Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  He didn’t care about card games. He had nothing against the others playing, but he himself didn’t know the rules to even a single game. At the time, in the thirties, forties, and fifties, card playing was a very widespread way of using up one’s free time, though it was generally thought to be a marker of bad taste, lower cultural or social status, so people often played in secret. Karlo Stubler didn’t share the prejudices of his day. He didn’t care if we played. Perhaps it even pleased him that we were spending time together that way, that we were happy, and that we’d have something to remember each other by. But about card playing itself he had no opinion at all. He didn’t play, and that was that.

  Karlo Stubler didn’t play chess either. He wasn’t inclined toward any social games. He did everything himself and needed others only for conversation. He told stories and listened patiently to the stories of others, trying not to let anything disturb, disrupt, or – God forbid – direct them in the telling.

  It was important to him only that the children learn some things that they might remember throughout their lives. Something like a mushroom prayer.

  The Balijan Summerhouse

  When the Stublers moved to Kasindol Street, down a little farther toward the future tram tracks, there stood a luxurious summerhouse that belonged to the Balijan family. It was designed by the engineer Moravec, husband of Doctor Marija, for his father-in-law and all their family to enjoy. The elder Balijan was an Armenian, or a Jermen, as they said in Sarajevo. He had lived in Istanbul, where he’d obviously done well for himself, such that in 1915 when evil times arrived and the great nation of Osman decided to reform itself into something of a smaller Turkish nation, Balijan ran away toward the West, saving his neck in the process. As he’d set off at the right time, he didn’t leave with empty pockets and was then able to purchase a house in his new homeland and continue to live well. He sent his daughter to Zagreb to study medicine, and in Ilidža, in accord with the old customs of Constantinople gentlemen – whose pastoral habits we would come to explore in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul – he built a summerhouse where his family would spend their days from spring to fall. He would arrive as soon as the mountains turned green and stay until the first autumn frosts.

  In the golden days of Tito’s socialism, when Sarajevo was being built from the money that the large state factories made in Libya and across the countries of the Middle East, high-rises sprouted up all the way to below Stup and Otes, the city joined Ilidža, so that today Kasindol lies right on the edge of Sarajevo. But at the time when Balijan had his summerhouse built, in the thirties of the previous century, one came to Ilidža by train.

  The Balijans would gather at the train station in Marjin Dvor, with their bags, suitcases, and supplies for the next several months, and the narrow-gauge local would transport them for the next half hour to Ilidža, from which they would set off on foot or, if they had too much luggage, on a villager’s horse-drawn wagon, for their summerhouse.

  This way of life was unusual for Sarajevo. People expressed surprise at the Balijans and their habits – and indeed Sarajevans liked more than anything to express surprise about anyone who differed from them – because there wasn’t any sort of pastoral culture in the city. Those who kept summerhouses in Stojčevac and near Vrelo Bosne, Turks and Austrians, had long since gone away by then, leaving behind only those who didn’t share their customs, or those who had thrown off such cultural habits in the intervening years – fearing that someone might identify them with defeated kingdoms or hateful occupiers.

  But Nono Balijan had no such problems with historical heritage and cultural practices. He arrived in Sarajevo with the intention of living precisely as he had lived in Istanbul. Here of course everything was a bit smaller, closer, and somehow more practical, but the only thing he really lacked, for complete satisfaction, was the sea. Sarajevo was like Istanbul, captured in a crystal ball, but without the sea, likely because you could never fit such a body of water within the spherical confines of glass. Instead of leaving for somewhere far away, France, Italy, Germany, or America, where the exiled Jermens in fact often went, their children going on to become famous singers, actors, and authors, slightly changing their family names according to their new languages and cultures, Nono Balijan had gone to a place that seemed to him at the time – in the twenties and thirties – the most similar to that bygone Ottoman Constantinople in which the neighborhoods hummed and jingled with all the languages of the empire, each of which any small child understood. Praying to God, too, took place in countless, eternally opposed manners, such that in Constantinople, as now in Sarajevo, each person was of a different religion than, and a heathen to, his neighbor, though they understood one another all the same.

  Perhaps Nono Balijan arrived in Sarajevo by chance, through a combination of circumstances, or maybe he chose it in just this manner. We will never know for sure.

  Nona Balijan had the appearance of a refined European lady, while her husband seemed to us more like an Istanbul serasker from the previous century. He actually looked a bit like a villain from a heroic epic poem. We were afraid of old man Balijan until we got used to him. And once we’d got used to him, we would make our way down Kasindol to find him. We’d dart around his legs while all our enemies – the older boys, Ilidža’s Gypsy kids, and anyone stronger than us – would run off in different directions, afraid of Nono Balijan. He was short, like all our Jermens, and was not particularly strong, nor did anyone ever hear of him threatening someone, but he looked like he could threaten. Later everyone got used to him, and his frightening appearance no longer protected us from the enemy rayahs.

