The Stublers

A Family Novel

Have You Seen Regina Dragnev?

There in Bosowicz, in the Romanian Banat, on his departure for Bosnia, my great-grandfather Karlo Stubler left behind an elder brother. His name has been lost to family memory, but his daughter’s survives. Karlo too would give the name Regina to one of his daughters. This is what his great-granddaughter would also be called. In the end, my mother too would come to carry the name when, on her birth in May 1942, they refused to inscribe her as Javorka in either the civic birth registry or the church registry. Thus she became Regina Javorka, and she would continue to be called by these two first names until, twenty years later, in the very same registry office, she was forced to choose between them, due to the fact that in our socialist society nothing could have two meanings or two names, and so neither could she. She decided on the second of her names superstitiously to avoid exchanging fates with any of the numerous other Reginas in the family.

The fate of the first Regina was by then well known. She was the mother of Opapa Karlo. And while we don’t know precisely what made her great or important, our ignorance, along with familial and historical oblivion, have probably in some way served to make her greater.

My great-grandfather’s niece was older than all her Bosnian cousins. In a certain sense she served them as a distant paragon because they never met her, though her name would come to leave its trace. Though from a peasant’s home, albeit a Swabian and well-off one, Regina regularly attended high school in Timisoara, and then during the Balkan wars – while the burgeoning Yugoslavism was spilling its Serbian blood and dying of beauty in its Croatian schemes and tubercular fevers – she went to Sofia to study medicine. It was not terribly common then at the beginning of the twentieth century, not even among the Swabians of the Banat, or in Romania, which at the time was called the France of the Balkans, for a village girl to travel to a distant town to study medicine.

But perhaps Sofia was not all that far from Bosowicz back then. In Bulgaria there were lots of Germans, and maybe the Stublers had relatives or friends in the capital who would have been able to look after Regina.

She became a doctor by the end of the First World War.

She found work and married a Bulgarian about whom we know almost nothing, except his family name: Dragnev.

My great-grandfather, together with his family, was expelled in 1920 from Dubrovnik, where he had taken part in a strike as a high-ranking railroad official. He lost his job and ended up in his place of domicile, Sarajevo, along with his wife and three of his four children. In the years after, his livelihood was mostly taken care of by the labor union. Two or three union members, who worked for the railroad as stokers or engineers, used their paychecks to help Karlo and his family, and this was how Karlo’s children were able to finish their schooling. Karlo’s daughter Regina fell in love and later married Vilko Novak, a son of one of the railroad union leaders.

Before the First World War, as a young and spirited railway man, Karlo Stubler would visit his brother in Bosowicz. But during the long years after the Second World War, he would never again return to his native land. All communication with his brother and remaining family took place through letters, and these would on some occasions be quite lively, dynamic, and, in a certain sense, fruitful. Just as Jewish immigrants sent pictures from America, along with trinkets of memorabilia and even packages to their families in the tiny, now nameless shtetlach of Galicia, so did Karlo and his compatriots operate with their relatives in the Banat. The correspondence flowed back and forth for decades between Ilidža and Bosowicz, and while it was not clear which was America and which Galicia, or who would set out for where, their letters prepared for a meeting that would never arrive. Composed in German, these letters were exchanged at regular two-month intervals, with special postcards at Christmas and Easter, and the correspondence was maintained through the twenties, thirties, and the start of the forties, before the horrors of war dissipated the epistles.

Somewhere among the remains of the family archives, on Kasindol Street in Ilidža, in the home of the Novaks and Cezners, where most of what once belonged to the Stublers remains, there used to be, or still are photographs of Regina Dragnev. The doctor living in Sofia looks out at us from them: tall and beautiful, smiling as one does when posing for a photo for the sake of one’s relatives.

What held our family together, what we were and what made up our very identity, was based – like any joining of culture and kin beneath a family roof – on an illusion. Part of this illusion was that one day we would see our cousin who lived in Sofia. We never even shook hands, let alone embraced.

No one except for Karlo Stubler ever touched Regina Dragnev. He had played with her as a little girl when he was a young rail worker. He would fold his right leg over his left, she would sit on his shin, and he would rock her. His leg was a horse that Regina would ride out into the distance.

After the war, near the close of 1945, when the mournful cry of the people for themselves and their illusions took hold, Rudolf Stubler initiated a search through the Red Cross for his relative, our cousin, Regina Dragnev, née Stubler, a doctor who’d lived in Sofia.

He would look for her for the next twenty years, through various organizations, for as long as there were people to search for someone, until the broadcasts on the radio changed, in some strange transformation of genre, from searches for the missing to transmissions of birthday wishes on listener request lines, or greetings from home to sailors at sea, but she would not be found, nor would anything at all about her fate be known. Regina Dragnev had slipped into the earth, transformed into smoke, or perhaps nothing happened at all.

At least three authors have written about such searches: Amos Oz, David Grossman, and Ivan Lovrenović. Oz and Grossman have written about the quest for relatives whose fates were darkened in the Holocaust, Lovrenović about the fathers and uncles who, as soldiers of the defeated or enemy armies, flitted into nothingness during the victory celebration and great reprisal. But they have something in common, all the missing in Oz and Grossman and Lovrenović: it was possible for the searchers to say who and what the missing ones were, victims or aggressors.

Her cousin Rudi, my beloved Nano, would search for Regina Dragnev with two kinds of dread. The first he shared with millions of Europeans: was she alive and if so, where? And if not, did anyone know where she lay buried? The second kind of dread would be his and ours alone, a family form of it: who exactly was our relation Regina Dragnev from the standpoint of the war’s victors, of justice, of antifascism? I mean, however many times in those two decades they wrote, neither Rudi nor the Regina in Ilidža ever knew anything of her political affinities. She had a husband and two children, she worked in a hospital, she cared about her patients – about whom she would sometimes write to her far-off relatives – she went to the theater from time to time, read the same books as they did, mentioned things she remembered about Bosowicz, asked about living and dead relatives, but never did she write a word, nor was a word written to her, about Hitler and the German eastward expansion, about communism or fascism, or about any of the other things that are so important now, but which one wouldn’t think to elaborate on in letters to a distant relative.

