“Don’t worry about me; I say all kinds of crap,” he said dismissively when he noticed how Regina was looking at him.
Franz Hoffman was seventy-five and looked good for his age. He had curly gray hair, a mustache in which every whisker went in a different direction and so looked as if he had purposely tussled it. He looked like the Serbian poet Laza Kostić in the one photograph that was reproduced in school textbooks and encyclopedias during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He jumped up when they entered the room and kissed Regina’s hand. That frightened her even more. No one had showed the fairer sex that honor in at least fifteen years.
“Sit down, please, sit down! Hamdija, boy, make the lady some coffee,” the old man said, fussing about as if guests were arriving for the first time in years. “How was your trip?”
Regina nodded—good, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. She thought that anything she might say would come out wrong and would do her and Bepo some harm. What kind of harm, she didn’t know, nor could she know in such a place, among these people.
“Yes, it’s far, really far away. I haven’t been to Dubrovnik since ’23. But the city is beautiful, especially when you’re a young man, and then later you remember it and don’t know which was more beautiful—your bygone youth or the city,” Hoffman said, trying to calm down and win the good will of a woman who, he was sure, held his life in her hands. But instead of making a nice remark, what he said came out garbled and idiotic, so he laughed and tapped himself on the forehead with his fingertips. That didn’t change anything either. She kept her hands in her lap and looked at him as if she didn’t understand the meaning of his existence in the world.
After the patient Bepo Sikirić had refused his food for the first time and stated that he’d eaten what there was to eat in life and had no intention of continuing to eat the ground bones of his dead comrades baked into bread (because enemies of the people and wartime speculators cut corners to save flour), Dr. Hoffman spent the night tossing and turning in his bed and thinking about what might happen if a colonel in Tito’s army starved to death, someone who was also a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and a revolutionary. How would he convince the secret police, the State Security Service (and who knew whom else) that he wasn’t to blame for his death? They would take him out in front of the wall of the asylum, where he’d worked for more than fifty years, and shoot him before he could get a word in. And he’d be lucky if they didn’t torture him before they shot him. After the patient had refused his food the next day and then refused it for three more days, Franz Hoffman wrote a last will. He also told his Tidža, with whom he’d lived since 1907, when they’d gotten married in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna and she’d converted to Catholicism and taken the name Margaret (people in Sarajevo didn’t know anything about this and continued calling her Tidža), that he had a feeling that he’d been pushed up against a wall, both in reality and metaphorically. And that this time there was no chance of escape. Tidža mumbled something, took a rolling pin, and started vigorously rolling out a layer of dough, stretching it to the point where it was paper thin. But unlike his life, it would never tear. And for years he’d been waiting for Tidža to make a mistake and for the dough to get a hole so she would have to start rolling it out all over again, until finally he realized that there was no chance of her making that mistake.
“They’ll kill me, my dear,” he said, trying to make her understand that this time it was serious.
“Oh, Franz, people talk about all sorts of things, and you talk about how someone’s going to kill you. You’ve been doing it for twenty years now. First it was Hitler who was going to kill you because you went to Vienna to study with Freud and because people saw you reading his books in cafés, then the Ustashas wanted to kill you when you wouldn’t show them the papers that told what religion the patients were, and then the partisans wanted to kill you because you’re a Kraut and because you went to the Ustasha and German celebrations at Christmas and Bayram. Oh, if I only knew who wants to kill you now! But for God’s sake, don’t tell me! I’ll sleep easier. And when will you come to your senses for once? Who might kill me? And who would deal with all the crazies if it weren’t for you? People aren’t stupid. They pray for you to live as long as possible. If you die, the crazies will be walking around the market squares, and then nothing will help at all, not socialism, not Truman’s eggs,” Tidža said, and he realized that there was nothing he could say to convince her that his life depended on Bepo Sikirić’s.
He breathed a little more easily when he and Regina talked on the phone and she agreed to come and talk to her brother. He thought she wouldn’t, that there was no chance of that woman overcoming the reasons why she’d never visited him before. He didn’t know what those reasons were, nor was he particularly interested. The reasons why relatives didn’t come to visit patients were always the same and didn’t differ that much from the reasons why others came to visit every week and inquired when their relatives would recover. Both kinds of people were irrational. The former, because they believed that their fathers and sons were already dead. But they weren’t—they were all too alive. God knew how much longer they would live, and they were often very concerned about someone coming and visiting them. And those who came to visit were irrational because they thought it was simply a matter of days before their sons and fathers would get right in the head. As if their heads were full of water and all one had to do was wait for the sludge to settle on the bottom. But the fact that Regina nevertheless said she would come was the first good sign in a long series of bad signs that had combined in recent days to lower a gravestone over the head of Dr. Hoffman.
Hamdija came in with their coffees. On three copper trays were three small copper pots, each with a lid that had a crescent moon and a star, as atop minarets on postcards. Golden floral decorations were painted on the coffee cups, and in each little sugar dish were two cubes of sugar.
