Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Before the First World War, as a young and spirited railway man, Karlo Stubler would visit his brother in Bosowicz. But during the long years after the Second World War, he would never again return to his native land. All communication with his brother and remaining family took place through letters, and these would on some occasions be quite lively, dynamic, and, in a certain sense, fruitful. Just as Jewish immigrants sent pictures from America, along with trinkets of memorabilia and even packages to their families in the tiny, now nameless shtetlach of Galicia, so did Karlo and his compatriots operate with their relatives in the Banat. The correspondence flowed back and forth for decades between Ilidža and Bosowicz, and while it was not clear which was America and which Galicia, or who would set out for where, their letters prepared for a meeting that would never arrive. Composed in German, these letters were exchanged at regular two-month intervals, with special postcards at Christmas and Easter, and the correspondence was maintained through the twenties, thirties, and the start of the forties, before the horrors of war dissipated the epistles.

  Somewhere among the remains of the family archives, on Kasindol Street in Ilidža, in the home of the Novaks and Cezners, where most of what once belonged to the Stublers remains, there used to be, or still are photographs of Regina Dragnev. The doctor living in Sofia looks out at us from them: tall and beautiful, smiling as one does when posing for a photo for the sake of one’s relatives.

  What held our family together, what we were and what made up our very identity, was based – like any joining of culture and kin beneath a family roof – on an illusion. Part of this illusion was that one day we would see our cousin who lived in Sofia. We never even shook hands, let alone embraced.

  No one except for Karlo Stubler ever touched Regina Dragnev. He had played with her as a little girl when he was a young rail worker. He would fold his right leg over his left, she would sit on his shin, and he would rock her. His leg was a horse that Regina would ride out into the distance.

  After the war, near the close of 1945, when the mournful cry of the people for themselves and their illusions took hold, Rudolf Stubler initiated a search through the Red Cross for his relative, our cousin, Regina Dragnev, née Stubler, a doctor who’d lived in Sofia.

  He would look for her for the next twenty years, through various organizations, for as long as there were people to search for someone, until the broadcasts on the radio changed, in some strange transformation of genre, from searches for the missing to transmissions of birthday wishes on listener request lines, or greetings from home to sailors at sea, but she would not be found, nor would anything at all about her fate be known. Regina Dragnev had slipped into the earth, transformed into smoke, or perhaps nothing happened at all.

  At least three authors have written about such searches: Amos Oz, David Grossman, and Ivan Lovrenović. Oz and Grossman have written about the quest for relatives whose fates were darkened in the Holocaust, Lovrenović about the fathers and uncles who, as soldiers of the defeated or enemy armies, flitted into nothingness during the victory celebration and great reprisal. But they have something in common, all the missing in Oz and Grossman and Lovrenović: it was possible for the searchers to say who and what the missing ones were, victims or aggressors.

  Her cousin Rudi, my beloved Nano, would search for Regina Dragnev with two kinds of dread. The first he shared with millions of Europeans: was she alive and if so, where? And if not, did anyone know where she lay buried? The second kind of dread would be his and ours alone, a family form of it: who exactly was our relation Regina Dragnev from the standpoint of the war’s victors, of justice, of antifascism? I mean, however many times in those two decades they wrote, neither Rudi nor the Regina in Ilidža ever knew anything of her political affinities. She had a husband and two children, she worked in a hospital, she cared about her patients – about whom she would sometimes write to her far-off relatives – she went to the theater from time to time, read the same books as they did, mentioned things she remembered about Bosowicz, asked about living and dead relatives, but never did she write a word, nor was a word written to her, about Hitler and the German eastward expansion, about communism or fascism, or about any of the other things that are so important now, but which one wouldn’t think to elaborate on in letters to a distant relative.

  Who was Regina Dragnev in 1941 and 1945, this cousin of ours, the German girl from the Banat who had married a Bulgarian? Had she collaborated with the enemy? This question made my Nano uncomfortable, but still he didn’t give up. He was not a courageous person and was afraid one day they might burst in through the gate and start asking him why he was looking for this woman and was he perhaps planning some kind of counterrevolutionary action with her, but what else could he do when this search had become such an important part of his identity, of the identity of our family? For him the important thing was tracking down his relative – while for us today it is knowing who she was. This eternal ignorance would follow us for as long as we lived, its reverberations, like those of the Second World War, refused to cease.

  My great-grandfather did not make inquiries about his brother. Karlo was taken from Bosowicz in 1945 and never brought back. His good Serb neighbors saved him in Ilidža, just as he had saved them from the Ustaše – he had sealed them up in his house and stood at the threshold; the cowardly Ustaše didn’t dare strike a German, even one as feeble as he was.

  There were no inquiries after the relatives in Bosowicz. No one was left: they had flitted off in 1945, turned to dust, an empty concept, something that would not be spoken of during Karlo’s lifetime. In contrast to the fates of the Jews, those of the Germans cannot be spoken about. This is simply the case, and so it had to be for my great-grandfather. In his home they spoke German, but he was silent about the Germans. And out of the silence grew a memorial, a small Tower of Babel.

