Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Ganimed Troyanovsky remained in Sarajevo for half a year. He left the city and Bosnia behind in the middle of October. The caravan for Paris had fewer people in it, and Sarchione was not part of it. But for the youth’s security, Botta was the route commander. The return journey took nearly half as long. This was a rule: return, as a rule, took less time. No one knows, meanwhile, whether Botta visited the Minerva antiquities shop in Montparnasse to seek out the book bound in red leather, where it must have been written whether Ganimed was a fraud. If he did go there, he didn’t tell anyone. Today it is impossible to verify anything since Botta left no evidence that he had ever existed.

  In the course of six Sarajevo months Ganimed worked daily from dawn to dusk. He no longer laughed, babbled, drank, or smoked opium. He only worked with a group of designers and laborers, the best in Bosnia, assigned to him by Latas, to measure the land in Bistrik, perform excavation tests in order to verify, on both dry and rain-saturated days, whether the ground was stable enough, whether there would be danger of mud slides, whether underground water would be a threat, and how deep it would be necessary to dig so that the structure would be sound and solid.

  Ganimed was not present for the construction of the Sarajevo Opera, and at its opening in May 1870 neither he nor Latas would be there. The pasha’s life was nearing its end. He was ill in Istanbul after returning from Paris on his military mission, during which he had seen Ganimed Troyanovsky in public places – at the theater and in cafés – in Turkish garb, but the architect did not travel to Sarajevo for the opening of his first great building, curtly explaining that there was nothing familiar to him in the city anymore, and he would feel insecure among strangers.

  The Sarajevo Opera opened with a performance of Mozart’s Così fan tutte by a traveling troupe from Vienna. There is little record of the production, except that it was adapted for Turkish mores so as not to incite temptation. For Sarajevo society and Bosnia as a whole, opera alone must have been quite a wonder. All three hundred forty seats, as many places as there were in the parterre, the balcony, and the royal box – the so-called Sultan’s Box – were filled.

  It was the first and last opera performance in Ottoman Sarajevo. Ten years would pass before the next one. In that time, the kingdom would collapse, the Turks would prepare to withdraw from Bosnia, and Ganimed Troyanovsky’s grand construction would begin to decay. The local people, mostly Muslims, who called themselves native Turks, were proud of the opera building, trusting in its grandeur and symbolism, hoping somehow that in its greatness lay a guarantee that the kingdom would not fall, but at the same time they really didn’t know what that place was for and wondered whether the Swabians from Vienna would again be invited to bring those men who were as round as their sauerkraut vats and their enormously large ladies to squeak and squawk with their horns, violins, and drums after evening prayers.

  Sarajevo would have to wait until May 27, 1880, for the next opera performance. The production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus was covered in all the newspapers of the monarchy, which reported on this wondrous occurrence, “Strauss in the city of a hundred mosques.” The news reached even Paris and London. New York’s Manhattan Tribune ran a short, unsigned story – probably adapted from a larger article from the Vienna press – under the headline “Mohammed at the Opera.”

  This production, it seemed, was more acclaimed in the foreign press and more important in the European perception of the Bosnian Orient than it was for the Orient itself, and it would not be going too far to say that in Sarajevo Die Fledermaus came and went in silence. The city was still under the influence of the events of summer 1878, when Baron Filipović’s troops occupied Bosnia and took Sarajevo. The locals had not settled down with the new times. The Austrians were thought of as godless occupiers and interlopers, and it would be some time before Sarajevo accepted their ceremonies, manners, and operas.

  Die Fledermaus was also experienced as a terrible insult because the Swabians had come to the Sarajevo Opera as if they’d built it themselves and seemed to be enjoying themselves at the Turks’ expense.

