Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Could be, but this too is an improvisation. The stringing together of memories, living and invented, imagined, false, phantom-like memories with which one fills the emptiness, while the memories multiply, before swallowing each of us up one day. Death is a tiny rip in the universe.

  To me, my new lesbian Nona would be just as dear. Besides being pure in her unhappiness and suffering, she confirms, in narrative and in reality, the completeness of my own isolation, a stone with which one more window is sealed up that used to look out onto the wide and all-pervading foreign world.

  The thought of her lesbianism is even a consolation compared to the story of Mladen’s death and her own. Perhaps this is what makes it seem so implausible – because in fact there is no such consolation.

  Germans in Sarajevo

  In the colony of huts that began in front of the destroyed temple and widened out along a muddy wasteland shielded on two sides by the rows of buildings along Yugoslav National Army Street and the Obala Vojvode Stepe tramline, extending all the way to the First Gymnasium, there lived Germans from Vojvodina and Slavonia who had been driven out when those regions were cleansed of the servants of the occupier, and of any ethnically unacceptable population. After having collected them all at the end of the war into deportation camps which, in terms of living conditions, in terms of cold, hunger, and epidemics of infectious diseases, resembled Nazi concentration camps, the Partisans attempted, unsuccessfully, to have them transported to Germany. Razed to the ground and occupied by Allied forces, Germany was unable to care for its own citizens, and so the cattle cars filled with people were turned back from the border, or never even set out for that ominous fatherland that these people were being required to accept in place of their lost Heimat. Both were their homeland, and the differences in the meanings of these words would be defined afterward by the destinies of millions of displaced persons.

  In order not to have to form camps again – since they themselves were probably aware of the uncomfortable associations and ominous similarities with those of the Nazis – the former Partisans resettled the Volk families across Yugoslavia, in barracks and abandoned refugee settlements, where they would wait to be driven away in the end. This would go on for years, while Germany was being rebuilt and renewed, and they would die of misery, despair, and old age, repaying their own debts and those of others, until finally being resettled in a land where they would forever be foreigners while their children would be Germans who had sacrificed their own family memory in the name of collective responsibility.

  At the time this story begins, in late summer 1946, these people had been delivered via cattle car to the old train station at Marijin Dvor, from which they were led by military escort to the very center of Sarajevo, the Jewish temple, and to some abandoned barracks whose previous purpose remains unknown to us.

  The very next day, the chairman of the Local Party Committee, climbed to the top floor, the fifth landing (the elevator long since out of order) in a building on Yugoslav National Army Street, just next to the Temple. He rang the buzzer next to a plate that said Franjo Rejc and asked to speak to Comrade Olga.

  “This is she,” she said.

  “May I come in?”

  And in he came, but she was undisturbed. This might seem strange but we were never frightened when, in the course of the Stubler history, representatives of the authorities descended on our home. I suppose we were slow on the uptake, though as time went on we would glance at one another in silent questioning of what some person wanted from us, beyond what he had said he wanted.

  The president of the Local Party Committee knew Olga spoke German and, moreover, spoke it extremely well, so well that under different circumstances it might have been suspect, and he offered to put her in charge of the distribution of ration coupons and booklets for the precinct’s provisions. In exchange, her family would be placed into a higher provisions rationing category and would receive better American canned goods and more flour, oil, soap, and powdered milk.

  Thus did my Nona get the first job of her life, becoming the main link between the world of the Volkdeutsche barracks and the city in which the barracks found themselves. Besides the fact that the corralled Germans lived in deathly fear of anyone who approached them or happened to enter their hidden colony on some errand, these people avoided the most innocent of contacts with the city’s residents, refusing even the most casual of kindnesses.

  It was as if they were trying to avoid even the possibility of treading on the Sarajevo asphalt or in any other way inscribing their lives and fates into the city’s history. There are no newspaper accounts of their stay in Sarajevo, no historical document or testimonial texts. Some seventy years later there is no corroboration that a colony of German barracks even existed. These people never were.

  Around the same time as these confined unfortunates, German technicians and specialists began to arrive in Sarajevo with their families. They came from the east and the west of Germany, from destroyed and abandoned industrial centers, as the first postwar European guest workers. Engineers, mechanics, electricians, contractors, and architects, people with university degrees and high-level specializations in their professions, all came to Sarajevo to work and make money, to endure until such time as their countries lifted themselves up, renewed, and they and their knowledge would be needed once again back in Germany.

  When they arrived, they were housed in the Hotel Pošta on Kulović Street. They lived there, were provided for, and taken care of. Following the wartime horrors and life among the Allied bombings, following twelve years of Hitler’s rule, in the course of which each person well knew how much they each had suffered, or what had burdened their conscience, these Germans must have found their arrival in Sarajevo as a kind of disencumbering of body and soul. The men quickly adapted to the local work routine, befriended the other workers, and little by little learned the language. Of all the Germans in Sarajevo, and the city had observed all sorts and sundries since 1878, these were somehow the most open and friendly. They were overjoyed whenever they met someone who knew German, and our apartment on Yugoslav National Army Street, formerly Tašlihanski Street, was often filled with Germans. Olga and Franjo befriended them without any hesitation and visited them at their homes, and many years later, as a retiree, Franjo would work part-time as a bookkeeper at the Hotel Pošta (by then the Germans had long since departed) without feeling at all burdened by the horrors of the war years. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that one of these people might have committed murder in Ukraine or Belarus, or that one of these skilled engineers might have built the gas chambers of Auschwitz. If they had ever suspected this, it would merely have deepened their own grief and suffering, for Mladen too had died in a German uniform.

