The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “What on earth got into you, son?” he asked, watching him as an eagle watches its sick young, and he would have liked to peck out his brains.

  “Nothing,” said the eaglet and curled up beneath the quilt, staring at something beyond everything else upon which he might fix his gaze.

  “What do you mean ‘nothing’?” Ivan asked, gnashing his teeth. Rafo didn’t answer; he was thinking that the whole affair would be forgotten.

  “What do you mean ‘nothing’?” Ivan thundered over him. “Do you know what you’ve done to all of us, goddammit?!”

  Rafo gave no answer and didn’t move. He tried not to reveal that he was breathing or that he was there. His head was empty, the fragments of the previous night’s dreams were flashing through his mind, and grains of dust sank into the depth of his gaze and ended in the gleam of a ray of sunlight.

  “Answer me!” Ivan yelled. “Answer me!”

  The boy remembered Alija’s fingers. Two of them were odd, his thumb and index finger. The fingernails on each were the same size and shape, on both his left and his right hand. He looked at his own fingers. Their nails were very different. Everyone’s were like that except Alija’s. His thumb and index finger were like twin brothers.

  “Why did you have to be born so late, damn you?! Why did you even come out into the world, you damned bastard?! Why didn’t we choke you the day you were born?!” Ivan howled with the voice of a wailing woman. Rafo laughed.

  He could have killed him. It wouldn’t have mattered; no one would have cared. And he probably wouldn’t have served any time. He could have strangled him, and people would have said that Rafo had died of the consequences of the hanging. All of Trebinje knew that he’d tried to hang himself. There would have been a large funeral, military representatives and imperial priests would have come, and the shame would have been forgotten over time. At any rate, it belonged to the emperor every bit as much as it did to Ivan. Ivan would certainly strangle him as soon as he started laughing! He would have wrung his neck like a Christmas turkey if his head hadn’t been full of what he owed Medžid Bašaga and what the town and his family were trying to take away from him. Rafo would finish school, Rafo would go off to Vienna, everybody would know about Rafo; Rafo would get an appointment at the royal court . . . And who would be the only one who’d helped, who’d saved Rafo from dying and put him on his path in life? Ivan! No one else but Ivan! Rafo hadn’t been brought up by all the Sikirićes but only by him and Franz Joseph! Everyone else would have strangled Rafo as if he weren’t a human child but a kitten or a puppy! They would have thrown him into the Trebišnjica River so his body would never again see the light of day.

  The train left with a half-hour delay. The boy sat by the window. He was pale, and his eyes were completely empty.

  “Are you sick?” asked the conductor.

  “Sick— no way. He’s as healthy as a horse!” Ivan answered, smiling idiotically at the uniformed man.

  “Yeah, he’s healthy like a horse’s ass,” the conductor said scornfully, evidently insulted by the difference between his uniform and Ivan’s tattered suit. Since railway tickets had become cheaper, every scumbag traveled by train. Soon they’ll let live pigs into the cars, just when we’ve started becoming upstanding citizens, thought the imperial railway official, hoping that Ivan would start to make a fuss so he could kick him off the train. But he didn’t. He was mild-mannered and frightened in the face of the fact that he was going on such a long trip for the first time. He wouldn’t if he didn’t have to; he wouldn’t even if his life were on the line! He was afraid of the railroaders’ uniforms; he was afraid of the thought of arriving in Sarajevo and not being able to find his way around there, of not knowing how to get Rafo to those nuns. The boy wouldn’t be any help. It had been three days since he’d spoken a word. You could hit him on the head, you could spank his bare ass, you could make him kneel on corn plants and thrash the soles of his feet with a willow switch— Ivan had tried all that— but his face didn’t twitch, nor did he make a sound. He just kept quiet; only when the skin on his back broke did he squeal, God forgive me, as if he were an animal or as if his soul were on one end of the globe and his ass on another. The last thing he said was that he wasn’t going back to Sarajevo.

