He had not even managed to sit down when the doctor called him back.
Phimosis, he said, not quietly, and not looking Berti in the face.
What is that? asked the father in fear.
Doctor Freud explained in brief terms that the foreskin had almost completely enveloped the glans, the skin having simply grown all around the head, and this was most likely the reason for the frequent infections.
The diagnosis was quite simple. The child would need to be circumcised.
Is there no other way? Albert Plaschka asked, panicking. Anything at all?
Doctor Freud looked at him, and in his look there was something that made Berti feel uncomfortable.
Normally for simple problems there is but one solution. Circumcision. Nothing else.
He took hold of the boy’s hand and escaped from the exam room without saying goodbye. As they made their way along the edge of the park toward the exit from the hospital circle, Albert Plaschka felt as if he would die of shame.
He lifted David into his arms and ran. The boy was heavy, being nine years old by then, and one did not carry nine-year-olds in one’s arms, so the patients sitting and smoking on the wooden benches stared, but this didn’t bother him. He just wanted to run as far away as possible and forget about it all.
Did there exist in this world, the despairing father asked himself, even a single circumcised David who was not a Jew?
At the time of the boy’s birth, they had been poor and young, just having arrived in Sarajevo, hoping nothing more than that they might survive. He had instructed the waiters in how to serve while the train was traveling at top speed, told them about the distinctions in waiterly tone and bearing, about the rules that applied when there was firm ground beneath one’s feet and when the earth would not stay still beneath them. He had never imagined that they might place him in such a high position or that he would so quickly become constricted in Sarajevo and almost completely forget about old Plaschka and his ransom. He had not been thinking of anything when, free of any intention, he gave the child the name David.
And how could he have known about phimosis?
This time he told Milena everything. She listened to him quietly and was not in the least concerned.
You really think someone’s going to order David to pull down his shorts to show whether or not he’s circumcised? You think such a time might come when men are so intimate with one another? Or that maybe women might do this?
This calmed him a bit, but going to that same Doctor Freud to have David circumcised was out of the question.
So take him to some other doctor. He’s not the only doctor in the hospital.
Going there is out of the question! Completely out of the question!
And so it was decided that Berti would ask one of the Muslims who worked for him, best of all one of the old, serious ones, where they circumcised their children. And this was what he did.
You’re a chifut! Hasan Soha exclaimed in shock, and then bit his tongue.
Plaschka took this as an insult and a confirmation of his fears, but he explained to Hasan very calmly and collectedly that he was not a Jew, he was an Austrian and a Catholic, but that his son was suffering from an illness that required circumcision for him to be healthy.
Ah, it’s too bad he wasn’t born a Muslim, said the old innkeeper softly, almost to himself, and then he indicated to the director the best man for such things, the neighborhood barber Uzeir Skaka, who was from a family that had been performing circumcisions for hundreds of years – on children, that is – and never had there been any problems. If necessary, he would recommend him to Uzeir and tell him about the child’s illness.
This happened at the beginning of summer, and there was no time to wait, because it was usually in summer that the child got sick. His ureter would become infected, barely a drop would come out, and then his kidneys would get infected, and the distress would drag on until fall.
He decided to take him to Skaka on Sunday so as to make an arrangement for the barber that very evening, if possible, to come to their house and take care of it. Why Sunday Berti did not know. He couldn’t even tell Milena why when she asked. But he knew that only Sunday was an option.
Sarajevo was bustling that Sunday. The crown prince was visiting the city. Everyone had dressed up in their Sunday best and headed out to the market squares. The local community, old-time Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox inhabitants, did not take their wives with them. But the Swabians, Austrians, and other kuferaši set out with their ladies on their arms, as if they were going to a ball or the theater.
In the prince’s honor, the bakers were handing out Turkish flat bread. First it was given to the poor, then later to anyone who wanted it. Whenever a baker saw that the people wanted to honor the prince, he too, no matter how much of a skinflint he might be, had to take part in the celebrating. And when the other tradesmen saw what the bakers were doing, they didn’t want to be left behind. Especially whenever an Orthodox shop owner saw what a Muslim shop owner was doing, he would set out to double the offering lest anyone, God forbid, believe he was against the emperor. And it was known around Sarajevo, especially during recent months, that the Orthodox were against the Austrian emperor, since they wanted all this to be Serbia and for the three tribes and four faiths to be one and the same people, which all together, at least when considered from the shop owner’s window, was not accurate. Only the unemployed could think such a thing, workers unhappy with their wages or students from the Main Gymnasium.
But Berti, oh Berti, was not thinking about such things as he held David’s hand, dragging him through that mass of people. All sorts and sundries, rich and poor, perfumed and stinky, male and female, of all the faiths and languages that one could hear in Sarajevo, who had crept outside to see whether they might profit somehow from this great occasion, this celebration outside all the usual holidays and saints’ days, when the shop owners threw their cares to the wind. They spent and scattered, shared and yanked away what was theirs as if Judgment Day were coming rather than the crown prince.
