My heart stopped. I thought you had drowned.
Me? Drown?! the boy said, laughing.
The anxiety was short lived. It vanished in the few seconds of true happiness, the sort one experiences only in the proximity of a great life’s loss. Or when death hovers over his head, only touching him lightly with the tip of its robe.
He continued to read calmly. Then he wondered, distressed, how he could have regained peace of mind so quickly. It was inexplicable, and the distress would grow to envelop his life. Maximilian Seghers-Stein lost his reason and quickly died in a mental institution near Modriča, in Bosnia. That was why Gertrude had moved all the way to Bijeljina, to be close to her dying husband, who did not recognize her anymore, or his children, or anyone else.
His mind’s eye must have been the bleak empty horizon of the sea. He knew that he was no more, that he had drowned, yet his heart did not stop short. It could not, for one’s heart cannot stop short twice. The adrenaline cannot gush through one’s veins twice in such a short span of time. He’d had the chance to save his son but didn’t take it. God had granted him a warning not to read a book while the boy was swimming in the sea. But Maximilian had not taken advantage of it. That’s why he had taken yet another son from him.
For a moment he did not know whether perhaps the two events had merged into one. The boy had come up behind him all wet and asked, What happened, Dad? That was a ghost. Just as now it was a ghost standing wet before him, grabbing him with his cold claws, keeping him from running away, shouting, What’s wrong, Dad? What’s wrong, Dad?
How Maxmilian Seghers-Stein lost his mind would remain one of those eternal Stubler riddles. No one would express curiosity about it – rather, they would remain fearful, or watchful, of sudden insanity, which did not arise from a mild psychiatric disorder, neurosis, or depression, but erupted from nowhere, clouding a person’s mind. It was only because of Mr. Maksim and his frightful destiny that the Stublers had an aversion to psychiatrists and avoided them as children avoid dentists. This aversion would only come to an end with Olga and Franjo’s daughter Javorka, who, ignoring the family story of Maximilian Seghers-Stein, would start visiting a psychiatrist to discuss her suicidal tendencies.
He drove Wolfram Justus away the way one drives a ghost away. The child was distraught, and for a long time his despair would mark him, darkening his otherwise light and simple character, for he did not understand why his father had pushed him away. Before he went into the sea, everything had been fine, as on any day or month or year before…His father was a composed, peaceful man, withdrawn and reticent before the world but gentle with his children and devoted to the point of submission to his wife. Why had he so suddenly yelled at him, shoved him, taken up a rock from the beach to strike him in the head. It was great good fortune that Vuko was strong, and for some time stronger than his father, for had he been weaker, his father would have smashed him, killed him, and crushed him in his frantic conviction that his real son had just drowned in the sea.
He asked that the boy’s body be searched for along the beaches and in the harbor, and when it was found, that Wolfram Justus be buried at Boninovo beside his brother Adrian. They did what he asked, hoping that afterward he would recover his sanity. More people attended the funeral of Wolfram Justus Seghers-Stein, who had drowned in the sea near Dubrovnik, than had attended that of his younger brother. Many more. The first time those who came were truly mourning the boy – family friends, colleagues and acquaintances from Mr. Maksim’s work, neighbors and people who respected the old postmaster – but all of Dubrovnik came to the second one. Everyone who wanted to see the burial of someone who was actually alive, the empty casket, half-filled with wet sand so the grieving father would not be suspicious, and all those who wanted to measure their own sanity against Maximilian Seghers-Stein’s madness and feel reassured afterward came that afternoon to Boninovo. It was probably the biggest funeral ever held in Dubrovnik, one that would not even be outdone three years later when the whole town turned out to see off their poet and playwright, Count Ivo Vojnović. The only one absent was the unfortunate Vuko. He could not be at the funeral, even if he had died and turned into a ghost.
Deep into the fall of 1926 Gertrude Seghers-Stein continued to believe she could save her husband and return him to his right mind if only she fulfilled all his requests. She went with him to the cemetery, cried over the graves of their two sons and the plaque with their two names on it, Adrian and Wolfram. Afterward she would quietly speak to her son, consoling him: You didn’t even like being called that name. Now the name is buried, and you are Vuko.
