Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  The medicine bag was practically empty. There were handkerchiefs inside: seven clean, pressed handkerchiefs of old-fashioned, geometric designs, these too inherited from Karlo Stubler, and one purple silk handkerchief for special occasions, usually worn in the lapel pocket of a jacket. Besides the handkerchiefs, this bag held only a wooden school pencil case with two sharpened Faber pencils, a sharpener, a two-color blue-black pencil, also Faber, and a never used Parker fountain pen purchased before the war with a small bottle of blue ink and a spare gold nib.

  Tucked into the inside pocket of his gray traveling jacket was another pen, a green-black Pelikan, for everyday use, alongside a small metal box in the same pocket, containing about ten metal nibs. The pocket also contained his Yugoslav passport. In his left inside pocket was his billfold, with the money he had received for the trip from headquarters, along with some dinar banknotes of his own.

  Before setting out he had sewn fifty dollars into the belt of his trousers.

  Rudi wore a gray raincoat over his jacket – prewar, but in good condition – that had since 1939 been lying in a wooden crate in the attic among moth-devoured wool sweaters.

  He had ordered a hat from Hlapka’s on Tito Street as soon as he learned about the trip to Berlin. At headquarters, they were amazed he had spent half his monthly salary on that hat. He just shrugged and said, “One does not travel to Berlin without a hat.” Some may have suspected that Comrade Rudolf Stubler would not be returning from Germany but would emigrate to the West. Many had done it, they simply hadn’t come back. And then again, why order a hat at Hlapka’s in Sarajevo, when in Berlin, in the West, there were probably better and less expensive hat makers?

  “How was your trip from Sarajevo, was it crowded?” Joška Herzl asked, just to change the subject once he sensed that the gentleman with the shaved head was taken aback when he learned that Joška was a juggler. Most people didn’t consider juggling a legitimate occupation but rather an idle pastime. He might have told the stranger the truth: the police had come in three times to question him before they had even reached Zenica, that they’d looked through his papers. It was better, however, not to talk about this at all. Rudi had no way of knowing who this stranger was or what he knew, or whether it was by chance that he had come into his compartment.

  “What do you juggle?”

  “Any number of things,” said Joška Herzl, laughing, “bowling pins, apples, hand grenades…No, I’m joking. I’ve never juggled bowling pins. I juggle matchsticks.”

  “Matchsticks?” Rudi said, surprised.

  “Yes, I juggle matches. Matches saved my neck. I’d have rushed into the sky otherwise, turned to smoke, disappeared. You get it?”

  Just then a policeman appeared at the door and asked for their documents. Behind him a thickset, hairy man in civilian clothes waited ominously in the corridor. He stared at the two of them as if he recognized them, and knew their secret intentions. As if the examination of their documents was a mere formality.

  Rudi felt guilty. He always felt guilty in the face of police authorities. He grew awkward, his identity card slipped from his hand as he was holding it out to the militia, and it disappeared under the seat. His voice shook as he answered the questions.

  “Father’s name?”

  “Karlo.”

  “Mother’s name?”

  “Ivana.”

  “Maiden name?”

  “Škedelj.”

  “Destination?”

  “Berlin.”

  “Berlin?! Purpose of trip! Passport! Documents!”

  He gave him the passport and both letters. The policeman went out into the corridor. His back was turned as he showed Rudi’s papers to the boor.

  They stood there for a long time – too long for Rudi’s timid nature. He grew fidgety, imagining what they might find in his papers.

  “They’re doing it to make you feel guilty,” whispered Joška Herzl. “It’s what they do.”

  The militia gave him back his papers in a crumpled heap, and it took Rudi some time to put them back in order, each letter back into its envelope with the fold on the inside.

  He gave Joška Herzl back his passport and ticket, asking no questions.

  “You were saying something about juggling matches?” Rudi asked to relieve the awkward tension.

  This idly uttered question, as questions often are among people who meet for the first and only time in a train compartment, would be fatal for Rudi. What was about to happen over the next three and a half hours while the train to Vienna idled at the Zagreb station would preoccupy him for the rest of his life, and he would relate it in vivid terms to everyone.

  Before demonstrating his juggling skill, Joška Herzl told Rudi his sad life’s story.

  He was born the only son of famous parents, the Zagreb pianist couple Maksimilijan Stinčić and Bosiljka Kamauf Stinčić. Maks Stinčić was, we know, the first Croat to make a gramophone recording, but what is less well known is that from the turn of the century to the beginning of the Great War, he was probably the most sought-after concert pianist in Europe. He performed in America as well, premiering pieces by Debussy, and was at home in all the great concert halls of Germany and France.

  His wife, Professor Bosiljka Kamauf Stinčić, was the first pianist of the Croatian Academy and today is still a professor at the conservatory in Salzburg. This perhaps explains why Joška Herzl, her son, obtained his travel documents with ease. The professor often came to Zagreb, gave lessons at the Music Academy, and over the years among the envious and the defeated, rumors spread that Bosa was actually the lover of some highly placed party official.

