Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Mainly Muslims came to Skaka’s. This was a custom but not a rule. Swabians, Catholics, the Orthodox, and Jews got shaves and haircuts and had their mustaches trimmed there too. This rail man was also a Muslim, who had picked up the fashion of the Viennese mustache from his comrades, but that gentleman with the hat and his little boy, they weren’t Muslims. They waited quietly. The gentleman rarely spoke, did not allow himself to laugh at the barber’s slaps and his customer, and held himself as if it were his first time there. The little boy was scared. He had pulled his head down between his shoulders like a hunchback, a tortoise…

  I changed position. My knee had stiffened up from squatting. I lost sight of Skaka’s barbershop, and from the other side of the dog’s eye, on the other side of the street, I saw a crowd in front of a bakery that was located at the spot where the ćevap shop Kod Hodžića should have been.

  I turned around, frightened.

  Extinguished, cold neon lights glimmering in the storefront window, the empty glass of the meat refrigerator, a blinking, half-dead advertisement for Sarajevo mineral water: the Kod Hodžića ćevap shop.

  I looked for it in every direction of the dog’s eye, but it was no longer there. Just the bakery in front of which was a terrible crowd. The men were in the front, the women behind them, and with their hands above their heads they carried a carved up roasted ram. They pulled it apart in their greasy fists, in the air above them, such that the animal diminished and then disappeared completely once the women’s hands had taken hold of it. Then another ram appeared. They could barely get it through the wooden, unglazed door. They tore at it and carried it forward. The whole ram’s head ended up in a frighteningly large man’s hand, and his finger had stuck into the eye socket as he grabbed for it. The eye popped out like the cork of a champagne bottle and fell into the crowd.

  I turned away. The sight was painful.

  In the middle of the road, step after step, gentlemen with ladies were making their way as if heading toward Vijećnica. Something was happening there. They had formal clothing on as if for an officer’s ball. As they passed, they looked contemptuously toward the bakery, before which the tearing of the roasted ram still continued. This was fortunately no longer visible in the dog’s eye…

  * * *

  —

  Albert “Berti” Plaschka managed all the restaurant cars on the territory covered by the Sarajevo railroad headquarters.

  He was born in 1880, in the Czech village of Bítov. He studied in Prague, where he met Milena Panenko, the daughter of a poor baker. They fell in love and eventually married in the first year of the twentieth century. Berti’s parents disowned their only son at that point. The father, a rich industrialist, told him that he could repent and come home but only after he had left that slut of a girl. He would wait patiently, he said, for as long as he was alive. But if he should die before the boy’s repentance, Berti must know that he would inherit nothing. And the old man Plaschka had been, and still was, a rich man. So rich that Berti would not have had to do anything for the rest of his life if he didn’t feel like it. But that wealth was not such that Berti could marry the daughter of a poor baker.

  In spring 1905, an order arrived from Vienna that all the large passenger trains traveling through Bosnia should include restaurant cars. Especially on the longer lines and if it was likely that among the passengers there would be more foreigners. Initially, three specially built cars would be included from Zagreb on the regular routes and tested through the end of summer 1905, and if the need was demonstrated, if the public showed interest, the service would be made permanent and a manager would be named in the Sarajevo headquarters.

  From Vienna, into a gathering of waiters at Sarajevo’s City Café who had been selected for an unusual sort of job, to work in that moving inn, café, and restaurant, came Albert Plaschka, a former philosophy student and young maître ď of the restaurant at the Hotel Plank, which was under the direction of the royal and imperial railroad.

  He brought with him his pregnant wife, who would, with God’s help, deliver a baby in a rented room in Bistrik that summer.

  This wondrous novelty introduced by the Austrians – an inn where one ate, drank, and picnicked, like in any other inn, except that you started the picnic in Sarajevo, were drunk in Doboj, and were hungover in Brod – turned out to be one of the few that Bosnian society enthusiastically embraced since the Austrians showed up in 1878. People started traveling, even when they had no reason for it, just to see if it was possible: people would start gabbing at Marijin Dvor, singing in Zenica, sleeping in Vranduk, and waking up near Usora. And it was true – one could do just that! The world had never seen a greater wonder.

  In the end, during those few spring and summer months there would be a clamor and frenzy for those three restaurant cars. People would take legal action after they had purchased their tickets and the conductor had taken them to their cars and seats and found that there wasn’t any meat or rakija anywhere and it was all a lie, a trick, false advertising, for there were people who thought that the train – that satanic instrument of the unbeliever, “which distracted the devout from the path of Allah,” as one hajji in Visoko put it – was composed of a locomotive pulling five cars, each of which had a restaurant inside. And some of the idle people were sorely disappointed to find that certain ordinary cars served only to move people quickly from one place to another. If that was the case, then the railroad made no sense at all, since a horse- or ox-drawn cart could do as much, and one could even ride on a donkey! Well, yes – the young rail workers explained with enthusiasm, not removing their uniforms even when they were off duty – but the route that a horse could cover in three days the fastest train could cover in three hours! Only here would the opponents of the ordinary cars dig their heels in that this was all about the most ordinary of tricks: how in the world could a person be in such a hurry that he would change three honest days of riding into three hours? This was one of those questions for which there was no answer, nor would there ever be.

