Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  We would quote Opapa – That idiot will lose the war in the end! – after everything had passed and neither he nor we remained, reproducing that word idiot in his German accent, in a way that we never spoke otherwise, except when repeating his words.

  And in the spring of 1945, when Hitler eventually lost that war, two Partisan soldiers would come for Karlo Stubler to take him off to the Ilidža station and put him into a cattle car whose destination remained unknown. They knew Opapa was a German, and the Partisans had their lists, so why had they not taken anyone else when the house was still full of Stublers? But then with us, both the German blood and the German blame had thinned considerably over the years. We were Croats by now, fit to live more comfortably in the brotherhood and unity of our complex nationalities and ethnicities. But Opapa Karlo was there to atone for our sins, in some deportation camp, where he would no doubt perish, and we’d never learn of his fate, just as Aunt Doležal would never learn what happened to her husband in the work camp in Norway where the Germans had sent him for reeducation. We would have carried him inside our souls like the bitterest of almonds, and never would we, Croats all, have gotten over the loss of our German great-grandfather.

  But that’s not what happened.

  When they heard that the old Stubler had been taken, our Orthodox neighbors rose up. The men and the women ran to the station, the men half-shaven with soap on their faces, the women with their suddenly awakened children – as if they had just leaped from their beds – to beseech the good Partisans to leave Karlo Stubler in peace, for who would be there on Kasindol to protect the people should the Ustaše come back one day? This is not exactly what they said, but this is how it was impressed upon us for our whole lives, and maybe I would have let slip from my mind the wartime actions of my great-grandfather had I not recalled so many times over the past twenty years how Opapa spoke to the Ustaše when they showed up at his door:

  “You can’t come in here! This is a German house!”

  I would have liked to have occasion to utter this sentence at some point. More than that, I’d have liked just to have the courage do so.

  I often wonder why after the war Karlo Stubler quickly lost the desire to correspond with his relatives in Bosowicz, why he rarely inquired about his brother’s fate, why he was so indifferent, almost apathetic, to Rudi’s search for our cousin Regina Dragnev, and why he never exchanged a word about any of this with any of us. After 1945 he pulled back into his Germanness like a snail into its shell. But why? There have been days, months, even entire years when it seemed to me that, in the face of the new era, the South Slav state, and the righteousness of the victors, Opapa contritely lowered his head and died – he too, like another victim – but perhaps the truth is different. Perhaps we were not to be permitted to nestle in this truth as eternal victims of our own suffering.

  It may be that in 1945 Karlo Stubler broke off contact with his relatives so that he would not have to share with them their defeat and crimes. For he had never supported the idiot, and maybe they had. Maybe not, but his life had already run its course, and he did not have time for verifications. He remained a German to the very end, but after 1945 he no longer shared his Germanness with us.

  When he died, the obituary writer asked Rudi what the deceased’s ethnicity was.

  “A Croat,” blurted out our Nano, frightened.

  The Long Missive of Mihajlo Fleginski

  Whether his conscience weighed on him or whether he held onto a desire from long before (I suspect that he himself didn’t even exactly know which it was), after his return from Vienna, Rudolf Stubler tried studying in Zagreb too. His entrance exams in mechanical engineering were exceptional, and he would take the train there for lectures and tests, something that didn’t impose any additional expense on the old man, since all of us at the time, as members of a railway family, were able to ride the train for free. Rudi would spend two or three days in Zagreb, sometimes a whole week, then return home, carefully creating the illusion that he was still hard at work at his studies. He then returned to playing his violin in the Sarajevo movie theaters again, to make enough money for his next journey, or enough at least for his entertainment expenses in Zagreb.

  This lasted on and off for a year or two, and then, we didn’t even notice exactly when, he just stopped going to Zagreb, and no longer said a word about college. It’s possible Opapa noticed, he was the one after all who cared most about Rudi’s schooling, but for us it just slipped by. Thus, very quietly, the last embers of Rudolf Stubler’s academic ambitions died.

  These trips of his to Zagreb would have long ago been forgotten, like all the rest has been, if it weren’t for Nano’s photographs of that city. Here he is in Tuškanac during late autumn, with the first snow falling all around. Or on Ilica, a few steps from the outlet onto Ban Jelačić Square, grinning at the photographer. A picture of him in the park below the Kaptol walls, with an unknown lady, behind them the towers of the city’s fortifications visible.

  Mihajlo Fleginski is not in the photographs, but his story, more than all the pictures or old travel documents, brings to mind Rudi’s sojourns in Zagreb. Although we never met the man, we came to learn everything there was to know about him when, at the beginning of the seventies, years after Opapa’s and Omama’s deaths, a long letter appeared. We began to think about him and through him and, in a different way, we began to think about ourselves, about how fragile and weak the human body is, and how little it takes to be forgotten by everyone. And then, several years later, a very short piece of news reached us: Mihajlo Fleginski’s son had notified Nano that his father had died – Mr. Stubler’s name was listed by his father among those who should be notified – and that he was buried in X cemetery in Y town…As if we were going to visit his grave and light a candle. We were not. Ever. As to why will become perfectly clear.

