Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  In fact, the next morning the story had spread around Sarajevo, eventually reaching the ears of my mother, that a certain young poet had been as drunk as the earth and had shouted in my direction:

  Jergović, what are you doing here? Fuck your Chetnik mother in the mouth.

  That small turning point, a caesura in a line of verse, where my mother changed from being an Ustaša to being a Chetnik, thus losing thereby a potential nationalist connotation in the utterance, reminded me just then of how happy I was that I did not live in Sarajevo and was far away from the new Sarajevo poetry.

  We left town early the following morning. I dragged our red suitcase through the front hall, my backpack across my shoulders, a book bag in my hand. Loaded down like that, I barely managed to make it through the door. We trudged down the steps. My mother stayed up above, seeing us off from the entrance. I can imagine what I must have looked like in her eyes then, in the early morning light. That was the last time I saw her healthy. I didn’t come back to Sarajevo for months.

  I didn’t fault the waiter or ask him to make me another coffee, instead of this caffeinated piddle – this was what Nona used to say when they made her weak coffee. He watched me from the bar, expecting something, at least that I might raise my eyes, but I kept my nose down and continued to revise the story that I would never complete:

  * * *

  —

  Last year in May, when I was visiting Vienna for the last time and was at the hospital, I dreamed I was going back to Zagreb. Doctor Jelovšek had mentioned to me that somewhere on Pantovčak a splendid villa with an orchard was for sale for six thousand florins. It had been on the market for a long time, he said, the price was suitable, but there were no buyers. Far from Gornji Grad, far from the throng of the city, and on a hillside. If it were in the center, it would sell immediately for three times the price. And from the moment he mentioned it, from one night to the next I started thinking how nice it would be to collect the money, take out a loan, and buy that house. I’d get better immediately, it seemed to me. And the more I thought about it, the more it all seemed not so much an empty dream but something to accomplish. And the longer my sleeplessness and fantasies continued, the more attractive Zagreb became. I see now that after my death there might be debts worth more than the cost of the villa on Pantovčak. Illness is expensive – it shames a person in every manner, morally and physically.

  * * *

  —

  I crossed out the last sentence and rewrote it:

  * * *

  —

  Illness is expensive – it shames a person in every manner, morally and physically.

  * * *

  —

  I did this out of caution so it would look like I was doing something. In some higher, metaphorical sense, my mother’s illness had no meaning. Everyone has to die. But one could die in a different, easier, more humane manner. Her illness and her dying – was she dying already? – were utterly inhumane. It was as if she were somehow being punished by God, in whom she did not believe. Or as if the Stubler exile from Dubrovnik to Bosnia were part of her illness, with which our family’s history in Sarajevo would come to a close. The punishment for supporting the railroad union’s strike would be completed by her death. The Stublers would have left no trace behind them, no documents, buildings, or services rendered in the new history of the city.

  I reached my left hand into my pocket, pulled out a fistful of coins, and from the kunas and euros picked out three and a half marks, exactly the amount of the check. I put it on the table so that it made a loud enough noise to be heard at the bar. I put on my coat and headed toward the exit.

  “And the bill?” he shouted behind me.

  I half-turned, without looking at him, and pointed toward the table.

  Making my way out of the Vienna Café, I could hear him mumbling something behind me. The clang of the words that I no longer understood, though they were pronounced in my own language, reminded me of my childhood fantasy: that a person could consciously forget a language he knew. As a young boy I’d sit under a table where adults were talking and try not to understand them anymore, to make their words and sentences into a cascade of unconnected sounds that didn’t mean anything. It seems to me in my memory that sometimes I succeeded in this: they spoke but I didn’t understand. It might be nice to no longer understand the language others spoke and remain alone.

  The air was heavy and fetid, stinking of a Sarajevo November morning, of coal smoke, and rot, a fog in which, like bed linen that has not been aired out for a long while, all the odors in the air have settled. The fog contained the memory of this city, all the odors of the last six hundred years. It was a memorial and grave marker of everyone who had lived here. I too was in the fog’s odor, my walking to school thirty or forty years before, or being taken to the clinic on Skerlićeva Street to get vaccinated against small pox. When I was able to make out my own scent among the others, the temporal streams would separate, and I might happen to encounter on the street the self whose scent I had discerned.

  When we looked into each other’s eyes, the two of us would disappear. One would swallow the other, one time disappearing into the other, and the picture would multiply into infinity, like the mirrors in the big barbershop across from the Hotel Europa, in which I would examine the back of my head in the mirror, in which I could see the back of my head, until the mirrors within mirrors swallowed up everything that could be seen in them.

  I tried to slow down time before heading to Sepetarevac. I was afraid of what I would see there. And of the leave taking. It was probably the last time I would see her alive.

  I went to the burek shop at Sahat kuli.

