Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  I crossed the former Tito Street, which now bears the name of the mythic founder of the city Isa-beg Ishaković. Beneath my feet there was no longer asphalt but uneven, slippery stone slabs that had been laid at the beginning of the eighties for the Olympic games in order to evoke the impression of an old Turkish road. People kept falling and breaking bones here for several winters before they got used to it. People can get used to anything with time. And then there was so much time that the mechanisms of all Sarajevo’s alarm clocks and wristwatches could have been used to build electric plants. It passed slowly.

  If there was ever anything about Sarajevo that I missed – and it seems to me today there is – then it was that long walk through the portion of town where I wasn’t looking down at my feet but could raise my eyes in search of someone I might meet. The day before, I had passed through looking at people’s stomachs, their half-open flies and knees, trying my best not to be recognized by any of them.

  I stopped in front of the Sebilj.

  The barking of Sarajevo resonated from one end of the valley to the other, bounced off the slopes of Trebević, Sedrenik, Pothrastovi, and Bjelave, rushing down to Igman to drown in its dark pine forests, its black verdancy so deep that for thousands of years all the known and unknown history of the world had sunk into it and disappeared, all human destinies, ceremoniously resettled to this isolated city in the greatcoats and uniforms of the military hordes of General Filipović, the destinies of the rainworms, maggots, the night moths, the flying ants, the destinies of bacteria, bacilli, viruses, all the tiny entities discovered in laboratories in Paris, Vienna, and Zurich, all sank into those Igman forests and vanished, so Sarajevo would never stretch out beyond that mountain and the Sarajevans, whether they were humans, beasts, or house vermin, would never go down toward the sea, and this city would forever be closed off in all directions, with its only escape route toward the heavens.

  The city was squeezed between the hills, situated and concentrated around a shallow, dirty river that was yellow for most of the year, but in the eighties, in the early afternoons, especially on Fridays in summer, when everyone had gone to the coast, it would change colors and become bright rose, green, and yellow and then, over the next half hour, the rose would turn violet, the green would become the color of the Igman forests, and the yellow would turn to crimson. People would gather on the bridges to watch this unusual natural phenomenon. They superstitiously associated it with their hopes and desires, anticipating that the colors might do for them what the good Lord, in whom they believed and did not believe, had not done. They quietly prayed to the greens and the yellows to change their destinies, replace theirs with some other, like one might replace a too small winter coat at the store on presentation of the receipt. The Miljacka would grow so colorful that it looked like a Benetton sweater – the brand was fashionable in those years – and this was the only time in its long and unhappy history since the Ottomans had built the city that the Miljacka had produced a happy and pleasing effect. This river stream, too small to support an entire city on its banks, would turn into a vibrant, living being during those summer afternoons.

  Tonight, standing in front of the Sebilj as I waited for the cold to drive me from my spot, I thought about those people on the bridges above the colorful Miljacka. It seemed to me that they’d been unfortunate, that they had expected from some unusual natural phenomena, from games of chance, from fortune-telling dregs at the bottoms of coffee cups, or from the lottery what is now expected from God. But this was probably also why it seemed to me they were better people: with their own kindness and human propriety they had had to contend with so many factors and considerations, which otherwise might be coldly categorized within the rubric of chance, dice, cards, the dregs in a cup, the lottery wheel, and the Miljacka in a thousand watery colors, while the people of today, God-fearing according to a new nature, needed to contend with just one factor – the good Lord, in whom they only believed to a certain degree, if at all. And that God, especially when he came down into the Balkans, particularly into Bosnia, rarely got around to matters of human kindness. Those who had managed to ingratiate themselves to him knew this well.

  The Miljacka stopped changing colors one summer once there were no longer any people on the bridges putting their faith in its kaleidoscopic effect. This happened in 1992 when no one was crazy enough to stand on a bridge, for there were no longer any bridges that enemy snipers didn’t aim at. But that wasn’t why: the little river didn’t change colors because the plant that had been flushing its colors into it had shut down. I never found out what sort of plant it was. People said it was the Ključ Sock Factory, but I wanted to believe the Miljacka had been dyed by a rug-weaving mill that had been moved to Bistrik in 1892 by order of the local Austro-Hungarian authorities. Only women worked in that factory, using the most modern looms of the time. The wise imperial and royal authorities had a two-fold intention with this industrial operation. In Sarajevo at the time of their arrival, that mythic Orient of the Thousand and One Nights, of sketches and vistas, and of the accounts of travelers through Constantinople and Asia Minor was both coming into being and disappearing, and all this fired the imaginations of Viennese and Budapest ladies and gentlemen, disrupting the distances and boundaries of that captivating, far-off eastern world. Sarajevo suddenly found itself in the suburbs of Samarkand and Bukhara, and it seemed natural to open a mill for Persian rugs. The second reason for the mill was quite practical and rational: it got the women out of their houses, their courtyards, and kitchens, and sent them to work in a factory. This was the real revolution. But within ten or fifteen years, these same women would find themselves, like their European comrade sisters and fellow sufferers, on the long road to freedom and general equality: they would be organizing strikes and charging at the police with their bare fists. They were hungry, they no longer knew how to feed their rachitic children, but they had always known how when they cared for them in their kitchens and courtyards, behind the high garden walls.