  Die Fledermaus had three performances, on May 27, 28, and 30, 1880. Each time the Opera was full, and the Vienna law student Vjekoslav Sunarić, a future Belgrade lawyer, was among the few locals present at the event. In his Memoirs of People and Events, there is only this regarding Die Fledermaus: “That evening was a sorry sight for the Austrian officers and their ladies, where one applauded, laughed, and danced as if at some provincial wedding. The orchestra was hopeless, the musicians fatigued from their journey, and Madam Rosie Felbingerova, in the role of Rosalinde von Eisenstein, and Master Markus Spitz von Marburg, in the role of Gabriel, sang as if they were battling terrible colds. Madam Felbingerova seemed to be sneezing in the pauses between the arias. A catastrophe, horror, and wasted evening during my brief visit to my hometown.”

  Only once more, just after the annexation of 1908, would the Austrian authorities try to infuse Sarajevo with the spirit of opera and thereby convey to the building Ganimed Troyanovsky’s imagined intention. First, through the tour of the Milan Opera company, which would perform Verdi’s Aida five times (in the second week of October 1908, just a few days after the announced annexation decree), and then, in the spring of the following year, through the attempt to form its own Sarajevo Opera Ensemble, which was supposed to hold its first performances during the 1909–10 season.

  The Milan Opera tour and the formation of the ensemble are most fully explored by the Sarajevo historian Risto Besarović, to whom we owe gratitude for the extraordinary care with which he researched the topic and the collection of artifacts such as the entrance tickets to Aida, the posters, official invitations, the folding fan used by Madam Elisabeta Marinelli, who sang the role of Aida, which she gave as a gift to an unknown woman who worked in wardrobe, and the menu for the official reception after the performance…

  The Sarajevo Opera was founded according to the order signed by the regional governor, Anton von Winzor, before his departure from Sarajevo on February 14, 1909. Its first – and last – manager arrived soon from Zagreb, the one-time Vienna Opera baritone Emil Albori, along with three members of the voice company: the soprano Madam Nadica Štefan, and two tenors, Messrs. Dimitrij Pop Nikolić and Ferdinand Šupfa. The latter two had occasionally performed on the stages of Vienna, Pest, and Zagreb. While they were not retained long and, obviously, did not become wildly popular, the two tenors were not completely anonymous, while the name of Nadica Štefan is impossible to discover in the operatic or theater chronicles of the monarchy. No one knew who she was. She simply did not exist.

  Old Sarajevo natives, however, remember the woman – there are still living witnesses to the time of Besarović’s research – whom they would see with Mr. Albori walking arm in arm along the banks of Miljacka. He had just turned fifty. She was probably twenty years his junior.

  At the beginning of summer, Milica Lukacz Bogdan, soprano, and Svetolik Sveta Bogdan, baritone, came to town from Belgrade. Albori had invited them and hired them for an engagement. They stayed in Sarajevo for several months, actually up until the idea of the Sarajevo Opera Ensemble collapsed. They returned to Belgrade, from which they fled to Paris at the beginning of the war and then on to the United States. There, as is known, Milica Lukacz Bogdan had a magnificent career as one of the greatest interpreters of Wagner’s work outside of Germany, while Svetolik Sveta Bogdan went on to teach music at Princeton, where he wrote A Short History of Music in One Hundred Measures.

  The Belgrade journalist Miroslav Radojčić, a native-born Sarajevan, met Milica Lukacz Bogdan in London in 1977. She was nearly ninety years old, “a well-preserved lady of the old order,” quite eloquent, conversant on all the topics of the century that she would soon leave behind, but when Radojčić asked about her and her husband’s Sarajevo episode, she said she didn’t remember anything, except that it was cold and all night long the dogs barked in that city. It was so c
old, she said, that they’d had to return to Belgrade at the beginning of October 1909.

  “Did she ever return to Sarajevo after that?” Radojčić asked.

  “No, she never did. Does Sarajevo even still exist?” the old woman asked, laughing.

  Two years later, Milica Lukacz Bogdan died in Santa Monica, California. She is buried in a vault constructed of Brač marble, beside her Sveta and their only daughter, Svetlana, who died in 1941, not having reached the age of twenty.

