Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  He had thought, the first secretary, or actually he had dreamed, and in his dreaming came to believe in the eventuality that the dead author might bring him salvation and deliverance from this horrid place.

  And now there was nothing, everything had fallen through, the author had died, they said, from a heart attack.

  This could not be. Maybe he had frozen, as that eccentric with the tearful eyes had written, the toothy Doctor Karaosmanović, but he surely had not died from a heart attack.

  And then they needed to decide where and how the body should be buried.

  The first secretary angrily called the Sarajevo mayor’s office. From the mayor’s office they called the author’s mother – again they did not reach her but some unknown individuals – and then the embassy, telling the first secretary they didn’t know what to do, so he should call Zagreb. The first secretary, in a furor, hung up on them midsentence. But then he called Zagreb, where, to the surprise of the first secretary, they were very sad over the author’s death. He could not have dreamed that M. J. might have been so important to them. No one had ever told him he needed to read his books, but fine, if he was so important already, it would be better if he were buried in Zagreb, with all the state honors lit up at Mirogoj Cemetery…

  But even that wasn’t possible just like that. First the closest relatives would have to be consulted, in this case, the mother of the deceased. She needed to be asked where she wanted her son to be buried.

  And thus did Domagoj Antun K. set out on foot for Mejtaš, up Sepetarevac, to talk with the woman. If no one else was going to, he would tell her she had lost her son…

  * * *

  —

  I’d been leaning on my elbows against the hotel window for half an hour, my upper legs burning from the heat of the radiator, my stomach, chest, and head freezing from the ice outside, and every bone aching from the unnatural position while I looked out into the darkness. It would make no difference whether I was in a hotel room in Sarajevo, or Zagreb, in Warsaw, Graz, Dubrovnik, or Rome, the news coming from the receiver would be the same. On this score there was no doubt. It would be morning. All the Stublers had died at dawn, or more precisely, at the moment when the night had passed but it was not yet light. The sun just slightly below the horizon, beyond the high hills that surround Sarajevo, that moment between night and day stretches out and most people are not aware of it. For them it does not even exist. But for the Stublers it always existed. It was the time they came to death, ceased breathing, had their hearts stop, and their godless, foreign kuferaš spirits would slip quickly through that crack between the night and the day, such that it was unclear which side they had ended up on. According to spatial, earthly categories, that time between night and day is clearly reflected and has its correlative in the belt of no man’s land that divides states and belongs to no one. This, I imagine, is the reason why the Stublers died at that time of neither night nor day. It was their time, their temporal homeland.

  She lay there barely moving from the bed. She needed help getting to the toilet, and when the telephone rang, it was easier for her to talk on the mobile, as it was a little lighter than the cordless receiver. Soon, I knew, she would not even be able to hold that tiny, barely visible little phone, with which she could no longer call anyone since her fingers no longer obeyed her.

  She lay there, mostly crying. She didn’t know what else to do. Or she stared out the window in silence. She shouted that she needed to go to the toilet. Sometimes she groaned. Her voice continued to be strong. When anyone called from far away, they thought she was healthy and was complaining and crying because she had always been like that, with a tendency to dramatize every life situation, especially illnesses.

  No one who knew her well could have said how much pain she was in. Or, as they express this in the world of patients, where it hurt and what kind of pain it was. Among patients, and sometimes among physicians, pain had ceased being a state and become a phenomenon, a material that was living or dead. Pain was no longer singular, it was plural. There were many different kinds. They grouped themselves together and attacked, not retreating from the positions they occupied, remaining to the end, as long as the person lived.

  No one who knew her well could have said how numerous or varied, how strong or maddening all her pains were. Those who knew her only in her current state knew this better. Her current dying state.

  Was she dying?

  Was my mother dying now?

  The question made me nervous. I was sorry I wasn’t a smoker. If I smoked, I’d have lit up and collected myself somehow. I just stood, closed the window, walked like a caged rat around the hotel room, to the door, around the bed, into the bathroom. I like hotel bathrooms and toilets because they’re so clean, and people can overflow the water when showering, use up towels unconscionably, wipe the floor with them, because someone will put it all in order, clean and mop it up. Someone will come in after I’ve gone out and wipe all the traces clean. In hotel bathrooms people heal themselves from the work they’ve been doing and from the petty daily tasks and obligations that have been killing them, but in that instant as I tried to drive the terrible question – was my mother dying? – from my mind, like one drives away an ugly, tasteless radio melody, something by Jelena Rozga, some Bižuterija song that the Croats are as proud of as if it were a great achievement of their culture on the field of battle against Oriental folk singing and Serbian turbofolk. As I tried to forget about my mother and think about something else, it would have been good if I’d been able to clean the bathroom, wipe the floor, scrub the toilet bowl, if I’d been able to wash the dirty dishes, dust the shelves, stuff the dirty clothes into the washer, open and close the windows to air out the apartment, oil the squeaking doors, it would have been good if there was a door squeaking, if I could have changed the light bulbs, changed the shower hose, if I could have done anything, if I could have thrown myself to cover from the shells, crossed a street being shot at by snipers, just to get the melody of those four words out of my head – was my mother dying?

