“Why are you doing this?” Luka couldn’t help asking as they parted.
Orhan laughed and said, “If I told you it’s because I’m a good person, would you believe me?” He turned around and waddled away along a row of poplars, on which black and green death notices were pinned, one next to another.
Luka stood glued to the spot, watching him until he disappeared between two poplars. He remembered the man with the dog’s eyes later, on the day of his great death-bed joy. “If he’d been a dog, he’d certainly have succeeded in life. As he was a man, they certainly beat him like a dog,” he said as Regina, Dijana, and the nurse Patricia, who didn’t even know Croatian, split their sides laughing. Then, in the spring of 1969, Luka Sikirić, settling his accounts, thought that he had only once been at a loss in life. People laughed even when he said something serious or sad. But he wasn’t sorry, and he laughed along with them, over the unknown grave of the pretty-eyed Orhan Velić.
As Luka gave him his six thousand dollars, the American jumped for joy and started hugging and kissing him. Luka couldn’t understand any of this. And it’s better that he didn’t because in Jablanica he’d given Velić phony penicillin that the Sarajevo underground bought up, after Reed’s deal with Albanians had fallen through at the last moment and after which he could choose either to throw the boxes into the sea or attempt something that had little chance of success. First, to find someone who would deliver the phony penicillin to Orhan Velić, which from his position on a moored American ship seemed impossible, and then to make sure that Orhan gave the money to the courier instead of killing him because if he’d killed him, no one would have come after him for it, and he’d have had ten thousand dollars that he could have then passed on to his own people. And finally, the guy that Velić gave the money to had to be honest enough to bring it back to him. When he’d offered Luka three and then four thousand dollars as a fee, he was already sure that his deal was ruined. He tried it with him in the crazy belief of pioneers in the Wild West who didn’t quit as long as there was even a glimmer of hope for success. It was true that Oliver Reed wasn’t risking anything, apart from the life of an unknown man whom fate had determined would pay someone else’s bill.
And so the next winter people who’d been treated with phony penicillin died throughout Bosnia, hoping until the end that they would get better because they were taking American medicine. Maybe they would have lived if it hadn’t been for Luka Sikirić, just as Luka might not have survived if Orhan Velić hadn’t thought he was a nice guy. Luka didn’t look like a smuggler or a criminal at all to him—it was obvious he liked the way Luka looked.
On the night before his escape to Italy, Luka Sikirić assembled all the harbor prostitutes in the abandoned shipyard. There was eating and drinking until dawn; whether anything else went on is hard to say, but it’s unlikely that it did. Luka was the only man among the thirty of them and wasn’t in good repute with women. Once a year he would lie on one to see whether anything had changed, or he would slip his hand under the skirt of one of them in front of other men to show how good he was with the prostitutes. And that was all. When they parted, he gave each of them enough money so they wouldn’t have to do anything for a month except live like queens, and then he left. Maybe everyone else would have thought that Luka Sikirić was crazy, but the prostitutes, to the very last one, were sure that he was an angel. Sixteen years later every one of them who was still alive came to his funeral. Younger ones came too because of those good old days that they had never experienced. It was comforting to know that there were such days once and that people and angels existed that gave prostitutes money, smoked and drank with them, without asking for anything in return.
At seven in the morning Luka came by drunk to say good-bye to Regina and Dijana. The little girl had just gotten out of bed and was getting ready for school, and his sister was sitting beside the stove and shelling beans.
“I’m going, and we might never see each other again,” he said.
“Don’t talk shit while you’re drunk!” Regina responded calmly.
He lifted Dijana up into the air. “Dijana, sweetheart . . . ,” he said but didn’t know what else to say. “Don’t give up, sweetie!” he said, left a thousand dollars on the table, and left.
He didn’t say “farewell” or “good-bye,” and Regina sighed: that damned brandy would kill him. Only when she was done with the beans and got up did she see the money. She nearly fainted; she knew well how much a thousand dollars was worth. Dear departed Ivo wouldn’t have earned that much in six months of voyaging. She was seized with panic. She ran outside to look for her brother, but she was smart enough not to tell anyone about the American money because if she had, Luka would have been arrested before he reached Gorica. “He’s gone off to hang himself, woe to me, mama!” she cried, running around the yard, and raised the neighbors to search for him. They looked into each attic, searched for him in hidden inlets and parks, and when he didn’t turn up for two days, they reported his disappearance to the police.
A month later a postcard arrived from Milan that read: “I’m well and healthy. I don’t talk shit while I’m drunk. And I won’t give up. Yours, Stijepo Bobek!”
