Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Karlo, to whom all this was whispered at the table, which still featured the same rich Sunday lunch, looked first at one then at the other. He did not say anything but became rock hard. If he could have spoken, he would have said there was greater security in letting Mladen go to the Partisans. But rocks don’t speak. If he hadn’t become like a rock, and if words had not collapsed on top of him, like a house built with one’s own hands struck by an earthquake, then Opapa would have agreed with Franjo: it looked like the Partisans would win. If that wasn’t the case, then it was still better to go to them out of conscience. If they didn’t win, life here would not be worth anything, for every night Đulaga, Ismet, and Jozo Posušak would knock on someone’s door, and it was better to take your life into the woods than let them take it on the threshold of your house. This is what Karlo Stubler would have said to Olga and Franjo had he not become hard as rock. And had he not been afraid that he would only speak in such a way so as to free himself of his Germanness. He didn’t want to be free of his Germanness. That would have been undignified. He had never done anything like that. He could have, and probably it would have been useful for him, to call himself a Croat or a Serb, since there were Serbs in Bosowicz, but he could never do such a thing. And now he had no right to send his grandson to the Partisans so that his grandson might free him, Karlo, of the horror of being German.

  * * *

  —

  And so Mladen reported for duty. Everything was still in order at the time – the hives were carefully opened and the bees returned to the world after the long, tortuous winter slumber. Much had happened since the preceding autumn; the world had performed several somersaults, turning war into something that for Karlo and his family was unrecognizable. He always had his own way of thinking, which he did not hide and which had cost him a transfer from Dubrovnik to Bosnia, but he had lived in a world in which it really did not matter to anyone which side in the war was chosen by the railroad officials, the postal workers and their children, the Orthodox priests and their wives, the court reporters, innkeepers, barbers, grocery store managers, merchants, or the kuferaši, who had been tossed from one end of the empire to the other by imperial decrees. If such a person had his own way of thinking, it would not cost him his head. It had cost Karlo his life, true, for he was driven from a city where he was valued and respected, where he lived in a large house in Lapad, and it was likely that from his railway official’s home he would have moved to a home he built himself, but that was still within the confines of the old imperial times. Perhaps he had flown off the handle and made a mistake in calling for a strike at a time when the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes had just been formed, and perhaps there would not have been the same consequences if he had done it five or six years later, but whenever it might have happened, Bosnia was never that unkind to him. Opapa consoled himself, but then came the war, and with it, suddenly, a time when the decisions of ordinary people became important, in such a way that it seemed we were not living our own little lives but a series of ancient tragedies, where the individual was in the hands of the gods who would decide his destiny, though it was up to him to oppose them. At times Karlo Stubler no longer knew whom to oppose. But he could not think about the decision they had made for Mladen. Such thoughts would have led him to madness. That was why he preferred not to think. Or to maintain that a mother and father knew what was best for their children.

  But everyone agreed that it was important for Mladen to stay as long as possible in Stockerau. And he had already stayed for a long time, much longer than the training lasted while it seemed things were going well for the German forces on all fronts.

  Everyone was writing to him then, making their characters and their nearly palpable anxiety evident in their letters. We sense it some seventy years later, as latter-day readers of letters not addressed to us. Mladen did not sense their anxiety. He was naked to the waist, sweaty, marching all morning, at target practice all afternoon, playing the guitar, and singing German songs. The Erika March too.

  On the same commercial paper, Olga’s sister, Aunt Rika, wrote him on January 1, 1943. She wrote in black ink, her handwriting hardly legible, the letters thin and sloping to the right, like a burnt pine forest.

  * * *

  —

  Dear Mladen!

  We received your letter. It makes me happy that you remembered us. I haven’t been to see your mother in Sarajevo. I don’t know when I’ll be able to and I only know how they are from what you’ve written. We live here like hermits. We can’t go to Sar. without a special permit. You seem to have found your way there. You wrote that you have not heard from us. I did write, but it seems you have not received my letter.