“Prewar coppersmith work,” Hoffman said, full of pride, as if he had hammered out the pots himself. “My sister sends the sugar from Vienna. It’s not easy to find it there either, but she manages. I won’t drink coffee unless it’s got sugar in cubes,” he continued and dipped a cube into his coffee as a demonstration. A brown color spread through the white of the sugar.
“A pity,” she thought as she watched the crystals melt and disappear. A sweet taste on the palate wasn’t something that could take the place of the beautiful, symmetrical cube, the product of Viennese masters and international smugglers, and it was more of a rarity and a wonder than ancient statues, cathedrals, and the stone arches in the atrium of the Franciscan monastery and everything else created by human hands that had survived the war. She plopped in both her cubes quickly and pushed them down with the little silver spoon so that they wouldn’t dissolve slowly but would disappear at once.
“Will he recognize me?” Regina asked.
“Of course. He hasn’t forgotten anyone. He thinks the same things about people that he did when he was healthy. It’s just that his attitude toward himself and life is a little different,” Hoffman said, and it seemed to him that she might think that was a reproach for her not having come all these years, “but he lives in a different world, on a different planet, not on ours. On some Saturn because it’s easier for him. It seems to me that it’s easier for him, although I know as much about it as you do. That is—nothing!” he said, trying to look at her as a co-conspirator and hoping that this might open her up so she would do something to persuade her brother to start eating. Though she was dressed in black, she looked to him as if she were under forty and was, at least in the eyes of Dr. Hoffman, very pretty. She had pale skin and a regular face, which was a rarity among Mediterranean women, and she looked like an actress in Fritz Lang’s silent movie. He couldn’t remember the name of the movie or the name of the actress, but the whole world revolved around her, and men took care not to get shot and to come back from every war for her.
“Do you want to see him?” he asked after
Regina had drunk the last of her coffee. She shrugged her shoulders and looked at the floor.
“Don’t be afraid; I’ll come with you,” Hamdija said in encouragement.
“What would she be afraid of, I beg your pardon!” Hoffman snapped, feigning indignation.
Bepo was alone in his room. He sat on an army bunk and was looking at the wall on which there were two photographs: one of Vladimir Ilich Lenin delivering a speech to workers and another of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
“You came!” he said, astonished. “Hamdija, this is my sister, my only sister! Oh, I’m really crazy; you must have already met,” he said and hugged Regina.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” said the young man.
Regina felt a flush of unexpected joy because Bepo wasn’t like she thought he would be. For years she’d looked away when she ran into a retarded child or one of the city’s four oddballs. Regina saw her brother in every grimacing visage, in people who were very drunk, or in market sellers when they blew up because a customer had cheated them. Their distorted faces, warped with hatred and fear, were the closest thing to insanity that she could think of.
The last time she had seen him healthy was when he’d received three days’ leave after the liberation of Belgrade. At that time there wasn’t anything noticeably different about him, no signs of the war. He wasn’t even worn out; he looked as if he were coming home from vacation, all tanned and muscular, better looking than he had been before. He laughed a lot and took an interest in everything. He walked around the house and looked over everything he was going to repair and patch up after the war was over.
“Just a few more months and you’ll have me home,” he said when they said good-bye, and every evening Regina had only one thought: Don’t let the last bullet hit him; don’t let him fall in the last battle; don’t let him be like that soldier in the story who died because a general spent three more seconds signing the cease-fire because he had a surname with seventeen and not seven letters or because the pen ran out of ink. Or the courier got to drinking in a village tavern and arrived late with news of the end of the war.
When they sent word that Bepo was in the hospital because of an attack of nerves, she thought that it couldn’t be anything serious. If he was alive and well and nothing hurt, he would have to be okay in the end. His soul wasn’t yet an open wound that would bleed him to death. All the lunatics in Regina’s life had been lunatics from birth or lunatics because they just wanted to be that way. But Bepo had been born the most ordinary man under the stars.
But after he’d been transferred to the Sarajevo asylum and after his revolver, service booklet, and decorations had been delivered to her at home, she realized that something bad was happening. Only the dead are stripped of their weapons and decorations, and only then are sisters asked whether they need any help. The army had to care for the families of dead comrades; yet her Bepo hadn’t been killed—he was going through something else. She didn’t know what, but it was certainly terrible if they were awarding him with posthumous honors.
Thus she developed her story about sane people and normal people, which might have had little to do with what was written in books but was true. Truth is everything one believes in, and it’s easy for there to be truth in the idea that insanity is more contagious than the plague or cholera.
That was death without a grave, she concluded after she’d thought about it for days and changed her mind about whether she would go to see Bepo in Jagomir. Insanity was contagious. She realized this when her life began to change only because she knew where her brother was. And it changed by virtue of the fact that a difference arose between what she saw and heard and what was real. Maybe not even anything that was happening to her or anything that had remained when Ivo died was what it was, but what it wasn’t. The difference between “is” and “isn’t” lies in the decision for something to be or not to be.
