The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  It was almost as if they’d become nobility when the Austrian colonel made his entry into their family home bearing gifts. At the time of Rafo’s birth, his oldest sister was going on forty-five and had three grandchildren, while his youngest brother had already turned eighteen. It was this other difference that was the greatest source of amazement for the Austrian doctors. How was it possible for a woman to give birth to fifteen children— four of which were stillborn or had died in the first years of their lives— between her sixteenth and forty-fifth years and for nothing else to happen for seventeen years, only to have one more at sixty-two?! They tried to ask the flabbergasted Matija questions about her menstrual cycle. At first she didn’t understand, then she started crossing herself and praying to the Virgin Mary to chase the demons out of her house. After they persisted, she called upon St. Elijah to strike the Austrian Kaiser with lightning and bring back the good sultan. In short, no matter how they tried, the doctors were unable to discover the secret of Rafo’s entry into the world, and there were indeed those among them who doubted that Matija had given birth to him.

  “It’ll probably turn out that it’s an illegitimate child of one of the old woman’s daughters. These people are primitive, something between men and animals. They slip their young to one another like cuckoo birds,” Dr. Gerlitzky observed to his younger colleagues. The old Bratislava bloodhound ignored the Čapljina midwife Jovanka when she swore that she’d assisted in Matija’s childbirth. He was unmoved by the fact that the old woman’s breasts were producing milk. “Female hysteria knows no bounds! A woman can piss gold if she convinces herself she can do it!” the doctor fumed.

  But the majority still believed that this was a medical miracle, so Rafo’s case entered into Austrian and German textbooks on physiology and childbirth. True, it was mentioned only as a statistical exception because it couldn’t be scientifically analyzed due to Matija’s refusal to cooperate. Regardless, the birth of Rafo Sikirić was the second Herzegovinian contribution to theoretical medicine in the Habsburg empire. (The first and most important was endemic syphilis.)

  The boy became the family pet, partly because of the money that arrived every month from Vienna, and partly because his brothers and sisters treated him more like a Habsburg prince than like the belated offspring of their own mother. They had a feeling that if something bad happened to Rafo— if, God forbid, he fell from an apple tree or some idiot hit him in the head with a rock— they could all end up in prison. And in the terrible Beledija prison in Sarajevo to boot, a place that was the source of dark legends in Herzegovina, spun mostly by tobacco smugglers who invoked Beledija to frighten one another. To make a long story short, one of his older siblings always had the task of looking after Rafo all day long, following him wherever he went, making sure that he wasn’t hungry or thirsty. In the general poverty of the Sikirić household and the widespread poverty of the region of Trebinje, such treatment was almost unseemly. It ended up not doing him any good.

  Old Josip Sikirić died the second winter after Rafo’s birth, and more people came to his funeral than would have been expected given his poverty and unsociable nature— he was never seen in bars or at get-togethers. But the tale of Josip’s fertility— worthy of the imperial blessing— grew into a legend, and the people turned that pauper into a notable. Twenty years after Josip’s death the women of Trebinje still picked stones off of his grave and secretly put them in the pockets of their insufficiently potent and fertile husbands. The belief in the magical power of those little stones would wane only at the turn of the century, when the tale of the “male water” of Kladanj spread through Bosnia and Herzegovina. That otherwise tasty and very drinkable mountain water, rich in minerals, would overshadow many local legends about fertility and would be in demand even in Vienna.

  Rafo’s mother Matija would depart six months after Josip. On one summer afternoon she just lay down and never got up again. Naturally, no one came to her funeral. Only the family and a few neighbors. But a letter from His Excellency did arrive in which he called Matija one of the most courageous mothers in the monarchy and a model wife of the region of Herzeg-Bosnia. That was an obvious sign, though not for Trebinje, that the emancipation of women had made great progress in Austria-Hungary, but also that there was a considerable difference between the Balkan and West European views of the mystery of human birth. The Balkan peoples were fascinated by the man who impregnated the woman, and the Westerners respected the fact that she’d brought the child into the world. The difference in these perspectives explains why the monarchy couldn’t grow together along its Balkan seams. The rationalism of the Habsburgs was more repugnant than the rule of the sultan to these mystics and metaphysicians.

