Kin

by Miljenko Jergovic

  You sell papers?

  Yes, but what does that have to do with anything? It was the first time he had flinched, and his eyes suddenly grew calm. He looked at me with concentration and patience, like a chemist staring at a slide before putting it under a microscope, the way people look who are completely certain of themselves. This man completed his schooling, I thought, both the regular kind and the prison kind…

  It doesn’t, I said. I’m just curious.

  Yes, I sell newspapers: Oslobođenje, Dnevni avaz, Vesela sveska…Are you interested? Here, I still have got a copy of Dnevni avaz. The others have sold out. The world is more literate today than it used to be. I used to sell barely ten copies of Nada in a day through all of Baščaršija. And not a single paper was as sought after as Nada, but people were not interested in reading. You wouldn’t believe me how every issue was sought after and how people would look to see whose poetry was being published that day. There was one vender in town. His name was Haim Albahari, a good man, a Jew, and Jews in Sarajevo didn’t much care for Nada, you know. Haim was an exception. He was born that way, for poems and stories, not for life, but what can you do, from a poor household, and it had fallen to his lot to make buttons and combs from animal bone. And that, my dear sir, is hard work. Making buttons is harder than breaking rocks in a quarry, friend. And you’re invisible, you never meet anybody. The buttonmaker’s is the hardest work after the miner’s. That’s what people who know say. So this Haim Albahari was the only Jew who would buy Nada from me. There were certainly others who were subscribers, but that was a finer, more educated Jewish society, especially those who were in government employ. Our Jews here didn’t recognize them, called them Swabians, for a long time wouldn’t even agree to use the word Jews for them. There were surely those among them who read Nada. But this Heim of mine wouldn’t just buy the paper, he’d call me over after work, around eight or half past, and then I had to read him the poems. I can’t see them, my boy. My eyes are weak! His eyes were weak, but he made the tiniest buttons and figured out exactly how to make them fit into the hole! I saw Haim Albahari wasn’t telling me the truth, but I thought: he likes hearing my voice, he enjoys recitation. It was years before the old guy admitted in his shame that he wasn’t lettered. Didn’t know a single letter but loved poetry. We had that sort too back then, amongst all the various and sundry, somebody like Haim Albahari.

  That was a long time ago, I said. More than a hundred years.

  It was, it was. For some people it was a long time ago, for some not.

  A man lives on average seventy-five, eighty years…

  There are those who don’t even make it to fifty and are already old.

  And you were selling newspapers a hundred years ago?

  I was. So what?

  Well, God, then how old in the world are you, man? I asked finally.

  You know, I’m not sure. I counted up to forty, then stopped. There’s no point! What use is pushing time to pass, unless you’re in some violent rush to get somewhere? I haven’t been rushing. There’s nowhere I need to go. I’m here where I am. That’s the way it is with time, see: if you don’t push it, it stops passing. The wheel stops, and stays where it is.

  His eyes were again dancing to and fro. The old man was not mad; he was a swindler, once a prized occupation in Sarajevo. I knew some of them in Mejtaš in the seventies. They had swindled me too, though I’d been a child. They had done it to teach me. I knew I didn’t have the right to get angry or feel offended by the fact that they’d cheated me. This was their job, and just as Mama was a chief accountant and Papa was a doctor, they were professional swindlers.

  I felt a bit relieved when I realized the old man wasn’t mad. I let myself relax and started trying to catch him up in mistakes. I watched for when he might make a false statement, asked him questions he had already answered, looked for inconsistencies, tried to get him to lose pieces of his story, but he was unflappable and didn’t make a single mistake. He understood what I was trying to do but didn’t get angry. He was patient and could answer the same question several times over, in both roundabout and direct ways, with endless variations on the Kranjčević theme and without showing the slightest fatigue or frustration. I stopped when it seemed he was ready to go on till the end of the world, with thousands of different variations on the same story.

  But eventually he got tired of it:

  My dear sir, now I’ve grown quite tired! I have to go. You should leave Kranjčević and his bitterness alone for your own good. That story isn’t worth anything to you. Silvije was much gentler than you’ve presented him. You don’t have a right to his bitterness, especially not to justify your own bitterness through his. It’s true that Zagreb is a foreign land for you the way Sarajevo was a foreign land to him. But you won’t see any good come from your own bitterness once you’ve spread it around in your stories. That is futile. All human bitterness is alike, and there isn’t any artistry in it. I had to tell you this. It’s why I came. And I was ready to tell you about Kranjčević, what he was like in his soul, what he smelled like, what sort of teeth he had, whether he had a feel for music or went to the theater. I could have told you lots of things because there wasn’t anyone as close to him as I was, but, well, you were interested in trivialities. That too is the price of bitterness. Something for you to consider when I leave, something to keep as a remembrance.

  As he said this, he placed a photograph face down on the table in front of me, next to the notebook in which I’d been writing the story “Costly the Illness of Homelands,” which had come to me as I looked at the two memorial plaques with their two nearly identical texts on the building where Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević had lived.

