Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  He could have stayed there until the evening and deep into the night, when the horizon’s line would be just as visible, illuminated by the starry sky except without the colors, but he didn’t dare stay too long since his housekeeper Ruža was expecting him for lunch. And Ruža was a strict woman who did not tolerate tardiness. She was especially strict with him, a confessor and pastor of the Lord. Sometimes she would scold him, call him a whippersnapper, but afterward she’d be sorry. She would come to ingratiate herself to him, like a mother to a child after giving it a whack on the bottom, and he would be prankish and pretend to push her away, just like a child. Ruža had become like a second mother to him in his old age, even though she was a half century his junior. Sometimes he would get to thinking and lose himself, but then suddenly he’d feel like drinking a glass of milk.

  Mother! he shouted, then realizing what he had said, he would appear to sigh as if from some great heaviness. Oh, dear mother!

  Upon which she would appear and say, Reverend, you’re just complaining. It’s a good thing the woman is deceased with how often you call her.

  And that morning he was thinking that his time was limited, by eleven he needed to be at the table for lunch. Ruža was proud of each of his ninety-five years. She thought he had reached such an advanced age because of her good, healthy food.

  Those prayers would not help you, she told him, if you started eating what you cooked up on your own. Not even the good Lord has any patience to heal such unhealthy children who don’t pay attention to caring for their bodies.

  He would just have time to cast his glance another few times slowly across the length of the horizon, gaze once more at the little town in the valley, the small houses in the settlements, and the wooden hillside huts that only his practiced eye could make out among the green and brown shades of the mountain slopes before he had to go.

  At that instant he detected the scent.

  That same heavy, chemical stench that had penetrated and enveloped Kranjčević’s home on the day he had gone to confess the poet. He could no longer remember what the dying man had entrusted to him in his confession. Could one forget that?

  He no longer remembered his intention to ask about what had happened with his poems, why they had not been published in Nada. Don Serafim had forgotten about those poems, like the majority of things that embarrass a person. His bad reminiscences had evaporated, and he was happy.

  He wrote poems about insects, wild animals, and the plants of the forest. About the line of the horizon and the good Lord.

  But still he was gripped a bit by fear because he thought at the moment that this was the stench of his death.

  And then a crazy idea came to him: that scent was detected when it was a poet’s turn to die. And the fear passed immediately.

  Only then did he notice that two Germans, a young pair of newlyweds whom he saw every morning, were seated at a neighboring table. The man was reading the paper. The woman was dipping a little brush into a bottle to paint over her red fingernails. As she drew the brush over them, the color disappeared.

  Excuse me, madam, what is that in the bottle?

  Acetone, answered the woman kindly.

  Don Serafim nodded sagely, as though he knew what this was. For the next five years, until the day when, blessed in Christ, he was buried, the old priest thought about acetone. While he did not know this had been the stench at the Kranjčevićs’, he had been able to live with the mystery of the scent, but now he could not get it out of his head. The thing that bothered him most was that he had not looked at Ella’s nails to see if they were red. He entrusted none of this to anyone, not to his old housekeeper, or even to the good Lord, who knew everything anyway.

  * * *

  —

  What are you writing there, sir? asked a voice, calling me up midsentence. I hadn’t written half the story of Kranjčević’s death and the arrival of the train from the main Croatian city. If I stopped now, I knew the story would be lost.

  An old man stood in front of my table, no taller than a meter and a half, with a white beard and lively blue eyes. He was carrying a bag of newspapers on his shoulder. A newsvendor.

  I’m writing something I’ll forget by the morning, I answered, sullenly enough to make him go away but also decently enough so as not to feel I was being unpleasant.

  Eh, well morning’s a long ways off. It’s not even one thirty! Is what you’re writing important?

  It is to me.

  What’s it about?

  It’s something about a poet.

  What’s the poet’s name. Is it Sidran?

  No, not him. Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević.