  We spent Christmas as humbly as you can possibly imagine. We didn’t even have sugar for cakes. I wrote you that Onkel Vili was sick, now he’s better and will start his service on May 11 in Prača.

  The one thing for now is we are all healthy again, and we aren’t refugees like last year but are back in our apartment, small as it might be.

  As you know, the Germans have left. Opapa wanted to leave, but his health would not allow it so he is nervous and everything irritates him.

  Željko was here on Christmas Eve. He is well. He’s gained eight pounds. Not at all surprising. It’s not good here, but it’s worse in Dubrovnik, so the poor fellow ate a lot of Srem cutlets. They were hanging around Fruška Gora while there were grapes on the vines, and he said he’d never eaten so many in his life.

  Otherwise nothing has changed here. We have some eggplant. The poor bees have buzzed themselves out, but your papa can’t come to see them because he can’t get out of Sarajevo without a special permit. And they won’t give a permit on account of bees. Opapa takes care of them the best he can. So does Onkel Vili, though he does not quite know how. The bees know that your papa isn’t around and they don’t like it. They’ll give honey anyway. I’m sorry Aunt Dora hasn’t been able to visit you. Maybe you’ll be able to go to them. Say hello for us. Write again soon.

  With best wishes for your health,

  Your Tante Rika

  * * *

  —

  On the other side of the page, Uncle Vilko writes:

  * * *

  —

  Dear Mladen!

  Here I’ll just add a couple of words. As Tante Rika mentioned, thank God I’m back to health now, but for a while there I was quite sick. The climate here is fairly mild, so I won’t have to spend the whole winter in Prača. Your mother told me when I was at her place that you would come down as soon as you have a few days of leave.

  I see from your letter that you’ve become a veritable soldier and it isn’t a hardship for you. If only this were a different time and everyone could be home. Otherwise, there’s not much to report.

  Wishing you well,

  Onkel Vili

  Nevena is writing and will send her letter separately.

  * * *

  —

  The modest Christmas would continue to be the subject until Easter, which would also be modest, and which, in 1943, would be celebrated by Catholics and Orthodox on the same day, April 25. Aunt Rika was “Tante” as she had always been, while Uncle Vilko was “Onkel Vili.” They liked that Mladen referred to them this way. Or they might have also thought that it would please the German censor. In the part of the letter written by Aunt Rika there was at least one detail written expressly for the censor: “As you know, the Germans have left. Opapa wanted to leave, but his health would not allow it, so he is nervous and everything irritates him.”

  When at the end of 1942 the Germans in Sarajevo and Ilidža were listed for repatriation with the aim of firming up the German national territory, those who made the lists were not as forceful as in other parts of the country. People were allowed to choose whether or not to move to Germany, where, it was true, they were promised a house, mostly in the cities and towns of Silesia a
nd eastern Prussia. Old Stubler was thus offered the opportunity of settling in Lemberg, Polish Lviv, which after the war would belong to Ukraine and become part of the Soviet Union. Karlo politely, in the name of his entire family, thanked them for this offer. Some maintain he had explained that two of his daughters were married to men from the local community, one a Dubrovnik native, the other a Travnik native, and not even the third, Regina, could say that her husband was a true German, so it made no sense for an old man to move to that beautiful, far-off city. Others claim that he said nothing, just signed the paper that said he was not moving.

  Those who signed such a paper were merely warned that by remaining where they were they might no longer find themselves under the protection of the German Reich, but would instead share the fate of the local population.

