Our Man from Osijek

Being a true and faithful account of the mission of Deputy Section Head Emil Barišić to the Zagreb Land, in the autumn of the year 2054

Tibor Kovačić Short story. Zagreb County, autumn 2054.

I. In which a man is entrusted with three papers and one piece of advice

In Osijek they will tell you that Emil Barišić was chosen for the Zagreb mission because he was the most patient man in the Directorate for Registry Harmonization. In Zagreb they will tell you he was chosen because he was the youngest, and the Ministry did not like to waste its patient men.

Both accounts are correct, which is the usual condition of accounts.

Barišić was thirty-four, a Deputy Section Head, the son of a Vinkovci stationmaster, and the owner of a very good grey suit which had been made, as everything in his life had been made, by machine. He believed in the machine the way his grandmother had believed in Saint Anthony: not noisily, but completely, and with the quiet expectation that lost things would be found.

The Minister received him for four minutes, which in Osijek is a long time, since the Minister’s calendar was administered by a scheduling system that regarded human conversation as a form of leakage.

“Three matters,” said the Minister, holding up three fingers so that the matters should not escape. “First: the Instrument on Quarterly Remittance. The County pays us once a year, in a lump, like a peasant paying his priest, and we cannot audit a single kuna of it. You will obtain their seals on the quarterly schedule. Second: the registers. Births, deaths, marriages. They keep them in ledgers, Barišić. In ink. We require certified duplicates in transmissible form. Third—” and here the Minister’s voice changed, dropping out of the national interest into something older and softer, “—there is a parish in Zelina. Sveti Ivan. My grandmother was baptized there in 1961. I should like the certificate. For the family.”

“Yes, Minister.”

“One piece of advice. They will not refuse you anything. Remember that refusal is not the danger.”

Barišić did not understand this remark, and would spend six weeks coming to understand it, which is the correct length of time, and the subject of this story.

II. The line, and what the customs man said

The electric train from Osijek runs west as far as the outer line in five hours, humming, lit, refrigerated, and certain of itself. At the transfer market it stops, because beyond that point the world has been asked to be quiet, and the world, for once in its history, has obeyed.

At the line Barišić surrendered his devices. This is done at a long oak counter by men with the ceremonial gravity of sacristans. His tablet — the whole Directorate in a slab of glass, the registers of four million Croats, his correspondence, his music, a photograph of a woman in Đakovo about whom this story will be tactfully silent — was powered fully down, its power cell isolated, inventoried, printed, wrapped in oiled paper, sealed with red wax, and deposited in a numbered lock box behind the counter.

“It will keep,” said the customs man, an elderly Zagorec with a moustache like two grey squirrels at rest. “Wax is honest. It only opens once.”

“The seal is hardly the point,” said Barišić. “The device won’t function across the line anyway.”

“No,” the customs man agreed comfortably. “But a thing should be told when it is going to sleep. Otherwise it worries.”

He stamped a numbered deposit chit and slid it across the counter. Barišić folded it into his journal and did not take the device with him.

Barišić noted in his travel journal — a paper journal, issued to him with some ceremony by the Directorate, as one issues snowshoes — that superstition regarding electronics was prevalent at the line. What he did not note, because he had not yet learned to see it, was that the customs man had been making a joke, and that the joke had been at his expense, and that it had been made with love, the way one teases a nephew who has arrived from far away wearing remarkable shoes.

Beyond the counter began the other Croatia: porters, horses, the smell of warehouses, oats, tar, wet wool, and paper — above all paper, for on the far side of that counter paper is not a record of the world but the world’s actual working machinery. A clerk with ink to the elbows was calling out cargo numbers in a voice trained to carry over animals. Two Bosnian carters were arguing about an axle in a language that was three languages. A Hungarian innkeeper’s boy from the Zala side was selling coffee that smelled like an ambush.

Barišić took the horse tram.

III. Concerning the horse tram, and the between-born clerk

The horse tram from the line runs along the old rail corridor into the city in something under a day, with stops that are announced not by station but by kitchen: “Sesvete — good soup”; “Dugo Selo — the widow Horvat’s beds, get down here if you value your spine.”

Opposite Barišić sat a young clerk of the Courier Union, perhaps twenty, with the Union’s brass seal on a cord around her neck, going home to Zagreb from Brežice. Her name was Anica. She had been born in 2033 and had therefore never in her life seen a room light itself.

She examined his deposit chit — the numbered proof that his tablet was sleeping in the lock boxes at the line — with the frank interest of a naturalist.

