Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

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 naturally 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.