The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Ivo, of course, had no idea in which direction they should go. Franjo the janitor had kicked them out of the prep school without any instructions about the schedules and routes of the Ustasha patrols and the easiest way to get out of the city.

  “If you’re good men, you won’t give me away,” he said and slipped into the darkness. And from there they were on their own.

  They walked through the market district for two full hours without Klein’s noticing that they were going in circles and that they had passed by the Hilmina Inn twice. Ivo’s hands were sweaty; his heart pounded against his breastbone. He felt panic coming over him and that with every moment he was further away from exiting that labyrinth. He silently cursed the Turks and their architectural logic, cursed Emperor Franz Joseph, who had only built his villas, mansions, shops, and ironbound storefronts to fit into it. None of them differed from any of the others at all. There was that deadly oriental need not to run afoul of your neighbor, to build a shop that wouldn’t be an inch higher than his and wouldn’t differ in color or form, so that one day when someone had a need to flee through the market district, he would go in circles like a caged mouse in a biology lab.

  Nevertheless, they finally slipped out of the city without running into anyone, which Ivo counted among the signs of luck, whereas Klein didn’t even notice. They reached the first groves and stands of willow trees along the Vrbas River and then a shed in which they would spend the day hidden in the hay. There the little man would sneeze, cough, and whine and raise a ruckus loud enough, Ivo thought, to draw the attention of three German armies and Pavelić’s bodyguard. But nothing like that happened. Not the first day, nor during the next three months of their journey together. Whenever they hid in hay or walked through mowed meadows, Klein sneezed and coughed, as if he were just asking for trouble. Soon Ivo grew used to it and managed to convince himself that they weren’t fated to die or fall into the hands of the army.

  Two unusual men thus went through the empty Bosnian countryside, and it was a real pity that there wasn’t a movie camera to film them. The tall one loped ahead; his face was already covered with a pointed beard. A short, hunched one hurried a few steps behind him. The tall one mostly kept silent, while the short one spoke for both of them. If he wasn’t sneezing or moaning, then he babbled on about the meaning and meaninglessness of life, about diseases that fly through the air, and about how it was only a matter of time before you inhaled them. About international relations that had led to that terrible war, about the fact that the proximity of warm seas makes people better, so that Salazar, Franco, and Mussolini could never be like Hitler, and Hitler would have been even worse had he been born in Norway or Denmark. About Winston Churchill, who was living proof that worry and trouble make a person fat (before the war he’d been almost slender, and in the last year he’d become fat as a pig—Klein couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw his picture in the newspaper). About Grandpa Pinto, who was supposed to become a Sarajevo rabbi, but the Jewish market district didn’t want him because he hurried too much and they thought he would try to hurry them. About the tarawih, the longest Muslim prayer, and about wicked priests who, according to his grandfather, had tormented the people with frequent tarawihs. About the fact that he didn’t know at all what kind of prayer that was (nor had his grandfather) and he’d been waiting for years for an opportunity to ask a Muslim what the tarawih was. About the Orthodox, who really overdid their liturgies, which were all longer than the longest Catholic and Muslim prayers. About his own people, who would barricade themselves into the temple and not come out for a whole day. About his sincere wish to be religious, but it didn’t work at all because to be religious a man had to be as naïve as a child and as meticulous as an Old Testament sage (maybe he was somewhat of a child, but he didn’t have anything of the sages in him). About German motors, which were the best in the world, regardless of whether they were put into automobiles, ships, or airplanes—so if Hitler won in the end, it would be because of Germany’s superiority in motors. About the fact that most of the world thought that Germany’s superiority lay in the spirit of Wagner and Goethe, which had nothing to do with reality because German superiority lay in motors. And he would babble on about the Ethiopian emperor Selassie, about the spears that his warriors hurled at Italian airplanes, about desert air being good for asthma, in contrast to jungle air, about his allergy that wouldn’t turn into asthma (although Dr. Weber from Graz had told him that every allergy in the end turns into asthma). About the fact that professional medicine still hadn’t acknowledged the existence of allergies and that you couldn’t find a single word about that condition in medical textbooks (but he knew well that it was the malady of the future and that one day the whole world would suffer from allergies). He also babbled about venereal diseases and the need to have public toilets built in the vicinity of the main city squares, about homosexuals and their depravity, and about how every beauty is meaningless—but why did one have to seek meaning in everything?

