Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

He sat down by the window and looked down at the Neretva, above which a canyon rose up into the sky. Gray shadows were laid softly one on top of another like layers of phyllo dough in a thick cheese borek. They wound and curved as if a giant hand were crumpling them in the borek before it let green water flow in between them. What had God had in mind when he piled them up like that? And then He planted a single pine tree on top of the highest bluff. That pine grew out of the stone; Alija saw clearly that there was no soil up there. When the wind blew, the pine clutched the cliff with its roots, and through the cliff it clung to the entire world. Anything you might touch at any spot in the whole wide world and wherever you stepped and whatever you sat down on so you could rest was a part of what that pine above the Neretva was holding on to. And there was no place on the globe that was so far away that it didn’t belong to that pine. In the face of such a wonder a man had to be quiet. In the face of other wonders one was supposed to be loud and rejoice at them. The first kind were greater than the second kind. The pine growing out of that rock was a greater wonder than the trainset in which they were riding.

Rafo sat across from him but didn’t notice the same sights. As he looked at Alija, his own solitude returned to him. A feeling that it was crazy to believe that it was possible not to be alone. As soon as you took a better look at something, you began to notice that it was moving away from you. If you looked at it long enough, you realized that it would soon disappear. It was the same way with Alija. And so it was better to stop watching him because he might disappear too. And that would be a pity, a great loss, the greatest that Rafo could think of before he shut his eyes, only to see Alija’s feet swinging in the air a few seconds later because he’d remembered that some young men dive from the bridge in Mostar. They weren’t afraid at all. And Alija had been terrified of looking down when he’d been in Mostar for his job two years before and had climbed up to the middle of the bridge. Herr Heydrich had sent him because it was his daughter’s birthday, and they were baking her a cake in the Kaltz pastry shop. Herr Heydrich didn’t like our desserts. He said that he thought baklava was too sweet, and Bosnian poached apples were too low class. Whoever heard of stuffing apples with walnuts?! If that were meant to be, Heydrich fumed, Eve wouldn’t have bitten into the apple, but Ismo the boza maker would have brought her a poached apple. Herr Heydrich was a man of the world and knew that well. Our desserts weren’t world-class; they were just ours, Bosnian. And who were we? Nobody and nothing. If we hadn’t had Austria, we would have been left as orphans on the globe. Even Istanbul had washed its hands of us after a few hundred years. Why wouldn’t it?! The Turks had too many headaches with Bosnia, and even more with Herzegovina. No gain at all, but the expense was tremendous! Both in blood and gold, or whatever you wanted! And then our beys went ape! They put fezzes on their heads, took their muskets out in the sun, and spread their cushions out on the dirty ground. They sunned their butts a little and started a few rebellions and uprisings! They said they weren’t going to listen to what the sultan said but were going to do as they pleased. You couldn’t tell them anything! Of course the Turks got up and left. Better to steer clear of lunatics; and we’re lunatics and don’t do ourselves any good, and so others— bigger, better, and smarter— can’t do us any good either. Oh, how can Trebinje measure up to Istanbul?! That would be like little Alija challenging that acrobat from Prizren to a duel, the one who the year before had broken heavy chains with three fingers! God forbid if Austria ever gets tired of us and leaves. God pity whoever lives to see that!

Good Alija thought some of that and told some of it to Rafo while the trainset crept and crawled along Mt. Ivan, so slowly that they could have gone out and picked wild strawberries along the track. Alija might have suggested they go out, but it was dark, and if there were any strawberries, no one could have seen them. As the locomotive struggled along the last ascent before Bradina, they fell asleep one after the other. And no one knew who drifted off first while the steel wheels spun and recited their zikr, as if in the middle of a ring of dervishes.

The shouts of the railway porters awoke Rafo. Alija, coiled up, kept snoring and wouldn’t have woken up until the conductors threw him out. In those years people with light sleep were rare. People fell asleep wherever they managed to, and they slept deeply and without fear of being woken up. Light sleepers are another invention of the twentieth century and a modern age in which life is easier, the body is exerted less and wasted less, and the soul has it harder and harder, so it never really gets a good night’s sleep.

The platforms were as crowded as Purgatory. There were porters, people selling boza and popcorn, train dispatchers, pickpockets, town criers, people waiting for someone, policemen and spies in plainclothes, coquettes and women in black, Gypsies and cripples missing arms and legs, Krauts with disgusting expressions and their beautiful wives, travelers and clerks from provincial post offices, emigrants of all kinds, people with big butts, big eyes, or big beards, bald men, those who smelled of feces, and those who looked at everything around them more sinisterly than dogs. There were lowlifes and dolts, high-class gentlemen, traveling singers, people invited to municipal picnics, and an unfamiliar mass of people about whom no one knew which class they belonged to or what their story was. When a train arrived in the station, they all began pushing and shoving each other and sticking their fingers in others’ pockets, so much that it looked just as if Noah was preparing for another voyage and everyone needed to get aboard as soon as possible to escape the flood. Alija grabbed Rafo firmly by the hand; he wasn’t going to lose him now when his mission was nearing its end, and the boy trembled with fear.

Freshly awoken, he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t passed from one slumber to another and wasn’t dreaming that he was awake when he’d really sunk deeper into sleep, into a nightmare beyond all nightmares, which he’d known had existed for a long time. Everyone knew it and awoke from bad dreams happy because they hadn’t dreamed those uglier dreams. The faces of these men and women, old and young, and even of the children were without exception threatening. They laughed wickedly and shouted wickedly, and the Sarajevo speech— Rafo was hearing it for the first time— had rough and hard accents. As if those people had never felt open spaces but were all squeezed into a fit of slurring, grating their teeth, and hissing.

Grayish-yellow boza spilled on the platform; there was the fragrance of salep, intense and intoxicating like medicine given to a dying patient so his suffering might be eased with the illusion that it could be treated. Hot halva was smeared on blue packing paper and dripped down the sleeves of sweaters of undyed wool. In the distance one could hear a chorus of dogs howling and barking; the recently established dog pound was working at full force.

Beyond the high mountains, the likes of which neither Rafo nor Alija had ever seen, the red morning sky was spreading out. In a few minutes, the valley, which the city filled from one end to another, was flooded with stark colors that hurt the eye and sent a tingling up one’s spine and all the way to the skull, which Goethe (who was still unknown in Sarajevo) had claimed was the last vertebra. Alija saw the minarets of a hundred mosques— did Istanbul have as many? Instead of a dusty road beneath his feet, there was a black pavement that had no end; in every direction there were buildings with five or six stories— how could their foundations hold up such big houses? Women with uncovered calves passed by— were they the low women, and were there really so many of them? Married women in headscarves passed by, but they too hurried as if their legs were naked and they didn’t know how to cover them up. .