Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Perhaps somewhere in the Museum of Yugoslav History in Dedinje, or in the depths of some Belgrade archive, the letter my mother wrote to Tito still exists.

  She would remember the letter whenever she was enumerating the proofs of her literary talent. This was important to her and revealed that it was from her I had inherited that gift. She would be jealous anytime Nono’s prison camp diary from 1916 was mentioned, written in Cyrillic script but in Italian so that no one could spy on him, or the little diaries he kept in Drvenik, filling up the margins of desk calendars. Or when I would mention the letters Nona had sent me when I was in the service, or the literary essays of her older brother Mladen, or the philosophical and educational treatises of her grandfather, which were published in the interwar years in Sarajevo…

  She would have accomplished something – having labored diligently, suffering, exhausting herself, destroying her nerves, working herself to the bone – had the one thing she’d managed to do been to impart this talent for writing to me. She would be deserving of a good long rest, having sacrificed everything and remained alone, with no one to bring her tea when she got sick. I mocked her. I’m mocking her now as I write this in my red armchair, the same chair I was writing in when last June the telephone rang and she cried that she had found a new lymph node when she had thought there wouldn’t be anymore, and then she said what she’d never say again – that she thought she was dying; and I stop mocking her as I see the same books I saw then, the same window, the same part of the wall with six framed pictures on it, four portraits, a linocut by Daniel Ozmo, and a photograph of the main street in Sarajevo from 1937, and I see that nothing at all in the scene has changed, though a year has passed, and that I’ll be able to freely mock her only when forgetfulness frees me from her, from her dying and her death.

  At that time she wrote her one and only poem.

  The poem tells the story of a veterinarian who cares for all the dogs and cats, those that have masters and those that have no one.

  He performs miracles for them.

  Then she writes about herself and her illness and how she too, like the animals, deserves a miracle.

  She sent me the poem by email. It was the last email I got from her.

  She sent it to all her women friends too – up until the end she always had many. My mother was superficial and devoted to her friendships, and it was a kind of friendship people liked. Especially in Sarajevo. She was also indiscreet, didn’t hide anything from them, and found little of interest in what they’d say or do.

  And then they all put her poem on their Facebook profile pages.

  She already had a profile.

  Dead people’s nails grow for a little while longer after they die, and so do their Facebook profiles. One day several months after her death a friend request came from my mother. I erased the message, but later I was sorry. I don’t have a Facebook profile, but it would have been worth accepting her friend request. It would have meant that I had at last accepted her as she was.

  It bothered me that her poem was wending its way through the Internet and strangers were talking about her illness. She had always waved off intimate matters with ease. What she would keep hidden was anything that could lead someone to think she was to blame for something.

  She asked me whether I might want to publish her poem somewhere.

  She said she would like that.

  For people to read it, if it’s good.

  Yes, it’s good.

  Let them read it then.

  And this was how we would talk, repeating the same phone routine whenever she was in a better mood or nothing was ailing her. The conversation about the poem lasted through the summer, until the first autumn rains, as school approached its pupils, and her death approached us. Then, at last, it seemed she forgot about the poem.

  She didn’t ask me anymore whether I might like to publish it.

  Though she would have liked that.

  For people to read it, if it was any good.

  It was.

  Let them read it then.

  I told her I would get her poem published, as long as she wrote two more. It didn’t matter what they were about. She should write whatever came to her, however it came to her. In the same way that she had written that poem. And I would get it published under her proper first and last name, in a literary magazine.

  No, no, isn’t there shame in publishing one’s first poems so late in life?

  Why would there be any shame? There have been other cases.

  She said she would write when she felt better. When nothing was hurting. She said that she couldn’t write in her state. I was never sure when her dying began. Was I unjust toward her? Is what I’m saying ugly, and is it even possible to be ugly when a person says what he really feels? It can’t be ugly to feel.

  If I was unjust, I never once raised my voice when she asked whether I might help publish her poem somewhere.

  And I wasn’t lying. The poem was good. If there was such a thing as a gift for writing, and if this was the result of that gift, then I had inherited it from her. If the gift for writing was a particular kind of indiscretion, eternal talking about oneself, and being unprepared in the midst of such talking to spare others one’s most intimate matters, then this was a gift I had certainly inherited from my mother.

  By second grade she had started taking music lessons, studying piano. They bought her a small instrument, which would stay in our apartment until 1969 and our move to Sepetarevac. There were lots of pianos in Sarajevo in the early years after the war. They were sold off cheap, since pianists, it seemed, had been among the earliest victims of the war. Or they were the first to escape to the West, to Zagreb, America, and Argentina, and now their pianos had to be sold off.

  Buying the piano was no great expense. No one remembers who the seller was, but my mother recalled that Nono paid in three installments. The piano cost less than a large bedspread or a winter coat but more than a fountain pen. At the time, prewar Parker or Waterman pens could be acquired for the price of a chicken’s egg, for no one, it seemed, needed them anymore, and it would be years before the socialist offices would be equipped with proper writing supplies.