  But in that year of 1880 it was too early for anyone to understand that the new state wouldn’t come to a good end. Which state did? Not in human history has there been a state that didn’t collapse and on the eve of its collapse didn’t seem to its subjects to be the most ridiculous and worst of all states that had ever been created. That’s simply the fate of this kind of human community: it’s born in blood and dies in the realization that it was born for no reason. This banal repetition of the same old fates of countries, not favored by divine intent, was where the small lives of men began and ended. Rafo’s was one of the smallest. He’d barely started walking and speaking his first words when he lost his father and mother. Not only did he not remember them, but later family stories about them would seem like legends of distant ancestors. They’d lived their lives long before his turn came. Instead of parents, he had brothers and sisters, eleven of them, who took the place of his father and mother in turns, on different days.

  Until he started school, he seemed like other children. He laughed as much as they did, cried as much as they did, and endured his princely position fairly well. The fact that he received more than others didn’t stir him to ask for more than he got. At the Trebinje market people told how there was no better and smarter child than Rafo and that his mother had never given birth to a child like him. Rafo was an angel but also living proof that Franz Joseph was a wise ruler.

  “The emperor knows whose godparent he will be, and the eagle knows what kind of chicks are being laid in its nests,” the Christians said, trying to provoke the now powerless beys of Trebinje.

  “Rafo’s no Mujo, and the Kaiser isn’t an Istanbul fatass,” they said loudly wherever Turkish ears could hear them.

  And the beys wouldn’t say anything in response to their remarks but slowly packed their things for the trek to the free East and mumbled among themselves that the future didn’t bode well for either the German empire or that child.

  There was no malice in their words, nor could there be any. Even before Turkey had renounced Bosnia, they realized that they’d clung to life by an unlikely trick of fate, though their time had passed. It was the first time in the world that someone had outlived his own age. In the next century it would happen to many. But it should be remembered that it began with the Bosnian beys and that they endured their fate (with few exceptions) with dignity and an unscathed sense that they meant something in this world.

  In those days and months and in the years that followed, until they emigrated or assimilated to the citizenry, drank themselves to death, went crazy, or gave themselves over to religion, the Trebinje beys looked on everything they saw with melancholy.

  They looked on the land with melancholy. And on the Viennese emperor too. They looked with melancholy on their estates, which were being invaded by common folk of all three faiths. And they looked on that child with melancholy too. Imperial grace and generosity wouldn’t bring it happiness but unhappiness. A person is made happy only by what falls to his lot by God’s calendar and design. Everything else loads trouble onto his back. And it can’t be that a poor child, no matter which faith he was, could have any kind of ruler as a godparent and closest relative. That was what the beys thought about the fate of little Rafo.

  Naturally it wasn’t to their taste, and n
aturally there was hardly any wisdom in such apparently wise words that align the stars over men’s heads, but something really did change in Rafo as soon as he started going to school. Though he was a smart boy who remembered things easily and could repeat after the teacher even more easily, none of what was taught stuck in his head. He studied what he had to, understood what was expected of him, but could get no use out of either. He would connect new things that he was learning with what he’d already learned only if someone pointed it out to him or ordered him to do it. Otherwise he would study everything as if it were for the first time. For instance, he learned all the letters of the alphabet more quickly than other children, but it took him a long time to learn to connect them into words. And even then he knew how to write certain words but without an awareness of how they were spelled.

  This inexplicable disorder went hand in hand with Rafo’s withdrawal into himself and the loss of any interest in being with the people around him. After he finished the fourth grade, he gave the impression of a tired, sad old man. He would run only if he had to, he participated in children’s games only when asked to, and he no longer laughed. He slipped through the children like a shadow, rarely said a word, and mostly sat under a pear tree in the schoolyard and waited for Ilijas the janitor to signal the end of recess with a cow rattle. He mastered the skill of disappearing. He wouldn’t go off anywhere; people knew that he was somewhere around. But if anyone were asked at some moment where Rafo was, no one knew, though Rafo was there, two paces away from them. You had to look really hard, peel your eyes, to see that Rafo was right there. And there wasn’t a child or an adult who was immune to that skill of his. If it was a skill and if some other word or explanation wasn’t required.