  There aren’t even a hundred steps between the Hotel Pošta and the Temple. There was no wall between these Germans and those, or any visible barriers. It is very unlikely that the authorities kept track of whether the displaced Banat Swabians from their barracks had any communication with the German engineers and craftsmen from the Hotel Pošta. They didn’t even have to do this, since fortune and misfortune were so clearly evident among the divided peoples at the time that there was no way of mixing themselves up in it. And although these émigrés were united by language and belonged to the same people, they were as distant from each other as they were from Jews, Serbs, or Croats.

  There was, however, another collection of Germans in Sarajevo, the domestic ones, those who had not been compromised during the war and who, after 1945, continued to live their normal lives. By contrast to Karlo Stubler, who had lived on the very edge of the city, whom they would have sent off to a deportation camp had it not been for Aleksa Božić and the Serbs from Kasindol, no one touched the Germans and Austrians who lived in the apartment buildings at the city’s center. Of course everyone knew what each of them was doing and where they had been from April 1941 to April 1945, and no one forgave anything of anyone. B
ut if they had done nothing wrong, they continued to live afterward like the rest of the world. And once again in 1946 and the years that followed one could hear German being spoken on the city’s main thoroughfare of Tito Street, and in the cafés across town. It was their language, and they spoke it loudly, as Sarajevans do as a rule, so that a traveler might have thought all the town’s inhabitants were a little hard of hearing.

  These people, like Olga and Franjo, spoke readily and made friends with the specialists from the Hotel Pošta, while the unfortunates from the barracks avoided them, just as they avoided every other Sarajevo resident who might have chanced to approach them or enter their hidden colony on some errand.

  In the early spring of 1947, before the Hotel Pošta, with their bags and cardboard suitcases, appeared Mr. and Mrs. Püframent. Tall and blond, Mr. Püframent was one of those ideal Germans who some fifteen years later would come through in their Opel Olympias on their way to the Adriatic, while his wife, an attractive Swabian with a healthy, pink complexion, tried to keep their two children in line, at least until someone from the hotel’s front desk might check them into their room, where they could run wild…

  Mechanical engineer Heinrich Klaus Püframent found employment at the railway works. He was charged with overseeing the repair of steam locomotives and switching engines, and with exploring the possibility of bringing on line the rolling stock that, during the war years, had been utterly neglected and ravaged by the sabotage tactics of the Partisan underground, engineers, switchmen, and technicians from the works. The identities of these individuals were, for the most part, never uncovered and the Party’s railroad network was never broken, not even during the several terrifying weeks of Vjekoslav Luburić’s reign of terror, and so the engineer Püframent’s work was, among other things, to teach the technicians how, in the name of public good, to repair the machinery that, during the war, also in the name of public good, they had ruined.

  People welcomed the German engineer warmly, the work proceeded apace, and with the work, social life. This is how the engineer met Franjo – by then a high-ranking railway official in a neat and well-pressed suit, not often seen in the early days of socialism – who spoke Hochdeutsch with no accent, so that Püframent, who was already accustomed to the Sarajevans’ distorted variant of Viennese German, was so surprised that he assumed Mr. Rejc was a German.

  “No, I’m not German, I’m Slovene. My father-in-law is German.”

  Püframent was bewildered by how having a German father-in-law would enable one to speak the language of Thomas Mann, but asked no questions. After all, in this country, he was a guest with the awkward reputation of a former occupier. Regardless, he did not believe Franjo one bit. He would later confess, laughing, that he’d thought Comrade Rejc was a Soviet charged with keeping this Yugoslav collaboration with German experts under control.

  Before long the Püframents began visiting us every Friday. Mrs. Püframent and Nona would oversee the preparation of a poor man’s feast in the kitchen and, while potatoes in the crust baked in the oven, would exchange recipes for stew, chocolate cake, and “rabbit à la vild,” though probably neither woman hoped to ever use these recipes or believed that there would ever come a time when they might once again eat as they had long ago. Nona would recall times from before the war, while Mrs. Püframent didn’t wish to recall anything as a rule, or did not wish to speak about the times she was willing to recall.

  At the same time, Franjo would be discussing world politics and the future of the railroads with the engineer in the living room. Afterward, each of them would praise the intellect and culture of the other to their respective wives, but never would they ask each other what they did during the war. The Püframents knew that Olga and Franjo had lost their son in the war, but they didn’t dare to ask how Mladen had died, on which side or in what uniform. And Olga and Franjo in turn did not ask the Püframents what they had been doing at the time, or how they’d lived or where.

  Meanwhile the children would run wild through the house.

