Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Do you love me?” Aris asked and blinked as the Reichstag burned.

Jana was practicing with twelve bowling pins and when they were all up in the air said, “You’ve asked me that thirty times today already. I’m not going to answer!”

Luka hit his fist on the table, and Regina slapped him, the first and last time in her life.

“You’re a lunatic, a common lunatic,” he shouted through his tears, and she cracked her knuckles. The joints popped like a hot pine stump in an autumn rain.

“I’ll groom horses; I know everything about them,” Aris told the circus owner, Tibor Timošenko.

“So you don’t have any more money, huh?” the old acrobat asked and squinted at him.

“When he spends his last dinar, he’ll come back to me,” Regina whispered to Luka through the prison grate.

“And what if they convict me?” he asked, but the English consul didn’t bring any charges.

“You fall asleep in Austria and wake up in Germany,” Timošenko said and sighed as prep school students paraded through Vienna’s Ringstraße shouting slogans about German unification.

“We’re finished,” Jana said and sighed.

“We’ll fight,” Aris answered. “Hitler can’t conquer the world.”

She looked at him sadly: “He doesn’t have anything to do with you and me.”

That same evening an Arab horse named Hafez struck Aris in the forehead with its hoof, and he lost consciousness briefly. The very next day he remembered everything except that he’d ever been with Regina. That detail would come back to his memory only when he died in 1940 in Paris, in the arms of Tibor Timošenko, who’d lost a bet that his trapeze artist Aris Berberijan could do a double somersault with his eyes blindfolded and without a safety net and grab onto the arms of Alija the Turk, the strongest man in the Levant. The knuckles of their middle fingers only brushed each other, and Aris fell into the abyss and broke his spine.

Two days after the Anschluss, Ivo Delavale kissed Regina for the first time.

“I’m sailing out tomorrow,” he said, “and you’ll wait for me if you love me.”

She looked at him with yearning, as a beaver looks at a broken dam. “I won’t wait for you,” she said, shaking her head. “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.” And he pressed her in his embrace and with his fingers he imitated ants climbing up her underarm. He tickled her until tears came to her eyes and then left.

The next year was the happiest in her life. She forgot one man and wasn’t really waiting for the other. She didn’t believe him because she’d decided not to. If you survive being in love, you can decide what you want, and you won’t make a mistake or give in.

Everything went well until that May evening when she ran out of the Cosmos Cinema in tears, horrified by the Hindenburg disaster. She realized that she was thirty- two years old and wouldn’t live to see the advances in science and technology repair what Aris had broken. What had been broken by both Aris and Mina, who’d died to pay some terrible debt, and also by her fear, which was the reason she’d waited so long and then ended up with the wrong man. Everything was wrong, and only the hope that she would fly into the clouds with kings and princes held her soul together. However, the Hindenburg went down in flames. And what else was left for her to do but to give herself over to the one whom she didn’t believe and, when he finally came back, to create faith in him. And that faith, of course, wasn’t a faith borne of love but a faith borne of fear. One of many religions that leave no holy books or stories behind. Neither holy wars nor the blood of innocents strengthen them. They have no armies of infidels arrayed against them. And no one recognized hers to be a faith because it didn’t belong to anyone other than this desperate woman who’d created a new faith. Regina created hers around the Hindenburg, and many men of her generation created theirs around the Spanish Republic.

When years and decades would pass and the twentieth century came to an end, their grandchildren would ask what had happened to their grandfathers, what kind of romantic chaos had taken hold of their souls and led them to go thousands of kilometers away to defend something that belonged to someone else so that they died for Barcelona and Madrid and in French camps they awaited the Nazis, who then sent them to eastern Poland to death camps, gas chambers, and crematoriums, where their great illusion finally went up in smoke and ash. Their grandchildren, to be sure, wouldn’t know that the old men in their families had fought for something of their own and not something that belonged to someone else! Spain fell to them as the last great hope of the world, breathing its dying breath. Hope replaced God because God didn’t live to see the twentieth century. He died with the last great Requiem Masses and oratorios. Mozart still believed in him, but with Wagner faith had already become a myth. Bepo Sikirić went to defend Spain in the name of hope. And during that time his sister waited for the Hindenburg to land at Popovo Polje; millions of men and women all over the world hoped for hundreds of thousands of their own miracles and in doing so scorned one another because the hopes of others almost always seemed trivial. The problem came about because the majority of men believed in organized and collective miracles, those for which it was worth spilling blood. The blood of others if they were stronger and were on the attack, and their own if they were weaker and on the defensive. That was the most probable reason why revolutions broke out, stronger than all considerations of class and nationality cited in history books. In a world without God, cities, countries, and whole nations suffered on account of the hopes of men, but on account of the hopes of women no one usually suffered except the woman who hoped. Only in exceptional circumstances did whole families suffer. If a man’s thinking didn’t do them in with war. True, it sometimes happened that the roles were reversed and that the hopes of men became the hopes of women.

So it happened that Olga Benario, the daughter of a rich Munich lawyer, went in those years to start a revolution in Latin America. No matter whether she was disgusted at what was happening in the beer halls of her own city, or had ceased believing that Europe could become a continent of freedom and justice, or whether she was carried away by the musical melodies of the Hispanic languages, she arrived in Brazil and fell in love with Luis Carlos Prestes, a Marxist and the leader of an insurrectionist march through the jungles of Brazil. Together with him she went through a little revolution that for political reasons wasn’t mentioned in the European newspapers, neither the Western ones nor the Soviet ones, and history mostly passes her over in silence because in our century the rule is that history doesn’t record what the newspapers haven’t already reported.

In that revolution Olga Benario saw blood, death, and villages in flames, but she also saw a flower that after her death would spread through the Mediterranean and be known by the name bougainvillea. In the Amazon jungle, where it was warm and wet, that flower was almost always a white color, but on the Adriatic coast it was blue, dark pink, and violet, depending on how much the plant lacked warmth. She liked that white flower but not because she was a woman (as one who clearly divides the world into a male and a female half might assume), but she liked it as would anyone who had a pure eye and saw something for the first time. Luis acknowledged its beauty, though he’d never noticed it before. Because he’d been looking at it all his life.

“You see, that’s good. People need to mingle in order to learn to see. That’s why the revolution will win,” he shouted. “The Internationale is in the eye of woman and man!”