  The career collapse of “Zagreb’s Franz Liszt,” as Stinčić was called, took place after Josip’s birth. When the child was three years old, his father realized to his horror that Josip was tone-deaf.

  A happy and spirited child, he was interested in everything, learned quickly and easily, even knew all the letters of the alphabet by the age of four. By all indications he was an advanced and good child, except in what his parents, especially his father, found most important: he could not hit a single note correctly.

  His mother would probably have got used to it with time, though it was not easy for her either, as she examined the family tree, searching in vain for unmusical branches, great-uncles on one side, great-aunts on the other, whom the boy might have taken after, but his father was in despair. He started turning down performances, considered committing suicide, and lived in fear of someone discovering that Josip was tone-deaf. He let all his household responsibilities go, spent most of his time alone, and holed himself up in their villa at Zelengaj. Only Mrs. Stinčić would go down to town to take care of the necessities, after which she would return even more depressed, for everyone she met would ask: How is Mr. Stinčić? And how is your boy?

  In the end, after it had become clear that Maksimilijan Stinčić would die of sorrow and the time was nearing for the boy to start school, an idea occurred to Bosa Stinčić: announce that Josip had died of diphtheria! There would be a big funeral at Mirogoj Cemetery, the empty casket would be placed under the arcade and into the tomb of Maksimilijan’s father, the church composer and organist Antun Svetolik Stinčić, and this would be followed by forty days of mourning, when all of Zagreb would pay its respects at the Zelengaj villa and witness the parents’ sorrow. After all that they had gone through, it would not be such a difficult performance.

  While all this was happening, Josip would move in with Rozalija Herzl, Bosa’s aunt Ružica, a widow who had no work beyond caring for her sweet, feeble-minded daughter Doroteja. She would adopt the boy. Of course, Aunt Ružica was Jewish, and there was no reason Josip could not also become a Jew. He would be neither the first nor the last. The fact that he had been christened at Saint Mark’s in the presence of national leaders and distinguished persons posed no impediments. The boy would not remember it anyway.
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  None of this of course meant that Maksimilijan Stinčić, our first and most famous piano virtuoso, and Bosiljka Kamauf Stinčić, the renowned professor and music pedagogue, had contrived to renounce their son. This they simply would not have done. They were merely looking for a way to avoid a shame that for both of them, but especially for Maks, was unbearable: a tone-deaf child.

  And so did the Zagreb boy Josip Stinčić, who might have become a leading professor of botany – for he was very interested in trees – or perhaps a rival to Krleža and his dramaturgy – for Josip was passionate about the theater – become the Graz Jew Jošua Herzl, nicknamed Joška.

  At first Joška noticed only positive changes. Instead of a father who spent entire days in his pajamas, drinking or crying as he sat at the piano, and a mother who, in response to most of his questions – What is the capital of Mongolia? Why do people believe in God? Why does the wheel on a bicycle turn? How many centimeters are there between the earth and the moon? Which one of us would die first? – did not have answers and did not try to find them, he had got a big sister, Doroteja, and Aunt Ružica. And he had also become a Jew! Although Judaism was linked to some uncomfortable experiences, and even a physically painful one, Joška was enthusiastic. Being a Jew meant forever living in a fairy tale, and believing only in the fairy tale, which in the course of the year would continue to bring new excitements and experiences. For Jews not a single day was ordinary. Even cooking was a great adventure…Everything he remembered from his previous life now had suddenly become more exciting and intriguing. He was not surprised when, after several months, he came across people who did not like Jews.

  While he was crossing the main square with Aunt Ružica, some drunk boys in hunting clothes had called out something foul at them. Are they Catholics? he had asked Aunt Ružica. No, they are nasty and unhappy hunters! Are those hunters Catholic? he had insisted. Well, yes, what else could they be? she had said. And suddenly everything became clear to Joška. He did not hold anything against those Catholic hunters, for he knew they were envious. They knew that for Jews every new day was different from the previous one while for Catholics every day was the same. Jews lived in fairy tales. Catholics drank, cried, and lived in anxiety. Joška knew this, for he too had once been Catholic.

  Mama Bosiljka came to visit once a month. He saw Papa less often, maybe once every three months. Mother brought money, which she would leave under the little crocheted tablecloth on her way out in such a way that it was visible to everyone but appeared discreet. He did not like this game, for she would blush afterward every time. Aunt Ružica would tell her, “But Mizzi, you shouldn’t have!” and then pick up the money and stuff it into the pocket of her housecoat. There was something ugly about this, Joška thought, and it seemed to him that Doroteja was both happy and smart in not noticing such things.

  “When I grow up, I’ll be like Doroteja!” he once said to Aunt Ružica.

  “No one can become like Doroteja,” she answered. “One has to be born like Doroteja.”

  But this did not discourage him. If you look at something long enough and think that it is you, in the end you’ll turn into it, the boy thought, having found in his big sister his first and only life model.

  His father’s visits were even less pleasant.

