Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

As he boarded the trainset to Mostar, Rafo Sikirić decided not to return to Sarajevo alive. In fact, he’d known that earlier, but now he had to review what he’d learned so he wouldn’t forget, or it wouldn’t seem to him that what he’d seen on the platform was true, while everything that had happened the previous months was only an illusion. Rozalija and Paulina pushed their way through the people without worrying about the dignity of their mission or about what people might think when they saw two nuns crying their eyes out while they passed a boy bags with bread, roast chicken, apples, and bottles of milk and water through the window so the little one would have everything he needed and wouldn’t, God forbid, starve to death on the way to Trebinje. And people might have thought all kinds of things when Paulina began yelling to Rafo at the top of her lungs not to go to public toilets under any circumstances. All kinds of people went there, and there were all kinds of illnesses there. She shouted because they’d forgotten to warn him about that amid the dozens of other people, so now she tried in vain to outshout the locomotive.

He waved at them as long as they could see him, but he knew that his hand wasn’t waving as the four of theirs were. It started hurting and would always hurt him whenever he remembered how two women of God had seen him off, how much they loved him, and with what fear they’d given him up to the wide world in the fervent belief that he would come back to them.

If mothers are known for anything and if motherhood isn’t a way in which biology cheats and deceives the human mind, then they are known for that fear. Rafo felt it in Rozalija and Paulina, but after that— never again. The fact that he was unable to give that love back to them was one of the rare sins that he would sense clearly in his life.

Another sin was that he wouldn’t believe in everything that the two of them believed in. That might have saved him. And he himself would become conscious of that fact some fifteen years later, when he began to sort his nails and realized that he would now be maintaining the thread of his life more easily if he’d learned Rozalija’s and Paulina’s simplemindedness. But he wasn’t able to drown himself and warm himself in the abundance of his family. He didn’t have a sense for the comfort of the service of the Lord and the blessed, calming power of belonging to the flock of believers.

Once before bedtime Paulina told him about one day (he remembered it— January 15, 1882!) when Sarajevo had received its archbishop. In the presence of respected people, in the wooden church of St. Anthony, Josip Stadler became first among the shepherds. She described in a lively fashion the golden tassels and buttons on the uniform of the commander of the city, General Herman Dahlen, who’d come to greet the archbishop; she told Rafo what they ate afterward, what kind of soup there was, and what cuts of veal were roasted, and mentioned that white bread was served but that the general requested black bread. The hosts were surprised and a little insulted because in those days it was hard to find flour for white bread. Dahlen had completely innocently shat on their fun; that was exactly how Paulina put it, and she said just that— shat! She didn’t swear or say bad words, but she didn’t lie or put a false face on things. That was just the place for that word, in the story about a great day in her religious life, the day when Sarajevo became a city of Christ. Rafo was truly touched, almost as if he’d seen Alija in that woman. Until the end of the story, when she admitted that she hadn’t been in the church or at the dinner that day because there had been no room for her and Rozalija. She hadn’t seen anything that she was telling about with her own eyes but had only believed what others had told. And not even they had been there but had been told by those who had been. Paulina was comforted because she was able to see what wasn’t happening to her as real. God hadn’t given Rafo that power, so He didn’t exist for Rafo.

In Trebinje he was awaited like a little emperor, as if he’d already gotten his doctorate and not spent only a half-year in the prep school. The whole family gathered at the railway station again, and all the way home they showered him with questions about the most closely guarded worldly and metaphysical secrets. They asked him about everything that had ever bothered them and for which they didn’t have any answers because they hadn’t finished the imperial schools:

“Are there more churches in Vienna or more mosques in Istanbul?”

“Are there more Chinamen or ants?”

“How many times a day does the Austrian emperor lunch?”

“Do people live on stars, and is it hot or cold up there?”

“How many dunams of land do the richer Sarajevans have?”

“Are there still Turks in Sarajevo, and what are people saying? — How long will our people put up with them?”

“Will Jesus return to Earth if the whole world ever believes in Him?”

“Does anything exist that is faster than the railway, or is the railway faster than a swallow?”

“Do people in Sarajevo eat baklava?”

“Is there anyone who doesn’t believe in God?”

“Are there any foreign languages besides Turkish that you haven’t learned?”

“How do you say poached apples in Latin?”

“About how much smarter is a person when they finish all their schooling?”

He had to answer all their questions, and if he didn’t know the answer or the question didn’t make any sense, Rafo made something up and lied. They believed everything he said— would an educated man lie? — and were content because he was clearing up things about which they’d been confused all their lives, things about which they’d racked their brains for years, and now in a second everything was becoming clear.

For seven days they treated Rafo and led him from one get-together to another. They sat him in the front pew for the midnight Mass, right next to the city elders and military representatives. Before the Christmas meal the district courier brought him a card and gifts from the emperor, and a day later a correspondent of the Vienna newspaper wanted to see him who intended to remind the forgetful public of the first Herzeg-Bosnian godchild of the Austro-Hungarian sovereign. He endured all of that and waited for a moment when he would tell Ivan, his oldest brother and the head of the family, that he wasn’t going back to Sarajevo. When he had an opportunity he didn’t have the courage, and when he had the courage, Ivan wasn’t there, and in the end he realized that there was an easier and simpler way to save himself from the prep school and everything that oppressed and tormented him.

In the early morning before New Year’s in 1892, he got out of bed before everyone else, grabbed a rope for tying up young bulls before they were castrated, climbed onto a plum tree in the yard and tied it to the lowest branch, and tied a noose in the other end. He could barely pull it down over his head; the rope was almost as thick as his arm. He looked at the windows behind which his clan was sleeping the sleep of the just, then up at the sky above the verandah, and finally at the pavement that surrounded the plum tree. At the moment when he slipped down, Rafo didn’t miss anything. Nothing mattered to him for one more fraction of a second in which the visible world shot upward, and then he felt a terrible power jerk his head, his eardrums pop, his breath stop, and instead of stopping, his heart started beating like crazy. . He forgot everything he knew and why he’d climbed up on the tree and was no longer the old Rafo; he wasn’t a person but a being— maybe an animal, maybe a sinful soul in hell— that was trying to find solid ground under its feet.