Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  The cars were connected quickly with the engine from Vinkovci, and the train for Vienna set off. Though they could not know that this was the end of all their misfortune and tough times in the former royal and imperial railroads, both of them, almost in unison, sighed. They felt no wistfulness of any kind. A darkness fell upon Bosnia. By the time it again grew light, the country would be far behind them.

  No remembrance of Albert “Berti” Plaschka, the first manager of restaurant cars in the province, would remain in Sarajevo or in Bosnia. His name no longer appeared in the papers or was spoken in public. Perhaps his work was remembered through the gestures, manners, and fixed smiles of the waiters in the restaurant cars of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and then in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but this too probably faded in the passing decades.

  If he or one of his two dear ones had died, God forbid, he would have been buried in Saint Josip Cemetery in Koševo. Then he would have remained forever in Sarajevo.

  David Plaschka grew up to become a lowlife good-for-nothing. He completed gymnasium in Vienna, studied at a technical college in the twenties but never completed his degree. He grew ever more estranged from his father. His mother would take care of him during the intense hangovers that would follow multiple-day bouts of drunkenness in the dives and darkest portions of the city. He avoided the center of town, strong light, and sunshine. He was attracted to dark alleys, frightened women, and eccentric old unmarried men, petty clerks and wretches, the smell of urine in the entrances to their buildings, the poverty of workers, their children, their little girls who, while their fathers were at work and their mothers waited for customers on the street corners, would run outside with their little First Communion skirts on with nothing underneath. When Germany occupied Austria in 1938 and all this – from the northern seas almost to the Adriatic – became one great country, in which everyone spoke German, David felt for a moment like a participant in a great event and an adherent of the idea of European unification and collectiveness, under the mantle of the great Führer. Actually, he was stimulated by the fear of Jewish people, by the fact they would get off the sidewalk and step into the street when he turned up, he a Viennese idler, a person who was seemingly no one, but still here he was so respectable and important that Jews would step into the street before him, not even looking to see if they’d be run over by a tram. He would stare each time at the wretch, marked as she or he was with the symbol of David, to see whether his glance had somehow penetrated their consciousness, whether he could sense what they were feeling at that instant. This excited him.

  But soon his desire for all this left him. Or the Jews disappeared from the streets where he walked. The dream of the great nation that would spread from the northern to the southern seas and in which everyone would live together scattered and disappeared. Soon everything became so unbearably empty that David Plaschka no longer felt like going out. Not even the entryways smelled of urine anymore.

  No one ever took off his pants to check whether he was circumcised. His father had stopped worrying. He was buried in his work in an ugly hotel for small-time bureaucrats, an inn for the unfortunates who came to Vienna under some compulsion, and he no longer thought about David. He didn’t want to be reminded.

  And his mother flipped through the pages of prewar magazines, bewildered. It seemed that she had never been young. How could she have ever married that man?

  * * *

  —

  When I moved my hand closer to pet her, the little dog – hardly bigger than a mole – recoiled in fear and huddled in a corner of the doorway. She didn’t try to bite me, didn’t growl. She just curled up into a corner and pressed herself against the wall.

  You’re not there, I whispered, and her ears barely visibly pricked up.

  She was listening for the tone of my voice, whether I was growling, threatening, or, maybe, whining, though I was so large and strong. She didn’t dare look at me anymore, but dropped her gaze and stared at the tattered edges of my trouser leg, then slowly, so as not to upset me, turned onto her back, exposing her neck and soft belly. She had given up.

  But all the same, her ears were cocked as she listened, still curious. I could have crushed her with my foot, there in the corner of the doorway.

  I stood up from my crouch, and at the same instant, she jumped up to her feet, ready to follow. She’d forgotten all danger.