  Oh, him! Eh, he was a real bard. The moment I open my eyes in the morning, to make sure I get enough sleep, I think about that “behind low-hanging lashes”! And I go right back to sleep. Just imagine it, dear sir, how beautiful: low-hanging! Not closed but low-hanging! If he had just written that one word, and not a whole poem of them, he’d be a great poet. The greatest one who ever lived in this town. Poor guy was sickly, always in a foul mood, had some sort of torture inside him that couldn’t get out. I told him, Mr. Silvije, you mustn’t agitate yourself so. Everything’s fleeting in this town, all of us are fleeting. Only your poems, here, are eternal. All this will go away, terrible misfortune will come, famine, plague, war, this building will be razed to the ground, but your poems will remain. So you mustn’t get all worked up, dear Mr. Silvije!

  The old man was twisting and bending as he spoke, as if he were on stage, an old ballet dancer, a choreographer showing the youngsters a scene, a vorspiel, as they say in the basements of theaters and cafés, and his eyes swam about, back and forth like a swaying boat, and one couldn’t tell what he was looking at, if he was looking at anything at all. Perhaps they were focused inward, his eyes were those of a madman.

  It was the fall of 2012 and I had come to Sarajevo to visit my ailing mother and to see her, probably, for the last time.

  In front of me an old man stood, swaying, a figure from Oriental intarsias or vedutas, telling a story of how he had tried to return Kranjčević’s self-confidence. Kranjčević had died in 1908, but maybe the old man didn’t know this. Perhaps he was not crazy, just a pathological liar, a thwarted author, for whom the tiniest little key word could serve as the basis for a great, extended lie. It was understandable how unaccomplished people, especially men when they lacked status, could invent stories that all had the same goal and point – to show that the teller was important.

  May I sit down? he asked. I can tell you all sorts of things about Silvije firsthand.

  Not knowing what to do, I gestured for him to sit. This was the way things worked in Sarajevo, even in these times when the city was empty, still someone might turn up to sit down uninvited at one’s table and irrevocably interrupt a person’s train of thought.

  He called the waitress, ordered a rakija for himself and a salep for me.

  Jahja, Jahja, what are you going to use to pay for this? she complained to him.

  That’s not your business, woman! Have I ever left here owing you?

  He wasn’t bothered in the least by her indiscretion. His face was calm, his eyes swimming with each of his movements. Insect eyes.

  He was a sweet man, Silvije. But I can imagine how he might have been harsh and complicated to his family. You know how it is when you live among women – and he had two of them, Madam Ella and little Višnjica – and you’re working on all sorts of men’s affairs, politics, the nation, and revolution, and you start to act like a drunk father, like, God forgive me, the sort of tyrant who is either hungover and hangs himself or drunk and slapping around everybody in the house. But Silvije never struck anybody, never even raised his hand against a person, let alone against those two. I don’t want to say it, but I’d say the nation and revolution, in those times especially, meant violence against any kind of intimacy… />
  I was surprised to hear him use this word: intimacy. As if it did not accord with the old man’s appearance. He was too refined and sensitive for a street newsvendor. But maybe this was the way things were when a person read newspapers every day. He ended up learning this word too: intimacy. And some instinctive, rudimentary talent taught him to insert such a word in just the right place, more skillfully than a single local writer could. Was there actually in Sarajevo a single living poet who knew how to use the word intimacy?

  That’s what Ella died from – the old man continued. At first for years she took care of Silvije, pampered him, and then in the middle of the worst part of the illness, her mother fell ill too. Madam Slava, a lovely woman with a gentle soul, was weak of faith and afraid of death, so Ella, the moment she had buried her husband, needed to go to Zlatar, near Zagreb, to be there for her mother’s final days. The poor woman was terribly afraid of the emptiness, the void that comes after a person’s last breath, and she burdened the poor girl with her fear. She went from one deathbed to the other, her mother’s after Silvije’s. When she was leaving for Zlatar, I told her to take care of herself, however difficult it might be with her mother, in the most difficult moments of her life. Ella, my dear girl, don’t let her take you to the grave with her, I said. And she answered, Ivan, you mustn’t talk that way. She’s all I have now that Silvije is gone…

  Ivan? Aren’t you Jahja? I asked, catching him up in a white lie.