Who was Regina Dragnev in 1941 and 1945, this cousin of ours, the German girl from the Banat who had married a Bulgarian? Had she collaborated with the enemy? This question made my Nano uncomfortable, but still he didn’t give up. He was not a courageous person and was afraid one day they might burst in through the gate and start asking him why he was looking for this woman and was he perhaps planning some kind of counterrevolutionary action with her, but what else could he do when this search had become such an important part of his identity, of the identity of our family? For him the important thing was tracking down his relative – while for us today it is knowing who she was. This eternal ignorance would follow us for as long as we lived, its reverberations, like those of the Second World War, refused to cease.

My great-grandfather did not make inquiries about his brother. Karlo was taken from Bosowicz in 1945 and never brought back. His good Serb neighbors saved him in Ilidža, just as he had saved them from the Ustaše – he had sealed them up in his house and stood at the threshold; the cowardly Ustaše didn’t dare strike a German, even one as feeble as he was.

There were no inquiries after the relatives in Bosowicz. No one was left: they had flitted off in 1945, turned to dust, an empty concept, something that would not be spoken of during Karlo’s lifetime. In contrast to the fates of the Jews, those of the Germans cannot be spoken about. This is simply the case, and so it had to be for my great-grandfather. In his home they spoke German, but he was silent about the Germans. And out of the silence grew a memorial, a small Tower of Babel.

His son Rudolf Stubler often traveled in Europe, but he never went to Bosowicz. Wherever he went, in whatever city he found himself, he would go to a phone booth and look through the fat directory chained inside. They said Nano did this for fun. Stubler is not a common last name, which was why he had been looking for Stublers for so long. That’s what they said.

To me it seemed that in the directories of Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Leningrad and Moscow, Budapest, Prague, Amsterdam, and Madrid, he had only ever looked for Regina Dragnev. But such a thing was no longer possible to say, for there was no one who could hear it and grasp the sense of such a long search.

This is What We Looked Like on the First Day of the War

When Karlo Stubler was driven out of Dubrovnik in 1920, his eldest daughter did not want to accompany the family into exile. She had already graduated from the trade institute in Dubrovnik and wasn’t the one who had been forced to go off to Bosnia, so she stayed, determined to be independent and live her life away from the railroads and their unions. While it wasn’t common for daughters to disobey their fathers’ will, Karlo had no choice but to walk away from Karla. Even as a child she refused to go by a name she considered masculine and paternal and started introducing herself as Lukretia, and this was the name she kept for her whole life.

When her people left for Sarajevo, she found herself alone in the city without family or friends, a kuferaš’s daughter, maladjusted, with a mind of her own, in eternal war with her surroundings. She made her way and was able to enchant a well-off financial officer – eighteen years her elder – from the island of Pelješac named Andrija Ćurlin. Our uncle Andrija was one of those men who measured fate for too long, considering all the marriageable girls, constantly changing their minds, until the time was suddenly up. Then, for fear of being left an old bachelor, they would make a hasty choice, as a rule mistaken, and marry someone who, like our great-aunt Lola, had been left behind after some sort of banishment, political upheaval, or natural catastrophe.

It would be crude to say that Lola married out of calculation. She married because she needed a strong footing, someone she could rely on, certain as she was at that moment that it would be easier for her if he made all the decisions, so that one day, reversing course, she would be the one making all the decisions, and she would be the one to drive him, Uncle Andrija, away, just as she had driven away old Karlo Stubler. The poor man could not have known anything about this, because among the well-bred daughters in his hometown of Kuna Pelješka, just as in Grad, there were no women like Karla, Lukretia, Lukre.

She didn’t love him. Was it because one does not learn to love by force of habit, because she dreamed of a different sort of man, or because Aunt Lola could never really love anyone else, for what was great and strong and pure in her was her love for herself? I suppose this last idea was closest to the truth.

She gave birth to Željko and, five or six years later, to Branka.

This didn’t change her either. A person either is or is not a mother. This is possible to know in advance, before any children are born. People often make the mistake of thinking that giving birth changes a willful woman’s character and that because of it a clenched-up or closed-off heart will be touched by some great transformation. Aunt Lola did not change, she was no mother, and almost nothing inside her was altered.

Whenever she got fed up with her life, or rather whenever she got fed up with her Andrija, she would leave him with the children, and without saying much, be on her way. Ten or fifteen days later she’d come back, announcing angrily as she came in, So here I am then!

And that was that. Not a word more, and he would never ask. No one ever knew where Aunt Lola went during her seasonal tours. Dubrovnik was a small town back then, it would speak behind anyone’s back in time, so there could not have been any secrets, except maybe little lies and small, unfair slanders, but still nothing leaked out, no one uttered a word about where Lukre Ćurlin went off to. Not among the family either, among her sisters, nieces, and nephews, did anyone ever learn anything, and no one, to her dying day, ever dared to ask. The only thing they knew, and everyone would recount it, some as a joke and others in fear that someone like her might one day appear in their own lives, was that phrase of hers: So here I am then!

Branka was still little at the time, but Željko must have been badly shaken by his mother’s absences. He did everything he could to grow up as fast as possible and get out of the house. After middle school he went to the war, to aviators’ school, and became a pilot in the famous Niš Air Corps, which would be dismantled and split up in 1941 along the lines of family and national affiliations, as well as predictions and prognostications regarding what would happen in the course of the war. Željko Ćurlin completed his pilot training in the Independent State of Croatia, under Franjo Džal, but then quickly escaped to the English and flew until the war’s end as a pilot of the RAF.