  As the Austrian empire sprawled out in Bosnia and Herzegovina and began to burden and impose on the people like every other empire, the Christians lost their desire to fill their Muslim neighbors’ ears with talk about Rafo who was no Mujo and the Kaiser who was no Istanbul fatass, so the Muslims also forgot about the child. The only people for whom he continued to be important and who kept caring for him with unabated fervor were his brothers, sisters, and the office of the Austrian emperor.

  Thus, regardless of Rafo’s poor grades, it was decided that he should continue his schooling at the Boys’ Classical Preparatory School in Sarajevo, a school that had been recently opened and enriched the pride of the city authorities because it was patterned after the best Viennese models, with a select cadre of teachers who had been brought from all ends of the monarchy.

  On the thirtieth of August, 1891, Rafo went to Sarajevo. He was seen off to his secondary schooling by his whole family, which in the meantime had grown and spread, partly on his imperial appanage. Thirty some-odd Sikirićes, everyone except Rafo’s niece, who was just being born, went to the newly built railway station in Dubrovnik, and all of them, including three illiterate brothers, were enchanted by the historical significance of the moment. The first Sikirić was going to the big city, not to be a servant but to pass through some magic whereupon others would be his servants. It was hard to imagine and harder still to describe that excitement! It was surely no less than people’s excitement when man first stepped on the surface of the moon. People would start revolutions to experience what the Sikirićes experienced. Millions of heads would fall to the ground dead in the twentieth century due to such excitement; the continent would drift out to sea; some nations would disappear and others would be born; athletic records would be broken, and humanity would be overcome with a fever on account of which not even the winters would be cold any more . . . Emperor Franz Joseph had granted the Sikirićes something that was bigger than all the valuables in all his treasuries.

  Rafo was the only one who didn’t feel the significance of the moment, though he knew what was going through his brothers’ heads. But why was it given to him of all people to carry the burden of their happiness? There was no answer to that question, nor was there any hope that anything could be changed. Only great misery and tears that he didn’t have to hide. They thought that he was crying because he was leaving home, that he felt sad because he wouldn’t be seeing Trebinje for a long time, and they almost felt pride. If you were sorry when you left for paradise, that meant their town square was worth something after all. They tried to console Rafo, hugged and kissed him, and he yielded to his misfortune, certain that the imperial curse had caught up with him. He who wanted more than anything for the whole world to leave him alone.

  Invisibility did the boy good; he could spend days like that without ever getting bored, happy in some inverted fashion, which was incomprehensible to others. On the way to Sarajevo he discovered the beauty of tunnels. While the wheels clattered through the darkness, Rafo could be whatever he wanted. For the first time in his life. And it didn’t matter that he had no wishes and that he didn’t care. He felt ashamed to his heart’s content, blushed in the darkness like a carrot in the ground, and at times he felt like shouting for joy. But such shouts would have been heard; they would have risen above the grating of the steel and the coupling rods that were colliding wildly and destroying anything in their path, so he said nothing and tried to hold his breath until they emerged from the tunnel and people started interpreting the flush on his cheeks in the wrong way. The child was traveling by train for the first time, and the capillaries in his brain almost burst from fear.

  Lunchtime had passed when the train arrived in Mostar, where everyone had to change to another trainset that was going to leave for Sarajevo in two hours. The dispatchers and conductors would pronounce the word trainset with a special dignity in their voices, as if they were speaking about Mozart or Brahms, and take every possible opportunity to mention the Sarajevo trainset.

  “Please purchase tickets for the Sarajevo trainset in the station,” they reminded the passengers, though most of them weren’t traveling any farther than Mostar.