They had just managed to get through to the front of the bakery, where a huge roasted ram was being passed along by a group of men. It had been cooked with the horns on, and the hands passing it along were tearing off meat as it went by. The sight was gruesome. People cried out as if they were being skinned alive, uttering the worst curses in all their languages. In addition to the local Bosnian – which in Vienna they called Serbo-Croatian – one could hear curses in Turkish and Hungarian, all of it furious and desperate, since the ram was sliding out of reach from the hungry hands. Even though they were tearing at it, shoving their fists deep into its innards, the majority of hands were unable to hold anything. The greasy meat slipped through their fingers and they cursed to the tenth generation both the ram and those who had managed to pull meat off it.
Berti was barely able to get the child through that mob. He was distraught, trying to hold back his tears. He would have started crying, but how could he before the child? Something horrible was going to happen, he thought. Something horrible had to happen to people who do such things. It was all the same whether God saw them, whether he existed at all, whether he would punish them or they would be punished according to the natural order of things, the evolution of Mr. Darwin, who had courageously proved that man had come from beasts and that all life on earth had come from proto-life and proto-vegetation. Something horrible was going to happen, he thought, repeating his litany as he tried to free himself from the image of the roasted ram that grew smaller as it made its way across the street.
And now he had stopped in front of Skaka’s barbershop.
Berti entered and said hello. The child followed behind. The master, leaning over a man’s nose, was just then giving the final shape to a small, nondescript mustache. He smiled, still bent over, and returned the greeting. Berti did not have to explain who he was or why he
’d come. All that had been taken care of by the old headwaiter Hasan Soha. What had he said to the barber, how had he announced them? Berti felt better not knowing. This was a strange world, and he wasn’t going to understand it no matter how long he lived with them: indiscreet, coarse, and outrageously open, filled with a sort of flippant hatred in which there was nothing particularly personal because every difference and similarity here – every reason for hatred – had to do with someone’s faith and heritage. At the same time, whenever anyone needed to do someone else a service, resolve some problem, perform something for the closest of kinsman, a great favor or a family obligation, they did it easily and quietly, without great ceremony, so that the person for whom the service was being rendered also accepted it with the utmost ease. This was how Hasan had proceeded. It was clear from Skaka’s smile that the barber knew everything he needed to know. And nothing beyond that.
And this is our hero! he said, patting David lightly on the shoulder after the customer with the mustache had left the shop.
Come in, come in. No need to be concerned about me. And what is there to be concerned about? On such a day, when the future emperor is coming to the city, what is there to be concerned about! Isn’t it true? Yes, of course it is!
Uzeir Skaka made an appointment to arrive at their apartment at Marijin Dvor promptly at six. There needed to be hot water and ice for numbing the pain. All the rest was his concern, he’d said.
On his way back home, Albert Plaschka sensed that the outside world had become strangely agitated. There were as many people out as earlier – they hadn’t stayed very long at Skaka’s – but it was as if they had been replaced with others in the interim. Hurried and distrustful, they darted furtive glances, both gentlemen and townsfolk. The women seemed to have virtually vanished, just the odd elderly municipal judge or financial director, puffed up and red in the face, passed by quickly with his wife.
Moods shifted in this town like lightning, thought Albert Plaschka. This was a characteristic of the Orient, he had read somewhere. Here, every moment of enthusiasm and every regret manifested itself collectively. God forbid someone might feel something on his own and be happy when the whole town was crying, or sad at a moment when everyone around you was celebrating. You’d be suspicious to the police, gloomy to your neighbors, and your closest relations would have doubts about your common sense. Sarajevo was one enormous Greek chorus. In this amphitheater among the mountains, this crater left from a long-since extinguished volcano, the main characters were madmen, eccentrics, martyrs, hermits, heretics, dervishes, rabbis, friars, and crazy monks from Romanija, ax in one hand, icon in the other, intending to reconcile the world, even though they couldn’t reconcile their own two hands.
That afternoon, before the arrival of the barber Uzeir Skaka, who was coming to circumcise his son David, Albert Plaschka felt a sorrow that eclipsed his shame. And the need to analytically approach the world around him would set him free forever, to study and note down his experiences in Bosnia and the Orient, mostly negative and devastating for anyone who might want to visit that land. He would bring his notebooks with him to Vienna only to immediately forget them behind a row of books in the small library he had built in his workroom, just as he would soon forget both Sarajevo and Bosnia, completely occupied with the monotonous duties of managing a second-tier Vienna hotel.
Although the situation was extraordinary, the windows of the Orthodox-owned shops had been broken, there was hysteria through the city, pursuits were underway for anyone remembered by the mob as a good, proud Serb, Judgment Day was drawing near, and anyone would have abandoned any work he might have started, still Uzeir Skaka honored their agreement. He arrived promptly at the agreed-upon time and efficiently, and almost painlessly, performed the delicate operation. While he did everything as any surgeon would, skipping the entire, long folkloric and religious ritual that accompanied circumcisions of Muslim boys, still, at the end, he gave David a gift, precisely as a family member or friend, according to custom, would give a gift to a Muslim boy: a handkerchief with the initials D.P. embroidered on it.
