Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  I rambled on, hurling ideas into the wind to make it easier to walk up. My back was sweaty. This was the worst in Sarajevo. The town was so steep that a person would sweat and freeze at the same time, climbing up the monstrous, knotty inclines of its streets. There was only one way to avoid the sweating: by obsessively thinking about something else. I was climbing up through Bistrik again, where I had been so many times, but now I was an outsider, going to pay homage to Ganimed Troyanovsky and his dear friend and patron Omar Pasha Latas.

  I was suddenly happy that something – at least for a minute – existed that was bigger than the fact that my mother was sick. For a moment I could think about it without it swallowing me, and it was almost as if I was prepared for the certainty of her death, for I was no longer me, as if this city was my friend and, when she died, it would bury her in hundreds of hearts and arrange her in as many graves, as if she would not fall upon my heart, for it was to me that she had given birth and I stood at the edge of the long, unhappy chain, the one who would close the doors forever on the empty rooms, in which light traces remained on the walls where pictures had once hung. But it was easy for me to think about all this now, jubilant as in a musical, for I was on my way up through Bistrik to the Opera.

  I don’t remember ever being there with my mother. I probably was. Probably at least once all four of us were there together: Nona, Nono, mother, and I. We were surely there, but I can’t place it. My mother wouldn’t have made fun of this structure, laughing until the tears ran down her cheeks. I don’t remember her ever laughing at anything I said.

  Nona had laughed until the tears ran down her cheeks – at that strange and senseless building, where operas weren’t performed anymore, though it was said the hall had perfect acoustics, and at me, who knew how to dream things up that would make tears run down her cheeks. Nona would laugh so hard her heart throbbed. She grabbed her chest and shook, and it was lucky no one was close by, lucky no one was in front of the Opera when we came up, for the news that Mrs. Rejc had lost her mind would have spread all over Sarajevo.

  There was no gravel on the little square in front of the Opera anymore, just packed earth atop which snow would soon fall, and perhaps not melt before the spring. The building was illuminated by some twenty floodlights so all its splendor could be seen at night. Ever since 1998, when the French government had renovated it in the name of the pacified city, the lighting design having been personally overseen and implemented by the famous Hector de Silva Jimenez, the building itself looked like an opera set. The French had remade it into a concert hall, which they gave the name Hall of Understanding and Friendship. Perhaps the bronze plaque with that name still hangs in the foyer, but the name was never used and no concerts were ever held there. At its official opening, at the end of August 1998, the violinist Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica had performed, and that had been the first and last concert held in the Sarajevo Opera. In the last fourteen years there have been several commemorative events in honor of worthy Sarajevans, deceased multiculturals, and in 2007, a three-day gathering devoted to Susan Sontag. Other than these occasions, the Opera has been empty. The French take care of conservation, protecting the metal door handles from rust, preserving the seats under white covers, covering the stage with plastic, heating the space in the winter…To make sure everything is cared for and kept in order there is one cleaning woman – Mrs. Fatima – and the building superintendent Ljupko Huterer, a prewar civil engineer who lived through the war as a refugee in Paris, from which he was brought back and put to work taking care of the Opera. A film about Fatima and Ljupko attracted great interest in Europe several years ago and was even screened in America. It provided a sensitive depiction of Sarajevo fifteen years after the war, viewed once and immediately forgotten. The one result of the film Silent Opera, or The Story of Fatima and Ljupko was that afterwards journalists and TV crews started coming, and there ended up being more work for the two of them, for every so often they needed to wipe off the door handles, open up the hall, take the plastic from the stage, and, after the journalists had gone and the cameras had been turned off, put everything back in place, and seal everything shut again.

  The lights come on and soon Fatima is at work. At least this is how it’s shown in the film. Ljupko arrives a little before noon, after seeing his friends on Baščaršija, drinking a cup of coffee and talking about the good old days, when people respected and valued one another, and Sarajevans would visit each other’s homes for Christmas and Bajram. What were the Sarajevans doing during the other 355 days of the year when they weren’t celebrating any religious holidays? According to the documentary and the stories of people, it seems that in the Sarajevo of that time every day was either Christmas or Bajram.

