Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  In sickness and dying a person no longer lives by balancing on the thin thread between past and future. The thread stretches out, becoming as wide as a runway, and for the first time the person lives in the present. She only hopes to prolong it, looking back all the while. This is how it was with her.

  Meanwhile, as her body grew ever thinner, simulating a single point of universal pain, hope grew ever more powerful. Hope in the miracle of healing, in Zagreb. The problem, however, was that her illness could only be treated in Sarajevo, using some ungodly expensive German experimental technique. A similar kind of experiment had been discontinued in Zagreb several months earlier.

  She was horribly angry with her Sarajevo physician. This made it easier for her. Such an inexplicable, undeserved, ghastly way of dying, and the humiliation of ending a life in such a way, had to be rationalized somehow. Clearly and cleanly, so that all the columns came out equal and every total was correct, like in a well-made accounting report. So the doctor had to be at fault.

  I went to see her one summer day on one of the upper floors of the central clinic. An imposing handsome woman, who probably expected me to be a clearinghouse for her patient’s anger. In the office space behind her, on a board where offices display nice notes, messages, and photographs, there was a picture of a large, shaggy white dog. It was very old and sick. I asked her about it. In this way, the Sarajevo doctor, whose name was Maja, and I shared our grief. I suppose that dog is no longer alive now either.

  I told my mother she would not have a better doctor if she lived in Houston. You mustn’t be angry with her, I said severely. I didn’t want to acknowledge in any way that she was dying. If I did, hope would disappear.

  The illness was quicker than the process for determining whether she belonged to the Croatian nation. After all the files had been filed and the protocols protocoled, the documents were sent to Zagreb according to policy. (Perhaps her workbook is in a drawer in Zagreb?) In Zagreb they might have opened up the package or not. In metaphysical collusion with the sentence “I follow cultural events in the Republic of Croatia,” I found a man who could be of help, if I needed it, in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Zagreb. But in September and October the illness made such progress in its work that such an operation lost all sense.

  During her final month, which was November, it occurred to me that maybe the decision by which she would be accepted into the Croatian citizenry would arrive all by itself. The thought reminded me of the end of David Albahari’s novel Tsing:

  * * *

  —

  The apartment quickly filled with people: women worked in the kitchen, men drank brandy in the dining room. There was nothing to be said: everybody already knew everything. Then somebody rang the doorbell, and when I opened it, a girl asked me if I wanted to buy life insurance She had light hair and bright eyes; I also noticed the rounded shape of her knees. I shook my head and closed the door. Angels always come too late.

  * * *

  —

  But no one called or looked for me to tell me that the case had been settled. Maybe somehow they knew that she’d died? I doubt it. That kind of news takes decades to reach the institutions of officialdom.

  Such an ending is in keeping with the poetics of our family extinction. My mother’s spirit floats above the thin strip of no-man’s-land between Bosnia and Croatia, hoping for a miracle.

  But her story does have one other ending, contained in the last sentence of her declaration before the consular officials: I thank you in advance for this request. She needed to put, “for your response to this request.” As it is, she seems to be thanking the officials for the request without anticipating a response. Angels sometimes reside in grammatical errors. If ever anyone would say something to her, then she would tell them…

  Hunger, Colored Pebbles

  My mother’s first memories are from April 1945.

  She would be four years old soon, her mother was carrying her to a shelter, the sky was being torn by Allied bombers. They were tearing it like the dark cloth that would be torn into rags on the floor. The little girl wasn’t afraid. Going into the shelter was a big event. Everyone was there.

  Between Madam Heim’s building where we lived and the National Theater were crooked little Bosnian houses made of wood and adobe. Families from those houses came to our shelter. Little Kemo came too. He was a year or two older than my mother and lived in the tiniest of the houses, closest to the theater.

  The first memory in my mother’s life was Kemo sitting across from the shelter entrance eating a big piece of pie. It was a time of famine. The piece might not have been that big, but she hadn’t ever seen one bigger, nor would she ever again.

  “Mama, mama, look, Kemo’s eating a pie!” shouted the little girl. This was the first sentence she remembered ever uttering.

  Next she remembered Mrs. Matić, the neighbor from the third floor, the mother of Seka and Sinek. Mrs. Matić’s husband was a Serb, but she was a native of Zagreb.

  Sinek was stupid: he went off to the Chetniks at the beginning of the war. Everyone knew this, but Mrs. Matić and her husband Đuro were left alone. There she was, sitting in the shelter on top of an army fuel tank, tasting something from a pot she’d brought inside with her.

  It could be the same raid or two different ones: one day Kemo was eating a pie, and another Mrs. Matić was scooping from a pot. They were indistinguishable from each other in her early memories. She remembered the food. The spring of 1945 was hungry, and it would be no better for the next several years.

  She didn’t remember the end of the war, the entrance of the Partisans into the city, or the great changes that took place. As a child, she didn’t experience any of that, but then nothing was as memorable as Kemo’s pie.

  She played outside in the Temple yard. It was a heaven for the kids from our building. It was covered with colored pebbles. She gathered some up and brought them home. Her mother looked away. Her father said nothing. The next time, he took them away and said, “These are not to be played with!”