  The project of founding a Sarajevo Opera Ensemble experienced a breakdown on October 29, 1909, with the sudden death of Emil Albori, who was found dead in a hotel room. He was lying unconscious on one side of a twin bed. The other side was empty. He rented the room as a bachelor, but a pair of women’s silk stockings had been found under the bed and on the nightstand a small bottle of Bulgarian rose oil. When they needed to send a telegram to Zagreb, informing someone of the sudden, tragic passing of the famous singer, no appropriate address could be found. Emil Albori no longer had any relations there. No one knew him in Vienna and Trieste either. In the end they did not send a telegram, and Emil Albori was buried in Sarajevo’s Catholic cemetery in Koševo. A beautiful memorial was built using state funds, with inscribed verses by Petar Preradović, who proposed that Emil Albori loved his homeland and his Croatian kinsmen most of all.

  It is unknown whether Madam Nadica Štefan attended the funeral, or whether anyone returned her silk stockings or Bulgarian rose oil, a gift from her dear Emil, who had brought it back after one of his short excursions to Vienna. Nothing more is known about Nadica Štefan. She disappears from our history the same summer morning when Emil Albori suddenly died of a burst vein in his brain, the first and last manager of the Sarajevo Opera from Habsburg times.

  Ganimed Troyanovsky was invited several times to Sarajevo to see his creation but each time excused himself because of age and poor health, until he died in Paris at the beginning of the new year in 1920, leaving behind the most marvelous of all Sarajevo’s buildings, which would never serve the intention for which it had been designed and constructed.

  * * *

  —

  The day was still far off, light lay beyond the dark hills that surrounded the city on three sides. People had begun to leave their houses. Their faces gray and bloated, morose and distrustful, they came out onto the street, looked to see if any danger threatened or if rain might be on the way, and then set off, lighting up their first cigarette as they walked, then gasped and coughed, spitting out onto the sidewalk what had collected in their bronchial passages during the night, and slowly, without hurry, continued in the direction they had started out. They walked bent forward, looking just ahead of their feet so as not to fall into a crack in the sidewalk or an open manhole. They would cough again, stop, spit – this was the early-morning music of the city. Coughing was the bark of the people.

  I approached the embankment that had once been called Obala Vojvode Stepe (the Embankment of the Warrior Stepa). I couldn’t remember what it was called now. It had been tormenting me for three days. I kept forgetting to look, and I felt ashamed to ask. The former times were ugly and foreign, those were names of the enemy, the new names were the true ones, our own. It had always been this way. There were the ugly names of the past and the good names of today’s warriors and heroes.

  In the morning I would go to my mother’s on Sepetarevac so we could see each other once more, so she could tell me stories about her childhood and youth, stories she believed I would put to use in literature, and then I’d return to the hotel parking lot for my car and set out toward Zagreb. How would I drive without having slept for nearly two nights? And how would I remember after all this that coughing was the people’s bark?

  I crossed the Careva Bridge, walking toward Bistrik.

  The little river was dark and quiet, shallow still because there had been no heavy rains in September or October. I tried to make out its scent, but there was nothing in the air but bad, burnt heating oil and the thick damp stench that recalled the smell of the city morgue. On the other side of the bridge were the remains of a park, large rotten trees planted during Austrian times, piles of garbage, wet cardboard that perhaps a homeless person had been using for shelter.

  A slight incline beside the old City Command and the Konak, not far from where Omar Pasha Latas’s residence had been, beside the monastery and church of Saint Ante, and then farther on, next to the stone steps and water ravines, alleys whose asphalt had long since washed away and which I knew well from the time I used to come out for walks here with Nona. Back then I would still hear the whistle of the engine from the station at the top of Bristrik, where it set off on the narrow-gauge line for Višegrad, and Nona would always say the same thing when it sounded:

  They couldn’t put the opera here, for how would it have been to hear a train whistle in the middle of Turandot?

  She would say this in a sort of victorious tone, like a great discovery as to why Sarajevo had for a hundred twenty years had a structure with Latin and Arabic letters on its front that read opera but the only real opera house, the one where people sang, was stashed in the small, boring, gray building of the National Theater founded more than a half century after Omar Pasha Latas began constructing that wonder in Bistrik. She would guide me as we looked at that unusual house, larger than all the other great, old Sarajevo houses, a building that looked like a cake from afar, especially when they opened its wide doors, wider in their time than the wooden doors of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. When we were there making fun of the Opera, we would laugh together. Otherwise she didn’t like it at all if I laughed at things she said.