  On the yellowed back was a cursive note in faded black ink: Sarajevo, October 31, 1908. Funeral of S. A. Kranjčević.

  I examined the yellow cardboard, which was lined with traces of glue from someone’s photo album, and instead of looking immediately at the picture, I waited for Jahja to go out, like a child silently obeying the rules of a game.

  The moment he had crossed the threshold of Erzurum and stepped onto the street, I turned over the picture.

  I was a little disappointed: a black-and-white photograph, fifteen by twelve centimeters, in a format that was not common at the time, taken through the heads and backs of numerous men in dark coats, bare headed or with fezzes. Atop an excavated grave stood an older, gray-haired gentleman with a half cylinder on his head and, in his hands, a cross on which the poet’s name was written in black handwritten letters. Behind him, where by my time there were already broken old grave markers overgrown with weeds, there was fallow empty land. Beyond that was a newly constructed cemetery wall.

  It took me perhaps five or six seconds to notice the reason behind his leaving me the photo. I shuddered with horror and the sudden rush of adrenaline, jumped up from the table, and ran out after Jahja.

  But he was no longer there, not down the street toward the tram station or the Sebilj, not up above toward my hotel. It was as if he had vanished, for he couldn’t have left the field of view so quickly. He had probably guessed what I would do so had quickly ducked into one of the numerous courtyards or building entrances.

  It was three in the morning, and I wouldn’t have been able to find him even if I’d known where to look.

  I went back to Erzurum.

  The waitress was leaning triumphantly against the counter.

  See, I told you! Jahja gets everybody like that once. He won’t a second time.

  I went back to the table, but the photo was gone.

  Excuse me, where’s the photograph? I asked her.

  What photograph? she asked, scowling as if I was accusing her of stealing something.

  I waved it off.

  I closed the notebook, which was still open to the last sentence of the story, that I would probably never finish, packed up my things, paid the bill, and l
eft Erzurum.

  Those people were still sitting there, chatting in their incomprehensible language, their heads pressed toward the middle of the table, and didn’t seem to have noticed a thing.

  The photo had captured the moment when, with the help of two lines, the men in black, some distinguished persons, others grave diggers, were lowering Kranjčević’s coffin into the grave. The one whose face was most clearly visible at that instant when the shutter opened was looking directly into the camera, a white-bearded, small old man. None other than him. Jahja or Ivan, who on that thirty-first of October 1908 had been just as old as he was today. Probably he had been the one to write the words on the back of the photograph.

  Perhaps Jahja had enchanted me, slipped something into my salep, made me lose consciousness for a moment, and I had imagined the whole thing.

  The barking had become less pronounced. They always got quieter closer to morning, having curled up somewhere to warm themselves against one another and have a short sleep.

  I passed by the taxi stand again. The wakeful, stocky man with the Rolex on his left wrist was waiting for his first customer, his hands on the wheel of his new Mercedes, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up high. Behind him were four other cars with four sleeping drivers. Either they had lost hope that anyone would turn up or sleep had snuck up on them before the morning. After midnight, around one thirty, when the first cocks begin to crow, a mystical time of the night begins when something changes and rearranges itself in the human spirit and body, or when God, if he exists, takes account of people and dogs. Sleep overcomes some at that time, while for others, the sick, it is death that arrives. They suffocate and rattle, their hearts stop, rest for a bit and then start beating again, or they fall into an ever deeper coma, become nothing, disappear in an instant, without prior notice, easily and quietly, as if the angel Gabriel had passed across their face. Between the hours of two and six people die in hospitals, in their homes, on the deathbeds of their marital suites, and the weight pushing down on them from above becomes all the heavier, and all the more forceful grows the urge to depart, and thus does the battle between breathing and not breathing continue, the soul separating from the body, the world splitting in two, each time anew, each night from one thirty until the morning, in order for everything then to return to the normal daily rhythm, for to those remaining from the previous night it seems a little better, the color returns to their cheeks, they breathe more peacefully, as if they were just sleeping, and by around afternoon they’ve sort of returned to being themselves, and then, with the approach of evening, they go back to their pre-death state, while the time of the first cock’s crowing draws near, and with it the time of death. No living being, not bird, animal, or insect, announces death like the cock does, but not in a single faith is the cock a symbol of death. One does not hear the sound of the cock crowing from anywhere, from any direction, in Sarajevo. Only the barking of the dogs, and later the creak of switches and the bell of the first morning trams, then the church bells, the taped voices of muezzins…But by then all those who had been destined to die are dead already, and those who will die tomorrow are certain of themselves.

  Those twenty steps, from the old Drina to the Old Orthodox Church, were the last little piece of Sarajevo I would cross with a familiar sensation, even though I came to town because of her illness, and it was a happy thought that I’d never see Sarajevo again, never think of it as a living place, as when I was growing up in it, when Nona was still leading me by the hand and later, when I became conscious of my sexuality and imagined the moment when – as it was said at the time – the “scales would fall from my eyes” and I would lie with a woman, glide inside her, realize my masculinity, experience that greatest, most sung about physical pleasure, which, by the way, would never be as much as it had been when I imagined it, those twenty, or fifty, steps from the Drina entrance to the old church gate.

