Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Rafo Sikirić was the youngest of twelve living children of his mother Matija and his father Josip. He was born far too late in the lives of his parents, a miracle about which the Viennese press reported. Namely, Matija Sikirić, née Valjan, had brought a live and healthy child into the world one month before her sixty-second birthday. Doctors from all corners of the Habsburg empire went to Trebinje, and Emperor Franz Joseph— the idolized monarch who, after occupying Bosnia the year before, was at the height of his power— sent a letter to Josip and Matija in which he communicated to them how moved he was by the birth of their child and that he wanted to be its godparent. A special emissary from the Sarajevo military administration, Colonel Steiner, arrived with imperial gifts and explained to the father, Josip, and the mother, Matija, exactly what the emperor’s godparenthood meant. Until the child’s eighteenth birthday monetary support would be paid to the name of his guardians, to the amount of the salary of a second-class government official, and after the boy finished high school, he would be offered the possibility to continue his education in accordance with his talents and wishes at the emperor’s expense, in Vienna, Zagreb, Budapest, Prague, or Bratislava. .

While the Colonel listed off the cities where Rafo could study, the two elderly parents huddled together and didn’t really understand anything. Josip had already reached eighty and hadn’t been doing anything for a long time but was now a burden to his children. His mind was already slipping away, and he still hadn’t entirely gotten used to the fact that the Turkish sultan had been replaced by the Austrian emperor. The only thing that kept him alive was his sexual desire, which had almost cost him his head. Namely, when Josip’s sons had realized that their mother was pregnant in the twilight of her life and that she was going to give birth to a sister or brother of theirs, at a time when they already had children themselves, they went crazy. Mostly because of the shame they assumed would come when all of Herzegovina and half of Dalmatia heard that an old woman— their mother! — had had a baby. If it weren’t for the imperial godparenthood, this would have been a great shame and an occasion for the kind of gossip that went on for more than one summer and was often a source of family nicknames. But since the emperor had intervened, it turned out that it wasn’t a shame but a great, if completely incomprehensible, honor.

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.