Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“People, a man has died!” Dominko Pujdin shouted as loud as he could, but no one heard him. They were wrangling over the empty sack with the gold.

“My Niko is gone, people!” he continued, more for himself than for others.

Only for an instant did he think of his ducats, but he remained sitting on the ground, with Niko’s head on his lap and a feeling that with every moment there was less and less of a reason for him to tell anyone about this. Soon some women would come, the army and police would appear, Dr. Hans Eberlich would take him by the hand and lead him to a carriage, and some men in black would take his friend Niko Azinović off toward a hill.

“Why are they carrying him?” he asked Eberlich.

“Everything will be okay,” the Kraut answered, as the comforting fog of veronal descended on the lights in the harbor.

Niko Azinović was one of four victims on the day after the great rains: he, Admiral Sterk, Čare Nedoklan, and— if he could be considered a victim— Antiša Bakunin!

No one was particularly surprised, not to mention moved, when it was revealed that the mute robber was actually the most notorious anarchist in the city, a dropout from the University of Vienna. Many were relieved because Antiša was not family or kin to anyone in the city. His father, Captain Ante Bartulović, was from the Bay of Kotor and had moved to Dubrovnik after he’d stopped sailing. People didn’t know the real reasons, but they probably had something to do with Antiša’s mother, a noblewoman from Trieste whom people in the Bay of Kotor called the Trieste Tart because of her hats and short skirts. Shortly after they bought a house in the Pile district, the captain died, and Mrs. Francesca spent all her savings on Antiša’s studies in Vienna. God only knows what kind of company he fell in with there, but after wasting seven years there, Antiša was deported to his birthplace because he’d taken part in anti-imperial demonstrations and preparations for the assassination of the director of the Vienna Opera. The former might have lent him some status in his home town, but the latter (that he’d wanted to kill the director of the Vienna Opera!) only provoked mockery and scorn. Instead of settling down and waiting for people to forget about his Vienna episode, Antiša bristled and argued and tried to convince anyone and everyone that the Vienna Opera was one of the main levers in the oppression of the enslaved peoples of the Habsburg monarchy and its director an important and crucial functionary of the state as the highest means of exercising terror on the individual. He didn’t notice that they were taunting him and goading him into saying the same thing over again for the hundredth time. It was too late when it finally occurred to him that they’d made him into the biggest object of ridicule in town. Then it didn’t matter what he said. Sometimes they called him Antiša Carusoe, other times they called him Antiša Bakunin, but both nicknames were equally derisive.

It wasn’t known whose mind was the source of the idea of the robbery or who had thought up and spread the tale of the caravan, but everything pointed to him. The other dead robber wasn’t from Dubrovnik, nor did anyone recognize him, and as for the two who’d gotten away on horseback, it also seemed probable that they weren’t from the city. If they had been, people would already know somehow, or people would have heard that someone was missing from someone’s household. But such a robbery could have occurred only to someone who lived in the town, knew the people there, and thus knew how to set the bait for them. The main thing was to lure them outside the city, get them to gather up all the gold from their houses, and get greedy. The caravan was coming! Everyone knew about it, and everyone kept it from everyone else, so everyone thought he was the only one who knew. If it had been any different, the plan would have surely failed or the booty would have been more meager. As it was, people went with the intention of buying up the whole caravan, feeding and satisfying their families, and reselling what was left to recover their expenses. Antiša had conceived the plan perfectly, but he thought it more important to hit back at the town that had humiliated him than to get rich. That was his mistake. He wanted to leave them without a penny to their names, naked and barefoot in an empty clearing, and then watch them humbly return home as fools and asses. Maybe he would have succeeded if it hadn’t been raining for nearly a whole month and his outlaws hadn’t started stopping in at Niko Azinović’s cellar out of sheer boredom.

Regina’s grandfather and Antiša Bakunin were buried on the same day. Niko’s funeral was the largest since the beginning of the war, and the town might not have seen a bigger funeral except when bishops died. Three priests saw him off; almost everyone whom he’d helped to regain their gold came to pay their respects. A lot of women and children gathered, as well as representatives of military and police authorities, plainclothes agents who were working on the case of the caravan, a large number of curious people, and wretches and misfits who came to every meeting of any historical significance. Niko Azinović became a hero and a martyr; it was said that he’d rushed at rifles with his bare hands without defending himself and his rights, consciously choosing death so others could live with dignity. He’d saved the property of his fellow citizens and the honor of the city. Only his bravery had spared Dubrovnik from the largest robbery in its history. That was what was said by those who saw off Grandpa Niko. And after each one read what he had to say over the open grave, he went up to Kata and Angelina, hugged them, and comforted them, promising that the sacrifice of their father would never be forgotten. The little girl moved away, fleeing from the moist palms that patted her face and hair. She listened and remembered. Instead of protecting her, who’d loved him and was his, he’d tried to defend people whom he didn’t love or know.

Antiša Bakunin was buried outside the cemetery wall, in weeds and wild cabbage because people threatened that they would smash the grave of Captain Ante Bartulović if his son was buried in his family’s grave.

Father Ivan didn’t want to see him off to the hereafter and explained that Antiša had been an anarchist and an anti-Christian and that in view of this, the sacraments that Antiša’s unfortunate mother was requesting didn’t mean anything. She paid two workers to dig a hole and buried him herself. If there was anything comforting in his sad fate, it was that the town would not remember Antiša Bakunin as an object of ridicule. His attempt at robbery would grow into a legend that would speak for a while about the conflict between Antiša the Antichrist and Niko the Martyr, only for Niko’s character to pale soon and disappear from a story whose final version told about how in the First World War Antiša Bakunin and three outlaws killed and robbed charitable men who were trying to save the town from hunger.

In contrast to him, the wretched man from Konavle acquired no fame. A few months before the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire he was sentenced to death and hanged in a prison yard. How did he conduct himself under the gallows, and did he feel any regret about the murder of the city’s last clock-maker? Nothing is known about that, nor is it known where he was buried, but it is possible that Father Ivan didn’t forget his soul and that he gave his blessing to its repose.

The corpse of the fat robber was never identified, and it was buried in a metal coffin beyond the military shooting range. The two robbers who escaped were never caught. However, the police worked on the case of the caravan until the end of the war and the fall of the Habsburg monarchy. The Serbian Royal Army was about to reach the Adriatic, the negotiations on the establishment of a state for the South Slavs had ended, and the Habsburgs were already preoccupied with tragedies of their family instead of tragedies of the state when plainclothes police agents were still questioning people, listening to conversations in bars and taverns, and trying to learn from women and children the manner in which the story about the arrival of the caravan had spread through the town. Inspector Aldo Tomaseo, who’d been assigned to the case, didn’t believe that the robbery could have been organized and perfectly carried out by four men. Rather, there must have been a network of people who’d gone from house to house telling people that the caravan drivers were coming. Indeed, Tomaseo had a hard time figuring out how anyone could have believed in something that had disappeared with the departure of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans. But that secret would be revealed, he thought, as soon as he fingered the group that had spread the rumors.