  Three times Albert Plaschka telegraphed Vienna, three times he asked what he should do, how he could turn away travelers from the restaurant car, for every now and then “a fight would erupt between those who had gone inside and those who were trying to get inside the car,” and the crowd was so large that it was impossible to follow and observe the rules of proper service and maintain gentlemanly order, to which the trains of the royal and imperial railway were accustomed. Three times he warned that the restaurant cars entrusted to him had come to resemble “cars for the transport of livestock,” “man’s thigh was pressed against man’s thigh,” which wasn’t even moral. To these lively dispatches, into which Plaschka poured all his alarm but also the enthusiasm of someone just starting out on the job, the response from Vienna was always to raise the price of the rakija, for this would turn away the excess guests. So three times Plaschka doubled the price, until the restaurant cars thinned out a little bit to the point where even the odd foreign traveler might be able to find a place in them.

  And so in the spring and summer of 1905 the deadline for the trial period of restaurant cars in the trains of Bosnia passed, and afterward, in an office in Vienna, it was decided that henceforth Bosnian trains of longer than three cars would be equipped with restaurant cars regardless of their connection points. Consequently, five cars needed to be sent to Doboj for outfitting and these would be introduced into circulation over time. Thus did five additional wandering inns arrive in Bosnia.

  At the same time, it was decided in Vienna and ratified in Sarajevo that Albert Plaschka should be appointed as the first manager of all restaurant cars at the railway headquarters of Sarajevo. By then his and Milena’s firstborn son was three months old.

  David was a sickly child. He was tormented by painful bladder infections, which spread to his kidneys, such that his father and mother constantly worried over him. The child would not be long for this world, Berti Plasc
hka feared, but he didn’t dare say this to his wife. Also David was ill because Sarajevo’s water was unhealthy. He believed his son would have been healthy had he not been greedy and taken the offer of directing all the Bosnian restaurant cars but instead had continued to live humbly and poorly in Vienna. David would have been born there, gone to school with the children of workers, grown up as a shoemaker’s apprentice or a small tradesman, but he would have been healthy. In this place, however, even with all the pay of a high-ranking state employee, Berti was losing his child.

  He said nothing about this to Milena.

  And Milena said nothing about believing David’s illness was due to something slightly different, though equally incurable. He had been conceived from her poverty and his wealth as a half-Czech, half-German, and they had brought him into this land that until recently had been called Turkey, and he simply had not taken to it, just as a seedling did not take to weak, poor soil. This land was barren for her son.

  She could not say this to her husband because she believed he would answer that people weren’t trees. Children were not planted and transplanted. And what could she say in response?

  In spring 1914 David fell into a fever that lasted two full weeks. One night he became delirious. Milena and Berti were at an official reception held by General Oskar Potiorek in honor of the impending visit of the crown prince, who was beloved in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they had left the child with his nanny. She grew frightened when he spoke, with eyes closed, about events unknown to her. The child’s voice was almost completely clear as he told a story about something that, she understood, had happened long before. Frau Rosie Steinhuber did not understand the local Bosnian of the town very well. She had learned it, by virtue of being exposed to it over the last two years, since coming to Sarajevo, so she was spared the ghastly content of David’s story. If she had understood completely, it would have been said later of Frau Rosie, who was of a sensitive and delicate nature, that she had lost her mind.

  The next day too, and the next evening, because of an increase in his mysterious fever, David would fall into that state of delirium during which, in the most serious of terms, he was outside himself.

  On the first evening, before his horrified father, since Milena had been so worried about the child that she’d been accosted by a terrible migraine, David had pronounced a sentence in which Berti recognized the words of his grandfather on his mother’s side, Rabbi Samuel Haller, whom he had never met. The rabbi had not even wanted to know about his grandson, since his most beloved daughter Mirjam had run off with a nonbeliever, for which she had become the equivalent of the whore of Babylon to her aggrieved father.

  David was saying Jewish prayers in his delirium, in languages he did not know, in Yiddish and Czech, then he addressed some unknown people in German, men and women, whom he called by name or by rank and title, and among them the distraught father recognized some people: the rabbi’s brother, his great uncle Moses Haller, a famous Prague sign painter and portrait artist; the old nurse and midwife Mitzi Glovatzki; Doctor Artur Silberstein, a well-known Prague physician and philanthropist. David was speaking to them in his child’s voice, advising them about financial questions, asking about their loved ones, providing short instructions regarding what was and was not kosher, telling them in fear about the horrors of Gehenna, and in the end, his voice weak and pitiful, telling them the story of how his daughter Mirjam had betrayed and broken faith with him. She would end in hell, like all harlots, but let the dear Lord take pity on him, her father, and let him replace her in Gehenna and all be forgiven her.

  This was what David said, sighing deeply, before falling into a calm, healthy slumber.