  “Well now, fool, you think you’re not going back to the imperial school?!” Ivan had never heard such nonsense. “You can shame your own brother, you can spit all over those who gave birth to you, you can give the Lord God the finger when he asks how you’re doing, you can kill yourself, but you can’t spit all over the emperor’s grace and godparenthood, my boy!” That was basically what he told him or something like that . . . But not exactly in those words because Ivan wasn’t very good with words, and he lost his nerve at that moment. So maybe he said something else, and maybe he didn’t say anything but just sputtered something through his lips, but that was the sense of it.

  “You can shame your own brother . . . ,” Ivan whispered so no one could hear him, more for himself, proud that he’d come up with such clever words. He used these words to deflect the insult that the conductor had inflicted on him. Listen, you horse’s ass! Oh, he would make a horse’s ass of him when Rafo finished school. He would find him, give him a slap, and order for him to be fired . . .

  “Do you want some borek?” he asked him as they went across the Mostar station to the ticket office. He was holding him by the collar— sure was sure— but Rafo didn’t answer again. And he didn’t have to! He would speak up when he got hungry. No one had ever killed themselves by refusing to eat, and he wouldn’t either, Ivan thought cleverly, and bought himself some borek. The fat borek man held out a piece wrapped in newsprint, but the guy in front of him— probably some Kraut— had gotten his in nice white paper. It was there for all to see: a bunch of torn newspaper pages and a neatly arranged thin stack of clean paper. And depending on how he sized up a customer, the borek man would wrap the borek in the one or the other. But it cost the same for everyone! Ivan was irritated, but again he didn’t dare say anything. He knew that the world had been turned upside down, but that it had gone this far— that was too much for Ivan. He chewed his borek, the grease dripping down his chin. He bit into the imprints of gothic letters on the dough and tried to convince himself that there was no way in hell he was ever going to travel this far away from home again. Maybe we aren’t such elegant people, he thought, maybe we smell of onions and brandy, but we aren’t the kind of people who have one kind of paper for poor people and another for rich people.

  “Now sit here,” he said and made himself comfortable in a red armchair of the Sarajevo trainset and took out a bottle of brandy. The borek wasn’t anything to get excited about— too much onion, and the potato was somehow rancid— and he tried to quiet the storm in his stomach with the plum brandy. He’d packed a chain and a lock in his bag, just in case, to chain Rafo to a seat in the compartment if he felt he was going to doze off, but now he felt it would be awkward with other people around. What would the conductors say if they saw him chaining up the boy? He was his child, and it was true that no one had the right to interfere in what you did with your own kin, but again— there were all kinds of people. They would laugh at him and make all kinds of comments, and Ivan would rather not have anyone talk to him any more. Hopefully they wouldn’t look at him; hopefully they wouldn’t know he was there.

  “Don’t think about making a move because I’ll break your legs!” he warned the boy before he pulled his hat down over his eyes and drifted off into a slumber in which he tried to calm the sprouted onion and the spoiled Glamoč potatoes that had been frozen who knows how many times before they had ended up in Ivan’s borek. The wheels of the trainset clattered in a regular rhythm, as if the unerring hand of God were tolling church bells and calling his flock to repentance. The flood was coming, and the only ones who were safe were those who had the least to lose. Ivan had less than nothing and could slumber more deeply than any of the other passengers in the trainset.

&nbs
p; He was awakened by a painful drumming in his temples. He thought that the pain was coming from the noise of the wheels and gripped the boy firmly by the elbow. Rafo groaned softly— so he was there! And then he felt that something strange was happening in his bowels. He heard the panicked signal of his own intestines; the strength of his muscles in their attempts to contain what was forcing its way out was growing feebler and feebler. A harsh heat, greasy, painful, and viscous, was raging inside him. He didn’t know what to do! Either he would jump out of the train and take a shit like a man, even if Rafo got away from him, or he would hold the fire inside him and protect the right of an eldest son, defend his honor before the Trebinje square, and save his soul . . . The only thing he couldn’t do was soil his pants! People would smell it, and their scorn would devour him; they would kick him off the train and kick him in his side with their boots . . . The trainset crept up Mt. Ivan slowly; it was hardly moving. His head was about to burst and flashes of light obscured his vision. Tightening the most important muscle in his body, he took the chain out of his bag and, without saying a word, started chaining up the boy’s legs and locking them. He couldn’t care less whether the conductors would see him; he tightened the chain as much as he could, and then, moments before he soiled himself, he ran through the car. The passengers watched him in confusion; a lady with a hat jumped up and frowned— maybe he was a pickpocket who was running from the police! Her purse was luckily in its place because he’d already jumped out of the train. He got caught in some branches and slammed down onto the rocks. His muscle had relaxed, a little spurt streamed into his underwear, but Ivan pulled himself together quite quickly, pulled his pants down, and with an explosive whine released from himself water, fire, and the unbearable stench of digested plum brandy. His head hurt unbearably; he closed his eyes and strained to eject what was left. Then, without losing time to wipe himself, he pulled up his pants and ran toward the train. The horror of the human heart can be such that a person no longer feels pain. He ran as he’d never run in his life.

