Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  After you’ve passed by Hadži Hajdar Street, Sepetarevac quickly curls to the left before opening onto Bjelave. This long, steep street, on which cars were once a rarity and for as long as you can remember was one-way, though at the intersection-facing Kevrin Street drivers would often pull out the sign, thereby declaring it two-way, belonged like all of Sarajevo’s steep streets to the people who lived around it. Nobody climbed it without a particular need to do so. You could live your whole life in Sarajevo without once climbing up to its top. Especially since it was possible to get to Bjelave and Višnjik by a tamer and gentler route, and without being pressed upon by the threatening bunched-up houses on either side of the street and the destinies of the people within them.

  During the time of Samuel the porter, they used to go from the synagogue to Mejtaš, from the Jewish workshops up to Bjelave, along a difficult, painstaking path several times a day. I don’t know what they thought about or whether they had hope, besides that they might live another day or another year, but the ascent must have had a deeper metaphysical meaning for the Jewish poor. They spent their lives on that pilgrimage with sepeti on their backs, and soon it would be as if they had never been there at all, their only memory being in the names of these streets.

  But Bjelave, Bjelave is wide and flat. Once long ago, in pre-Ottoman times, this was Bilave, a village that would remain a village even after it became part of Sarajevo. Only in 1530, when a certain Hajji Alija erected a temple, would the village become a city quarter, which Alija Bejtić notes was described in the cadastral registry as “the quarter of Hajji Alija’s place of worship, known by the name Bilave.”

  One went to Bjelave to visit Krunić’s bakery, for bread and rolls, and for flat bread during Ramadan. Every morning in those years, when Nona would take you to the eye clinic for your exercises – you were cross-eyed, suffering from strabismus, and they would sit you down in front of a cold metal device with two peep holes and looking through them you needed to lead the parrot to its cage, the green parrot with a big yellow beak – you took a round-about route in order to stop by Krunić’s to buy the morning rolls.

  Even today I can taste those rolls, and I often find myself hoping I’ll taste them again whenever I’m in some unfamiliar eastern city and manage to get rolls from a bakery.

  In the mideighties many new bakeries opened in Sarajevo. People had been spoiled by living well and were no longer satisfied by just any old bread, and the bakeries began to compete with one another. Thus did the rumors about Krunić begin to spread: late at night, they said, when no one was watching, someone would deliver piglets to the shop, and Krunić would put pork into the dough for the flat bread. There wasn’t a grain of truth in this of course, as anyone who thought about it even a little bit knew, but the rumor had the effect of making the poor baker swear up and down that he was not doing something that everyone knew he wasn’t doing. And of course he felt a little guilty because a person feels guilty when people accuse him of something, however unlikely the accusation might be. The guilt wasn’t toward those who falsely accused him but toward those who truly believed it…

  At the time you laughed. Everyone around you was stunned at the sort of world we lived in, at the things people were willing to believe. When you remember this today, you’re seized by anger. And suddenly nothing is funny anymore. Everything is a question of human feeling and perspective. What was once funny now seems like a premonition.

  Both the laughter and the anger, meanwhile, are real. But if one were to write a novel about Sarajevo in the eighties, it would need to be told from that older vantage point, when the rumor of the pork in Krunić’s flat bread was a nasty joke but, still, just a joke.

  Zatikuša: Forgotten Alley

  A woman wrote me a very kind but admonishing letter to say I had made a mistake: Sepetarevac does not open onto Bjelave, it is separated from there by the street on which, as it happens, she lives. I understood immediately of course, and before my eyes appeared the street she was referring to, the street I had taken so many times. Sepetarevac has a dead end, but instead of bumping up against a wall, it turns to the left, along a street that has disappeared from memory, according to some unfathomable but ever-present logic of forgetting. Nothing is ever forgotten by chance or randomly. It happens according to an order and in accord with a person’s internal equilibrium.

