Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Sarchione was amazed at this fury and wondered where it had come from and what was happening to Latas. Had this come with age? He had turned forty-two, his beard was going gray, his shoulders drooped, and he seemed to have somehow grown smaller – Sarchione was practically a head taller than him now while two years before they had seemed to be the same height. Perhaps this rage grew out of premature aging?

  Everything in a person needs to be in balance, the Ancient Greek and Eastern sages taught, in order for him to be fulfilled and happy. But in Latas, in contrast, everything was out of balance. He had strong poetic and artistic gifts, but still stronger shame with regard to dreaming and imagining what was not actual or true. He was the marshal of a grand army, admired in both Istanbul and Vienna – too bad for the Swabians that they had lost such a man! – but at home and in his heart: desolation! The unhappy Latas had neither a kitten nor a pup. Actually, Sarchione had never married either, but that was different. Neither women, nor family life, nor children had ever attracted him. If things had been different, he would have become a monk in Venice, and he would not have broken the vow of celibacy. He would have violated all the other religious and secular rules and restrictions at least once, but in terms of celibacy he would have remained innocent and pure. But what was for him torment and revulsion with regard to female inclination and the body, for Latas was a great, unfulfilled hunger. Yet another imbalance of the soul. This made most people unhappy, but him it made wrathful.

  While Eustachio Millas Sarchione’s name is largely omitted from Omar Pasha Latas’s biographies, probably for extraordinary and clandestine reasons, this was how his closest friend and secret confidant explained to himself Latas’s deep Bosnian fall. When the biographies do mention him, they mostly note that it was he who, during Latas’s military campaign across Bosnia, transported the first concert piano to Sarajevo.

  While we were spending a great deal of time describing the story of Sarchione and Latas, during the caravan’s trip across Bavaria nothing happened. Ganimed continued slowing down the journey, less with his capricious behavior and tears than with his consistent evening fever.

  And he showed no interest whatsoever in Sarchione’s stories. He seemed indifferent to music, and to poetry, and to the wonders of Arab calligraphy. In vain did the Venetian narrate his life’s story to the people of the caravan in such a way that Ganimed could hear. In vain did he weave such fantastic details into the story that had been unnecessary in Istanbul, when he told it to the beauties of the harem and to women of the court, intelligent and educated women saturated with great love stories and passionate human destinies, for that was all they had heard their whole lives, and he would more easily pull them into his tale than he could the handsome Ganimed Troyanovsky, who would either be weeping or trembling with fever, and showed not the slightest interest in the vision of little Sarchione gnawing on the bones of his dead brothers and sisters.

  It is no shame to invent! Sarchione said, somewhat insulted, in the middle of one of his tales that had fallen upon the deaf ears of the young man. Ganimed had been looking out the coach window at the clear day and the snow-capped peaks in the distance, sighing.

  The shame is when a man has to invent in order not to be burned at the stake or impaled!

  The youth had suddenly turned and for the first time looked him in the eyes: Do you think so?

  Yes, I do.

  From all that you told us, what was true and what was invented?

  How would I know that? asked Sarchione in surprise. I’ve been telling stories for thirty years, and for twenty-three I’ve been writing down what I tell, first in Latin, then in Arabic. If I once knew what the truth was, or what really happened, by now it’s been lost or mixed up together with what I invented.

  Have you entangled them, sir?

  I have not. What I want to say rather is that we invent our memories. Even the honorable serasker invents things and the shame torments him afterwards.

  What really happened?

  Nothing.

  And this, this isn’t happening? We’re not traveling?

  Sarchione shrugged and laughed:

  It’s not my place to tell you this. It would be improper.

  The next day they came upon the trading posts of the last little town in the valley. After that the road entered the mountains, and there began the most difficult, most unknown part of the journey, which they could have avoided if they’d traveled across Hungary. But this would have extended the journey, and neither Botta nor Sarchione wanted that. Besides, neither of them feared the mountains. (And if either of them did, he would not have shown it before the other.)

