My life Miljenko Jergović, writer

the Banat region. And everything else in her family was equally complicated and mixed, such that it could be said that she was a typical child of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

“From the upbringing I received from them, I was left with a kind of detachment, withdrawn nature and non-aggressiveness. And some learned sense that this is not my city and this is not my world, and these aren’t my people. That’s something I’ve carried with me from an early age, and which has often caused me all sorts of social problems, but, unfortunately, that’s ultimately exactly how it turned out. In the end, both my life and my world turned out just as Nono and Nona told me they would.”

Responding to the observation that his literary work, particularly the vivisection of his family relationships, is capable of irritating the public, he offers a simple explanation:

“Literature is actually writing about something that is either impossible to write about or shouldn’t be written about. That’s because it’s actually meaningless to write about something that’s easy to write about, can be written about and everyone recommends as a topic to write about. One writes about what should not be written about or discussed.”

It was almost thirteen years ago that he published the novel The Father, which is actually a story about his own father that received very fierce public reactions.

“That had a slightly scandalous effect, but to me there was nothing scandalous about it. I didn’t intend to cause any scandals; I had no intention of provoking anyone. That was a story about my father, about my life, about the times I lived through. In an attempt to hide it from people who might take it the wrong way, I published the book in Belgrade [published by Rende]. That was a targeted move, as I counted on it going unnoticed among some malicious and ill-intentioned people in Zagreb. However, that just made it even worse.”

Miljenko’s father, Dobro, was a respected, highly-rated and beloved doctor in Sarajevo, and in his son’s eyes, he was “a great doctor, and that fact made up for everything that he was incapable of being in life. For him, medicine and his mission compensated fully for everything else. And that’s generally not an uncommon human trait.”

His mother, Javorka, was the most beloved character at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, where she worked as head of the accounting department.

“Unlike my father, she was extremely sociable, and all beyond the confines of the home. It was decidedly glooming in the house, which was a combination of being unfulfilled in life and emotionally, due to the huge burden of her poor relationship with her parents. She lived as though life had betrayed all her expectations and she was annoyed with her own life and all those who she felt stood in her way in that life. She was essentially an extremely problematic mother. There were moments and periods in her life when she didn’t shy away from showing me that I’d ruined her life’s journey in a certain way.”

As an educated and intelligent woman, Miljenko’s mother understood the way literature functions perfectly. She also understood her own role as a character in literature: “It is interesting how much could be written about her without her taking it personally.”

Jergović’s many stories, novels, essays and columns have been subjected to numerous comments, from shows of admiration to the casting of aspersions. His spiritual path, often teetering on the brink of the abyss, has prompted emotionally intoned judgements among readers and critics alike, but he didn’t reflect on them too much. Is that an integral part of his personality, or did he try a little harder to publicly communicate things that most would prefer not to mention?

“I think that’s a combination; that it relates very strongly to the certain kind of ‘outsiderness’ from which I emerged. Outsider in the broadest possible sense. For instance, you live in a multi-ethnic community like Sarajevo, while at the same time your origins are extremely complicated compared to that multi-ethnic community, and even extremely problematic in a political identity, ideological sense. And that was particularly so in Sarajevo, which was a pretty dark corner of Yugoslavia at that time, because various services were very fond of using such things to blackmail people. And I was, in a way, a child of enemies of the people. My parents weren’t enemies of the people, but rather loyal Party members, but my paternal grandmother had been a member of the fascist Ustasha Youth, and my mother’s much older brother had served as a German soldier in World War II. That knowledge had been present in the house and discourse with the external world was adjusted according to it, firstly towards the first neighbourhood, and then towards everything. There was fear over what someone would say, who would report whom, what that information could mean somewhere.”

Miljenko developed an aware of this early on. He belonged to the ‘lucky generation’ of children who were left home alone by their parents and grandparents.

“Nona would go to the market, I would somehow get out of having to go with her, and as soon as she’s was out of the door, I would start rummaging through their drawers in search of documents, in search of secrets. I started doing that when I was eight or nine years old. Before the age of ten, I’d discovered the dark secret of my elder uncle. It is today impossible to explain what a shocking thing that was for me. It’s like finding out that your uncle was a salamander, that he didn’t belong to the human race. I think that was the moment that marked the start of my great interest in such things.

“As for my paternal grandmother, she has been the ultimate villain since I was born. A very dark woman who I quickly learnt was actually an Ustasha woman. That was somehow perfectly logical to me, given all the other negatives about her. That remained a reflex of mine as an adult. For example, today, as an older man, I often wonder whether my deep-rooted intolerance of the Ustasha and domestic traitors contains something completely personal that’s much more intimate than nationalism and historical facts.”

Survivors always have a right. And that marks the emergence of deep injustice, which is blind to its victims. Since the war, Sarajevo has been a city where the survivors often suffered more than those who took the bullets. While everything resembled an idyllic place unstained by blood, Miljenko grew up in Mejtaška Mahala, or the Mejtaš Quarter, with this toponym also finding its place in his literature.

