But she did somehow manage to go to Dubrovnik one week every summer. She’d stay with Aunt Lola until she wore out her welcome. She’d tell Aunt Lola off: “You really don’t need to visit me all the time! It’s not like I’m sick!” You might think that such a scolding would frighten her away for good, but not two months would pass before Aunt Lola would turn up again at our place in Sarajevo, announcing as she always did, “So here I am then!” My mother kept trying to find a way to slip into the conversation, “You really don’t need to visit me all the time…” But you couldn’t do that with Aunt Lola, so she gave up, and the next summer she would again show up for a week at Aunt Lola’s place in Dubrovnik.
My mother was not a big fan of elaborate beach outings. She swam at Porporela, where her mother had once done the same as a young girl, and where, at the end of the First World War, she had won a gold medal at a city swimming championship. This was actually where the other Stublers had used to swim too, until 1920, when they were banished for union activism from Dubrovnik to Bosnia. Porporela is one of the places where you could pinpoint the history of this family. Here in fiction and fantasy, when none of us are around anymore, we could take a great collective family photo with everyone from Karlo Stubler and his heart-ailing wife, our Omama, Ivana Škedelj (or Johanna Skedel), to those of us who, over the next several decades, would depart, reconciling the accounts on their Sarajevo graves.
When I was born, they took me to visit Aunt Lola in Dubrovnik. I learned how to swim at Porporela, in that scary, deep sea that I’ve never liked because you can’t see the bottom. I was three. My mother was happy because, according to her way of thinking, there was a possibility I might never learn, given that my father was not a swimmer. And I’m physically just like him, with several of his peculiarities, including numerous non-talents.
Mother never fell in love in Dubrovnik, though it was full of actors and musicians. Once she offered her hand to Sviatoslav Richter to help him onto the Lokrum ferry. His palm was soft, his grip tough as steel. His long, nimble fingers wrapped around her hand, swallowing it up in such a way that my mother’s heart began to race, for it occurred to her that Maestro Richter would discover by squeezing her hand that she did not play the piano well. She had little talent and suddenly felt ashamed for the first time because of it. She kept her hands hidden inside her wide linen sleeves as they sailed to Lokrum. Again she hid them that evening as they listened to his concert at the Rector’s Palace.
Every town up and down the coast, from Rovinj to Ulcinj, had its famous summer visitors. Whether they might grow rich or not was not considered important. In fact, the majority of the famous guests were poor on average. But they were artists. From the beginning of the sixties until just before Yugoslavia’s collapse – after which my mother never vacationed again – people felt a certain awe before painters, actors, directors, and, especially, writers. They went crazy over the idea that someone might describe this, that this summer, which was like any other summer, might end up in a story, in literature, in an utterance that was truer and more exact than any other, in the utterance of a writer. And maybe a whole novel could end up being devoted to it…
A place that did not have its famous writer, painter, and director was insignificant, for it did not qualify for eternity. There could have been such a place on the coast, but it seems to us today unlikely.
But no coastal city could compare with Dubrovnik. On the beaches of Banje and Šulići, and even our own Porporela, some sort of famous person took a swim on a daily basis. Even now I can see the great actor Branko Pleša sitting on a short towel, probably taken from the hotel room, looking out toward Lokrum as if he is trying to remember something. Sublimely dignified, with a thin lower lip that gives his face an expression of satisfaction while it presses against his dry upper lip, Branko Pleša, long since dead and even longer since gone, is probably sitting even today at Porporela while my mother looks on from the side, not daring to start up a conversation though she sorely wants to. She is bothered by the fact that she’s here with her child. Luckily, they’re both dead, in some eternity of their own here at Porporela, where they are bothered neither by the great cruise ships nor the new masters of this city, whose white summer walls one cannot look at directly.
It is the summer of 1974, and my mother is getting ready for the premiere of Dina Radojević’s production of Hamlet. A twenty-eight-year-old Rade Šerbedžija is playing the young prince. She takes a long time dressing and is nervous about being late. The production is on one of the terraces at the Lovrijenac Fortress, from which one could fall and die. She comes back spellbound. Three days later there’s a consultation about whether Nona will take me with her to the play or go by herself. At the premiere, a boy my age got scared and cried. I assure them that I’m brave, I won’t get scared. My world will collapse if I don’t get taken to Hamlet. I’m only eight years old, but I’ll remember every moment of that performance for the next forty. Today, I believe, Dubrovnik feels so low for me because Lovrijenac then was so high. I don’t need to go to a place where my mother still sits, open-mouthed, thinking up something to say to the famous Belgrade actor and after forty-some summers later still hasn’t said anything. Dubrovnik is a city of invisible monuments and invisible people, while the real ones, without even noticing it, tread on Pleša’s little beach towel and on my mother’s fingers, preventing Sviatoslav Richter from climbing onto the ferry, since there was no one else there to offer him a hand.
