats used the specially designed rails to toss him and the stretcher quickly into the Volkswagen coroner’s van. Behind M.J. they closed the doors of Sarajevo forever. Once they had taken him away, he would find himself in the green car port of the dissection department, at the very threshold of the underground world. The unbeliever and wretch would have no one to carry him into the sky, from that leaden valley traversed by a shallow, smelly vessel of dirty water that from time immemorial had worn the old Slavic name – Miljacka.

  At the moment when, covered with a white sheet, he was squeezed into the van, just one street dog continued to follow him. Warming itself in the frigid November morning against the door of a closed shoe-repair shop, it blinked lazily toward the stretcher. A gentle breeze swept toward him from Kovači, carrying with it the odors of the scene. Man knows little about dogs and canine perspective, and it is hard for him to imagine the picture of the world transmitted through a dog’s nose. We cannot know what the dog thought or how it took its leave from the Sarajevo-born writer who had taken up residence in Zagreb, the shaggy, long-haired mutt with short legs and long face, the distant offspring of dachshunds, Scotch collies, and who knew what else, in whose nature were mixed and complemented contrary instincts and drives, prenatal and collective memories, reminders, and frustrations, distinct according to heritage and identity, blended, conflicting, and damaged, in effect, just like the heritage of that dead, displaced man.

  Of course, not even the autopsy could take place in an ordinary peaceful manner. The first finding, which was signed by Doctor Fahrudin Karaosmanović, stated that “the patient expired following cessation of the heart, produced by a coronary shock brought on by the low temperature.” Or, more clearly stated, Doctor Karaosmanović was suggesting that M. J. simply froze while, leaning against the window frame, he was staring at the wall of the neighboring building and the remains of an old Bosnian courtyard.

  In answer to this, the Croatian embassy sent a very sharply formulated request to repeat the autopsy in the presence of a Zagreb pathologist. At first, the offended Doctor Karaosmanović – with the written support of the clinic’s director, Doctor Salčinović – responded that as far as their institution was concerned, there would not be any repeated autopsy since the first one had been conducted with the greatest care and according to the highest scientific standards, even more in fact, given that, the words of the reply read, “the matter touched upon our fellow citizen, a great writer of this city,” and if the gentlemen from Zagreb doubted the findings of Doctor Karaosmanović, a pathology specialist and department chief with three long decades of experience, they should make arrangements to repeat the entire procedure according to their own abilities and in their own facilities, but after someone from the political sphere (probably from Bosnia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs) got involved, the decision was changed, as was the tone of the electronic communication with Zagreb, and the message went out that Doctor Fahrudin Karaosmanović and his team would be very pleased to host a colleague or colleagues from Zagreb and repeat the autopsy of the deceased M.J. together with them, or, if the gentlemen from Zagreb so desired, simply assist them in repeating the procedure.

  The body of M. J., along with the slides obtained and the documentation from the first autopsy, were temporarily put into refrigeration in the hospital morgue.

  In the late evening hours, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina received word from Zagreb that Doctor Emil Steinbruckner, a pathologist, and two forensic scientists, Đoko Firaunović Antolić and Igor Meisner, would be arriving on a regularly scheduled flight to Sarajevo the next day. This information was promptly conveyed to Doctor Salčinović, who immediately telephoned Doctor Karaosmanović.

  Doctor Fahrudin Karaosmanović knew Doctor Steinbruckner well. He had for a short time been his mentor when, in spring 1996, Steinbruckner came to Sarajevo for specialized training under the auspices of an American foundation, which intended to use the numerous mass graves – and the fact that all across Bosnia and Herzegovina an entire executed humanity was literally rising from their shallow tombs – for scientific research on pathology and forensic science and as part of this initiative had also funded some local specialists. Steinbruckner had quickly distanced himself from his mentor, made friends with the Americans, and found other ways of arriving not only at a specialization and a doctorate but even at a certain measure of renown in scholarly circles and in the media, which, again because of so many mass graves from the previous war, had grown interested in pathologists and forensic scientists.

  Karaosmanović remembered him as a friendly and energetic young man, very polite in his communications and full of respect both toward his older colleagues and toward the city where he had arrived. For years afterward he received New Year’s cards from Steinbruckner, which of course he did not respond to – because who sends New Year’s cards these days? – but he was still pleased at each of these contacts, and he happily followed the news of professional and public acclaim for his younger colleague. On one occasion he defended Doctor Steinbruckner when some of his colleagues were scandalized that he had taken part in a Croatian TV talk show.

  Karaosmanović was shocked when Salčinović called to tell him the man was coming from Zagreb. The moment they finished their call, Karaosmanović turned on the computer and Googled the names Firaunović Antolić and Meisner to see if he could discover what lay behind Steinbruckner’s visit.

  All sorts of things occurred to him in the meantime. Even the most banal possibility that Zagreb intended to put the sudden death of one of its citizens to a politically instrumental end.