  Ganimed was in an unexpectedly good mood.

  He took Sarchione by the arm and babbled constantly, jumping from one subject to another, the violin makers of Cremona, the differences between maple wood and walnut, Goethe, Dante, and Shakespeare, how in the future all distinction between a king and his subjects would disappear, the medicinal characteristics of melancholy and how somewhere in the middle of the Carpathian mountains, a Romanian would be born to an Orthodox priest, and he would write the following sentence: “If it weren’t for melancholy, we would roast nightingales on a grill; it was just a shame we would not experience that moment since we would have all long since been dead by then.” Then he babbled about daguerreotypes, the newest Parisian invention, which stopped time and put all the reality taken in by the eye into a silver-copper plate, about how in the future people’s thoughts and then their persons would be imprinted on such plates whenever anyone grew tired of life and wanted to live in some other, distant future time, and also about how Russians were a bloodthirsty, sentimental lot, and they were more so in both domains than any other people, especially than those feather-brained Frenchmen obsessed with the pleasures of the flesh, and this was the main reason that the Russians, more precisely Grand Prince Vladimir, when selecting between Catholicism and Orthodoxy had chosen Orthodoxy, the most aesthetic and melodious variety of Christianity, to which he would add his own mystical Russian bloodthirstiness, and then he talked about a certain Jean Marais, who had murdered twenty-seven women in Lyons before he’d been caught, and then they had taken him to Paris to have his head chopped off with the Parisian guillotine, and Jean Marais had said he was satisfied because he had killed all those unfortunate women, then had seen Paris and died…

  Nearby, the scent of medicinal herbs wafted from the wooden tables, goat’s and cow’s milk was being poured out from buckets, the children, out of boredom, were wrapping their arms around the enormous rounds of cheese: in this little town within reach of the end of the world, a person who could wrap his arms around the cheese such that the tips of his middle fingers touched was considered a grown-up man.

  Old men with alpine caps followed the collection of unusual strangers with curious glances. The women wiped their palms on their aprons, their cheeks red as they tried to attract their attention, to get them to lower their glances to their wares. It was obvious that strangers were rare in these parts, that travelers and merchant caravans went around the Alps, most roads to the east cutting through Moravia and Slovakia, along the endless Hungarian lowlands. But these strangers, mustachioed Turks with long Turkish flintlocks and turbans, had been seen only in the illustrations of adventure novels. The least they could do was have a look at their cheeses, it wouldn’t cost them anything, and it would mean a lot to the local housewives.

  In a place no one visits, time moves slowly and life seems to last much longer. Every glance is important there, for a glance can be enough for the beginning of a folk legend.

  Botta stood next to a counter in the market, following the youth with his gaze. Regardless of the fact that he no longer left Sarchione’s side and Sarchione had taken him in hand, Botta kept to his job. After having been unobservant for an instant, he felt defeated and humiliated. He was trying, without success, to correct things and make up for his loss throug
h an exaggerated zeal. He was doing what all bad spies always do, and it would take another day on the road for Botta to return to being what he’d been in this story and what he was in the biography of Omar Pasha Latas: the greatest clandestine killer of the waning empire.

  This was why Sarchione had insisted on this apparently senseless walk. He was parading Ganimed by the arm in front of Botta’s eyes, and he was prepared to do so until evening or until the market closed, when the baffled old men and women ran back to their homes, considering whether it would be better if Turks came by every week or, perhaps, much better and safer if they never appeared again. To them, and to the greater part of the caravan, it was unclear what purpose this ceremony served. Why was Sarchione walking around with the youth, who was suddenly babbling as if he’d lost his mind after days of being closed up and self-centered? Why was Botta standing in one place all this time, not speaking to anyone, staring at the two of them, as if he were verifying his eyesight, checking whether he could make out three or all seven buttonholes on Ganimed’s shirt, or how many wrinkles were on Sarchione’s cheeks, those tiny wrinkles that came from worry and others that came from joy?

  It was a ceremony to cleanse the soul.

