Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  The aroma from the Lapad garden of the sisters Jelavić was no more, and every stench was palpable, as it was in any other town. And that was how the sweet scent of Dubrovnik was lost.

  Why did Olga make a note that Mina had visited them on Saturday, June 7?

  This was the next question that hounded me, and to which it seemed I would never find an answer but instead go on wondering why Olga had chosen to note in Franjo’s discarded notebook that Mina had visited on Saturday, June 7.

  It was futile to run from obsessive thoughts. The whole thing was futile from the start. Instead of tossing out the rotten bag, without looking inside it, or if I had looked inside, then instead of calmly throwing it out along with the rusted lighter, the pencil, the letter-seal wax and the notebook – instead of calmly tossing out the notebook without ever opening it, for days and then months and years I had tortured myself in an attempt to answer questions that could not be answered, about the bag and its contents, only to have new questions arise in the place of one whenever I might happen to find an answer for it. Like in fairy tales about serpents and dragons who grow three heads in place of every one chopped off, so through the end of 1998, the number of questions only multiplied with every day I spent on the notebook.

  Olga had been barely seventeen when she married Franjo. And she was probably already pregnant by then. She’d come to Karlo, her father’s favorite, and told him she was getting married. Her father was disappointed, she was his most beloved child, she’d been a son to him, set apart from his two other daughters and his fickle, gentle son Rudi, and his disappointment showed. She went to confession before her marriage. This was difficult for her. It’s likely that she really was with child.

  And so her little adventure with the young, handsome rail man, a Slovene, did not serve her well. Perhaps this had made having sex with Franjo nauseating for her for the rest of her life. And she had unwillingly given herself to him. She never talked about it, she was disgusted by such talk, she’d get angry…Was it because such stories reminded her of how it had all started? Or because she was a lesbian?

  Whatever it was, the two of them had not loved each other as man and wife through the course of their lives. At the start they’d been a couple in which she was dominant, and then after Mladen died, they blamed each other and drifted apart. Even so, there had always been a certain deep devotion between them, a feeling that they had been destined to be together. They were not conservative, did not believe in God, neither was a true wife or husband to the other, though they became mother and father three times, and their marriage was as hard as stone. They had horrible arguments, but neither she nor he ever swore at the other. Or struck the other.

  And so they came to resemble one another in many ways. He was obsessed by his little chronicles and journals, he followed the movement of the queen in every hive, he looked into the souls of his bees, and the day when the drones were tossed out of the hive was for him an event equal to the start of the Second World War. And so Olga too, with the passage of years, began to note the dates when Mina had come to visit, and whether it was a Saturday or a Sunday. And she began to imagine the world in his manner, filled with small details whose coordinates, names, and places were for whatever reason important and worth writing down.

  The dates should be remembered.

  * * *

  —

  18 IV 35. Frost on the 15th, 16th, and 17th. All the flowers in bloom destroyed. All swarms well supplied with pollen and new honey. Nests spread across 7–12 frames. Drones have hatched. Numbers 1, 2, and 3 received extensions. The pasture has emptied.

  2 V 35. They bring less pollen (two illegible words). The supply of honey strikingly reduced. Drones driven out from hive no. 6.

  * * *

  —

  Mid-April freezes in Sarajevsko polje are frequent. They happen every spring. Snow falls in April. The May Day parade, which in the prewar years headed toward Vrelo Bosne, early in the morning, was caught in a snowstorm on the road. The blizzard was so intense they couldn’t see where they were going; only a line of trees along the roadside prevented them from losing their way and freezing to death. If the Swabians hadn’t planted those trees, Sarajevo’s workers and trade unionists would have perished that May Day. But this was not in 1935, it was earlier. Karlo, Rudi, and Franjo were saving the bees, digging the hives out of the snowdrifts. The snow had melted by May 2, and one of the sunniest and warmest springs in the century followed. Perhaps this had been in 1933? It too is described in one of Franjo’s lost notebooks.

  While the spring did not begin as it should have, the year was nevertheless good. There were no diseases among the bees, and the worker bees had to fly a long way. The flowering plants extended all the way to Stojčevac, Vrelo Bosne, and Mount Igman, so the honey was luxurious and brought with it the scent of distant parts, of the heather, lindens, and meadows around Ilidža’s Roman bridge. Or this was just Franjo’s imagination as he watched the poor things circling the stunted, wounded blossoms, collecting the pollen left over from before the freeze. It was honey from suffering bees.

  He lived for forty years among the bees and knew everything about them he could read and learn. He collected a library of books in all the languages he spoke, and also in those that, with the help of a dictionary, he could read, including the massive Glossary and Customs of Beekeepers in the West and the East, upon Examination of Religious Teachings Concerning Bees, by the young Romanian author, scholar, and lunatic Mircea Eliade. And when he had learned all that others knew about these holy insects, Franjo found himself before a wall. He realized he did not understand them. This tormented him, and he would often speak about it, while playing preferans under the tree on Kasindol, in front of the future garage.