He would officially change his name to Vuko Seghers-Stein when he was twenty-one. We come across the name in Politika in May 1936, when Vuko Seghers-Stein was named representative of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia for the upcoming Olympic games in Berlin. He did not, however, end up attending this largest of sports competitions. No explanation for this can be found in the newspapers of the time.
There is no cross etching on the plaque above the grave with the names of the two brothers. The grave is located in the largest Catholic portion of Boninovo, which means that according to the rules of the time, Gertrude and Maximilian Seghers-Stein had to demonstrate proof of belonging to the Holy Roman Catholic Church to the parish priest. It is perhaps possible to find a few other grave markers in that part of Boninovo without Christian designations, but they are exceptions.
The war would find Vuko Štajn in Belgrade, where he worked as a swimming and fencing instructor. Some say he was connected to a clandestine cell of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Others swear they saw him in public with the Comintern conspirator Mustafa Golubić on Terazije Square and Knez Mihailova Street in May 1941. Golubić was in the uniform of a Wehrmacht colonel, while Vuko Štajn was in civilian clothes. But all these are probably false leads, lies, and inventions of the Belgrade busybodies, that over the years would spread through theater lobbies and literary cafés, and among the UDBA officers and frequenters of the Saturday matinees at the Hotel Majestic. It is more likely that Vuko Štajn was arrested at the end of May of that year because they suspected him of being a Jew. The baptismal document he provided was counterfeit, a fact verified through phone calls, first to the Ustaše commissioner under the Italian occupation force in Dubrovnik, and also to the office of a Catholic parish in Vienna, which unambiguously confirmed the Gestapo’s suspicions regarding Štajn’s Jewish heritage. Vuko Štajn died in a gassing van, a moveable gas chamber built by the SS officers Götz and Meyer who David Albahari describes in his novel of the same name.
How the news of the death of yet another of her sons reached Gertrude Seghers-Stein, the definitive death of one whose name had died before his body, a name etched above a grave in which the body would never be placed, we cannot know. Here the story returns to Rudolf Stubler, the Home Guard second lieutenant who, at the behest of his father, would visit Gertrude and insist on giving her all the money he had on hand.
On Saturday, June 30, 1943, it was raining hard across the territory of Semberija.
The Home Guardsmen had permission to go into town, but only the bravest ventured to do so. Or the most desperate. The others sat around on their bunks, played cards, or, like monkeys, picked the lice off one another. They had been quietly discussing since the morning why it was strictly forbidden for a Home Guardsman to carry an umbrella when it rained. Yes, it made sense not to go to the front with an umbrella; that would be strange and dangerous. How would you reload your rifle if you were holding an umbrella above your head? But why was it prohibited to open an umbrella if you had a valid leave notice to town signed by all the appropriate higher authorities? Was it the same in other armies? Well, the Germans didn’t carry umbrellas either, but they were Germans, and everyone knew how Germans were. The Italians? It could very well be…Actually, it was quite likely that Italian soldiers, during their down time and when they received leave permission did in fact open red-white-and-gre
en umbrellas. The English, too. In England, the rain fell all year round, it didn’t ever stop, so what would happen if the English army was forbidden to open umbrellas? The war would have been over long ago; Churchill would have capitulated, the fat belly bowing his head before the Führer. Proud Albion would have had his nuts sliced off in Berlin if such a moronic law existed in England…
Second Lieutenant Stubler listened to the laments of the Home Guardsmen, then got up from his work desk in the corner of the sleeping quarter, wrapped himself in a heavy cloak, and went outside.
He walked to the other side of Bijeljina and knew that by the time he got to Mrs. Gertrude’s apartment he would be thoroughly wet. But he could no longer listen to the Croatian Home Guardsmen quietly breaking wind, tossing cards onto the worn blankets confiscated from the army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as the most significant Croatian wartime booty, and discussing umbrellas. Anyway, he would dry out at Mrs. Danica’s. She would look after him, as she had looked after all of them long ago, when the four of them went to her for their music lessons. He dragged himself across town, trudging through a yellow mud that seemed to be a mixture of Saharan sand and the shit of sick people. But for the moment at least, he was content.