  Mihajlo Fleginski had moved to Zagreb from the Serbian town of Jagodina. This is where his family had lived after emigrating from Russia in 1919: father, mother, and boy. He was already an adult at the time but started college seven or eight years later, once they were comfortably settled in Jagodina and decided to go no further. Perhaps Fleginski had begun his studies in Saint Petersburg and wanted to continue them in Zagreb. But he became a mechanical engineer easily, with due order and in good time, and then returned to Jagodina. He found a good job and married a woman whose name we have forgotten, though she is remembered to have been a Russian.

  Up until the war Rudi exchanged letters with Mihajlo Fleginski – the exchange of letters, postcards, and photos was something of a family passion that infected everyone, so much so that we grew restless if a day or two passed without someone writing to us from afar – and perhaps they even saw each other on some of Rudi’s train journeys. When the war began, they found themselves in two very distant lands. Rudi being mobilized, made an officer, barely escaped with his life. If he ever thought about Mihajlo Fleginski, it was a fleeting thought, like an envelope with an address and a stamp tossed into the postbox empty.

  After having lived through his share of fear, and after the war-time and family misfortunes had passed – the Stublers had lost their Mladen in a German uniform and their Željko in that of a Yugoslav airman – Mihajlo Fleginski ended up among those who had gone missing, disappeared, vanished; and then came the long period of waiting for these missing either to suddenly resurface or be forgotten for good.

  Did Rudi in the meantime stop thinking of Mihajlo Fleginski? Even if he didn’t, surely he stopped thinking that his friend from Jagodina would ever find him again.

  It could have been in 1971 or 1972 that the letter arrived on Kasindol Street in Ilidža, but with the prewar house number. A stamp with the face of Lenin. The name Rudolf Stubler was written out in Cyrillic in the handwriting of an engineer. Mihajlo Fleginski had written to Nano.

  Days would pass before he grew calm and collected enough to show us the letter and read it to us. Nano h
ad always been easily moved to tears by just about anything: sentimental movies, the ending of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Schumann’s Träumerei, when well performed, the burial of the household dog, which lived to a ripe old age and was laid to rest in the garden behind the apiary, but this was something different altogether. More serious than affection, something one could not cry one’s fill over in the same way.

  In minute, clear handwriting, as if along an invisible straight line, covering both sides of eight sheets of paper, Mihajlo Fleginski wrote about what had happened to him since the beginning of the war. With an engineer’s precision, he enumerated the events, linked them together, and assembled them into a whole, as if he were assembling an internal combustion engine, a turbine, an electric coffee grinder, without feeling, as if the story were about someone else, except when, after bringing one section to completion, in a very short phrase, he noted that his wife had suffered greatly.

  Mihajlo Fleginski had spent the entire war in Jagodina. No one had touched him, nor had he got mixed up in anything, but he had gone on with his engineering work, as valued and useful in wartime as he had been in peace. Machinery deteriorates, engines break down, and someone is always needed to maintain them. Then on October 17, 1944, after several days’ worth of hard fighting against the SS division on the Prinz Eugen, the allied units of the Red Army and the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, under the command of Marshal Tolbukhin, entered Jagodina.

  Once the euphoria of victory had passed, the city’s liberation had been celebrated, and the apprehended traitors of the people had been shot, soldiers from the Red Army came for Mihajlo Fleginski and his family. He did not know, nor would he ever learn, why the soldiers had come. They led his family to the station, crammed them into a train, and for the next three and a half months the family Fleginski traveled along the remains of Europe’s railroad tracks toward Russia. In cars for people and for livestock, in first, second, and third class, on racks for coal, in open wagons, before the loaded rifles and pistols of young Red Army soldiers, policemen, and civilians, and then on foot, when the tracks came to an end at demolished bridges, they made their way, with other families until they disappeared, with German POWs, disarmed deserters, and other émigrés, gathered up like them in their sleep and now being taken who knew where, to Russia or the end of the earth, it was all the same.

  After 111 days on the road, their train came to a stop, and Mihajlo Fleginski was told that he had half an hour to say goodbye to his wife and three-year-old son. They did not tell him where he or they would be going, or explain the separation. Would they be apart for a day, a year, the rest of their lives?

  The journey to Siberia was shorter. Mihajlo Fleginski described life in the camp without fear of the censors, who might read what he’d written and return him to the camps as punishment. Or he believed that no one would do anything to him, for he didn’t complain about anything, he didn’t write that he’d been hungry or thirsty, or about the cold. He did not describe a single emotion in the story of his twenty years of life in the prison colony, or the eight years he spent as an exile in Magadan, where he had a well-heated room, worked in a machinery shop, and could receive packages and write home as much as he wanted. He could even phone his wife and son whenever the lines were free.

  He wrote about Siberia without emotion or complaint, without sympathy or self-pity, describing in a few sentences the trains that took him there, as well as the regions he passed through, and the station where he said good-bye to his wife and son. But in all the minutely written sheets of paper informing Rudolf Stubler where he had been for twenty years, there was not a single description. Only figures, how many people were in the camp, how long the winters and summers lasted (there was practically no spring or fall in Siberia), an array of meteorological details, noted with precision and commentary, the number of teeth lost from his upper jaw (the camp doctor said it was gum disease), Stalin’s death, the news of which delayed by months and, actually, never uttered aloud, and then another array of meteorological details: winter, a few days of spring, summer, and of autumn before the first big snowfall, as if he were writing to someone who was about to travel to Siberia and might want to know what the weather was like.