  He found that Đoko Firaunović Antolić, was born in 1968, graduated in criminal justice, volunteered in the Croatian Homeland War of the 1990s from the time of the so-called Bloody Easter at Plitvice, defended Vukovar, was held captive in a Serbian concentration camp, and trained on the job as a forensics specialist. His name appeared in an array of media noted cases in the search for mass graves throughout eastern Slavonia, Lika, and Dalmatia, but also in investigations linked to individual murders or the reopening of cases of violent crimes connected to political controversies. Nowhere was any statement or interview with Firaunović Antolić available, and the overall picture gathered from the least reliable means of unearthing information about people – by Googling them – was unnerving but in principle positive. However strong
his aversion to the excessive patriotism in the biographies of famous contemporary Croats, Karaosmanović nevertheless found Firaunović Antolić impressive.

  Regarding the other forensic scientist, Igor Meisner, almost no information could be found, except that he had completed two degrees, one in medicine, the other in criminal justice, and that he was born in Zagreb in 1985. So just a snot-nosed kid of barely twenty-seven. And the name Igor Meisner could also be found in the world of social media, on Facebook, but as these references appeared to be about an individual who presented himself as a rabid fan of Dinamo and a supporter of the charismatic Catholic Zlatko Sudac, Karaosmanović suspected there might be two Igor Meisners.

  Steinbruckner, Firaunović Antolić, and Meisner were installed in the Hotel Europa, the oldest and one of the most expensive hotels in the city. Doctor Karaosmanović considered whether he should invite them to one of the better Sarajevo restaurants in Sedrenik, where better-off Sarajevans would charm foreign guests, but decided against it. He continued to be tormented by the question of what was behind the Croatian request for a second autopsy, for which they had sent such a high-level but also rather mysterious delegation, and what a specialist in mass graves was doing at an autopsy for an individual who had died in a hotel room.

  He met them a little before nine in the office of the Central Clinic’s director, Doctor Salčinović.

  He shook hands warmly with Emil Steinbruckner and introduced himself to the other two. He was mesmerized by the appearance of Đoko Firaunović Antolić. A rather short, bowlegged, unbelievably ugly man, with slanting, Mongolian eyes, wide shoulders, a high chest, he looked like a gangster from some old Soviet movie. But when he spoke, his voice was soft and gentle, very cultured, and – most surprising given what he had found on the Internet – Firaunović Antolić mixed western and eastern forms in his speech. He did this somehow naturally, without correcting himself when he pronounced certain Serbian words, but continued smoothly as the words flowed from him without any regard for language rules, or state boundaries, or wartime traumas.

  He almost didn’t notice Igor Meisner. A tall young man in a hooded cotton shirt, awkward and silent, in the twenty minutes that coffee with Salčinović took, he didn›t say a word. He just stared straight ahead and occasionally twiddled his thumbs like a bored old man.

  Steinbruckner was no longer the young man Karaosmannović had known. He’d grown flabby and thick, his head having turned into a pear in which his little eyes were pulled so far back that to Karaosmanović it seemed he was speaking with someone who had already left, moved out, and what was sitting on the other side of the table was a mere ghost.

  This saddened him.

  Where, good Lord, had that handsome, ambitious young man gone, whose ideas, words, and phrases had overtaken each other in such quick succession that it was hard to listen to him? In the interim he had grown sluggish, like an old cassette tape player whose batteries were low.

  He did not find this picture amusing.

  Karaosmanović was on the verge of tears, right there in Salčinović’s office. He gazed at Steinbruckner, nodding as if he was listening to what was being said, and thought a little bit about him and a little bit about the body that was waiting for them in the dissecting room, and about the man to whom that body had belonged, the author M. J., whom he seemed to have met before the war, as a young poet and promising journalist at Naši dani, then disappearing and moving to Croatia in the midst of the war, after which he did not often enter his mind, until he saw him dead, strangely bent over, with wide open eyes that it was impossible to cover up. That youth, who at the moment of his death had long since become a middle-aged man, had had blue eyes, but it was as if in dying or earlier, during his life in Zagreb, those eyes had somehow turned gray. Pathology, especially working on dead bodies, was for him a crossing from science into art. Dead bodies were divine sculptures and it rested with pathologists to marvel at God’s work, to respect him during the autopsy and look past the illness, deformation, and much-vaunted causes of death to see their beauty too. About the beauty of the body that had belonged to the writer M. J. he knew nothing, for those eyes would not leave his head. The gray that had once been blue left him feeling bereft. And who could understand all this? Who could grasp what went on inside a person who thought one way about something one day and something very different the next? He too would have felt differently about this man the day before yesterday. He had not liked his newspaper articles. He hadn’t read the books. It had been a long time since Doctor Karaosmanović had read books in general. But articles, yes, and he hadn’t liked them because they were somehow…Croatian. No, God forbid, he didn’t have anything against Croats, they were people like everyone else. He had Croat friends, he loved Zagreb and Croatia, and what had happened in the war had happened and not come back – but he could not bear, he couldn’t understand, that someone born in Mejtaš might write articles that were somehow…Croatian. He would not have known how to explain this. His intelligence was that of a doctor, practical, not literary, journalistic, or artistic, but this was how he felt. And he was certain that what was really true was in the way a person felt. Yes, he had not liked him when he read those articles of his. It seemed to him that the man was taking something from him with his writing, a part of his life, what had existed twenty years before. Back then Karaosmanović never would have imagined that the young man could ever write articles that were somehow…Croatian. More than this, then he could not have known, or understood, how something disconcerting or false might be referred to as…somehow Croatian. As he thought about M. J. and looked at Emil Steinbruckner. Living and dead, the pathologist and his corpse, they had both once been boys.

