Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  I stood in front of the courtyard gate and seemed to hear voices within. Perhaps it was some Orthodox holy man or some early-morning prayer for which the monks – the two or three of them left in this city – had gathered, or perhaps it was just an illusion.

  If I were to start banging hard two or three times right now on the door, would they be afraid I was some violent nonbeliever, or would they believe I was one of theirs and open the door for me to enter? Probably the former. There are barely any of them left in the city. This was why they were so dear to me. I was alone too. We were almost kin.

  If I banged three times on the door and they opened, that would be a good sign, I thought. If that happened, that was a miracle and my mother would be cured. This thought was not enough for me to bang on the door.

  I was always giving up on things. What would happen if one time I didn’t?

  The former Tito Street was empty and quiet. Nothing could be heard but, in the distance, the sounds of dogs barking. One dog let out a plaintive whine and was answered by two comrades with short barks, then a wail came from the other side of the Miljacka, somewhere near Bistrik, and then a response came from Vratnik or Kovači. Then it started again from the top: a quiet whine from far off, as if from having been poisoned, then the two others, furious and without commiseration or understanding, answered with barking, then from across the Miljacka, from Obilaznica or Soukbunar came a wailing, to which someone from Bjelave or Mejtaš responded, beneath my mother’s windows as she slept, dreaming fitfully.

  Did dying usually begin when the sick person could no longer get to the toilet? Or when she no longer had the strength to wipe herself? Or when she was no longer conscious of needing to go to the toilet? When did dying begin?

  I crossed Tito Street and turned onto a little street called Prote Bakovića, and ten paces farther down on the right was a little courtyard that led to a restaurant I had once visited in September 1999 with a Sarajevo writer whose name I’ve been trying to forget for years who had claimed it was the best place to eat in Sarajevo. I recalled the cramped dive, whose walls pressed in on my shoulders like a tight graduation day jacket, and the thick odor of browned flour and oil in which Vienna steaks had been sizzling for days on end. I remembered the owner, a fat woman in a dirty white apron who addressed everyone as if they were her children. She cooked and brought the food out herself for three or four people at a time, to tables that had barely enough space. She would collect the money with her greasy fingers as people left. Little pieces of raw meat, burnt breadcrumbs, and palm oil would stick to the bank notes. Laughing and talking, they would press the banknotes with the faces of Bosnian-Herzegovinian poets on them into their pockets. The surprised faces, captured when they had had their identity pictures taken, and then employed in a deception for the purposes of eternity, folded up and smeared, would be mixed together with bits of pocket garbage. Bosnian-Herzegovinian poetry thus arrived in the pockets of the postwar poor gorging itself at the end of 1999.

  The establishment was called “Auntie’s Place,” and all the customers had to call the proprietress Auntie. She didn’t have another name, so no one knew what her faith was. But as the dive was located on Prote Bakovića Street, and prota was a term for an Orthodox priest, I believed Auntie was Orthodox. If not, she most likely would have said what her name was.

  As she brought the food out, she reminded people: In this house you must finish your food and at the end wipe up the plate with your bread!

  She had told us the same thing, after she put two plates filled to the brim with beans (“homegrown beans with pork sausage, Auntie’s original,” it said on the menu): In this house you must finish your food and at the end wipe up the plate with your bread!

  To which my friend the Sarajevo writer smiled sweetly. It seemed that such was the custom. Whenever Auntie dropped a plate onto a table and delivered her magic phrase, the guests at the table would smile in the same way. Even if they came to Auntie’s Place every working day and every time she delivered the same phrase in the same way in the same strict voice, the customers smiled as if it were happening for the first time. And probably the same shtick had been playing out for months and years, in the midst of the shifting political and historical conditions. God willing, given health and good fortune, everything would continue on in the same way in this city and this little establishment.

  There are few things that can so unsettle a person and force him to face his natural limitations, even his own mortality, than a plate overflowing with a shiny brown sea of beans. Faced with such a trial, I was no longer hungry, though I hadn’t yet dipped the spoon into the plate and was already imagining how to get out of all this, how to withstand the wave of Sarajevo humor that would follow the moment I got up from the table in a desperate attempt to escape.

  My literary compatriot, whose name I try to forget in vain, because something always reminds me of him, did not take any notice of my faintness and incapacity before all such difficult instances of Sarajevo hospitality, but instead was heroically devouring the bean soup as if he were on the Western Front in 1915 somewhere near Caporetto and had sat down in the mess hall to gorge himself with utter abandon.

  He clutched his spoon and worked with the bread, which crumbled between his fingers, but after every mouthful he managed to utter a new compliment to Auntie’s cooking and even add a question for me:

  How did I like the beans? Had I had better beans since the army?

  Had Sarajevo Marlboro been translated into English? Really, that’s too bad!

  What was it like in Zagreb? Did they have concerts?

  How long would I be staying in Sarajevo?

  Why so little?

  I remember answering him in short sentences, distracted, and felt how, in accord with my answers, his emotional state quickly changed. Maybe I could have got more into the spirit of it if I hadn’t been so occupied by what I saw in front of me.