  First that of one person: the killer Botta, who did not take his eyes from the person he was supposed to be watching.

  Then that of another: the young Ganimed Troyanovsky, who had begun to speak about everything after weeks of melancholy, and for whom even the desire to return to Paris would soon evaporate, the pull to run back home rather than go to Bosnia, where he was drawn by the sweet, albeit quite masculine, compliments of a certain Turkish general.

  And then this stroll along the edge of the market was healing a third soul: Sarchione’s. He could at last be silent. He did not have to invent anything or tell any stories, for everything was now unfolding on its own.

  After a full two hours of going round and round the little market and squeezing by the little wooden tables, Ganimed ran out of topics or lost his breath from all the babbling.

  Shall we go? Botta asked.

  They did not answer, just headed obediently toward the coaches.

  The youth fell asleep the moment he dropped into his seat. Sarchione watched him for a little while longer, then pulled a little book from his coat pocket and plunged into an exciting novel titled Robinson Crusoe, a work by the English author Daniel Defoe. Usually on the road he carried philosophical books, Montaigne, or Dante, or Goethe, but now he was looking for something to entertain and rejuvenate him. And for some reason it seemed to him that a novel about a man who was the sole survivor of a shipwreck and lived by himself on an empty island and hunted and fished like people in the Stone Age was one that could return him to the years Ganimed was now experiencing.

  As the column was starting up the first rise, Sarchione had just got to the moment when the dark man Friday makes his appearance.

  At that point it stopped being a novel for children. In an instant the reader was doused with Latas’s shame. He remembered the reason Robinson Crusoe had set out on his journey. He looked at Ganimed, at that face of a young ephebe, and quickly shut the book. He heard the deep, warm smack of two, firmly bound sheets of printed paper, like a collision of known and unknown worlds.

  He had shut the book in such a way that he would not know his place, never intending to open it again.

  The journey across the Alps was riskier and harder than anyone could have imagined. The roads were frozen and snow swept, the wide royal byways turned into narrow paths, then into mountain trails, and then the trails disappeared and all around was a wilderness that frightened both the horses and the people. The former whinnied, the latter prayed to God or, if they did not believe in God, examined topographic maps. But cartography in this place and at this time of the year was less help to them than prayers.

  Ganimed, meanwhile, was calm. Surprisingly calm. To one of the porters, Jusuf from Anatolia, who spoke only Turkish, he explained that he shouldn’t worry about a thing because he had come upon a book in an antiquities shop in Paris, in which it was written how and when he would die. He wouldn’t tell him the date, for that was too intimate a thing to relate, but the place of his death was exactly 543 kilometers away from here, on a road that had not yet been constructed. So if Jusuf was afraid of dying, he should stay near Ganimed and he would be safe.

  He asked Botta to translate all this for the frightened porter. And also to emphasize that the store was called Minerva, that it was located on such and such a street in Montparnasse, and the book was located on the shelves to the right of the door as one entered, in the seventh row up from the floor. It was high, but the bookseller, whose name was Joseph Levy, would fetch a ladder so that he could verify for himself that on the seventy-eighth page on the twelfth line from the bottom was written the time and place of Ganimed Troyanovsky’s death, exactly as he had just said.

  Jusuf was illiterate, but he believed everything the young man said, and did not leave his side after that, until, with God’s help, through miracle and chance, they had broken through to the southern side of the Alps and begun to descend toward a valley.

  If it wasn’t surprising enough that Jusuf from Anatolia believed the unusual gentleman – how would the poor wretch not believe him when the glorious serasker believed him and had invited him to Sarajevo? – it seemed that even Botta believed the half-crazy story about the book in the Minerva antiquities store, despite the fact that he was professionally trained not to believe anything.

  Why did you return the book? Why didn’t you buy it since it contained something so important to you?

  Why should I buy it? Ganimed asked, surprised. It was easy to remember something as simple as the time and place of my death. Nothing else in the book was of interest to me. It would have just collected dust in my library.