Aunt Lola and Uncle Andrija meanwhile continued to live their empty and displaced marital life. Branka grew up, Andrija worked very hard, and Lola, by then in her forties, continued to enjoy herself like a young girl, actually living the kind of life that would become common for the majority of women at the end of the twentieth century. Aunt Lola, you might say, was the avant-garde of a future, dissolute, touristy Dubrovnik. And she was not overly concerned that somewhere high above Željko was flying, or about the fact that, up there in the air, among warring armies, he was changing one uniform for another. She was a staunch atheist and never believed in any sort of God, or expected anything from him. Death was always the definitive end.

On the first day of the war, Sunday, April 6, 1941, with her usual euphoria for leaving the house, Aunt Lola set out with a girlfriend on a walk through town. Dubrovnik at the time was patrolled, just as it would be decades later, by wandering photographers. They would take pictures of the men and women who seemed likely to pay, mostly foreigners, and then would offer them the photos for sale. If they accepted, the picture was purchased on the spot, and developed photos would be delivered later. The practice remained in place until the beginning of the eighties, when the photographers lost their jobs – by then all the tourists and travelers had their own cameras and considered themselves expert enough to take their own pictures of the world around them.

And so on that first day of the war, a Dubrovnik photographer (Studio Berner) snapped a photo of Aunt Lola and a friend of hers. We cannot know for certain, but maybe that was the only work he could get that day, when all of Dubrovnik was gathered around the radios listening to the news of the bombing of Belgrade and the public calls for mass military mobilization. Lukre acted her part meanwhile, defying through her nature the implacable logic of historical time – that day, yet again, she refused to go into exile.

She liked the photograph so much that she sent it to her sisters in Sarajevo, with a short note on the back: This is how we looked on the first day of the war, so even the photographer thought it worth taking our picture. Her sisters at that point found Lola’s folly comforting. As if her nonsense might protect them from all the miseries that sense could foresee and claim, miseries that would dictate the future trajectory of their lives.

Life in the Ćurlin home was secure and quiet, and they lacked for nothing even throughout the war years. Andrija Ćurlin, a respected gentleman who kept himself apart, had only ever messed with the authorities to the extent that it was necessary, meaning very little or not at all, and had remained useful to everyone because of his expertise in the business of trade and finance. In the Dubrovnik of that time his was one of the rare homes to have a telephone in it. We even find his name in the telephone directory of the Independent State of Croatia for the year 1942. Listed on this page, his is one of the six subscriber names from Dubrovnik that begin with the letter Č/Ć. It notes that he is a Secretary of the Commission for Trade and that he resides at no. 1 Bunićeva poljana. Until Aunt Lola’s death this address would remain one of the rare, unchanging details in the history of the Stubler family. Everything else would be altered many times over, lost, vanished, or even wiped away. The phone number where it was possible to reach Uncle Andrija Ćurlin was 640.

It’s this number that we would call in the autumn of 1943 to say that, in a battle against the Partisans, Mladen had perished, the son of Lola’s younger sister Olga, my Nona.

For Lola too this would be a terrible event. She would sense that it was not the end but the beginning of something that even today, after all their deaths, remains unresolved. The last of the Stublers had just been born, and all that was needed now was to see how each of them would die and on whom the heavy conscience for that death would fall.

When the three sisters and their brother met each other in the post-war peace, it would be the first time they clearly heard the differences in their speech, their accents and intonations. Lukre spoke like someone from Dubrovnik, and her siblings sounded to her like Bosnians. Only their German remained unchanged.

When it was clear the war was over, the family ace pilot Željko changed his uniform once again: from a flyer for the British Crown he would become a pilot in Tito’s young army. One day he would drink himself into a stupor, take off from Zagreb’s Borongaj barracks, and plunge to his death. How could such a thing happen? Had Željko killed himself?

After the war, the two Stubler sisters and their husbands would be separated by their dead sons.

It is not possible to express fully such long-suffering remorse, such all-consuming, silent, and unspeakable mutual blame. My Nono Franjo and Uncle Andrija did not send their sons off to die, nor did they expect any kind of heroism from them. My Nona Olga and Aunt Lola didn’t do what the two men expected of them, which ultimately would have kept both Željko and Mladen alive. This passivity was palpable for years after, even up until Olga and Lola’s deaths. To their own misery and that of their sons, the mothers had been stronger and more influential than the fathers. They’d made decisions for the boys, put pressure on them, sometimes for the boys’ good, sometimes for their own, gratifying their own whims and dispositions, so that their sons might fill the shoes of husbands they’d never fully accepted or loved. Yet their sons had still fallen.

Aunt Lola was shaken by Željko’s death more than any mother could be. She would wander around her apartment and through the streets of Dubrovnik, just as she continues to wander today through the family letters and reminiscences passed on thirdhand, by people who don’t even remember her.

Up to that moment she had lived alone and free, but now it was her lot to live with Željko’s shadow. She tried many different ways to manage: She forced Uncle Andrija to move to Peru but immediately wanted to return to Dubrovnik; she said that the altitude of Lima was too much for her. Then they adopted a child. His name was Šiško. Šiško was supposed to serve her as a way of forgetting Željko. He was her new son. But it didn’t work, he was different. He seemed weaker than Željko, whose intellect and goodness had in the meantime taken on heroic proportions.

When Šiško grew up, he ran off to be a sailor. He’d come home to Dubrovnik once a year. I met him when I was three. Uncle Andrija had died long before, and we would visit Aunt Lola in her beautiful, spacious apartment above the city’s main square. Šiško took me down to the harbor to show me the boats. He took my picture on an enormous metal bollard. I was terrified that I would fall into the sea.

