There are few reasons in the world why good, intelligent people would agree to publicly humiliate themselves, but the fact that someone else had been against Stalin and he turned out to be right certainly wasn’t one of those reasons. His jokes at Stalin’s expense could be forgiven, but reminders of those jokes couldn’t be. If the whole world admires a murderer, it takes great courage to stand in the middle of a city square and tell people they are wrong, but when the people’s admiration passes, it’s crazy to remind them that they had worshipped a murderer. They would kill you with all the passion of self-denial that is always greater than real love or hate because it was actually the sum of the equation. Yesterday’s love for a dictator and today’s hatred combine to produce the most powerful human passion, which no physical or spiritual power can resist. There was no moral institute or institution, no church or party, that could stand in the way of idiots who wanted to remind someone that they’d been against Stalin even before. That was because everyone, good and bad, had been on the side of Stalin. Idiots who didn’t realize this were fated to have the sky come crashing down around them.
However, it was true that if the Red Army hadn’t sent its soldiers to their deaths, Hitler would have won the war. America and England were only a nice decoration, a fine humanistic decoration on millions of Stalin’s dead soldiers.
When Radio London broadcast the news of Stalin’s death, Luka left the card game and his card buddies; he didn’t put on his coat because it seemed unnecessary to him on this occasion—what could a bora and a storm do to him when Stalin was no more! He went to his sister because she was the only one to whom he could express his joy freely, without his stomach constricting or feeling nauseous if she were happy too. In any case, she didn’t care. Her life took its course with or without Stalin.
“He’s dead and gone,” she said. “And you’re going to catch pneumonia!”
Luka was looking for the bottle of brandy that was in the cupboard, behind the pots and plates. Regina would always hide it in a different place so that it wouldn’t be drunk up so fast and because it irritated her that any time a man came into her house, all he did was look for the brandy.
“C’mon, dammit, give me the bottle; Stalin’s dead!” he said after he couldn’t even find it under the sink. He needed brandy to convince himself that Joseph Vissarionovich was no more.
Around five in the afternoon the bora stopped blowing all of a sudden; everyone came out of their houses and inspected the broken limbs of mulberry and fig trees, pushed at tiles that had fallen from their roofs with the tips of their shoes. They did it carefully, as if they were bombs that might go off.
Though most of the city was left without power and there were only a few who could hear the news of Radio London, everyone knew that Stalin was dead. But no one talked about it. If someone wanted to check to see whether his neighbor knew about it, he would simply flash his eyes and make a face. The answer was the same. That initial expression was passed from face to face until everyone in the city had given and answered the question about Stalin’s death with their eyes and nose. No Parisian master pantomimist could have taught so many different people to do the same thing at the same time. It happened after the great bora on the fifth of March, 1953, continued for an afternoon, and that expression was then lost, vanished forever or until the death of some new Stalin. Not until Radio Zagreb and Radio Belgrade broadcast the news, stressing who and what Stalin had been for the peoples of socialist Yugoslavia, did the people dare to start talking about it. And after everything that had happened, who could know in advance what attitude to take toward Stalin’s death? It was better to hear what Tito and the party had to say first and only then say that Stalin should go fuck himself.
As soon as the bora quieted down, the teacher let her pupils go home. They’d stayed three or four hours after school, but that was better than having furious parents coming the next day. Dijana pulled the hat down over her head and ran home, convinced that her mother wouldn’t believe her when she told her that the teacher had kept them after school. She also wanted to hurry home because children started picking on her as soon as she left school. Someone would take the hat off her head and they would throw it to each other in the schoolyard; she ran from one to the other, but the hat was already with someone else. The whole school was in on the game, and there was no help until one of the instructors or teachers showed up and the kids scattered and Dijana finally managed to grab her hat. She didn’t have another one, and she knew that her mother wouldn’t care if they stole her hat. She’d say, “Steal theirs!”
She ran around the schoolyard for hours like a chicken with its head cut off, horrified by the mere thought of having to go without a hat before her hair grew back. Of course, her persistence only provoked the children, and a game called “Baldy Delavale” gained unusual popularity in the school. It even became more popular than their favorite pastime of catching a cat, hurling it into the sea, and throwing rocks at it when it tried to get out of the water.
She came home, and Uncle Luka was dead drunk. He was singing a Russian song and tugging on Regina to try to get her to sing along. She was cooking and hitting him with a wooden spoon on the ends of his fingers. Uncle Luka would cry out and say that no sacrifice for the revolution was too great. He kept singing, then tugged at the hem of her skirt and got it on the ends of his fingers, cried out, and enjoyed it. Regina was tittering and tried to yell in a strict tone for him to settle down, but she was enjoying these antics. She didn’t ask Dijana anything and said only, “In a few minutes lunch will be ready, lunch or dinner, who knows on a crazy day like this.” And then she would swat Luka’s fingers again.
