Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Only a month after the creation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, on January 10, 1919, the entire street, from Marijin Dvor to Baščaršija, would be named after the future King Alexander I Karađorđević. In the middle of April, when the Ustaše arrived on trains and trucks in the city, which had already been occupied by the Germans, and the local riffraff instantly broke into the new Jewish temple and desecrated it, without waiting for any German or Ustaše order. The street was given the name Doctor Ante Pavelić.

  After the liberation, on August 20, 1945, the city authorities rendered a decision to return to the street its previous name of King Alexander. At the time the Partisans probably didn’t know what to name the main Sarajevo thoroughfare, this line traced by your thoughts and feelings, and so returned its previous name to it temporarily. In this they showed a clear and very important difference between on the one hand, the unifying King Alexander and his class enemies, who established the republic of equal South Slavic nations and ethnicities atop the charred remains of the previous monarchy, and, on the other, Ante Pavelić, a criminal. Perhaps it was not even intentional, but the Partisans did an important thing for the residents of Sarajevo when they allowed the main street to again carry the deceased king’s name until April 6, 1946. Those seven and a half months were enough for everyone to examine the palms of their hands, in prayer or not, to see whether anyone’s blood might still be on them.

  And then, on the first anniversary of the liberation, once their consciences had been unburdened, emerged Marshal Tito Street.

  Focht Street; or, the End of Art

  It has often happened to you lately that you’ll be describing some picture or event and in the middle of the story you stop and grow silent, confused, for it seems to you all at once that you haven’t been describing something you actually saw in real life, something that happened, it is some other person’s life, and you are telling a story about some other world, which you know perfectly, but which has no connection to the world you inhabit. And then, after a few seconds, you go on talking, certain that you’ve invented the whole thing. But you have begun to invent. And it is no longer you, since you earlier stopped being me in order to be able to talk about Sarajevo. And then you become a subsequent you, multiplying personas, like the reflections in the men’s hair salon near the Hotel Central, and each of them tells a story about his own life, until at a certain moment he cannot grasp how to talk about something that no longer exists. He is silent then, but he’s begun to invent, transforming into a subsequent you, who continues to talk about himself…

  The last time this happened to me I was in Poznań, in a library, speaking to an audience about the public library where I had my first library card. Poznań is a city in western Poland where Jews once lived among the Poles and Germans. Then the Jews were transformed into smoke and the Germans disappeared into Germany.

  I don’t know what led me to talk about my first library card, but after the second sentence came out of my mouth I could sense something there, in Poland, among the spirits and absent people, behind the facades in which a disappeared world was reflected through the architectonic physiognomies, that was as comfortable as in its own homeland.

  And I heard you talking about the Vlatko Focht Children’s Library in Višnjik in 1975. The year before, they had got you a library card and you had started going twice a week with Nona to return your books and get new ones. She would accompany you, but you would finish two books in a single afternoon then want to go back. Taking out more than two books was not allowed. The checkout limit was fifteen days. You spent every weekday that summer in the library, from the beginning of vacation on. When September came and school began, you would continue with the same regularity. It would be like this to the end of the fourth grade, when you were able to get an adult library card. There weren’t any books left in the children’s section for you.

  You didn’t think about who the library was named after then. Nor did you think about the names of the streets, squares, or schools until the names started to be changed. The children’s library, along with a line of branches, had been founded in 1961. The next year the divisional branch in Višnjik opened. The library bore the name of Vlatko Focht.

  That same year Vlatko’s older brother Ivan published his book The Destiny of Art. And when the library opened, Ivan became an adjunct professor at the philological department of the University of Sarajevo. He lived in a city where he had no relatives and where everything reminded him of their death. The entire life of the aesthetics professor Ivan Focht was a remembrance of death. He was a Marxist and not a Marxist. He was a free man preoccupied by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He contained within him a perfect Pythagorean order. In the mathematics of Bach’s music, without intending to do so, Professor Focht found corroboration for the material nature of the entire world, and of the dialectics that lead matter toward its eventual origin. Bach’s music helped keep him from going crazy.