  But what was frightening in this?

  I had known for ten months that she was sick, that it would end just like this.

  I had even known when it was most likely to happen.

  Why was the idea of her death so overwhelming to me now?

  My mother was dying.

  We were not close. But perhaps, a son is never as close to his mother as when he utters the words my mother is dying.

  We did not choose each other but were rather condemned to each other, she to a son, me to a mother, according to the laws of probability and the rules that structure all the living world on earth. The link we shared was founded on folk traditions and beliefs, church teachings, legends, and superstitions, cultural heritage, accepted social norms, so why was the phrase so scary?

  I was not able to lead Domagoj Antun K., first secretary of the Croatian embassy into the house on Sepetarevac, into the apartment where I had once lived, which was now filled with people because my mother was ill. If he had crossed that threshold, he would have been entering directly into my entrails, and with him so would the very Croatia that has been trying for all these years to spit me out, and I would have had nowhere left to hide.

  Although he was invented and could be snuffed out if I wanted, Domagoj Antun K. never did dare to set eyes on that place. He did not pass through that hall where the parquet floor still creaks, hear the door closing behind him, the same sound I heard for forty years, though I don’t remember the voices of the people who lived in that apartment, the Stublers and the Rejcs, and soon I will not remember her voice either – the eight paces to the room that was once mine, in which on the right side of the marital bed of her deceased parents lay my ailing mother.

  I could not allow him to approach her and offer his hand, serious and quite official – they were good at this in Zagreb and no one knew how to be so dutiful as they �
� although it might perhaps have been good if I’d had the courage to do it. He would have extended his hand to her, but she would not have reciprocated. She would have screamed that she couldn’t, she was in pain, and with her clear, nearly boyish, childlike soprano she would have shouted upward into the ceiling and the heavens, a cry and an accusation that she could not help and that, actually, would have been completely plausible. My mother, in other words, was no longer capable of raising her right hand for shaking. Her left hand, puffy and blue, appeared as if it had been the first to pass away into the dying that had already begun.

  It would have been hard for the first secretary to carry out his ceremony when something so unexpected happened. But I’m curious what she would have said, how she would have responded, if Domagoj Antun K. had actually managed to break the news to her. The continuation of the story, or of my life, would depend on the words she spoke or did not speak.

  Whatever she might have said, at that moment my mother would have felt utterly abandoned. She had mostly felt this way during all of her seventy years. Now she would feel complete isolation and abandonment. Regardless of the fact that we did not choose each other, and that by contrast to the majority of other mothers and sons, during the greatest part of our life together we felt clearly that we were not good for each other and that our relationship was one of pure and improbable chance, I was for her, at least since the time she got sick, an exception to her loneliness.

  I hug the pillow and think about my mother. I came to Sarajevo to visit my sick mother, probably for the last time. It was unbearably hot in the room. It was dark outside. The sounds of dogs barking were audible, and the only things that existed in that impenetrable Sarajevo night were the smooth cobblestones beneath the window.

  I’m alive again now, trying to get to sleep on the rock-hard bed of room number 17. Death would pass by in a minor key. Not even this thought stopped me short. The mattress was as hard as a tomb. The room would soon become unbearably hot…

  When at last I figured out that it was impossible to fall asleep, I opened my eyes. I wanted to get up, maybe open the window and stare into the dark, or get dressed and go out, but I myself don’t quite remember now what I wanted to do because what I saw then horrified me so much.

  In the middle of the room, closer to the bathroom door, stood a dog. It looked at me morosely, but its glance was filled with reproach. The eyes were no longer those of a dog, they were human eyes, the eyes of someone I knew. I cried out and jumped over the bed, but it just backed up a little bit. It took a few small steps back, enough to find itself in the florescent light of the bathroom, which I had left on before getting into bed so the room would not be completely dark.

  What are you doing here? I shouted. I understood it was a dog and it wasn’t in the nature of dogs to respond to such questions. (Goodness what had become of Sarajevo, with dogs walking at their leisure into hotel rooms! I remembered Mama Leone and the sentence with which the book begins: “When I was born, a dog started howling in the fronthall of the maternity hospital.” What year had that been? 1997? I invented that bark so the entire story would sound like a fairy tale. As if I had known…)

  I wanted to get up and go down to the reception desk, threaten that cheeky little girl, the psychology student with the colorful pencils, tell her I’d cause a scandal, sue the hotel, write about it in the Croatian papers…if they didn’t immediately get that dog out of my room.