That summer he quarreled with his adoptive mother. We don’t know what it was about or what she might have said to him, but we never saw him again after that. Šiško disappeared forever, from Dubrovnik and from our lives. He had never got completely used to our family, just like Aunt Lola in fact, but he had been part of it. We don’t know if he’s still alive, but if he is, maybe he visits Dubrovnik occasionally. None of us are there anymore, none of us are anywhere anymore because, in turn and out of it, we have all disappeared. And now, if he’s alive, Šiško lives in God’s peace, alone.

My aunt Branka was a striking, upright woman. She completed medical school and became an anesthesiologist. From her father she inherited a gentle, clear disposition; from her mother, an inclination toward a life of beauty and freedom. She worked in the Vinograd Hospital in Zagreb and married the actor Jovan Ličina. When they divorced, she remarried in Germany in her late forties and gave birth to a daughter, Katarina, and then promptly died in her sleep. An aneurysm, they said. She’d lived five years longer than Aunt Lola.

Karla, Lukretia, Lukre, Lola Ćurlin, née Stubler, rests in the Boninovo Cemetery, beside Uncle Andrija, Željko, and Branka. Their family vault is overcrowded. When Branka died, or rather, when it was time to bury her, it seemed that there wouldn’t be enough space. But then one of the gravediggers banged his shovel into the coffin where Aunt Lola was lying and it burst into tiny pieces. Bad wood, they said, chipboard. Don’t make them like they used to. So, freeing us from the burden of finding a new grave, they swept to one side what little remained of Lola’s bones. Branka’s coffin, which they’d brought from Germany, now had a place to rest.

If they hadn’t done that, who knows what we would have done with the deceased. It was good that way. Excellent in fact. There was no one left in Dubrovnik besides those in that brimming vault, which we didn’t visit, and which we wouldn’t even recognize anymore among the innumerable graves.

May Josip Sigmund Be Upon Your Soul

It’s a shame our Nano had no children. And it was for quite sentimental reasons that he didn’t marry. While it might have long seemed, when looked at from outside, that Rudolf Stubler was a scatterbrained layabout – until well into his forties he still didn’t have a single day of regular employment – Rudi was a man with a broken heart.

He had excelled in everything from an early age, had neat, elaborate handwriting, was well-read and talented in all the fine arts, was a gifted mathematician – scholars from all parts of Bosnia and Dalmatia would come to Dubrovnik to watch and wonder as seven-year-old Rudi solved the most complex problems of arithmetic and geometry. No one questioned whether Rudi wanted to continue his education, it was assumed he would go to Vienna. The only question was which branch of learning he would choose and in which of the sciences he would distinguish himself.

The Great War had just been concluded, Germany’s teeth had been smashed in, and forever, or so it was believed at the time, its imperial aspirations had been quashed. In the east the fiery dawn of communism was gobbling up Russia, and there was nothing left of the Habsburg monarchy beyond an oversized Vienna where minor geniuses from the peripheries of the vanished empire arrived, predestined to distinguish the great century of Europe. Mostly Germans and Jews, an occasional Serb, Croat, Slovene, or Czech, a gifted young painter or violinist would come to the great academies, impelled by ambition and sometimes fear, both dark and painful, an eccentric spirit that meant ruin for all those unable to conceal themselves in large cities.

Rudolf Stubler was a child of this future century. Or he should have been. But Rudi was free of any ambition or fear. And that is why he became a layabout.

He studied at polytechnic institutes in Vienna and Graz. He regularly wrote long, beautiful letters home in which he described life in the metropolises, gatherings with our Viennese relatives, theater productions, operas, and concerts. Rudi wrote about everything like a skilled newspaper reporter, but regarding his studies he noted only that he was spending days on end in the college lecture halls without seeing the sun for all his learning. Usually this was tucked into one or two sentences, a formality to pacify old Karlo.

It took him a long time to grasp what it was Rudi was actually doing in these studies of his. Or perhaps he understood immediately but hoped that something would change with time, that after a year or two of nights and days out in the Vienna cafés and vaudevilles, Rudi would finally grow diligent and would apply himself to real scientific learning.

But that did not happen.

Our Nano never finished his studies. His father tolerated the boy’s being in Vienna and Graz, sent him pocket money from his meager means and from the help provided by the unions, until the day when news of the great scandal reached Sarajevo and Ilidža from far away – in Vienna Rudi had fallen in love, and with none other than Dora Dussel, our close cousin.

This loose and cheery incestuous adventure exceeded even his father’s tolerance. In a terse, sharp letter, Karlo Stubler told his son to return home immediately. Rudi obeyed because he had no other choice but to do so. Such were the times, or such was the strength of the old Stubler’s authority. On the whole, it didn’t even enter his son’s head not to return home. He’d left Dora behind unreservedly, and she remained until the end, until her own death and after, our dear Viennese relation. She would visit Sarajevo. In the fifties we took her to Vrelo Bosne, the wellspring of the Bosna River, where great family dinners were organized, even during the leanest period of socialism.

They would sit next to each other at the overflowing table in Ilidža, talking about everything that relatives who have not seen each other in a long time talk about. It was a time when everyone lived with their own secrets. Only these secrets were of the sort that other people also knew about. And conversations went on as if there were no secrets at all.

On returning to Sarajevo, Rudi continued to live his own kind of life. As there were no Viennese cafés and vaudevilles, he solved math problems, played preferans, and frequented the theater. For years he played violin in the Sarajevo movie theaters, both before and during the films. Fortunately, the fashion of sound cinema developed slowly and with difficulty in Sarajevo, so he always had work. The theater owners were actually grateful to him, because as soon as Rudi had come back from Vienna they didn’t need to keep a piano around anymore. They said that Rudi’s violin conjured up whatever was happening on the screen better than any keyboard. Karlo Stubler never went to a movie. He wasn’t angry at his son. It was his life. If he had decided to fritter away all his talents, so be it. But it made him sad all the same.

