Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Hey, how about that trainset?!” Alija gaped like a fish, and Rafo wasn’t indifferent when from a sideline there appeared a locomotive that was twice the size of the one from the Dubrovnik train, black as tar and gleaming like a girl’s hair. It was pulling four cars, and a glance was all it took to tell that they were more luxurious than the most luxurious carriages in which Ali-pasha Rizanbegović had ridden during the time of the Turks whenever he would go to Trebinje.

“Lord have mercy! By the power of Allah!” Alija said, folding his hands and walking around the trainset in amazement. But he did so cautiously so as not to disturb or break anything and be charged for it afterward. And so the trainset wouldn’t suddenly jump up and bite him on the nose.

It seemed as if Rafo smiled too. Or maybe it just seemed so. That midget was growing on him, with his little feet that swung back and forth when he was excited, as was his enthusiasm, as a mutt has when it gets excited about something but is afraid to go closer to it. Rafo had never met anyone like Alija in his life. He was small, so every mood took hold of all of him, not just half or three-quarters. If one of Rafo’s moods took hold of all of him, he would burn up in a minute like a match, or he would vanish like a piece of hail that falls in a yard in the middle of the August heat. But Alija was good; he was all happy five minutes after he was all unhappy. He would have started getting on someone else’s nerves, and maybe he did— Rafo would have to ask people who had known Alija longer. But Rafo came to like him. It wasn’t that he didn’t like other people, but Alija was the first person about whom one could say that he really liked him. It was easy to disappear in front of Alija. But when Rafo disappeared, Alija kept acting like he was there.

They’d hardly taken their places in the trainset— the car was, to be sure, half empty, but God forbid that Alija would sit in someone else’s seat! — and the locomotive had hardly started pulling the cars on their way when he suggested they go to the Viennese restaurant on wheels.

He’d remembered the conductor’s words verbatim, and there was no chance that he would distort something or misrepresent it. Rafo liked the game. He imagined how the midget would be surprised and everything he would say and was entertained by his happiness.

The interior of the restaurant car was all gold-plated and covered with ornaments, with a shag carpet on the floor, lounge chairs and tables of carved wood, and with strange curves. Two waiters were wearing formal railway uniforms with strange yellow fringes, ribbons, and epaulettes. If one had the impression that the imperial railway happened to be introducing military ranks, then the waiters would be generals and the conductors ordinary soldiers. Alija gently stepped back in the face of those figures, who looked at him lazily and somewhat scornfully. There was no one else in the Viennese restaurant on wheels, and the waiters didn’t think that the midget and the boy looked like potential customers at all. Instead of yielding to melancholy and drawing a long face at the beauty of the car and not noticing that they were looking at him or losing his nerve and saying, “Let’s get out of here!” Alija bravely stepped on in, grabbed Rafo by the hand, and with unexpected authority said, “You sit here!”

And then he went around the table and hopped up on a chair that was too high for him.

Maybe someone would think this scene was funny, but the waiters didn’t even manage a smirk, nor did they think of noticing how the midget’s feet hung down because Alija turned around ever so slightly, as if his neck were stiff, and with the baritone voice of a Herzegovinian aga barked:

“Young man! Some service!”

The waiters came skipping with the manners of third-class circus performers when their act goes wrong. Alija leaned on the little table with his elbow and waved in the direction of the older one with his little finger, following the rhythm of his own words: “For the boy, raspberry juice, and brandy for me. Grape brandy! No, no; bring me plum brandy, but don’t let it get over twenty-five degrees. If it’s over twenty-five degrees, it doesn’t agree with my stomach, and I’ll give it back to you. And I won’t pay you because I told you nicely that it can’t be more than twenty-five degrees!”

The waiters looked at him with a kind of fear that people of the twentieth century know nothing about and have a hard time understanding even when people try to conjure it up for them with images. It wasn’t the fear of a weakling in the face of a bully but the fear of a Bosnian commoner before a grand vizier— fear before a grim glance behind which hides intelligence, power, confidence, tradition, and the law of heaven and earth. It was the fear that in people who are given to feel it tears away every inner and outer support. Before the vizier they were pathetic and small, even in those things that had never occurred to the vizier himself. And that’s how the waiters of the restaurant car were as Alija was telling them what he wanted.

In an instant raspberry juice and brandy were on the table— it wasn’t a smidgen warmer than twenty-five degrees! Rafo then saw clearly for the first time the face of that man. Earlier Alija had continually laughed, made faces, complained, frowned like a child, and changed ten expressions in five minutes, and each one was as if his face was made of rubber and created for humility of any kind. The faces of the humble are harder to remember than the words of a strange and completely incomprehensible language. But in the restaurant car the pauper turned into a grim and languid aga whose bright eyes didn’t show a tepid soul but radiated fountains locked in ice in the middle of January. His face was symmetrical and typically Herzegovinian, with chiseled wrinkles wherever they are according to the rules of mature male beauty. Alija was another man. Rafo sensed that he had a protector, someone who watched over his outer and inner worlds equally. Alija knew that and was glad.

He grabbed the boy by the hand, remembered something, and started singing through his nose, softly, so the waiters wouldn’t hear him: “May your repose be great, enormous, endless. .”

As he paid the bill, Alija didn’t even show with a misplaced flash of his eye that he’d just reduced by half the gifts that he meant to take home to his family. He knew that the raspberry juice and the plum brandy would cost so much; it was clear to him as soon as they stepped into the Viennese restaurant on wheels, but the price wasn’t too high for him. He regretted every kreuzer that he’d paid for the borek, but the money that he’d just spent would have bought three pans of borek. He could have fed the Dubrovnik-Mostar train and the Mostar-Sarajevo trainset, but that was something else. He’d bought the borek on orders, whereas the raspberry juice and the plum brandy had nothing to do with Herr Heydrich or the radiant emperor. No one would reimburse him for the money he had spent, but was that important? And could anyone really reimburse such expenses? Honor and hospitality have no price. And it was no accident that those two words— čast and čašćenje — were so similar, though their meanings were different. The language wasn’t stupid, even if the people that spoke it could be. Alija knew that well, just as he knew that Allah wouldn’t hold it against him if he downed a brandy here and there. Bosnia was a land of brandy; every Turk knew it. Even those who’d never in their lives violated God’s law and drunk a drop from a bottle knew it. And it was a land of brandy not only because of its plums and vineyards, but also because of the effort that it took to make brandy. Allah didn’t measure every person, all of his sons and daughters, by the same ell, but took into account whether someone lived in the mountains, where the fog didn’t lift until May; or lived on the seacoast, where the bora blew through a man’s ribs; or lived in the desert, where it was always scorching hot and your head started to boil every so often even without brandy. Allah wouldn’t reproach him even for the rage and spite that made him spend money. You couldn’t look at someone you knew nothing about the way the waiters had looked at him. If someone was going to humiliate him out of the blue, then he was clearly going to humiliate them three times worse.