  Ivan Focht studied music and mushrooms, which he’d gather in the woods around Sarajevo. He was the first dedicated mycologist of Sarajevo; his best known work, The Mushrooms of Yugoslavia, appeared in 1979.

  He retired in 1974. A few years before that he had slowly begun to move out of Sarajevo. He went to Zagreb but would come back every week to hold his lectures on aesthetics. A month after Tito’s death, another essay on his life’s topic appeared in Belgrade’s Politika: “Hegel and the End of Art.” Here is how it closes: “If art comes to an end soon, it will not be for the reasons given by Hegel, not because it has become too narrow and foreign to the spirit but because spirit itself has lost its battle. Not because spirit has climbed to a higher level but because it has sunk to the lowest possible.”

  Professor Ivan Focht died at the moment of art’s end, on October 20, 1992, in Zagreb. In the city where he was born sixty-five years before, the first winter of the siege was about to begin. One winding, irregular, strangely shaped street still bears the name of the Focht family. Here was the house with a marble tablet where the professor and his younger brother Vlatko were born. On the tablet are a few lines about the fate of the Focht family.

  It was on this street that you first happened to lose your way, during one of the first years after moving from Drvenik when you were still trying to make friends with people your age. They rejected you, but you tried. You believed there was meaning in childhood friendships, and in adult friendships, that would last to the end of one’s life. Nono and Nona had many friends who had died, about whom they spoke as if they were living.

  You were playing one of those hiding games where you would break into two teams and then run and hide in the dark entrances of dilapidated brick buildings, ranging across the whole hill between Nemanjina Street and the Music Academy, all the way to the Sarajevo City Museum.

  That’s how you ended up on Focht Street and read the inscription on the marble tablet. The next morning you woke up with a fever of 103. Your mother said it was from the previous day’s running around. You’d come home all sweaty. Nona said it was surely from all that running around. Nono was by then lying in a grave at Bare Cemetery.

  I couldn’t tell them I hadn’t got sick from running and hiding in the entryways that stank of boiled cabbage, where you had to speak softly and breathe even more softly because in the rooms above, behind the closed doors, someone was always dying, but rather because of what was written on the marble tablet next to the house where the Focht family had lived.

  I had looked in through the windows and imagined them there. The unmoving curtains, the light chandelier, the high, yellowish ceilings – everything must have been the way it was in their time. Besides this, perhaps there was a difference between my own time, in which I stood for the first time before that house and read the inscription on the marble tablet. Perhaps inside, I thought, the Focht family was waiting for what was inscribed on the tablet to happen. There was no way to avoid it, it was already written there.
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br />   I thought this and then got sick.

  You didn’t go to school for a whole week. They forbade you from running around like that in the future. Why can’t you play quietly? Nona asked. And you answered, “We can!” You didn’t think it was really possible, but to such a question there was only one answer.

  Josip Focht was a converted Zagreb Jew born in 1897. He fell in love in Bosnia and married Sara Ozma. She was a member of the Ozma family from Olovo. In order to seem less Jewish, or so that her name would be more acceptable to the Swabian ear of her husband’s family, she became Charlotte. Their two sons, Ivan and Vlatko, were born in a span of four years. The Focht family resembled the many kuferaš families of Sarajevo officials, teachers, and rail workers who had moved there after 1878. The difference began with the fact that the Fochts were of Jewish origin.

  They would have survived the war without anyone touching them – for Josip was baptized, and their neighbors on Čadordžina didn’t know he was Jewish, and as a rule what the neighbors didn’t know the Ustaše didn’t know – had it not been for what Josip and Charlotte Focht believed and what they taught their sons.