After the eccentric and half-baked love affair with Dora, our Nano fell in love only once more. Several years after he returned from Vienna, he took a shine to a girl in Mostar whose name we don’t remember. All that is known is that she was a Muslim. Their romance was short and stormy. Her family rose up against this young Sarajevo native, prepared to perish in defense of honor and faith, and the virtue of the young woman. The vehemence of the attack astonished us and struck fear into our hearts.

Why do they hate us so much? asked the bewildered old Karlo, and this question, so naïve, would remain among the family lore, carried forward like a counterpoint to circumstances in the state, wars, neighborly quarrels, and even massacres. This memory, perhaps, appealed to a different time.

Why do they hate us so much? Opapa Karlo asked himself, not the family members around him. He asked out of fear, but also out of arrogance. There was arrogance because he felt a certain sense of superiority for not hating anyone. But of greatest interest was, again, his fear. He was afraid, this Swabian from Bosowicz, of what he represented for them, as a foreigner in Bosnia, an eternal foreigner, an Ahasuerus, into whose family they would not allow their daughter to marry, even should the world come crashing down upon their heads.

Karlo Stubler didn’t believe in God, and never had second thoughts about this – God had been permanently absent from his life. Everything that happened today was what had always happened. This didn’t mean, however, that he was unable to distinguish the differences between himself and Muslims. However absent Jesus Christ was, along with Jehovah, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, they were his in their nonexistence, while Allah, their God, was something else. It wasn’t his place to think about Allah’s existence or lack thereof.

Our Nano, so the family story goes, was prepared to do anything to hold onto his bride-to-be. If necessary, he would turn apostate, run away with her, do all that her family might require of him. Nano was willing to humble himself, if only they would allow her to become his wife.

But it was all in vain: this unhappy love was the last of his life. He would travel to Mostar no more. He’d look at the town from the windows of his train car. This for the next thirty years until the memory faded.

For a while Rudi’s sisters did their serious best to get him married. They’d bring home acquaintances from work, pretty, unmarried girls, a French teacher or hotel decorator, and he would excuse himself to the bathroom, then run off through the back garden and across the neighbor’s courtyard, returning in the evening when the coast was clear. These incidents would then be talked about, and thus did new family legends arise in whose recitation he too would come to take part, until everything turned into a big joke.

There were such sons in those days, mostly among the kuferaš families, those who didn’t have deep roots in Bosnia and in Sarajevo but rather, since the time of the Austrian annexation, had lived in an atmosphere of temporariness, as if preparing for an impending move, and the fathers often would not even notice that their sons were layabouts and were growing old. Anyway, they would think, somewhat presciently, the enemy would take all this away one day soon, drive us all off somewhere, leaving the land desolate and empty.

It didn’t take much for Rudolf Stubler to be mobilized.

He was the ideal recruit. Unemployed, well educated, and an ethnic German to boot. They made him a first lieutenant, even though he had not served in the military before, and sent him to Bijeljina. He was paralyzed with fear and lived with it every day for months – because he was by nature something of a coward, a lone boy among sisters, and because heroism didn’t come naturally, or in any other way, to the Stublers, and because Rudi found himself among people with whom he had little in common. He followed the rules, was a respectable citizen, a top student, and would not have revolted against the authority of the state in any way, no matter whose state or what kind of state it was, nor would he have gone to war, or spilled a drop of his own or another’s blood in the name of the state, whatever state it might be.

After the fall of Stalingrad and a winter of starvation, followed by a series of failed German-Ustaše offensives, the Partisans attacked suddenly and from behind, often striking quiet, unassuming defense garrisons far in the rear. And so, at a certain point, they set upon the region of Semberija, reached Bijeljina, and along the way destroyed the unit in which Rudi was serving. In the battle where he managed to save his neck at a certain hopeless instant by lying under shallow cover with only his buttocks protruding, his head covered with his hands while he waited for the roaring to subside, the spectacle of him – as he himself recounted the story later – softened even the battle-tested Partisan machine gunners, and in the end he escaped at a run through the corn fields and was not even taken prisoner. When he realized that no one was chasing him, he ripped the officer’s markings from his uniform with the intention of making his way by foot to Sarajevo. He had a friend with him, someone of similar character evidently, and together they struggled for days through the fields and woods, feeding themselves on the rare fruits of the forest that city kids like them could recognize, and they would have soon died of hunger had a Partisan patrol not taken them prisoner near Kladanj.

They brought him before the Partisan commissar, a kind, refined man. He offered Rudi a seat, spoke with him, and correctly concluded that he was in no sense a real enemy.

Would you like to stay with us, Mr. Stubler? You won’t be worse off, and we need interpreters. And you’ll be fighting for the right cause.

Must I stay?

The struggle for freedom is a voluntary affair, said the commissar with a frown. Freedom cannot be forced on anyone.

In that case, I think I’d rather go home, said Rudi sheepishly.

Alright then, if that’s what you’ve decided. But remember: Josip Sigmund was a German like you, and he laid down his life for this people. You will surely live to see freedom, people like you always survive, but may Josip Sigmund haunt you and your soul, if you have a soul. Saying this, he gave him a signed transit pass with which Rudi could travel to Sarajevo across Partisan-controlled territory.

When he arrived at the door to our apartment, we didn’t recognize him. Rudi’s sister Olga didn’t even recognize him.