She would look at Dijana, her little girl, and wonder whether the problem lay in the name she bore or in the life that had begun within her. And she didn’t love her with the love that she’d imagined when she was carrying her or as she listened to other mothers talk about what it meant to have a child.
“They told me you’re not eating,” she began as soon as they sat down on the bed.
“How’s the girl? I’m sorry I haven’t seen her,” he said, acting as if he hadn’t heard.
“She’s fine. Getting bigger every day,” she said; it was the first thing that came to mind.
“If she takes after Ivo, she’ll be tall. Taller than you by a head, and maybe taller than her uncles. That’s right. We grew taller than our papas and mamas, and they were taller than our grandpas and grandmas. In three hundred years men will be like cypress trees, and women like poplars. They’ll marvel at the little houses we lived in. They’ll laugh at us, but we won’t care because we won’t be around any more,” he said, cracking his knuckles until the joints stopped popping. Then he stopped.
“Bepo, why aren’t you eating?” Regina asked.
“We don’t leave much of any value to our children. To our children or future generations. No matter how we might think we’re leaving them a lot, no matter how much we’ve sacrificed, it won’t mean anything to them. A little world that you can’t move into. It’s as if we’d inherited the little we have from ants. In America there are anthills that are a hundred times bigger than ours, but they’re still not big enough for people to live in,” he said and waved his hands. Then he made anthills in the air with his palms, left just enough space for an ant between his index finger and thumb, and used his palms to show the difference between the large ones and small ones.
“You’ll die on me from hunger,” Regina interjected as soon as he ran out of things to say and show.
“We believe that communism is something great and eternal. We think so because it is in proportion to us, but it won’t be for our children and our children’s children. The little ones can’t understand the big people, just as we can’t understand them. We know only that communism will seem trivial to them. They’ll take a red banner between two fingers, like this, and will walk across Russia in three steps because Russia will seem small to them too, much smaller than Pelješac. You just watch children growing big, and you see that there’s no point in measuring the world on a scale bigger than your own life. I’ve come to understand that!” he said raising his voice and lifting his finger above his head. That was the gesture of a strict teacher, an attempt at being funny.
“Bepo,” she said, grabbing him by the hand, “what’s wrong, dear Bepo?” she asked and started crying.
“That won’t help you at all,” he snapped at her in disgust; “how can you ask me that and cry? If you’re going to cry, ask something else!”
She hurriedly wiped away her tears with her sleeve: “Here, I’m not crying any more. What’s wrong with you? Tell me,” she said, trying to smile.
“Oh, that’s better! And not so I think I’ve stolen an apple. Nothing’s wrong with me. Every morning Dr. Hoffman brings me Politika and Oslobođenje, and I see that nothing can be done with the world. Take a look, a cease-fire has been signed between India and Pakistan. They were fighting over Kashmir, and it really seems to me that Kashmir is their Bosnia. I imagine it has a lot of sheep, green mountains with snowy peaks. Why else would they fight over it? The only thing I can’t understand is what’s going on with Berlin. Stalin won’t let the English enter the city via the railways and roads, so the English fly in and out more than a thousand times a day in airplanes. As if the Russians couldn’t shoot down their airplanes. It really seems to me that the Allies are spiting them.
He showed how airplanes take off and land and did it so well that his hands almost seemed to turn into big military transport planes.
“And you’re acting out of spite!” she said.
“Why do you think so?” he asked, saddened.
“Because you’re not eating, Bepo. You’ll die if you don’t eat.”
“Mother in
Heaven, you’re treating me like a child. ‘You’ll die if you don’t eat, you’ll die if you don’t eat.’ I’m sure you talk to Dijana like that. Do you think I’m a child just because I’m in a mental hospital?”
“I don’t think so. I just think you’re acting out of spite.”
“Hamdija certainly told you that. He’s a good, simple-minded boy. Hoffman wouldn’t talk such nonsense. The boy doesn’t know what life is.”
“They’re both worried about you. You’ll die.”
“Of course I’ll die. Everyone dies, right, don’t they? They die no matter what.”
“Why aren’t you eating?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. If I could tell you at all. But I can’t! That’s between me and the movement. Once you get into it, there’s no getting out. But I don’t regret a day of it. I’m only sorry about Spain and Granada. Spain will never again be what we dreamed it would be. It’ll be too small for our children, and they’ll toss it aside like a toy. We’re the last who knew how beautiful it was. And how big it was.”
“Are you going to eat?”
“Regina, you’re stubborn as a mule. You didn’t used to be like that.”
“Are you ever going to eat again?”
“You’re crying again! Have you lost your nerves? Watch out; that’s how it starts. Ask Hoffman if you don’t believe me. No, I’m not a child, and you don’t have to pester me. Or are you trying to help me? I’m beyond help. I ate my share of bread, and I don’t need any more.”
Regina jumped up, grabbed her chin, which was quivering uncontrollably, and ran out of Bepo’s room, straight into Hamdija’s arms. He led her without a word down corridors full of empty echoes, in which her sobs sounded like the grating noises of a cabinet being pushed from one end of an empty parlor to another.
The Walnut Mansion Page 26