  This etched itself deep in her memory. Even though she hadn’t been hiding anything and he did not yell at her, the little girl felt ashamed. She remembered it because of the shame.

  In April 1941, during Sarajevo’s first raid, before she was born, a bomb had fallen on the synagogue located beside Madam Heim’s building and damaged it. A day later a bunch of local riffraff had desecrated the synagogue. I would hear stories about this horrible event, which my Nono and Nona watched from their window, for the rest of my life. What the little girl heard was an argument against each and every form of nationalism and racism, especially anti-Semitism, something her parents had witnessed and experienced and because of which they felt lifelong shame. They had done nothing. What could they have done, oppose the Ustaše?

  It went without saying that the Ustaše and their helpers were the ones who had ravaged the Temple. I grew up with this fact, which was spoken of and passed along through time. It defined our attitudes and actions.

  Several years ago the Zagreb historian Zlatko Hasanbegović admonished me about the error. Which was not really an error but rather an entire creed written into and certified by family memory. The Ustaše, in fact, arrived in Sarajevo several days after the synagogue’s destruction, which took place during the days of anarchy. It had been a spontaneous act of barbarism by Sarajevo hooligans, joined by local Muslims and Gypsies. They took away the menorahs, unfurled the Torah scrolls, threw out the furniture, caroused and plundered…It was they and not any Ustaše or Germans whom Nono and Nona had watched from their apartment window.

  Nono and Nona would certainly not have survived the reprisal of the Ustaše or opposing their fellow citizens driven to pillage the Temple out of blind hatred toward the Jews – this hatred was obviously something much older than Pavelić and Hitler, and in Sarajevo one did not speak of it. But while it was happening, neither of them knew w
hat the future would bring, and in truth, they, like the other people in Madam Heim’s building, were complicit in the evil that unfolded.

  But maybe they wiped the truth from their minds because they had to keep on living with those people. Ustaše come and go. Others will always step in to be the Ustaše. They were never our fellow citizens, but the ones who destroyed the Temple would remain there forever. They were locals. They would never be prosecuted by a court, for it was not possible to pass judgment on them as they were not the ones blamed – not Ustaše. Nor were they Germans or Chetniks. Nono and Nona, like all the kuferaši, could sense the temporary aspect of their stay in the city. This temporariness linked them to those who had desecrated the synagogue. It was the basis of their fears.

  “These are not to be played with!” he said to Javorka as he took away the colored pebbles.

  The pebbles were the pieces of a demolished mosaic from the synagogue, which was first destroyed by a German bomb and then was spread in all directions by the hands and feet of those who had entered the Temple to take away its riches. They were in the yard, on the street, and throughout the whole city. Colored pebbles covered Sarajevo. It was a real children’s paradise. With them around one even forgot one’s hunger. It took great effort for the colors to be driven back from one’s consciousness.

  The Temple’s mosaics were never restored. Nor would there ever be a new Sephardic synagogue. The few Jews who remained in the city after the war all prayed to God in the Ashkenazi synagogue. They continue to do so today, though there have been no Ashkenazi among them for a long time. The pebbles have been dispersed and carried away, and it’s been some time since one might find any trace of them. I believe they can be found all over the world. Perhaps people took them along when they went away to the Holy Land to found their Israel, or to America, Canada, or Argentina to find neighbors who would be better to them. The colorful pebbles from the mosaic can also be found in the riverbed of the Miljacka, beneath the asphalt of the streets, in garden clearings, in the city sewers…But not one of the thousands of them has been destroyed, for the matter, say those who know, is indestructible. Thus do they remain to affirm the abdicated responsibility of those who witnessed the mosaic’s dispersion. My grandfather and grandmother, Nono and Nona, lie together in the same vault at Bare Cemetery along with my mother, the little girl who once collected colored pebbles, but there is still no way to assuage the horror of that day when the mob entered the Temple. The mosaic needed to be pieced together, and the story told as it actually happened.

  My Mother Offers Her Hand to Sviatoslav Richter to Help Him Climb onto the Ferry for Lokrum

  For years after the war only sick, poor children went to the seaside, along with orphans and the dying, those who the sea air was supposed to restore to life by some miracle. Though it was a time of miracles, these people died, so the registered places of death for many residents of Sarajevo, Zemun, or Doboj were Cavtat, Hvar, and Baška Voda. And especially Dubrovnik. That was where people went at the end of the forties and fifties to suffer and die, which means that in the years when I used to walk around at the Boninovo Cemetery, I would see the graves of children and adults from Sarajevo, Kakanj, and Zenica who had died somewhere in the vicinity and been buried among the gentlemen and eccentrics, and also among Dubrovnik’s ordinary folk, who had lived and been buried here in accord with some human, familial, or historical imperative. With their deaths they became incidents, covered over with grass, whose wooden pillars – which at the time were used instead of crosses and tombstones – would one day rot and, like everything else in this story, disappear.