What do you want? she said, trying to sound angry, as she looked at the ragged man holding a shoe box in his hands, with crazed eyes, a face contorted into a spasm of weeping, stinking to high heaven.

But it’s me, he whispered, shuffling back.

If Olga had slammed the door then, if she hadn’t taken another look and instantly recognized him, who knows what might have happened to our Nano.

First she gave him a careful examination to make sure he didn’t have lice or fleas, while he was still clinging to the shoebox.

What’s this? she asked, grabbing the box.

It was empty, not a thing was inside. Later we would ask him why he had carried an empty shoe box around with him, and Nano replied, That’s what happens when you’ve lost your mind.

I never believed this.

I’ve thought about it often during the forty years since I first was told the story of the box. I grew up, watched films, read books about wars and bouts of madness, I lived through one war and became a sort of kuferaš myself, finding my deepest foreignness in Zagreb and in Croatia, but I’ve never been able to fathom what First Lieutenant Rudolf Stubler carried inside the empty shoe box. Whatever it was, it must have been important. It’s hard for a person to walk empty handed, especially if he’s ragged and hungry.

I’ve had enough of your brother and his lying around. These are serious times! said my Nono, intent on finding work for Rudi so he wouldn’t be sent back to war.

This was the greatest, actually the only, instance of favoritism in the history of the Stublers.

Nono found him a job in a railroad stokehold. Rudi was then forty-three years old. In the stokehold he would continue to be a diligent and valued worker even after the war, someone who never took sick leave or was late for work, not even by five minutes. A true Swabian, they would say, while he also worked on the accounting and bookkeeping, despite the rules. As a single man, however, he was not able to get his own apartment. To the end of his life he lived with his relatives in Ilidža, in a basement room.

Near the entrance to the building where Rudolf Stubler worked until his retirement hung a commemorative plaque dedicated to Josip Sigmund Pepi, a skier, mountain climber, prewar communist, and locksmith in the railroad stokehold, who had worked in the Partisan underground, that is until the Ustaše criminals discovered him.

A Pine Floor Shining Like the Sun Beneath Your Feet

Karlo’s youngest child, my Nona Olga, was born in 1905 in Konjic, where her father served briefly as the stationmaster. She grew up in Dubrovnik, finished elementary school and then started at the Italian high school. Olga was the most intelligent of Karlo’s children and the most interested in literature and art. By the time the century reached its end, we’d also need to add, the most unfortunate child too.

Olga fell in love the moment she arrived in Bosnia. Handsome like a tall cypress, he was a young railway worker who had just returned from Italian captivity where he had spent nearly four years, my future grandfather Franjo Rejc.

Whether Franjo defiled her in haste or Olga, who was barely seventeen, committed a wayward sin and got herself pregnant, or whether it was all a stormy but pure love in which they were both consumed for the rest of their lives, we no longer know because some of the important dates have since been lost (perhaps on purpose), so we aren’t sure how many months passed between Olga and Franjo’s wedding and the birth of their first son, my uncle Mladen.

All we know is that Olga’s announcement to her father was quite ceremonious and that all were anxious about what would happen and in what state she would come out of Karlo’s room, where she had gone to say that she’d fallen in love and would like to marry a young railway worker, a Slovene. My retroactive anxiety is perhaps deepest of all, for on this conversation my very birth depended.

Anything in all this could have put Karlo out. Olga had not finished her third year of the classical high school – she was a minor, the age Gypsy girls marry, the time of year young bitches first go into heat, by all accounts an absolutely inappropriate time for a Stubler daughter to marry. Besides, one of his daughters – Karla – had stayed behind in Dubrovnik, having refused to go with him to Bosnia, while now the other would come to be married several months later in the east. The old man surely had a feeling that she was promiscuous – his dearest, most gifted child. So beautifully did she play the zither, that mournful, solitary instrument he had carried with them all the way from Bosowicz…

He didn’t say anything for a long time. He just looked at her silently, then finally pronounced what sounds today more like a prison sentence than a father’s blessing:

Fine. If this is what you have decided. But just remember, there’s no coming back!

They lived together in a house rented from strangers. Karlo supported them with money provided by the union, collected from people who were poorer than he was. He was humiliated, and it didn’t look as if anything would ever change. But then suddenly someone took pity on him, or they mislaid his police file, because he landed a job in the largest railway junction in Bosnia, and for a while he moved to the town of Doboj.

What else could he have done but let Olga marry the first man she had taken a shine to? If he’d refused, Olga would have simply run off with Franjo. Or she would have drunk from the goblet, jumped from the tower, killed herself. But one thing is certain: in those days she would not have given birth to an illegitimate child.

Had Karlo not allowed his youngest daughter to decide for herself, perhaps quite a few future misfortunes might have been avoided, though that iteration of the Stublers, if someone were to tell it, would be an utter fiction. If my Nona had killed herself, I would not be telling this story.

My elder uncle Mladen was born in 1923, in Usora, a small railroad station near Doboj, where Franjo Rejc had become the stationmaster. Olga gave birth to him at home, far from the hospital, in the blood and sweat of her brow, in the middle of Bosnia, green, dense, misty, poor, disconsolate, and, in absolute truth, plain ugly Bosnia – at least when seen through the eyes of a certain Swabian daughter, a native of Dubrovnik, who once in happier times long ago shocked the solicitous citizenry with her head-first dives from Porporela.

Mladen was a child born of love.

But that did not stop Olga from falling in love with a certain Usora teacher, a man whose name we were never able to learn but about whom we fantasized for a good twenty years. Could he have been a Czech, a Pole, an Austrian, a Croat, or – please, God, let it be – some charming Serb with the hairline mustache of a lover from a silent Hollywood melodrama who was sent to Catholic Usora to reform and convert members of that mistrustful Yugoslav tribe prone to Roman schisms? Some imagined that lover of Olga’s, the first after her husband, through the despair and anger of a betrayed and abandoned child, but I thought of him with pleasure and sweetness because my Nona, even as a young mother, fell in love with him and, good God, gave herself to him for all of us future children, born and yet to be born, who would not have the heart for such loves.