  * * *

  —

  I made my way around the building, just as Nona and I used to, but it wasn’t possible to go all the way around the Opera anymore. In back, about halfway around, a thick metal fence, rusted already, had been built.

  I went back to stand in front of the Opera for a bit. I stepped backwards, checking to see how far I needed to back up before I could take in the whole building and hold it all between my two fingers when I spread out my arms, as I would do as a kid.

  On the day after the attack in Sarajevo, the bodies of Prince Franz Ferdinand and Baroness Sophie were laid out on the stage of the opera house. The doors and gates had been opened wide. The day was sunny and quite beautiful, and a fresh, cool breeze came down from the mountains, as Sarajevo trembled, the windows of the Serbian shops were smashed in the marketplaces, and neighbor attacked neighbor.

  Oh this self-pity!

  I moved back, step by step, and came to the edge of the dirt square, but I wasn’t able take in the whole Opera with my arms out. I could not hug the Opera as I had once so easily done.

  The square was the same width. They hadn’t made it narrower or shorter. It was strange that I couldn’t take in the whole building between my hands anymore. I had brought the girl I was with here in 2000 to show her this great Sarajevo marvel, but she remained cold to it. She had seen greater marvels in her life. Afterward, disappointed, I hugged the Opera. I had not told her what I was doing or why I was spreading out my arms. We broke up soon after, upon returning to Zagreb.

  A parade had first been planned for the crown prince and his wife, but the plan had suddenly been changed. In the canonical work on the assassination, The Road to Sarajevo, Vladimir Dedijer proposes that the absence of official funereal ceremonies was due to the chaos in the center of town, the lynchings, the destruction of Serbian shops. But anyone who comes all the way up here can imagine what the real reason was. Neither in 1914 nor today was it easy to get to the Opera: along the narrow winding side streets and alleyways the smell of urine and tubercular expulsions mixed with cabbage cooked in vegetable oil, across courtyards and kitchens, outside of the strict urban sense upon which the Habsburg monarchy insisted, with the grand, beautiful structure before one’s eyes – you could see it but couldn’t get to it – it was not possible to hold an honor procession for the man who had been destined to become the Austro-Hungarian sovereign but who instead became the victim of one reckless Sarajevo youth.

  No approach route to the Opera had been envisioned that would accord with the grandeur and significance of the structure. Actually no approach route had been envisioned at all, and one had to make one’s way along the same little back streets that had been used to travel to the old Kevrin plum grove.

  Twice they made plans to create a wide road that would lead from the brewery and the monastery of Saint Ante to the Opera. The first was after the annexation in 1908, the second, during the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1934. They came to old Mati Karivan from the city authorities with a letter and a sealed offer of purchase, for his house was located on the route. He accepted the offer and began talking with his wife about moving to Zagreb, for with the sum offered for the house in Bistrik they would be a
ble to buy the nicest house in Tuškanac. Just as on the first occasion, political events delayed construction for a while, the first coming with the annexation crisis as the country was threatened by war, and the second arriving with the king’s assassination in France, and everyone lost interest in the Bistrik road. Thanks to the painter and social activist Đoko Mazalić, by the start of the fifties the Opera had become a protected cultural monument.

  Eventually, on that spectral Monday, June 29, 1914, on the morning after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand while a train was being prepared at the other end of town to take the deceased to Vienna, climbing up toward the Sarajevo Opera were only the most select members of Sarajevo’s political and social life, assorted high-ranking royal and imperial officers and out-of-breath civil servants, to bow before the sovereign couple, who would have been able to see all Sarajevo with their dead eyes had they had pillows beneath their heads.