  In the end, few Sarajevo Germans or Austrians accepted the call for repatriation and resettlement in Germany. Those who had thought of going had left after 1918. Besides, they were secretly listening to Radio London, news and rumors were spreading fast and what was happening with the German armies to the east was not reassuring. Those who did end up leaving, and from whom nothing was heard ever again, did not so much answer the call of the Greater German Reich as decide it was better to escape the Ustaše and the Ustaše regime – which was more of an illusion of a regime, since all the neighboring woods, mountains, and suburbs of the large cities were full of Partisans and Chetniks – and they did not know when the Independent State would run out of Serbs and Jews and the Ustaše would turn their anger against them, the kuferaši. These people made the same fateful mistake Olga and Franjo made when they led Mladen to report for the call of duty. They felt that the German soldiers, particularly in comparison with the Ustaše, were polite and proper in every sense.

  Aunt Rika was a kind, happy woman, the most reasonable of Karlo’s daughters. She accepted the conditions of life as they were and tried to find a way to deal with them. Where Olga and Aunt Lola were prepared to engage in crazy things and to rebel, she looked for solutions as to how she and Uncle Vilko might make it through life and the frightening twentieth century. She looked after Opapa and Omama, and after Rudi, who needed looking after, as he would never become his own man. When Karlo lost his strength, or when he drew back into a sort of internal seclusion, Aunt Rika took over as head of the family. She did not choose this role for herself, rather it fell to her with the drama which the Stubler family spun to the end of its history.

  Aunt Rika did not have any distinct talents, again by contrast to her sisters and her brother Rudi. She was average in everything, balanced, ordinary, as if she were more closely tied to her Italian grandmother, Josefina Patat, who made her way with a sure hand through the immense poverty of her entire life, giving birth to children for as long as God expected it of her, and never asking him to settle her life’s accounts. Seventeen times Josefina bore a child, fifteen of whom died before the age of seven. Mostly from poverty and childhood illnesses. Omama survived with her sister, who later got married in Mostar, but she too was not long for this life. Josefina Patat lived with her son-in-law Karlo Stubler and her daughter Ivana, and they took her with them as they moved farther into Bosnia, approaching but never arriving in Dubrovnik. She died in Konjic, where Olga was born. Her grave was there.

  Simple like her grandmother, Aunt Rika was very funny. She was ready to turn any misfortune into a joke, fooling around, and trying to trick the authorities in minor ways, ingratiating herself with the German military censors, showing that she was a good German, our good Tante Rika, who with Onkel Vili, represented a brave, self-sacrificing, and sober-minded German family, about which one might even make a movie.

  The language of her letter is odd. The vocabulary along with her lexical eccentricities were evident since her adolescence in Dubrovnik, where the Stubler children attended school. Aunt Rika did not read much, except for Holy Writ and humorous books in German, so she wrote the way she had learned in Dubrovnik at the beginning of the century. There is something touching in this lovely blending of old Ragusan and Volksdeutsche petit bourgeois poetics, transplanted to Ilidža’s Kasindol Street in Bosnia. Although Aunt Rika didn’t care much about identity, but rather tried to adapt to the times and her family’s surroundings, her letter is a metaphor for all our impossible Stubler identities.

  Between Sarajevo and Ilidža there was a police checkpoint with a border, which was more heavily guarded than the future borders between states. In the winter and spring of 1943, to get to the other side one had to produce a special permit. Obviously at that point it was not just a formality, for if it had been Aunt Rika would have gladly applied for permission, received a permit, and gone across to see her sister in town. The border was put there to keep people in a state of fear and could result in the murder of anyone who, on whatever basis, might take it into his head to request a special permit. In writing to Mladen, and hiding her fear of what might be happening to him, she twice mentions the permit. At the beginning and at the end. First she can’t get to Sarajevo, so she doesn’t know what is happening with Olga and Franjo. And then Franjo can’t get to his bees, so Opapa and Vilko have to take care of them.