Franjo was traveling a lot at the time. He’d be away on business. He’d visit his relatives in Tolmino. Or he’d go to the railway headquarters in Sarajevo. He studied foreign languages, collected books on beekeeping, read patriotic Slovene newspapers, the works of Anton Aškerc and France Prešeren, and kept up a correspondence with his relatives, but whether he learned about the teacher we don’t know. Either news never reached him of what everyone else knew, or he pretended not to know. Both are possible. It’s also possible that he too had fallen in love with a beautiful teacher. Or with a nun at the Zenica hospital who rebandaged the painful abscess at the base of his spine, a wound that would occasionally reappear to torment him until the end of his days.

Three years after Mladen, Dragan was born. This was in Kakanj, where Franjo Rejc had received a transfer and was again stationmaster. Kakanj was the last station on his slow advancement toward Sarajevo. They stayed there until the midthirties, when Franjo was transferred to headquarters, where he would soon obtain his highest position: head of railway timetables.

The years in Kakanj would be remembered as the happiest in Olga and Franjo’s fifty-year marriage. In this small industrial mining town, built during Austro-Hungarian times, which barely had even the smallest of Oriental bazaars, Muslims were the majority, mixed with a Catholic minority composed of indigenous people from the neighboring villages – actually from the oldest, most ancient, royal Bosnia – along with kuferaši from all the regions of the then monarchy of Franz Joseph. Engineers, master blacksmiths, toolmakers and locksmiths, railroad and postal officials, the odd botanist, stray piano instructor, geologist, and surveyor, lived together in Kakanj, taking on with a certain unexpected lightness the rhythms of life, as well as the customs, of the local Muslim population. These people of a different faith were, in a wondrous way, closer to them than the Catholics of the surrounding highlands. By nature the Muslims were closer to the city and to an urban way of life, they were often better off in terms of property, and their social and cultural interests were somehow broader, more diverse.

No one knows whether Olga fell in love in Kakanj too. Probably not, since she had two children on her hands and the social life was busier than in Usora, so there was not enough time for such excesses or for those excuses she’d once used as a means to slip away. They went on excursions to the surrounding hills or to the Bosna River, making the rounds to the Rejc relatives – there were so many of them, around Kakanj and Zenica in the early 1930s. It gave us the illusion, perhaps for the last time, of being a great and extensive family, whose closeness and sheer size would protect it from all evil.

In Kakanj Olga made one of the best friends of her life. In contrast to all her other girlfriends, from Dubrovnik and Sarajevo, whose names were long ago forgotten, though we look at their beautiful, young faces in photo albums, knowing nothing of these nameless faces except that they were Nona’s friends – in contrast to all of them stood Zehra, a simple, illiterate woman.

In fact, she wasn’t the least bit simple, but then how does one explain this to someone so they might believe you? Her husband, like most Kakanj men, was a miner. They lived in a humble house that nevertheless had one completely unexpected sign of comfort: in place of a floor of packed earth of the kind seen in the homes of most of the miners and iron workers, Zehra had a floor made of pine planks. Always irreproachably clean, it glowed and glistened like a ray of sun. When both Zehra and Kakanj had disappeared into the distant past, and nothing was left in her life but to die, my Nona would talk about never having seen anything cleaner or shinier under her feet than that floor of Zehra’s. If a paradise exists, and if she had not been, like the rest of the Stublers, punished by God for her atheism, Nona’s paradise would surely be covered with that floor of luminescent yellow pine.

Zehra, however, believed in God. In her world the question of God’s existence would’ve been impossible to ask, meaningless, for there was no way that there could not be a God. What could there be without Him? She fasted, prayed, and did all that was expected of an old-fashioned Muslim woman. Nothing in her life resembled the way Olga lived. But Zehra somehow understood everything, and if there was ever anyone to whom Olga spelled out the pain of her life, to whom she explained why she had married Franjo Rejc, it was Zehra. Their friendship would be deep and lifelong, but its content would remain a secret. We can only guess what she saw in Zehra, and why she would remember her sunny yellow floor and talk about it with such wistfulness up to her dying day – but why Olga was so important to Zehra, why this city girl, in many ways a foreigner, should remain Zehra’s dearest friend in life, we are still in no position to even imagine. Let alone the question of how she spoke about Olga to God. Of one thing I am certain: in Olga’s whole life there was no one who spoke to God about her – surrounded as she was by nonbelievers – as Zehra did.

From Bosowicz, as a family gift and signifier, Karlo Stubler brought along something that would last longer for us than any memory and that would be transmitted forward to a time when we no longer even knew his German language anymore – migraines. Most of his children and his children’s children would suffer from occasional intense headaches accompanied by visual and olfactory irritability, and the Stubler migraine, though less intense and growing rarer with age, would come to be my inheritance as well.

When Franjo would head off to work and Olga was left alone with her migraine and her two sons, who she found impossible to care for at times, she would lock herself in a darkened room and let them do as they pleased as long as they let her be.

They can break the dishes for all I care, I won’t say a word!

This was known to go on for days. She would lie in the dark, moaning, not suspecting, fortunately, that these migraine-filled days, weeks, and months, would be the best of her life.

Through the closed door the boys could be heard fighting.

You Kakanjan, Kakanjan! Mladen would say to Dragan.

Oh, yeah, you Usorian. Usorian…

Nona would listen and laugh, which would only make her migraine worse.