  Don’t worry about it, Karlo Stubler told him. It isn’t rational to expect a beekeeper to understand bees.

  Don’t go to so much trouble, said Rudi. If God had wanted people and bees to understand each other, he would have given them a common language.

  Bees are the same everywhere, in Poland and Bosnia and at the ends of the earth. But people are all different. That’s why it’s not a man’s place to understand bees, Matija Sokolovski philosophized.

  That’s stupid, Franjo answered. You don’t know anything about bees. The bees in Poland and the bees in Ilidža are not the same sort of bees. And you, Rudi, if you think God spends his time thinking up languages, I must say you’re wrong.

  And that would usually be the end of the conversation. No one wanted to work himself into a sweat over what Franjo expected of himself and his bees. Besides, no one besides Karlo Stubler understood how serious he was about all this, or how much he was joking with them, soothing his nerves with a story and shortening the day with the philosophy of bees. Karlo never played cards; he could not enjoy the game. Cards for him were a waste of time, but he knew his son-in-law was serious. He really would have liked to talk with the bees and to understand their reasoning.

  It worried him a bit that he had put the first hives at Ilidža and introduced Franjo to beekeeping.

  Don’t worry about him, Olga had said.

  And then she would tell the story of how Opapa was worried about Franjo’s mental health and how he might lose his marbles over the bees.

  Everybody thought that was funny, except Karlo and Franjo. They both got angry, each for his own reasons, and neither found anything entertaining in the story.

  They both approached bees seriously.

  Karlo loved them but looked at them coldly and rationally. He studied bee anatomy, was sad whenever there was an epidemic. If he had to destroy a swarm because of it, he did it according to the rules, and it was important to him that the bees not suffer. But he was absolutely certain that bees had no souls. They did not have their own language, thoughts, or feelings. Outside their swarms, societies, and colonies, bees did not actually exist. They react instinctually, as a swarm, and make decision
s as a swarm. In this they differed from people, Karlo thought, troubled by the way Hitler was turning Germany into a hive.

  Franjo experienced bees individually. The swarm was the perfection of their organization, which would not have been possible without a bee language. If he could not learn it and speak to the bees as equals, at least he wanted to know something about that language. And to study the language, one had to know what the bees felt.

  For instance, what they felt when tossing the drones out of a hive.

  Heavy and sluggish, these bees were unfit for life and would not survive outside the hive.

  They could not fly. They lived off what the worker bees brought in on their wings, and took pleasure, if bees like people find pleasure, in extending the species.

  When their task was accomplished, their voracity and gluttony became a burden to the swarm. Once the bees’ feminine nature had been satisfied, the amazing prolongation of the species took place. And so one day in early spring, the time of life’s renewal, they started pushing them out of the hive.

  Franjo liked to be present when the bees tossed out the drones. He was superstitious and believed this brought him luck. Besides, it was the beginning of a yearly cycle, the time of the hive’s renewal and of nature’s as well, and a man felt he too was being reborn.

  A life’s span was not seventy-five short years, but seventy-five re-births, which was nothing to sneeze at.

  This was how it seemed to Franjo since he’d become engaged in beekeeping.

  But he did feel some discomfort about the fate of the drones. He would lift one up from the grass, let it rest on his palm, flailing its wings in vain. He’d touch its stinger with his thick thumb, and it would bend as if it wanted to sting. But nothing happened.

  Then he would put the drone back into the grass, where it would die of hunger, unless some little forest beast had finished it off. The next day the ants would scatter them throughout their anthill, and soon there would be no trace of it left.

  Idleness had killed it, someone joked.

  After the frost fell on the blossoms in 1935, the year’s honey was scarce but good and healthy. The bees had to fly far, and they brought news from distant domains on their wings and legs. It was said they flew all the way to Mount Igman. The pastures on the mountain were always rich. Stubborn, extremely fragrant plants grew there. The plateau of some ten kilometers, which could be encircled by an enormous compass, opened out into a broad, extended world.

  Inscribed into the honey was the history of that circle, which because of the April frosts of 1935 was wider than in other years.

  Franjo never sold honey. In his forty years of beekeeping he was an expert at overseeing many hives. From 1933 to 1939, he had some thirty hives in three locations, at Želeće, above Bistrik, and at Ilidža, but he divided up the honey among his friends and relatives. It would be interesting to calculate how much honey was consumed in the home of Franjo Rejc from the time his father-in-law introduced him to beekeeping until his death in the fall of 1972, or until the end of the seventies, when the last of the honey jars ran out.

  On the pantry’s highest shelves were the half-kilogram jars with exemplars of the honey from each year of his beekeeping. The first three, from 1935, had yellowed labels with notes in fountain pen: “Ilidža 35,” “Želeće 35,” “Ilidža 35 (Falatar).” The third contained honey from Stjepko Falatar, who was ailing in those years and whose story needs to be told, as Franjo took care of his bees, keeping a sample of their honey. Farther back on the same shelf were another forty-three dusty jars in no particular order.