  In time I learned to say things that would make her laugh too. I don’t know if she laughed because she really thought they were funny or just to encourage my inventive powers. But she must have known that I liked when she laughed at something I’d said about the Sarajevo Opera.

  Then I began to invent things. These were my first metaphors, though I didn’t know what they were called, my first hyperboles, parables, metonymies, and stories. This was how it started, in Bistrik, on sunny days in spring, summer, and fall. Mama would be at work, Nono would be engaged in something somewhere, studying a new language, reading articles on beekeeping (though he no longer had his hives), or sitting at the card table with his friends, and Nona would take me out to Bistrik, to the Opera. To make fun of it, and make things up. For her, after all that had happened in her life, it was necessary to be able to say:

  They couldn’t put the Opera here, for how would it have been to hear a train whistle in the middle of Turandot?

  I know it was then that I actually began to engage in literature. My first literary work was to imagine something that would make Nona laugh while the two of us, twisting our necks, would stand in front of the Sarajevo Opera. This would make us both so hungry that on the way back we would surely have to stop by the Egipat confectioner’s for a piece of cake, Nona’s with white cream, mine with chocolate.

  We’d stop at the Egipat every time, and then once, on a Sunday, the Egipat wasn’t open, so we went to a different sweetshop. There I ate a piece of cake that forever made chocolate sickening to me. The next day I got up for school at eight. I had to memorize a poem by Dobriša Cesarić about the drops of a waterfall. The poem was short and easy, but it wouldn’t stay in my head. I was sleepy and couldn’t stop yawning, and when I yawned, my eyes would begin to tear up. Even with the tears in my eyes, I stubbornly repeated my mantra about the waterfall until it was at last carved into my frontal lobe. The first class was math, then again math, the third was art – the nauseating smell of the watercolors – and at four was Serbo-Croatian. One by one by last name in the roll call we recited the poem about the waterfall. I was number seventeen. With each recitation I felt the torment grow. I thought it was because of the poem. Even if I hadn’t studied it, I would have remembered it from the monotonous, cyclical recitations of the cl
ass’s excellent students. My head was spinning from their voices. When the turn came to Adnan Jakubović, number fifteen in the roll call, and when he tentatively started repeating the poem’s words, I threw up uncontrollably.

  I didn’t know what was happening. I was on fire. They called Nona to come get me. They wanted to take me to the emergency room. She said it wasn’t necessary. I had a temperature of forty degrees Celsius. I lay in bed, the covers wet and cold, tears streaming out my eyes. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I threw up again. Nona gave me water. I threw up the water too. Papa came with a nurse, and she gave me an injection. I lay there with a high temperature for three days, neither alive nor dead, Nona would later say, and then suddenly it all went away.

  And since then, I have forever been repulsed by chocolate. Because it had been Sunday, the Egipat was closed, and we’d gone to a different sweetshop, and Nona had eaten a cake with white cream, while mine was with chocolate, and that had been that. Afterward we continued to go to Bistrik to walk along the crimson gravel in front of the Sarajevo Opera and think up ways of making fun of it and carry on serious conversations about life and death, but we never went for cakes again.

  One approaches the Sarajevo Opera by the same route, narrow streets and alleys with potholed stone steps across mud and masonry boards. Back then with Nona I could get to the Opera with my eyes shut. Now I can’t anymore. It’s dark. My eyes no longer know the ground I’m walking on, don’t feel the width of the stairs that, in the meantime, have shifted and been torn up by the spring and fall torrents. I tried hard to forget this place, to forget Sarajevo, but really I hadn’t forgotten a thing. It was just that my feet no longer remembered its steps, my hands no longer knew the height of the doorknobs; the width of the tram tracks, much wider than in Zagreb, surprised me, as did the height of the tobacco stands and the depth of the holes that opened up beneath my feet. Zagreb was an alien land, shallow and light, tortured, an echoless place. Zagreb was the dust on the surface of a mirror.