The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

It’s perhaps difficult to claim that there’s a single day in a person’s life that is the most important, but the fate of Rafo Sikirić— everything that he would become and everything on account of which his Kata would waste her life— was finished a little before noon on August 31, 1891, the second day of his stay in Sarajevo. Paulina came back from the police station all in tears, accompanied by two policemen in civilian dress, and Rozalija hurried Rafo off to his room. For no reason, because he alone knew and was certain that Alija Čuljak was no longer among the living. Someone had found him a little below Vrbanja and Skenderija, by the bank of the Miljacka, horribly beaten and with his throat cut. The policemen were unable to pry apart his hands, which were still clenching Nafa’s kerchief. Roasted chickpeas were strewn all around the corpse. As he didn’t have his wallet, they easily solved the motive for the crime.

  However, they didn’t know, nor would they ever find out, where Alija’s throat had been cut. Because it hadn’t happened on the Miljacka River; his dead body had only been dumped there. Whether he had seen the low women, whether he’d taken a fancy to one and thus paid with his life or kept his promise to the Good Allah, that likewise remained a secret between Alija and the Almighty. What people knew was that no one was able to take his kerchief. They tried to pry his fingers apart when they were preparing him for his funeral. But it didn’t work.

  Thus the silk kerchief ended in a small, open coffin, as if a child were being buried, with a body that was being committed naked back to the earth.

  If Nafa didn’t suspect her husband (and sorrow and pity hope that she didn’t), then she knew at that time that the kerchief had been for her. Which only increased her pain and sense that the Good Allah was not accessible to the weak mind of a woman, as He ruled the world and took to himself people’s loved ones.

  Rafo went on living with his guilt, but in the meantime he lost the gift of invisibility. Or Sarajevo was different than Trebinje in that no one could be invisible there. A trove for those who knew how to fight, good for those with quick minds and sharp tongues, a heaven for jokesters and hotheads of all kinds, Sarajevo was a hellish place for the soft-spoken and weak souls, all of whom like to get out of the way first. In the prep school he found himself among thirty little bandits: children from upper-class Sarajevo households, children from old Muslim families, and little carpetbaggers with Czech, Austrian, Slovak, Slovene, Ashkenazi, Italian, and Hungarian names whose fathers had come in the imperial service after the occupation in 1878.

  And while their families retained the manners and customs of their old countries and didn’t grow accustomed to the strange humor and severe climate of their new home, their children didn’t differ at all from their classmates of the Islamic faith. The latter were even a smidgen more restrained and calm— though that wasn’t the rule— because they probably felt the faint traces of their bey origins, whereas all those little Aloises, Ferdinands, Josephs, and Františeks had completely adopted the harshest forms of the local mentality and moreover those of its most dangerous and most colorful residential and lumpenproletariat subtype. Their spirit, and later the spirit of the city, was not formed by the market district, which in the Turkish time had had its humor— but a humor that knew moderation, wasn’t full of cynicism, and rarely threatened the integrity of the unprotected. The carpetbagger children, of which there were more in the prep school than local children, had been molded and marked by the carnivalesque debauchery of the Muslim and Christian common folk, who’d for centuries been active on the edges of the city, reveling, carousing, and starving— and who with the arrival of the Austrians had broken into Sarajevo and occupied it, in a manner of speaking. That invasion in general hadn’t had a negative impact on the city itself, which was weary of the kind of oriental social symmetry that had become tiresome to Istanbul as well. But it could cost people with tender souls and lesser vigor their lives or at least their minds. Those who didn’t know how to adapt, or had no opportunity to adapt, were fated never to step across their thresholds into the street with peace in their hearts. Which was again a paradox because the new Sarajevo was tuned so that most people found peace in their hearts in the street and nowhere else.

