Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Aunt Lola met Uncle Andrija after she had definitively refused to accompany her family in her father’s exile. She remained alone in Dubrovnik, a twenty-year-old girl with a trade school education. He was twenty years older, a well-situated bachelor, a secretary in the trade office. Uncle Andrija loved Lola, but she married him from pure necessity. The moment he met her, he knew why he had waited so many years. And he understood his love would consist of humiliation, patience, and submission, and that, for the most part, it would not be returned. Željko was born in 1924; Branka six years later. Željko is the pilot in the novel Gloria in excelsis. In reality, as a heroic pilot of the Royal Air Force loaned out to the Partisans and then returned to Yugoslavia’s wartime aviation enterprise, Željko wanted to study medicine. They would not let him. He was worth more to the homeland as a pilot than as a doctor. He could not get over this. He got drunk and took off from the Borongaj airfield, then plunged his plane into the ground. Branka studied medicine in Zagreb. She moved to Germany, where she worked as an anesthesiologist. She died from an aneurysm in her sleep in the fall of 1979. She was not yet fifty.

  Uncle Andrija outlived his son by four years. He died in late summer 1955. Željko had perished in September 1951. Karlo Stubler died in April. Johanna ten years later. And Lola died in her sleep in the summer of 1974.

  The birth went easily. The little girl lit into the world, in her mother’s words, like a cork from a champagne bottle. At first she did not cry, and they thought she might be dead. The fat midwife picked her up and animated her with several expert movements. As if she were dancing, directing marionettes in a puppeteer’s performance, kneading dough for a pie. They forgot the name of the midwife. They only knew she was a Serb. Once she got home from the night shift, she found her house empty. The Ustaše had taken away her husband and three sons. She hanged herself from an attic beam before the Ustaše let the four of them go, for someone had intervened. Were they really going to slaughter the husband and children of the best midwife in the hospital? They discovered her hanging there, a half meter above the Independent State of Croatia. The midwife who brought my mother into the world. Per custom, the photographer was waiting in ambush at the entrance to the maternity ward. When the mother left with her child, it was offered as an immortalized scene. Olga did not stay long in the hospital. She only spent the night. It was May 12, 1942. The photographer’s imprint says “Šeher, Sarajevo.”

  It is her twelfth year, at Ilidža, in the Stublers’ model garden. It is August 1954 and Opapa has been dead for three years, but according to his plan, corn has been planted in one part of the garden. After ten harvests, when the earth is worn out, the corn will be given over to something else. Opapa read about this in some East German magazine devoted to advanced agriculture. Although he was near the end, he talked enthusiastically about what he was going to plant after the corn’s decade had ended. Javorka is hiding amid the weedy stubble. The unknown photographer told her to hide so he could take her picture. She has the face of a grown woman already, a smile that would survive until her late forties but grow cruel with her life’s experiences, her scattered marriages, anxiety, and dissatisfaction.

  Javorka’s final year of gymnasium. The house is filled with suffering and muffled fury. Olga and Franjo do not cease to blame each other for Mladen’s death. Javorka has come into her own as a woman, which infuriates her mother. She is also infuriated by the girl’s ambitions: she goes away to workers’ actions, is a member of the Yugoslav Communist League, the municipal youth committee. She wants to study medicine…Olga likes none of this. She would prefer her daughter sit in the corner and be quiet. Her ambitious dreams remind her of Mladen, and the girl is not worthy of him. She was seventeen when Olga first called her a whore. Did that happen before or after this picture? It’s impossible to know. It was taken during the months when Javorka posed for an art photographer in front of the stone engravings at the Natural History Museum.

  The first car the Stublers owned was a secondhand 1953 Opel Olympia that Dragan drove back from a business trip he’d taken to Germany. A young metallurgical engineer, he was married and had two children by the time he bought the car in 1959. He used it for a short time, two Bosnian winters, and in 1960 they took it to travel to Serbia to visit Javorka, who was at a youth action for the construction of the Brotherhood and Unity Highway. Dragan took the picture, with Olga, Javorka, and Viola. Olga is holding a cigarette in her right hand. The Olympia’s license plate has the letters BH in Cyrillic and the numbers 10640. They were still putting the republic initials on them then. Families used to take pictures of themselves around their cars. Pleated skirts were in fashion. These were important details in the family journey to the village of Džep in southern Serbia to visit the female team leader. One must imagine what she might be holding in the packet and reconstruct the most likely route they took. As an accompaniment to the story there should be a map with a meandering line in red pencil that crosses the Drina River at the town of Foča.

  My father has my head and face, my expression, my way of thinking, and my slightly awkward smile. Her hand is on his knee. I look at this picture, which was taken by a passerby – Dobro gave him the camera and showed him how to shoot – and I feel her hand on the inside of my own right knee. The hand of my dead mother, young and pretty, on the knee of my dead father. And from the beach, someone else’s eyes look at them.

