The Family Secret Under Glass

For fifty years the medal sat in a frame of green velvet, first on the wall of my great-grandfather's kitchen, and from two thousand five in our restaurant, above the register, between a photograph of the destroyed bridge and the price list for roast lamb. Tour buses stopped at our place on their way to the coast, and while people crowded around the spit, the guides told them the story. My dad told it better than the guides. In March of forty-three, near Jablanica, nineteen-year-old Mursel Kulović carried three wounded comrades out of the icy Neretva, one by one. For that he received the Order for Bravery. The restaurant was called Brave Mursel's.

I barely remember my great-grandfather, I was four when he died. I remember him by his cane and by the fact that whenever he sat in the kitchen, he always kept his back to the wall with the frame. Everything else I know from the story. Every March the children from the school came to the restaurant to hear it, and the local television filmed my dad showing them the medal. Once, for a television crew from Zagreb, my dad even cried, at just the right moment, and that moment stayed in the story ever after. On the promenade along the river the municipality put up a bench with a small plaque bearing my great-grandfather's name. When I came back from Sarajevo to Jablanica after university to help at the restaurant, my dad taught me the story first, and only then the register.

One Wednesday in October, in the rain, a small car with Montenegrin plates parked in front of the restaurant. A woman of about fifty got out, in a rain jacket, and sat down alone at a table by the window. She ordered the lamb and barely touched it. She had short gray hair and a ring on her thumb, and while she ate, she got up twice, went closer to the wall and came back. She was looking at the medal. When she came up to pay, she asked me quietly, in that singsong accent, whether the frame opened. I said it never opened. "Then I can tell you what is written on the back," she said. "M. K. and three short lines. Under the middle line there is a scratch, because the needle slipped."

My dad was standing by the spit and heard everything. He came over, wiping his hands on his apron. "M. K. is Mursel Kulović," he said. "All of Jablanica knows that." The woman nodded, as if she had expected as much. "M. K. is also Milunka Krivokapić," she said. "My grandmother. She was a nurse. That night near Jablanica she pulled three wounded men out of the Neretva. One of them was a young man from here, with a head wound. His name was Mursel." She said her name was Vukosava, that her grandmother had died last year in Nikšić, at a hundred and one, and that before she died she had told her she had left the medal with a young man in Jablanica to keep for her until the spring of forty-eight. "The spring is long past," said Vukosava. "I have come to take it home."

My dad turned red to the tips of his ears. He said people make up all sorts of things when they hear about a famous medal, and that one should not play games with the dead. Vukosava did not argue. She laid a business card and an old photograph on the counter and went out to her car. The photograph showed a young woman in a partisan cap, with a Red Cross band on her sleeve, and next to her a skinny young man with a bandage around his head and big ears. My dad looked at that picture for a long time and said nothing. He saw those ears in the mirror every morning.

At the next table sat a tour guide from Mostar, waiting for his group to finish lunch, and he had heard everything. By evening a post had appeared on Facebook, and in the morning the Neretvanski Glasnik news site ran the headline: "Was Brave Mursel Brave?" At the market people looked at us differently. The neighbor from the end of the street, who had drunk coffee at our place for free for thirty years, announced in front of everyone that he had always suspected it. The school principal called to say the March visit was postponed until things were cleared up. An agency in Split canceled two buses. There were four hundred comments under the article, and my dad read every one of them, to the last, even though I begged him not to.

Nana Behka, my great-grandfather's daughter, lives above the restaurant and is seventy-six. My dad did not go up to see her, so I did. She was sorting beans for the next day's lunch. I put the photograph on the table, next to the bowl. She was not surprised. "I knew," she said. She spoke slowly, without stopping her work on the beans, as if she were giving me a recipe. Her father had told her in the hospital in Mostar, in his last week, in ninety-eight: "Behka, the medal is not mine. It belongs to the woman who pulled me out." She asked him why he had never said so. "They asked me whether I had received a medal," he said. "Nobody asked me from whom."

Nana told me the rest as well. In seventy-five a journalist came from Sarajevo to write about the anniversary of the battle, saw the medal in my great-grandfather's drawer and wrote a story about the three wounded men Mursel Kulović had carried out. My great-grandfather did not correct that story, but he did not confirm it either. He kept quiet, and in Jablanica keeping quiet has always counted as a yes. In the summer of forty-seven Milunka came to find him and stayed two months. Then her father fell ill and she had to go home, to look after the farm and her younger brothers. She left him the medal and said she would come back for it. For the whole of the following year, every Friday, my great-grandfather went out to the station when the train from Mostar came in. In forty-nine he married Nana's mother. "My mother knew," said Nana. "On Fridays she dusted that frame and never said a word."

That night I went down to the restaurant around midnight. My dad was sitting in the dark, and the frame lay in front of him on the table, next to a cup of coffee he had not even touched. "For thirty years I have been telling the same story," he said. "Do you know how many times I have said he carried out three men? A thousand times. And he was one of those three." I told him Nana had known. He did not ask why she had kept quiet. He knew why, because he would have kept quiet too.

Then he took the knife for the lamb and began prying the tiny nails out of the back of the frame. There were eight of them. Under the cardboard was the velvet, and under the velvet the medal. He turned it toward the lamp. M. K., three short lines and, under the middle one, a scratch. Between the velvet and the cardboard lay a folded piece of paper, as yellow as tobacco, written in my great-grandfather's large, unsteady letters: "If anyone ever comes from Milunka, give them this. It is not mine. M. K." My great-grandfather, Nana had told me, made the frame himself in seventy-five, a week after that article, and would not let anyone help him. My dad read the paper twice and laughed, tiredly. "He even signed it with the same letters."

In the morning he called Vukosava. She was still in Mostar, at a hotel, waiting, as she put it, for someone to call. We met by the destroyed bridge, where you can still see the Neretva through the iron that was left in the water. My dad put on his good jacket, and I drove, because his hands were shaking. He carried the medal in a baklava box from the pastry shop, because we had no other box. He gave her the box and my great-grandfather's note. Vukosava read the note and cried, the first person in this whole story to do so. Then she told my dad to keep the photograph. "Grandma had another one," she said. "The same. She kept it by her bed." She opened the box only after she had gotten into her car. Through the window I saw her turn the medal over and feel for the scratch with her finger.

A week later my dad had a sign painter take one word off the board above the door. The restaurant is now called Mursel's. In the spot where the frame used to be hangs Vukosava's photograph, framed, and under it a card my dad wrote himself: "Milunka Krivokapić and Mursel Kulović, the Neretva, March 1943. She pulled him out." The photograph is smaller than the frame, so around it a lighter rectangle shows on the wall, where the medal hung for twenty years.

The Neretvanski Glasnik wrote a second article, a shorter one, and under it there were only sixty comments. The agency in Split brought its buses back. Nana came down to the restaurant, for the first time in many years, and stood in front of the photograph for a long time. The children from the school came in March after all. My dad told them the story by the spit, as always, but he no longer says that my great-grandfather carried out three men. He says he was one of the three, and that he was pulled out of the water by a girl from Montenegro who was twenty years old and had stronger arms than his. The children listen, as they did before. My dad would not let anyone paint over the wall around the photograph.