  Nono was fascinated by fountain pens, the little vials with black and blue ink, ink blotters, fine, handmade paper, lead pencils, Japanese brush pens, which used India ink that allegedly was produced from a special kind of ash. Much had been destroyed and burned up in order to make a sea of ink from that ash.

  He left behind a fine metal box with twelve Faber pencils with varying densities of graphite for various kinds of writing. Not a single one of those pencils had ever been sharpened. I didn’t sharpen them as a child though I’d been tempted to do so. But I had terrible handwriting, the worst of anyone in school either in Drvenik or Sarajevo, so it would have been a poor use of the pencils. When one day my handwriting improves, I’ll sharpen one of the pencils from Nono’s box. Later I stopped caring about what my handwriting looked like – it remained as bad as ever – and what I wrote rather than how I wrote became the most important thing. The metal box with the twelve Faber pencils with the graphite of different densities that had been purchased before the Second World War in Germany reappeared unopened in some drawer on Sepetarevac when I went to Sarajevo for the first time in 1996. I took it with me to Zagreb, and afterward it traveled with me from one apartment to the next, remaining with me after the sudden, stormy ruptures from the people I shared those apartments with, during relocations when other things were lost, things much more useful in a practical sense. It was that much stranger since the box wasn’t even that important to me for such a long time. I didn’t know why I had brought it from Sarajevo, and it would have been easy to come to terms with having lost it. I might not have even noticed if it wasn’t there anymore.

  Today each one of those pencils remind me of the Croatian artist Josip Vanista’s painting devoted to
Manet called The Endless Cane, a dandy’s walking stick that forms into crescent handles at both ends. A bewildering cane that was never taken on a walk. Pencils identical at both ends, without point or tip, introverted, sealed up in themselves. Hundreds of manuscript pages archived inside them, an unrealized potential in their graphite hearts.

  After they had all died one after another, and after Sarajevo was no more – and I was driven from what rose up in its place – these little things became important. Objects no longer used for anything or, having passed through history, would never be used. Like the twelve Faber pencils. Nono had that box for thirty-five years and never sharpened a single one. They were there in that drawer, which during his life was quite tidy. He saw them every day but, it seemed, never needed them. Or there was some reason why he never sharpened any of them. When he died in 1972, the contents of the drawer remained in the same ugly piece of socialist furniture – under the china cabinet with the liquor bottles that no one ever opened, in the back of which was a mirror that made me think you could creep inside it – and no one ever emptied it, while everyone continued to call it Nono’s drawer except that now it was messy. Inhabited by piles of trifles whose provenance it would forever be impossible to discern, Nono’s drawer quickly became my Amazon and Polynesia. I explored it for years, really for my entire life in Sarajevo and after – until my mother replaced that piece of old socialist furniture with a new, transitional one – and from it I learned more about life, about the Rejc family, the Stublers, and the Karivans, than from any of the stories they told.

  But it was only in the end, when the answers to all questions could be found only in fantasy, that I began to consider why Nono never dipped into the pencil box. Today the silver-colored box with its fine paper label displaying the old-fashioned company logo and the twelve unsharpened pencils, identical at both ends, is some eighty years old. And they shouldn’t have lasted long, just so long as any of Nono’s stationary supplies and writing materials. Pencils shrink the more you write with them, and Nono wrote a lot – at work in the railroad directorate and then, after he retired, as a part-time accountant at the Hotel Pošta. He also kept a journal about everyday occurrences, who had visited, when they’d installed a new gas canister, as well as beekeeper’s journals, a different one for each hive. And he wrote all of them in pencil, such that they are hard to read now. Pale traces of lead against the pale paper.

  He used a fountain pen for letters and official documents. The differences between private and public, amateur and professional, and personal and communal were marked by the distinction between Faber pencils and Nono’s four fountain pens. The Parker 51 (about which a story was preserved in fragments and so has been transformed into a fiction later in this book), the Ordinary Parker (which may not have been ordinary but this was how Nona referred to it when speaking of Nono’s four pens, now lost forever), the Waterman (allegedly the most expensive), and the Pelikan. The Pelikan was always stuck in the inside pocket of his jacket. He would move it from one to another like a handkerchief or a lighter. But the fact that the pen was not expensive but was an ordinary greenish-black Pelikan of the sort carried by every high school teacher did not matter to him, which is probably why he never lost it. A person never loses the objects he doesn’t care much about, or the objects he needs for telling a story in the end.

  In any case, the purchased piano was ultimately not a big event in the life of the family.

  A corner was found where Javorka could practice at her ease, in the apartment’s quietest, most soundproof room, which gave access to the attic. She didn’t bother anyone, nor did anyone bother her. I don’t know if she had a gift for piano. She sang well and worked hard, but probably this wasn’t enough for the piano. She finished the elementary school music training and then several classes in middle school, and I assume if she’d had serious talent, something would have come of it.

