Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  It suddenly seemed to him that he too could no longer dream. All he wanted was to stay at Blind Marica’s, to have barley porridge brought to him every day, and to let that porridge finally become his name, heritage, and homeland. And then to die and be buried in this town at the edge of the eastern tip of the West. His whole life had been flight – one long flight – and he couldn’t even remember what he was fleeing from, how all this began, why he had left Venice or why he had fled all the way to Istanbul.

  Later, that Sunday, Botta would appear and look at him without uttering a word. Sarchione would recognize the man’s professional doubt in that glance of his, because he had received an answer to the important question of why Sarchione had said life was one long flight, and at that moment everything would become easier for him, everything would again begin to make sense.

  Morose and cold, Botta left the room, and the old woman who kept order in the life of the inn, who was perhaps blind Marica, was waiting for him:

  “Is the lord going to die? Shall we call the reverend to confess him?”

  “No,” he answered abruptly. “He’s a Turk!”

  She went back into the kitchen, swinging her head left and right as if her neck was dislocated or she just couldn’t figure out what it was about being a Turk that meant the reverend should be turned away when the reverend could help him, however much of a Turk he might be. Then she remembered and ran back:

  “Shall we make him some chicken soup?”

  Ganimed slept like a slaughtered man, in a deep, rich feather bed prepared just for him. The rest, including Botta and Sarchione, slept on ordinary army straw, but for him, as a special guest, the feather bed had been prepared that was kept, cleaned, and aired out in case one day, God willing, some Viennese prince or Pest count might stop at Blind Marica’s. As it had been decades since any prince had been to Zagreb, let alone to their inn, they made use of the occasion to offer the feather bed to a guest worthy of such attention. And Ganimed appeared to be just such a personage: handsome and slender, with a lofty bearing like some Russian princeling. The truth was that the old woman and her young valet, with a mustache like that of the most refined postman, had not accorded this honor because of Ganimed but more for themselves and the story that they would tell for a long time thereafter, and which they would continue to live off until an actual prince might come, about the youth who was so handsome one could not look away.

  He really did sleep “like a slaughtered man.” The valet, who had learned this strange local expression, told him he would sleep precisely so in their bed of goose down. Botta translated his words calmly. Ganimed was shocked, but this served as the inspiration for his self-portrait, surely the best known of Ganimed Troyanovsky’s drawings that have been preserved and about which we should say several words here, for later there will not be time.

  The painting Self-Portrait with a Slit Throat was kept in the permanent exhibit of the Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina until the war. For financial reasons, or as a consequence of the lack of public interest in art, the permanent exhibit was never shown in its entirety again after the war, and the gallery closed for good in 2012. Self-Portrait with a Slit Throat was kept all this time in a gallery storeroom and only displayed on two occasions to the public over the last twenty years. The first time was immediately after the war, in 1996, at the exhibit The Free-hand Sketch – Drawn and Painted Works of Well-Known Architects, which was held in Paris’s Museum of Architecture, and the second was when it was included in a small 2005 display of Ganimed Troyanovsky’s works in the foyer of the Vienna Opera House on the occasion of the building’s construction.

  Self-Portrait with a Slit Throat is one of Ganimed’s most elaborate paintings, with a multitude of details amid the five colors of the brush strokes and a slight watercolor overlay. The setting is a hotel room interior where a roughhewn wooden bed stands with a rich coverlet and a slightly oversized pillow. Under the bed is a ceramic chamber pot with a floral motif, and on the wall above the bed hangs a holy picture of the God Mother with her child. A spider’s web sits in the corner of the room, with a spider spinning a new strand. The door looks to be rotting and has a heavy rusted handle and lock. The wooden floor is also brilliantly depicted, with recesses and exposed portions in the middle of the room.