He was afraid that they would be accused of some misdeeds if he signed his name, and so he put the name of a popular soccer player, one of the members of the team that had beaten the Russians at the Olympics in Finland. He knew that both of them would know who had written them and would be glad to read what he’d written. In a few months he’d spent the money he still had on Milanese hotels and socializing with the strange people whom misfortune had brought there from all corners of the earth. There were Russian dukes and professors of mathematics, who in 1918 had come in coats into which hundreds of ducats had been sewn, with pockets full of diamonds, and with a sorrow that spent all their wealth in a minute, so that they were reduced to begging and rummaging through garbage bins in the area. There were renegade members of the Comintern, who in ’30-something had managed to save their skins from Stalin and had already been hiding there for twenty years either from Mussolini, the Italian partisans and communists, or from themselves because apart from the revolution they had no other work. In Milan there were gentlemen from Zagreb and Belgrade who’d fled in 1941 from the Germans, Nedić’s men, the Ustashas, or the mobilizations, or in 1945 from the communists and their lust for revenge. There were Jews of every kind: German Jews, Polish Jews, Zagreb Jews, Hungarian Jews, Romanian Jews, and those happy-go-lucky ones—the Bosnian Jews, who were constantly pulling someone’s leg, telling vulgar jokes and anecdotes. But when they gathered among themselves in a corner of the railway station or in the barracks for collective accommodation, they spoke sadly in a strange language that was and wasn’t Spanish and would then break into a melancholy Bosnian song that was nice to listen to but made you lose your will to live. There was also a Chetnik rabble in Milan that moved among two or three taverns owned by Italians with surnames ending in -ić, where they blathered on about international politics and the intentions of King Peter—“a thug and not a king, the fucking bastard!” They fell into bouts of depression because they realized that Peter didn’t have anything in mind and would drink themselves blind drunk and shout so loudly that the sky over Italy would shake, and the police would draw a wide berth around them. But Luka would sit with them too, treat them to drinks, and try to explain to them in a roundabout way that they were all brothers because they spoke the same language, to which they would nod in agreement. But after that he would tell them that the Bosnian Muslims were their brothers and even the communists too.
“You’re a good person but also a complete idiot,” they would say and look at him with pity in their eyes, convinced that one day he would pay with his head for telling people things they didn’t want to hear. What he said sounded good in church or on one’s deathbed but couldn’t be true in real life. If such truths existed, the whole world would have burned in hell after the last war.
There were also poor Us
tashas in Milan. They hurried along the facades as if they’d sold their own shadows and were ashamed that people might notice. They had the eyes of wild deer, and all of them introduced themselves as engineers, old Zagreb nobility, or Travnik beys. But they weren’t any of those. They needed something to hold on to and for which the world would take pity on them. But they realized bitterly that no one would take pity on them of all people because there were no sins that were greater and more despicable than theirs. No matter how much he’d seen who the Ustashas were and what they’d done in and around Dubrovnik during the war, Luka couldn’t believe that these men were the same people. “The eyes of a swine or a man who hunted Serbs and Jews to slake his thirst for blood, those eyes never turn into the eyes of a doe,” he thought and offered them help. But they fled, convinced that he was a provocateur, an agent of the secret police, that he would blow out their brains on the spot or cram them into trucks and take them to Yugoslavia, where he would sic Serbian and Jewish dogs on them. In Milan there were two or three Catholic priests, Croats who’d been sent from Rome, who gathered up those big-eyed ne’er-do-wells, hid them in monasteries, and provided them with papers for countries across the ocean. Luka even tried to make contact with them. They would smile at him condescendingly and in their nasal bishops’ tones bless the moment that Luka would move on and leave them in peace.
There were people of all kinds in Milan in 1953. If anyone had filmed it, it would have been one of the sadder films. So many people who had nothing except what they carried in their hearts and heads and had no place to call their own.
It wasn’t until Luka spent his last dollar that he felt that he belonged to the world of those people, and he began to be wearied by the thought that he was far away from the place he called home. He listened to nostalgic stories of cities and homelands—Chełmno, Kraków, Vukovar, Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Chernopol´ye, Bitola, Zagreb, Belgrade, Split, Sarajevo, Skoplje, Koprivnica, Subotica, Travnik, Vienna, Banja Luka, Odessa, Mostar, Talinn, Bucharest, and Dubrovnik. He listened to one man’s lament for his city and was surprised to find that he didn’t feel sorrow. That man, whose name was Moritz Ferrara, had fled Dubrovnik in 1943 to save his skin from his neighbors, to whom state law gave the opportunity to consider everything that had been his to be theirs, including his life. Ten years later Moritz was ready to forgive them for everything if only they would let him come back and act as if nothing had happened. But he knew it wasn’t possible because he wasn’t the one who was given the right to forgive; rather his neighbors were supposed to forgive him because he’d put them in the difficult situation of having to persecute him, only for world history to be shaken up later. New laws were passed that declared the old ones to be criminal, and those who’d carried them out—that is to say, Moritz’s neighbors—to be criminals. As if those people had ever made any kind of laws or opposed them. If it hadn’t been for him, they wouldn’t have been living in fear then, and even if they forgave him for everything else, they couldn’t forgive him for that fear. Moritz Ferrara would die from an illness that had no name but could be most accurately described as a tumor of the soul. His homeland would grow inside of him, until it sucked in all his vital fluids, softened his bones, and killed him in the end, either in Milan or in some other city.
Luka didn’t believe that he would ever come down with that illness. His reasons for leaving were almost inconsequential in comparison to those of Moritz Ferrara. He was simply different from those among whom he’d lived, and he couldn’t change, or he arrogantly thought that he might be bypassed by the stupidity that had made blood flow in rivers and on account of which everyone felt guilty afterward.