  Even after twenty years of living in Zagreb, when I dream, and when the dream has a definite setting, the setting is somewhere in Sarajevo. Unless I’m on the road in my dream. The people I dream about are mostly dead, though I dream about them as alive. My uncle, aunt, Nono, Nona, mother, father appear together with dead neighbors, friends, and school teachers in these Sarajevo dreams, telling me something with great liveliness or participating in events that characterize their natures. Events from twenty or thirty years before are repeated, both real and dreamed up, in which the people correct something or make things much worse. I get angry and frustrated with them in the dream, though I usually know they’re dead and will be gone again when I wake up. This part is not important. There is nothing sentimental or sorrowful in these dreams. I dream of them somehow conscious of the fact that it is only a dream. And the dreamed Sarajevo does not resemble the city of today, nor is it the city in which I once lived. It is just the city in the dream.

  Parts of it are beginning to disappear little by little. Streets and entire quarters are disappearing, as people do. Some parts of this are accessible to reason, others are not. Thus, in the last decade or so, I have parted ways, quite gruffly and in uncomfortable circumstances, with many Sarajevo friends and acquaintances, and with some I’d called friends. It’s not important how this happened. They went away and it’s done, and while I continue to dream of the dead as if they were alive, I do not dream of these others at all. They have disappeared, like streets I have not walked down for a long time, or thought about. In dream, Sarajevo is a small town, populated by the dead.

  In our time Sepetarevac was linked to Bjelave by a little street called Zlatikuša. Alija Bejtić explains: “In old Sarajevo, which was provided with water by street fountains, individual water sources were not abundant, such that in any of the places where the water was inclined to flow freely, the pipes needed to be squeezed and hindered, the verb for which was zatiskivati, so that the water would accumulate in the supply basin. These places were called zatikuše, one of which was in the location in question.”

  I cannot recall that there was a fountain there when I passed by for the last time. That could have been in the spring of 1993, or earlier, before the war…They continued to call the street Zlatikuša for a long time, for it takes but a slight revision to adapt an empty word without any meaning to the excessive desires of human imagination. And thus did gold, or zlato, appear on Zatikuša, at the top of Sepetarevac.

  Now I seem to remember everything. But that of course is an illusion, for I cannot be certain that I really do or, what is more likely, am taking someone else’s experience as my own. What has been forgotten cannot be renewed. There is nothing to be reminded of.

  Veliki Park

  Autumn would arrive around the time of Velika Gospa, as soon as August had split in two and was heading toward its end. While it was never a matter of heat waves, and the sun would not bake things as happens in Mostar, nor would it be steamy like Zagreb or Vienna, and even during the worst July heat a pleasant cool would arrive with twilight, such that you could gather the sense of Muslim evening prayers as in the old folktales. The first signs of autumn would bring a sense of brief easing, for then, with Velika Gospa, came the most beautiful time of the year, which would not last long, until mid-September, when there was nowhere in the world like Sarajevo, and when everything, the climate, the historical moment, and the people, found themselves in complete harmony, and a person would briefly understand why he had ended up here, living in this city, far from the world and from friends and relatives. Then, as September too split in h
alf and suddenly the first morning frosts fell, and the mists rolled up from Otes and Sarajevsko polje, the longest and most miserable time of year would arrive, which was known to last until the end of April, during which the sky above the city would not turn blue, nor would the sun shine, nor would there be any sign by which to surmise that this climactic misfortune would ever pass. For a full seven months of the year a person would not be able to fathom who had ever come up with the idea of putting a city on this crater in the middle of the mountains. Unless Sarajevo had sprung up one year between the fifteenth of August and the fifteenth of September and people had never had occasion to move after that.