  At the end of summer Olga would go away to Drvenik with her grandson, while Franjo stayed in the hospital. The boy was starting first grade – in the middle of June his grandma and grandpa had taken him for tests, without his parents’ knowledge – and Nona needed to be there with him. They thought he was gifted and sent him to school a year early. Two weeks later, around the twentieth of September, Nona went back to Sarajevo. Nono was in the hospital, but they let him go home, and then he went back to the hospital. The lifeline on the EKG was almost inverted, dropping so low that every beat of his heart seemed the last. He was fine otherwise, clearheaded and calm. He just breathed with a bit of difficulty. No one wanted to acknowledge it, neither the doctors nor Dobro, but his dying had been underway for some time already. The muscle of his heart had been weakening for years. For the last twenty it had not been strong enough to push the blood into his lungs, though as late as the previous spring it had been good enough to let him walk the several kilometers from Drvenik to Donja vala or Zaostrog. In June he had taken the boy for tests before the start of school. And afterward he had ordered a rakija at a seafront bar to celebrate the boy’s mind. He was proud like a man who still had big plans in life. The child would start school, the world would be dazzled by his gift, and then he would enter high school and college and become an architect. The boy spent days on end on the balcony or, when it rained, in the room that opened onto the balcony, making houses out of Lego blocks. Very imaginative, colorful houses with lots of windows. Or without a single window. He would build a whole city there on the balcony, as long as he had enough blocks. What else could he be but an architect? The grandfather could not know about the boy’s sloppiness and lack of talent for drawing, and his stupidity – bordering on a mental defect – when it came to even the simplest mathematical operation. This would become clear only after the first months of school, but by then the grandfather was no more. Franjo Rejc would spend eternity in the belief that his grandson became a famous architect.

  What happened after the shot of rakija with which he toasted his grandson’s success?

  Dobro sent Franjo to the home for the disabled in Trebević in September. It was one of those socialist healthcare hotels one could go to for a summertime tourist stay, but mostly people went there on a doctor’s referral. The airy bathhouse above Sarajevo, where the air was sharp as a razor with the scent of pine sap, like verdant grass, and the sky was close, must have helped to enrich his blood with hemoglobin. It was easier for his heart to drive the rich, healthy blood, blood as thin as hospital soup. This was the doctor’s gentle way of
revealing the truth to his patient. At the end, when there was no other help, doctors often prescribed eccentric remedies. They didn’t believe in miracles but rather were humoring the families of their patients who only believed in miracles. In this case Dobro was both doctor and family. He sent Franjo to the home for the disabled as a last resort.

  He was placed in a single room with a wooden-frame bed – most of the beds were metal – and a thin mattress. The room had a sink with a mirror above it. It also had a night tray for the spittle for when he coughed at night. Nono took three books with him to the home: A Dictionary and Grammar of English; the Schedule of Trains for the Yugoslav Railway for 1972; and a novel by Dmitry Merezhkovsky entitled Antichrist, which was based on a biography of Peter the Great. He dragged around that book with him for a long time but never read it to the end. He had his brown suit, several white shirts, and two ties. As well as sweats, pajamas, and slippers. His pocket watch, a Pelikan fountain pen, a planner in which he noted down phone calls and when he received letters, New Year’s congratulations, and postcards. He wrote down the names of the medicines he was talking, noted the visits of tourists to the view site near the home, the changes of seasons, the morning temperature…What use were all these notes to him? Was he delaying death by trying to remember every waking instant of the previous day?

  Olga and Dragan came to visit him on the eighth day of his stay at Trebević. It was a Saturday. Dragan had come from Moscow to see him. He said he had some business in Zenica: a special order for a large quantity of steel for Siberia. There must be a notebook for recording all the lies told to sick people. In Nono’s case the lies were not for his sake but for those who lied to him. He was happy to see Dragan but did not believe a word of what he said.

  Dragan had brought a new camera with him, a Yashica that he had purchased for a lot of money in Germany. He used it for the first time at Trebević. He didn’t know how to control the aperture, so the pictures came out dark. It was cold, as it often was in early fall in the mountains around Sarajevo. Olga covered her face with the shawl she had bought two years before in Russia, where she’d gone to visit her son and daughter-in-law. He waited for his wife and son in his suit, with a white shirt and tie. He would live for three weeks more. He smiles at the lens and at Dragan who is making a mistake with the aperture setting. Although the shot is dark, the colors are unusually natural. As if it had been taken at sunset. It is their last photograph.

  Their visit did not last more than two hours before he went back to Sarajevo. On Tuesday Dobro came, listened to his heart, and looked at the latest EKG results. His blood might have been filled with hemoglobin, but that was not important anymore. The hospital van took them down to Sarajevo. He did not take Franjo home. He had Franjo admitted to his ward without any hope of making him better.