  “The Sarajevo trainset will be brought up forty minutes prior to departure . . . The trainset is equipped with a special restaurant car, a Viennese restaurant on steel wheels— a wonder of the world . . . ! The Sarajevo trainset departs punctually and never arrives with a delay at its final destination . . . Spitting on the floor of the trainset is strictly forbidden . . . ! The trainset consists of six, seven, or nine cars. We cannot know in advance . . . ! The trainset has the strength of a thousand of the strongest horses in the empire, which stretches from the northern to the southern seas . . . ! The trainset is a marvel of human engineering; the good Allah will have to try hard to create a greater miracle . . . ! If we nevertheless run late, it’s not due to the trainset but to objective circumstances on the route . . . ! Woman, are you continuing on with the trainset . . . ? Well, you don’t need the trainset; you’re already crazy enough on your own!” The Herzegovinian railway workers spoke their sweet speech in rhythm and made a clear distinction between trains and trainsets. What ran from Dubrovnik to Mostar was an ordinary train, but the unprecedented marvel that would take selected passengers to Sarajevo was a trainset. Why? Well, you’ll find out, you who’ll have the luck and a reason to travel beyond Mostar! When you cross the invisible line that divides Herzegovina from Bosnia, you’ll understand right away when God quit creating the world and at which moment he started making a trainset out of it. It was easy to imagine the envy that the travelers on a train felt toward those who would continue their journey on the trainset.

  The name of the midget assigned to accompany Rafo from Dubrovnik to Sarajevo was Alija, and he worked in the Trebinje city administration stoking fireplaces and ovens. They chose him of all people so the boy wouldn’t experience a shock as soon as he sat down in the train. There was no more ordinary or simpler person than Alija in the city administration, so the little boy would have an easier time adapting to and accepting his transition from one world to another. Even an adult would be frightened the first time he went from a carriage to a steel behemoth and a locomotive replaced horses, so how wouldn’t a child?! But Alija accepted the ta
sk like a reward for his faithful service to the emperor and his homeland. He’d never dreamed of being able to see beautiful Sarajevo, and he told Rafo everything he was going to do in Sarajevo until his return to Trebinje, down to the smallest detail. He would buy roasted chickpeas and sweets for the children, buy the prettiest silk kerchief for his wife Nafa in the Bezistan Market. Then he would stroll streets where only gentlemen walked and go to the Alipaša Mosque, where the daily prayers were recited by Hafiz Sulejmanaga Ferizoglu, the most intelligent hafiz west of Damascus. Hafiz Ferizoglu knew not only the honorable Koran by heart, but also everything the Muslim mind had thought up from the beginning of time . . . And after all that Alija would go to Skenderija, which was probably some street in the middle of Sarajevo where real Vienna whores sold you-know-what! But those weren’t just any whores; they weren’t like Saveta and Kata in Trebinje— they were wild girls, the prettiest there were, and there were few like them even in the sultan’s harem! They’d gone to school for their trade; they even have those kind of schools in Vienna, so they knew how to turn men into roosters and stallions, into Rudonja the bull, whose seed was paid for in ducats. Alija wouldn’t go to bed with the Sarajevo low women, Allah forbid, because how would he look Nafa in the eye and how would he perform the abdest? He just wanted to get a look at them. He’d been hearing tales of their beauty for ten years; anyone from the city administration who went to Sarajevo was bewitched by the low women, and there were also men who wouldn’t touch their own wives with a ten-foot pole after they had gone to bed with them. The file clerk Hamza had been with three low women and had lost his mind when he got back to Trebinje. When they mounted you and started singing their German songs, you forgot who you were and whom you belonged to. You turned into a winged charger, and it seemed to you that— God forgive me— the houries of paradise were spurring you onward. There was no greater sin, and Alija wasn’t going to burden his soul with that, even if he didn’t love his wife. But he loved her so much that even now he felt empty without her, so he would just peep into the yards with the Viennese whores, get a whiff of their fragrances— and they surely smelled of roses and jasmine. Because what could smell better than roses and jasmine? Then he would run outside so the spell wouldn’t intoxicate him— God forbid— and lead him into temptation.