  After he retired from the railroad central office, Franjo Rejc volunteered as a bookkeeper for the Hotel Pošta. Until 1966 he kept bees in the village of Glavatičevo, near Konjic, visiting them on weekends, until his grandson was born in the spring of that year and he gave away the last of his hives, thereby bringing his apian career to a sudden end. In autumn of the same year he would hand over his accounting books too, and they were so orderly and complete that the entire history of this hotel for government officials could be discerned from them, while their fragments could long be found in Franjo’s storage drawers in the fifth-floor apartment in Madam Heim’s building and, later, in the apartment on Sepetarevac. These gleanings, half-filled notebooks, hotel ad materials, and yellowed empty pages with memo headings would stick around until 1992 and the beginning of the siege, after which they too would disappear.

  Though he worked at it for only a short period of his life, barely seven or eight years after retiring from his position as a traffic engineer, bookkeeping was not something Franjo gave up easily. He was an industrious person. Work calmed him. He found life’s meaning in putting things into order, arranging documents and protocols, administering daily life, and turning it into a history, so leaving his work meant a slow withdrawal from life, dying at the front, with the passage of the seasons that in Sarajevo had a fateful effect.

  He had to quit bookkeeping because of his illness. He was weighed down by cardiac asthma, and the Sarajevo winter was getting harder and harder on him, such that his doctors recommended he spend it at the coast. So in 1967, with his wife Olga and his grandson born the year before, he wintered for the first time in Drvenik, in an old Dalmatian house that his son Dragan had purchased a few years before. His heart and lungs took a liking to the sea climate, but he was simultaneously faced with his own imminent disappearance and the futility and senselessness of life when one is idle and there’s nothing to write. To ease the suffering, he started studying English. In addition to Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, German, Italian, Hungarian, and French, Franjo Rejc in the final years of his life studied English. This, he said, was the language of the future. In his case, it was the language that helped him cheat death.

  The move to Drvenik also disrupted Sarajevo’s seasonal rhythms. But one of them remained: the first sign of fall, around the fifteenth of August, every year.

  After retiring, Franjo went to the office at the Hotel Pošta every day a little after noon. He would usually stay until five, and then, instead of walking the fifty or so steps from the hotel to the building where he lived, he would head down Kulovića Street, then along Marshal Tito Street, all the way to Veliki Park. He walked along the asphalt paths, under the tall trees that have never been renewed since being planted here as little shoots in the eighth year of the Austro-Hungarian annexation, when the park was ceremonially opened in October 1886. After climbing up to Mustafa Golubić Street and the Veterans House, Franjo would sit down on a bench to rest, always the same bench, which does not exist there anymore. He said this spot had the greatest amount of air and was the freshest and most comfortable place to sit in summer. In winter he would just stand next to the bench, listening.

  It was precisely here, in the middle of August, that autumn would take its first breath through Veliki Park, inaugurating the finest part of the year in Sarajevo, which lasted such a short time that one needed to know the precise start in order to experience the whole thing.

  After resting on the bench, Franjo would slowly make his way home. And so it was every day, endeavoring to slow down the time that, meanwhile, passed ever more quickly.

  The Vakuf administration had granted the approximately thirty Ottoman stremmas that the old Muslim cemetery Čekrekčinica had covered to the provincial government in 1885, on condition that the graves remain where they were and that grave markers be created and trees planted around them. This was not in complete accord with the faith. One did not touch burial sites or go walking around the graves for no particular reason. These were modern times now, the Vienna emperor wanted it his way, people had changed, and the graves themselves, to be frank, were very old. Supposedly the area had been fenced off by Muslihudin Čerkrekčija and made into his own waqf at the beginning of the sixteenth century. He was buried here as well, and his burial markers are still recognizable.

  The plan for Veliki Park was the work of the provincial government official Hugo Krvarić. While he was not a landscape architect, of which there were many in Vienna – they created the plans for the beautiful, luxurious parks in Zagreb – his design was realized and permanently maintained, such that when Franjo sat on the same bench every year waiting for the fall, its state was not much different from in 1886. The paths were identical, the benches in the same locations. Only, in the interim, an ossuary for national heroes had appeared along with a fountain in the lower part, by Marshal Tito Street.