  Ivo would just listen to him and wonder whether that man had always been like this or whether his garrulity stemmed from nervousness. Or from fear. They say that when one is about to die, his whole life passes before his eyes and he lives his days one more time. Everything is repeated in a single second, in the blink of an eye, and so seventy years of average life fit into a tiny slice of time. It’s packed and pressed like hay when it’s put into bales. Likewise, when someone feels the fear of death, he feels the need to speak and repeat all the words he has ever uttered. Only Klein’s fear lasted a long time. What he said was interesting, although it came in fits and starts, so that his tales couldn’t be remembered, nor could anything be learned from them.

  Bosnia looked like empty country all the way to Bihać. They ran into only two or three peasants, who upon meeting them were more afraid of them (probably because of their beards) than Ivo and Klein were afraid that the peasants would turn them in to the police or chop them up with axes. The going was easier at night, not because it was less dangerous—because one could never be sure of that—but because during the day they would grow weary of seeing burned houses and villages, ravaged roads, dead cattle decomposing in ditches, battered army trucks, and discarded bloody uniforms. It gave the impression that it would always be that way or only get worse and that the only thing that would grow again in this land were weeds and wild apple trees, the shoots of which they encountered at every step, as if a wind had blown untold numbers of their seeds everywhere.

  But no matter how dead and destitute Bosnia was, you wouldn’t starve there. Every other plant was edible. Every few kilometers there were fallow potato fields. In neglected orchards fruit grew abundantly, like wild vegetation; it bloomed out of season, not according to any calendar or changes in nature, as if it were crazed by the fact that it hadn’t been picked.

  “Bosnians believe that nature brings forth its fruit best in the years of the worst war,” Klein said as they were picking overripe pears and swatting away wasps and wild bees at dusk on a height offering a panoramic view of Bihać.

  “Bosnians believe in anything and everything,” Ivo responded. “Whatever happens, it turns out they’ve already believed in it. I know them well. A guy named Hilmo was with me for a while, a sailor from Zvornik! He was twenty when he stuck his finger in the sea for the first time and was twenty-one when he sailed on a transoceanic ship. That Hilmo was a good guy, but nothing could happen that he didn’t already know about. If a storm arose, and a storm on the Pacific is something that no living man can imagine, Hilmo would shrewdly conclude that it had been clear earlier that there would be a storm because his ring finger had been itching all day long. And as soon as your ring finger is itching, it can only mean that there’s going to be a storm on the Pacific. If the sea was as smooth as a mill pond, Hilmo would say, of course, I knew it; my left eye didn’t twitch for three days for nothing, and when someone’s left eye twitches, that means that you’ll be able to burn a candle outdoors. Hilmo could explain anything
, I mean anything that happened on the ship, with his magic and omens. That annoyed me a little, and I told him it was easy: a storm arises, and he says he knew about it yesterday. So why didn’t he tell us yesterday? Because you didn’t ask. I told him, well, you’ll be hanging from the mast the next time your ring finger itches and you don’t tell me. And I waited in anticipation for the next storm, just so I could watch him squirm. Just imagine me as a sailor waiting for a storm, all for a joke and a prank. That’s youth for you! And you know what happened? The next day we almost drowned. That was the biggest storm I ever experienced at sea. Not far from the shores of Australia. Men wept, prayed to St. Anthony, and no one thought we’d come out of it alive. But Hilmo, you see, knew. That’s a Bosnian for you. There was nothing he hadn’t believed in before it happened. And what benefit do they get from it?!” he asked, pointing with his hand at a burned, dead village, as if that village were the best confirmation that Bosnians didn’t have a lick of sense. They knew their destiny in advance but didn’t do anything to avoid it.