Ivo Baškarad and Mujo the Eternal

Both Christmas and Easter decorations were on display in the Stubler household, despite Opapa Karlo’s hardened atheism. He was areligious in the same way that some people are tone-deaf. Rationally he knew what God was supposed to be, and he didn’t object to either profound or superficial religiosity in his house, nor did he have anything against the Church or priests. In his soul he was and would remain a union man, committed to justice and equality for all, and in this was very well read, such that neither Marx nor Engels had escaped his attention, but his godlessness had no connection whatsoever to their writings. For Karlo Stubler religion was not the opiate of the masses but a plaything and waste of time, a folkloric celebration for the entertainment and consolation of a simple-minded people that he had nothing inherently against. In truth, it wasn’t just that Karlo didn’t believe in God, he didn’t believe that in today’s world, in which the provenance of lightning and thunder had been explained, in which it was known that the earth is round and orbits the sun, that the tides rise and fall in connection with the moon’s gravitation, that there really could exist people who still believed in God. From his perspective, the civilization of the West had been created by individuals, tribes, and peoples for whom it was important to act as though they believed in God. He had nothing against this, nor would he have fought in any sort of revolution against the Church, against faith or superstition. To him this battle simply did not seem serious, and perhaps that is why Karlo Stubler, despite his convictions and thorough reading, never became a communist.

Years after he’d retired, after the Second World War, he would sometimes briefly lose consciousness. During the afternoon siesta, he’d be sitting beneath the thick crown of a walnut tree, watching the people pass by along Kasindol Street, or he’d be in the midst of a lively conversation, after spending a long time sorting small pieces of wood to make a medicine chest, when he would suddenly stop, go silent, tune out – and everyone around him would hold up and wait.

There was an accident, two trains collided…

Or:

A train flew down into the Neretva River…

Or:

A train jumped the tracks…

All we had to do was turn on the wireless radio, wait for its green eye to light up, and we would hear the details of the accident. Opapa was never wrong. In the thirty years he lived in Bosnia after being exiled from Dubrovnik, he grew quiet like this five or six times, zoned out, disappeared, as if some gentle epilepsy had carried him off for a moment, and he would always come back with a frightening report, and each time it would be confirmed on the news. Karlo Stubler witnessed train wrecks that took place hundreds of kilometers away. This made him uncomfortable on every occasion, because he didn’t believe in superstition or in prophecy.

Gypsies will examine your palm for spare change, women after their morning coffee will turn over their demitasses to read each other’s fortune in the patterns of the grounds, old crones, before wars and after they were over, once tossed beans across rough-trimmed wooden tables to discover whether brothers and sons who’d disappeared would come back, and a certain Russian who was rumored to have been lady-in-waiting at the court from the house of Romanov – half of Ilidža thought that women of the court were actually upscale tsarist whores, while the other half, better educated and more cultured, said with a certain disdain for the former that women of the court were in fact countesses – flawlessly read the past and future of Ilidža’s pluckier inhabitants from her cards, which resembled those used for rummy and schnapsen except instead of gendarmes and kings printed on them there were people being hanged, court jesters, and Death with a rusty Turkish scythe. To anyone who had the courage to pay her, Liudmila would say when and from what illness death would come. It was said that just after the war Ivo Baškarad dutifully paid to have her tell him just one thing – where he was destined to die. In Ilidža, prophesied the Russian. Really? Ilidža? Yes, really. Ilidža.

The very same day Ivo Baškarad picked up the things he most needed from home, said goodbye to his family, and left for Sarajevo, never to return to Ilidža. When or how Ivo Baškarad died is no longer remembered.

Karlo Stubler smiled at all this good-naturedly. He transcended it all peacefully, not believing either the Gypsy women, or Liudmila, or the grounds in overturned demitasses, and we attributed his lack of belief to the fact that great-grandpa was a Swabian. And Swabians were, it appeared, rational people who didn’t even believe in themselves without solid proof, who dealt with facts rather than wasting their time. True enough, and through him we too were German, but something of Bosnia and Ilidža had caught hold of us, clung to us and started to accumulate inside us, so we believed in everything others believed in. We would become Swabians only when others wanted to make it known we weren’t the same as them.

So how then did Karlo Stubler reconcile his godlessness and firm disbelief in any form of superstition with the fact that he would every once in a while lose consciousness and see a train wreck happening? Was it perhaps from low blood pressure? Or had he never got over the fact of having been dismissed from the railroad, which had been everything to him in his life, so that to that very day he would see a collision of trains with the same eyes as a train dispatcher whose negligence had led to an accident? We would support his theory, and he’d calm down, believing, together with all of us, that those born and yet to be born, that everything before us, had arisen from tiny, almost meaningless, physiological disturbances.

Fathers wake up at night in fear. They check to be sure their sons and daughters haven’t stopped breathing. But train dispatchers dream their whole life of the collisions caused by their mistake, two trains finding themselves on the same track. Karlo of course never was a dispatcher, he was a stationmaster.

Opapa was second sighted. And his second sight touched only upon trains and the railroad. He had no insight into our future lives. He did not see the time, not very far off, when there would no longer be any Stublers or Stubler descendants in Sarajevo or Bosnia. What little that remained of his lineage would be hidden within other family names, spread across the earth, drowning and disappearing amid the fates of strangers and foreign identities.

Likewise, Opapa was unable to foresee the destinies of his Banat relations, the brother who disappeared and the entire extinct world in which, long ago, the Stublers had been born. He was silent about them, and this silence was their only known grave – he did not see them while they were disappearing, neither in his dreams nor in reality. And he was quite convinced that a person could not see what was not present before him, or indicate the past or future with his eyes closed. Nevertheless, he saw railway wrecks more clearly than Liudmila the Russian saw the time and place of Ivo Baškarad’s death. It seemed that of all