  Well Jahja is Ivan, and you know it! said the old man, laughing. But let me go on, not cut off the story’s thread like you did your own when you invited me to sit down at your table. And so, Ella, the poor girl, did not listen to me but instead plunged into her mother’s illness, and never came up to the surface again. She did not come back to Sarajevo alive. Consumption, a disease of the city and a certain epoch, had already taken many, and now it took her too, Ella Kranjčević, whose maiden name was Kašaj. But it wasn’t tuberculosis, my dear sir, it was rather that the young woman had accustomed herself to death, immersed herself in it without any fear whatsoever, and died, like Silvije, easily, as if there was nothing more natural, as if nothing else besides death and dying held any meaning! Madam Slava took her with her so she wouldn’t be alone, so she’d feel less lonely in her dark grave. I was at Ella’s funeral…

  That was in 1911! I noted sarcastically.

  You are correct. It was the beginning of the month of April. The spring had come early, and with the spring, in a morning train that had come through the night from Zagreb, in the luggage car, was our Ella, in a cherry wood casket, the most beautiful and luxurious piece of furniture in the Kranjčević apartment. She had received it as a gift before her final journey, from the gentlemen patriots and writers of Zagreb for the young widow of a Croatian poet. They had wanted to demonstrate their gallantry in the face of death, and that, I must admit, they accomplished. Croats are gallant people. You know that better than I do since you’ve lived in Zagreb for a long time.

  Yes, by force of circumstances, it will be twenty years soon…

  Force of circumstances? Hmm, you shouldn’t speak that way. Please don’t. It’s a beautiful city. They are a gallant people.

  You recognized me then?

  Well everyone knows everyone here. And everyone knows you. Of course some people might pretend they don’t. You’re right if now you’re thinking I intentionally stopped you in the middle of your story. I did it because it’s not a good story about Kranjčević. You mustn’t ever write about human bitterness. Those sorts of stories never work. You see, we’re all bitter in the same way, especially in this town. And your bitterness is the only thing that connects you to your birthplace. Only when you’ve rejected the bitterness will you become calm and, with peace in your soul, be able to leave this place and never come back.

  You’re wrong…

  If I am, you can forget I ever said anything to you. It’s easiest for me when I’m not in the right. Then we just go on to the next subject. Or we can go back to where we were before. It was April 7, 1911 – a Friday – the passenger train from Zagreb was pulling into the old Sarajevo station at Marijin Dvor. It was early morning, and there were a lot of passengers. That weekend would be Palm Sunday, and the Catholics were recognizable by the olive branches they had been collecting in Zagreb. People were coming home for Easter. Students were arriving from Vienna and Graz, a few from Zagreb, and the atmosphere was festive, the sort of holiday you can’t even imagine nowadays, especially in Sarajevo. We were standing to the side, waiting for the train to empty out and the travelers to leave the platform so we could open the baggage car and take out Ella Kranjčević. This is what they do with coffins, you know. It’s an ancient traveler’s rule that has existed as long as there have been railroads, and now they do the same with airplanes. Coffins are transported out of the travelers’ sight, for people would not be pleased to know that a dead person was traveling with them.

  You yourself carried out the casket with Ella Kranjčević?

  No, I didn’t. I didn’t have the right build. Four young men from the Croatian Cultural Society carried the casket. If you gave me some time, I might remember their names…

  It’s not important.

  Yes, it’s true. Today it’s no longer important. They happened to be at the Napredak building when they were making the arrangements regarding Kranjčević’s widow’s death, and they agreed to come. It was chance.

  They sent you as well?