Kuferaši
Vladimir Nagel was a family friend and neighbor. We lived on Yugoslav National Army Street, in the building above the Temple, beside which the Energoinvest high-rise would be built at the end of the seventies, when we would move to Sepetarevac Street. Some time earlier, the Nagels had moved to Rijeka, but we kept in touch, exchanging holiday cards, and Vlado Nagel came to Sarajevo several times. The last time was in the seventies, when the former evangelical church was being repurposed as the arts academy and some papers needed to be signed. Being that there were no longer any evangelicals – or rather, Protestants – in Sarajevo anymore, he had to come. It’s probably not exactly true, but it might be said that our one-time neighbor Vlado Nagel was Sarajevo’s last Protestant.
By the early 1880s, after the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, people had started coming from various parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, some looking for work, others as respected specialists in their fields. The greatest number were the closest to Bosnia, Croats and Slovenes, but there were also Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, and Poles, whose biographies and occupations, and often whose inextinguishable nostalgia for home, one can discover by walking around the Catholic cemetery at Koševo and reading the grave markers. These were the people immediately and abusively termed kuferaši: people in Sarajevo called them this not merely to taunt them with their wayward and rootless nature in the place where they had settled, but also because it was the first time they had ever seen a kufer – that is, a suitcase. A hundred and more years later, when the original kuferaši had died out and their families had spread out into the west or been completely assimilated and acculturated with the local population, the word kuferaš would lose its abusive aspect and become a sort of marker of distant heritage.
The majority of these people were Catholics, a smaller number Protestants, and the smallest, Ashkenazi Jews. But the royal authorities built a grand evangelical church on a beautiful spot, striving to maintain in Sarajevo the national, cultural, and religious equilibrium upon which the empire stood. They actually needed to build a new Ashkenazi synagogue since the local Jews, who were exclusively Sephardic, were not well disposed toward their new religious brethren and didn’t want to let them into their own temple, referring to them disparagingly as “Swabians” and not really even considering them Jews at all. Beside the class element – for the newly arrived were without exception well bred while the majority of the locals were ordinary poor folk – the Sarajevo Jews, as was natural, acted in a
ll this like all other Bosnians. Very likely they were as yet not familiar with the myth of Bosnia as a place of coexistence and of Sarajevo as a European Jerusalem.
And just as the kuferaši had settled in the newly constructed homes and buildings between Baščaršija and Marijin Dvor, and the beautiful evangelical church had been built on the bank of the Miljacka, complementing Sacred Heart Cathedral and the Catholic churches and monasteries, the First World War broke out, and the country that had settled these people in Sarajevo collapsed. During the first few months, in 1918 and 1919, a large number of kuferaš families left Bosnia forever, but many stayed, and this was because – contrary to our romantic notions of their having drunk the waters of the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque and been linked forever to Sarajevo as a result – they simply had nowhere else to go. The homes they had left behind twenty years before or more in Vienna, Brno, or Prague, or some Sudeten or Banat backwater, did not exist anymore. In these zero years of their new identity, when there was no Austria-Hungary anymore, they were a people without a homeland and without a clear sense of belonging. They had become exiles.
It must have been easier for the Catholics than for the others. This was due less to the fact that in Bosnia, and in Sarajevo, they were surrounded by a large number of co-religionists – for there were still great social, cultural, and linguistic divisions that separated them – and more to the spiritual, and, in particular, the political legacy of Archbishop Stadler. This man, who was himself something of a kuferaš, advanced rather ambitiously the establishment of a Croatian national framework for Bosnian Catholics, a framework that Poles, Austrians, Czechs, and others fell into, especially in these early days of the birth of the nation. This was not our own Bosnian idiosyncrasy, and even less was it a sign of our backwardness – it was not significantly earlier that the masses of Europe, in Croatia and elsewhere, had been “nationalized” in their own manner.
Those, however, who had not become Croats by 1918 would do so in the coming two or three generations, and this was first of all because the Bosnian religious, ethnic, and identity schema was tightly fixed, and it was difficult to remain outside it. It would have meant you were outside society, and, as we well know, it has never been good to be outside society. But the kuferaš identity, at least in Sarajevo, was not simple or monolithic. Besides being a Croat, a kuferaš would often have certain Czech, Slovene, or Austrian sentiments. Or his brother might have been born as a different nationality. This was the case with my grandfather Franjo, who was born in Travnik and lived his whole life in Bosnia, moving as a railroad worker from one station to another until he ended up in Sarajevo, but he was nationally a quite conscious Slovene, spoke his mother tongue (which in his case was his father’s) fluently, subscribed to Slovene newspapers, and maintained close ties with his family in Tolmin and Ljubljana, while his three brothers, whom he loved and got along extremely well with, were all Croats. There was really no difference between him and them, except that they resolved their kuferaš status in ostensibly definitive ways and in a distinctly national key. But both their roots and their uprootedness in Bosnia – our three uncles, for whom we used the Bosnian Muslim word amidža – were identical.
In all the countries that emerged after 1918, the kuferaši struggled to prove their patriotism in order to cancel out what separated them from the majority. They altered their last names in accord with new ways of spelling, gave their children local, nationally distinctive names, served as the strictest officers in the military and the most unyielding investigators in the police…And yet they were never completely accepted, for our society was not capable of accepting those it considers Other, instead assimilating them in part and getting used to them in part. While we thought highly of ourselves, in every kingdom we were our own deep, distant province.