  The next day, at the same time, when it had grown dark and the fever had flared up, David again lost consciousness and, after a short period of groaning and suffocating, as if he were sailing away from himself, he again began to speak. But now he was no longer Rabbi Haller but his wife. She was speaking in German, complaining that her bones were aching, that she couldn’t lift a spoon to eat.

  Milena was present too, panicking and frenzied, crying about what was happening with her son and, dear God, would he come back or die…And then, suddenly, she grew quiet and almost lit up with joy.

  Old Helena! Berti, that’s Helena!

  Helena Panenka, her great-grandmother, had died the year Milena and Berti married. She was 103 years old, as old as an ancient oak or an Old Testament elder. For years she had lain on an Ottoman in the living room. She just ate, smoked, and complained about her aching bones. Everyone had grown used to old Helena as if she were an old piece of furniture that had always been there and would never be replaced, the Panenkas being poor bakers who had no funds for new things. If there had been funds, old Helena would have been replaced a long time ago. And when in the end they were able to live a little better, since Milena had run off with Berti and there were fewer mouths to feed in the house, old Helena couldn’t lift her spoon anymore – she was too weak, her bones ached. Soon she wasn’t able to chew or swallow the food that others put into her mouth. And so she died of starvation. The poor woman had suffered like a famished child in the Belgian Congo.

  Have pity, she had said. I’m hungry. Oh please have pity! she had wailed on the last day of her life.

  Have pity. I’m hungry. Oh, my child, take pity on my hunger! David repeated, then suddenly stopped, stiffened, sighed deeply, and fell into a peaceful, righteous slumber.

  God, that’s how our old Helena died! Milena said, her eyes filling with tears.

  At twilight on the third day, the same thing was repeated: David fell into a delirium, left his child’s role, and took on the role of Uncle Ernest, brother of old Plaschka and Berti’s only uncle on that side of the family, a queer and happy-go-lucky fellow, who lived his life outside the family, and better Prague customs, doing whatever he damn well pleased with each living day in joy and pleasure. He did not hide his inclinations for young men and boys, which were such that he was often caught in bed in the company of gentlemen, one, two, even three of them, always in a different room of the Plaschka family’s spacious house. The adults in the house, Berti recalled, had always opened doors with anxiety, or blushing beforehand at what they might see and at their own imaginations, which were fired by the idea of Uncle Ernest in all sorts of the most unlikely erotic poses, stretched out on the cross of his passions, happy and smiling, in a perpetual rush toward a final moment of life’s happiness, in which, like the sun’s rays in an optical lens, all its lived minutes, days, and years would be collected into one.

  As he was dying of a heart ailment – or of drinking and young men, as he himself put it – Uncle Ernest told jokes, stories, and anecdotes from the Prague beer halls. David repeated all this, then heaved a sigh and slept like a child.

  The same thing happened over eleven evenings, but with different characters. David would become delirious then, in different languages both known and unknown to him, he would pronounce the final words of Berti’s and Milena’s buried uncles, grandfathers, and relations. They recognized everyone in David’s travels into the world of the dead, except for one man, who spoke a completely incomprehensible language. Berti thought it could be Geza the Gypsy, a violinist who, according to family gossip, had been in love with his great-grandmother. If this was the case, and if those coming to David in his sleep were only his relations, then Geza the Gypsy could have been Berti’s actual great-grandfather. If that was true, it meant the merchant and money lender Manfred Plaschka, who’d once killed a Russian for not paying a debt, was really nothing to him, a false great-grandfather. This pleased Berti for some reason. Actually, what pleased him was the thought that in that case his real last name, and with it his real identity, was unknown, insofar as he did not know the family name of his newly discovered great-grandfather, Geza the Gypsy.

  He did not dare admit it to himself, let alone to Milena, but it was as if he was more fascinated by the dis
coveries in the child’s delirium than fearing for the boy’s life.

  Milena ran to the church and, all in tears, confessed to Don Serafim Balta that in her heart she no longer felt any love for her son, because for her he had already passed to the land of the dead, from where he was now transmitting such thrilling reports that she’s lost sight of her role as mother.

  Don Serafim told her not to worry, this happened to every mother and every father, and after some time it would pass, and everything would again be as it had been and as it was supposed to be. To understand what maternal love meant, one needed to feel its terrible absence. Don Sefarim had the impression that God also would sometimes get lost in the world of the dead, and forget all about the living. And the world then was ravaged by plague, fires, floods, wars…

  It will pass, my child. Simply be patient!

  She was patient, she did not entrust her pain to Berti, just as he did not entrust his to her.

  On the twelfth day, David was suddenly better. They didn’t know he was better until the evening when, instead of falling into a delirium, he remained awake. Happy and talkative, he was constantly asking questions, as befitted a child.

  They were disappointed, for they both knew it was the end.

  Just as Don Serafim had said, Milena’s sense of motherly love did return after a few days. Fear took hold of Berti, and he took his son to the doctors so that they might examine the boy and tell Berti what had been wrong.

  He mentioned only that David often had urinary and kidney infections and that his temperature had been high for two weeks, but about the delirium Berti said nothing. Doctor Markus Freud merely nodded without saying anything, then asked the father to leave the examination room so that he might be alone with the child.