Thus, something existed that was more important for him than his homeland, so it was logical that he never fell ill because of it. Maybe he wouldn’t have even fallen ill or the illness would have been delayed longer if he hadn’t been so spendthrift or if he’d had more American dollars. But on the day when he first thought that he should save his money for later instead of feeding a bunch of washouts in the first tavern he entered, Luka was close to the realization that Milan wasn’t a place where he wanted to spend the rest of his life. And when he held the first lira that he’d earned in his hand, after he’d had a role as an extra in a film about a pauper who ran after the rays of the sun and flew off into the sky in the end, he could already understand the endless sorrow of Moritz Ferrara and the railway-station history of the Jewish simpletons from Chełmno and the reasons why the Russian aristocrats spent all their ducats and diamonds instead of investing them in something and living the same life they’d lived in Moscow and Petrograd. As soon as you can’t go back to where you came from, you begin the life in railway lobbies; everything is temporary and you have no reason to plan anything or start anything anew because you’re waiting for your train, and nothing can be important besides waiting and chatting with others who are waiting. That train will never come, as everyone who has ever waited for it knows, but you don’t think about that until you spend your last ducat, diamond, and dollar.
After his first year in Milan, when he was already living the life of a European railway bum and singing the sad love songs of his homeland, Luka decided to move to Trieste. They tried to dissuade him and warned him that that city was half in Yugoslavia and was teeming with Tito’s agents. Abductions and murders were common, and the Italians and Americans were fairly indifferent to them. It might happen that he would fall asleep in Trieste and wake up in the Zenica prison. And it wasn’t likely that he would find work in Trieste. The locals there lived badly. And there were many Istrians who had the right to live there and didn’t look kindly on Yugoslav emigrants if they were Slavs . . .
But nothing could dissuade him. Or he was a little attracted by what they were trying to frighten him with. Trieste was closer. It didn’t matter what it was closer to, but it was closer and by virtue of this fact it was more his. He went there with an unmuddled feeling that life could and had to be happiness, cheer, and idleness and that only obscurantists, those who were hard on themselves and those around them, seriously planned every step they took and were deathly afraid of not having anything to live on. It was only natural that they ended up destitute and died of hunger. If someone never thought of poverty, it was most likely that they wouldn’t become poor—Luka Sikirić was convinced of this, and in his case it turned out to be true.
On his very first day in Trieste he met both the State Security Service agents and those who were hiding from them. The Yugoslav spies, secret agents, and cutthroats drank in one bar, seemingly incognito, and in another, a few hundred meters away, there were gatherings, just as incognito, of deserters, losers, tax officials, distrainers of defunct states, and the commanders of Quisling armies, but most of all there were those who simply bet on the wrong side. This they’d done too publicly, so after losing in the betting office of history, they took to their heels. Those in the first bar spoke about those in the second as if they were a gang that needed to be taken out, while those in the second bar spoke about those in the first as if they were a gang that would be taken out by the English, Americans, and the free world as soon as they pulled themselves together and realized that Tito had screwed them over in 1945. The phrase “the free world” was used by those who were not free, more as the name and surname of a fairy tale hero than as a political label or a literary metaphor. When they said “the free world,” it seemed as if those people saw clearly the shape of the nose, the eye color, and the high brow of its imaginary prince.
None of them, neither the pursuers nor the pursued, were in any particular hurry. The bosses of the spies and agents had evidently given them no deadlines for finishing all their work, and they would rather drag out these jobs than get new ones, while their victims continued to believe that it was a matter of days until the Allies would take out Tito and the communists and they would return home. True, something always happened to delay American action in Yugoslavia. At first the tensions with the Russians were too great because Harry
Truman wasn’t as smart as his predecessor. Then there was the unfortunate war in Korea that prevented them from moving on Yugoslavia. And Stalin’s death didn’t come at the best time either . . .
Luka started dropping in at both bars right away. He told everyone who he was and where he’d come from and why he’d fled Yugoslavia. And everyone, of course, was sure that he was lying. A quiet suspicion arose among the agents that he was actually a high-ranking officer and that he’d been sent from Belgrade to check up on them, whereas the fugitives were sure that Luka was a secret policeman and that he’d been sent from the other bar to infiltrate them and acquire as much reliable information as possible. However, both sides were mystified about why he didn’t ever ask any questions or start political discussions but told jokes, fooled around, pulled people’s legs, and hid corkscrews from waiters.
“He’s a fucking dope!” said Raško Pribojac a.k.a. šajkača, the main figure in the agents’ bar.
“He’s not stupid, but he’s not all there either,” remarked Husref-beg Urumlić, the clearest thinker among the fugitives, who had been a communist before the war and an Ustasha official in Janja during the war.
“Should we give him a scare?” asked Lojze Bohinjc, the youngest and most ambitious among the spies.
“I’d like to knock some sense into him—beat on his kidneys, toss him into a canal, and then see how he recovers!” said Rudolf Zovko, the only Ustasha officer in the fugitives’ bar.
The Walnut Mansion Page 23