  Architects sometimes have difficulty with painterly perspective but Ganimed Troyanovsky was a complete exception in this regard. In his Self-Portrait with a Slit Throat, the space of the room, the distance of the objects from one another, the depth of perspective, are rendered with almost hyperrealistic imagination and classical drawing skill. It is truly the sort of “freehand sketch” the French curators had in mind when they selected it for their exhibit, despite the difficulty of getting access to it, for the preparations for the exhibit were undertaken during the siege of Sarajevo, when it was impossible to know with certainty whether the Self-Portrait with a Slit Throat even still existed. Ganimed’s piece, however, ended up on the official poster for the exhibit.

  On the bed lies a figure in striped silk pajamas with a quilt covering him to halfway across his chest. The expression on the face is gentle, slightly smiling, as if he might be dreaming of something, and the man’s neck is slit open. This is Ganimed. His face is sketched very carefully and precisely, if slightly egotistically. If we compare this portrait with the two preserved daguerreotype images of Ganimed Troyanovsky, we see the same face, sketched with almost virtuoso accuracy but with one rather astounding defect. It is as if the sketch artist saw himself with a woman’s face. It is known to happen that particularly attractive men, especially in their youth, have girlish faces. But such was not the case here: in the daguerreotypes Ganimed is exceptionally attractive but in a quite masculine manner. He seems, however, to have seen himself differently.

  The neck has been cut as in anatomical manuals or crime dramas of today, in a very scholarly manner and without imagining anything that might be unknown to the painter. Quite simply he must have known in actuality what a slit throat looked like in order to sketch it the way he had. Somewhere he must have seen this.

  And the most mysterious thing about the picture is that it’s simultaneously ghastly and attractive, almost erotic: there is not a single drop of blood in the picture. Everything is perfectly clean. The viewer is at first bewildered, wondering where all that blood could have ended up, and then understanding what the Belgrade painter and art critic Marko Čelibonović so brilliantly explained when, writing about the Self-Portrait with a Slit Throat, he put forth the storyteller’s hypothesis that it was actually “a satirical illustration of a certain Serbian or Serbo-Croatian expression: to sleep like a slaughtered man.” Ganimed Troyanovsky must have heard it on his way to Sarajevo and been so pleased that he had decided to construct a self-portrait from it. When this Čelibonović wrote his piece, it was the dark and difficult year of 1948 in Yugoslavia, and no one really took it seriously, but because he was a Jew and a true-believing revolutionary, it had been allowed.

  This is the only self-portrait in Ganimed Troyanovsky’s oeuvre. It is known he had it in his portfolio when he arrived in Sarajevo. They had hidden it away from Omar Pasha Latas before Ganimed showed him the pictures from his journey. They couldn’t even imagine what the pasha might say about this drawing, and Sarchione had decided it should not be shown to Latas. Botta supported his decision. He already thought the Self-Portrait with a Slit Throat was a bizarre work, living proof that Ganimed Troyanovsky needed to be shut away in a madhouse before he killed someone. Most likely himself.

  When the caravan set out from Zagreb, Sarchione’s dark thoughts and listlessness began to pass, and when the city had disappeared completely, and the tops of Medvednica – the small mountain range on the other side of Zagreb to which the people had given such a big-sounding, serious name, as if to frighten themselves with – could no longer be seen, Sarchione was reborn, he told stories about everyone and everything.

  S
oon they had crossed the Sava by ferry near Gradiška, the buds were emerging all around, the nights were no longer cold, and there was no more morning frost. Nature was coming alive again in anticipation of the guests from the West, charming little towns with white minarets in the center alternated with Christian, Catholic, and Orthodox villages, low and compact, and a third kind of place, the strangest of all, villages and towns where it was impossible to know whether they were Muslim or Christian for they had both a minaret and a church, and the population mixed along the streets and alleys as if they were not even each other’s enemies. Nowhere were there visible traces of the rebellions for which Omar Pasha Latas had come to Bosnia. It was as if war had not touched them. Instead all was gentle, naïve, lovely, exactly as a European traveler might have desired as he set off into the Orient.

