Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  This was at the beginning of the fifties.

  The suffering of Manka’s son Ivica, Aunt Ruže’s only grandson and the great-grandson of Marko Kljujić Šumunja, who was as strong as the earth and built that well with his own hands, was the sort of event that amounted in the memories of others to an entire biography characterized by pity.

  No one could ever remember Ivica without feeling pity.

  II

  Aunt Luce was a kind woman. She would rush to help anyone in need, without asking who it was or why. She had married a certain Segat, who’d spent about three years in prison after the war. No one asked what part of the law he had violated or what wartime misdeed he’d committed. Serving time was all you needed to know then, it was better not to ask more.

  As soon as the war was over, the people of Kakanj would use any excuse to go out to the meadows, which they referred to by the Turkish-derived word meraja. The moment it wasn’t too chilly and didn’t look like rain, they’d pack up for the meraja. Miners, rail men, office workers, both men and women, everyone would bring food from their homes, Turkish coffeepots and cups, a bottle of rakija and little glasses, and, somewhere along the Bosna River, have a picnic and tell all kinds of stories. Once in a while they would even spend the night, returning to the Colony well after dark.

  On one such occasion there was a trip with Segat and Aunt Luce. Franjo and Olga came from Sarajevo with their daughter, who must have been five or six. Old enough, that is, to remember it all for the rest of her life.

  When he’d had a couple drinks, Segat grew expansive and started to tell a story.

  Otherwise he was not a big talker. He was normally quiet, sullen, and everyone said this was because of his time in prison.

  The more he talked, though, the louder he got, until our people felt like hiding their faces. Both the women and the men. They disappeared, like tortoises pulling their heads inside their shells, waiting for Segat’s foolishness to pass. But he didn’t stop. He said everything, as if for years he hadn’t said a word and this was the beginning or the end. And just when you thought now he had to stop, he couldn’t possibly go on, a God-fearing person couldn’t talk like this, on he went, sinking lower, growing uglier, more horrible. He talked in such a way that a person felt guilty for listening, as much to blame for the words being aired as the person doing the talking.

  This was in 1949 or 1950, in the mining colony at Kakanj, in the summertime, on the meraja along the Bosna River.

  When he understood no one was going to do anything, Franjo got up, took his child by the hand, arm in arm with Olga, and walked away, just like that, without a word. No one asked where they were going.

  Segat was drunkenly shouting out a story of how some Gypsies had been butchered one dawn at Jasenovac while he was in the service there.

  For years in our house the question was debated whether Segat had invented his service at Jasenovac as a kind of boast.

  That was the last trip to the meraja in Kakanj. Segat was not seen much after, only at family funerals. Then he himself died. No one knows exactly when, or from what.

  III

  There were villagers who worked in the mines. Either they lost their land or didn’t have any in the first place and therefore had to go into the pit to feed their families. They didn’t last long. If they weren’t buried by a landslide, they took the ash into their lungs, or were consumed day after day by alcohol.

  There was one fat peasant who would sing the same bawdy folk song every morning as he came toward Kakanj every morning alongside the Colony:

  When you give your titties

  A little shaky-do

  You don’t give me no peace

  I’m sad through and through.

  In sunshine and snowfall, when no one was around or with people everywhere, he sang the same song. People got used to him.

  Once he was singing When you give your titties a little shaky-do when from down the street an older woman in traditional dress called, “Praise Jesus, child!” to which the peasant-miner politely replied, “Praise him everywhere” and then continued, You don’t give me no peace. I’m sad through and through.

  For years on end. Nothing ever changed there – nothing, that is, until the great mine accident down in the pit, the innumerable funerals, and the eventual arrival of delegations from Zenica and Sarajevo.

  IV

  Aunt Jele was the boss of the home.

  Not because she wanted to be, but simply because she had to be. Uncle Karlo was a foreman in the mine, a quiet, helpful person, but he never decided anything on his own. It was his nature. He could have, but he was tired out from always being the boss.

  He drank a lot but never became a drunk.

  Aunt Jele died in 1970. Uncle Karlo five years later.

  It wasn’t easy for him on his own.

  The Karivans: A Short Tale

  I

  The Karivan house was the closest building to the Franciscan monastery in Kreševo. Karivan Place was an old smithy where since the Middle Ages they had forged steel in the same way. On this same spot a large public ironworks would be erected after the end of the Second World War – the state would nationalize the land, destroy the smithy, and build something of its own.

  No one would even ask about compensation afterward. After 1990, when denationalization should have taken place, the war came. After that it was too late. The Karivan descendants scattered across the world, and no one was around who could still remember the story of the smithy, let alone ask for restitution. Besides, to seek restitution all the heirs would need to connect. And these people, perhaps, didn’t want to know about each other.