  My friend, the clever author of a good novel about the siege and a few weaker novels about the dissolution of his marriage, had already eaten half his plate of beans before I got up the courage to take my first spoonful.

  The soup was still hot. Thickened as it was with the flour, it cooled slowly, and I blew on the spoon for a long time. Every time I stopped to inhale, I would smell the dark, thick scent of the browned flour fried in oil, which covered all the other scents, along with the rather sweet and good-natured odor of precooked scarlet runner beans, that most valuable of Balkan leguminous plants.

  My stomach would then turn as I inhaled the smell of the browned flour, which was that smell of a homely Austro-Hungarian childhood, inscribed into personal memory, the smell of the Stubler kitchen in all its difficult times, when sons died and it was necessary to cook an entire cauldron of beans for all those relatives, the rail workers, miners, manual laborers and their wives, who would come from their small industrial towns for the funeral and the long mourning. I wasn’t conscious that I was thinking about the Stublers, for browned flour had been their signature and identity. Browned flour which spread through one’s bowels and bloodstream, made its way to the heart, lungs, and brain, in the end spreading through one’s entire person in the form of an afternoon melancholy that was especially pronounced on Sundays. And all the Stublers, men and woman alike, carried around in their heads lists of foods that harmed them. These dishes differed, and they would happily refer to their lists of harmful foods in conversations with guests, in the waiting rooms of the local clinic or at the bus stop, even with people they didn’t know at all. To those strangers or to those they found odious or hateful, those they suspected or knew for certain were spying for the police, working for the Gestapo or the Yugoslav Secret Police, searching for enemies of the people or concealed Jews, to them they would talk about how bread dumplings did not agree with them, or egg drop soup, or string beans if they had a lot of tough veins, or that unfortunate, heavy, upsetting type of bean. In the same way
that other people, in their small talk and concealment, were obsessed with meteorological conditions and the influence they had over achy bones, so the Stublers made small talk about dishes that did not agree with them. And it was as if it never occurred to them that it wasn’t the dumplings or the meat that was bad for them, it was the browned flour that bothered their stomachs, that insufferable Austrian addition to every stew and broth, the baneful nature of which, perhaps, caused the empire’s fall. Those who needed to be defending it had suffered terrible stomachaches after their lunch.

  I swallowed the first spoonful, after that a second, and after that who knows how many more before the liquid level in the bowl had dropped enough for me to leave the place as quickly as possible and forget, as soon as I could, that I’d ever been there. First I had to resolve the problem with the writer and then with Auntie, who would use the occasion to work her maxim – in this house you must finish your food and at the end wipe up the plate with your bread! – into a short drama.

  This is what happened. Auntie had a scene prepared for everyone present.

  First she pretended to be strict, saying I wouldn’t be allowed to leave until I had eaten everything. And it wasn’t just me who couldn’t leave but all these other people too, who had to go to work or get home to their wives and children, and she took her keys from her apron and went toward the door, pretending she was going to lock it.

  Of course, as appropriate to the joke, everyone present joined in.

  And everyone suddenly recognized me, in a very intimate manner.

  I would never be a foreigner in this city, even once I had turned into the worst sort of tourist and Sarajevo belonged less to me than to any old American or Iranian, whom Sarajevans greeted with open hearts.

  After that first onslaught, which was filled with scolding, she said, You’re going to wipe your plate, or I’m not Auntie. You will, by God, or we’re not getting out of here!

  Zagreb has spoiled you. You’ve lost the taste for homemade food. You just eat crackers, caviar, and steaks there! The final three words she pronounced in a fidgety voice, tilting her head to one side, and blinking, which provoked the loud laughter of those present, including my friend the writer. He seemed to be brimming with pride that he had brought me to this place. Later he said something to me about writers who write about Sarajevo but who don’t really even know the place. It seemed to me he had in mind all those who had never been to Auntie’s Place.

  Besides laughing, they continued to heckle me – God, I thought, am I going to get out of here alive? – and all my efforts to get out of it were futile. I answered some of them with jokes of my own, insulted Zagreb and the people I now lived with. I changed my accent and intonation, spoke as I never would have, in the manner of a Sarajevo lug, the worst actor in the most trivial TV serial, a Sarajevan trying to charm a Zagreb audience, but all of it was futile.

  I was not theirs. They were demonstrating their hospitality to me. And they were doing it much more sincerely and resolutely than they would have with a real Zagreb native.

  In the end she grew sad, so horrible was the insult to her that I had not eaten more than ten spoonsfuls of her famous beans. The chorus took this up with zeal, laughing and trying to persuade me to eat my beans, not deliver this slap to Auntie’s face, at least finish half my plate, which she then took away, insulted, taking hold of my spoon in front of me and, in a single hysterical swoop, spraying me with drops of the undevoured bean soup. This too ended up provoking loud laughter from the others. My friend laughed too. Let her bathe me in her greasy, pork soup, then bake me in her moussaka, then plaster me with puree and spread feathers all over me, just get me out of here as soon as possible.