  In the end he ordered Botta to write on a piece of paper for Jusuf:

  “Right shelf, seventh row up, book bound in red leather, without any writing on the spine, on the title page in Latin script the words Sarajevo Dogs, seventy-eighth page, twelfth line from the bottom.”

  When you’re in Paris the next time, and you surely will be on some errand of the state or your pasha, you can check to see whether the gentleman isn’t telling the truth. It does not bother Ganimed in the least that Jusuf might know the time and place of his death. No evil can come from knowledge. Perhaps the knowledge will make them like brothers.

  Jusuf held the little paper in his hand as if it contained a countercharm. It was the greatest valuable he had been given in his entire life. Though Ganimed’s spell was saving him from harm, Jusuf was actually of much greater use to Ganimed. He helped him, carried him on his back, used his shoulders to lift the coach out of the snow, warmed him from the snow and ice, finding nothing difficult. He believed in the gentleman’s immortality – or rather that his death was unfailingly intended for a distant future – but he was of constant help, as if it was the natural order that the strong should be of constant help to those who were more intelligent, especially if the more intelligent one was a lord.

  It was not just this untutored youth who believed in the existence of the book Sarajevo Dogs, in the seventh row from the floor on the right-hand shelf, in which was written the place and time of Ganimed Troyanovsky’s death. Botta did too. He went out to the coach and, from memory, which he had exercised in the spy schools of Venice and Istanbul, wrote down on the last page of Cervantes’s Don Quixote – a book he took with him on journeys for he believed it would bring him good fortune, though he never read it to the end – he wrote the words down:

  “Right shelf, seventh row up from the floor, book bound in red leather, without any writing on the spine, on the title page in Latin script the words Sarajevo Dogs, seventy-eighth page, twelfth line from the bottom.”

  Then he stopped and added:

  “Perhaps made up? If so, to what purpose?”

 
By contrast to Latas, who never realized his artistic talents – never wrote his novel of the Lika Krajina, his bildungsroman about the son of the Vidin captain and the young Abdulmedjid, to whom he had taught drawing – because he was ashamed of every kind of invention, more so than his own nakedness, Botta did not understand why people invented things. What for the lord was a source of creativity and a reason why he himself could not be an artist, for Botta was merely a possible means of enemy espionage or a symptom of a dangerous mental disturbance. Either Ganimed was a French spy or he had lost his marbles.

  From that moment he began to watch him even more attentively.

  And the young man, now buoyant, his fevers dissipating as the caravan descended lower in the Alps, as if he had forgotten about them, dreamed up new lies all the time. It was clear to everyone, even his faithful Jusuf, why he was doing this: he was not able to be of any help to them, he was physically weak and bungled every task, and what he could have done they wouldn’t let him, lest he injure himself, so he tried to be of use at least by entertaining them with his stories. Even Sarchione, the greatest master of storytelling, enjoyed them, for Ganimed’s tales fascinated him in that they contained not the slightest bit of truth. Everything was invented, and everything was actually impossible. This was something new for Sarchione. For every one of his own stories, even the greatest of fabrications, began from something that had actually happened. But in these tales everything was filled with ships that disappeared in the midst of a storm only to reappear with all their sailors on the Danube or the Caspian Sea. Libraries overflowed with various secrets, improbable details about what had yet to happen and impossible explanations about what had just occurred. And there was Ganimed’s tale of Jesus Christ, whose right hand had not been nailed well, the nail had loosened and fallen away, leaving the young man from Judea hanging by just one hand. He had screamed from the pain, called on his father to help him, deathly afraid, for as he was both man and God, he knew everything beforehand, and he clearly saw centuries and millennia into the future and the crosses on the walls of churches where a wooden figure that looked like him was attached, a mirror of his suffering. What happened? asked the horrified Christ. Why had one of his hands come free from the nail? What would happen to him next? Would he even be resurrected, and was he even the God-man, or was all this some sort of irreparable mistake? Perhaps his suffering was in vain.