Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

And then the barren years came, typhus and diphtheria reigned, and there were rebellions in Serbia and Macedonia. It was a time of lawlessness in the former Turkish provinces; the minarets in the Užica district came crashing down like rotten poplars. Misery and poverty spread more quickly than enthusiasm for the newly won freedom and the rulers who crossed themselves and went to church. August wandered around the devastated areas and cut down walnut trees, sometimes with his apprentices but often alone. At the time when his business was going strongest, he had five warehouses and as many workshops: in šabac, Sarajevo, Mostar, Split, and Trsteno.

He made furniture for Austrian administrative buildings, churches, and mosques; carved likenesses of rulers and national heroes; made gusle for kings and highwaymen, up until times changed again. As far as others were concerned, they’d gotten better, and as far as he was concerned, they’d gotten worse than ever. Walnut wood was hard to come by, and there were fewer and fewer orders. Furniture arrived from Vienna, and dilettantes began to take over who made gusle from any kind of wood in large numbers. The world was losing its sense of esthetics. Everyone had started to entertain and celebrate things, wandering theater troupes appeared, operettas were performed, and balls and celebrations were organized and held in the Parisian and Viennese fashion. People were slowly but surely losing their minds. At first August was despondent about this, but then he began to take wicked pleasure in the coming disaster. All he had left was his house in Trsteno. He’d sold the others because he had no reason to hold on to them; he was getting up in years. More and more often he couldn’t work because of his rheumatism. He was losing his strength in his hands. His children had gotten married in Zagreb and Karlovac, and all he had left was his Matilda.

Still, he didn’t have it bad! August didn’t complain except to his closest friends! He didn’t even speak to anyone else, and friends are there for you to complain to them sometimes. He knew that they would grow tired of his whining, so when they stopped coming to his place, August was not angry but went to them. To Dubrovnik, Čapljina, Sarajevo. . He always brought them a gift that he’d fashioned: he took a carved wooden medicine cabinet that he’d copied from pictures of a Baghdad mosque to Ilidža for Karlo Stubler, his oldest friend, a railway official. Stubler was naturally thrilled. August had been complaining of his rheumatism to him for a good seven years, and his friend had tried to comfort him and would never have thought of mentioning his heart problems. He took a figure of King Tomislav on a rearing horse to Ivo Solda in Čapljina, and it still stood there, in a special place in Solda’s hotel beside a portrait of the emperor. He carved a Venetian gondolier for Mijo Ćipik and gave him Mijo’s face. It took Mijo’s wife Zdenka ten days to get over her astonishment at how accurate he’d made the likeness. .

August didn’t need money to live on! He’d earned enough for three lifetimes, but he couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he was getting on in years— Matilda told him a hundred times a day that he needed to rest! He got upset when no one came with orders for work, and he only made gifts for friends. In those days and months he was furious at everyone— neither the authorities nor the priests were worth anything. The newspapers that his children sent from Zagreb irritated him. He would get short with Matilda. But what was worse— when there was no work, August aged more and more quickly and generally went downhill. He began to forget things; in the evening he couldn’t remember what he’d said in the morning. Names slipped from his mind; he couldn’t remember where he’d put his glasses; he’d leave for Dubrovnik and halfway there he didn’t know why he’d gone. . He was downcast then, but Matilda was even worse. She was afraid of losing him and that the old man would kick the bucket before his time, bite the big one, take a dirt nap— as he said in jest— and she would be left on her own. That was why it was so difficult to describe the joy in the Liščar household in Trsteno when, after six empty months, four orders came in as many days! A gusle for the king, a ship for Captain Vojko, Prince Marko for the mountain climbers, and the fourth order: toys for the unborn grandchild of someone in Dubrovnik.

That man had come to him to tell him that his daughter had conceived, and was actually in her fourth month, and that he wanted to give the child toys made of walnut wood. It didn’t matter what they cost! That was what he’d said. A happy-go-lucky type, a little crazy, but August liked him. If he hadn’t, he would surely have refused him. First: he’d never made children’s toys in his life! Second: wasn’t it an insult to the noble wood to be piddled around with for such purposes? Third: August wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was a little afraid of having to make something for the first time. And fourth and most important: that man wanted toys to put next to the cradle as soon as the child was born and for the toys to work for both a male and a female child! August had never received such a difficult order. For days and nights already he’d been thinking about what the male and female worlds had in common. He started from what boys and girls would like to play with, but very quickly he raised his inquiry to a universal level, philosophizing about sexual differences, reading what scholarly books said about it, and ordered philosophical and theological treatises sent to him from Zagreb.

He went to Zaostrog for a talk with Brother Anđelo, a monastery librarian, a learned but also progressive man who reconciled the ice of the church with the fire of modern life and had read all the important books on the one and the other side. First he asked indirectly, and the monk started going on at length about how there was no difference in intelligence between men and women but that women were more sensitive and men were more rash. “Only their feelings make the world happier, whereas their rashness brings misfortune. That’s the basic difference between men and women!” Brother Anđelo exclaimed, but August didn’t see any great benefit from this wisdom, so he simply stated his problem to him:

“What kind of toys should I make for the child if I don’t know whether it’s going to be a boy or a girl?”

The monk was confused; his eyes seemed to have teared up in the face of a question that had no answer. Then he thought for a long time and looked at August on and off— some other priest or smart-ass would have certainly gotten out of it by saying that toys were a waste of time and there was nothing to think about them, but Brother Anđelo wasn’t of that type. For him there were no questions of lesser importance. From how many legs an ant has to why Peter betrayed Christ, he thought every answer was important.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Brother August,” he said with the tone of an Old Testament penitent. “Could you make a crib instead of toys?”

No, for August that would be tantamount to admitting that there was something that he couldn’t make out of walnut wood. He would have been confirming that he’d grown old, spitting on everything he had built in his life. And in the end he would have been lying to a customer! He would have been lying to the man from Dubrovnik, saying that there was something that couldn’t be fashioned from walnut wood. There wasn’t anything, except stoves! A stove was the only thing that you couldn’t make out of walnut wood. For everything else all one needed was smarts and skill. It couldn’t be that he’d lost his smarts.

August wasn’t sitting under the stairs as he otherwise did when he tried to see what purpose there was in a piece of wood. He toyed around with gusle, Prince Marko, and the ship Santa Maria delle Grazia, but in fact all he had on his mind were toys. He hadn’t done anything for hours already, and when his nerves gave out from the tension and his hands froze up, August tapped on the chisel. There were shallow cuts in the wood, but he couldn’t get working. In the end he would reconcile himself to his fate— there was still time before the child was born— and he would start on what was easiest. In two days he would turn a piece of wood into the head of Prince Marko, a dark-mustached man with a low brow and lowered eyebrows under which one could sense the gaze of a bull that was about to start on a decisive run to clash with Musa Kesedžija. In thirty years August had made a few hundred Prince Markos. Every time he strove to carve the same head, without changing the expression or the shape of the nose, because there was no other way to imagine the portrait of a man when no one knew what he’d actually looked like. Every sculptor or painter, artist or dilettante, made his own Marko, and the more times he repeated the same work, the greater was the chance that people would believe that the famed hero had looked just like that. August, there was no denying it, was about to become the creator of the definitive likeness of Prince Marko. Long ago people had started copying his work and that angered him, but he was aware that in that way they were also helping him. A low brow, lowered eyebrows, and the look of a bull! If that were really Prince Marko, let it be known that he hadn’t been created like that by God but by the master from Tolmin, the earl of walnut, August Liščar!