  Besides Marija, whom everyone called Mica, Nono and Nona Balijan had a son named Ivica. He was a handicraftsman and had neither the intelligence nor the ambition of his sister, but like his father he was beloved in Kasindol. He did not take after his paternal side or have anything Jermen-like or stambolski about him, but resembled rather the Sarajevans of his generation, the rather fickle youth born toward the end of the First World War and in the immediate postwar years, in whom was preserved the Ottoman partiality to an unhurried life and small, everyday pleasures that, in combination with the provincial fashions of Habsburg officialdom, produced a ruinous mental blend among all the witty Sarajevo layabouts, of the sort that we continued to see up until the 1980s.

  Ivica Balijan fell in love with Štefica Reš – who was actually Stephania Resch – and she became his wife, with whom he would have two children – Alfred (Fredij) and Jasminka. They arrived during two years of the war, a fact that perhaps supports the hypothesis that neither Ivica nor Štefica experienced the war in particularly dramatic fashion. They came through it intact, the trouble arriving only in the summer of 1945. Stephania Resch was from somewhere in Vojvodina, a Swabian, a daughter of the Volk, though in the Balijan household, and even more so for the estranged Jermen that was Ivica, this was in no way an important subject. Perhaps all this was too complicated for him, his experience of the world, and the priorities of his life. If not, it means he was smart enough to know that living with such revelations was impossible while dying from them, God forbid, was quite possible indeed.

  That summer Štefica lost all contact with her family. They disappeared as if swallowed up by the earth. She wrote to neighbors in Vojvodina, but they didn’t know anything either, or at least they pretended not to. As the story spread through Kasindol about how the Partisans had been marching away Karlo Stubler when the Serbs from his neighborhood came to save him, led by the prominent, influential Partisan collaborator Aleksa Božić, the unhappy Štefica could only imagine what had happened with her loved ones. They’d been taken away, and for them there’d been no one to run to the train station to rescue them.

  She was beginning to come to terms with the fact that they had disappeared and she would never see them again when, several months later, her mother appeared. Her husband had died in the camps, but she’d survived, that is if what remained of
her could be called a life. The unfortunate woman was beside herself, deranged, lost. She could not finish a single thought, or explain what had happened to her or what she’d experienced. They thought she would get through it, but she never did. For years we would see her around Kasindol, talking to herself, marveling at the sky and the clouds, and strolling along the road beside the traffic marker that in 1992 would become the line of demarcation between warring soldiers, a noose strangling the city. She was always dressed in folkloric garb, which here on the fringes of Sarajevsko polje, in the depths of Bosnia, seemed distant and uncanny, just as the suffering of this woman seemed distant and uncanny. The war came to an end, people were poor, they bought their food and soap with rationing coupons, but everywhere the belief in a better future grew, a future that she didn’t embody.

  What had Karlo Stubler thought when he would see her passing by on the street?

  The architect Moravec imagined the Balijan summerhouse through a twentieth-century vision. In front of the house he built a pool, designed with beauty and discretion, so that the children would be able to swim in the summer. By contrast to the pools of today, his was not visible from all angles, nor did the striking blue tiles clash with the harmony of the surrounding greenery or the earthen tones of the house and its environs. Actually, the entire area’s landscape from spring until fall was brown, as in the abstract paintings of Ljubomir Perčinlić, so that the summerhouse and its pool attracted all the colors and nuances of Kasindol Street. In Stubler memory, it was the most beautiful house of the neighborhood, and even though it was foreign, it was there that the Stubler biographies were most inscribed, our family tree, all that we were but also all that we might have become if our fates and separations had not driven us in different directions.

  On the cover of the historical-family novel entitled The Stublers, which would, like a small stone tossed into a calm pool, widen outward in concentric circles with the stories of the inhabitants of Kasindol Street and, very likely – after years of research, filming, photographing, and roaming around the Kasindol of today, along with collecting statements, memories, photocopies of documents and school diplomas, flipping through photo albums, examining city archives and police records and traveling across the world to speak with the scattered former inhabitants of Kasindol – would comprise several thousand pages and be released in five or six volumes, on the cover of that novel would be a photograph of the Balijan summerhouse, just as it was until the end of the fifties, when the Balijans sold it. But such a photo was probably never taken or was taken and lost forever, just as the novel itself will never be written. I mention it again here not in order to lament the things we’ve forgotten or remove the weeds from our graves but because I rather like these kinds of novels.

  Doctor Marija Balijan and the engineer Moravec decided to move to Zagreb at the end of the fifties. This was a time when many of the Sarajevan kuferaši – Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Slovenes, and Jermens, too – who had in the interim been nationally reborn as Croats – decided to move to Zagreb. They all had some reasons of their own, and all these reasons appeared simultaneously, for life had gotten easier, basic goods were no longer being rationed, the first imported goods were appearing in stores, there was more money, and even the real estate market, as one might put it today, had recovered.

  And so the time had come for the sale of the summerhouse, and its eventual disappearance.

