Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Everyone had come from Zagreb for his funeral on the eve of All Saints’ Day in 1908. The trains had been full, it was said, and not even a needle could have fit into the compartments, for everyone in the literary world of the day was on his way, invited or not, those with talent and those without, lyric poets of various political persuasions, people of the right, republicans, coalitionists, Hungarian sympathizers and Austrophiles, all were headed for Sarajevo to bury the greatest among them. After that overlong train trip, which was likely also the most famous Croatian death by beauty in history, the great Croatian literary consort hailed with great cheering the decision that made Silvije the most important Croatian poet ever.

  While he lay dead in the Sarajevo morgue and had begun to smell a bit from the damp, humidity, and rot of the building with the two memorial plaques on it, while he waited for them to bury him solemnly and with all the reverence of the marketplace and the nation in Saint Josip Cemetery, the unfortunate poet could not know anything about his greatness. For just yesterday, or the day before, six months earlier, a year, two, he had been much less. So much less had he been, not just to that majority of Croatian culture, which was typically worldly, Austrophile, or Hungarophile, but even to his own right-wing political allies, who, the moment they were pressed, would extinguish all their nation-building, Ante Starčević zeal, proclaim themselves Germans, and, with a deep bow to the royal and imperial crown, play their farewell waltz, while Kranjčević they suppressed, as if he wasn’t even a poet, or they simply didn’t understand modern poetry well. This was how poor Silvije ended up in Bosnia, in Livno and then the great village of Sarajevo, first on a temporary basis, later on a permanent one, in an exile for which, again, those to blame were not in Vienna or Pest but in Zagreb, with all its political shades and nuances. The poor guy tried to go back to a more narrowly defined homeland for himself, but it was hopeless, for there was not a place to be found for him anywhere. It seems there were too many cultural giants for the Croatians to keep track of. There was no room for the living Silvije yet just enough for his coffin. It took some time for Silvije’s name to stand apart from the herds of all those lyric poets (who emerge from their obscurity only in the fat editions of Croatian biographical encyclopedias, publications of the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographical Institute). For all these national cads and dilettantes need to be written about, and so Silvije had to kick the bucket for the Croats to set out, as if for an Austrian ski trip, for his funeral in Sarajevo. On this journey, which stretched over an ungodly length of time, there was time to raise him up above all the other corpses and proclaim him their greatest poet. I sometimes lament the fact that I was too young – I hadn’t even been conceived yet – to have been there together with them, the immortal Croats, to witness the burial of the poet Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević. With them and with Silvije’s Sarajevo pals, with the Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox, who would, when the time came, spread love, understanding, and tolerance above the open graves.

  With Kranjčević began the glorious tradition of Croatian literature according to which – it is worth mentioning that this was unique in the broad European context – all the greatest poets were sent into exile. This was not something performed by the wielders of power, the monarchs, ministers, or city police chiefs. Rather, it was their weak and powerless colleagues who drove them away, those glorious Croatian impotents, whose literary greatness lasted as long as a dragonfly’s life. They did this in order to find a place for themselves on Parnassus, as renters and short-term residents and, in the end, to await the exiles in their coffins, or visit their funerals in the graveyards of Belgrade and Sarajevo.

  And as I was gripped by fury, in the middle of the frozen November Sarajevo night in 2012, only then, for a moment, did I not think about my mother and her illness, or my guilt, which would endure as long as I lived. As I thought about the Croats, that tribe to which I belonged by an unfortunate tangle of circumstance, because my forbears, like dolphins caught in fishermen’s nets, hadn’t known how to extricate themselves. As I thought about them, I was free from every humiliation, free from pain and unhappiness, which for me had always been private. I’d never shared in collective happiness.

  * * *

  —

  The Erzurum hostel stands across the street from the Baščaršija taxi stand. A light was shining inside, and several men were seated at a table in the corner, near the improvised reception desk. I was feeling cold and I wanted to write down the story of the train making its way from Zagreb to Sarajevo on All Saints’ Day in 1908 for the poet’s funeral, so I decided to go inside. I was struck by the warm air, the scent of butane from the two ignited gas heaters, and the smell of men’s sweat and Bulgarian rose oil. The door squeaked, and all four men at once turned to the entrance, looking at me in surprise as if no one had come in for years. I nodded to them – these days, no one said good evening or good night anymore – and they all quickly turned back to their work. They spoke in a language I didn’t understand, their heads crowded together over cups of thick salep. They were sitting with their coats on, though it was warm inside. It was as if they were waiting for someone to come for them and they might jump up at any moment to rush outside.

  I took out a new notebook from my backpack and wrote:

  * * *

  —

  November 8, 2012

  * * *

  —

  He’d been sick for a long time. Ella had hoped to the very end that he would recover, but then she went to Don Serafim Urlić, the old priest from Makarska who had been living by then for several years in Pale, near Sarajevo. There he confessed the believers and walked around Mount Romanija, certain that the mountain air would prolong his life.

