Setting Free the Bears

THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II

I wonder where my stealthy father was when the Luftwaffe bombed the open city of Belgrade, without a declaration of war. I feel certain that Vratno wasn't observing any protocol either.

On 6 April 1941, Heinkels and Stukas were used simultaneously. The Wehrmacht pushed into Yugoslavia with thirty-three divisions, six of which were panzers and four of which were motorized. The aim was to march on Russia in mid-May, in the dry-weather season - when the roads would still be hard. So the German onslaught against this upstart revolution was fierce. So fierce that on 4 May Germany announced that the Yugoslav State was non-existent. But on 10 May, Colonel Drazha Mihailovich and his band of wild Chetniks hoisted the Yugoslav flag on the mountain of Ravna Gora. Mihailovich and his freedom fanatics went on doing that kind of thing all summer.

Oh, stories got told, you know, how Croat quislings and other Yugoslav capitulators marched with the Germans, hunting down Chetniks. How the Chetniks would disguise themselves as Croat quislings and appear to be hunting for themselves. How Mihailovich was a magician in the mountains - potting Germans throughout Serbia, in fact, in watchful America, Time magazine voted Drazha Mihailovich Man of the Year. And the Communist press was most praiseworthy too. After all, the Germans didn't get to march on Russia in mid-May. They were delayed five weeks and they sloughed in on soggy roads. And they were no longer thirty-three divisions strong; between ten and twenty divisions were left behind as an occupying force - still hunting down those fanatical Chetniks.

But those were heroes, and I'm wondering where my father was. I suspect he summered in Jesenje, mastering the languages of likely victors - even learning the names of foreign wines and soups, brands of cigarettes and movie stars. Regardless, his whereabouts are unknown to me until the fall of '41, when Vratno Javotnik appeared in Slovenjgradec.

The city was full of capitulating Slovenes and Croats who felt reasonably secure to be occupied by Germany, and who resented the wildly resisting Serbs to the southeast. The only people my father had to fear in Slovenjgradec were a few uprooted Serbs. These called attention to themselves on 21 October 1941, by protesting the somewhat conflicting reports of the massacre at Kraguyevats, where - one broadcast said - 2300 Serbian men and boys were machine-gunned in retaliation for 10 German soldiers killed by Chetniks, and 26 Germans also sniped but only wounded; another broadcast said that at least 3400 Serbs were shot, which would have been in excess of the retaliation number promised by Germany to combat Chetnik sniping - that is, 100 Serbs per German killed, and 50 Serbs per German wounded.

Whichever broadcast was correct, the women folk of Kraguyevats were digging graves from Wednesday to Sunday, and Slovenjgradec, at least, was generally pacified to learn that the Germans had presented the Kraguyevats Town Council with 380,000 dinars for the poor. Who were just about everyone after the massacre. Oddly, the amount of the German donation was estimated to be slightly less than half of what 2000 to 3000 dead Serbian men and boys might have had in their pockets.

But the Kraguyevats massacre had all of Slovenjgradec outdoors anyway. Just to hear the conflicting broadcasts and to catch the sentiment of the city from sidewalk talk. In fact, the massacre brought people out in public who might otherwise have stayed aloof.

Namely, my father - out listening to dialects of his native Serbo-Croat, and picking up various German colloquialisms from cafe to cafe.

And namely, the entire Slivnica family horde, as they were known - dreaded fiends, all of them, enlisted in the service of the Ustashi terrorist organization, supposedly headed by the fascist Ante Pavelich. It was a hireling of Pavelich's, we're all told, who assassinated King Alexander and French Foreign Minister Barthou in Marseilles in '34.

Fascist Italy was reportedly behind the Ustashi end of this organization; Yugoslavia's neighbors were known to take advantage of the endless tiff between Serbs and Croats. But the Slivnica family horde were Ustashi terrorists of a special kind. Oh, the terror they waged wasn't in the least political; they were simply well fed for their work. In fact, they were feeding when Vratno encountered them, although it was only the lovely Dabrinka who first caught my father's eye.

The Slivnicas were at a long table at an outdoor terrace restaurant above the Mislinja River. Fair Dabrinka was pouring the wine for her two sisters and four brothers. Her sisters were nothing to what Vratno saw in Dabrinka. Only squat, circle-mouthed Baba, and the sulky, melon-round Julka. Dabrinka was a creature with lines and bones - more features than flesh, my father was fond of saying. Dabrinka was a cool, slim trickle - more the green stem than the flower. My father thought she was a waitress, and never guessed her to be a member of that most thick family she served.

One table away, Vratno raised his empty glass to her. 'My girl,' he said. 'Would you fill me up?' And Dabrinka hugged the wine decanter; she turned away. The Slivnica menfolk turned to my father the linguist, now speaking Serbo-Croat. My father felt the wrath. Oh yes. Four of them: the sturdy twins, Gavro and Lutvo; Bijelo, the eldest - and leader - and terrible Todor, body-awesome.

'What shall we fill you up with?' Bijelo asked.

'Nails?' said Todor. 'Or ground glass?'

'Oh, you're all one family,' my father cried. 'Oh yes, I see.'

For the resemblance was striking among them all, excluding Dabrinka. She had their olive-black and green color only in her eyes, but not their quickly sloping-away foreheads and nothing of the family swarth. Not the flat, pounded cheeks - which even Baba and Julka had - and not the twins' close-together eye slits. Not the exaggerated dimples of Bijelo the eldest; not a bit of the bulk of her big brother Todor, and not his cleft chin, either - the imagined tool work of hours with a rat's-tail file.

'Seven of you!' said my father. 'My, what a big family!' Thinking: What inconceivable twosome could ever have mated and conceived them?

'Do you know us?' Bijelo asked. The twins sat mum and shook their heads; Baba and Julka licked their lips, trying to remember; Dabrinka blushed through her blouse; Todor hulked.

'I'd be honored,' my father said, in ordinary Serbo-Croat; he faltered to his feet. Then in German he said, 'It would be my pleasure.' And in English: 'Happy to know you, I'm sure.' And in the Mother Russian tongue, hoping to arouse possible pan-Slav sympathies: 'Extraordinarily glad!'

'He's a linguist!' said Todor.

'A linguist,' Bijelo said.

'He's sort of nice,' said Baba.

'Just a youngster,' Julka breathed, while Lutvo and Gavro still sat mum.

'And you don't know us from somewhere?' said the leader Bijelo.

'But I hope to,' my father said, in his straightest Serbo-Croat.

'Bring your wineglass over,' Bijelo commanded.

'Perhaps,' said Todor, 'we could powder the rim of your glass into the finest possible bits, and let you sip the glass dust down?'

'That's enough humor, Todor,' Bijelo said.

'I only wondered,' said Todor, 'what language he would speak with glass dust in his larynx.'