  For she spent all her practice time at the piano on her own.

  Once in the midseventies we were visiting our relatives in Ilidža at the house where Karlo Stubler had once lived. I was ill and probably had the flu, so they’d had me lie down after lunch in a darkened room where there was a piano.

  After a while she got tired of the company or decided to check on me and see whether I had a fever.

  She opened the piano, set aside the green cloth cover, and played a very short Chopin piece. She lost her place, stumbled over the notes for a moment, for she was playing from memory, and went back to the start.

  She said what a shame it was I hadn’t wanted to go to music school and study piano. It was so nice, she said, while you played. You went off by yourself as if no one else existed.

  I was nine or ten at the time and remember it clearly. Probably because of the way she said this, there was something dramatic about it. In any case, she was telling the truth. You could always tell when she was lying, putting on airs, or rehearsing her performance of self-pity. In this too she was like a child.

  This was why when she was telling the truth you could feel it so sharply, especially when that truth held some drama for her. These small moments were important to me from as early as the years we spent in Drvenik.

  When she said such things I thought my mother loved me. That it was too bad I hadn’t wanted to go to music school, because it would have given me an opportunity to be alone.

  It was one of the rare occasions when, almost unintentionally, she was comparing me to her. She was confessing her unhappiness to me as if it were my own. And as if I too were unhappy because she was not able to be. Which was of course the truth, but this truth did not, as a rule, get through to her. As if she were not concerned about me, and it really didn’t matter if I and the whole rest of the world were unhappy, for hers was an unhappiness that was unique.

  The rest of the world and I were simply the stage on which her misfortune played out.

  Nothing on the stage was real except for her, who watched it all and for whom the world unfolded as her own living misfortune.

  There was nothing else and could be nothing other than my mother and her picture of the world.

  It has often been difficult for me to push this away. The world, after all, is something else. It isn’t a stage for playing out my own unhappiness. And then I rebel, I write against the petty Croats and the state they are so proud of, just to make clear that I’m alive, though they too are alive and not merely an image or show, or a film with an unhappy ending, those petty Croats, their clergy, and their independent Croatian state, they are real, living, breathing, and dying, just as my mother died, never managing to escape from the steel shell she was locked up in when Mladen perished. And he had perished all because the petty Croats wanted to be great in the eyes of Hitler.

  Whenever she wanted to ridicule my father and her former mother-in-law, who had really detested her, my mother would say that Grandma Štefanija had a piano that took up half a room, the only room she had, in order to keep her winter food supplies cold underneath it. After Grandma Štefanija died, she changed the verbs to past tense but told the story just as earnestly. She kept this up until the war and my departure from Sarajevo. When she was depressed or feeling vindictive, she’d tell the story of Štefanija’s piano, which really was rather grotesque. In their small room, which was divided into a kitchen, living room, and sleeping area for her and her son – she kept a bed for him even after he’d moved out – stood a large baby grand piano that no one knew how to play, for neither Štefanija nor Dobroslav were musical. I saw Štefanija’s piano with my own eyes and wrote about it in my novel Father. It was grotesque in the manner of a monstrously large nose on a man’s face that has grown as the result of a disease, and I really could write about only that, that piano, my whole life long, for the story of that piano reveals the destiny of a certain Croatian and Catholic world, as well as a part of my family’s destiny, and this musical instrument, Štefanija’s piano, played a living part in guiding me, as n
o other piece of furniture did. But anyway, no matter how grotesque Štefanija’s Catholic piano might have been, what was the most irritating were my mother’s constant repetitions of the same derisive remarks toward her former husband and his mother for being cooped up with a piano like a couple of perfectly unmusical wretches.

  Her denigrating my father didn’t bother me.

  In general it never disturbed me when she said anything unpleasant about him.

  She did this quite a lot, in fact.

  And when she had nothing ugly on her mind she’d even say she felt sorry for him.

  This, I repeat, didn’t bother me. But the repetition did. As did the fact that for some time I had been searching in her sentences for things pronounced according to animal instinct, inadvertently, or in connection with some completely inaccessible subconscious, which for the greater part of her life had resembled nothing more than an American prison during a riot: plenty of noise and calamity but without any particular goal except to express a feeling of having been wounded, of injustices suffered.

  I asked her why she was telling me all this over and over.

  “And who else is there to tell?” she responded self-pityingly, and again was victorious.

  This was why it was better not to ask her anything, to act as though I was taking in everything she said, hearing the story for the first time. Like an actor playing the same scene in a family drama for the fiftieth time.

  My father didn’t know how to swim, he wasn’t musical, he didn’t know how to dance, he was weak.

  She was a good swimmer, she played the piano and had a good singing voice, she had a good sense of rhythm and only needed a man who knew how to lead.

  This was how she spoke.

  And then during the war, with my departure, something happened that changed her. Or she grew older in the interim. She stopped telling the story about Štefanija’s piano. A few years later, during one of my visits, I reminded her of it, thinking I might light a spark.