“Good,” she said. “We don’t want them waking here.”

“They say the doors open by themselves over there,” she said. “Is it true?”

“In the newer buildings. The door sees you coming.”

Anica considered this with the seriousness it deserved.

“And if the door doesn’t like you?”

“The door doesn’t have opinions.”

“Then it isn’t seeing you,” she said, satisfied, and went back to her Union manifests. “It’s only counting you.”

Barišić opened his journal, wrote Note: local attitudes toward automation are, and then sat for a long while without finishing the sentence, watching dead towers go by with pigeons in their upper storeys and cabbages at their feet, and the dark tram wires overhead holding up nothing but swallows.

IV. In which everything is granted and nothing occurs

At Zagreb, Barišić was received magnificently. Let no one say the County does not know how to receive an official of the state. The župan himself, Valent Krznarić — a broad, mild, walnut-colored man who had been a Vrbovec miller and still had a miller’s habit of weighing whatever he was handed, including sentences — came down the steps of the county house, embraced him, called him naš čovek iz Osijeka, our man from Osijek, and lodged him with the widow Tereza Fabijanec on Opatička street, where the beds were fatal to ambition and the plum dumplings were fatal to everything else.

On the second day Barišić presented the Instrument on Quarterly Remittance.

The župan read it through twice, nodding warmly at every paragraph, the way one nods at a well-built fence on another man’s land.

“Beautiful,” he said at last. “A beautiful instrument. You will want the seals.”

“The Ministry requests the County’s seal, yes.”

“Which one?”

Barišić blinked. “The County has… several?”

“Well, there is my seal,” said the župan, laying a hand on it modestly, “but of course I may not seal alone — an instrument touching relations with the state wants three seals at least, that is the constitution, we are very strict — so you will want the convenor of the Table of People, who is in bed with his lumbago, poor Šimek, the damp got into him at the flood works; and the convenor of the Table of Places, who is Imbra Pogačić of Mraclin, and Imbra is at the hay.”

“At the hay,” repeated Barišić.

“The second cutting. He’ll be back for the pig fair, God willing. And then, since the instrument concerns money, the Steward of Grain and Roads must review it, and since it must be reviewed it must first be rendered — you understand — because a County act must be posted and read, and it cannot be posted and read until it exists in the Kajkavian rendering, and old Weiss’s press has the rendering office, but Weiss’s best translator is at his niece’s wedding in Zala.”

“In Hungary.”

“In Zala,” the župan corrected gently, as one corrects a man who has called a cousin a foreigner. “Ten days, perhaps twelve, if the roads hold. But you are not to worry,” he added, seeing something in Barišić’s face, and he leaned forward and patted the Instrument as though soothing it. “Nothing has been refused. You will notice that nothing has been refused.”

Nothing had been refused. Barišić noticed it for six weeks.

V. The rendering, and what became of one sentence

Old Weiss’s printing house stood in the lower town behind the cathedral precinct, and it printed, in order of volume: the market price sheets, the Courier Union manifests, the theatre bills, three newspapers, the salvage bulletins, a Kajkavian serial novel of criminal sentimentality which the whole County was reading aloud to itself, and — when there was ink to spare — the acts of the state.

Weiss was eighty and had set type through the Withdrawal by candlelight while the world argued about whose fault it was. He received Barišić’s Instrument with respect and read it standing, which was his form of prayer.

At the fourth paragraph he stopped.

“Here,” he said. “‘The contribution shall be brought into conformity with national fiscal normality.’ Normality.” He looked at Barišić over his spectacles. “In the rendering, what would you like normality to be?”

“Normality is normality.”

“Ah,” said Weiss, “but whose? If I render it as navadnost — the way things are usually done — then the Table of Places will read it and say: excellent, the way things are usually done here is a bulk payment after the winter account, we are already in conformity, seal it. And if I render it as the Osijek way of doing things, which is what your Ministry means, then it is honest, but then it must go to Clearance review, because an instrument that names one government’s custom as the measure of another’s touches the constitutional relation. Six months, that. Longer, if the Sava floods.”

Barišić stood in the smell of ink and lead and felt, for the first time, the precise weight of the Minister’s advice. Refusal is not the danger.

“What do you suggest?” he heard himself say.

“I am a printer,” said Weiss placidly, distributing type with two fingers like a man dealing cards to old friends. “I suggest nothing. But my late wife used to say: when a word will not cross a river, send its cousin.”