  The legend of the emperor’s godchild was finished all because Ivan Sikirić’s intestines had started working when the Mostar-Sarajevo trainset was almost at the top of Mt. Ivan, which divided Herzegovina from Bosnia and prevented the Mediterranean climate from reaching all the way to Sarajevo, presenting a challenge for architects and designers of the railway schedule because there was no locomotive that could ascend Mt. Ivan with a speed of more than a walk. But as soon as it crossed the top of the pass at Bradina, the trainset rushed at full speed toward the golden valleys and the Sarajevo basin so that not even the swiftest Arab horses could catch up to it. Ivan Sikirić ran in vain after the last wagon. He called and swore into the night in vain. He was left alone in the middle of unfamiliar country, where all one could hear was the howling of wolves and the distant sobs of forest fairies and spirits. Luckily, that was a year with no snow and no hard frost because otherwise he would have frozen to death by morning.

  They reported Rafo’s disappearance, made inquiries everywhere: Had anyone seen him? Had anything been heard? Were there any children anywhere about whom it wasn’t clear who their parents were? They spent all their savings on phony reports and spies, whom they sent to Bihać, Višegrad, and Brodska Vrata. But the boy seemed to have disappeared without a trace. An inquiry came from the Sarajevo prep school asking why Rafo Sikirić hadn’t shown up for classes. Two nuns wrote letters every week with a request to contact them. Some people from the police also came. There was a suspicion that the family was preventing the boy from returning to school . . .

  A month later a sealed letter arrived from Ivan Polak that informed the first-grade pupil Rafo Sikirić that he’d been expelled from the school due to his disregard for school discipline and unexcused absences and that the decision had been forwarded to the minister of education personally. Three weeks later instead of the imperial appanage a request came for the money from the previous month to be paid back. That was a sign to the Sikirićes that Emperor Franz Joseph had renounced his godchild and that they didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. Instead of showing concern, instead of sending people to search for him across the empire, and instead of acting as godparents do in times of distress, the emperor had requested that his money be returned! In that winter of 1892, the Sikirićes were bitterly disappointed in the monarchy.

  The town looked on their tragedy with malicious gloating, but regardless— the reputation of the Habsburgs sank very low in all of Trebinje! That wasn’t the state that they’d been hoping for, nor did its emperor treat all his subjects in the same manner. Or didn’t godparenthood mean anything in Vienna? It didn’t matter what the problem was, the people didn’t think it was right. No more letters arrived from the palace or from the Sarajevo government concerning the emperor’s godchild. The Sikirićes paid back the money, along with the interest and the revenue stamps.

  And Ivan simply shut himself out of everything. No one dared even mention Rafo in front of him: not Rafo, not Franz Joseph, not the town square, nothing of anything that had been important to him and that had ever troubled him. He rarely went down into the city. He took care of his bees, and when his memory stung him, he touched the scar on his cheek and immediately forgot everything. He lived like that for five more years, and then in the rainy spring of 1898, while he was unchaining his beehives, a swarm of hornets attacked him and stung him all over. The beasts had slipped into one of the beehives, killed the bees, and settled there. He crawled to the house and died shortly afterward. They didn’t open the coffin before the funeral because his face was so disfigured that the neighbors wouldn’t have believed it was him.