  * * *

  —

  The waitress appeared, a dark-skinned young woman with too much make-up and bleach-streaked hair.

  Her voice was deep and raspy.

  I ordered a salep. I hadn’t had one in more than twenty years, since before the war, but that wasn’t why. I wanted the men in the corner to take me as one of their own and leave me alone. Their speech was filled with sighs and guttural sounds and it was difficult to gauge their mood. The only thing one could know for certain was that these people were close, their conversation was not obligatory, and they weren’t chatting about the weather or the meaning of life. Their heads drew ever closer to the center of the table where they were sitting.

  * * *

  —

  For days Don Serafim had been hesitant and unable to make up his mind. He had put off meeting with the sick poet, running the risk of committing a grave sin should the sick man die without confessing his own guilt. He justified himself before God every morning and evening, thinking he was old and his memory often failed him, though he was still on his feet like a younger man, and thank God for that.

  One day he wouldn’t go out because he apparently forgot. The next he didn’t feel well, it seemed to him he had coughed up some blood, and he’d got scared that a cavity had opened up again. But fortunately this wasn’t the case and it had only seemed so. On the third day Don Serafim had work to do in Pale, he was dead tired that Saturday as never before and he couldn’t make it down to Sarajevo. The next day was Sunday and on Sundays Don Serafim didn’t do anything but rest his soul and pray to God.

  On Monday he had nowhere he needed to go and couldn’t think of any other excuses, so, unwilling as he was, he went to the station, bought a ticket, and set off for Sarajevo to look in on the poet.

  Don Serafim composed verses, all to the glory of the good Lord and the Lord’s mercy, and had some years before sent a potpourri of them to the journal Nada, addressed to the main editor, Mr. Kosta Hörmann, with a request that they be published, if they were worthy of it. In the accompanying letter, very polite in tone, filled with Latin humility and contrition, he asked the high office to request the expert poetic evaluation of Mr. Silvije Kranjčević of his work. Don Serafim also
noted that he, like our great poet, had been born in coastal realms, in Drašnice, “while Mr. Kranjčević was from Senj, from which the glorious uskoks and hajduks had hailed.”

  He wondered whether this last part might be overly ostentatious, whether the poet might take them as a sort of imposition from a fellow countryman – though they weren’t even countrymen since it was farther from Senj to Drašnice than from Sarajevo to Zagreb – or whether the editor Hörmann might see it as excessive and inappropriate, or whether he would even show his work to Kranjčević.

  Several times he began rewriting the letter from the beginning, but he would get stuck at exactly the same place and toss it into the waste basket, and several times he hesitated as he tried to make a clean copy, but in the end, after all this, he left everything, even “from which the glorious uskoks and hajduks had hailed.”

  In complete despair, he put the papers into an envelope, seven pages of poetry and an eighth with his letter, which he then sealed with wax using his personal seal. After he had taken the envelope to the journal’s office and given it to a tall young gentleman, from whose name he concluded that the man was in all probability a Christian of the eastern faith – he was called Lazar – Don Serafim understood that in that unfortunate and prodigal addition to his final sentence there might be something that could offend the authorities and Mr. Hörmann, as a sentimental Habsburg.

  Would it seem to him that he was praising the uskok pirates and the hajduks? What if Mr. Kosta Hörmann thought, heaven forbid, that he, Don Serafim, was counting on a hajduk or uskok connection with the Vienna authorities and presenting it as an accounting in blood, lead, and gunpowder? It did not scare him – he was already an old man – that they might take him to the constabulary because of this or, how dreadful, evil, and backwards, imprison him without guilt or regret. Rather, he thought Hörmann would be insulted the moment he got to that part of the letter, crumpling it up and tossing it into the garbage.

  Or he would test the poet and his patriotism by sending him the letter in jest and then waiting to see whether Silvije would act in accordance with what had brought him to Bosnia and publish the poems of the priest who, contrary to Vienna and Pest, praised the uskoks and hajduks or, instead, as an alert defender of state interests, throw it in the garbage.

  Don Serafim was prepared to return to the Nada office and correct his mistake in order to avoid potential misunderstandings, but it was too late. He also did not know how to explain why he returned for an envelope with poems inside that he had just delivered for publication and the letter in which he recommended himself to Messrs. Hörmann and Kranjčević. He would only become suspicious at that point, he thought. Only then would they read his letter with special attention and discover what was in it. Otherwise, perhaps they would not notice anything.

  Or maybe the mention of Senj’s uskoks and hajduks would not be seen as disrespectful or awkward in regard to Vienna’s gentlemen and the interests of state? Those people had revolted against Venice and the Turks, thought Don Serafim, consoling himself, not against Austria.

