Atentat

K R P A R A

It was October 1934, the month of my 13th birthday and the forthcoming Bar Mitzvah, which I dreaded. My cousin Mauricio, also13, was much better at the preparations and I knew I’d flop because I didn’t like to study. It came true, and I detested him, the striver.
Birthdays were no big deal in my family – we didn’t celebrate them, as we also didn’t wear jewelry, play cards for money (well, maybe for pennies – at which my mother cheated so transparently, we always had a good laugh.) My mother also wore a brooch here and there and an occasional pearl necklace, miniature diamond-studded watch with a black grosgrain band to match her impeccable dressers. She was a fashion plate, having worn slinky flapper silks and cloche hats in the 20-es and their couture descendants thereafter. She always had a two inch wide band of white in her coal black hair – you couldn’t mistake her for anyone else a mile away.
My black sheep cousin Izi woke me up because they killed King Alexander and we had to go out and do something about it. The King was visiting France, and was assassinated in Marseille by a shooter widely believed to have been a follower of the banned Croat Ustashe movement, then training in Yanka Pusta in Hungary. It was later rumored that he was a hired mercenary, and a Macedonian. They all had grievances against the monarchy ever since Alexander disbanded the Parliament and abolished the Constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1924.
Izi was a factor in every scrap in town, be they gang fights, one-on-one duels, ethnic demonstrations, you name it. He often hid a gun under his mattress, and had been jailed for things. His father had left my mother’s sister to raise their two sons alone, while he stated a new life and family in Uruguay. Izi was 18 month old when I was born and has exploited the age advantage over me ever since, grabbing the best morsels at the family table, pushing me around, using me as his Sancho Pansa in skirmishes with his enemies and generally enjoying his reign over me. His mother was doing dresses for people, and his older brother became a breadwinner at 19. representing an Austrian insurance company. His job later took him to Skopje, where he and his mother endured the first big earthquake of the 1930’s.
Perhaps I should also mention here that Izi was a resourceful individual. Once, when his mother and I assume the whole family, had enough of all the trouble he was causing, they sent him for repair to an island monastery off Dubrovnik. It was an island, and very far away, but Izi managed to show home in Sarajevo within a month. How did you do it? asked our uncle Isidor. “I am a patent man”, answered Izi. This was the uncle who traveled a lot and spoke languages, bachelor until he was 36. My mother used him for my education; she would send me up to his apartment with instructions were to tell him: “Regard moi le main”, at what point he had me go to the sink to wash my hands and face. It didn’t make much of a difference that I was repeatedly told how my mother had trouble keeping me clean, even for a short walk to a studio for a childhood photograph, dressed in a ruffled white blouse, black velvet shorts and patent leather buckle shoes with sagging white socks.
Both Izi and I were enrolled in the local Catholic school. I thought I was there because of him needed discipline, but may have used some myself. I loved Sister Salezia Habazin, of the Marymount Order, even after she had me kneeling on corn kernels for some reason that got erased from my memory. I do know the Church had something to do with the first and only beating my father administered: having searched for me when I didn’t show up and they couldn’t locate me for two hours, they spied me at the head of the Lent procession, carrying a flag. The beating had nothing to do with religion, but with the scare I had caused my parents. The memory of Sister Salezia Habazin followed me through my whole life: I remember being kind of proud when Eves Saint Laurent designed the new habits for her order in the 60’s.
Well, no one had ever figured Izi out. The same went for the other black sheep of the family, our second maternal uncle, Mavro. He was an imposing big-boned six-footer who never kept a job, but was lucky enough to be kept himself by a succession of abandoned maiden teachers. He did marry one of them at the end of his life, but even then grudgingly. He would talk bout her as a “she,” even when all that was left of their marriage was her tending to his ailments. What these women found in Mavro was anybody’s guess. From this vantage point I’d say he was good at sex.
As a child I kind of feared Mavro, and hated him because he treated my mother so brusquely. He was know to have nothing to eat for days, and then come into money and throw a 5 kilo piece of meat onto our kitchen table. Make it! he would command my mother, and devour the whole mound before disappearing again.
The day was brisk and chilly, as is usual in Sarajevo in October, but nice. There was a feeling of something brewing, of electricity on the streets. Soon enough, Izi, with me in tow, was at the head of flag waiving demonstrators, wowing eternal vengeance. When the mob started breaking windows and looting. Izi took me and a few other kids out of the path of the demonstrators, and showed us how to break into a candy machine. A stream of popular “505’s with a line across” fell out of the machine and we gorged ourselves. I trembled in my bed, long into the night.