  The autopsy was conducted in good order. Nothing new or atypical was discovered. Steinbruckner agreed with his elder colleague in everything but proposed that the two of them jointly sign the document indicating that M.J. had died of a heart attack.

  Why? asked Karaosmanović in bewilderment.

  Because no one will believe us if we announce that he froze to death because he was thinking about something while he looked out the window.

  Meisner laughed hysterically at this. Karaosmanović grew convinced at that moment that he was the same Igor Meisner who was a rabid fan of the Dinamo soccer team and a follower of a certain charismatic Catholic priest.

  But the truth is he froze. It’s not up to us to evaluate how probable that might seem to others.

  I agree. But it’s enough that we know he froze. The public doesn’t need to know this. They won’t believe it, and some sort of circus will certainly come out of it.

  It’s not a circus, it’s the truth!

  The truth is, dear doctor, the biggest circus of all.

  He said this and smiled as if he had just delivered the worst diagnosis to a patient and now he was smiling by way of apology.

  There at the gate of the old hospital built during Austro-Hungarian times, Doctor Karaosmanović took leave of his guests from Zagreb. Gone was the desire to take them to dinner, point to the city in the valley through the windows of the Kibeta dining room, to all of Sarajevo as it had once been. He no longer had the strength to talk. He wanted to go home as fast as he could, lie down and not think about anything at all.

  Why Doctor Emil Steinbruckner, one of the most promising Croatian scientists, and also one of the most popular public figures in the country, had come from Zagreb, and why he had brought with him the forensic scientists Đoko Firaunović Antolić and Igor Meisner, perhaps might be told on another occasion, in some different story in which Karaosmanović will barely be mentioned and the corpse of the writer M. J. will simply serve as a convenient pretext and justification for some new story, which might be told about who knows what, provided it isn’t forgotten by then.

  The report on the second autopsy was on the desks of Ambassador of the Republic of Croatia Tončijo Staničić and First Secretary Domagoj Antun K. by the n
ext day. The ambassador was flustered, as if something big was taking place and guests whom he had to meet were on their way, though the actual results of the autopsy were not terribly interesting to him. To him it was somehow normal, even expected, that a man of those years should die of a heart attack. You collapsed as if lightning had just struck, and that was that.

  But the first secretary was dissatisfied.

  Actually he was furious.

  And mad with disappointment.

  He’d been expecting this sudden hotel death to change his life. He’d envisioned a case of poisoning – Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic extremists, al-Qaeda had placed poison into a Croatian author’s tea; he saw suffocation by pillow, murder by trickery, liquidation, death, the suffering of a Croatian martyr that would find its way to the headlines of the domestic and international papers, and he would give interviews in English, French, and German for the European television stations, the world humming with this frightening event, and, somewhere in the back, he would be the only visible face in this enormous affair.

  Domagoj Antun K., with his lively imagination, perverted character, and weak mind, had momentarily imagined the continuation of his diplomatic career, sensed it gliding forward upon the wave provoked by the death of a celebrated author, carrying him into the world, to Berlin, Paris, London, far from this fucking backwoods, where he found himself against his will, through the cynicism of some dark, incomplete history that had determined the Croatian Republic should have an embassy in Sarajevo, which made no sense, had no logic to it, for what was Sarajevo? A bazaar at the edge of the world, a backwater market town similar to the ones in deepest Anatolia, in Kurdistan, in Nowherestan, where the novel Snow by Orhan Pamuk unfolds, which Domagoj Antun K. had been reading that summer on Palmižana Beach, while he waited for the officials on Zrinjevac Square in Zagreb to decide where to send him and to which diplomatic mission to assign him. And it did not occur to him then, under the palms and pines, in the courtyard of Madam Dagmar Meneghello, that there could even exist in the world a capital like this horrible snow-swept town, not in Turkey or the depths of Asia, and that he would find his own mislaid claustrophobic version of the Turkish town of Kars barely five hundred kilometers from Zagreb, covered in mist and smog, beneath a snow that at some moments fell gray and black from the smoke and soot, where the people sat in tiny tea shops, drinking Turkish coffee and over-sweetened, thick salep, talking with one another only in half sentences, sighs, glances filled with darkness, despair, hopelessness, and a sort of dull meanness that he, with his silky soul, was afraid of because it actually attracted him. He would toss himself out to them across their little wooden tables, among their Turkish cups and demitasses, to let himself be torn up, used, and tossed away, pierced through like Saint Sebastian, to let them sully him, and he would take pleasure in their filth and lay himself flat like the asphalt of the highway to Zenica, which would never reach where it set out for, with a viaduct leading to a chasm, to the Bosna River, to mud and snow, and the deviant desires born in man in such claustrophobic spaces.