Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

So one of them would rush at him— never both of them at the same time— and would, say, sneak up behind Rafo and stab him in his rear end with a compass. Rafo would squeal, “Don’t!”

The one who did it would shrug his shoulders and say, “I didn’t do it!”

As soon as Rafo turned around and started working, he would stab him with the compass again, this time really hard. Rafo could hardly hold back his tears from the pain: “Don’t, you jerk!”

The third time he would jab the compass down to the adjusting screw. Rafo would turn around and grab him by the neck. A shoving match and a fight followed, but what was also more important in a physical altercation: the exchange of swearwords and insults. The enemy would withdraw strategically, avoiding a real fistfight, but would land some very precise verbal blows.

The goal was to attract the attention of as many of the grade as possible, to get a laugh, to get Rafo’s eyes to tear up, to make him start stuttering and repeat one and the same swearword like a parrot because he was unable to come up with anything with which to respond. And he wasn’t able not because he was stupid, and maybe even not because he was less verbally agile, but because he’d been attacked, and the one who was attacked in such fights was always at a disadvantage. The basic principle and the rule of the game was that the attacker always won, unless the one he attacked decided on a real fistfight. But even then only half a victory was in sight because more value was placed on making a fool of someone than really beating him up. Besides, fistfights were punished in the prep school but insults weren’t.

After Alois and Džemal had had enough of abusing Rafo, it was the turn of the next level of bullies, who wanted to carve out a piece of the grade’s respect, to test their courage and sharpen their tongues.

After two months there were only four or five boys who hadn’t picked on Rafo. At the same time, he wasn’t the only one they picked on. The others were cunning and resourceful, had older brothers or dangerous fathers. A boy who mostly kept quiet and stayed out of the way, and the only one who wasn’t from Sarajevo and for whom two funny nuns came to the parent-teacher conferences, was fated to daily abuse. In the other grades there were miserable boys with similar fates, but never just one in a grade and never so fainthearted.

He never told Rozalija and Paulina what happened to him. They noticed when he came home muddy from school because ten or so rascals had decided to give Rafo a practical demonstration in natural history, about the Turopolje wild pigs, and would push him into the mud in the middle of the schoolyard. The nuns would see that his eyes were red from crying, and sometimes they noticed that he had bruises on his arms, but neither did they know what to do, nor did they know the logic of the world into which Rafo had been thrust. Apart from the fact that according to the nature of their calling they could have had no idea about the jungle in the schools, Rozalija and Paulina still lived in the world of Ottoman Bosnia, in which people bowed to each other when they didn’t get along and people were terrified only of those who had higher appointments in the formal hierarchy. One feared the aga and the aga’s men, one feared the vizier if he accidentally ran into him or ended up in his way, but that was about it. And again, the common folk, especially the Christians, thought that was too much. A free man is more afraid of fear than slavery because a slave is only afraid of his master and no one else.

Rozalija and Paulina, as well as the few nuns that there had been during Turkish rule, thought that they were living in the role of earthly slaves. They served their church, the hungry, and the unfortunate, but that was not the essence of their slavery. They slaved for the Turks and the Turkish authorities, oppressors who didn’t honor Christ or his pastors and confessed a false faith. That fact upset them greatly; they prayed for the era and ways of the Ottomans to come to an end, and depending on the nature of their hearts, all of them either hated the Turks and everything Turkish or merely feared them.

Rozalija and Paulina had befriended one another by virtue of the fact that they were both unaccustomed to hatred, and the times of great upheavals always seemed to be created for hatred, and that was why those who could not stoke it in their hearts had more to fear from such times than those who were most exposed to it.

A shortcoming of that devilish gift of hatred, unworthy of reason, would in times of upheaval often be interpreted as a lack of patriotism and even a lack of faith in God. Rafo’s guardians understood that in good time and made every effort to be as far as possible from everything that could summon hatred in them but also from whatever might show the world that they didn’t know how to hate. Happy and content that a Christian emperor now ruled over Bosnia instead of the sultan of Istanbul, the two of them tried to be spared from further information.

“Is anyone picking on you?” Rozalija would ask him and without waiting for an answer would continue, “If they lay a hand on you, you just go ahead and get away, find some shelter; that’s smarter and closer to God. You shouldn’t have anything to do with fools, even if you’re stronger than they are. And especially if you’re weaker! If a Muslim lays a hand on you, forgive him because he’s angry that our emperor is now in Bosnia. He’s not hitting at you but hitting at His Highness Franz Joseph, and you should understand that and walk away. The poor boy isn’t to blame because his papa and mama are of the wrong faith. He’ll realize sooner or later that our emperor is a good man, and when he realizes that, he won’t hit you but will be your friend. That’s the way it’s always been. If, on the other hand, a Christian child lays hands on you, forgive him too. The people have become wild, and hardly anyone knows what is good and what is bad. They have blood in their eyes as if there wasn’t enough of it in 1878. They’d like to pay back the violence that the Turks committed for four hundred years and lash out when they can. They don’t honor God or the church, nor do they honor people. Shame on them forever,” Rozalija would say and grow angry, without Rafo having said a word. He would only watch the face and hands of that funny and precious woman; his gaze would pass from her eyes, which were blue and narrow like an old salamander’s, to her nose, which was big like a ripe cucumber, and then on to her fingers, which moved excitedly around each word, and it seemed that they were not coordinated with one another.

The scene calmed him, but what Rozalija was saying didn’t matter to him. And it didn’t because one of them lived outside that world. Rafo’s anguish— his inner anguish, which he’d brought with him from Trebinje, and his outer anguish, which Sarajevo had bestowed on him— had nothing to do with emperors and sultans, nor was it at any moment important which confession his tormentors professed.

The only ones for whom he was invisible were the teachers. Before the Christmas holiday and the winter vacation not one of them remembered his name and surname, nor did they recognize him by sight. His grades were a gray average: he would neither fail nor excel in any subject. Grimy, and often bloody and muddy, Rafo remained outside the teachers’ field of vision, which was in and of itself unusual if only because there was a strict instruction about paying attention to the pupils’ hygiene in the First Preparatory School. The Viennese teaching staff were stunned at what a dirty land they’d come to: lice, fleas, bedbugs, venereal diseases, and endemic syphilis (the most terrible thing one could imagine). . Still, one has to admit that they were willing to notice so much filth because they expected it. And so, more than the low level of hygiene among the local inhabitants, it was the fact that they had found a few hundred public fountains in the city and encountered the Muslim practice of washing before every prayer that surprised them. Regardless: the First Preparatory School was supposed to serve as a model of the advance of public hygiene. They looked out for dirty fingernails and lice-infested heads as one might take care of the highest strategic interest of the empire. Blood and mud and Rafo Sikirić’s face cast a dark shadow on the scope of the teachers’ efforts.