  Uncle Vilko was a cheerful, simple man, like his wife, but less adept at life than she was. He was a rail man and the son of a union activist who had taken in Karlo Stubler and his family after they had to leave Dubrovnik. The Stublers had even lived in his home for a time, which was how young Vilko fell in love with Karlo’s daughter. Although everything evolved from self-interest, given that Novak had saved the Stublers from homelessness, it very quickly turned into an ordinary form of young people’s love and then a marriage that resembled so many other marriages. Though the Stublers had arrived at the Novaks’ hearth, no strife arose from this, nor was there ever any question about who had come into whose home, or who had arrived as dirt-poor folk from Dubrovnik. If there were any problems in their marriage, they were never related to this. They built a house together, into which their mother and father later moved. This was not a problem either. For years before the war, and then at its very start, Uncle Vilko had worked in Prača. He was a communications specialist and repairmen for telephones and other communications technology. He had two trades, and he was good at both and prized for them. But Prača was a tiny, lost, east Bosnian backwater, which had slowly begun to develop after the Austro-Hungarians built the tracks that lead to Višegrad. (In school it was taught that this track had been placed so that artillery could be transported in the future war against Serbia, but this, from whichever point one looks at it, was an exaggeration.) For a long time this track would remain the only connection between Sarajevo and the greater part of eastern Bosnia. The roads were old, Turkish, muddy, messy, and narrow, so the way one got to Višegrad was along the slow, narrow-gauge track.

  They say it was good to be working on the railroad in Prača in the late thirties. A quaint place full of fresh air, water, and greenery. Whoever moved there had no worries other than keeping the trains arriving and departing on schedule, maintaining the track, and making sure the telegraph and postal traffic was working properly. Everything else was godly peace, sweetness, and a slow-paced life, with long days such that everything happened in its own good time. One could chat with people, have a coffee, a glass of rakija, wait for the train, watch the people get out of the train cars.

  Bad news took a long time to reach Prača, or never reached it at all, so that not even the news that war had broken out in Europe made an impression. People knew about it, they read the newspapers and listened to the radio, but in that meadow, among calm, reasonable people (and only such people lived in Prača, for anyone unreasonable took immediate flight) the war seemed terribly distant and foreign. To those living in Prača in 1939 or during March 1941, when everything was still covered in snow, it was not easy to imagine all the horrors of the world. To those living in paradise, the stories people tell about hell appear exaggerated and implausible.

  Neverth
eless, in the middle of April 1941, Uncle Vilko and Aunt Rika sent Nevenka to Ilidža to stay with Omama and Opapa. It would take several months for the war to reach Prača and bring to an end this idyll.

  It so happened that in 1941 several well-known families were waiting in Prača and their journeys decades later would intersect with ours.

  The station chief was Ibrahim beg Mulalić, an unusual, quite elegant man, a foreigner in the land where he was born. There are such people: they do not put down roots or become accustomed to a place, even the place where they are from. The Mulalićs acquired their Turkish noble status after the Ottomans lost Hungary. They had been Hungarian Muslims who resettled in Bosnia, where they were foreigners, and Ibrahim beg had, centuries later, inherited something from that time of wandering.

  Ibrahim beg married Štefanija, a Habsburg Pole and lifelong Catholic believer, whose faith shaped all her identities and feelings of belonging but which did not prevent her from enjoying a true and lasting love. The couple loved and respected one another, and Prača, with its remoteness from all civilization, was an ideal place for their life.

  Štefanija’s parents had escaped from Poland in the nineteenth century. They were escaping from farther east, from the Russians in who knows what war, and they brought with them just two religious objects: a crucifix and a painting of the Mother of God, reminiscent of a Russian icon. The Christ on the wooden crucifix was made of porcelain. With time and their various moves, the wood rotted completely. The Son of God remained with his wide-open arms, without a cross. This was how Štefanija would bequeath it to her granddaughter Mirela upon her death in the ’70s. Mirela would wait out the new war and the siege of Sarajevo in her Hrasno apartment. The Christ was attached with thin nails to the wall of her bedroom, where a grenade landed in spring 1992. Nothing was left of the room or the wall but the porcelain Christ, which gently landed onto a demolished ottoman amid plaster, dust, and pieces of concrete.