  They moved the factory to Blažujska Street in the southern suburb of Ilidža, where the road to the seashore begins. This happened long ago, so long that even the oldest among the living don’t recall that the factory was once in Bistrik. But the dead surely remember. It pleased me to think the Miljacka had been dyed by the rug mill in Bistrik and that the colors released from the fabric, threads, lamb’s wool, and sheep’s wool a hundred and more years earlier had floated down it.

  * * *

  —

  Things were hurdling toward their end, the crown of the Stubler family tree would be cut, no longer producing shoots, and almost all its members had died, while I waited for the morning on Baščaršija, unable to go back to the overheated room, I happened to remember the colorful river as I looked at a stream of water as thin as a hair.

  As I circled around the Sebilj, I did not notice the dogs gathering a stone’s throw away. There were three – three, wasn’t this the smallest number for a gang among both people and dogs? – one bigger, shaggy like a Tornjak, while the other two were small, wiener-like mixes that looked like dachshunds. They were standing by the tram stop, looking at me. I turned in the other direction without thinking: four more at the start of Sarači, next to the door of a souvenir shop, across the way from the Carigrad ice cream store. The leader was a Staffordshire terrier with a broad chest, crooked legs, and enormous, wideset jaws that it opened with every breath as if preparing to speak; its expression was sneaky, its eyes narrow, that evaluating glance I remembered well, for it had followed me for a long time, half my life, the Sarajevo half. I had almost forgotten it and wouldn’t have remembered if not for this ugly, painful occasion. Next to it was another terrier, larger and shabbier, with a bitten-off left ear, maybe stronger than the leader, but not as smart. Next to it lay a tired-out, gray-bearded mix of a Schnauzer and some sort of slender shorthair, an Argentine herder maybe. It looked toward me with compassion and understanding, like a priest who to
his own chagrin was professing his faith in a language I didn’t understand. If I understood him, I would know salvation was there, I just had to kneel and pray. The fourth was a mangy brown hound, the blood brother of the Fido that Professor Dragutinović used to take around Dubrovnik with him in seventy-something until they poisoned it and its heart burst.

  Fido boy! I whispered but then felt ashamed.

  From the other side, in front of the mosque, came five more: a white bitch, her nipples hanging down, as if she were still feeding, and her two pups, which she was trying to push away. And one completely black dog, maybe a purebred lab. And then a slightly thicker male poodle. Strangely, he was the leader in this pack.

  I was afraid.

  Not that they might attack but that I had recognized Fido, the “mangy brown hound,” and I remembered that this was what Aunt Franka had called it whenever she saw Dragutinović passing by on the Lapad shore. This was what frightened me, and I turned with the intention of getting away from them all.

  I started off straight toward the white female and her group. The two overgrown pups, which had long before become adolescents, crowded up next to her so she would protect them, and she didn’t know what to do first. She growled at them, then at me. The poodle rushed forward to defend them all together, mad and bold, as only little dogs can be, small in stature, just frenzied enough to be leaders, but before it could seize me by the leg, I leveled a hard, angry kick into its ribs, upon which it cried out in a voice that sounded utterly human and staggered away as if it had broken a rib. The moment I struck it, that very instant, I understood I shouldn’t have and I would be haunted by the memory for the rest of my life. But I wasn’t thinking about the dog, I was thinking about this city that had spit me out, where my mother was dying.

  This is why I am writing. It’s the real reason for the story, its central place, after which will, I hope, come a descent, a calming and consolation, until, I hope, the story will fade out into that silence from which everything began. In the end only one question will remain: did this really happen or was it the fruit of a writer’s imagination? Yes, all this is the fruit of imagination, and when we’ve come to understand this, the writer’s conscience will again be at peace.

  The gray poodle had collapsed against the mosque’s fence. It continued to whimper softly. The white female with her two good-for-nothings ducked back another two meters, as if this were no longer her pack or her world. She was not concerned with its suffering. She didn’t have time, for she was again in the decisive moment a mother caring for her pups. She would have sacrificed herself for them and died defending them if need be, but one should not expect her to also concern herself with the fate of the pack or to take sides. If it were up to mothers, there would be no war.

  I made my way around them and set out toward the Petica ćevap shop. I had gone there often after the war, as soon as I could travel to Sarajevo. It wasn’t open at that time of night, but at least I could walk past it.

  I didn’t turn around to see if they were following. But the barking did not stop. It came from all sides of the valley, both banks of the Miljacka, and with it my life and theirs continued to flow, in this city without people, for they had lain down to sleep, protected from the thick, suffocating, hazy November fall, and the winter that in Sarajevo one always lived through with the idea that one had to wait and survive, with God’s help, until spring.

  In order not to torment myself in an overheated room, I would spend the night walking through the world of dogs.