Gertrude Seghers-Stein lived in a Habsburg-era three-story building with a peeling facade. The dark stairwell stank of cabbage and cat urine. The light didn’t work. Mrs. Danica lived on the top floor. The name Seghers-Stein had been etched in cursive on the bronze door plate. Only the last name and with a hyphen. Rudi was certain that Mr. Maksim had not written his last name with a hyphen. The engraver had made a mistake, and Mrs. Danica had not objected but instead quietly accepted the hyphen.
My Rudi! she cried, opening her arms wide and hugging him, as his drenched undershirt clung to his body. He felt a chill down his spine. It was dark, cold, and stifling all around. As if it were winter rather than the middle of June.
The wooden armchair under him creaked but held. He decided not to ask for anything but just sit there all wet. He merely took off his military cloak, which ought to have been waterproof. “Officer’s mantle of rubberized canvas” was the official name for this article of clothing. But it was soaked through with rainwater like everything else. It could have been wrung out.
In Zagreb they called it twist-drying, he thought, or something like that.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wet stack of paper notes bundled with a rubber band. He had collected 1,500 kunas.
My father sends you this, he said.
But why, Rudi? asked Mrs. Danica in surprise.
Have you heard from Emil and Roza? he asked, just to say something but instantly regretted it.
Yes, Emil was here in the spring. But you know how it is. He’s got so much work he doesn’t know where his head is. And then there’s this war, hard to stay normal. And Roza is Roza. She’s fine. She invites me to come to Ljubljana. What would I do there? Ljubljana, Bijeljina, Dubrovnik, it’s all the same to me, my Rudi.
She was lying, it was clear, but years would pass before Rudi understood what constituted Gertrude’s lie. Do I need to say, or should I leave this part of the story untold? Or should we begin yet another story, composed of two ellipses that cross paths in two places and postpone what has been postponed throughout this story: the event from the early autumn of 1943? We shall avoid this and tell the story of Emil and Rozalija another time.
In short, only this: the Viennese neuropsychiatrist Emil Seghers-Stein is the author of the cult post-psychoanalytic novel The Eternal Fatigue of Katharina von Obervellach, which is the story of a Vienna laundress of Slovenian descent with the gift of precognition. Katharina tells the psychiatrist, a bachelor, whose laundry she washes each week that the world will soon lose its soul and that he will escape with his patients, for the insane will be the only ones saved. Emil Seghers-Stein’s novel would be translated here and published in 1955, in an edition by the Zagreb publisher Zora, under the title of Katarina the Washerwoman from Gornja Bela.
Emil Seghers-Stein, as noted in the first edition of Krleža’s General Encyclopedia, experienced a nervous breakdown in 1939 and was hospitalized in the open ward of the institution where he had until then practiced. He stayed there until spring 1943 when, along with several hundred mentally ill patients, he was deported to Auschwitz.
Rozalija Lipovšek, Gertrude and Maximilian’s only daughter, escaped with her husband after the April war of 1941 to Argentina, from where she never sent word to anyone, so it was long thought they had disappeared in the middle of the ocean, got lost in the primordial forests of the Amazon, or simply been swallowed up by that large foreign continent. Meanwhile, when the city planner Lúcio Costa and the architect Oscar Niemeyer were speaking on April 21, 1960 at the inaugural ceremony for Brasília, which they had imagined and designed as the capital of Brazil, behind them, among two or three coworkers, stood Bogdan Lipovšek. His Ljubljana students recognized him on television and in photos, after which he was invited from Belgrade to return to Yugoslavia and contribute to the development of his homeland. But Lipovšek was not interested, nor did he ever agree to speak with the Yugoslav press. Like Costa and Niemeyer, he lived a long life. He died in 2003 at the age of ninety-five. Rozalija was supposedly still alive at the time. She is mentioned in the obituary published in the Folha de São Paulo, the largest newspaper in Brazil, as “the maestro’s eternal inspiration, the life partner who preserved the memory of the Slovene language from which he had sprung.”