  On the seventh day of school they began picking on Rafo. He tried to defend himself, but he didn’t know how. He was physically stronger than Alois Schechtel, the most loathsome brat in his grade, and he could hold his own against Džemal Sirća, the son of a rich watchmaker in the market district, a hooligan who would have probably ended up among the pickpockets of Mejtaš and Bjelave if his father hadn’t followed his every step and as soon as he did something wrong thrashed him with a horse whip.

  However, neither Alois nor Džemal picked fights according to the rule of the world of boys, with the intention of showing their power over those who were weaker than they were and thus to gain a gang of followers. First of all, they weren’t in a position to do so, and second of all, it never occurred to them. Running a gang wasn’t anything that anyone in the prep school or even in the communities of Sarajevo dared to do. With the Austrians and the arrival of the common folk from the outskirts a kind of anarchy had taken hold. God forbid that someone got the idea of playing aga or vizier. Years and decades would pass before Sarajevo would receive new formal and informal leaders that would dictate what one could and dared, and what one couldn’t and didn’t dare, to do. At the time when Rafo Sikirić found himself between Alois and Džemal, his two enemies, there was no leader in sight. But one had to show the strength of a leader to survive in that world.

  So one of them would rush at him— never both of them at the same time— and would, say, sneak up behind Rafo and stab him in his rear end with a compass. Rafo would squeal, “Don’t!”

  The one who did it would shrug his shoulders and say, “I didn’t do it!”

  As soon as Rafo turned around and started working, he would stab him with the compass again, this time really hard. Rafo could hardly hold back his tears from the pain: “Don’t, you jerk!”

  The third time he would jab the compass down to the adjusting screw. Rafo would turn around and grab him by the neck. A shoving match and a fight followed, but what was also more important in a physical altercation: the exchange of swearwords and insults. The enemy would withdraw strategically, avoiding a real fistfight, but would land some very precise verbal blows.

  The goal was to attract the attention of as many of the grade as possible, to get a laugh, to get Rafo’s eyes to tear up, to make him start stuttering and repeat one and the same swearword like a parrot because he was unable to come up with anything with which to respond. And he wasn’t able not because he was stupid, and maybe even not because he was less verbally agile, but because he’d been attacked, and the one who was attacked in such fights was always at a disadvantage. The basic principle and the rule of the game was that the attacker always won, unless the one he attacked decided on a real fistfight. But even then only half a victory was in sight because more value was placed on making a fool of someone than really beating him up. Besides, fistfights were punished in the prep school but insults weren’t.

  After Alois and Džemal had had enough of abusing Rafo, it was the turn of the next level of bullies, who wanted to carve out a piece of the grade’s respect, to test their courage and sharpen their tongues.

  After two months there were only four or five boys who hadn’t picked on Rafo. At the same time, he wasn’t the only one they picked on. The others were cunning and resourceful, had older brothers or dangerous fathers. A boy who mostly kept quiet and stayed out of the way, and the only one who wasn’t from Sarajevo and for whom two funny nuns came to the parent-teacher conferences, was fated to daily abuse. In the other grades there were miserable boys with similar fates, but never just one in a grade and never so fainthearted.

  He never told Rozalija and Paulina what happened to him. They noticed when he came home muddy from school because ten or so rascals had decided to give Rafo a practical demonstration in natural history, about the Turopolje
wild pigs, and would push him into the mud in the middle of the schoolyard. The nuns would see that his eyes were red from crying, and sometimes they noticed that he had bruises on his arms, but neither did they know what to do, nor did they know the logic of the world into which Rafo had been thrust. Apart from the fact that according to the nature of their calling they could have had no idea about the jungle in the schools, Rozalija and Paulina still lived in the world of Ottoman Bosnia, in which people bowed to each other when they didn’t get along and people were terrified only of those who had higher appointments in the formal hierarchy. One feared the aga and the aga’s men, one feared the vizier if he accidentally ran into him or ended up in his way, but that was about it. And again, the common folk, especially the Christians, thought that was too much. A free man is more afraid of fear than slavery because a slave is only afraid of his master and no one else.