  She had forgotten it not because her memory was short and superficial but because she couldn’t imagine death. However many times she had seen her male and female comrades dead, run over on the road, torn up by other dogs, their insides riddled with rat poison, she didn’t grasp the idea that before her was her own fate, that death came to everyone, including her. The canine freedom from death is something that should be envied. This freedom is an immortality given by God. If I believed for an instant – in Sarajevo, completely alone, as my mother died – that God had created the world and that he directed the destiny of each of his creations, I would think he had made dogs happier and more complete than he made people. Dogs do not need God, for dogs do not know death.

  * * *

  —

  In the early days of my mother’s illness, this thought had often occurred to me: in the café where I go every morning to drink my coffee, a large, beautiful golden retriever comes with the owner and is sweet and friendly with everyone; I imagine my mother will grow healthy miraculously if I kill that dog; I have a half hour to do it, otherwise the spell will fade away; I glance around the premises for something to crush it with, something that will kill it relatively quickly, before its owner – a pretty, long-haired French teacher – can prevent me, or before the men seated at the neighboring tables can grab hold of me…

  I see an older lady, a retired professor, walking her little dogs alongside the farmer’s market. It’s Sunday and everything is deserted. A few kilometers farther on there’s a metal container burning. Smoke wafts up from it into the sky, flames reaching outward, blue and yellow at the edges. It would be easy to tear away the dog and toss it into the burning container. My mother would be cured in that instant.

  Early autumn, the beginning of September, that time of year when nature loses its orientation in the calendar for a moment and the city smells of ripe Maytime spring. Somewhere by now the grain has begun to turn, the early cherries are ripening, and soon the scent of lindens will begin to spread…I’m standing on the pedestrian overpass above Frankopanska Street. In front of me a boy, strong like the earth, balances on the edge of the walk, his tattooed shoulders bare. As the tram approaches, I hear – she’ll get better if I do that. It would be enough to give a little push, almost without trying, and he would lose his balance and fall onto the tracks. His dismembered body would end up in the morgue and in the newspapers. Perhaps no one would see that I was the one who pushed him.

  Since my mother became gravely ill and I began to prepare for her dying, which would be long and painful, ending with a morphine drip – by then my mother would be speaking nonsense, like a hippie on heroin in the old Kaktus disco club – and everyday, in my thoughts, I sacrificed at least one dog, cat, or person for her to be healed; I would grab the child from the carriage in front of the convenience store and smash it against the ground while no one was looking at me, and with this I would grow calm, exchanging one horror for another, which would grow more bearable. Her sickness and death, the way she assailed my conscience in our daily phone conversations, as if I could make her well or as if her illness came from me, this I could not survive for long. I’d had to swallow my fill of her death, like someone who can’t swim swallows his fill of the sea before he learns to swim. For me to start swimming, the miracle of healing would need to occur, or I’d need to believe in God. I would need to test it out, like a broken old mixer that suddenly starts to work when someone accidentally switches on the power. But it would be easier to push the man under a tram, in the belief that his sacrifice would h
eal her, than to start believing in God.

  It wouldn’t take much to do it, to push him. Muscular and strong as he was, with a Croatian coat of arms tattooed on his shoulder, the youngster would be a tough piece of meat for the tram’s sharp wheels. Maybe he would live and be confined to a wheelchair, maybe the wheels would sever his head.

  It was the beginning of September, the linden scent beginning to spread, and I thought about how, according to the plan and program of her illness, she would not live to see the next spring. And how I would experience all manner of things before she ceased to be. How she would drag me with her, forcefully, like the time when I was fourteen and barely managing to stay on the surface of the sea and she had pulled me hard by the leg, to teach me to dive, get me used to seawater in my bronchial passages, or from sheer cruelty.

  And then the little dog seemed dear to me, I leaned down, caressed her head. I did this from a guilty conscience. She pulled back, curled up, became even smaller, a guinea pig, a mouse; she was unaccustomed to the human hand.

  Her hair was strong and sharp, like a garden hedgehog. In my childhood, in Sarajevo, we had hedgehogs in our yard, beneath the window of the room where my mother was lying.

