Kin

Kin

Where Other People Live: A Presentation
My father and two uncles went to the same high school in Sarajevo that I did.
Despite the nearly fifty years that had passed since my elder uncle was enrolled in
the school – back in 1934 – the interior had remained the same. The person who
noticed this was my grandmother, who came to the parent-teacher conferences
for both him and me. My father and younger uncle were taught by the same art
history professor, whom I would eventually have as well. When the old professor
died at the beginning of my second year, all three of us attended his funeral.
From its founding in the 1880s it had been an elite school for the bourgeoisie.
The Bosnian author and Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić graduated from it, after considerable
torment, about which he would later speak with horror and disgust.
This is probably why his name was never mentioned at school functions, when
the director would enumerate all the distinguished personages and celebrities
who had attended the school. In my own days communist revolutionaries were
considered the most noteworthy graduates, in addition to the assassins of Franz
Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Gavrilo Princip himself,
who fired the shots that struck Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, did not graduate
from the school, because he had moved to Belgrade by then, but several of his
close associates did.
Our professors often told us that we must model ourselves after these figures
– we lived in a socialist society, after all, which held especially fast to its bright and
shining examples. Among them our parents and uncles were often held up to us
as paragons of sacrifice and heroism.
Around the subject of my elder uncle there was silence. He never received
any grade lower than the very highest. He had pen pals in other countries with
whom he corresponded in Latin, he solved unsolvable math problems, he played
the guitar, and he wrote an essay on Paul Valéry. In photographs, tall and fragile,
with his blond hair and blue eyes, he looks like a young aristocrat in a Thomas
Mann novel, someone who will die by the end of the book, from meningitis or
gaping caverns in his lungs, but his will not be an ordinary, quotidian death for in
it will be gathered the destiny of a family or even that of an entire generation. I
should say that while this is how my elder uncle looked, nothing else about him
was like in Mann, except that I’d have been happy to reproduce on his gravestone
the words with which the doctor of philosophy Serenus Zeitblom takes leave of
his own friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn: “May God have pity on your
poor soul, my friend, my homeland.”
But I’m not at all certain what my uncle’s homeland would have been. What’s
clearer, at any rate, is that I don’t have one, which means in the end that I wouldn’t
really know what such an epitaph on his hypothetical grave would even mean.
He was born in Usora, a small town in central Bosnia, where his father, my
grandfather, was employed as a railroad stationmaster. He grew up along the
tracks built by the Austro-Hungarians, changing homes and friends often. From
his father he learned Slovenian, while his mother tongue was Croatian, but his first
language was German. This he learned from his grandfather, my great-grandfather,
a high-ranking railroad official, a Swabian German from Banat, who was
born in a town that’s now in Romania and went to schools in Vršac, Budapest,
and Vienna. He too spent all his working life along the tracks of Bosnia.
You must understand, then, that my elder uncle – let’s call him Mladen
because things will get too confused if we keep this up without names – lived
in complex surroundings and a complicated linguistic web. It is possible for language
to determine a person’s destiny. Mladen’s grandfather Karlo was a nationally
minded German, and he spoke only German to all four of his children until
he died. Not once did he ever speak to them even a single Croatian word. With
his daughters’ husbands – two Croats and a Slovene – he spoke Croatian, despite
the fact that all three of them spoke perfect German. With his grandchildren he
spoke both languages, but only after he had been addressed in German. If anyone
greeted him in Croatian, Opapa pretended not to hear.
They say the weekly meals at which the whole family would gather were quite
something. There was a strict language protocol of the sort that today probably
only exists at the headquarters of the European Union, though no one seems
to have wondered why it had to be that way. Karlo’s Germanness was especially
important to him, everyone else around him would have to adapt. In return, no
one, least of all he, prevented them from being something other than who they
were or from speaking whatever languages they pleased. My great grandfather
loved his sons-in-law, and it didn’t bother him that they weren’t German; rather,
he was proud, I should note, of their civic calling. Belonging to the railroad workers’
trade was for him something like being in a secret society, a Masonic lodge
of sorts, whose members differed from other people by their understanding of
the world and their own role within it. A German rail man and a Croatian rail
man enjoy a brotherhood that allowed them greater mutual understanding than
any members of a single nation among themselves. Opapa was a leftist, and in
the early 1920s he ended up in prison and later lost his job for backing a rail men’s
strike. It wouldn’t have been a scandal if he had not been a stationmaster and
a German among the barbarous Slavs. He was harshly punished by the royal
government for the betrayal of his caste and his nation.
But at home we were raised with the belief that all people have the same
rights, regardless of their faith or economic status. The poor little country of
Bosnia, where nearly 90 percent of the people in the 1920s and ’30s were illiterate,
where epidemics of typhus and cholera would take over with alarming
frequency, and where an endemic syphilis ravaged generation upon generation
without respite, like some kind of evil tradition, this Bosnia was – for Opapa
Karlo and his ideas – the ideal place to be living. He never had any notion of
returning to the Banat or of moving to Vienna or Germany. Those were foreign
countries to him. When asked about it, he would quietly answer that he wouldn’t
ever be able to live in those places because that was “where other people lived.”
As far as I’m concerned, there’s never been a more precise definition for the opposite
of one’s homeland.
Uncle Mladen was more like his grandfather than the other grandchildren
were, even though one wouldn’t have said he resembled him physically. The
elderly Karlo had dark hair and a long gray beard; judging by his photographs,
he looked more like a Romanian rabbi, or at least a learned Jewish man, than
a German. But Mladen, with his Nordic blue eyes and his bearing, took after
the Slovene peasants of his father’s side. When I look at the two of them in the
faded black-and-white photos, I wonder what their lives might have been like if
German had not come so easily to Mladen, if he hadn’t so willingly listened to
his grandfather play the violin, if he had been seated farther from the old man
during the Sunday meals. I wonder what might have been if the old man had
hated the Slav in his grandson even a little bit.