  While they were obviously distrustful by nature, the local people seemed eager to convince the traveler of their meekness. The Turks, local Muslims with blond hair and blue eyes just like those of the Christians, wanted of course to show their hospitality and understanding of Western customs and manners. Someone had clearly told them this was necessary.

  The Christians, especially the Orthodox ones, who called themselves Serbs and people of the Krajina, were equally sincere about wishing to show the foreigner that this land was not so meek at all. There was no freedom here, they said, clenching their fists. But when you asked them what freedom was, what they understood by freedom, they either didn’t know what to say or told you freedom was when there weren’t any Turks. They were clearly prepared to die for this freedom, but the uprising that had begun in Bosnia had by-passed them. A good portion of them disagreed, however, for the authorities in Constantinople, under the pressure of modernization and reform inside the kingdom, were offering the Christians of Bosnia rights they had not had before…

  Ganimed Troyanovsky listened to Sarchione as he spoke about this, meeting and shaking hands with the local Muslims and Christians wherever he had the opportunity, and he quickly forgot about his homesickness and the torments this journey had long presented to him, and all traces of the fever from which he had suffered and almost died were long gone.

  In the course of just a few days, he had fallen in love with this land. But perhaps this is not something that should be mentioned. This sort of thing had happened to other travelers in Bosnia too, or such were the inventions of weak writers and loud traders who believed in the sentiment that somehow it became a commonplace that anyone who stepped foot across the Sava fell in love with Bosnia and its people. But this is not true. More numerous were those who ran away and never wanted to be reminded of this land again. Ganimed was not one of those.

  Whether because of Sarchione’s lessons and stories about Bosnian history and the character of the local inhabitants, or because of the conversations with people and the imbibing of šljivovica, the smoking of good Macedonian opium, and sprees in roadside Krajina inns and taverns, Ganimed painted only two pictures between there and Sarajevo. These are the prized Vrbas River Triptych, in which depictions of the Banja Luka market on a fair day, the Plitva waterfall in Jajce, and the little church in Podmilačje come together, and which is the property of the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Italo Svevo wrote about the Vrbas River Triptych, a little before his death, in the essay “What the Young Man Saw When He Looked in the Water,” which some literary theorists consider the introduction to an unwritten novel that had to have been a sort of continuation of The Confessions of Zeno. Svevo describes Ganimed’s sketches in great detail, examining them as a narrative whole, a peculiar form of comic, but as he not once mentions the artist’s name or hints at whose works are in question or where he saw them, it was long supposed that he had a fictional text in mind, which is to say that the author invented both the drawings and the artist, “a youth with an irresistible appearance, fragile and lithe, like a forest animal whose beauty belonged to the sex from which the eyes looked out.” Besides the fact that the painterly depictions rather precisely correspond to what is found in Ganimed’s work, Svevo writes of the artistic discovery of the journey through Bosnia, “a primitive Oriental land in which human passions heave, nothing is known of its true character or heritage, and human eccentricity, every corporeally expressed love, is paid for by death, inquisitional burnings at the stake, or wooden Ottoman stakes greased with animal fat.” On this journey, writes Svevo, the artist discovers that “woman’s beauty is like an empty walnut husk” and that he is more drawn to the “young ephebe, Roman, or Turkish, a dirt-streaked little boy.” Svevo’s invectives against Ganimed’s homosexuality, prompted in all probability by the author’s psychoanalytic obsessions, are actually not borne out by other sources and must be taken in the framework of a literary reinterpretation, especially if it is true that the prose work “What the Young Man Saw When He Looked in the Water” was to be a continuation of the psychoanalytic duology begun in The Confessions of Zeno.

  Ganimed Troyanovsky arrived in Sarajevo at the end of April 1851. Omar Pasha Latas was not in the city, having gone on one of his disciplinary trips through Bosnia, so he probably first met the young architect on the first or second day of May.

  Sarchione accompanied Ganimed to Latas, then, after a short, formal exchange, withdrew from the pasha’s chambers under the pretext of having some important work that could not be delayed. It was important for the two of them to get a feel for each other.