The destinies of Gertrude’s two children could grow into two elaborate works of reportage. But I will have difficulty enough disentangling myself from the Bee Journal and from all the connotations deduced from the rotten wool zobnica discovered in 1998 in the basement on Sepetarevac, in which there was but a pencil, two pieces of sealing wax, a rusty cigarette lighter, and the gray notebook.
My father sent you this, he urged again.
But why, my son? I don’t need money!
In the end she took the stack of bank notes to let it dry out on the table. She laid out the bills on the tablecloth, which was eaten through by moths, as if she were laying out cards for a game of patience.
You’ll take them after, okay? she said, smiling.
I can’t. Father would disown me. As it is he doesn’t trust me.
Really?
Yes. He lost faith in me when I flunked out. Now he doesn’t trust me at all. Especially where money’s concerned. He thinks…
That you’re going to spend it on women?
Exactly, he said, laughing.
Oh, my dear, my dear, he lives in the past. There are no women in this war. At least I don’t see them in Bijeljina. And I don’t think there are any even in Berlin or Moscow. Are there any in Sarajevo?
No.
See, there aren’t any. That’s the kind of war this is. Horrible. But in the last war, when your father was young, wherever the army camped, in war or in peace, women would show up. They would fly in like doves and stand up in a straight line. One more beautiful than the next, and all you had to do was choose. That’s the way wars once were and armies too. That’s why there were no deserters. The boys rushed to join the army, rushed to death, for they knew that before they died their doves would be there, all lined up one after another, at the telegraph station near camp, as news from the front streamed through the lines. Ten, fifty, five hundred, a thousand dead…Now it’s different. There are no women.
No, there aren’t.
I’m composing.
She hopped up as if milk had started to boil on the kitchen stove. Drago liked my sinfonietta, she said.
It’s a pity he will not hear this, she said, opening the piano, which was missing several keys and produced hair-raising sounds. It was as if glass was breaking and china exploding, the walnut groaning amid the frightening rupture of Gertrude’s melancholy notes. The chords poured from the sky like crushed glass that cut into
his skin. He opened his mouth and wanted to scream. He did not, for he was ashamed. And he felt sorry for this dear woman, whom he had known all his life, who had taught him to read notes and understand music. Gertrude Seghers-Stein had taught Rudi what counterpoint was. Counterpoint was a lack of harmony that sounded harmonious, three kinds of chaos that flowed along three riverbeds, merging into a sea of clean, universal music. That was counterpoint, she told the child, and his eyes opened wide in wonder, and he understood nothing, but remembered it all. And later, through life and through music, he saw all phenomena through Gertrude’s theory of counterpoint. If there were no God and there were no music, Rudi understood, the world would be chaos. Gertrude taught him music and made him religious.
This was why he was gripped by such horror at the sounds emanating from the dilapidated piano, as this transfixed woman with fists that branched into bony gray fingers, struck her chords, in which there was no longer even a hint of melody.
When he understood that this would take some time, for Gertrude Seghers-Stein, the first women in the Vienna Conservatory to study composition, was just then performing one of her symphonies for piano and her foot was banging against the rotten oak parquet floor, Rudi eventually calmed down. He got comfortable in the armchair, and no longer felt cold. His trembling subsided and he was quickly prepared to sit there for hours. For as long as Gertrude felt the need to play her symphony, which, judging by the volume of the notation paper she had placed before her, was no longer a sinfonietta.
At that point, Rudi began to take note of all the advantages of his situation. Instead of dawdling with the Home Guard in the barracks and listening to the dreary stories, which, like his own, boiled down to fear of death, and not feeling or thinking anything other than fear, fear, fear, here he was sitting and listening, in complete peace and mental harmony, which enveloped him and eased any discomfort and evil thoughts. He felt the uniform drying on his body, blood coursing through his veins in a normal rhythm, the newly created cells in the organism replacing those that had died, and the toxins slowly steaming out of him with the moisture, and it seemed to him it would always be this way. Time flowed by him in reverse and left him next to the train that was leaving the station while he stood firm, both feet planted on the platform, and knew the train could not come back for him.
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