“Mejtaš is a small crossroads in Sarajevo that’s slightly elevated above the city. A steep street leads up t it, and extending from there is a series of steep and very steep streets. These are some of the sunny slopes of the city. There was a Muslim cemetery and mosque there until about eighty years ago, when they disappeared. Those graveside monuments, or tombstones, were carried off somewhere, the plateau was asphalted and covered by streets. The mosque burned down during the 1920s, with a grocery shop built on the site later, after World War II.

“The word mejtaš itself refers to the stone on which the deceased is placed before the funeral, or Islamic burial. It’s a kind of stone catafalque. Mejt means corpse and taš means stone. The neighbourhood itself consists of a square and a dozen surrounding streets and alleys. This was the place where I grew up in Sarajevo. At the same time, I also had the privilege, or misfortune, of having two parallel upbringings. I grew up as a little Bosnian and Sarajevo native in Mejtaš, and as a Dalmatian at Nono and Nona’s place in Drvenik, where I’d spent eight months of each year until starting school. So, as a kid I changed identities on a seasonal basis, which seems bizarre, but it was a huge difference. I was both identities, but actually neither.”

What is certain is that, in Sarajevo, he lived and grew up in a passionately traditionalist urban environment. This awakened in him a lifelong preference for those parts of cities that preserve something a little older, from a little earlier. That’s also why, in Belgrade, he and Ana have been staying with the same landlord for about fifteen years, in the same flat, in the same place on the corner of the former Đura Đakovića and Budimska streets, where it still smells like old Dorćol.

During the siege of Sarajevo, Miljenko spent a year and a half in his hometown, before abandoning it.

“That experience split my life in half, forming two separate and completely different lives. I wouldn’t say that I’ve changed, but I would have been someone completely different if it hadn’t been for that war. I would be writing something else, thinking about something else, living a completely different life. And I would live somewhere else. However, I didn’t leave of my own free will, but rather of the will of the war. And when you don’t leave of your own free will, you leave in a different way and the whole thing is experienced and lived differently. After such a departure, a person never feels the way they did before. One feels like someone who has been banished in one way or another; like someone who is a migrant, to use that modern word. In the meantime, between those two lives, those pre- and post-war lives, there is an entire decade that doesn’t belong to either, but rather marks a decade of waiting for things to be normal again.

“That’s because it takes a lot for a person to understand one terribly simple and selfexplanatory thing. And that is that things will never be normal again. I realised that around the year 2000 ago and developed the insight that I needed to live a different life.”

Prior to embarking on that quest for a new life, he was hit by the feeling of the impossibility of returning to Sarajevo. He hadn’t been to the city for almost five years, which was a longer period than the entire duration of the war. It is also a much longer period than when he didn’t come to Sarajevo during the ‘90s.

“There are naturally reasons why I would go to Sarajevo, but there are obviously much stronger reasons why I would not go to Sarajevo. And those reasons are of a very private and very intimate nature. A man simply doesn’t have to do certain things; he doesn’t have to participate in certain things, and he doesn’t have to attempt to turn back time by force and contrive his spaces and his cities where they no longer exist.”

Miljenko and Ana have long been living their second life. Their winter address has long been in Zagreb, while from April to October they reside in the countryside of Turopolje.

“At some point while living in our flat on the 16th floor of a Zagreb high-rise, around 15 years ago, we began fantasising about life in the countryside. I then realised that the last moment had arrived, because that could become too expensive in the next episode. Then Zagreb natives would also realise what Westerners have also been discovering: that it is better to live 20-odd kilometres from the city than in the city, and our fantasy would perish. Prices would then skyrocket and we’d have no chance. We then very ambitiously started searching for a house on the outskirts of the city until we found one. Partly with credit and partly with cash, we bought the weekend cottage of a socialist director 20 kilometres from Zagreb, from a gentleman who actually was a socialist director. We started living there and it was something sensational. That’s an excellent opportunity for a person to try to move out of their default context.”

There are few writers who write in the language of Ivo Andrić, and whose name is mentioned alongside Andrić’s as often as Miljenko’s. It is thus somehow normal to conclude this interview by asking him what Andrić means to him, apart from the fact, mentioned at the beginning of this article, that they attended the same Sarajevo secondary school.

“Ivo Andrić is our language’s most accomplished writer. And the greatest writer of our languages, whatever anyone might think of that. And the world of Ivo Andrić, his geographical world, the world of his cities, the world of his different religious-tribal and religious-national identities, actually aligns very precisely with my world. This isn’t something that’s crucial for literature, nor for the reader, but it is something that’s actually a big deal when it happens, a big deal in the most intimate sense. That gymnasium high school that Gavrilo Princip, Ivo Andrić and I attended, was solidly built, never subjected to interior renovation, and those same stairs and handrails that we all walked on have remained. We were schoolmates with a difference of over 60 years.

“Andrić is the writer of my world, and Andrić is the writer who wrote my world.”