Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Lick the master’s other leg.” And Ivan would go to the other side.

“Lick his arms. .

“Lick his hero’s chest. .

“Lick the putrid cock of Mujo Bašaga, you infidel dog!”

Medžid would shout the last command, and Ivan expected him to hit him. But he didn’t hit him once, though the series of commands was repeated in the same tone and order for hours. Night came; Medžid put a bag of tobacco on his knees and started rolling one cigarette after another. Ivan would look at him askance, whereupon he would only hiss, “Lick it. .! Lick it. .! Lick it!. . ”

When he found himself on the side of the grave opposite Medžid, Ivan jumped up and started running. He clasped the hook with his hands and would step on the string, which would jerk the hook and hurt him even more; he howled, pleaded, and cried, expecting a blow to the back of his head, and couldn’t even collect himself enough to realize that the giant wasn’t running after him. Medžid had remained sitting on the grave opposite his father’s, smoking and looking uninterestedly in the other direction. Had anyone come along and seen him like that, he would have thought that the son had grown sad and come to talk with his dead father in his thoughts.

It took time for Ivan’s rage to return. He squealed and called for his mother while his sisters took out the hook. Tears came to his eyes when they tried to clean the wound with brandy and stop the bleeding. In the end they sewed up the wound with a length of fishing line because the bleeding wouldn’t stop. But that wasn’t enough. Every minute he spat blood into a metal basin, folded his hands as if he were at prayer, and his eyes sought someone to help him. Rafo was lying in the next room, frightened to death because he’d seen how people die and was aware that he was to blame for what had happened to his brother. It would have been nice to disappear, but people aren’t snow and can’t just melt away. He realized this a little too late.

He dreamed of Alija Čuljak and the two nuns. They were sitting in the dining room of Karadža’s villa, eating and laughing. Before them were empty plates from which they were taking pieces of nothing, putting them into their mouths, and chewing. He tried to call to them, tell them that the plates were empty and that no matter how much they ate they would still be hungry, but they didn’t hear him. The same dream went on until morning. There were five more days until his trip back to Sarajevo. Actually, until the day that they would try to take him back there.

In the morning Ivan grabbed a hunting rifle and left the house without a word. He spat blood every few steps, walked quickly, and looked grimly into the dirt. He walked around the market square three times, but didn’t find the man he was looking for. If he was even looking for him. If Ivan Sikirić had dared at all to shoot at Medžid Bašaga. No, he wouldn’t have shot at him or at anyone else! He’d taken the rifle to make himself look frightening and to drive the anguish from his soul. As his rage came back and he was no longer a crybaby but a man who’d long since passed fifty, despair grew inside him. That was a frequent scene for the market square. It happened often, especially in spring, when the blood in people’s veins went bad and their nerves frayed, that a prominent and respected man would stroll around with a weapon in his hands. One took a rifle, another an axe, a third a pitchfork. He would stagger around for a bit, scowl at everyone he saw, firing looks like cannonballs meant to destroy the city, but as a rule he wouldn’t run across the one who was the cause of his misery. People would click their tongues and sigh, ostensibly in pity, but the truth was that the majority of them watched it with malicious pleasure because one more person’s soul had been torn asunder, his life burst before their eyes, or his mind started leaking out, and the day would soon come when he would completely lose it, so instead of a local bigwig, a head of a household who commanded respect, we would get one more town idiot, fool, dolt, jackass, and wretch. Soon women would chase him— a filthy, soiled, crazed man— with brooms out of the yards of the town. The respected Muslims of Trebinje, those who’d withdrawn into their homes since the arrival of the Austrians, particularly enjoyed such spectacles because now there were incomparably more cases of imbecility and springtime insanity than there had been in the time of the Turks, and the majority of those afflicted were Christians or the Muslim common folk— who were all the same to them. These people tried to convince themselves, and then the town, that such things didn’t happen in honest Muslim families, which was of course a lie. Beys, their sons and daughters lost their minds too, only they wouldn’t shamble around the town square but would endure their mental anguish within four walls. When Ivan Sikirić appeared with the rifle and a large wound across his cheek, no one thought he was looking for Medžid Bašaga and that there might be trouble. The town wrote his name down in the register of present and future idiots.

And so in two days three scandals had befallen the Sikirić family, all as bad as could be: their youngest, Rafo, had tried to kill himself; their oldest, Ivan, had been forced to lick the grave of Mujo Bašaga, whereupon— at least in the eyes of the town— he’d lost his mind. The same sorrow darkened all the houses inhabited by Matija’s and Josip’s offspring. They kept their eyes to the ground, said nothing, and sighed here and there, or the women would sniffle over the pots in which they were boiling their laundry. Someone would start coughing; a child would squeal because someone had suddenly opened a door behind which it was playing. A cat meowed, a dog barked, but no one said a word. In the households into which the Sikirić women had married their husbands glared grimly at their swollen ankles and calves but didn’t say anything. Even their mothers-in-law, who were otherwise the first to have something to say about the family of their daughters-in-law, kept silent. But until the previous day they’d gone around with their heads held high because one of their in-laws was the emperor’s godchild, and they used that to threaten a grocer who’d sold them moist salt, or they’d boasted to their neighbors how Franz Joseph would soon invite them to Vienna to show them the imperial palace. Whoever in Trebinje bore the name Sikirić and into whose house one of the Sikirić girls married began to feel a little like a Habsburg. Whenever a neighbor woman would mention her godparent Stevo from Nikšić, who was coming for Easter with three Njeguši hams, she could expect the following answer:

“Well, just what is our godparent in Vienna going to send us?! Who gives a damn about Stevo from Nikšić when your godparent is the Austrian emperor?!”

The neighbor woman would lower her gaze; rage would gather in the corner of her lips. Then the emperor’s in-law would offer her another cup of coffee— solely to hear the tone in which she would refuse it. Ah, now the time had come to settle accounts! Rafo had hung himself from a plum tree, and the imperial crown had fallen from many heads.

Ivan’s shame upset them less. Though he was the oldest and commanded respect not only among his younger brothers but also in the homes of their in-laws, it was easy to renounce him because he wasn’t the first or the last to lose his mind and his reputation because of his own foolish behavior. If there were a curse, it would only fall on his house and the houses of his children. His sisters would lament him, his brothers would clam up and never mention him, and it wouldn’t be long before the town forgot who was whose brother. Ivan understood that. He hadn’t fired the rifle he’d carried through the market, and Medžid Bašaga had gone back to Dubrovnik. The oldest Sikirić had crumbled like a pillar of plaster. He had only one trump card left in his hands, but that was the strongest. The emperor’s godchild was lying in his house.