  I knew that this would be one of the last times I would stand before Sarajevo’s opera house. I would surely return to Sarajevo, but that visit would be still more painful than this one. Every subsequent visit to the city would be still more painful, and it was unclear whether the day would ever come when there would be no reason for me to visit Sarajevo. When that happened, I knew, I would not go anymore, nothing would draw me to my native city. I would not come to ask forgiveness of anyone.

  I did not turn around again.

  I would have liked to not look at the Opera for the rest of the time I was in Sarajevo. But “this white, rather ghostly structure, this spirit with a certain beauty of Paris, with which Latas fell in love during his six-month military delegation,” as Ivo Andrić describes it, was visible from every point in town. “Ganimed’s building long served as a reminder to Sarajevans, young and old, rich and poor, of every faith, of what they might have become but never would. It was a monument to dissatisfaction, to the misery of not living in some other place, closer to the sea or to the center of things. Looking at it evoked melancholy, the sort of soul sickness and thirst that marked the Bosnian soul. If they had understood how thoroughly their operaless Opera had saturated their lives with baseless chagrin, the Sarajevans would have set out for the building with picks and hammers to raze it to the ground. But fortunately for beauty’s sake, they would never fully grasp this. Nor would they have heard it if someone had told them.”

  I still had at least three hours to kill. I couldn’t go to my mother’s before nine thirty. If she were sleeping, the woman would serve me coffee and juice, sitting me down on Nona’s couch in the living room to wait for her to wake up. That would be unbearable. But by ten she should be awake. She’d be having her daily treatment then, the miraculous medicines for her illness, which would have cost fifty thousand dollars a month even if the treatment were not experimental. It was lucky, I told her, so lucky that a Sarajevo hospital had made an agreement with the German pharmaceutical company. If that hadn’t been the case, she would not have had those miracle drugs.

  I wouldn’t go back to the hotel. I didn’t know what I would have done there now, in the overheated room among the empty white walls – it seemed that in Bosnia there wasn’t a law, as there was in Croatia, regarding how many pictures needed to be hung on the walls of hotel rooms. Could I write down the story that the news vendor Jahja had told me earlier about Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević? Not much time remained. No, it wouldn’t be possible to write a story in three hours.

  I went into the newly remodeled Vienna Café at the Hotel Europa.

  Two cleaning women with heavy vacuum cleaners were collecting mud and dust from the red carpets with the routine movements of Buddhist monks. They were stroking the tubes back and forth, back and forth – it was impolite to look at them for too long – as if bringing two chubby hotel clerks to the pinnacles of pleasure.

  The waiters stood morosely next to the bar. Leaning on their elbows in their starched white shirts, dazed from the previous night’s drinking, they prepared themselves for another workday, their long commutes from the outskirts of town behind them. This was the way waiters in Sarajevo had looked since time immemorial. Elsewhere you would go to a café out of friendship or to spend an idle hour, but here one appeared before waiters as before the ancient ferryman who transported the dead to the other shore. And this had entered into their bearing: they looked at café patrons as if they were already a little bit dead.

  I sat down at a table by the window. All four of them looked in my direction, evaluating me for several seconds. Without a word, a thick, strong man, the oldest among them, lifted his elbow from the bar and headed toward my table.

  He walked for a long time, his pace slow.

  Yes?

  A short double espresso and a mineral water.

  Short coffee with soda, he repeated, as if trying to remember.