  Rozalija and Paulina, as well as the few nuns that there had been during Turkish rule, thought that they were living in the role of earthly slaves. They served their church, the hungry, and the unfortunate, but that was not the essence of their slavery. They slaved for the Turks and the Turkish authorities, oppressors who didn’t honor Christ or his pastors and confessed a false faith. That fact upset them greatly; they prayed for the era and ways of the Ottomans to come to an end, and depending on the nature of their hearts, all of them either hated the Turks and everything Turkish or merely feared them.

  Rozalija and Paulina had befriended one another by virtue of the fact that they were both unaccustomed to hatred, and the times of great upheavals always seemed to be created for hatred, and that was why those who could not stoke it in their hearts had more to fear from such times than those who were most exposed to it.

  A shortcoming of that devilish gift of hatred, unworthy of reason, would in times of upheaval often be interpreted as a lack of patriotism and even a lack of faith in God. Rafo’s guardians understood that in good time and made every effort to be as far as possible from everything that could summon hatred in them but also from whatever might show the world that they didn’t know how to hate. Happy and content that a Christian emperor now ruled over Bosnia instead of the sultan of Istanbul, the two of them tried to be spared from further information.

  “Is anyone picking on you?” Rozalija would ask him and without waiting for an answer would continue, “If they lay a hand on you, you just go ahead and get away, find some shelter; that’s smarter and closer to God. You shouldn’t have anything to do with fools, even if you’re stronger than they are. And especially if you’re weaker! If a Muslim lays a hand on you, forgive him because he’s angry that our emperor is now in Bosnia. He’s not hitting at you but hitting at His Highness Franz Joseph, and you should understand that and walk away. The poor boy isn’t to blame because his papa and mama are of the wrong faith. He’ll realize sooner or later that our emperor is a good man, and when he realizes that, he won’t hit you but will be your friend. That’s the way it’s always been. If, on the other hand, a Christian child lays hands on you, forgive him too. The people have become wild, and hardly anyone knows what is good and what is bad. They have blood in their eyes as if there wasn’t enough of it in 1878. They’d like to pay back the violence that the Turks committed for four hundred years and lash out when they can. They don’t honor God or the church, nor do they honor people. Shame on them forever,” Rozalija would say and grow angry, without Rafo having said a word. He would only watch the face and hands of that funny and precious woman; his gaze would pass from her eyes, which were blue and narrow like an old salamander’s, to her nose, which was big like a ripe cucumber, and then on to her fingers, which moved excitedly around each word, and it seemed that they were not coordinated with one another.

  The scene calmed him, but what Rozalija was saying didn’t matter to him. And it didn’t because one of them lived outside that world. Rafo’s anguish— his inner anguish, which he’d brought with him from Trebinje, and his outer anguish, which Sarajevo had bestowed on him— had nothing to do with emperors and sultans, nor was it at any moment important which confession his tormentors professed.

  The only ones for whom he was invisible were the teachers. Before the Christmas holiday and the winter vacation not one of them remembered his name and surname, nor did they recognize him by sight. His grades were a gray average: he would neither fail nor excel in any subject. Grimy, and often bloody and muddy, Rafo remained outside the teachers’ field of vision, which was in and of itself unusual if only because there was a strict instruction about paying attention to the pupils’ hygiene in the First Preparatory School. The Viennese teaching staff were stunned at what a dirty land they’d come to: lice, fleas, bedbugs, venereal diseases, and endemic syphilis (the most terrible thing one could imagine) . . . Still, one has to admit that they were willing to notice so much filth because they expected it. And so, more than the low level of hygiene among the local inhabitants, it was the fact that they had found a few hundred public fountains in the city and encountered the Muslim practice of washing before every prayer that surprised them. Regardless: the First Preparatory School was supposed to serve as a model of the advance of public hygiene. They looked out for dirty fingernails and lice-infested heads as one might take care of the highest strategic interest of the empire. Blood and mud and Rafo Sikirić’s face cast a dark shadow on the scope of the teachers’ efforts.