  Their daughter’s name was Wiebke, and she was the same age as the Rejcs’ daughter. Uwe, her little brother, was an active – which is to say, mischievous – child, only ever looking for what he could climb, what he could break, and, in the end, what he could dive off toward certain death.

  The girls would run after him, shouting, “No, Uwe! No, Uwe!” just as they had heard Mrs. Püframent do, but he did not hear them, just as he did not hear his mother, and just kept right on climbing the walls in defiance of gravity while the two precocious girls would punish him with slaps on his backside, which Uwe would also defy, and in fact they could thrash him all they liked, he merely wriggled out from under them and dashed off to something else. He would climb the walls, run in circles, cling to the ceiling – No, Uwe, you’ll fall on your head! But he wouldn’t listen to his father either.

  If he hadn’t been a living boy, insensitive to pain, but rather a metaphor, then Uwe Püframent would have been a German metaphor. But real people cannot be metaphors, not even the smallest of children.

  And thus would Uwe run wild through our apartment every Friday, while no one could stop him. The girl would be overjoyed, for then her family’s melancholy home would come alive, and for a few hours no one would think about the irrevocable past or blame anyone for anything, and everyone was dear and loved.

  The ration booklets for provisions were distributed on Saturday mornings: sometimes once a month, others every two weeks, still others every Saturday. This depended on the unverifiable, clandestine rhythms and rules of bureaucracy, about which we didn’t dare ask.

  Olga Stubler, known as Comrade Rejc, would take her daughter with her. From the fourth floor on which they lived – or rather the fifth, since the first floor was for some unknown reason called the “upper ground floor” – there were more steps than from the building’s entrance to the first door of the barrack.

  As soon as they caught sight of Comrade Rejc and the young girl, the expelled Germans would run for cover inside their huts, hiding and pretending to be invisible. They behaved as if they were the fearful natives of some wondrous, unexplored African territory. Except they were white.

  Olga took the young girl with her, hoping in vain that they would not be so afraid and with her help Olga would be able to get closer to them. This never happened.

  There were very few adult men in the colony. Some old men, a lame youngster, another who was missing an arm, and two others who didn’t seem to be missing any limbs. The women were all wearing traditional dress. In wide, gathered skirts, with dark blouses and head kerchiefs, they looked completely out of place. Like characters in a book that, by some mistake of the designer and printer, had found themselves in the wrong story and now were unable to escape.

  The young girls wore miniature versions of the same gathered skirts with dark blouses and head kerchiefs.

  The men spoke our language, but not the women. Either they were pretending not to understand it, or they didn’t. This was unusual, since the old people spoke Serbo-Croatian like natives. They had a drawl like everyone from Vojvodina, but their pronunciation sounded completely domestic and attractive. It seemed unlikely to us that Germans would speak this way. If they even knew our language, we thought, they had to speak it somehow more rudely. They had to talk, we said, like the people from Romanija, in the eastern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or from Kalesija in the northeast, but not like this. It was almost enough to make a person suspect that maybe they weren’t Germans at all, and that someone had made a terrible mistake in driving them from their homes, which were no longer theirs anymore but rather had become our liberated houses.

  In September of 1949, in the hungry days when due to Tito’s revisionism the country was isolated from the people’s democracies and barely accepted in the West because of our path into socialism and attitudes toward enemies of the revolution, Franjo and Olga’s daughter was in the same grad
e as the children of the expelled Germans.

  Mihailo, who would become Michael if he survived, was very aggressive. The moment anyone looked at him sideways, he would start a fistfight. Without the least bit of guile that some children have, deprived of any need that others should like him, dirty and covered in welts, Mihailo fought for his life like an animal. Of all the shapes of desperation in this long story of the Stublers, Mihailo’s despair is the greatest, even if his family name has been forgotten.

  Laura and Maria wore gathered skirts like their mother but removed the kerchiefs from their heads. This was the only sign that they’d started going to school.

  Laura spoke to no one and cried constantly. When the other children quickly formed into groups and ran to the courtyard during recess, she stayed in the classroom and wept. At the beginning she cried from grief and misery, but later she cried out of habit, not knowing what else to do. She cried for the same reasons that Mihailo got into fights. But she was reconciled to her own end. If she’s survived, Laura is a seventy-year-old German retiree today.

  Of the three of them, Maria was the strongest. If another girl took exception to her, she would yank furiously on her pigtail or braid. She was loud and authoritative, interrupted the teacher, spoke up impatiently when she knew the answer to some difficult math question. If we hadn’t known whose daughter she was and where she was from, if her name was not Maria, with an accent on the i, but instead was Marija, we would have seen in her a typical Sarajevo girl, sharp and promising, soon on her way to becoming a squad leader in the youth work actions of Bosnian Highway ’59, or a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, a valued and active participant in the workers’ collective…

  But Maria too was destined for exile.

  The teachers treated the young Swabians the same way they treated all their other students. They were strict and impartial, in accord with the meager resources of the day and the proclamations of the proletarian international, guided by old-fashioned pedagogical rules, they publicly recognized the good students and, also publicly shamed the bad ones. But they didn’t know what to do in the face of Laura’s weeping, which was so out of harmony with the atmosphere of general optimism and which somehow lay heavily on their adult consciences.