  His son Rudolf Stubler often traveled in Europe, but he never went to Bosowicz. Wherever he went, in whatever city he found himself, he would go to a phone booth and look through the fat directory chained inside. They said Nano did this for fun. Stubler is not a common last name, which was why he had been looking for Stublers for so long. That’s what they said.

  To me it seemed that in the directories of Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Leningrad and Moscow, Budapest, Prague, Amsterdam, and Madrid, he had only ever looked for Regina Dragnev. But such a thing was no longer possible to say, for there was no one who could hear it and grasp the sense of such a long search.

  This is What We Looked Like on the First Day of the War

  When Karlo Stubler was driven out of Dubrovnik in 1920, his eldest daughter did not want to accompany the family into exile. She had already graduated from the trade institute in Dubrovnik and wasn’t the one who had been forced to go off to Bosnia, so she stayed, determined to be independent and live her life away from the railroads and their unions. While it wasn’t common for daughters to disobey their fathers’ will, Karlo had no choice but to walk away from Karla. Even as a child she refused to go by a name she considered masculine and paternal and started introducing herself as Lukretia, and this was the name she kept for her whole life.

  When her people left for Sarajevo, she found herself alone in the city without family or friends, a kuferaš’s daughter, maladjusted, with a mind of her own, in eternal war with her surroundings. She made her way and was able to enchant a well-off financial officer – eighteen years her elder – from the island of Pelješac named Andrija Ćurlin. Our uncle Andrija was one of those men who measured fate for too long, considering all the marriageable girls, constantly changing their minds, until the time was suddenly up. Then, for fear of being left an old bachelor, they would make a hasty choice, as a rule mistaken, and marry someone who, like our great-aunt Lola, had been left behind after some sort of banishment, political upheaval, or natural catastrophe.

  It would be crude to say that Lola married out of calculation. She married because she needed a stron
g footing, someone she could rely on, certain as she was at that moment that it would be easier for her if he made all the decisions, so that one day, reversing course, she would be the one making all the decisions, and she would be the one to drive him, Uncle Andrija, away, just as she had driven away old Karlo Stubler. The poor man could not have known anything about this, because among the well-bred daughters in his hometown of Kuna Pelješka, just as in Grad, there were no women like Karla, Lukretia, Lukre.

  She didn’t love him. Was it because one does not learn to love by force of habit, because she dreamed of a different sort of man, or because Aunt Lola could never really love anyone else, for what was great and strong and pure in her was her love for herself? I suppose this last idea was closest to the truth.

  She gave birth to Željko and, five or six years later, to Branka.

  This didn’t change her either. A person either is or is not a mother. This is possible to know in advance, before any children are born. People often make the mistake of thinking that giving birth changes a willful woman’s character and that because of it a clenched-up or closed-off heart will be touched by some great transformation. Aunt Lola did not change, she was no mother, and almost nothing inside her was altered.

  Whenever she got fed up with her life, or rather whenever she got fed up with her Andrija, she would leave him with the children, and without saying much, be on her way. Ten or fifteen days later she’d come back, announcing angrily as she came in, “So here I am then!”

  And that was that. Not a word more, and he would never ask. No one ever knew where Aunt Lola went during her seasonal tours. Dubrovnik was a small town back then, it would speak behind anyone’s back in time, so there could not have been any secrets, except maybe little lies and small, unfair slanders, but still nothing leaked out, no one uttered a word about where Lukre Ćurlin went off to. Not among the family either, among her sisters, nieces, and nephews, did anyone ever learn anything, and no one, to her dying day, ever dared to ask. The only thing they knew, and everyone would recount it, some as a joke and others in fear that someone like her might one day appear in their own lives, was that phrase of hers: So here I am then!

  Branka was still little at the time, but Željko must have been badly shaken by his mother’s absences. He did everything he could to grow up as fast as possible and get out of the house. After middle school he went to the war, to aviators’ school, and became a pilot in the famous Niš Air Corps, which would be dismantled and split up in 1941 along the lines of family and national affiliations, as well as predictions and prognostications regarding what would happen in the course of the war. Željko Ćurlin completed his pilot training in the Independent State of Croatia, under Franjo Džal, but then quickly escaped to the English and flew until the war’s end as a pilot of the RAF.

  Aunt Lola and Uncle Andrija meanwhile continued to live their empty and displaced marital life. Branka grew up, Andrija worked very hard, and Lola, by then in her forties, continued to enjoy herself like a young girl, actually living the kind of life that would become common for the majority of women at the end of the twentieth century. Aunt Lola, you might say, was the avant-garde of a future, dissolute, touristy Dubrovnik. And she was not overly concerned that somewhere high above Željko was flying, or about the fact that, up there in the air, among warring armies, he was changing one uniform for another. She was a staunch atheist and never believed in any sort of God, or expected anything from him. Death was always the definitive end.