  He had recognized me and was correcting what I’d said. He thought: I was born here, in Sarajevo, but I said kava and mineralna, which wasn’t right. I should have said kafa and kisela, for that was the way they talked in Mejtaš. In my home neighborhood, the waiter thought, as did others who recognized me here, they had always said kafa and kisela, and it was affected and pretentious, maybe even nationalistic, to say kava and mineralna. This was why Bosnia was now dead and broken, because people who’d been born with kava and mineralna now came here to kafa and kisela. Everyone had somewhere to go away to, thought the waiter, the Croats to Croatia, the Serbs to Serbia, and there they’d say: kava and mineralna. Only the Bosnian Muslims had nowhere to go and had to say it in the only proper way there was: kafa and kisela. The waiter thought this. Those who recognized me thought it, as did the Bosnian Muslims who had lived for twenty years in Rome, Vienna, and Berlin whom I met there and who recognized me to my horror, and all said the same: everyone had somewhere to go, the Croats to Croatia, the Serbs to Serbia, and only they, the Bosnian Muslims had nowhere to go. And these people, who even today so uncompromisingly said kafa and kisela and who around Rome, Vienna, and Berlin talked about how they had nowhere to go, failed to notice that they’d left twenty some years or more before.

  I frowned and looked down, read something from my cell phone screen, took my notebook from my pack, opened it to the first page, which was dated November 8, 2012, the day before, and at the cut-off story about Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević. I would never write the rest. A poet should never try to settle accounts with his hometown.

  I started to read and edit what I’d written, just so I wouldn’t have to look over at the bar:

  He’d been sick for a long time. Ella had hoped to the very end that he would recover, but then she went to Don Serafim Urlić, the old Orthodox priest from Makarska who had been living by then for several years in Pale, near Sarajevo. There he confessed the believers and walked around Mount Romanija, certain that the mountain air would prolong his life…

  At that point the waiter approached the table, coming up somewhat from behind me, saw me writing with a trembling hand, and placed the coffee, a glass, and a small bottle of mineral water in front of me. The demitasse was filled to the brim, though I had ordered a short espresso. This was his revenge on me for not taking up the game. My face darkened like the sky above Sarajevo, I drew myself in and tightened like the artillery ring around the city, and it didn’t enter my head to debate linguistic quandaries with him or take it all as one big joke, part of the famous Bosnian sense of humor, the kava and the kafa and the mineralna and the kisela. A few months before, or a year or two, I would have been prepared to accept this joke, acceding to his arguments and doing all I could to win him over and gain his goodwill. For Sarajevo was, to use the language of waiters, my town and I was a Sarajevan wherever I might go. I’d carry my city on my back, dragging it with me wherever I turned. I was bent and hunched over from Sarajevo and its weight during all the years I had lived in Zagreb, and I was sorry not to have the strength for it. I wasn’t strong and powerful like Saint Blaise, who carried Dubrovnik on
his palm lightly and without exertion. If it were like this for me with Sarajevo, I thought regretfully, if I could carry it on my palm and not on my back, it would have been easier. But then something had happened, I had lost the will for these Sarajevo chats with waiters. I would not be staying in this city any longer than I had to, not a single hour more.

  I had freed myself of Sarajevo the summer before last, at the end of May 2011. It was late afternoon, a storm had rolled into the city, where we’d come for the film festival. It was coming down on us as if God were emptying out the sky. Three of us were making our way under two umbrellas across Čobanija Bridge, and just as we had turned in front of the Dva Ribara restaurant, on the Otokar Keršovani Embankment, and were heading toward Skenderija, from inside the covered courtyard of that ancient Sarajevo intellectual and artistic dive, a drunken voice pierced the air:

  “Jergović, what are you doing here? Fuck your Ustaše mother in the mouth.”

  The young poet, a war veteran from somewhere in the interior of the country, who had moved to town after the war, repeated his choice words several times. He was obviously drunk, but the words had been composed during the long Sarajevo nights, which I had spent far from the city; they had turned into a poem-slogan, a programmatic verse for this Sarajevan Mayakovsky:

  “Jergović, what are you doing here? Fuck your Ustaše mother in the mouth.”

  Delivered in this manner, with poetic variations, several times, in case it might provoke me into returning and coming over to him, drunk as he was.

  I turned and saw that at the table with him was another local poet, whose verse I had once included in the anthology of young Bosnian lyric poetry Conan Lives Here. He said nothing. His face had the air of a flustered fool, and I could already hear him saying he had nothing to do with this ditty.