  In early evening they lay down for a bit in the attic of one of the more intact houses. Their plan was to sleep until midnight and then continue the journey, bypassing Bihać and continuing on toward Kordun. Ivo found some quilts, and they used them to make beds on bare boards, and all stuffed with pears, they fell asleep like two bears as soon as they lay down.

  Klein dreamed an old dream of his, which had followed him since the day he’d started school as a boy, in which he’d lost his left shoe in the middle of a street and didn’t know how that had happened to him and was looking for it. Sometimes he awoke from that dream in sweat and tears, desperate because he had to return to his father and mother missing a shoe. But over the years he’d grown accustomed to his dream and accepted it as nightly entertainment and a respite from all his daily worries. He sought his lost shoe leisurely, putting off waking up and knowing that he wouldn’t find it because he hadn’t ever found it before, and who knew what would happen to his dream if the shoe ever turned up? Maybe he’d die then, he thought, and maybe he would really die if he found it in the dream. He knew, at least while he was asleep, that that part of the dream was far away.

  And so, as Klein sought his shoe, the sound of a fiddle insinuated itself into his thoughts. It was playing a melancholy Bosnian song, and an accordion soon joined in, and when a tambourine sounded, Klein realized that something was wrong with his dream. He quit looking for the shoe and tried to remember if a song had ever been playing in these circumstances before or whether the search had proceeded in silence. He couldn’t summon any kind of sound from his memory. But no silence either. Does an instrument play in dreams or not? Are there colors and odors in dreams?

  So he woke up, right when the horns blared. Every hair on his arms was standing on end. He firmly clutched the edges of the quilt and caught sight of Ivo’s eyes, which were bulging with fear. Though he’d already woken up at the first tone of the fiddle, he couldn’t figure out what was going on either.

  They stared at one another while a hoarse male voice tried to sing above the horns and the accordion. It sang, “On the far bank of the Pliva there grows a blade of grass,” and then finished even louder: “And every foreign land is a sorrowful expanse.”

  When the song was over, someone shouted, “Play ‘Zagreb Girls’!” The horns started up; one could hear squeals and male voices whooping, and a whole choir began to sing: “A young Ustasha under the banner, the battle rages on, the Ustasha banner waves, for freedom and for the home, the Croatian home.”

  Klein shuddered as if someone had connected him to an electric current. “Samuel won’t, he won’t,” he whispered to himself, “he won’t, Samuel won’t.” He repeated the formula that protected him from the dark. His grandmother had said, “He won’t, Samuel won’t,” when he lay dying from diphtheria. She had also said, “He won’t, Samuel won’t,” when he had fallen off a fence and broken his leg. This was the first time that Samuel told himself, “He won’t, Samuel won’t.”

  They lay at the opening between the roof and the attic floor, which in places was thirty centimeters wide and through which one could see the yard in front of the house and a campfire in the middle of it. Fifteen men in black uniforms were sitting cross-legged in a semicircle on the bare ground. On the other side of the fire were twelve musicians, unbelievably tattered, playing a song about a sweet little Marijana. At their backs were two men in black uniforms with automatic rifles across their chests. The horns gleamed in the firelight and didn’t fit in with the somber scene. If it weren’t for those instruments, the men would have been mere shadows—those who were sitting, the musicians, and the motionless guards. What Klein saw seemed more unreal than his dream, and the music that came from the instruments fit into this scene less than his eternal search for his shoe. It was as if someone had added music to a dead picture in the belief that they could thereby bring it to life. But instead it became more lifeless.

  “Play faster!” bellowed a motionless figure next to the fire, and the orchestra started playing faster.

  “Sing to me, sing, sing, o falcon, keep away, o falcon,” a voice wailed hoarsely.

  “Even faster; we don’t have time!”