  More than ten years would pass before Rafo Sikirić came to his hometown again, as a married man. Some didn’t recognize him, and others didn’t want to. He asked his brothers whether any of the estate was his. They told him none of it was and not to risk his neck and ask again! He didn’t ask again, nor did he ever see any of his family afterward. He worked as a station porter in Konjic. He cleaned the Mostar railroad station and ground corn for a boza maker, slept in his cellar, and acted like he didn’t feel anything when at night the fat old man touched him with a trembling hand. He loaded ships near Metković; he carried tobacco for smugglers to Split and šibenik . . .

  He grew and shot up like weeds along a railway track, listless as God had created him and always alone, with no need for friends or company. What kept him alive was the horror that he’d endured while hanging from the plum tree. He worked all day long so that afterward he could sleep free, without thoughts and dreams.

  He ended up in Dubrovnik because there was no longer any work in Metković, and a lot of snow had fallen and it was impossible to make it further toward Konjic and Jablanica. He got a job in the Gruž harbor and rented an apartment from Granny Petka, an old maid and the last offspring of a once eminent captain’s family. She was a drunkard who’d already gone off her rocker somewhat, from either old age or alcohol. After she’d sold the more valuable furniture, her father’s maritime diaries, her grandfather’s pipe collection (there were a few hundred pipes from all continents made of wood, clay, and one— a Greek one— of stone), sixteen inherited paintings (the oldest was from the period before the Hundred Years’ War), countless marine and geographic maps drawn with the pens of the greatest Portuguese, English, and Bay of Kotor masters, Granny Petka no longer had any source of money for brandy, so she spent months in the harbor looking for someone to whom she could rent out part of her house. Sailors waiting to set sail, dock workers, and all manner of jobless men who gather in all harbors and railway stations of the world turned down the old woman’s offer down to a man. First of all, it was expensive— she wanted a bottle of brandy every second day, which at that time cost serious money, and second of all, she didn’t give the impression of someone at whose place a man would want to sleep the night if he didn’t have to. Small and hunched, with an enormous witch’s nose on her thin face, dressed in unbelievably dirty rags, she stank of all
the most unpleasant smells that a human nose could imagine. The stench arrived first, and only afterward would she appear, shouting like a newspaper boy:

  “Wanted— an honest man for an apartment, no whores, no filth!”

  The harbor workers called her Granny Stinky and started chasing her away. Every time they told her to get lost, she would mope off and shrink a little more. And then one noticed that she had the pleading look of a dog that was convinced that people are beings that don’t go out without bones in their pockets. She would shuffle off to the next ship at the unloading dock and would be just as surprised when they chased her off too. No matter how many times she heard a dirty word, Granny Petka never got used to it. When the workers would break for a snack around noon and decide to mess with someone for dessert, one of them would take a bottle that still had a little wine in it and shout:

  “Hey, Stinky, are you still drunk?”

  Granny Petka would light up like Eve when she first saw the sunrise and start for the bottle. She ran, if one could call it running, stumbled, and fell, and just as she shambled up to them, the bottle would fly off into the sea. Everyone would laugh hysterically, and the main prankster would say:

  “C’mon, Stinky, jump in after the wine so you won’t stink anymore!”

  The same scene was repeated day in, day out, without anything changing at all. Every time the old woman raced off toward the bottle, the bottle always flew into the sea, and the workers laughed with the same enthusiasm.

  Rafo refused Granny Petka when she offered him the apartment for the same reasons the others did but didn’t participate in the jokes they played on her, nor did he snack with the group. However, his attempts to get away so he wouldn’t see or hear anything were futile. Wherever he found a spot to break his bread and cut some salt pork, in any corner of the harbor and a hundred meters out, one could hear the laughter. And one knew that they were tormenting Granny Stinky again. That started to drive him crazy, disturbed his daily peace of mind. The daily hardship of his soul turned into a wild tension, into something that resembled the echoes of the hallways of the Sarajevo prep school. He tensely awaited the laughter, and when he heard it, he felt like beating his head on the low stone walls of the harbor. He could choose: either to flee Dubrovnik or to take up residence with Granny Stinky and buy her brandy.