  Nona Balijan, who was born in 1879, was five year older than Nono, and died before him, in 1956. Nono would die in 1962, outliving the sale of the summerhouse and its disappearance. We don’t know whether he was touched by the news – probably he didn’t care, what was done cannot be undone, as they said. The Balijans had vanished forever from Kasindol, the engineer Moravec having moved to Zagreb with his spouse. They had two daughters, Višnja and Ubavka. Ubavka died young, but by then the summerhouse had already been long gone.

  After her mother’s death, Štefica and Ivica continued living in Sarajevo with Fredij and Jasminka. Ivica died in time, in 1982, before the very end would come. Štefica survived this too: she died in 2000.

  Their daughter Jasminka lived in Dobrinja. She had two children, Stela and Nikola. In 1993 or 1994, as was the case for most of the war, the city had no water or electricity. Jasminka and her daughter, Ivica and Štefica’s granddaughter, went out for water. At the water site, as in a newly composed epic, the turbo-folk epic of Sarajevo’s siege, a Serbian shell caught up with both of them, and they were killed.

  The granddaughter and great-granddaughter of the Jermen who had managed to survive the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks, the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of the German who had survived the avenging hatred of the victors of the Second World War, perished in the genocide that Radovan Karadžić attempted to carry out upon a people to which, in the persistent cynicism of fate, Jasminka and Stela didn’t even belong.

  And by then, the Balijan summerhouse had long since ceased to be.

  It had been bought by people who did not need a summerhouse but the kind of house where honest, hardworking villagers live. Nor did they need the engineer Moravec’s architectural design but rather space in which to shelter themselves and their property from the rain, the cold, the heat, and the sunshine. And so they started adding to the summerhouse horizontally and vertically until before long it had lost its shape and become one of those monstrous, eternally unfinished structures we see on the outskirts of all our cities. There is nothing of Balijan left in the house. It’s as if it has been swallowed up by oblivion, ravaged by Alzheimer’s, and now, in place of the grand pastoral vision of Moravec, there is only fear in an eye that continues to look out but no longer recognizes anything.

  In Istanbul Orhan Pamuk describes how, during his childhood, fires destroyed the abandoned wooden summerhouses of the Constantinople gentry. The fires broke out by accident, with some unknown homeless person lighting the first flames. But then others (perhaps those who came to replace the gentry forced out of the summerhouses) came and burned the houses down purposefully and methodically to make room and create lots where their own world would be built, with different memories and vistas. Nono Balijan’s summerhouse did not go up in flames. While writing about certain people and their destinies, the writer has linked them together with others, whom he didn’t know but who in his work do exist.

  Confession Before the Sacrament of Marriage

  In the brief biography of Olga Rejc, née Stubler, it is noted that she gave birth to three children, two sons and a daughter. She lost her firstborn son when she was thirty-eight. We shall set to one side the story of the circumstances surrounding Mladen’s death, though it was the most important event in the disappearance of the Stublers, an event that came to define us, though this was never uttered aloud, and Mladen’s name was never mentioned, even if he, or our idea of him, hovered behind every one of our actions, for as long as Nona was alive.

  There were no pictures of Mladen in the house where I grew up. Nona had destroyed them over the years. Whenever she came upon one, she’d tear it into the tiniest little pieces or expeditiously burn it in the stove. She was kept busy in this task for nearly forty years. Pictures tumbled out from all sides: from shoe-boxes in which useless family documents were kept, from old albums, from envelopes and thick books that had sat unopened, from the inside pockets of Nono’s old jackets and overcoats, from drawers overflowing with doctor’s prescriptions, diagnoses, and employment certifications; they appeared from every direction, and she doggedly annihilated them, taking care to do so unobserved. As if she were doing something shameful, as if she were in the toilet flushing down photographs of her eldest son, and it seemed as if all her work was for nought, for new ones continued to surface.

  The last photograph I found was in 1983, in a pre-war Stanoje Stanojević encyclopedia volume. I didn’t even know that it was my uncle Mladen in the photo: it showed a grade school classroom, two students sitting at their de
sks laughing. Their laughter was hysterical, hormonal, their faces distorted out of all proportion. Behind them, in the depth of the perspective, was a third boy with an angelic smile, calmly staring into the lens as if unaware of what was happening around him. That was Mladen.

  The picture was almost a miniature, four by three centimeters, which was probably why it had survived so long unnoticed in the house.

  I left it lying on the writing table in my little corner of the living room, and in the morning it was gone. That’s how I knew it was Mladen in the picture. Nor could he have been one of the two boys with the distorted faces. He was the quiet one in the back. I remembered his face then.

  Nona also destroyed all Mladen’s school diplomas, his birth and death certificates, his letters, and his homework. There was not a single sheet of paper in the house that might have had his name written on it.

  At the bottom of the wardrobe, under the winter things, she kept a wooden box of soil. Several months before her death, Nona spread that soil around the garden. After that as if on their own, odds and ends found their way to that box: postcards, receipts for electricity and television service, unused postage stamps. Grains of soil stuck to their adhesive back. Those grains were the last trace of Mladen in our apartment. It was soil from Mladen’s grave in Donji Andrijevci, Slavonia, a grave that no longer exists.