The kuferaši were annihilated like every other social minority and vulnerable group by social upheavals, wars, and revolutions, both red and black. The war of 1992 finished them off. They left in buses through Kiseljak and kept leaving, God knows, after the war too, in the era of new, soft ethnic restitution, when they realized that this was the final moment to leave. At this final moment, with the expiration of their own history and the knowledge of their heritage, they sought out and obtained the citizenship of the real and imagined homelands of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. They were leaving forever, and as a monument to their existence and disappearance, what was left behind was architecture. Everything, or almost everything, that was built in Sarajevo during the forty years of Austro-Hungarian rule, and a good part of what would blossom after – excluding the trees – carries the signatures of an identity that was dying in the city and that really no longer exists. The building of the arts academy – the former evangelical church – is a metaphor for the end of one history. All we await is for some new Vladimir Nagel to put a signature on their gifts.
But there is nothing new or distinctive in this from what happened to others. One can walk through Izmir or Thessaloniki to see cities built by those who are no longer there. Though in such cities, those who left earlier left happier.
Home
I moved, or rather, got moved, for the first time in May 1969. Though I was just three years old, I remember every minute of that day, from closing the door for the last time as we left the old apartment, to carrying our things to the truck, the black leather bags with all my essentials, my whole cosmos back then, over my shoulder, sleeping for the first time in the strange place and my first nightmare. We had moved from an apartment on the sixth floor of a large tenement building above the Jewish temple in the center of town to a building on a hill from which you could see the city in the valley through the windows, and the first thing my grandmother had pointed out the next day was where our old building was visible. Besides being able to see everything from the new place, you could hear more than before too. At night I could hear the steam puffing from the train on the other side of town as it made its way from Bistrik station toward Višegrad.
We left our furniture in the old apartment – a black Biedermeier table and kitchen cabinet, armchairs and ottomans, which I would later wistfully recognize in art deco catalogues and which my grandfather and grandmother had purchased in the twenties and thirties when they were setting up their household as young newlyweds. They had received the chandelier as a wedding present: it was enormous, made of black steel and white glass, and so beautiful and luxurious that it seemed to belong to some wealthier home and better-off world than they or I would ever be part of. I’d loved that chandelier: I would roll back on the ottoman and look at it with my head upside down.
In a flash of optimism, certain that by changing her furniture something would change in her life, my mother, who was then a twenty-eight-year old divorced woman with a child, took out a loan and bought new furniture for the entire apartment. So I would grow up amid the rather bizarre, uncomfortable socialist aesthetic of the sixties. Even today, when I go back to my native city, to that apartment on the hill, and look at the remains of the furniture that she paid off over the course of a good fifteen years, I am always reminded of the loss of my real home, the one whose door we closed for the last time in the summer of 1969.
The first time I felt homesickness was when I was walking by our old building with my grandfather. I asked him if we could step into the entrance hall. I opened the door and smelled the familiar odor. When our old neighbor Džemedžić poked his head out the door of his apartment, I ran away in a panic probably because I thought I was doing something wrong by going back to a place that was no longer my home. Anyway, I was only three. I would always experience the same feeling when I found myself near the Jewish temple and our old building, even when none of our old neighbors were alive. I experienced that first move as something of a banishment, though I was not conscious of this on the day we moved.
I moved for the second time in the summer of 1993, when I arrived in Zagreb during the war. Over the next ten years I would change sublets fi
ve times, but I don’t remember all that. Cheap foreign furniture collected without order or sense in order to prepare an apartment for renting out, other people’s beds for which I felt mild disgust, smells I could never get used to, half-removed Donald Duck stickers on the doors of other people’s fridges…Today when I pass by the buildings where I once rented an apartment, I experience a mild sense of release and a twinge of happiness, as if I were passing a hospital where I recovered after a tonsillectomy. I don’t remember anything good or nice from those apartments, except maybe how in 1995 I used to watch the soccer games at NK Zagreb from my fifth-floor room on Kranjčević Street. Everything in those apartments, especially while the war kept on in Bosnia, reminded me that this was not my home, and that the place I would have called home no longer existed for an array of reasons. I’d begun losing my home when I couldn’t look upside down at the great black chandelier in our living room anymore.
In August 2003, I was no longer subletting. From an apartment at the top of the oldest high-rise in Zagreb’s Zapruđe district, I looked down onto the beltway where the cars and trams crossed the bridges and then onto the fog surrounding Turopolje, which would not dissipate before noon. Somewhere beyond that were regions that could not be seen, with place-names from Miroslav Krleža’s Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh, the canonical first edition with Krsto Hegedušić’s illustrations. I thought: if this had been my home, I would have coexisted with Krleža’s Turopolje mists, like those puffs of steam from the trains making their way toward Višegrad from the Bistrik station. But that train was discontinued in 1974. The past is my home, while the present is for the most part a distant foreign land, regardless of where I might move. Foreignness and sublets.
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