The cousin that was eventually sent — after three evenings at the widow Fabijanec’s table, at which Weiss, the Orthodox veterinarian doktor Milovan, and Ibrahim-efendija the cobbler all happened to drop in, and all happened to have views, and all happened to express them while eating Barišić’s landlady’s dumplings — was the phrase pravovremeno i pošteno: “timely and honest.” Everyone agreed the contribution should be timely and honest. Everyone had always agreed on that. It was, doktor Milovan observed, raising his glass, the kind of phrase a man could seal with a whole heart.

Barišić had a dim sensation that the fourth paragraph had died in his arms and been replaced by a healthy local child. But the child smiled at him, and he was tired, and the plum brandy was very good.

VI. In which the state’s authority is borrowed, like a good umbrella

It must not be thought that Barišić’s authority counted for nothing in the Zagreb Land. On the contrary: it was a valued article, and like all valued articles in the County it was kept dry, used carefully, and returned in good condition.

In his third week, the market council sent for him.

The market council of the lower town met in a hall above the Dolac, and it was presided over by Mara Šimunić, a Posavina widow of such executive gravity that the fire watch set its clocks by her, and the fire watch of Zagreb is the most disciplined institution between Vienna and the sea, because a city of lamps has exactly one theological certainty, and it is fire.

“Gospon Barišić,” said Mara Šimunić, “you are an official of the national government.”

“I am, gospa.”

“Good. We have a warehouse steward in the eastern corridor — I will not say his name, his name is Grga Cindrić — who has been weighing grain with a thumb on the scale, and the thumb has been getting fatter since the Assumption. Now, we could take him before the road court, but his brother-in-law sits on it, and we could take him before the Table of Places, but that is a cannon for a sparrow. What we would like,” and here she folded her hands like a woman concluding a novena, “is for you to inspect him.”

“Gospa Šimunić, I have no jurisdiction over County warehouses. The Osijek Articles—”

“Bless you, we know that,” said Mara Šimunić warmly. “He doesn’t.”

And so it was that on a bright October morning, Deputy Section Head Emil Barišić of the Directorate for Registry Harmonization walked the length of the Cindrić warehouse in his machine-made grey suit, opening ledgers at random, saying “hm,” and writing in a paper notebook things which were in fact his observations on Kajkavian verb endings; while behind him Grga Cindrić turned the color of whey and mentally re-weighed every sack since the Assumption; and behind him two women of the market council followed with the serene faces of cherubs at an execution.

Nothing was seized. Nothing was charged. Barišić said “hm” once more at the door, thanked the steward for his cooperation, and left.

By Sunday the missing grain had returned to the widows’ ration store by night, the way frost leaves a window — no one saw it go, but there was the glass, clear.

“You see,” Mara Šimunić told her council, “the state is a useful thing. Like a constable. You don’t want him living in the house. But it’s good if the burglars know the family dines with him.”

This remark reached Barišić, as all remarks in the County eventually reached everyone, the newspapers being slow but the widow Fabijanec being not. He wrote it in his journal. Then, after some thought, he did not cross it out.

VII. The registers, or: the mountain comes to Muhammad, and is fed

On the matter of the registers, Barišić achieved what his final report would describe as “a substantive interim arrangement,” and what the County’s Vjesnik zagrebačke zemlje would describe, in a small item between the pig fair results and a poem, as “a visit.”

The parishes and municipalities of the Zagreb Land keep their books doubled: one copy in the parish or the town hall, one in the county archive, both in ink, both signed, both — as the archivist showed him, not without tenderness — annotated in the margins with the things machines do not think to keep. Twins; the second lived. Drowned at the flood works; the municipality owes the widow a cow. Married in Maribor; the banns were read in both places; God will sort out the jurisdiction.

“You may have certified duplicates,” said the archivist, “with joy. We will copy them by hand, on good paper, in both languages. It will take four years.”

“The Ministry had hoped for transmissible form.”

“Everything here is transmissible,” said the archivist. “It goes by cart.”

In the end the arrangement was this: Osijek would send six clerks of its own each summer to copy what it liked; the County would lodge them, feed them, and — the archivist added this clause himself, with a straight face fit for the closing chapter of Weiss’s criminal serial — teach them the abbreviations. Barišić recognized, dimly, that the state had just agreed to send the County six young people a year to be fed dumplings and married off to local girls. He initialed it anyway. He had been in Zagreb five weeks; he knew a good clause when he ate one.