  The Drina had not been an ordinary inn. I don’t know when I realized this. It seems to me I understood from the time I was conscious of myself that the Drina was a whorehouse, that inside was Šuhra the prostitute, as old as Sarajevo itself, with whom nameless, invisible men would lie. They were invisible because everyone detested the Drina and the old whores, and because nobody would lie down in such a dirty bed. That was my first understanding of sex – the Drina and Šuhra. It seemed I’d been born with them, and everything else had come the way it does, from Sigmund Freud to today, to all the children of the world, as an annex atop what had started it all off. I was returning in my thoughts, from consciousness, life, and dream, not to the ailing person on the threshold of death but rather to Sarajevo, to those twenty steps between the Drina and the Old Orthodox Church, where my entire conscious and unconscious life marched forward.

  I never saw Šuhra. Not in life or in a picture. I didn’t even know what she looked like. I know how I imagine her today, but I don’t remember how I imagined her twenty years ago, when the blockade began, or earlier, when I was in high school, or earlier still, when Nona would lead me by the hand past the Drina and the Old Orthodox Church.

  I remember as a little boy, an eighth grader, and an adolescent, I was disgusted by the thought of enjoying being inside such an old, filthy woman. A man had to be hiding something despicable to want to lie with Šuhra. Later, sex transformed into a dark male fantasy of an old whore who smelled of urine, before which one finds pleasure when the illusion of paradise disappears.

  They’d say: I saw Šuhra, ooh, Šuhra, she’s so nasty, I heard it from Šuhra, my pops went with Šuhra, that’s why he and mom got divorced – somebody told her, and: Šuhra came by a minute ago, wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, stood at the bar, knocked one down, and left without saying anything, and: ah, if only Šuhra were here to ease my troubles, oh, if only I were in Sarajevo to see Šuhra, ah, you know when Šuhra gave me the clap…And on and on like this from the start, from when I began school. All my friends, all my classmates knew her and saw her around, and later, in high school, some of them even lay with her. I was the only one who never saw Šuhra.

  It wasn’t a collective name for more than one woman, as one Slovene reporter wrote a few months before the war, in an article published in Delo that had the title “The City Where There Won’t Be War Because Everyone Knows Each Other.” That was a mistake, as was everything in his Sarajevo travelogue, though it was well intentioned and gentle. Šuhra was the only prostitute at the Drina. It was the only whorehouse in the Orient, or in Europe, where just one old prostitute worked. Everyone told stories about her from the moment they started school all the way to late in life, in retirement, at the chess club, the old folks’ home on Trebević, on the bocce ball courts of retirees from Dubrovnik, on footstools in front of the vegetable vendors and shoe repair stands, or in front of the Sebilj, while feeding the pigeons bread crumbs and corn kernels, Sarajevo’s old men would talk about Šuhra. About no one else but maybe Comrade Tito were such conversations carried on in Sarajevo, by both one group and the other, by both Young Pioneers and old pensioners.

  Every time I passed by the Drina, I would look, without turning my head, toward the door, which was often open, especially on hot days, and I always saw the same thing: the dark interior of the inn, with several tables where no one was sitting, a floor of dirty ceramic tiles, like in a public bathroom, and immediately to the left outside the door, a bar counter and a white window with some hard-boiled eggs displayed. Maybe there was something else, but I missed it because I never dared to stop and look, instead increasing my pace until the Drina disappeared from view, precisely and unforgetably inscribed. In this city that has grown into the most distant of foreign lands for me, and in which every dead thing strives to remind me that I am not from here, the only thing that has remained as my own privileged fragment of it, was the space of these twenty, or fifty, paces from the Drina to the Old Orthodox Church that I was crossing now.

  The Drina’s doors have been nailed shut, the display win
dows empty and covered with dust, and up above, an ad for a comics store stretches from one end of the building to the other. Perhaps Šuhra, the one prostitute in the only socialist whorehouse in Sarajevo, never existed and was, like Grozdana in Hamza Humo’s poetic novel Grozdana’s Giggle, only a comic book figure.

  And so there I was before the Old Orthodox Church, passing by the cedar courtyard fence worn away by time and rain, and stinking of urine, passing it as I had always passed it, with the same feeling of shame because of Šuhra the whore and my thoughts about her. Even when my Nona had been leading me by the hand alongside that wooden gate with its eternal stench of urine, beneath the tiny, narrow-arched doorways, the onion domes above the heads of the passersby, the same guilt had taken hold of me. The Old Orthodox Church had been my first and last temple, if a guilty conscience is a measure of Christian faith, for it was there that I experienced a discomfort before God’s power to know my sin and my thoughts. And who knows what my life might have been like and what sort of relation to God I might have had if by chance some other building had been there just below the Drina: a bank, a library, or a convenience store. Would my conscience have weighed on me at all? If it had, perhaps then my guilt would have lasted longer, expanding inside me across town everywhere I went. But as it is, that piece of Sarajevo remained just there, those twenty, or fifty, paces, and the last little bit of the city that remained to me was walled off.