Dijana loved him as others did, but her uncle was to her what her father and mother couldn’t be. Whenever they asked her what she was going to be when she grew up, she said—“Uncle Luka!” And then everyone would look at one another in awkward silence because Luka had just one flaw. No one had rubbed it in his face, though everyone always had it on their mind, and that was that he’d never done anything with his life; he had no job or profession. He had graduated from the prep school with excellent grades; people said that he was really talented in math and that he should go to the university, but then the war came and nothing came of studying at the university. And if there hadn’t been a war, it was unlikely that he would have ever gotten a degree because there were so many interesting things in life besides being a serious and respected man. Since he’d graduated from the prep school, he could get a job of course, but why should he spend days on end in a legal firm, a municipal office, or some other, worse place and throw his life away like that? He could play cards and chess, talk with children and the elderly, and cheer up people whose lives were dragging them down and might never laugh if it weren’t for him. For him there was nothing greater or more beautiful than seeing people laugh at what he said.
When Dijana was born, he stood over her cradle for two months, making faces and sticking out his tongue. The women tried to no avail to explain to him that the child couldn’t see him and wasn’t amused by his jokes. He didn’t believe those old wives’ tales, nor would he ever have believed in them even if he’d heard them from the smartest man in the world because it wasn’t possible that there was a single person, whether two days or two hundred years old, who wouldn’t laugh. After the two-month-old baby finally laughed, Luka wept tears of joy. He put Dijana on his lap and said, “My dear child, my little dove, my pretty flower.” He cried and everyone was astonished that she didn’t burst into tears. And she would howl as soon as others put her on their lap or said something to her instead of merely being quiet and breathing.
And so, instead of working, Luka stole time. True, many others in his generation did the same thing. If during the war someone hadn’t joined the Ustashas or the partisans but had hidden out, forging documents, cheating the state and the people, usually that person didn’t bust his ass trying to get a job after the war either. People probably figured that whoever was able to che
at the military and avoid making a sacrifice for the homeland would in the end cheat life too. The city folk scorned such young men and often even openly hated them. Not infrequently there were reports to the Ustasha police, and later to the partisan authorities, that some deserter was being hidden in a cellar or that someone’s papers certifying that he was unfit for military service should be checked. Deserters fared worse among the people than criminals or enemy sympathizers. Informants were the same in both regimes and fared better when power changed hands or the government changed than those who turned in Ustashas to the royal authorities or reported some hidden communist to the Ustashas. No one considered it a crime to turn someone in if he’d tried to save his ass from the jaws of historical imperatives: while young men were shedding their blood in Stalingrad and defending Croatia’s border on the Drina (or liberating Belgrade and holding the Srem Front and laying the foundations of a new Yugoslavia), and the elderly feared that they might starve or the British or Germans would bomb the city to cinders, shirking one’s military duty was an insult of the worst kind.
The only one who was allowed to do this was Luka. People needed someone to make them laugh. But it was still awful to hear Dijana as a tiny little girl say that when she grew up she wanted to be Uncle Luka.
At around eight he decided that he was going to celebrate Stalin’s death with anyone who was celebrating. Regina tried to hold him back, in vain. She told him that it was late and that he’d had too much to drink, but if he wanted more—here was another bottle, and he could do whatever the hell he wanted as long as he stayed right where he was. He wanted to be with people; the brandy had the effect of making him forget what their happiness was made of and what had made them happy in times past. He went out, and Regina barely managed to put Ivo’s coat over him, telling him that he shouldn’t because in his heart he had been warmed by the hot stove of the revolution. The next day he couldn’t remember what had happened after that. He woke up in a ditch along a road leading to villages up in the mountains, beat up, with broken bones and soiled with excrement. Whoever had beaten him had taken care to disfigure his face as much as possible. With a smashed nose that had bone and cartilage protruding from it, with his upper jaw bones broken and eyes he couldn’t open, Luka Sikirić was unrecognizable. They took him to the city hospital, where doctors patched up what could be patched and reset the bones that could be reset and said that all one could do was wait. If he survived to the next day, his chances of pulling through were good.
“Stalin came for his head!” a whisper went around the square. People shook their heads worriedly—like a field of dandelions in the wind—and everyone felt sorry. Those who didn’t shook their heads even more.
As he lay in the hospital, Luka was convinced that this had all been arranged by the Slovene investigator and that it was the secret police that had beaten him. Months later he would realize that it could have been the work of any of those whom he’d reminded of how they’d praised Stalin or those who knew that he had something to remind them of. It took him three weeks to get out of bed. He was unsure on his feet, and his face didn’t resemble the face he’d had before. The problem wasn’t so much the scars but how much his expression had changed. In place of a cheerful and youthful thirty-year-old who could pass as a high school senior to girls in Metković and Mostar, the mirror showed a middle-aged man with cloudy and expressionless eyes, a high forehead, and a flattened nose. The only living things left on that head were two rather floppy ears. But not even these could be funny to anyone any more.
But Luka had been frightened to death by something else. In the mirror he saw the face of his oldest brother, Bepo, who’d gone crazy after returning from the war and died in Sarajevo’s Jagomir sanatorium. Bepo had never resembled him. People said that Bepo, compared to his brothers and Regina, seemed not to have come from the same father and mother. Luka thought that maybe this was a sign that he would meet the same end if he remained there, in that rotten city and crazy country.