  For years after I avoided that little street. Then once I had to go by it because I was with friends who had come to Sarajevo for the film festival, the editor Goran Rušinović and his wife Olga, and it would have been hard for me to explain why I never took that particular street, but all my fears turned out to be groundless. Auntie’s Place no longer existed. No other establishment had opened in its place. The dusty door was padlocked shut, one of its two windows broken, and a light rectangular space appeared on the facade where the old business’s name had once been displayed.

  But all these were just Sarajevo travel notes, mementos, and memorabilia whose only purpose was to warm me up a bit, for it was getting colder as the morning came closer, and to shorten the time of my loitering around town, since I couldn’t go back to the hotel room. It was hot as hell there and ugly thoughts kept catching me up, the fears of what would happen in the coming days and months as my mother began to die taking hold, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking them, so I walked and thought of other things, waiting for the morning, when I would visit her once more before getting into my car and heading for Zagreb.

  Zagreb was so distant and beautiful, pleasantly foreign, as I thought about it on that little Prote Bakovića Street, just before morning on November 9th, 2012. And it seemed to me I’d never get back there. This scared me but still more filled me with grief. I was trapped in this city, this place within the narrow valley, which wrapped itself tight around my shoulders, and I’d never be able to escape.

  I cried out but no one could hear me. I called out again, but no one was there, as though I were screaming in a dream and couldn’t manage to wake up.

  I’d been wrong to let Jahja go as I had. And to allow them to steal his photograph of Kranjčević being lowered into the grave from me. If he turned up, I wouldn’t be able to show it to him. He’d think I had thrown it away. He might get angry. And now it seemed to me – suddenly I had an awful headache – that he was the only one who could help. If I had listened to him, maybe if I’d written down all he had wanted to tell me about the poet’s life, perhaps he could have helped me get out of this town somehow, save myself if salvation was still possible.

  I was going to cry out again.

  As I cried out, calling Jahja, Jah-jaaaaa, Jah-jaaaaa, Jah-jaaaaa, like some sort of Turkish astronomer keeping vigil in the dead of night as word spread among the shops, mutely carried from one ear to the next, that the sultan had poisoned his own two sons so he could remain on the throne, and again I shouted Jah-jaaaaaa, Jah-jaaaaaa, Jah-jaaaaaaa, suddenly, from Sarači, on the little Prote Bakavića Street, two police officers showed up. As if I’d been calling them. The first people I had met on the street all night.

  Fear took hold of me, and the moment they identified the source of the shouting, they increased their speed, the one on the left, the stockier one, automatically reaching for his baton. This was a warning, or a vocational bias: the moment you catch sight of a living creature in the middle of the night, roaring his head off no less, you go for your baton to get him to understand who and what you are.

  “Your documents, sir!” says the fat one.

  I take my Croatian passport from my inside jacket pocket. I could show my Bosnian identity card, but this is better.

  “Miljenko, father’s name!”

  “Dobroslav.”

  “Mr. Miljenko, do you know what time it is?”

  My watch has stopped. I look for my phone in my pockets…

  “It’s past three o’clock, and you, sir, are yelling. People are sleeping, Mr. Miljenko, while you’re shouting. That is not right.”

  “I know. It isn’t!”

  “Then why are you doing it? Why aren’t you in your bed sleeping like all respectable people?”

  Confused, I don’t know what to answer. Whatever I put together is likely to be more believable than the truth. But I can’t call to mind a single lie.

  I’m silent for a little bit.

  He looks me right in the eyes. This is probably something they taught him. It’s in the eyes one can detect a lie the quickest. And it’s not easy to come up with something when somebody’s staring at you like that.

  “It’s hot in my room.”
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  “Pardon?”

  “I said it’s hot in my room, so I can’t sleep.”

  “So it wouldn’t be bad to open a window then!” says the other one, who’s older and skinnier, upon which his colleague shoots him a look.

  “What is all this stupidity?”

  “The heater can’t be shut off, and it’s cold when the window’s open.”

  “You’re sleeping at a hotel!” asks the fat one in sincere bewilderment. “But why aren’t you at home? Aren’t you that writer from Sarajevo?”

  “Yes. My mother’s dying. There’s no space in her house.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry,” says the policeman sadly. “How old is she?”

  “Seventy.”

  “Not that old. God I’m really sorry. So you’re staying at a hotel tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why? You should be staying with a friend so you won’t be alone.”

  I shrug. Again I don’t know what to come up with. Even if I wanted to tell the truth to this stranger, I have no idea what the truth would sound like. Here I am imagining myself in an apartment on the sixth floor of a building on Alipašino polje. I’m lying in a child’s bedroom, in the upper bunk; I can’t reach the floor, but it’s okay because I’m with friends. Men’s checkered slippers on the linoleum flooring, with the design of a small town on it with streets for toy cars. The slippers smell of feet. The feet of someone no longer alive or who’s off in North America – still on the other side of the grave – and the only thing left behind is that sickly indelible foot odor.

  The silence was going on for too long, or the policeman had felt ashamed of his sentimentality. He turned quickly serious, handed me my passport, and said:

  “Fine, sir. This is life. We all know it. A living torment. But you can’t go around shouting and waking people up, sir. That, sir, is not right!”