  Soon in the Stubler house they would be reading Karlo Štajner’s Seven Thousand Days in Siberia. And then other books would be published in those years, translated from Russian, English, German, from all the living and dead languages of the Russian emigration, and in all these books there would be many descriptions. These would come to be a comfort to us, to Nano, and to all those who read Mihajlo Fleginski’s letter, or had listened to Nano read it aloud.

  After Rudolf Stubler died – the last among us to bear Karlo’s family name on his tombstone – in the spring of 1976, Mihajlo Fleginski’s long missive would be misplaced somewhere and disappear into the oblivion of time.

  Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps if I were to read it today, I would in fact find a few descriptions of Siberia, or the handwriting would not be so orderly and straight, as if following an invisible line, that eternal horizon of the engineer’s eye. Perhaps in this way I would lose a certain contact with that unreachable ideal: of suffering that is not named or described by a single word and that exists more truthfully than any verbal description of hardship. What is passed over in silence, in a good literary text and by a true author, knows how to speak through its white spaces and absences, and what surrounds the white spaces is dedicated to such silent speech. Mihajlo Fleginski had passed over everything in silence in order to tell his friend what had happened to him.

  Rudolf Stubler answered his friend’s long letter. We do not know what sort of an answer it was: probably it was well written – for Nano had a literary knack – and filled with feeling. He surely evoked God and consolation. Nano was after all religious: he believed as a little child believes in his guardian angel. To his letter, Mihajlo Fleginski responded politely, briefly, formally. Nano wrote again, and Fleginski again responded in the same manner. Everything he could really say he had said in the first letter. There was no true continuation. That was it.

  Mihajlo Fleginski didn’t return to Jagodina. He never visited Yugoslavia. This was in the time of Leonid Brezhnev. Was he unable to get a passport? Was he too poor? Or did he no longer feel like traveling?

  To his son he’d left a list of people who should be notified at the time of his death. Had he also asked his son to mention the name of the town and cemetery where he was to be buried? It is uncertain – we don’t remember the name of the town any longer, let alone the name of the graveyard.

  Have You Thought About Boras?

  And when the liberation was over, the earth atop the graves settled, the avenging forces collected their own and went away. They didn’t come for Karlo Stubler again, and it seemed that peace had come for everyone. But then from Dubrovnik, Marko Bašić, an old friend and union comrade of Karlo’s, arrived for some sort of work. Though younger than Karlo, Marko too was getting on in years. In truth he was an old man for whom the revolution had not so much meant rejuvenation as a certain reprieve from old age. People at the time believed in a well-being that would come one day, and the years while they were waiting for it stood still. As soon as they began to doubt, they might take on the age of an entire epoch overnight, while those who believed to the end would remain eternally youthful. This explains the phenomenon at the end of communism of how it was still possible to meet hundred-year-old adolescents, heroes older than their rifles had been when they’d joined the Partisans at fourteen.

  This was never a concern for the Stublers. They grew older in accord with the years and the family misfortunes, rushing unceasingly toward their own disappearance. We welcomed Marko Bašić as an old friend, though it perplexed us a little that he seemed so young. He ate a lot, spoke in a loud voice, had big plans for the future, invited us to visit him as soon as possible in Dubrovnik or at his other house in Brgat.

  And then
the two of them sat down to talk after lunch.

  Karlo expected that now they would share mutual recollections, and this pained him somewhat. As if Marko would be offering him some poor Turk’s halva of flour, water, and sugar. But there turned out to be no need for worry. The guest was completely fixated on the future.

  “Have you thought about Boras?”

  “No. What about him?”

  “He’s right there in Gruž. Alive.”

  “Let him…”

  “And what d’ya think now?”

  “About him? Not a thing!”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “What could I do?”

  “I don’t know. Now’s the time. Your time!”

  “And what should I do?”

  “Get back at him!”

  “You know, my friend, whatever I might do to him, it won’t give me back my life, or the years he destroyed. It seems to me best not to do anything. It’s by far the most practical thing.”

  “Oh, you’re such a true kraut!” said Marko Bašić, laughing.

  Maybe Bašić was a little embarrassed, because after that he turned everything into a joke, or he thought old Stubler was thickheaded and that’s why he laughed, but that day, and the next two while he stayed in Sarajevo, or with us in Ilidža, he didn’t bring up Boras again. Nor did he bring him up the next times he visited from Dubrovnik, when he brought what were in those years precious gifts from the south: oranges, carob, and dried figs.

  He came for Opapa’s funeral too.

  Later, at the wake, the vigil or the long period of sitting together that in Bosnia followed the burial of the deceased, when everyone was trying to say something nice about Karlo Stubler, as part of the conversation, in a joke or little story, so as not to provoke the tears of others, Marko Bašić said that Karlo had not wanted to take revenge, even when it became possible.