  For nights Don Serafim Urlić had not been able to sleep in peace. One after another imagined and unthinkable variations on this event came into his mind in sequence, and sleep would not come to him. And each would proceed to its end, weaving itself into his destiny in some new but always unpleasant manner. Don Serafim hardly believed anymore in that one simple possibility that his verses compiled for the glory of God might be published in Nada.

  Months would pass before he grew calm, years before he was able to forget, until that first time – it could have been during the winter of the year when Silvije finally ended up in bed – he opened an issue of Nada and looked for his own name in the table of contents among the listed authors.

  Don Serafim Urlić’s poems were not published in Nada or any other journal or newspaper. He continued diligently writing them, linking them together over-methodically with his meter and rhymes, and he would write them until the end of his life (he died in Pale in 1937, several weeks before his hundredth birthday), but never again would he send any of them to even a single editor. He gladly gave them to people to read, but just to the sisters of mercy and some of the younger priests, who would marvel at his devotion and his poetic skill. To each person he would mention offhandedly that poems such as these were only for the eyes of believers. Stories and novels were for unbelievers who did not have access to what God had created, while love and lyric poetry was for unhappy and unbalanced people, which was why, he said, he avoided mixing with both groups. Thus did he console himself for this debacle in his life – that his poetry had not been published in Nada – and lift from himself the longtime worry that had cost him his spiritual peace – namely what Hörmann and Kranjčević might have thought when they read that final fateful line of the sentence, whose origin has long since been forgotten, that “Mr. Kranjčević was from Senj, from which the glorious uskoks and hajduks had hailed.”

  He did not recognize the poet’s young wife when she suddenly appeared at the door of the wooden house where he lived in Pale, though she had been pointed out to him several times before, at official evening parties, receptions, and processions in Sarajevo. He had probably tried to forget her, since she was linked with events he did not want to remember. (This too should not be forgotten: once, near Christmas time at the end of 1906, knowing nothing about their secret connection, the banker Dušan Plavšić, Mila’s sister Ellen’s husband, had wanted to introduce Don Serafim to the poet after some function. They had shaken hands, but Kranjčević had not reacted with recognition when he heard the name Serafim Urlić. About this too he had thought a great deal, and it had kept him up nights.)

  He was shocked when she told him Silvije might be on his deathbed.

  He had heard the poet was ill, afflicted, Don Serafim learned, by Sarajevo’s humidity and fog. But it had not occurred to him that all this could happen so quickly. A young man. It had even been to his youth that he attributed the man’s nonchalance toward the manuscript he had sent him. This had been one of the kinder explanations he had come up with for why his poems had not been published in Nada. The fact that the poet might truly be dying so young shook and disturbed Don Serafim. Suddenly everything around the poet became grave. Suddenly Kranjčević seemed older than he was, and not only did the soul of the poet find itself before the gates of heaven, so did Don Serafim’s poems.

  For all this time, in the depth of his soul, he had nevertheless hoped to discover what had happened with his poems, and whether they had remained unpublished because of that obviously inappropriate phrase.

  Now he was going to be offered the opportunity to ask.

  In the course of 1907, Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević’s illness had become public knowledge in Sarajevo. It was that sort of a town: whenever anyone took ill, everyone wanted to know what with. Some were interested so they could commiserate with the sick person, others were interested so that they might offer him, even if through some intermediary, some medicinal remedy that cured everything, and others, unfortunately, just wanted to enjoy someone else’s misfortune. The biggest group, however, were those who wanted to know because such was the custom, the valley was narrow, the neighborhoods cramped, one house didn’t end before another one started up, somebody’s living room was in your kitchen, and in his kitchen was somebody else’s, pardon me, toilet, and all this was close to each other, in hate and in love, so it was somehow natural to know what someone was ailing from, even if, honest to God, not even in Sarajevo did anyone ever learn why that same other person might have been healthy.

  As the poet’s illness proceeded, and he did not give in to it but every day, if he had the strength, went out onto the street and made his way from the top of Baščaršija toward the cathedral, or turned back toward the Nada editorial office, so did Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević quickly become more known among Sarajevo’s residents for his sickness than for his poems. Actually he was almos
t not known at all for his poems. He was spoken of as a national teacher, carrying around the affairs of the poor, a good, respectful Croat in Austrian service, to whom members of the local population, whatever their faiths might have been, were dearer than the Swabians. He had a nice, proud mustache, which gave him the appearance of a rebel, and Sarajevans shrank from that sort the moment they were caught, but they were happy to accept them into their community while there was peace and tranquility. Though Kranjčević was not even all that sociable. This was the way people in his circle were, people said. Warm and respectful, but about their business.

  In his illness, it was as if his soul was being turned outward like a glove.

  He would stand and talk with everyone, and men of any faith, position, or status would stop him. To ask after the poet’s health, recommend some Eastern Bosnian herb, quack, faith healer, priest, or village sorceress, who could cure with a glance, and her glance was like a deer’s, so beautiful you could fall in love with it.