  He never took him by the hand or tossed him into the air, as other fathers did with their sons. It was better that way, he told Doroteja, because he might throw me up but not catch me. And you’d break on the cement! his big sister said, laughing at her joke, though she of course didn’t really believe it. But Joška knew it was true.

  One time just before Christmas they suddenly showed up from Zagreb. Papa had brought a Christmas tree. But we’re Jews! Joška said. Aunt Ružica just laughed, and Doroteja had already started clearing the corner where the little tree would stand with the gifts underneath it.

  To please their guests that Christmas, everyone in the house would be Christian until the new year; they acted like Christians and did things the Christian way. Big Doroteja went around the house with a melancholy expression, the sort Christians wore in the most solemn moments for Christianity, which got on Maksimilijan’s nerves, grating him so much that every once in a while he would whisper into Bosiljka’s ear: “Why is that retarded cow mocking the Mother of God?” She was bewildered, for she didn’t see mockery in Doroteja’s expressions, nor did she believe the unfortunate girl knew how to mock anyone or anything. In the end, Doroteja’s attempt to act like a Christian among the Christians even led to a little marital spat, when Maks Stinčić, not paying much attention to whether their hosts heard him, yelled that it was because of her, Bosiljka, that the Jewish grandmother was carrying on. Aunt Ružica and Doroteja actually did not speak Croatian very well, so might not have understood what he was saying, but Joška had certainly understood it.

  One other thing upset his father: in the home of Rozalija Herzl, Bosiljka’s Jewish aunt, there was no piano. There had actually been one at a certain point, during the life of Uncle Moses, who had played the violin in the Graz orchestra, but after Moses died, Rozalija had sold the piano. She didn’t say it, but it seemed that she had blamed the piano for Moses’s fate, his serious illness and short life. Maksimilijan Stinčić took this very personally. He hated the old lady, Joška’s dear aunt Ružica, and his sister Doroteja too.

  And since there was no piano in the house, Maks could not sing Christmas songs. It was the first time he could remember, he said, that he would celebrate Christmas without singing. This was a bad sign: “Song was prayer,” he explained to Joška, “and a sung prayer before God was worth twice as much. A person who didn’t know how to sing, in all probability, would go straight to hell.”

  As he said this, he stretched his long, bony fingers up into the air in front of Joška’s eyes. Maksimilijan Stinčić was proud of his fingers, so he liked to show them to people, including his son. “The secret of great piano playing lay in stretching one’s fingers,” he told him, “but you don’t know this, and you never will.” He sighed, without ceasing to move his fingers as if he were pressing the keys, each finger moving on its own as if they were not connected to the same hand or as if each one thought for itself. Little Joška Herzl found this fascinating. It was then that the desire to enchant his father was born, the way his father enchanted audiences with his playing.

  At the start he wanted to impress him.

  Later, embittered, he wanted to show his father, Maksimilijan Stinčić, that there was a greater skill than his, and that his fingers could think, each one for itself, and that they could move, each one at its own time, even though there was no music in them and never would be.

  “Music saves the soul,” said his father that Christmas. “Only those who are able to play and sing well can take Jesus into their souls. All others are lost!”

  Joška remembered these words.

  And that was how he started to learn how to juggle matchsticks. Rudi asked him several times whether he had heard about this skill from someone, whether he had seen anyone else juggling matchsticks, but each time Joška Herzl did not seem to hear the question. In the end, Joška never told him, and in the long stories about his journey to Berlin, about Furtwängler, and about the juggler of matchsticks, which Rudi would repeat with variations whenever he was in the mood or whenever anyone came to visit the Stublers at their Ilidža home, he was forever equally sorry for the missing detail in the narrative. The biography of Joška Herzl, unfurled in the several hours that the train for Maribor, Graz, and Vienna stood waiting at Zagreb’s main station, was crippled and incomplete without the story of how and where the boy had first seen match juggling.

  He started practicing between Christmas and New Year’s, at first using only the middle finger of his right hand.

  He would place a match on his fingertip to balance it there, then, with just a flick of the first joint, he would send it into the air and try to catch it. It took Jo
ška Herzl six months to flick the match once, twice, then three times in a row with his middle finger. This was not juggling. If there had been anyone but big Doroteja and Aunt Ružica looking on from the side, they would not have recognized any great skill in this thing that required ten hours of practice per day. When he wasn’t at school or at the rabbi’s for religious instruction, when he wasn’t eating dinner, doing his homework, or sleeping, Joška was practicing to juggle with that one finger.

  After he had managed to flick the stick seven times with his fingertip, he put another one on his index finger and tried to do it with two fingers and two match sticks separately. It seemed impossible. Months passed before he was able, for the first time, to flick two matches into the air, one with each finger. And that was just one time. It was another six months before it happened again, and it was a miracle, for each finger to flick and catch two matches twice.

  Doroteja didn’t ask a thing. She just sat there staring at Joška’s fingers. For her it was a wonder when he succeeded and a wonder when he failed. And Aunt Ružica just knew that the child was trying to do something important and she did not care whether he succeeded, nor did she care what anyone else might think of it.