  In this first meeting between Omar Pasha Latas and the architect who would design the Sarajevo opera house there was one additional mystery. They met, according to Sarchione’s account, “at the noon hour,” during a short official ceremony, which was supposed to show the young artist that he was being welcomed according to the state and kingdom’s honors delegated from the Sublime Porte. All the pasha’s military and civilian aides took part in the ceremony, lined up and ordered according to the strict hierarchies of the regime.

  If Ganimed Troyanovsky met Latas on the first of May around noon, the event would not lie outside the normal framework for procedures of the Ottoman empire of the mid-nineteenth century. Besides being a hardened soldier, a fierce Krajina Serb, a convert repulsed by the backwardness and inconstancy of the Bosnian begs, Latas had artistic ambitions. He wanted to appear before Paris and also be remembered in Istanbul and in Bosnia as the person who had brought the first piano to Sarajevo. He had convinced Sultan Abdulmedjid to construct the first opera house of the Ottoman empire in Sarajevo, as a symbol of modernization and transformation, but also the acceptance of Western culture and manners, which the kingdom would adopt to the character of the Orient without holding back its own importance and presence in Europe. Centuries later they would speak of Istanbul’s desperate attempt to halt the Habsburg incursion into the East and its occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by means of the opera, but there is some question about how much this was due to desperation and how much to Latas’s brilliance.

  If this meeting took place on Thursday, May 1, 1851, there would be no great surprise or possible scandal.

  But if Latas hosted Ganimed on Friday, May 2, “at the noon hour,” then something happened that was at the very least unusual: the state ceremony was ordered to take place during prayer time, when all Muslims would have been at the weekly public worship, except those with a reasonable excuse. And the arrival in town of a French architect was on its own not a reasonable excuse for not going to mosque. Not only would Latas not have gone to prayer – it is unknown whether the serasker did this under normal circumstances or whether he justified his absence because of his military duties – none of the others in his administration would have gone either.

  At first glance, it seems likely that the meeting took place on Thursday, May 1. But why is there doubt only concerning this date when all the others during Latas’s stay in Bosnia are securely documented in books and in the registries? How is it possible that already by the end of 1851, in the chronicles, court documents, memoranda, and Istanbul fiscal records,
Omar Pasha Latas is noted to have met the Parisian architect Ganimed Troyanovsky on either the first or second of May of the year just ending? Because it was truly unclear which date it was, or because the intention was to conceal the fact that Latas had arranged for the ceremony to take place during prayers?

  In all probability, therefore, Omar Pasha Latas and Ganimed Troyanovsky met on Friday, May 2, 1851, just after noon. Neither the chroniclers nor the other record keepers desired to pass over this circumstance in silence. They formulated it so that no religious or secular censure, basic human consideration, or sense of decorum could do anything more than sidestep and conceal it.

  No one knows what they spoke about after the short ceremony, when they were left alone. Ganimed was silent on this score. He wrote nothing about it in his journals or reminiscences of Bosnia, nor do we find any testimonials of his friendship with the Turkish pasha in the rich correspondence he carried on, in old age, with the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, at the turn of the century.

  Sarchione asked both of them, but in vain. What they spoke about is unknown. They could have spoken of anything, but the most likely thing was drawing, for that was the art Latas was most familiar with. After all, it was through drawing that he had come to Istanbul, a military career, and a marshal’s honor, but it was skill in drawing, said Sarchione, that forever remained his one unrealized desire. He had not wanted to be a soldier or politician. It had not been his wish to drive the Bosnian begs into the darkness, to save the kingdom, to be remembered as the man who never laughed, the dreamer who was ashamed of his imagination and wanted instead to be a calligrapher and sketch artist even if it meant living humbly and anonymously. But if it was possible for a Christian peasant from the kingdom’s border to become a marshal in the Ottoman empire, one of the last great military leaders of a foregone age, there was no way for such a person to become a humble Parisian painter, a Constantinople calligrapher, or even a sign painter.