In early spring 1919, while Trebević was still white with snow, the first and last manager of all the restaurant cars in the history of Bosnia, Albert Plaschka, departed from Sarajevo with his wife and son on the regularly scheduled train for Zagreb. No one saw him off, nor did he take leave of anyone in particular before his departure. His parting with Sarajevo was unexpectedly cold.
During those weeks and months many kuferaši were leaving the city. They traveled for the most part to Vienna, where they tried to arrange some other government service for themselves, and when they were not successful, as almost no one was, desperately defeated, melancholic, and lost, they returned to their distant homelands, which were now located in newly established countries, where they lived out the remainder of their lives in sadness, as people who no longer belonged anywhere and who could no longer experience a single city, village, or country as their own homeland. With the disappearance of Austria-Hungary was born a small European nation, without a common language, faith, or state, but which, more strongly than any other people, was linked to a shared sense of not belonging, rootlessness, and sorrow for their youth, a resilient, vital memory of cities that no longer existed with their street songs, poems, and bards, of the distant and far-flung provinces of the former country they had lived in, where everything had taken place outside the logic and reality in which all human and social communities functioned. This had been something different, these provinces with their wondrous, strange names had been something else: their memory resembled that of a fairy tale. Mournful and joyous, scary and enlightening, but always a fairy tale, which took away the gift and the possibility, from those who had experienced such a life, of ever experiencing any future state as their own. Some of them self-medicated from this melancholic lack of belonging, trying to forget everything. Rare were those like Albert Plaschka who really could. Others made peace with the sadness of the life they had lived, took pleasure in it, and sometimes even passed it on to their children and grandchildren.
This small European people, whose name is unknown but who in Bosnia were abusively referred to as kuferaši – only to have the abusive aspect of the name disappear over time, as the abuse turned into the essence of an identity – gave birth to great literature and music in Europe, but in such a way that it was impossible to know to what or whom their last works were dedicated.
It was to this people that Berti and Milena belonged as they waited for two days and one night on a siding track in Doboj in a train filled with kuferaši, with its two freight cars filled with luggage and the smaller household furniture they had elected to bring with them, as a bigger engine came from Vinkovci to take them to Zagreb. There as they waited, they each thought for the first time of how their life had been divided and split into two separate streams, like a river that by some miracle was split into a number of smaller rivulets that proceeded to flow along new courses, growing ever more distant from one another until the parts soon lost any mutual connection and perhaps even the memory of the great channel from which they had all come. There as they waited in the Doboj station – asking the unfriendly platform workers, porters, and boza venders whether they knew, or whether there was any talk around the station, about when the engine from Vinkovci might arrive – they felt intensely that they had ceased being Sarajevans, Marijin Dvor Swabians, and Bosnian transplants: Berti was no longer a high-ranking Viennese figure, a gentleman director, a worldly man with the manners of Vienna, Milena was no longer a lady with a white hat passing along the river walk, leaving behind her the aroma of cedar, rose oil, and some unusual Caribbean fruit that Sarajevo would see for the first time a hundred years later, after the memory of the Paschkas had faded completely, and in the wartime fire all the documents detailing the life and work of the first and last manager of the restaurant cars of Bosnia had long since burned. Instead of what they had been, the two of them, already he
re in Doboj, were Catholic Czech Germans, a bit Austrian, too, with a circumcised son named David, who carried in the pocket of his small gymnasium student’s coat a beautiful handkerchief with a monogram.
Berti was even sure that his son was coming to look more like a Jew with every day. This obsession, which only increased in intensity as they sat on the siding in Doboj, such that he could not think of anything else, overpowered the horrible newfound sense of homelessness. He did not want to talk about this with Milena. He didn’t want to upset her. Besides, when he once told her in Sarajevo, in the foyer of a newly opened theater where they were waiting for the second act of some boring Nordic drama, that it seemed to him something Semitic had begun to appear in David’s features, Milena had started laughing as if she was going to lose her mind. There had been something furious and desperate, something hysterical, in that laughter of hers. It wasn’t joy or surprise at what he had said, just a sort of sick convulsion. Or so it had seemed to him.
David did not notice anything but his father’s frightened, questioning glances. He looked at him as at a stranger, but this did not disturb him. He learned to see his father’s glance as akin to when the weak and powerless look into your eyes. Though he was still bigger and physically stronger in the same way that the majority of fathers are stronger than their fourteen-year-old sons, the glance he cast on him was that of a scared weakling, like the look of a good-natured Indian gnu before a wild dog half its size about to bite its foreleg tendons so it would kneel down far enough expose its neck. David would come to understand why his father looked at him like that and what he saw in him. This provoked a rage in him that would grow over time.
The next day, a new engine arrived at the Doboj station and came to an exhausted stop. A rusty, dilapidated shunting engine pulled the Sarajevo train from the siding and, with a cough and a rattle from its diesel engine, quietly disappeared from the stage of history. It was its final job. For some time after, there would be no need for a shunting engine at the Doboj station, and when in the spring of 1920, the railway traffic in the new kingdom was at last arranged, to such a degree that an entirely new timetable was created, one that would govern all the trains in its territory, the Doboj station would acquire two new German switchers.
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