  Under no circumstance was that honey to be consumed. When we moved from Madam Heim’s building to Sepetarevac, Franjo personally oversaw the transport of the little labeled jars. Although by then he was old and sick, his heart was spent, and he did not have much longer to live, he still fantasized about the bees’ language and the secrets of history inscribed in the honey and how he might one day decipher what it recorded. When he retired, he started studying organic chemistry, he would get together with Professor Ignjat Pobegajlo, author of the book on bee pestilence and the most famous Yugoslav specialist on bees, Bijelić’s mentor and advisor, and have long conversations with him about deciphering the notes in the honey.

  From the honey we would learn what a given year was like, but not just in regard to the climate. For instance, we could compare 1940 and 1941, the last prewar year and the first year of the war. Everything that had happened between those two years was recorded in the honey. This was what Franjo said.

  You might be right, you might be right, Matija Sokolovski would say, absorbed in thought, without letting go of his cards, but you can find all that out by going down to city hall and looking through the old newspapers. Everything is recorded there quite reliably.

  Had anyone else said that to him, Franjo Rejc might have got angry. But Franjo appreciated old Sokolovski’s comments and would conclude their talks by saying they were two old fools, each in his own way.

  But he never gave up on his dream of speaking with the bees and reading history from their honey.

  By the end of September 1972 he had fallen into the bed from which he would not rise. My father placed him in his ward at the hospital, but he asked to be allowed to go home.

  If you can’t help me, let me go home. Don’t keep me here imprisoned. Let me go home to die.

  This was what he said. And my father let him go home.

  Then and later, whenever people were nearing death, they would ask to be allowed to go home to die within their own four walls. There was a reason for this. And there still is. Franjo Rejc would die in the same room where, exactly forty years later, his daughter would die.

  On the last night, the one that ended with him saying to her, everyone else is swine, it’s just the two of us left. No more than several hours earlier he had said, “That honey should be eaten!”

  What honey? Javorka asked

  What do you mean, what honey? The honey that hasn’t been eaten.

  What honey that hasn’t been eaten?

  She thought he was raving, but until the very end Franjo was himself.

  Eat the samples. It would be a sin to throw out such honey.

  He told her he feared Olga might throw the honey in the trash. She was like that. She was afraid. She was squeamish. She thought honey could go bad. But it couldn’t! It could sit for two hundred years and turn into a single great crystal, but it would still be as fresh as the day it was drawn. Honey was eternity.

  This was what he said and again begged her not to throw the honey out.

  If you’re not going to eat it, I’ll eat it all myself, she would tell Olga after Franjo had died.

  Surprisingly, Nona did not object. And so, for breakfast, before going to school, I had bread, butter, and honey from 1943.

  That honey lasted us for years.

  In spring 1993, during the siege, while I was looking through the pantry for alcohol, I found a jar of Nono’s honey: “Konjic 1953.” It was tucked away in the back of the pantry, which had never been whitewashed, let alone properly cleaned – there it was.

  I took the jar to Cica Šneberger so she could make us honey cookies.

  A few days later, when I left for Zagreb, from where I would not return until the end of the war, Cica gave me a little bag of honey cookies from the year of Stalin’s death.

  Thus did we consume a history. I remember the crystallized honey, which melted in just a few minutes on the sunny windowsill, turning limpid and clean. Dark, the color of cognac, shiny like a lemon, the honey of long-since-dead bees. The honey of my grandfather, also long since dead, with all his talents, the languages he knew and I didn’t, the books he’d read and I hadn’t. His ideas died with him too.

  * * *

  —

  Stjepko Falatar had been a steam engineer for the narrow-gauge line to Višegrad and Plo
če. He lived in Višnjik as a renter in someone’s house. He was married to Rozalija, a pretty Hungarian with a short leg, which in those days was considered a great defect, especially among the lower classes and the poor. When she stood in one place, Rozalija was one of the most beautiful women in Sarajevo, but the moment she began to move, she was a crumbling house, a train falling with its engine into the Neretva River, a misfortune before which mothers would make a sign to ward off evil from their children. Rozalija would pretend she didn’t hear or see, continuing on her way without stopping. When she stopped and stood, again she was the most beautiful woman in Sarajevo. People would admire her, envy her, waiting to see her walk again, so their hearts would return to their chests.

  Rozalija gave Falatar five children, one after another between 1915 and 1921. This was a time of war famine, Spanish influenza, typhus, and cholera…Of the first three born, two would die. If a woman was pregnant and there was not space in the house for another child, it wasn’t a problem since one or another of the children would die anyway. During a time of great death, as around that of the Great War, the world succumbed to animal instinct, male came down upon female – this was how the human species fought for survival – and more children were born than usual. The priests had their hands full, for infants had to be baptized before they died.

  It was different with the Falatars. The Hungarian gave birth only to living children, who sprang up despite all the epidemics, and if any of the children did get sick, they quickly got better, and were bigger and stronger. But with each new child, they grew ever poorer.