  * * *

  —

  Once in 1991, the summer before the war, near the Oslobođenje high-rise, I saw a car fly into a dog as it crossed the street. It was thrown several meters to the side, the cracking of its spine audible, the sound of a dry branch breaking. The car, a dusty white Golf, swerved but continued on without stopping. The dog had stayed where it was for a moment, surprised, and then continued crossing the street. It had set off, broken in the middle. I looked at it as if it were an optical illusion – with a desperate hope that everything would be okay. It took several steps and then collapsed. It raised its head, trying to stand, but only its front legs obeyed. It wasn’t conscious of what had happened to it or what sort of consequences it could have. Some man ran into the street, took hold of it, and dragged it to one side. He tossed it into the weeds beside the road, then went back to the sidewalk and continued quietly on his way. The dog stopped moving while he was dragging it. It was already dead.

  The poodle reminded me of this. It wasn’t conscious of what had happened to it. Nor did it know that a great injustice had been perpetrated against it, or that this would mean its death. It lay down against the mosque fence to rest. Between a dog and a dying man there is no difference. There’s a difference only for the person present at another’s death, who is witness to the horror. This is why faith exists. If there were no death, there would be neither faith nor God.

  Across the stone threshold at the entrance to Petica lay a brown wire-haired female. She was hardly bigger than a mole. One of her eyes was shut, pasted over with yellow discharge, but the other was completely alert. In it, like in a round black mirror, the little street was reflected with its Turkish shop windows and ćevap houses, Kod Mrkve and Kod Hodžića, the Abdulah Skaka barbershop, where everyone in the marketplace had been circumcised, the little souvenir shop across the street, and looming above this tourist side street, I stood as large as the mountain spirit of Rübezahl, reflected in her eye, staring to see whether she too was dying.

  Although everything in the dog’s eye was distorted and my face looked as if I were staring into a teaspoon, my nose enlarged, my cheekbones wide, my forehead narrow, tapering to a point like a burnt match, and although the shops and stores with their names and advertisements were distorted and nothing was as it was, still everything was in that eye.

  She lay quiet, looking calmly and without expression. The eye did not move, so the same twisted picture remained, steady, motionless.

  To somehow atone for having kicked the dog, I squatted down in front of her to be able to see better what was reflected behind my back. There in the depth of the picture, in front of Skaka’s barbershop, two figures appeared. I turned but there was no one there. I looked again in the eye and saw that they had stopped in front of the barbershop. Again I turned, but the street was empty. There was no one, and there would surely be no one. But then I saw two figures: one tall, male, in a gray coat with a hat, and another, youthful – a little boy of perhaps five or six years old – go into the barbershop. The man, in a practiced gesture, removed his hat before he went inside. If I turned to the left, I could see them in the dog’s eye: they had sat down at a table behind the barber’s back and he had taken up a pair of little scissors like those used for fingernails and was trimming the small mustache of the man who’d just had his hair trimmed. It was a Hitler-style moustache, narrow and compact as if issuing from his nostrils, but it had been in fashion since before Adolf Hitler, and it would outlive fascism. These sorts of little mustaches had been brought by the railroad workers, the switchmen, engineers, and minor railway officials who – at the end of the century before last – had neither the time nor the money to attend to the luxurious, raised gentlemen’s mustachios of the sort made famous among the local inhabitants – annoying them at the same time – by imperial and royal officers, the director of the bank, the city museum, and the main gymnasium for boys. A particular set of cosmetics was necessary for such expensive and extraordinary mustaches, which one ordered from Vienna and Zagreb, and nothing separated people by level and class so much as a mustache, which always showed whose place was where. Mustaches determined facial expressions, emotions, and moods. One could gauge the spiritual state of a person by his mustache.

  The small, thin, daily trimmed mustache of the railroad worker was a sign of orderliness, and of faith in the good Lord and his son Jesus Christ. It was sported by the conservative kuferaš world an
d would continue to be until the end of history. The Romanian Orthodox and Fojnica Catholics would trim their tousled moustaches into this shape when they moved from their poverty and wretchedness to Sarajevo in order to then become its citizens. God forbid they shave them off because of Hitler or the horrible fratricidal war, or later, when the criminal’s name had been wiped out. Even then his mustache remained in Bosnia, and no one connected it with him.

  The rail man’s mustache would disappear with the railroad, when in 1965 the narrow-gauge track toward Ploče was replaced with a normal-gauge line and then, finally, ten years later, when the line toward Višegrad was discontinued. This was the moment when one great generation passed from the tracks and from this world, and with it disappeared the civilization that had brought the tracks to Bosnia. The mustache went with it.

  Good, respectable barbers did not charge for mustache trimming.

  Skaka was a respectable barber, perhaps the most respectable in Sarajevo. And this was old Uzeir Skaka, whom I didn’t remember. He died before I was born. I remembered Abdulah and Abdulah’s son, but here was Uzeir too, I was looking at him. He had finished with the trimming and was now applying eau de cologne to the customer’s face and patting it two or three times. He slapped it jokingly, while the man in the chair blinked, grumbled, and said something to him, at which old Skaka gave him one more slightly stronger slap. Flushed and smiling, the rail man jumped to his feet and wanted to turn the tables on the barber, who had just given him a good slapping, or, maybe, let him know about the birth of his grandson, who would need to be circumcised, and in this town, in this bazaar, no one did a circumcision like Skaka.