  Let’s go now – I said to her, and she followed obediently, as my mother never did. The three steps leading to the road were long ago cemented over. I checked to be sure the dog could make it up them. I recalled a boy sitting here drinking a beer he’d bought in the shop across the way in March 1992, a month before the war began. Now he was already a dead man they had called Čelik. They killed him at the top of the cable car on Trebević. He’d been the caretaker of the car, which today no longer exists.

  She was whining, scratching at the cement as she tried to climb up. I wasn’t going to help her. If she couldn’t make it up, she could stay there. We would eventually have to part ways anyway. The sooner the better, before too many shared memories had time to accumulate. There were few memories to move me from when she’d been well. Especially from before the war. She was always somewhat nervous and awkward. Or she wouldn’t believe me when I expressed sorrow about something. Or some suddenly expressed need of mine proved difficult for her. Once, on Tito Street, at the pharmacy Zvijezda, I desperately needed to use the bathroom. But she took her time, picked out some Plivadon tablets for migraines, some bearberry tea, blood pressure medicine, relaxation pills. Then came the long climb up to Mejtaš. Once we had made it by the children’s playground, passed along the edge of the buildings above it and the intersection that leads down to Staka Skenderova Street, and had started up the steepest part of the incline, next to the meadow at the foot of the Ćolina Kapa observatory, I said – I can’t hold it. And the shit ran down my shorts. Soft like pudding, it quickly made its way down my legs as I walked. The feeling was both pleasant and embarrassing. That shit changed me, I would never forget it. Only years later, in Zagreb, after I had come out of the war and bombs had fallen on Sarajevo, did I think for the first time that, if she had wanted to, my mother could have taken me to a bathroom in one of the cafés on Tito Street. After the war, once when I’d come to the Sarajevo Film Festival, I happened to remind her of this. She laughed and so did I. Or it was the other way around: I laughed then she did, uncomfortably. We have always hidden things from one another.

  I wasn’t going to turn around. Let her scratch and whine and call me.

  I continued toward Vijećnica and didn’t hear her anymore. I thought she had forgotten me and found another purpose for her life, but then I heard a quick patter approaching from behind. My bodyguard and my only acquaintance in this city, other than the one who – I hoped – was sleeping without any pain.

  I was climbing the steps that Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand had once climbed. Or maybe he hadn’t, I didn’t remember this from the photographs, but now I needed to believe it. With difficulty, she climbed with me, step by step. They were not as high, and she conquered them bravely.

  The doors of Vijećnica were still nailed shut. One could not go inside even during the daytime, though the exterior had been renewed. It had been repaired brick by brick after an enemy shell had damaged it in August 1992. Blessed have the times of bloodshed and war been when the enemies have been known. The tired shades and ghosts of firefighters and librarians lingered among the newly painted pillars, along with those of fighters from the first, second, and third wars. The heavy stench of cat urine and tiny mice carcasses was palpable.

  She had managed to make it up and was standing next to my left leg, as if she’d been trained. She worriedly sniffed the air, her nostrils flaring. She wanted to leave this place but wouldn’t leave me. She was afraid, clinging to my lower leg – God, she’d peed on my trouser leg! – but what could be the source of her fear if she didn’t know what death was?

  I shook out my pant leg, took a paper napkin from my pocket, leaned down, and tried to clean off her stream. As I did so, I happened to turn toward the street. On the embankment, on the other side – dogs. They were silent, still, waiting. There were fifteen in the pack. I had never seen so many. In the middle of the street, a few paces in front of the others, stood a large gray longhair, like the one from the Branko Ćopić story. Its tail was raised as he looked in our direction.

  Then he lay down on the asphalt and emitted the deep sigh of a fatigued leader but his head remained erect, prepared to leap up at any instant.

  I’ve never been afraid of dogs. I can imagine them leaping onto me, biting and howling, while I brandish my left foot then my right, kicking them savagely…I can imagine their attack, yet I am not afraid of them.