  They had been miners in addition to being smiths. On the whole, for generations, as long as the family had been in Kreševo, their lives had revolved around coal, iron, and steel for generations. One story has it that they’d begun moving to Sarajevsko polje to take up residence because one Karivan had killed a Turk and had been forced to flee. Though it’s not a very likely story.

  You wouldn’t run to Sarajevsko polje if you’d killed a Turk, you’d run toward the sea, where there weren’t any Turks and Turkish law was not observed. More likely they’d headed off in search of some sort of easier work. Not everyone is cut out to be a miner or a smith.

  And after some left, it was expected that others would follow. So from the end of the nineteenth century, from generation to generation, the Karivan kin had settled in Otes, Hadžići, and Tarčin. And then, eventually, closer to Sarajevo.

  Their line was not strong, nor did they give birth to sons, nor were they lucky in life. Who knows what else there might’ve been at play, but the family name Karivan didn’t seem to spread or grow.

  II

  It was not a large or a rich house.

  Made from little mud bricks, not stone or baked clay, the Karivan house in Kreševo, the closest building to the Franciscan monastery, caved in soon after they had left.

  The courtyard disappeared too: overgrown, transformed into wasteland.

  Only the walnut tree in front remained.

  Everyone called it the Karivan walnut.

  In Kreševo, in front of a house that once was, and a courtyard that is no more, grew the Karivan walnut.

  III

  By today’s standards, the distance from Otes to Kreševo is not far.

  If the road were better, it would take barely a half hour. But the road isn’t good.

  The part of the family that resettled in Otes, both the men and the women, stopped wearing the characteristic dress of Kreševo and replaced it with that of Sarajevsko polje.

  And the Karivan women from Kreševo, in their black Turkish embroidered pantaloons, their white blouses and black embroidered sleeveless jackets, would look so silently at the Otes Karivan women, with their black skirts and differently designed white blouses, while between them a foreign land grew larger
and broader. Some thought their daughters, daughters-in-law, and sisters-in-law were growing estranged, while others thought that their mothers, mothers-in-law, and sisters-in-law had been left behind in their sorrow and poverty.

  The space that separated them, however, could still have been crossed on foot.

  But the distance was the same as if chains of mountains had risen up and oceans had spread out wide between them, foreign languages sealed upon their lips. Everything was over once the first Karivan woman in her Turkish pantaloons saw another Karivan woman in a skirt.

  The foreign country expanded, and it swallowed them up.

  IV

  Uncle Mato Karivan had bought a house in Bistrik, in Sarajevo’s Catholic quarter.

  This house too was nationalized, then destroyed.

  All that was left was a rundown wooden shed full of holes that was for storing tools and unneeded junk. It didn’t belong to anyone.

  To the neighbors, it came to be known as the Karivan shack.

  It stood there for all of fifty years before finally falling apart by itself.

  That, or the neighbors had destroyed it during one of the winters of the war, lighting up its torn planks to warm themselves.

  Such is the story of how the Karivan shed and the Karivan family disappeared from Sarajevo.

  For the Love of Your Goddamn Mother

  I

  Aunt Mare married Kvesa, a miner from Raspotočje.

  When he wasn’t down in the pit, Kvesa was busy making kids. Aunt Mare bore nine of them.

  Watching over the kids, raising them, teaching them, was her job, but as kids will be, they were a handful. When one of her nine sons and daughters committed any sort of folly, by word, action, or oversight, Aunt Mare didn’t punish them right away, but made a mental note.

  Then on Saturday before dinner, just after their baths, she would line all nine of them up and have them bend over a bench to spank their bottoms with a paddle, dealing the same number of blows as indiscretions committed by each child during God’s good week.

  She beat them so they would begin the Lord’s Day cleansed.

  She was practical, Aunt Mare, because what other kind of person could have kept a running count of the punishments to be meted out for offenses committed by every one of her nine sons and daughters over the course of an entire week? She had a good memory and never forgot a thing. It would not have been fair to one child to forget or overlook something, for another child might then be doubly punished.

  Aunt Mare Kljujić was an Old Testament mining mother.

  One Saturday she was in the process of giving her most lively and energetic son such a wallop that he shouted, “Dammit, mother, for the love of your goddamn mother, cut it out!”

  II

  When they were given away in marriage, women became mourners.

  They put on black veils, but in a particular way, backwards, so it covered the backs of their heads.

  Among the more educated it was believed that in their black pantaloons and black veils they mourned the last queen of Bosnia, Katarina.

  Ethnologists believed in this quaint, romantic story, along with the collectors of folk proverbs, sketched panoramas, and photographs, who came from Vienna and Zagreb and fell fatally in love with the provinces of Bosnia and all their hardships.

  And perhaps it was really true. Perhaps the bride-mourners mourned for the queen out of some longstanding practice passed from generation to generation down to our own day.

  Every daughter of Marko Kljujić Šumonja, except for our Aunt Jele, was given the name Katarina.