  A history of a somewhat previous or parallel age noted the following fact: equipment belonging to the local chapter of the Yugoslav Communist Party – a roller copier and a radio – was stored in the apartment of Josip Focht beginning in March 1943. Focht compiled the daily bulletins concerning conditions in the country and the world, and events in the Yugoslav theater of operations. He made copies and shared them with trusted messengers, who disbursed the Party bulletins to other trusted individuals or left them in various places in the city where ordinary citizens could read them. Charlotte and Josip carried on an information war against the Croatian propaganda machine and the German propaganda that reached Sarajevo, that city in the southeast of the new Europe, in which Catholicism and Islam were united naturally and through mutual interests. At that time, shortly after the collapse at Stalingrad, in which the finest Croatian sons also perished, particularly those from Bosnia, but before the decisive tank battle of Kursk, Charlotte and Josip also went to war against the Vrhbosna archbishop Ivan “the Evangelist” Šarić, a sworn member of the Ustaše who wrote odes to Pavelić and called on the sons of Catholicism to take part in cleansing Europe – and our beloved Bosnia – of all varieties of the sordid and messy, of the Antichrist, the schismatics, the communists, and who, in the abhorrence of Jews and the faith in one God, found himself on the same side as the Jerusalem Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who had taken our Bosnian Muslims especially to heart, more than once making the rounds to visit them across the European theater and encouraging them to hold out in the battle for the righteous cause being pursued by the Führer of the German Reich Adolf Hitler. All this was being broadcast on Sarajevo Home Radio (whose programming could be heard in the city squares and cafes), written about in all the papers, and reported on by all the German, Italian, and Croatian town criers, while against all of them battled Charlotte and Josip Focht using a concealed copier and a radio. What they were doing provoked at least ten death sentences per day against them. They did it out of a faith in universal human values that was much greater than both the confidence in eternal life of our archbishop Ivan and everything Grand Mufti al-Husseini believed in and preached would arrive with Judgment Day. This being the case, it also testifies to the fact that Charlotte and Josip were prepared to sacrifice their two sons for their faith in the equality of all people, and in truth. This accorded with a certain Jewish tradition, described in the Romancero Judeo-Español, which in a future that they would not live to see would be compiled by the Sarajevo professor Muhamed Nezirović, but it also accorded with the truth of their times, of which they were both entirely conscious: the lives of their sons would be worth nothing, nor would they themselves have the right to live, if they did not spread the truth throughout Sarajevo with the Yugoslav Communist Party’s roller copier. If the lies of Mufti al-Husseini and Archbishop Šarić won out, or those of the man whose name was inscribed onto Sarajevo’s main street, Ante Pavelić, there would be no life for them.

  The Focht family was discovered on the morning of Wednesday, January 17, 1945. The mother, father, and two sons were arrested. This happened at the same time that an entire clandestine network was uncovered in the city. People fell in the railways, post offices, police stations, and in other institutions where they were hiding. This was thanks to Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburić, general in the Croatian armed forces, founder of a network of transit camps of the Independent State of Croatia, a quite brave and utterly compassion-less man, a criminal and a devil, who arrived in Sarajevo at a time when it was clear to everyone, especially him, that the war was lost. He came to avenge, to hang and butcher, everything that in the preceding four years had conspired against our eternal Croatia, Europe’s new order, and the Germans with whom Luburić was forever feuding, for German amenability and their impersonal manner of work irritated his sensibility, while they in turn were horrified by his open and utterly personal bloodthirstiness. He stayed in a modernist-era villa near the top of Sepetarevac while operating in a building that he had selected himself, on Skenderija Street. He chose it, they say, because of the Masonic symbol forged into the facade. He wanted to take revenge against the Jews and the communists.