  They played even faster, each musician playing for himself and in harmony with his own abilities, which were different in each of them, just as fear is different in every man, so they no longer sounded like an ensemble but like musicians who’d begun a song out of tempo with one another: one had started it the day before, another ten years ago, and there was little chance of them ever finding the same key and tempo.

  “Sto-o-o-p!” The one who’d been giving orders from the beginning got up from the ground and pulled out his revolver. The others didn’t move.

  “And now you’ll play ‘Wide Is the Danube, Flat Is Srijem’ slowly, but so it sounds like in the theater, without faking it. Whoever fakes it will get a bullet between the eyes.”

  Silence followed. Evidently no one dared to begin first. Their hands trembled in the nighttime breeze. From the northern reaches, from Pannonia and even farther, maybe even from Siberia or the dark seas of the north, there arrived a current of air that on a night like this in other circumstances might have had a sobering effect on men drinking brandy who were carried away by the lightness of the summer and led them to fall silent for a moment when each would break off a little piece of cheese from a plate painted with three red roses, put it in his mouth, and lose himself in thought about the salt in his body.

  “A raid!” shouted the man with the revolver, and someone laughed.

  “Look, the fiddler wet his pants,” said the one who’d laughed and pointed his finger at the old man with the violin, who had a stream running down his pant leg. At the same time two other streams started running down his cheeks. Only in silent films could you see so many tears on one face. The man in black put the muzzle of his revolver to his temple.

  “Play! ‘Wide Is the Danube, Flat Is Srijem,’” he ordered. “Just you, and then the others will too.” The old man brought the instrument to his cheek, lowered the bow onto the strings, and glanced at the man with the revolver. The round lips of the muzzle pushed into the softest bones of his head, pressing them slightly apart.

  He closed his eyes and drew the bow across a string. An unsteady sound came forth, like the creaking of the door of a dollhouse. The man with the revolver swallowed and said, “I think you started the wrong song!”

  Then there was a shot, not too loud, as if someone had hit a rock in a creek bed with a wet shirt. The man’s head exploded, its tissue sizzled on the coals of the campfire, and he collapsed sideways and lay there.

  In the flames one could clearly see an open, empty skull, like the bottom of a dirty soup bowl. Tufts of hair remained above it, and at the bottom, where there was the clear outline of a crater, as if cut out with a diamond knife, there were human lips and a black mustache, unscathed.

  No one moved. The men in the uniforms sat like children watching a pupp
et show, with those in the back straining to get a better view. The two with the automatic rifles looked disappointed. From their perspective the scene was uninteresting. That body, as far as they were concerned, could be the body of someone sleeping. They couldn’t see what the bullet had done to the man’s head, and they weren’t too happy about that. Ivo and Klein had the view from the gallery, from the royal box. At the base of the skull there was a gnarl; either a piece of tissue had stuck to the bone or the flames of the fire cast a shadow that made it look like there was something there when there actually wasn’t.

  Samuel F. Klein would never feel as protected as he did then; a small god whose immortality was unquestionable, ashamed because of everything that he could or should have felt then, everything that makes someone human. He felt an inner need to remove the remaining piece of tissue or move the body so the fire didn’t cast false shadows on it and death would become a completely round piece of porcelain from the table before a Sunday lunch. That aberrant feeling would torment him to the end of his days. He would free himself of everything and forget his fear and the moments when he thought his soul was falling into a thousand rays of light that nothing could ever bring back together. But the fact that he’d seen in a murdered man only an aesthetic fact, the bottom of a pretty porcelain soup dish, gave him no peace.

  “Was I crazy?” he would ask a Coptic priest in ’50-something in Jerusalem. The priest would stroke his cheek as he would a boy who’d come for religious instruction and wouldn’t answer. God knew what that old Copt thought or whether he understood the story at all.

  “Captain, don’t, for Christ’s sake!” the horn player pleaded, falling to his knees. The man with the revolver grabbed him by the ears; the young man groaned in pain.