  The cramped little buregžinica had been there on Čurčiluk Mali for at least thirty years. Actually it had been thirty years since the first time I’d gone to Sahat kuli for burek. This place was by far the best for the type of burek known as buredžike. I haven’t eaten these little pies, which are filled with meat and topped with cream into which white onion has been chopped, anywhere but in Sarajevo. Several years ago, when my mother was completely healthy and saying she planned to live to ninety-seven, she did a favor for one of her acquaintances, a woman from Sandžak, who had moved to Sarajevo after the war, and lived somewhere in the upper reaches of town. I don’t remember what sort of favor it was, maybe she had lent her a little money, or it could have been something even less important, but this woman had wanted to pay her back. And little things that were paid back in Sarajevo usually turned into some big story or made their way into a person’s destiny.

  Bajram came around, and the woman took to the streets across town, from one hilltop to the next, with gifts for the season. It so happened that I’d come to Sarajevo just then, and among all these little holiday food gifts she brought around to those toward whom she felt indebted, I found some of the meat pies, mini burek – but they weren’t actually mini burek. They were different, and there was something in the difference that could create in a person the sudden impression of having moved from one place to another, of having replaced one time with another.

  When one reads great novels – something that happens only a few times in a life, for there are not that many great novels, and the time needed to read them does not often open up – or in the duration of some longer pieces of great music, Mahler’s symphonies, the Goldberg Variations as performed by Glenn Gould, or in the face of the empty, frigid hall in which the paintings of Boris Bućan are displayed, a person suddenly feels that he is moving, one civilization is replacing another, a transfer to a thousand kilometers away, and he is certain at that instant that he will never again feel nostalgia for what he has left behind. The departure is easy when the Fifth Symphony thunders, for from where it is thundering everything is better and more beautiful, but it is not just that it’s more beautiful. It feels more native to a person, belongs to him more, is his. And so for a short time worlds and convic
tions change places, a person is freed from the excesses that his homeland puts before him and what he wakes up with every morning. Filled with the music and what it contains, its history and the culture of another world, he easily becomes another. By means of the music, an entire life with a childhood included replaces his own emotions, memories, and youth, along with the mementos of his youth, without ever being lamented.

  So this was what I experienced the first time I ate mantije. My mother said this was what they were called: mantije from Sandžak. She too had never heard the name or eaten that type of burek.

  Ever since then, the woman I never met continued to repay her little debt. Whenever I was coming back to Sarajevo, my mother would call her up to make mantije. Before my arrival she’d bring over a big panful. I don’t like meeting people. I don’t like thanking them out loud for things that they’ve done for me. There always seems to be kernel of falsehood in such thanks. It would be nice if all the good we needed to express to others were understood and we didn’t have to say anything, and it was seen and understood from the silence. Some people know how to do this: they are invisible and offer no occasions for ceremonial words to be spoken to them.

  Now it had become clear: I would never meet that woman, nor would she ever bake mantije for me. Never again. My mother was dying.

  Later she would offer money to the woman for the meat she used to make me the pies. The woman tried to refuse, insisting, but then my mother said it could be no other way, that her mantije meant much more to me than the flour, oil, and meat they were made from. This pleased her, perhaps filled her with pride, drawing her into a sort of mystic or metaphysical state, which certainly was not far from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony or Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and afterward she did not refuse money for her material expenditures, as if she were taking it for brushes, canvas, and paints. There was no shame when it was about art.

  I sat down in Sahat kuli to eat my spinach pie. It was still early, not even eight yet, the buredžike would be ready around ten, said the young woman at the counter. She was uncertain about me, looked at me askance. She obviously knew me from somewhere but couldn’t remember where. I didn’t want to help her, instead I pushed my face into the metal plate and ate the yogurt-topped spinach pie with my fingers, knowing that if I ate it my face would be reflected in the mirror of the plate bottom.

  I imagined the story of a man stopping at a burek shop early one morning before visiting his dying mother. He never ate breakfast and did not get hungry that early, feeling instead a thick morning nausea from when he’d been a smoker. But he forced himself to eat a spinach pie and, when he’d finished, was shocked to find someone else looking at him from the finely polished mirror of the metal dish. It was no longer him, a well-preserved forty-five-year-old who went to the pool and the sauna every day. What he saw was a sixty-five year old, ashen and gray in the face, who didn’t even look like him.

  His heart thumped, he tasted adrenaline, and his brain seemed to have leaped out of his cranium. He couldn’t think of everything that would have to change in his life if he was no longer the person he’d thought but was this other one instead. So he thought about his mother, surely awake by now, waiting for him.

  Actually he’d remained the same, only found himself in a different body. This had happened because he’d broken his rule and eaten breakfast. He’d eaten the spinach pie, and the spinach pie had eaten him.

  There could have been some interesting parts – making his way around Sarajevo in search of someone to forge him a passport, meeting all sorts of people in a Kaf kaesque atmosphere reminiscent of Paul Auster, while no one recognizes him, nor does he know anyone, but at the same time, he fears that someone might recognize the face of the man whose physiognomy he has assumed, if that man was even from there and not an alcoholic Pole, Finn, or Icelander, which was what he looked like. Then there was the mother, to whom the stranger would come and swear he was her son. There were his children and his wife, a rich Belgian he’d married many years before.

