Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

It was almost midnight when Rozalija woke up Rafo. Alija hadn’t come in for the night, and she and Paulina were worried because he too had been left in their care and because the people in Trebinje had told them that he was a good but somewhat simpleminded man who’d never been in a big city and had asked if they could keep an eye on him so he didn’t get lost. Rozalija thought that this had been said in jest— would they really entrust the boy to a simpleton? — but when Alija didn’t show up, both she and Paulina were seized with panic. They’d seen him as he was, and did they really not have enough sense to keep him from going into town? They asked Rafo whether Alija had happened to mention what he was going to do in Sarajevo, whom he might meet, and where they would go.

The boy repeated the story about the gifts and mentioned the wise hafiz whose prayer Alija wanted to hear, but he kept quiet about the low women. One certainly didn’t talk about such things in front of nuns, but, more important, he wanted to keep Alija’s secret and protect his friend. Even if the nuns didn’t report to Trebinje that Alija had gone to prostitutes, they would certainly look on him with derision. And only because they didn’t know the real reason why he wanted to see the low women.

On that night no one in the Karadža mansion slept. The nuns were dumbfounded with fear, and Rafo mostly kept silent and stared ahead. Rozalija and Paulina had visions of terrible stories from the time of the Turks. They remembered various cutthroats, agas, and ghazis who would draw their daggers at anyone who gave them a passing look, and the boy was tormented by an obsessive thought that Alija was dead and that he’d killed him. He’d killed him by taking a liking to him after they met— the first time he’d taken a liking to a stranger. Actually, maybe he didn’t love anyone else. His brothers, sisters, nephews, relatives, cousins, aunts, his kin and relatives by marriage— all had been fated to be his, and his attitude toward them was the same as to how he breathed. With no will of his own, by an irresistible habit, with no soul in fact. He would have erased them if he could have, just as he would have stopped breathing if it were somehow possible to do so of one’s own free will. Alija was the only person he’d chosen, and for that reason Alija was dead. At that moment he didn’t pity him. His guilt was too great for him to be able to pity him. It was so great that that divine house would have collapsed under it if it hadn’t been built by Ivan Karadža.

It’s perhaps difficult to claim that there’s a single day in a person’s life that is the most important, but the fate of Rafo Sikirić— everything that he would become and everything on account of which his Kata would waste her life— was finished a little before noon on August 31, 1891, the second day of his stay in Sarajevo. Paulina came back from the police station all in tears, accompanied by two policemen in civilian dress, and Rozalija hurried Rafo off to his room. For no reason, because he alone knew and was certain that Alija Čuljak was no longer among the living. Someone had found him a little below Vrbanja and Skenderija, by the bank of the Miljacka, horribly beaten and with his throat cut. The policemen were unable to pry apart his hands, which were still clenching Nafa’s kerchief. Roasted chickpeas were strewn all around the corpse. As he didn’t have his wallet, they easily solved the motive for the crime.

However, they didn’t know, nor would they ever find out, where Alija’s throat had been cut. Because it hadn’t happened on the Miljacka River; his dead body had only been dumped there. Whether he had seen the low women, whether he’d taken a fancy to one and thus paid with his life or kept his promise to the Good Allah, that likewise remained a secret between Alija and the Almighty. What people knew was that no one was able to take his kerchief. They tried to pry his fingers apart when they were preparing him for his funeral. But it didn’t work.

Thus the silk kerchief ended in a small, open coffin, as if a child were being buried, with a body that was being committed naked back to the earth.

If Nafa didn’t suspect her husband (and sorrow and pity hope that she didn’t), then she knew at that time that the kerchief had been for her. Which only increased her pain and sense that the Good Allah was not accessible to the weak mind of a woman, as He ruled the world and took to himself people’s loved ones.

Rafo went on living with his guilt, but in the meantime he lost the gift of invisibility. Or Sarajevo was different than Trebinje in that no one could be invisible there. A trove for those who knew how to fight, good for those with quick minds and sharp tongues, a heaven for jokesters and hotheads of all kinds, Sarajevo was a hellish place for the soft-spoken and weak souls, all of whom like to get out of the way first. In the prep school he found himself among thirty little bandits: children from upper-class Sarajevo households, children from old Muslim families, and little carpetbaggers with Czech, Austrian, Slovak, Slovene, Ashkenazi, Italian, and Hungarian names whose fathers had come in the imperial service after the occupation in 1878.

And while their families retained the manners and customs of their old countries and didn’t grow accustomed to the strange humor and severe climate of their new home, their children didn’t differ at all from their classmates of the Islamic faith. The latter were even a smidgen more restrained and calm— though that wasn’t the rule— because they probably felt the faint traces of their bey origins, whereas all those little Aloises, Ferdinands, Josephs, and Františeks had completely adopted the harshest forms of the local mentality and moreover those of its most dangerous and most colorful residential and lumpenproletariat subtype. Their spirit, and later the spirit of the city, was not formed by the market district, which in the Turkish time had had its humor— but a humor that knew moderation, wasn’t full of cynicism, and rarely threatened the integrity of the unprotected. The carpetbagger children, of which there were more in the prep school than local children, had been molded and marked by the carnivalesque debauchery of the Muslim and Christian common folk, who’d for centuries been active on the edges of the city, reveling, carousing, and starving— and who with the arrival of the Austrians had broken into Sarajevo and occupied it, in a manner of speaking. That invasion in general hadn’t had a negative impact on the city itself, which was weary of the kind of oriental social symmetry that had become tiresome to Istanbul as well. But it could cost people with tender souls and lesser vigor their lives or at least their minds. Those who didn’t know how to adapt, or had no opportunity to adapt, were fated never to step across their thresholds into the street with peace in their hearts. Which was again a paradox because the new Sarajevo was tuned so that most people found peace in their hearts in the street and nowhere else.

On the seventh day of school they began picking on Rafo. He tried to defend himself, but he didn’t know how. He was physically stronger than Alois Schechtel, the most loathsome brat in his grade, and he could hold his own against Džemal Sirća, the son of a rich watchmaker in the market district, a hooligan who would have probably ended up among the pickpockets of Mejtaš and Bjelave if his father hadn’t followed his every step and as soon as he did something wrong thrashed him with a horse whip.

However, neither Alois nor Džemal picked fights according to the rule of the world of boys, with the intention of showing their power over those who were weaker than they were and thus to gain a gang of followers. First of all, they weren’t in a position to do so, and second of all, it never occurred to them. Running a gang wasn’t anything that anyone in the prep school or even in the communities of Sarajevo dared to do. With the Austrians and the arrival of the common folk from the outskirts a kind of anarchy had taken hold. God forbid that someone got the idea of playing aga or vizier. Years and decades would pass before Sarajevo would receive new formal and informal leaders that would dictate what one could and dared, and what one couldn’t and didn’t dare, to do. At the time when Rafo Sikirić found himself between Alois and Džemal, his two enemies, there was no leader in sight. But one had to show the strength of a leader to survive in that world.