  In order to distinguish between them, or because of some already existing difference that found expression in a slight transformation of the order of vowels and consonants, they called the Katarinas by different names.

  Aunt Ruže called her Katarina by the shortened version of Katina.

  Aunt Mare’s Katarina was simply Kate.

  III

  All four of Marko’s daughters were literate.

  At least enough so that during Sunday mass they could read from the breviary.

  They signed documents in a knobbly laborer’s handwriting that to the ends of their lives lent their letters a beginner’s shape and would preserve forever the impression of being written by seven-year-old girls.

  They read the telegrams with news of the deaths of those close to them in faraway places, and then the death lists and newspaper obituaries of their own husbands.

  This was how being literate served them.

  IV

  Aunt Jele gave birth to large children.

  Both Drage and Vlado weighed more than four kilos. In 1944 Rezu was born, and he too was big.

  When Franjo’s wife Olga gave birth in May of 1942, Jele got on a train for Sarajevo to visit them. For some people this would not have been a great journey – it’s not far from Kakanj to Sarajevo. But for people from the Colony, both men and women, who did everything they did around Kakanj itself, and only when it was absolutely necessary ventured as far as Zenica, traveling to Sarajevo, a big city in which they had no business, was like setting out for the ends of the earth. And then there was the war, famine, and poverty.

  Aunt Jele, though, was very close to Olga. The two of them understood each other. They weren’t just sisters-in-law, they were friends. She had to go to Sarajevo.

  It never entered Uncle Karlo’s mind that he should go too. After all, he had work. Despite the war, in the mine they worked at full tilt. Uncle Karlo was a locksmith at the screening plant.

  Olga gave birth to a daughter.

  She had her at the hospital, which for Aunt Jele was rather extraordinary.

  The little girl was tiny, barely two kilos.

  After she was born, she lost twenty grams more.

  “Olga dear, I would have been ashamed to give birth to a thing like that!” said Aunt Jele, peering over at the little child in her sister-in-law’s arms.

  Even today people in Kakanj have a laugh at this, seventy years after the fact.

  Aunt Jele was witty and knew the right moment to make a joke, as few people do.

  Anecdotes and experiences that were made funny by two or three of her words of commentary were remembered and passed on. For the most part, people would recount them during mourning visits, at the home of the deceased after the burial.

  Then they’d laugh with relief. Just happy to still be alive.

  Uncles

  I

  Church was the center of social life in the Colony.

  People went to church, those who believed and those who didn’t, because of their friends, God, and Reverend Divić.

  Divić was handsome. All the girls were in love with him. He was also very mouthy. This was the word they used – mouthy. And the miners in those days prized such people.

  The way you spoke and the fact that you went down into the pit separated the brave from the cowardly. People to whom God had not given the choice to be brave respected the fact that Divić had been given a choice and that he had taken it. Their black miners’ garments were after all sown from the same cloth as Divić’s priestly gown.

  During the war, the reverend would bless the believers and ask them to pray for strangers, for all those they knew, for their loved ones. And each time he would add, “And let us pray for the ones out there…” and he would point to the woods, where in the collective imagination of the congregation the Partisans were hiding.

  Reverend Divić was instigating rebellion. The people knew what he was doing and why. There had never been many Orthodox Christians in Kakanj. Neither in the neighboring villages nor around the mine. But there was an Orthodox Church and a priest, Father Miloš.

  In accord with their experiences and spiritual interests, the rules of the market, or more probably as the result of a kind of empathy that brings people of similar characters tog
ether, Reverend Divić and Father Miloš became friends. The reverend would visit Father Miloš and his wife every Sunday for lunch, helping Miloš’s children with their Greek and Latin, such that a firm trust developed between them in this lost, melancholy Bosnian backwater.

  The first thing the Ustaše did upon taking power in Kakanj was kill Father Miloš.

  Reverend Divić was not able to save him. Father Miloš’s ultimate sacrifice weighed heavily on the reverend’s conscience. This was why he instigated rebellion.

  Maybe it was thanks to Reverend Divić that the miners from the Colony didn’t join the Ustaše. A villager here or there who worked in the mine did, but no one from the Colony itself. Instead they prayed for all the living, for the people they knew and those they did not, for their loved ones, and for the people out there.

  But when the people out there emerged from out there and liberated Kakanj, it did not take long for Reverend Divić to start being mouthy again. He disliked everything he saw about the communists, and he unloaded it all onto the people on Sundays, encouraging them to think for themselves and decide.

  It didn’t take long before they came for him.

  He spent a month, or two, or three, in the Zenica prison, then they let him out.

  Reverend Divić came back and continued his work.

  Years passed. Some people believed in God, others did not, but he kept on preaching. All the girls were in love with him. The Colony had, after all, never seen a more handsome man.

  II

  When the siren sounded, each person would look around to locate father, husband, brother, father-in-law…

  Then they would scramble.