  As he boarded the trainset to Mostar, Rafo Sikirić decided not to return to Sarajevo alive. In fact, he’d known that earlier, but now he had to review what he’d learned so he wouldn’t forget, or it wouldn’t seem to him that what he’d seen on the platform was true, while everything that had happened the previous months was only an illusion. Rozalija and Paulina pushed their way through the people without worrying about the dignity of their mission or about what people might think when they saw two nuns crying their eyes out while they passed a boy bags with bread, roast chicken, apples, and bottles of milk and water through the window so the little one would have everything he needed and wouldn’t, God forbid, starve to death on the way to Trebinje. And people might have thought all kinds of things when Paulina began yelling to Rafo at the top of her lungs not to go to public toilets under any circumstances. All kinds of people went there, and there were all kinds of illnesses there. She shouted because they’d forgotten to warn him about that amid the dozens of other people, so now she tried in vain to outshout the locomotive.

  He waved at them as long as they could see him, but he knew that his hand wasn’t waving as the four of theirs were. It started hurting and would always hurt him whenever he remembered how two women of God had seen him off, how much they loved him, and with what fear they’d given him up to the wide world in the fervent belief that he would come back to them.

  If mothers are known for anything and if motherhood isn’t a way in which biology cheats and deceives the human mind, then they are known for that fear. Rafo felt it in Rozalija and Paulina, but after that— never again. The fact that he was unable to give that love back to them was one of the rare sins that he would sense clearly in his life.

  Another sin was that he wouldn’t believe in everything that the two of them believed in. That might have saved him. And he himself would become conscious of that fact some fifteen years later, when he began to sort his nails and realized that he would now be maintaining the thread of his life more easily if he’d learned Rozalija’s and Paulina’s simplemindedness. But he wasn’t able to drown himself and warm himself in the abundance of his family. He didn’t have a sense for the comfort of the service of the Lord and the blessed, calming power of belonging to the flock of believers.

  Once before bedtime Paulina told him about one day (he remembered it— January 15, 1882!) when Sarajevo had received its archbishop. In the presence of respected people, in the wooden church of St. Anthony, Josip Stadler became first among the shepherds. She described in a lively fashion the golden tassels and buttons on the uniform of the commander of the city, General
Herman Dahlen, who’d come to greet the archbishop; she told Rafo what they ate afterward, what kind of soup there was, and what cuts of veal were roasted, and mentioned that white bread was served but that the general requested black bread. The hosts were surprised and a little insulted because in those days it was hard to find flour for white bread. Dahlen had completely innocently shat on their fun; that was exactly how Paulina put it, and she said just that— shat! She didn’t swear or say bad words, but she didn’t lie or put a false face on things. That was just the place for that word, in the story about a great day in her religious life, the day when Sarajevo became a city of Christ. Rafo was truly touched, almost as if he’d seen Alija in that woman. Until the end of the story, when she admitted that she hadn’t been in the church or at the dinner that day because there had been no room for her and Rozalija. She hadn’t seen anything that she was telling about with her own eyes but had only believed what others had told. And not even they had been there but had been told by those who had been. Paulina was comforted because she was able to see what wasn’t happening to her as real. God hadn’t given Rafo that power, so He didn’t exist for Rafo.

  In Trebinje he was awaited like a little emperor, as if he’d already gotten his doctorate and not spent only a half-year in the prep school. The whole family gathered at the railway station again, and all the way home they showered him with questions about the most closely guarded worldly and metaphysical secrets. They asked him about everything that had ever bothered them and for which they didn’t have any answers because they hadn’t finished the imperial schools:

  “Are there more churches in Vienna or more mosques in Istanbul?”

  “Are there more Chinamen or ants?”

  “How many times a day does the Austrian emperor lunch?”

  “Do people live on stars, and is it hot or cold up there?”

  “How many dunams of land do the richer Sarajevans have?”