Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

No one knew how long he hung there, and no one knew how long he would have hung beside the Sikirić house if Brother Ambroz Galonja hadn’t come walking by. He was a friar who suffered from insomnia and so liked to study the influence of the dawn on plant life. Brother Ambroz jumped over the low stone fence, grabbed Rafo’s legs, and began to call loudly for help. His sister Slavica ran out of the house first and climbed up the tree barefoot. The friar saw her breasts full of milk fall out of her blouse— it hadn’t been ten days since she’d given birth for the sixth time. He wanted not to look, but he didn’t have anywhere else to turn and didn’t think of closing his eyes because he was overcome with horror at the rasping coming from Rafo’s throat. His breath rasped like that of old men when they died— Brother Ambroz had seen hundreds of them off to the hereafter. Slavica tried to untie the knot, but it didn’t work; a man’s strength was needed for that. Her breasts pressed on a rough branch of the old tree, red imprints were left on her white skin; Brother Ambroz looked at them, beside himself with fear, and for a moment it seemed that this wasn’t real but that he’d lost his mind from the lack of so much sleep.

Feces were seeping down out of Rafo’s underwear and slowly, like a snake on a hot rock, went down the friar’s shoulder, leaving an ugly yellowish trail on his habit.

Rafo had the fortune or misfortune that the rope was too thick and didn’t cinch around his neck. Instead of dying, he experienced only the pain of death; everything hurt, and he lost his voice. He lay in bed as the members of the Sikirić clan took turns at his side. Brother Ambroz held his hand and kept mumbling the Our Father and Hail Mary. He did that so no one would ask him anything, not because he thought that prayer would help the boy. Not five minutes had passed since they’d taken Rafo down from the plum tree and Ivan Sikirić was already shoving five ducats into Brother Ambroz’s fist, only so he wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened. Rafo’s brother wanted to pay him off before he even knew whether Rafo would live or not. The friar went hazy in the head, as if someone had opened the gates of hell for a moment to air out all the stench of its sinners. It seemed to him that he wouldn’t be able to come to his senses again. He shoved Ivan’s hand away; the ducats jingled on the pavement. He followed the child into the house so that he wouldn’t ever have to look Ivan in the eye again. There he stood, saying the prayers he could remember, waiting for the moment when he could flee that house. God had put him on earth so he could care for grass, trees, and fruit trees and not for human misfortune. That should be in the care of the monastery’s brothers who more easily bore misfortune.

The very next day, of course, all of Trebinje knew that the emperor’s godchild had tried to kill himself. God knows how word got out and whose mouth let out the shame, but it was certain that Brother Ambroz Galonja hadn’t said anything to anyone. And since no one outside the house knew about Rafo’s hanging and no outsiders had been at his bedside, there could be no doubt that it was the Sikirićes themselves— that is to say, one of them— who’d broadcast the news to everyone else. Either one of the deceased Josip’s daughters, daughters-in-law, or granddaughters had taken it into her head to portray herself to the neighbor women as a martyr and babble what had happened, or one of the brothers had gotten dead drunk in Aladin’s bar and told all the town drunks why he was drinking.

Ivan Sikirić went around Trebinje for days like a Turkish ghazi, yelling so everyone could hear him: “Where’s that pig of a friar? I’ll dig out his liver with a pocketknife! I gave him money to keep his mouth shut, may Mujo Bašaga fuck him in his filthy ass!”

Apart from the fact that Ivan had sinned by cursing the monk who’d saved his brother (and he himself knew that he was sinning), though it was easier for him to slander an innocent than rack his brains with bitterness and anger in his heart, Ivan roused the fury of hell when he invoked the name of the deceased Mujo Bašaga, an adventurer and soldier who in some battle or another had come down with syphilis and deteriorated before the eyes of the town for years, from open sores and the fact that the disease had gotten into his head. In the end his nose turned into a scab, and it was whispered that his cock had fallen off and that instead of a male organ he had a split, as when an overripe watermelon bursts or as if, God forgive me, by some punishment he’d turned into a woman. Some swore that they’d seen him in the yard behind his house digging a hole and burying his manliness and saying a prayer over the grave, but no one believed them because those were people who hated Turkish soldiers and everything Muslim and tended to make up all kinds of things about their neighbors of the other faith. The story about Mujo Bašaga’s lost cock was conceived in fear of him and his disease. Violent as he was, and well aware of his condition and the way in which he’d ended up in it, Mujo didn’t threaten anyone with a dagger or an axe. Stout and strong, he would tell anyone who got in his way that he would await him after dark, him or one of his people, and cram his terrible organ into his ass, cunt, or eye socket. . People feared him and kept out of his way as much as they could, and only when he died did they begin mentioning his name under their breath in various jokes and pranks.

However, no one cut loose like Ivan Sikirić; no one shouted about him on the town square because they knew that the deceased Mujo had two sons, bigger than their papa and more excessive in their violence, to the degree that youth is more violent than old age. His son Hamid was already in his fifth year in the Sarajevo prison because he’d robbed and killed a French traveler, and the younger one, Medžid, had worked in Dubrovnik as a porter. And since Ivan had been repeating his curse for days, someone told Medžid that Sikirić was slandering his deceased father on the town square.

It was Saturday when Medžid Bašaga appeared with a fishing hook for sharks in his right hand and a string in his left hand. He didn’t say anything, didn’t greet anyone; he just walked around aimlessly, and people withdrew inside their houses and shops and knew well whom he was trying to find. No one turned up to warn Ivan about the return of the young Bašaga, and he himself was so foolish and preoccupied with his own misery that he didn’t even step back when he appeared before him on Arslanagić Bridge.

He didn’t hit him a single time. He stopped in front of Sikirić, looked him in the eye for a long time, long enough for a shadow to pass from one end of the string to the other, and when Ivan tried to go around him, deathly afraid but still unsure what he’d done to cross Medžid, the giant dropped the string and grabbed Ivan by the hinges of his jaw. He squeezed him with his thumb and middle finger; Ivan groaned and his mouth gaped instinctively. Medžid took the hook and ran it through his cheek. Blood streamed out, and Sikirić fell on his knees in shock, but that didn’t hold up Bašaga at all. He bent over just enough, and just as if he were puttering about a chest with a broken lock, he tied the string to the hook, leisurely, pedantically. When he’d tightened the knot, he tugged the string, and Ivan thought he was going to tear his face from his skull, but Medžid just whispered a little louder, “Let’s go, dog, to lick Mujo Bašaga’s grave!”

Ivan Sikirić passed through the market square on his knees, amid people who passed around him and acted as if they didn’t see him or as if Medžid was leading around a greyhound and not a man. He moaned because it hurt and because the hook was tearing an ever larger hole in his cheek, but he knew that no one would help him. Nor would he have helped him if he’d been in their place. When they arrived at the cemetery, Medžid sat down on the neighboring grave, and Ivan licked the gravestones and the earth on Mujo’s grave. When he licked all of one side of the grave, Medžid would whisper: