Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  As he listened to him, Botta was again suspicious. The Turks in the escort were laughing because the youth was narrating in a very funny way, waving his arms about like a woman tossing pita dough into the air, and Sarchione was watching him with enthusiasm, his mouth open in surprise while tears were rolling down his cheeks turning to ice halfway down and ringing onto his shoulders like tiny crystals.

  Botta thought it must all be true. The young man looked crazy but wasn’t making anything up. Who could have invented such a story about Christ screaming on the cross because his right hand had come free and he was using it to call to his heavenly father?

  He took the paper out of his pocket and secretly read it again:

  “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.”

  It was nighttime on Golgotha, Ganimed continued, and the caretakers were trying to get some sleep. But how could they fall asleep when the wretch kept screaming? Well, if there were a ladder, somebody could climb up and nail the young man’s right hand to the cross again. But where were they going to find a ladder at that time of night?

  Botta was sweating in discomfort, though the temperature was twenty degrees below zero and a cold north wind blew against his back as they made their way down the mountains. The Turks kept laughing like imbeciles. They were enjoying the story and saw in it the crucifixion of an infidel, who had suffered and to whom something horrible had happened, something that would certainly change the history of European civilization and would of course be good for Islam too, the one just and true faith, and for Istanbul, and for the glorious empire, and the infidel’s god would no longer be God. Bad luck, friend, it was bad luck for sure, but he could not be God. Bad luck was humanity’s wont and fate, at least for those who were sincere, profound unbelievers in the one true God, Allah the Almighty…

  What was just a comedy to the Turks in the escort, to the two Venetians was a wonder.

  The difference was not a matter of faith, place of birth, or outlook on life. The difference was simply that the Turks were illiterate. Or they just barely managed to scratch out the serpentine lines of Arabic symbols, which under their harsh pens turned into the gnarled roots of olive trees. They found it all funny because they remained at the gates of Ganimed’s stories. They understood Sarchione, but the young man not at all.

  And so, in the stories and amid their wonder, they descended toward the Slovene river valleys. Their crossing of the Alps had been aided by Ganimed’s fantastic stories, making it easier and more enjoyable than it would have been. All told, the frost had taken twelve toes from the escort. Mula the wrestler had expertly chopped off each one, applying a single blow with his heavy Gibraltar knife. The man would moan, the blackened toe would fly off into the weeds, the wound would be cauterized with a hot iron, and it would be over.

  The view was magnificent.

  Hillocks lit up by the spring sunshine – it was so warm that they cast off their peasant coats and shirts and made their way half-naked beside the coaches – and at the top of each hill a humble little church rose up, or a military outpost from some distant time. Everything was filled with light, the bustle, babble, and squeak of carts burst from every direction. It was a trading day. Some were rushing toward the market while others were returning home with their goods.

  The column, which had provoked curiosity and fear wherever it had appeared from Paris through Belgium and the German lands, here went almost unnoticed. The local population, which communicated among themselves in a variety of Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages, seemed accustomed to Turkish caravans.

  Sarchione would ask people questions, buy a rooster, a basket of mushrooms, a sack of shriveled apples that had spent the winter in someone’s potato cellar, a round of cheese, or he would just loudly compliment someone on his horse or ox in the local Slavic tongue, which he used quite well.

  Sarchione was trying to free himself from some of his own fears, but he wasn’t able to attract the attention of the locals either through his aggressive friendliness or his somewhat crackbrained need to purchase something from everyone. They weren’t even surprised by him. They would laugh rather absentmindedly, their rosy faces and hair the color of corn stubble giving them the appearance of heroes from a Russian fairy tale. He’d seen them before, having had contact with Slovenes in Venice and having traded with them in Trieste, and even in Istanbul he’d met a tanner who was originally from Maribor, but after the long, difficult passage across the Alps he was now seeing them in a different light.

  But for Ganimed Troyanovsky they were a completely new people. Turks and Arabs he knew, having met them in Paris or seen them in book illustrations or pictures and drawings displayed in the city’s museums, but Slovenes or Southern Slavs in general he had never encountered.

  He thought they were some sort of distant relations and went to his chest to take out his drawing pad, ink bottles of ten different shades, and brushes. What he sketched on the road from Maribor to Varaždin and Zagreb, five urban and pastoral vedutas, which he composed during stops at beer halls, inns, and basement shelters, as well as seven undulating virtuoso sketches in various hues of Indian ink, composed as the coach was moving, are today part of the collection of graphic arts in Zagreb’s university library. They turned up completely by accident at the end of August 1992 on a heap of rotting furniture and assorted garbage before the removal of a load of waste. They were found in an old gray portfolio, ninety by seventy-five centimeters, which had been placed inside on an old Obodin washing machine from which someone had removed the drum. The portfolio appeared to have belonged to Anastas Popović, an eighty-five year old retired graphic artist, for on the cover were several sketches of the Arslanagića Bridge in Trebinje. Himself from Trebinje, Popović recognized one of the symbols of his native city and took the portfolio.

  Popović took the drawings to be inspected by the poet and art historian Y. R., a close associate of President Tuđman and an advisor to him on Croatian cultural matters. Y. R. first offered to buy all twelve sketches for the sum of three hundred German marks, only to then withdraw his offer. When Antastas Popović asked for the drawings back, Y. R., according to the story in the weekly Globus, told him the drawings were a Croatian national treasure and as a Serb he might have problems were it to become known that they were in his care. In any case, he would have to explain to the police how they had come into his possession and who had given them to him.

  “I found them in the garbage!” the old man supposedly wailed.

  “No one will believe you,” Y. R. answered calmly.

  The gray portfolio with the sketches of Trebinje’s Arslanagića Bridge remained with Popović. He was apparently ashamed of the ugly sketches on the outside. Until the old man’s death, in January 1994, the portfolio stood in his living room, by the Gorenje television set.

  The exhibit Twelve Sketches by Ganimed Troyanovsky was held in the Arts Pavilion in October 1993, while Popović was still alive. At the opening, which was attended by the president of the country, Y. R. delivered a talk in which he revealed to the Croatian public these heretofore unknown works of the famous Parisian architect. The story resembled a scintillating spy thriller worthy of a Croatian Le Carré, which featured, besides Y. R., a beautiful young woman, a colonel in the Croatian navy who had once worked for the security services of the Yugoslav armed forces, an art professor in Belgrade, and an Orthodox bishop. In the story, which today in Croatia is considered the official version of the events in question, Y. R. actually traded for the drawings, yielding to the enemy side three less valuable Orthodox icons of the Greek seventeenth-century school, which they maintained had been stolen from the Nikolajevska Church in Zemun during the Second World War.

  After the Zagreb exhibit, Ganimed’s twelve drawings were displayed in Vienna, Berlin,
during the Croatian Culture Days in Germany, and Y. R. wrote a book about them entitled The View from the Carriage: A European’s Meditations in Ink, in which, as one inspired Vjesnik art critic put it, “he deconstructed each drawing, pulling apart the lines that had been assembled by the hand of the brilliant Parisian, analyzed each sketch, and then put the entire painting back together again, as if he were reassembling a perfect Swiss watch, which ran much better now that it had passed before the expert’s eye.”

  They stayed in Zagreb for more than a day.

  The group arrived in the late afternoon on Saturday and settled at the “Blind Marica” inn, which was located at the base of the Gornji Grad, near today’s Tkalčićeva Street. They were intending to continue their journey first thing in the morning but changed their minds when Sarchione was taken with a sudden ill humor or an attack of weakness and listlessness. He said he had shooting pains in his fingers, which was of course reason enough not to go on, but he was suffering from something else, worse than a heart attack – what happened to you when a marble slab sat on your chest, as he explained to them – he just did not feel like going on. But it wasn’t as if he did not feel like traveling that day or the next or on Monday, it was some misgiving that had taken hold of him about any movement at all. The best would be to stay here at Blind Marica’s with its rotten straw mattresses rather than ever have to go anywhere again. He did not know anyone in Zagreb, though he had passed through this town, this German island surrounded by Slavic tribes on the edge of Pannonia, at least twenty times, nor did he have any desire to meet anyone here. He would just be here and not go anywhere else, his flight having been stopped at last.

  Life is just one long flight! he said with a sigh.

  Botta glanced at him in alarm but said nothing. He left his room and went out of the building into the night air. From far off came the stench of the sewer that flowed like an open stream. The smell of a western trading post on the way to becoming a city. At one point, when all the great kingdoms had fallen, and they would, when Vienna and Rome and Istanbul were no more, then these trading towns would rise up, transformed into metropolises, but before their greatness could be known there would be this smell of open sewers, by which one could tell the difference between western and eastern capitals. In the East it stank differently. The cities stank differently there. Of burnt oil and human sweat, of the sulfur of millions of rotten eggs, of gunpowder, of sheep’s fat and the decaying innards of dead animals, of rotten onions and potatoes, of scalded milk, of meat roasted on countless fires, of human and animal shit, and of the sewers of course, but all these stenches mixed at every moment, competing and outdoing each other, changing places as the winds changed direction or as the pedestrian moved from one to another part of town. This was how it was in the East. In the West it was just the monotonous stench of sewage. It was as if the entire Western world boiled down to shit and was transformed into a single, collective, all-penetrating stench, into which all the individual stenches had been united until they could no longer be distinguished, those of all the city’s inhabitants, believers and nonbelievers, victims and their killers, the fishermen of human souls, church pastors, bishops, and drunken family men, and all the nameless, invisible creators of God, chance passersby, wanderers, the poverty stricken, escapees from who knew what or whose law and who had eased their troubles in the Roman sewers and taken on that great, invincible, unifying stench of the Western world.

