Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“What on earth got into you, son?” he asked, watching him as an eagle watches its sick young, and he would have liked to peck out his brains.

“Nothing,” said the eaglet and curled up beneath the quilt, staring at something beyond everything else upon which he might fix his gaze.

“What do you mean ‘nothing’?” Ivan asked, gnashing his teeth. Rafo didn’t answer; he was thinking that the whole affair would be forgotten.

“What do you mean ‘nothing’?” Ivan thundered over him. “Do you know what you’ve done to all of us, goddammit?!”

Rafo gave no answer and didn’t move. He tried not to reveal that he was breathing or that he was there. His head was empty, the fragments of the previous night’s dreams were flashing through his mind, and grains of dust sank into the depth of his gaze and ended in the gleam of a ray of sunlight.

“Answer me!” Ivan yelled. “Answer me!”

The boy remembered Alija’s fingers. Two of them were odd, his thumb and index finger. The fingernails on each were the same size and shape, on both his left and his right hand. He looked at his own fingers. Their nails were very different. Everyone’s were like that except Alija’s. His thumb and index finger were like twin brothers.

“Why did you have to be born so late, damn you?! Why did you even come out into the world, you damned bastard?! Why didn’t we choke you the day you were born?!” Ivan howled with the voice of a wailing woman. Rafo laughed.

He could have killed him. It wouldn’t have mattered; no one would have cared. And he probably wouldn’t have served any time. He could have strangled him, and people would have said that Rafo had died of the consequences of the hanging. All of Trebinje knew that he’d tried to hang himself. There would have been a large funeral, military representatives and imperial priests would have come, and the shame would have been forgotten over time. At any rate, it belonged to the emperor every bit as much as it did to Ivan. Ivan would certainly strangle him as soon as he started laughing! He would have wrung his neck like a Christmas turkey if his head hadn’t been full of what he owed Medžid Bašaga and what the town and his family were trying to take away from him. Rafo would finish school, Rafo would go off to Vienna, everybody would know about Rafo; Rafo would get an appointment at the royal court. . And who would be the only one who’d helped, who’d saved Rafo from dying and put him on his path in life? Ivan! No one else but Ivan! Rafo hadn’t been brought up by all the Sikirićes but only by him and Franz Joseph! Everyone else would have strangled Rafo as if he weren’t a human child but a kitten or a puppy! They would have thrown him into the Trebišnjica River so his body would never again see the light of day.

The train left with a half-hour delay. The boy sat by the window. He was pale, and his eyes were completely empty.

“Are you sick?” asked the conductor.

“Sick— no way. He’s as healthy as a horse!” Ivan answered, smiling idiotically at the uniformed man.

“Yeah, he’s healthy like a horse’s ass,” the conductor said scornfully, evidently insulted by the difference between his uniform and Ivan’s tattered suit. Since railway tickets had become cheaper, every scumbag traveled by train. Soon they’ll let live pigs into the cars, just when we’ve started becoming upstanding citizens, thought the imperial railway official, hoping that Ivan would start to make a fuss so he could kick him off the train. But he didn’t. He was mild-mannered and frightened in the face of the fact that he was going on such a long trip for the first time. He wouldn’t if he didn’t have to; he wouldn’t even if his life were on the line! He was afraid of the railroaders’ uniforms; he was afraid of the thought of arriving in Sarajevo and not being able to find his way around there, of not knowing how to get Rafo to those nuns. The boy wouldn’t be any help. It had been three days since he’d spoken a word. You could hit him on the head, you could spank his bare ass, you could make him kneel on corn plants and thrash the soles of his feet with a willow switch— Ivan had tried all that— but his face didn’t twitch, nor did he make a sound. He just kept quiet; only when the skin on his back broke did he squeal, God forgive me, as if he were an animal or as if his soul were on one end of the globe and his ass on another. The last thing he said was that he wasn’t going back to Sarajevo.

“Well now, fool, you think you’re not going back to the imperial school?!” Ivan had never heard such nonsense. “You can shame your own brother, you can spit all over those who gave birth to you, you can give the Lord God the finger when he asks how you’re doing, you can kill yourself, but you can’t spit all over the emperor’s grace and godparenthood, my boy!” That was basically what he told him or something like that. . But not exactly in those words because Ivan wasn’t very good with words, and he lost his nerve at that moment. So maybe he said something else, and maybe he didn’t say anything but just sputtered something through his lips, but that was the sense of it.

“You can shame your own brother. .,” Ivan whispered so no one could hear him, more for himself, proud that he’d come up with such clever words. He used these words to deflect the insult that the conductor had inflicted on him. Listen, you horse’s ass! Oh, he would make a horse’s ass of him when Rafo finished school. He would find him, give him a slap, and order for him to be fired. .

“Do you want some borek?” he asked him as they went across the Mostar station to the ticket office. He was holding him by the collar— sure was sure— but Rafo didn’t answer again. And he didn’t have to! He would speak up when he got hungry. No one had ever killed themselves by refusing to eat, and he wouldn’t either, Ivan thought cleverly, and bought himself some borek. The fat borek man held out a piece wrapped in newsprint, but the guy in front of him— probably some Kraut— had gotten his in nice white paper. It was there for all to see: a bunch of torn newspaper pages and a neatly arranged thin stack of clean paper. And depending on how he sized up a customer, the borek man would wrap the borek in the one or the other. But it cost the same for everyone! Ivan was irritated, but again he didn’t dare say anything. He knew that the world had been turned upside down, but that it had gone this far— that was too much for Ivan. He chewed his borek, the grease dripping down his chin. He bit into the imprints of gothic letters on the dough and tried to convince himself that there was no way in hell he was ever going to travel this far away from home again. Maybe we aren’t such elegant people, he thought, maybe we smell of onions and brandy, but we aren’t the kind of people who have one kind of paper for poor people and another for rich people.

“Now sit here,” he said and made himself comfortable in a red armchair of the Sarajevo trainset and took out a bottle of brandy. The borek wasn’t anything to get excited about— too much onion, and the potato was somehow rancid— and he tried to quiet the storm in his stomach with the plum brandy. He’d packed a chain and a lock in his bag, just in case, to chain Rafo to a seat in the compartment if he felt he was going to doze off, but now he felt it would be awkward with other people around. What would the conductors say if they saw him chaining up the boy? He was his child, and it was true that no one had the right to interfere in what you did with your own kin, but again— there were all kinds of people. They would laugh at him and make all kinds of comments, and Ivan would rather not have anyone talk to him any more. Hopefully they wouldn’t look at him; hopefully they wouldn’t know he was there.