  Five days before Franjo’s death Dobro asked to have him taken home. Franjo lay opposite the window through which, from his pillow, he could see Trebević, the hamlets at the base of the mountain, and parts of the old town, when the light fell at the end of the day. He listened to the puffing of the steam engines when a train would come around heading for Višegrad. He was clearheaded until the very end. On the last night, Olga was overcome by fatigue and had to sleep. Javorka was watching over him. He said to her: It’s just the two of us here. The rest are thieves. He died before first light. When Olga went into the room from which he had been removed, she felt as if there was someone there. This was what she said, but I never believed her. These were old wives’ tales and superstitions. She opened the window and heard the flutter of pigeon wings but did not see any birds anywhere. There was no one.

  There was one other episode so improbable that it was recalled reluctantly even when superstitious people were talking. Nor have I ever made use of it, for it seemed to me literarily implausible. Almost everything fantastical in reality is implausible in literature. The plausible are merely the normal things. Everyday minutiae turn into miracles. But let us tell it here, to accompany this photo. As Franjo was leaving us, Dragan was on a business trip to Leningrad. When he learned that his father had died, he changed his ticket and instead of flying to Moscow took off for Belgrade. The Tupolev jet flying from Leningrad to Moscow crashed after takeoff, and all the passengers and crew members were killed. If Franjo had lived another twenty-four hours, his son would have been on that flight.

  The façade of the building that once belonged to Madam Emilija Heim taken on November 2, 2012. Several hours later would be the last time I saw my mother. I captured the building in passing, the picture serving as a memento for what I was feeling at the moment. After taking the picture, I went into the store and bought some Plavi Radion detergent because it was the only thing in the store that looked like it was from when we lived there. Then I walked around inside the aisles a little, trying to imagine where the apartment had been, the living room, the anteroom, our neighbors, the abandoned old Jewish woman, whose cries and prayers echoed in the stairwell when they took her away in 1941. Making my way around the store, I would have run into her several times, for somewhere here had been her anteroom, where she had once opened the door for the last time. So as not to seem suspicious to the cashier, I bought the Plavi Radion. I took it to Sepetarevac and left it quietly in the bathroom. Preoccupied with dying, she never noticed it.

  Translator’s note

  The image of the translator sitting with a dictionary in a room by himself is perhaps nowhere more inaccurate than in translating a long, complex work like this one. It is a collective effort in many ways, and I could not have accomplished it without the help and support of many individuals and institutions. The process begins and ends with a publisher, and from the moment Jill Schoolman asked if I might be interested in translating this big book, she and her team at Archipelago Books have been supportive, generous, and professional.

  I benefited greatly from the financial and professional encouragement provided by a PEN/Heim Translation grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, both in 2016. My thanks go out to the readers, staff, and selection committees. Also helpful were my colleagues in the Translation Seminar at Indiana University, where I discussed aspects of the translation and received helpful comments and suggestions in early 2018. The excerpt “Kakania” appeared in the summer 2020 issue of The Massachusetts Review, along with a short Q&A (https://www.massreview.org/node/9103). Readers will note that the excerpt announces that it was translated “from the Bosnian,” while the book Kin claims to be translated “from the Croatian.” Both are correct. Readers of the book will understand why.

  Realizing early that I might easily forget some of the choices I had made in the first pages when I got to later ones, I kept a blog dedicated to “Reflections on Kin” at russellv.com, and the many comments and suggestions I received helped keep me consistent and critical vis-à-vis the strategies and principles I employed. Somewhere around this page, an email arrived from an unfamiliar address. Its sender had been reading about my travails and graciously offered to help “should the author’s services ever be needed.” Miljenko Jergović’s services were thenceforth prompt and forthcoming, and I thank him sincerely. Given that I address many of the technical and strategic issues that might normally be discussed in a translator’s note there, readers should feel free to delve into those entries and send questions via the blog portal should they be interested in knowing more.

  Several Indiana University colleagues provided help at crucial stages of my work. Larry Singell, Executive Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, allowed me to take a much needed semester of administrative leave to finish draft number one in fall 2017. My colleagues Carolyn Lantz, Katie Kammer, and Jez McMillen helped to fill in the gap of my absence all while expressing enthusiasm and support for the book that would eventually result.

  I also wish to express special thanks to my friend, colleague, and fellow translator Tomislav Kuzmanović, of the University of Zadar, for re
sponding with patience and good humor to the many, sometimes arcane questions that arose during my several years of trying to find the right English words. In a number of cases those words were suggested by him.

  Finally, translators often say that context is everything. This is true not only for translating. My family knows this well, and it is to Yasuko, Peter, and Dante that I owe the greatest thanks – for the rich and enduring context of our lives together.

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