  The Focht family was transferred to a building of the regional police, on what you remember as Boris Kovačević Street. A day later, while they were being interrogated, the eldest son Ivan jumped from the second floor. In this leap, which must have been an act of salvation in suicide, an original philosophical aesthetic came to life. A musical aesthetic above all, though Professor Focht was the first Yugoslav scholar – you would remember this as a bizarre detail – to write about science fiction. In this leap of the seventeen-year-old high school student from Čadordžina Street one hears the Goldberg Variations in their most masterful performance, by Glenn Gould, which Professor Focht would of course come to know. In the mathematics of the music, in its perfect symmetries, which permeate with the pageantry of a cathedral, before which even animals stop, spellbound, a wide-eyed lemur, the mentally ill grow calm as do children and penguins, and the good Lord marvels – if it is possible to believe in the Lord – at how a person can create such music. Inside it, in this music, is gathered all the miracle of Ivan Focht’s leap, from the second floor, to freedom.

  Charlotte and Josip were condemned on March 12 by the wartime military court of Maks Luburić and shot. Fourteen-year-old Vlatko ended up in a transport for Jasenovac. It is not known how he died. Or perhaps this was discovered by those who searched for him. But history stops before such an inquiry can begin in the name of a human hope that by some chance he might be alive. The Sarajevo library was named after Vlatko.

  In some future non-time, when you too will no longer be here, in the name of tradition, Focht Street will become Čadordžina, as it was called when the family lived there. Some street will be named after the Fochts on the other side of town, somewhere at the foot of Zlatište, on the slopes of Trebević, where they never set foot. Or perhaps Ivan did, when he was out hunting for mushrooms.

  The Church of the Holy Transfiguration: History of a Nightmare

  I completed my first year of elementary school in Drvenik before we moved permanently to Sarajevo. My grandfather had died and without his asthma there was no longer any reason for us to spend winters in Dalmatia and summers in Sarajevo.

  That same summer, before I started second grade at Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević Elementary, I started suffering from nightmares. Obsessive, horrible dreams – mostly about death – which repeated and also continued in episodes, like in a TV series, from one night to the next. I had slept poorly in Drvenik too. Most of those dreams would come back, waiting for the next installment. But something had changed: the dreams’ setting.

  All my nightmares for the next several years would unfold on the same narrow stage, in the courtyard before the Church of the Holy Transfi
guration in Novo Sarajevo, and then inside the church. I won’t describe the dreams. They were various, touching on my daily fears, whatever had happened in reality, and of course, death. Sometimes some ordinary dream would slide into a nightmare, and then I would suddenly be transported to the churchyard.

  And for years later, as an adult, before and during the war, I would occasionally dream of the Church of the Holy Transfiguration. The dreams were no longer as scary, but they were always uncomfortable.

  I think I stopped dreaming about it once I moved to Zagreb. Even today most of my dreams take place in Sarajevo. I dream of Zagreb rarely, but even when I do, the dreams begin on Ilica and end on Marshal Tito or near the Health Ministry. But the Orthodox church in Novi Zagreb is no longer in them. I freed myself from it by leaving Sarajevo.

  I suppose it might have been possible to speculate for a long time, completely erroneously, about the reasons why my uncontrolled, nighttime imagination chose precisely this stage for all the horrors my consciousness could create.

  It would have been an interesting theme for a psychoanalyst.

  * * *

  —

  I have an explanation. As a child I avoided looking at this church. Whenever we would pass by it on the tram, or later in a car, on our way to Ilidža for the Sunday trip to visit our relatives, I would turn my head to the other side. I believed I could erase it from my thoughts that way, that it wouldn’t visit me at night. Of course that was entirely wrong. Though I avoided looking at it for a long time, there was no other Sarajevo building I knew so well and remembered.

  After the war, arriving in Sarajevo on the road from Zenica, as I made my way down the wide avenue toward Marijin Dvor and the center of town, I would also look intently at it. I had freed myself from my bad dreams, I thought, which was at least one boon of moving away to Zagreb. At the time, at the end of the nineties and in the first seven or eight years of the new century, I would arrive in Sarajevo feeling a kind of radiance, such that I needed a reminder of misfortune, of something bad in this place that I loved. Things changed completely for me later, and Sarajevo did too, but I would still be compelled to stare at the church.