  I thought of how he’d beg his mother to listen. He’d remind her of something to prove he was her son: how in 1971, in her Dubrovnik living room, Aunt Lola had taken off all her clothes in front of him, for in the book You and Your Children, a Vuk Karadžić edition from Belgrade, she’d read this was necessary for warding off a dangerous taboo in male children, concerning their own mothers. This he would tell his ailing mother, and she’d know it was him. And feel wretched.

  I thought of how he’d beg his wife to listen. She’d try to slam the door in his face the moment he claimed to be her husband and the father of her children. Prepared for this, he’d stick his foot in the door-jamb and quickly start talking, for he wouldn’t have much time since she’d be screaming about calling the police.

  He’d remind her of her old Aunt Josephine, long since dead, whom they took to the seaside in 1996, just after the war in Croatia. She was eighty-five and wanted to see Dalmatia again, where she used to travel with her deceased husband Frank in the fifties and early sixties. But you don’t remember your uncle Frank, he’d tell her, for he died the same winter you came into the world. This he would tell his rich Belgian wife, and she’d know it was him. And feel wretched.

  That would be the end, I think, after they had agreed to separate and protect the children from the trauma – for surely You and Your Children has been translated into French – of learning what had happened to their father’s face when he broke his own rule and ate breakfast.

  Only outlines were visible in the turbid dish: the pallid, empty surface area of a face framed by hair and a beard. Without a face and invisible, as if everything that had happened over the past two days, and past ten months, would immediately be forgotten. It would be good if in the next instant, as things came to their end, I remembered nothing.

  “I’d like to pay…” I said without looking at her.

  “Three and half marks,” she answered, her voice hoarse, sore.

  It was nine o’clock, and though it was quite cold, people were out, bumping into one another along Vaso Miskin Street, embracing and greeting each other, religious greetings, some with irony, others out of faith and certitude. They uttered the word Allah in a very particular manner on this frozen morning, as if the word were a sigh and as if God were a sigh, and as if with the remembrance of God’s name one might cast off some heavy burden from one’s back. Some people said their allahimanet quite loudly, so it would be heard, and suddenly it seemed as if the entire Vaso Miskin Street was sighing. But the burden still rested on their shoulders, just as heavy as before, despite the sighs.

  I rushed, squeezing through the people as if I had a clear goal and was already late – I was going to her on Sepetarevac. Only that, again, wasn’t the reason for my rush: I didn’t want anyone to notice or recognize me. I didn’t want to hear my name called out from behind. I wanted to disappear. And for everything to materialize somewhere very far away.

  I go inside. The door has been left unlocked, without fear of thieves. The hall smells of cooked cabbage.

  Six steps to the room. Then right. The door is open. There she lies, groaning softly, her head on a low-pitched pillow. How are you? I ask, but the question means nothing. Shitty, she’s been answering for months on the phone. Shitty, she says now. It’s better when she says she’s shitty than just bad. She turned seventy on May 10. Her head is clear, completely collected, circling around its own axis, just as she’s been for as long as I’ve known her. For a long time her voice, too, remained as it had always been, that of a young person. It started to change in the last several weeks, thinning out and pulling back into her lungs. Only when she shouts, when the pain is terrible, does her voice again become young. She’d always been very musical. She could have become a singer. She’d had a clear, melodic, crisp voice, a slightly dark soprano. She used to scream hysterically when she fought with Nona, and, years later, after Nona’s death, when she fought with me. This w
as how I’d once broken the glass in the door of the living room with my fist. You see now, I’d yelled, blood running down my arm. She wasn’t impressed. She screamed. Today I have a scar in the shape of the letter V on my right wrist. I’ve had it for more than half my life. The scar reminds me of her. For a long time, years on end, I would look at it with anger and sorrow, despairing that we weren’t like others: an ordinary mother and her son. Later, after my departure for Zagreb, I turned to the scar with a sort of love. When the war was still going on in Sarajevo, I would look at it wondering if she was alive or had been killed by a shell. She was alive. I felt joy in this, though more and more she was living only for herself. The heliocentric pattern of my mother: she was like a sun illuminating her own self. I am not angry when I say this. I am never angry. Perhaps I was when I was sixteen, when I still thought things could be different. They couldn’t. She could have become a singer, I say. She screamed so much that the walls would come apart in the corners and the ceiling opened up to the sky. As my mother screamed our house had sky for a ceiling. And when she was in a good mood and wasn’t fighting with me or Nona, she would sing as she washed the clothes in the bathtub: “U tem Somboru” and “Sejdefu majka buđaše,” “Zagorje zelene,” and “Tamo daleko,” and oh, if the Croatian literary vermin knew that in the seventies, while she was doing the wash, my mother sang there far away, far from the sea, there is my village, there is my Serbia, they would curse my Chetnik mother at their gatherings, along with those minor Muslim poets and war veterans, but it’s too late for that, as she lies on her back and will not be getting up again, and I search for some way to get her to shout, get angry, scream in her youthful singer’s voice. My mother was musical, I say.