  On the first day of the war, Sunday, April 6, 1941, with her usual euphoria for leaving the house, Aunt Lola set out with a girlfriend on a walk through town. Dubrovnik at the time was patrolled, just as it would be decades later, by wandering photographers. They would take pictures of the men and women who seemed likely to pay, mostly foreigners, and then would offer them the photos for sale. If they accepted, the picture was purchased on the spot, and developed photos would be delivered later. The practice remained in place until the beginning of the eighties, when the photographers lost their jobs – by then all the tourists and travelers had their own cameras and considered themselves expert enough to take their own pictures of the world around them.

  And so on that first day of the war, a Dubrovnik photographer (Studio Berner) snapped a photo of Aunt Lola and a friend of hers. We cannot know for certain, but maybe that was the only work he could get that day, when all of Dubrovnik was gathered around the radios listening to the news of the bombing of Belgrade and the public calls for mass military mobilization. Lukre acted her part meanwhile, defying through her nature the implacable logic of historical time – that day, yet again, she refused to go into exile.

  She liked the photograph so much that she sent it to her sisters in Sarajevo, with a short note on the back: “This is how we looked on the first day of the war, so even the photographer thought it worth taking our picture.” Her sisters at that point found Lola’s folly comforting. As if her nonsense might protect them from all the miseries that sense could foresee and claim, miseries that would dictate the future trajectory of their lives.

  Life in the Ćurlin home was secure and quiet, and they lacked for nothing even throughout the war years. Andrija Ćurlin, a respected gentleman who kept himself apart, had only ever messed with the authorities to the extent that it was necessary, meaning very little or not at all, and had remained useful to everyone because of his expertise in the business of trade and finance. In the Dubrovnik of that time his was one of the rare homes to have a telephone in it. We even find his name in the telephone directory of the Independent State of Croatia for the year 1942. Listed on this page, his is one of the six subscriber names from Dubrovnik that begin with the letter Č/Ć. It notes that he is a “Secretary of the Commission for Trade” and that he resides at no. 1 Bunićeva poljana. Until Aunt Lola’s death this address would remain one of the rare, unchanging details in the history of the Stubler family. Everything else would be altered many times over, lost, vanished, or even wiped away. The phone number where it was possible to reach Uncle Andrija Ćurlin was 640.

  It’s this number that we would call in the autumn of 1943 to say that, in a battle against the Partisans, Mladen had perished, the son of Lola’s younger sister Olga, my Nona.

  For Lola too this would be a terrible event. She would sense that it was not the end but the beginning of something that even today, after all their deaths, remains unresolved. The last of the Stublers had just been born, and all that was needed now was to see how each of them would die and on whom the heavy conscience for that death would fall.

  When the three sisters and their brother met each other in the post-war peace, it would be the first time they clearly heard the differences in their speech, their accents and intonations. Lukre spoke like someone from Dubrovnik, and her siblings sounded to her like Bosnians. Only their German remained unchanged.

  When it was clear the war was over, the family ace pilot Željko changed his uniform once again: from a flyer for the British Crown he would become a pilot in Tito’s young army. One day he would drink himself into a stupor, take off from Zagreb’s Borongaj barracks, and plunge to his death. How could such a thing happen? Had Željko killed himself?

  After the war, the two Stubler sisters and their husbands would be separated by their dead sons.

  It is not possible to express fully such long-suffering remorse, such all-consuming, silent, and unspeakable mutual blame. My Nono Franjo and Uncle Andrija did not send their sons off to die, nor did they expect any kind of heroism from them. My Nona Olga and Aunt Lola didn’t do what the two men expected of them, which ultimately would have kept both Željko and Mladen alive. This passivity was palpable for years after, even up until Olga and Lola’s deaths. To their own misery and that of their sons, the mothers had been stronger and more influential than the fathers. They’d made decisions for the boys, put pressure on them, sometimes for the boys’ good, sometimes for their own, gratifying their own whim
s and dispositions, so that their sons might fill the shoes of husbands they’d never fully accepted or loved. Yet their sons had still fallen.

  Aunt Lola was shaken by Željko’s death more than any mother could be. She would wander around her apartment and through the streets of Dubrovnik, just as she continues to wander today through the family letters and reminiscences passed on thirdhand, by people who don’t even remember her.

  Up to that moment she had lived alone and free, but now it was her lot to live with Željko’s shadow. She tried many different ways to manage: She forced Uncle Andrija to move to Peru but immediately wanted to return to Dubrovnik; she said that the altitude of Lima was too much for her. Then they adopted a child. His name was Šiško. Šiško was supposed to serve her as a way of forgetting Željko. He was her new son. But it didn’t work, he was different. He seemed weaker than Željko, whose intellect and goodness had in the meantime taken on heroic proportions.

  When Šiško grew up, he ran off to be a sailor. He’d come home to Dubrovnik once a year. I met him when I was three. Uncle Andrija had died long before, and we would visit Aunt Lola in her beautiful, spacious apartment above the city’s main square. Šiško took me down to the harbor to show me the boats. He took my picture on an enormous metal bollard. I was terrified that I would fall into the sea.