Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Oh, the father of my grandfather, how foolish he was, God forgive his soul,” she always said after she sweetly mocked his crazy mind and how the old man sat at the window and imagined himself as a young man calling to the only love of his life.

“I’ve got a young daughter, and you, I see, are young,” Niko Azinović said one day to Rafo as he was paying for brandy. Rafo had been buying brandy from him for months.

“Her name is Kata. My daughter. She’s pretty as a picture,” he told him when he came the next time.

“It’s your time. Time for both you and her,” Niko added two days later.

“Will you at least take a look at her?” he asked him the next time.

Rafo didn’t respond to him. He acted as if he hadn’t heard or wasn’t interested in what he was telling him, but when he came for the brandy again, Niko wasn’t there to meet him. A nervous girl was there, her hands trembling as she poured out the brandy; she looked at him askance, frowned a little, but didn’t say anything.

“She likes you!” Niko said the next time. Rafo didn’t answer, but her father was no longer waiting for an answer. Everything was proceeding toward its logical conclusion, and he was content.

What made Niko Azinović, a poor but respected widower, want to give his daughter to a man who wasn’t from that town, didn’t have roots or family there, no house, no reputation, no place under the sun? The surrounding neighborhood would wrestle with this question until that whole generation ended under stone slabs in the Boninovo cemetery. Not until they’d all died off did their wonder come to an end, and the answer— though it was simple and understandable as soon as you thought with your heart and not your head— would never occur to them. Niko sought just that kind of son-in-law because he didn’t want to be left all alone. He loved Kata with the kind of love that hadn’t been able to get over her deceased mother, and he was horrified at the possibility that he would have to let her go off into someone else’s house. He would let his other daughter, Angelina, go, and he would also be glad if she went, but Kata was something different and had remained close to her father’s heart. How was it that people couldn’t understand that, and where did they get the idea that a parent treasured all his children equally? Maybe some parents did, but Niko didn’t. He found a son-in-law to fit his own emotions and— or so he believed— to fit a domestic mindset: Rafo seemed to him to be a stable young man and a model pauper whom trouble had forced to live with Granny Petka (because what else would have?). He didn’t have anyone of his own and gave the impression of a man who as a husband would care for his wife. What man would care more than one whose property began and ended in his marriage? That was what Niko Azinović thought and was sure that he hadn’t been mistaken.

From Rafo’s perspective, things looked a little different. He believed that Kata liked him, and she did, just as he would soon believe that she loved him. He wasn’t exactly clear about what that attraction and love were supposed to mean to him, but why would he object? Kata tolerated his silence well. Kata’s father didn’t expect for the questions he asked to be answered. Neither the one nor the other disturbed his peace of mind. He couldn’t have found better kin. He nodded, and that was his consent.

In the uninterrupted history of Rafo Sikirić’s solitude the only exception was his daughter Regina. On the day of his death, on the twelfth of February, 1924, she was the only one who really lost anything because only Regina liked him as he was. Everyone else had washed their hands of Rafo at one time or another; they saw him differently than he was or tried to change him. And no one other than she had a bad conscience about the way that he departed.

And the conscience is a good witness to death. Better than tears and all spoken and unspoken words of mourning. The survivors feel guilt before the dead, and that guilt is the only thing that ties their children to the world of shadows. Guilt is what dead parents leave to their children and what makes them turn into adults. If there was no guilt, then there was neither father nor mother. Actually, then they weren’t parents to their own children. Thus, Regina was Rafo’s child, and it was with her that his lineage was continued. On the day of his death she still hadn’t turned nineteen, but she accepted into her soul a great anguish that was hard to bear and by which a pure and genuine misfortune can be recognized. The nobility of misfortune depends, however, on the way it is borne through one’s life.

It had already been raining for twenty-seven days. Rowboats that no longer had anyone to look after them were sinking one after the other in the harbor. Women in black peered from behind their curtains and hid as soon as people appeared on the street. It was better not to see soldiers because you never knew what they were looking for. And everyone else who might come along was worse than the army. For some time, starving people had been coming down from Herzegovina every so often. Hordes of crazed savages arrived from Bosnia and Montenegro, stealing everything in their path and continuing on along the coast toward Trsteno and farther in the direction of Zaostrog and Makarska. It was hard for anyone to know what was really going on at the front. Austrian propaganda spread news that Serbia was about to fall and that the army and people were fleeing toward Albania. Italian ships were allegedly on the approaches to Dubrovnik. There was no trace of the French or English. It could be said that the Austrian emperor had already won the war. But there was less and less food. The villagers had raised the prices of potatoes and grain sky high, and the government seemed to have hunkered down. Its officials sat freezing in their offices, as if they were waiting to see in which direction the wet, metal roosters on the roofs of the observation towers would turn.

Niko Azinović was sitting in the darkness of his cellar, debating with three men not unlike himself about when a child acquires a human soul. It would soon be a year since his grandson had died, and Father Ivan had refused to conduct the funeral service and didn’t want to hold the Requiem Mass. The boy’s name had been Angelino. They’d given him that name to protect him because he was born prematurely and was smaller than a loaf of pauper’s bread. His little sister had named him Lino. He wasn’t baptized on time, but not because Kata and Rafo hadn’t done their part. They had; they’d gone to the rectory three times, but that same Father Ivan hadn’t had time. It’s true that in those days a lot of people were dying. It was true that the priest had more urgent business and that it made more sense to baptize the children of those who could feed him better, but if it was already like that and if Father Ivan’s mistake was that Lino had died as an unbaptized soul, did he really dare return him to the earth like a dog?

“That’s not right,” the first voice in the darkness said.

“Damn right it’s not,” the other confirmed.

“What do priests know?! They share the same plane with both God and the devil,” a third said. No one inhaled any smoke.

In a moment there was the glow of a cigarette rolled from a mixture of mint and a little wad of tobacco, and it briefly illuminated the faces of the men. One was obese, his head was planted on a body that looked like a wrecking ball for old ships, and his small, close-set eyes kept blinking. The face of the other looked abnormally elongated, with an equine jaw and an expression of surprise that was in all likelihood more a feature of his physiognomy than it was the result of his being surprised. The third face was small and barely visible under a large French hat. A ten-year-old girl sat on a three-legged stool in front of the barrel. She was pretty. Her face belonged to someone who wasn’t afraid and who wanted more than anything to show that she wasn’t afraid.