  No, my dear sir – the old man again let out a gentle laugh – I was there under a different authority. But to continue: there beside the road, just beyond the threshold, waited a hearse from the Croatian Catholic undertaker Pokop, with two beautiful horses hitched to it. One, I recall, was an extremely beautiful white steed without a single dark spot, a real general’s mount, the sort that would later be very highly prized throughout Europe. I’ll never forget that white Lipizzaner hitched up to a Sarajevo hearse. That, my dear sir, was the Belle Époque for you, the Sarajevo of once upon a time – a city in which the most beautiful parade horse pulled a hearse. The funeral was held that same Friday, April 7. Ella was placed into the Kranjčević tomb at Saint Josip’s. But there weren’t many people at her burial. To be honest, there was almost no one. A few people from Napredak and the other Croatian associations, a couple of state officials who had known Silvije, but no one from the Muslim or Serb communities. The people had had their fill of Catholic funerals, or they’d forgotten about it. From among her kinspeople, there was just Ella’s dear sister Mila, her Dušan, and of course Višnja. Oh, the unfortunate child, she hadn’t even started school yet and she had lost both her parents. It was a great tragedy – said the old man, those eyes of his racing to and fro – a great tragedy.

  From the start it had seemed to me that this all might be some distasteful Sarajevo joke. He had recognized me. He surely knew why I had come to town. My mother was not at all discreet. She spread word about her illness in all directions, and soon the whole town would be on its deathbed along with her, and he had just been waiting for the moment to catch me unawares. He had probably come up behind me while I was writing and made out Kranjčević’s name. That was the keyword he needed.

  And then it seemed to me again that the old man was completely mad and that he believed in what he was saying. He had no problem with the fact that Ella’s death had taken place a hundred and one years before. He’d been at her funeral. He’d forgotten a little, but most of it he remembered. Best of all he remembered what sort of a day it had been: early Sarajevo spring, not a cloud in the sky, warm like May, and only far off on the snowy caps of Bjelašnica and Igman was it clear that winter had only barely passed and might return to drop snow on her fresh grave. He recalled the heavy scent of the coal smoke, filled with sulfurous stench, that authentic reek of this land, the occasional, noble scent of ignited pine logs, and the perfume of burning resin. He remembered the budding lindens next to the cemetery ga
tes. And he remembered the patients who had escaped from the Koševo insane asylum and who mixed together with the funeral procession, letting themselves weep bitter tears – there were four of them, three men and one woman – because the deceased was leaving us forever, and theirs were the only tears that Sarajevo spent for Ella Kranjčević…The old man remembered all of this. It had always been this way in this city with its beggars and holy fools, whose faith depended on the people who they were trying to get a coin or two from.

  But most probably he was a fraud skilled in his trade who had used the occasion to warm himself up and have a couple of rakijas at my expense…

  Another rakija?

  Ah no, I won’t put you out for another. One’ll be enough for me…But maybe another salep for you? Woman, one more salep for the gentleman! he shouted, and she waddled grumpily over. Now she was looking at me as roughly as at him, displeased, probably, that I hadn’t driven Jahja away from my table.

  That Friday, my dear sir, the Kranjčević family came to an end. Dušan Plavšić took Mila away to Zagreb. Little Višnja was in their care – they might have actually been better for her than her own mother and father, if the wretches had survived. Later, at the end of his life, Plavšić went bankrupt. He was a banker, you know. And Višnja worked for a long time as a secretary at the Croatian National Theater. The managers changed, but she stayed on for decades. If they hadn’t helped the father, at least they could help the daughter. Besides, it was through her kinship that Kranjčević was with them, for everything else that was his had stayed in Bosnia and Sarajevo. Graves, graves, graves, my dear sir, it’s all just graves. The work was in vain, all those arguments and explanations, in vain did I tell them all that one day they’d be sorry, the poet would not be long for this world, and it would be nice if they accepted him in Zagreb, helped him to die there when it was already too late for him to go on living, that they might bury him under the Mirogoj arcades and let him have his own large grave. Graves, graves, graves, my dear sir. But they didn’t listen to me. They didn’t care until he died. And after he’d been buried with all that false Sarajevo pomp, after all those false tears had been shed, the letters, prayers, and orders started coming from Zagreb, along with the envoys who requested that Silvije be removed from his grave, like an eye from a living head, and that his dead body be moved to Mirogoj in Zagreb. Ella was still alive then, caring for her mother in Zlatar, but they didn’t ask her anything. This happens. It wasn’t for the widow to worry her head over important national questions. It wasn’t for a woman to think about where, in which grave, in which country, the body of the bard of Croatian poetry would decompose.