  She was shaking and I leaned down to take her into my arms. The moment I touched her, the pack’s leader, the longhair, jumped to his feet and started growling. I pulled my hands back quickly.

  The leader yawned and lay back down, almost uninterested. Though his head stayed up like before, he blinked as if he might fall asleep at any moment.

  Tough day, I said under my breath.

  * * *

  —

  Once during our daily phone conversations, my mother said in an accusatory tone that things weren’t good. A foreign body was growing inside her, it only had to reach her brain, she said. Or her lungs. The worst would be her liver or her pancreas. Then there wouldn’t be any more medicine, she said. As if there was still medicine that would help, but I was not being a good son by just sitting around in Zagreb instead of going out into the world to find it.

  I pretended she wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t explain it to her, for she wouldn’t have understood. We lacked a basic understanding, like between a person and an animal, light and darkness, a voice and an echo, because I was going away and she had to stay, or she was going away and I would stay, saved.

  There was an agreement between me and the pack: they would let me go, and I would go away, leaving her behind. I would not turn around, for whatever I might see would not make me happy. I descended the steps toward the former Tito Street and heard the tapping of street-calloused paws behind me, hundreds all at once, then growling, a brief bark, and silence.

  I didn’t turn around and don’t know what happened to her.

  I tried to forget that I’d left her.

  Time would pass, and this event, I knew, would free itself of everything inessential. The signs, colors, and voices would peel away, layer by layer: first I would forget the constant barking, to which I had already grown accustomed, while step by step I left the Vijećnica behind me, in its perpetual shadow, where the night was darkest and the smell of subterranean moisture was thick; then I’d forget the stench of cat urine around the pillars of that final piece of Habsburg kitsch; I’d forget the amateurishly painted and nailed entry doors, and about what I was reflecting on – this I had already forgotten – while I ran my fingertips across the door handle and the heads of the rusted nails, one nail askew as with Christ on the cross.

  If the thick fog of Alzheimer’s e
nvelops me in old age, I will remember only that I’d betrayed her and that my betrayal had killed her. Once at the beginning of her illness, she called me in the early morning to relate the dream she’d had the night before: she said she had dreamed she couldn’t speak, and she would choke any time she tried to say anything. This had lasted for a long time, she said, and then she had screamed and woken up. I could not hear her in Zagreb. She was alone. No one else was there to hear her, except the neighbor maybe. She had been screaming Miljenko, Miljenko, Miljenko…

  She told me about her dream, and a horror began to take hold of me. When she was no more, she would remain a burden on my conscience. I told funny stories about her illness, said she never wanted me, she wasn’t capable of being a mother, just as my father was not capable of being a father, or I said I was ready for her death since the moment I learned the diagnosis, but none of this was really the truth. The horrors had been accumulating inside me, and all at once they would become a petty, bitter mortification of the spirit.

  * * *

  —

  I dragged myself along the sidewalk of the former Tito Street, looked at my feet, making my way around the small, uncovered manholes, each one barely larger than a foot in diameter. Where in the world, I wondered, had all the covers gone?

  Before the street opened out onto the Baščaršija plateau, a hundred paces nearer the bend where the former Obala Vojvode Stepe melted into the former Marshal Tito Street, there was a tall, four-story building with two memorial plaques on it. Both noted that in this house the poet Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević had lived. The first had been erected long ago, more than forty years back, right next to the entrance gate. The second plaque was high above the first, where a person’s hand could not reach, and was bigger and more beautiful. The Croatian cultural association Napredak had put it up after the last war. In some other city and some other land, the first plaque would have been taken down when the second one was put up. Some socialist cultural-educational community had put it up when Kranjčević was a communal poet. Their cultural-educational community was as far from this world as the headquarters of the royal and imperial railroad with its officials and clerks in formal uniforms and suits awaiting the Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, and even the prince himself was as far off as the socialist cultural-educational community that put up the plaque for Kranjčević. They had placed it low, within reach, for then there weren’t yet any hands that would have swung a hammer at a plaque for a poet.