  But I couldn’t because I felt guilty.

  The dog’s stare reminded me of something else. I didn’t know what that might be because I couldn’t remember whose glance it was, where I knew it from, who had looked at me that way. At me or someone else?

  I realized I knew this dog.

  A Dalmatian with the head of a Lab. The leader of the pack that had followed me earlier that night to Slatki Ćošet. It was good I’d changed my mind about taking the dog home. I don’t know how I could have lived with a dog that looked at me this way.

  I moved toward it.

  The dog began to growl. Its look was no longer so gentle. Its eyes were steely blue, like Helmut Berger’s in some film never made by Visconti. I backed away, the sheet slid away from me, and I saw the most frightening thing a living person can see.

  I was not me.

  My eyes, which were perhaps not mine, saw a body that was surely not my own. I knew this because the body – strange, even painful to say – was that of a woman.

  Dear sweet Lord!

  The voice was a woman’s too. It was a voice I knew. I jumped up to run to the bathroom. I needed a mirror more than air. I was choking, breathing through someone else’s lungs, but it prevented me, baring its teeth. It would bite me if I took a step.

  Let me go just to look – I began, and then, from the past, from the deepest of memories, I recognized the voice. Although I heard it from inside, just as a person hears his own voice, and although the last time I’d heard it was twenty-six years before, in the spring of 1986, I knew it was the voice of my Nona.

  My dear sweet Lord! I said again, just to check.

  The dog was growling quietly, and then it grew calm and again looked at me with the sad, reproachful glance.

  It occurred to me that someone had looked at Nona that way, not at me, and this eased my mind. But I still didn’t know how the expression could be familiar to me. She would be going to say goodbye to her daughter at Sepetarevac in the morning. I would not be going to say goodbye to my mother. This eased my mind.

  Not for a moment had I thought it was a dream. I woke up, bathed in sweat, in the middle of the red-hot tomb of the bed, relieved by the knowledge that I was again me and this was my body.

  I decided not to try to go to sleep again before the morning.

  I dressed and went out.

  The young woman was sitting at the reception desk, engrossed in her book. She wore reading glasses, which it was clear she was a little ashamed of.

  Oh, you scared me! she said, taking the glasses off with a swift movement.

  I smiled and made some senseless gesture with my palms as if telling the earth to stop spinning. Nothing that night between the two of us meant anything. She smiled back. And I was already outside, on the street that sloped down gently toward Baščaršija. On one side of the street were old buildings from Turkish times that had been renovated and now had private rentals inside and small boutique hotels. On the other side were new three-floor buildings, ugly and gray, constructed in the final decade of socialism. These had branches of several foreign banks, small shops, dirty and empty display windows with For Rent signs. Though it was August and deserted, without any cars or people, I walked along the narrow sidewalk, making my way around the uncovered manholes and the after-effects of inclement weather and underground water, which were eating away at the foundations of the road, foundations laid when there were no cars and when only horse-drawn carriages, or an occasional rider returning from the far east, from Pljevlja, Novi Pazar, Istanbul, or from still farther away. Now the pedestrian had to look continually beneath his feet, between them, and up ahead, so as not to fall into some hole created by the fact that the weight of the world that traveled along Sarajevo’s streets had long since become too heavy for them. This was how it was that night and how it had been in my childhood. I had always walked looking down, to see where I would place my feet. This habit had stayed with me after moving to Zagreb, but then with time I slowly began to lift my gaze. Still today it is Sarajevo’s paths and sidewalks I know best, the potholed asphalt of the tiny roads and side streets of the sloping portions of town have remained the same from when I used to walk to school. The buildings have changed, the old ones having collapsed on their own, for no one lived in them anymore, and in their places new ones were built, which came to be inhabited by some new, foreign world of people. But the sidewalks and side streets remained unchanged, exactly as they had once been. If someone wants to look up to see what t
he weather might be like, if it might rain in the afternoon, first they have to stop, just as we, once upon a time, had always stopped.

  It was past midnight, but still there were three taxis waiting for fares, one after another at the stand at the end of the street by the market square. It wasn’t likely that any fares would turn up before morning. But they waited because this was their job. It was cold out, and the drivers were shut up in their cars. The driver of a white Golf 2, falling apart and at least a quarter-century old, was dozing, wrapped up in his leather jacket. The reddish light of the car radio glowed, probably the late-night program of Radio Stari Grad. The driver of a red Opel Kadett, a middle-aged man with a shaved head, in sweats, sat behind the wheel, reading a newspaper in the glaring light under the rearview mirror. And the third, the driver of the nicest car, a nearly new Mercedes. I realized it was the same old man who had driven me, the one who had pulled back his left sleeve just enough for his silver Rolex to flash. He was just looking forward, waiting.