  Hugo Krvarić was from Dugo Selo, near Zagreb. He’d been educated in Zagreb and Vienna and moved to Sarajevo immediately after the occupation of Bosnia. He settled here and had a son. Perhaps he died in Sarajevo too, who knows. Hugo Krvarićs’s son Kamilo was born in 1894, when the trees in Veliki Park had grown strong. He was born on April 25, at just the time they would have been budding. He went to school at the First Gymnasium, then went to Zagreb. He became a theater critic and was active and respected during the two wars. He moved to Osijek and became the editor of Hrvatski list, a paper that was published during the time of the Independent State of Croatia. In 1945 he emigrated and lived until 1958, dying in Argentina. He was a member of Ante Pavelić’s circle.

  Did Kamilo Krvarić remember Veliki Park in Argentina? In what moments, during which seasons of the year, and how often might he have thought about it? It’s impossible to know, and no one has cared for a long time about Hugo Krvarić or his son Kamilo, the wayward theater critic, product of a kuferaš family from provincial Sarajevo, who was in between worlds, without a homeland, and who, once in a while, like Kamilo, by means of political radicalism, elevated national and religious emotions, and everyday mental and social gymnastics, tried to become – local. Though almost nothing about him is known, when recalling the August murmuring of the leaves in Veliki Park and Franjo Rejc’s waiting there for the fall, it is clear how Kamilo could have become close to Pavelić.

  His father Hugo Krvarić had a gift. Thus was a beautiful Austrian park created from an old Muslim graveyard, with a fascinating network of paths that people became so used to that they hardly noticed them. The paths come from all four directions and all four of the streets that support Veliki Park. From the south it is Marshal Tito. From his bench, through the thick treetops and the slender branches, Franjo could see the Hotel Istria, which would be demolished two years after his death. He did not know this and did not care. From his perspective, that structure, named after the largest Yugoslav peninsula, which – as we were taught in school – was returned to its mother country by Tito’s Partisans, would always stand where it was on Stjepan Radić Street. Franjo had friends in Istria, comrades with whom he had once participated in conspiracies to free Trieste, Istria, Gorizia, and Rijeka from the Italian administration. His comrades used some methods of terrorism, and Franjo supported them from Sarajevo. They called their organization TIGR.

  An engineer named Bonić was in hiding in Sarajevo during the Second W
orld War. He was a TIGR member from Pula who had to leave his native town after receiving a death sentence. If they had known this, the Ustaše would have deported him to their Italian allies, and after the fall of Italy he would have gone to Jasenovac. Bonić bought a house in Sarajevo, which Franjo tried to sell for years once his comrade had gone back to Pula after the war, in the end finally succeeding.

  To the right of his bench was King Tomislav Street. Named for the Croatian ruler, whose thousand-year kingdom was celebrated in 1925 throughout the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes while today it is marked by marble memorial tablets throughout the territories of the former Yugoslavia. The propaganda of the day created the legend of Tomislav as the unifying king of all the Southern Slavs. It was after him that King Alexander Karađorđević named his second son and also the Herzegovinian town formerly called Duvno.

  Mustafa Golubić Street, which borders the park on its hilly side, flows into King Tomislav. Mustafa was a Soviet secret agent, a thug and assassin, whose bleak legend would require a novel, if a feature film was too expensive to make. And if there was an actor who could play Mustafa Golubić and live. The Germans caught him in Belgrade in 1941. They say he was wearing an SS uniform. They tortured him for days, broke all the bones he had to break, but he would not even tell them his name. He could not walk so they put him on a wooden office chair to be shot. The Germans didn’t even know who it was they had killed. It seems they didn’t care, just as no one today much cares about Mustafa Golubic, a Herzegovinian from Stolac, a Comintern murderer, whose eyes they say filled with tears when, at the age of thirty-something, late one evening in a Prague alehouse, he quietly sang, “Bloom rose, do not fade. Suffer, Ahmed, do not die, for I have no where to bury you.”