  The children born during the war were rachitic and tubercular. They were sick with tuberculosis of the bones and kidneys, or with the other, more common form, pulmonary tuberculosis. They suffered from all the known diseases caused by vitamin deficiency. They had shallow roots and died easily, and society tried to take care of them by sending them to the seaside. Doctor Carole Delianis worked in the school clinic by the Partisan movie theater in the 50s. A distant, elderly woman with gold-rimmed glasses and a completely white frock coat, she was one of those people you couldn’t say Sarajevo hadn’t accepted; they were the ones who hadn’t accepted Sarajevo. The city had left not a trace of itself in her way of speaking, her appearance, or her behavior. She was unselfish and smiling as she sorted and classified the children, looking for a way to give every one of them the chance to live, just as it was proclaimed in the Hippocratic oath and the programmatic documents of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Doctor Delianis was charged with determining which of the children would go to Villa Kaboga in Dubrovnik for treatment.

  My mother was sent there in 1950. She was eight years old and severely anemic. A tuberculin skin test she’d taken had come back positive. She had little appetite and was quiet and listless. The doctor judged that the sea could help her. The children traveled to Dubrovnik in the company of nurses and teachers, first along the narrow-gauge tracks to Mostar, then by trucks all the way to Dubrovnik. The journey lasted sixteen hours.

  The Dubrovnik patrician mansion known as Villa Kaboga had been converted after the war into a rest home for orphans and children of fallen soldiers, but it quickly became a sanatorium and treatment center for Sarajevo’s children. The story of Villa Kaboga and the fifty years in which thousands of children passed through its doors, with stays ranging from a few months to fifteen years, is an overlooked “minor history” topic that was described tangentially in Serbian author Momo Kapor’s 1976 novel The Provincial. Mother spent a full month there, until October tenth, when they returned her to Sarajevo in the same manner, first by truck then by train. From Dubrovnik – whose white walls shone so bright in the autumn sun that one couldn’t look at them directly, and for the rest of her life she would recall that city with a pleasant sensation of discomfort at having to squint into the light – she returned to a Sarajevo encased in fog and coal smoke, where the first snow would soon fall. Aunt Lola came with her – she had visited her at the Villa with Branka and Uncle Andrija and taken her to Cela’s Place for cake – and at home her mother and father awaited, somber and closed in with their own misfortune and the hopelessness of the kuferaš city, from which they would depart only when we were no longer there.

  That was her first ever summer holiday. It would be another eight years before the next one. In the meantime, they would travel to Dubrovnik to see our aunt and uncle, but only when it wasn’t hot, in the spring and autumn. Once in 1955, they went to Dubrovnik in winter. Uncle Andrija had died at the end of December, so Nono, Nona, and my mother traveled through the snow and ice to his funeral. She was thirteen then, and the trip was so long it seemed that they’d never get there, that they would die of cold somewhere on Ivan Mountain, which the train crossed slowly even during the summer, and then once they did get to Dubrovnik the wind from the north they call the bora was raging. While they lowered Uncle Andrija into the grave, along the westernmost wall of Boninovo Cemetery, the bora was so powerful that whatever the priest was saying was blown out to sea. They could see his lips moving but couldn’t hear his words, for they were already somewhere far away, between the islands of Lokrum and Daksa in the half-channel, headed for Italy. When they had all crossed themselves, she extended her hand toward her mother, and Nona slapped her fingers. But that’s another story. They returned to Sarajevo for Christmas that year, trudging from the train station through the snow, which continued to fall. She turned around at the entrance to the building, as Nona looked for the key, and the traces of their steps had already disappeared in the snow.

  She had her first real summer vacation in May 1958, two weeks at Budva on the Montenegrin coast. Her cousin Nevenka, who would be receiving her degree in architecture in the fall, was taking her fiancé and my future cousin Nacij, or Ignjac, or Vatroslav – whichever you felt like using. Friends of theirs were going with them, Milan Ristanović, Jug Milić and Zdenkica, so it wasn’t much trouble for them to bring my mo
ther along, who was sixteen at the time. People in those years were just beginning to take their first steps, quietly and a bit bashfully, into tourism. Five years had passed since Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had come to Belgrade as if it was his Canossa Castle, the reputation of Yugoslavia in the world had grown stronger with the definitive victory of little Tito over the Big Leader, and for the first time the standard of living was improving significantly. It was really only young people, artists, and eccentrics who were traveling, and it would take a few more years before Yugoslavia’s massive summer tourism culture would take hold, with families heading in droves for the sea.

  My mother fell in love for the first time in Budva, with the Belgrade actor who would later play the dervish Ahmed Nurudin in Zdravko Velimirović’s film Death and the Dervish. This love would not just last the two weeks of the Budva summer but would drag out through her life and into her mailbox slots, being transformed in the end into a legend. When in the seventies and eighties he would appear on the television screen in some film or other, she would stop in passing and say, “Good Lord, he is just so good looking!” And then she’d go on with whatever she’d been doing.

  In the years that followed it was hard to coordinate workers action excursions with trips to the coast. For my mother, as for the better part of her generation, workers action was more important. Real life rather than some dream was in those actions, and after each one there was hope that her whole life might be transformed. When that didn’t happen, my mother’s world slid into an abyss. And then I was born, transforming the abyss into a constant condition.