VIII. Zelina, and the third matter

The third matter he had saved, as one saves the sweet.

He went out to Zelina in November, riding in a wine cart through the northern vineyards, where the between-born were singing at the pressing in a Kajkavian so thick that the vowels had to be helped over the fences. The parish of Sveti Ivan stood among walnut trees, and its priest, Father Blaž, was in the churchyard arguing with a Slovenian bell founder about a crack that both of them privately loved, because it gave them something to argue about.

Barišić presented his request: a baptismal certificate, 1961, one Katarina, later grandmother to a minister of the Croatian state.

Father Blaž did not consult a ledger. He went into the sacristy and came out in four minutes — a minister’s audience — with the certificate already copied fair, sealed, and folded, and with a jar of honey.

“You knew I was coming,” said Barišić.

“The whole road knew you were coming, my son; you have been coming for six weeks; the newspapers have made you quite a serial.” The priest tied the honey with string. “I knew Katarina’s daughter. The honey is for the Minister. Tell him the walnut trees his grandmother climbed are still standing, and that he may come and climb them, and that no instrument is required.”

It was the only one of the three matters accomplished entirely, immediately, and without amendment; and Barišić understood, standing in the walnut churchyard with the honey under his arm, that it had succeeded precisely because it had been asked for as what it was — a favor between people — and not as what the other two had pretended to be, which was arithmetic.

He did not put this in his report. He put it in a letter to the woman in Đakovo, which is where such discoveries belong.

IX. The autumn session, and the seals

The Table of Places came in from the land after the slaughter, smelling of smoke and horse, and the autumn session convened, and the winter account was read aloud — an hour and a half of grain, hay, fuel, and the dead, listened to in a silence that Osijek’s parliament has not achieved since the Withdrawal — and then, in the good humor of a county that had eaten and could prove it, the Instrument on Quarterly Remittance came to the floor.

It passed. Let it be recorded plainly, for Barišić’s sake: it passed.

It passed with the fourth paragraph in its rendered form (“timely and honest”); with the quarterly schedule “adopted in principle, implementation to be studied by a joint commission after the winter account” — that is to say, adopted the way one adopts a resolution to rise early; with payment permitted “in national currency or in instruments convertible thereto,” a phrase into which the entire grain-certificate system walked upright without stooping; and with a preamble, inserted by Imbra Pogačić of Mraclin, of the plemenitaši of Turopolje, whose ancestors had been arguing with kings on this precise question since the year 1225 and had the parchments to prove it, affirming “the ancient and continuing loyalty of the Zagreb Land to the Croatian crown, state, and name, in whichever order the reader prefers.”

Three seals were affixed: the župan’s, the Table of People’s (Šimek rose from his lumbago for the occasion and everyone applauded the lumbago), and the Table of Places’.

Then Mara Šimunić came forward, uninvited and unhurried, and put the market council’s seal on it as well.

“That one is not required,” whispered the county notary.

“The constitution asks for three seals,” said Mara Šimunić. “The market asks for a fourth, or the flour stays in the corridor.”

Barišić watched her press it down and thought of the warehouse at Cindrić, and of borrowed umbrellas, and did not put this in his report either.

X. In which reports are written, and the truth is told twice

Barišić crossed the line in December. At the transfer market the same customs man drew his tablet from the lock box, broke the wax, and the device woke, and four hundred notifications fell on Barišić like snow off a roof, and he stood there letting them, thinking of a churchyard in Zelina.

His report to the Ministry stated that the Instrument had been adopted and sealed; that the registers would be duplicated by an ongoing joint arrangement; that the private commission had been discharged; and that “the County’s attachment to Croatia is not in doubt, though it is in translation.” The Minister read this last phrase twice, decided it was a compliment to the state, and promoted him.

The Vjesnik zagrebačke zemlje reprinted the phrase three weeks later — the courier having brought the Osijek gazette by way of two floods and a christening — under the heading: OUR MAN FROM OSIJEK UNDERSTANDS US; COMMISSION TO STUDY WHETHER THIS SETS A PRECEDENT.

And the honey?

The Minister kept the jar on his desk for a year and told visitors it was from his grandmother’s village, which was true; and that the village was in Croatia, which was true; and that the state’s writ ran there, which was — well…

The walnut trees are still standing. The certificate is in the family Bible. The quarterly commission has not yet met; it is waiting, they say in Mraclin, for the hay.

But it is all well, for in Zagreb Land hay always arrives in its due time.