  This was why the West would triumph one day, thought Botta restlessly, this most skilled cutthroat of the disappearing Eastern kingdom, invisible to all his opponents and to history, absent even to the most famous Bosnian storyteller Ivo Andrić, who in the last ten years of his life, nostalgic for olden times, would write his great novel of Omar Pasha Latas. However much the great writer searched, the executioner remained invisible and nameless to him. Andrić sensed an emptiness in his place, which tormented him and which he tried to fill with other figures, but it was all in vain. This was why Ivo Andrić never finished his novel about Sarajevo.

  Then it occurred to Botta: so what was it Sarchione was thinking of when he said life was one long flight? What was he fleeing from? And the moment he began turning this over in his mind, Botta again felt well.

  The next morning, as Sarchione wanted to be left in bed because the heavy stone tablet was lying across his chest, the rest of the caravan set off to wander about Zagreb.

  The Turks from the escort, wearing turbans, which they otherwise did not put on, and with antique pistols and curved knives in their colorful belts, which they also never wore, set out into the surroundings of the small town. Perhaps they didn’t want to disappoint the round housewives who peeked out from behind heavy curtains, sheltering their children’s eyes, or their proud husbands, small and swaggering, with the mustachios of hussars, everywhere prepared for a fight, or maybe it pleased them every once in a while to look exactly like these people imagined they looked, like merciless Turks, ready for every evil. In Paris, and down through the Germanic lands, this had long since lost all meaning: they’d had their fill of seeing Turks, more in pictures than in real life, and their turbans and yataghans were no longer wonders for them, but here in Zagreb, the people did not cease to marvel. It was as if every morning they saw the world for the first time.

  Ganimed Troyanovsky carried his sketch block under his arm while behind him, three steps back, followed the faithful Jusuf with the little case containing his ink bottles in all the different colors and his gold and silver brushes.

  The youth sketched the whole day long, from the moment the people entered church during Sunday mass until the hour of taps’ sounding, when the little town without street lights slipped into darkness. According to Sarchione’s journal and according to the estimates of those experts who have tried to calculate how much time Ganimed would have needed for each sketch, he spent between six and twenty hours on every Zagreb drawing and veduta. Not one has been preserved. Either they were destroyed or they were lost amid the clutter of the Parisian archives and libraries from which for more than a century the sketches of the ballet dancer and architect Ganimed Troyanovsky’s eastern travels, which extended all the way to Baghdad and Samarkand, had emerged with an almost regular temporal rhythm. It is possible that some of the sketches had been among the holdings of the National and University Library in Sarajevo, which was burned down during the Serbian bombardment in August 1992, the small but quite valuable graphics collection going with it. According to the testimonial of the last prewar director, Borivoje Pištalo, two lesser Ganimed sketches had been contained in the collection, a rough draft of the Kovači neighborhood and a very careful, detailed drawing of the interior of a Sarajevo bakery, but Pištalo noted that he personally had never been responsible for the graphics collection or its inventory, so it was entirely possible that there had been many more Ganimed pieces in the collection. The curator who had been in charge of the collection and who had performed this work for twenty-five years, since 1967, escaped to Belgrade in the first days of the war, where he died in a home for the elderly and indigent at the beginning of 1994, before it had become possible to interview him and attempt to reconstruct the contents of the destroyed graphic arts collection. Today one can only speculate about its contents, and in Bosnia and the Balkans, we know, from speculation arise myths that grow to improbable dimensions, such that the time is not far away when an entire burned down Bosnian Louvre might emerge from the memory of the little graphic arts collection. It is better therefore not to mention the possibility that the lost Zagreb works of Ganimed Troyanovsky had been located here.

  Sarchione would not leave his bed for the whole day.

  They took him his lunch and dinner in bed. He would eat a few spoonfuls of the barley porridge, that hard-to-digest dish which Miroslav Krleža would turn seventy years later into a metaphor for Serbo-Croatian relations. The state in which Sarchione found himself would one day be called acute depression. It had come upon him q
uickly, the result of long years of having no particular home, of rootlessness and constant movement from one town to another, the pain of which he had tried to hide even from himself, the pain of not belonging anywhere, of being no one’s and, actually, no one. To everyone he knew and with whom he had easily become friends, and to the serasker himself, Sarchione was a story. He wasn’t even a storyteller, for that would have at least been a trade and a calling. He was a story whose ultimate meaning was to intoxicate and bedazzle his listeners but behind which there was nothing. Sarchione lasted for as long as his story did, and once his story ended, he was a layabout, an idler, a bum. No one needed him, no one expected anything good (or even bad) from him. He was tolerated, given food and drink only because people figured he might come around and start another story. He grew silent, like Jusuf and Mula, who were incapable of recounting even the shortest of tales they had heard in childhood, or of uttering the simplest of things about themselves: how they felt, what hurt, what they wanted, what they dreamed of. Or did they not dream?