So he decided to flee Yugoslavia. He wouldn’t request a passport because he would never get one, and if he did, he would be suspect. Rather, he would flee like one fled across state borders, along with wolves and bears, robbers, criminals, industrialists, and prostitutes, degenerates who fled justice and the same degenerates who were convinced that they were following capital. It didn’t matter with whom they grouped him because as soon as you emigrated, you loaded your head with the sins of all those who’d done the same thing any time, anywhere.
For a month he collected his strength and money. The square was amazed at how serious Luka had become. And he was better off that way because you couldn’t live from revelry alone! One should think hard about life; wine doesn’t like being stirred up, but one should rack one’s brains, or so the retirees said as they strolled along Porporela beach. Through some harbor prostitutes Luka met an American sailor named Oliver Reed. He never forgot his name, and that sailor offered him a job that consisted of the following: he would take three packages that he had on his ship to Jablanica and give them to a man there. That man would give Luka money that he would give to Reed, and that was the whole job!
“What’s in the packages?” he asked the American.
“That’s not your problem,” he told him.
“Fine; if it’s not my problem, then no job,” Luka said in a conciliatory tone, thinking more about how to get his hand up Renata’s skirt—she was the youngest and most exclusive prostitute—while she squealed and moved away from him bit by bit.
“The pay is three thousand dollars,” Oliver said, knowing that Luka had never seen that much money in all his life. After the war three thousand dollars could buy everything that the state still hadn’t nationalized—houses, vineyards, fields—and you would still have some left over.
“I’m not in a position to agree to do that. And I don’t know what the situation would have to be for me to agree to your offer,” he said. And since he hadn’t succeeded in getting his hand between Renata’s legs, he grabbed her by the tit, whereupon she slapped him.
“Boy, that costs money; watch out!” the American said, laughing. “Look, I can offer you four thousand, but that’s my last offer.”
Luka looked at him in disbelief: “Four thousand dollars! I’m in even less of a position to put my head on the block for four thousand. Tell me what’s in the boxes, and we can make a deal. But, you know, if it’s weapons or propaganda materials, count me out.”
No matter how indifferent he was toward Tito and the party, Luka had no intention of passing flyers and guns to some Chetniks or Ustashas just because the Americans thought they’d fucked up by helping out the partisans. Moreover, he didn’t even believe that they’d fucked up. Or at least they hadn’t fucked us up because if someone else had come along instead of the communists in 1945, it wouldn’t be people that were missing but whole nationalities, and who knows when the war would have ended.
“It’s not guns or propaganda,” the American said; “it’s medicine, penicillin, so children won’t die from the most common colds, which the communists will use for their own propaganda purposes.” Oliver turned serious before he mentioned the communists.
“And that’s why you decided to smuggle penicillin. I have to tell you that you’re a lunatic. But fine, okay, I agree! I’ll take that to Jablanica and take your four thousand dollars.” But Luka’s extended hand hung in the air.
“Three thousand, because I told you what you’re carrying,” said the American.
“Forget it!” said Luka and got up, offended and resolved not even to agree to four thousand now. Reed dragged him around the square for a while, refusing to let him go, telling him that in San Pedro he had a wife and sick child and had to do what he was doing.
“Then take your penicillin and give it to him!”
Reed asked him if he didn’t feel sorry for the people he could save and whether he’d thought about what he could do in life with four thousand dollars. He said he’d told him three thousand becau
se he thought that people in Yugoslavia loved to haggle, and now he was apologizing and begging him on his knees to accept the job.
While Luka was on his way to Trebinje and farther on to Mostar and Jablanica, driving a van borrowed from the Dupin swimming club, a riddled piece of Italian junk captured in the war, two things weren’t clear to him and he tried feverishly to figure them out. First, why had the sailor picked him of all people for this job? Second, what made him think that he was going to bring him the money when he could drive off in any direction with all the money in his pocket and let the American eat his dust?
There were no checkpoints along the way to stop him. The roads were empty. All around were burned villages and a bridge that Tito had blown up to save the wounded rested peacefully in the green waters of the Neretva. Close-cropped Bosnian children tumbled around in the dust; small, stubby horses pulled beams out of a ditch while a peasant in an army blouse lashed them savagely with a whip; a butcher led two lambs to slaughter.
Women dressed in shalwars and wearing kerchiefs around their heads stood with folded arms, watching the van pass in the belief that it was a sign that something was being done so that things would be better for them all and that if not people, then dear Allah would provide food and drink for this grateful and beautiful little country. The van connected two distant places that they had never been to, but they believed that in those places everything important was being decided and thus that people who covered such distances were important too. In those months, angels of all three faiths raced every sunny day from one horizon to the other.
In Jablanica at the prearranged location—in the Edhem Pivac café—he was awaited by a very fat young man who wore a good-natured expression on his face and had extraordinarily pretty eyes, the kind that seem like puppy’s eyes and you believe them even when they lie to you. He said his name was Orhan Velić, but Luka didn’t put any stock in that, just to be on the safe side. They exchanged the goods behind the café. Orhan checked the contents of the boxes, and Luka counted up the ten thousand dollars.
The Walnut Mansion Page 22