Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

His wish was fulfilled. He returned to Trsteno after midnight. Matilda was already asleep, and he quietly slipped into her bed feeling like an unfaithful husband. No matter how much he wandered and traveled around, August had never slept with another woman, nor had another woman caught his eye. But it often happened that he felt like an unfaithful husband. Always when something became more important to him than Matilda. And now those toys were more important to him. And not only the toys, but the child that was about to be born. He hadn’t awaited his own children with such joyful trepidation.

“I know!” he shouted before he opened his eyes. He wanted to tell her, but his hand fell on an empty space on the bed— Matilda had gotten up first, as she always did. That immediately rattled him, but he decided not to get up before he told her.

“Eureka!” he howled at the top of his lungs. “Eureka! Eureka! Eureka!” he shouted until his throat was sore, but it was no use. Matilda evidently wasn’t at home. He grumpily pushed away the duvet and hurled a shoe at the other end of the room. And then he thought that maybe he shouldn’t have done that. An artist couldn’t be angry if an ingenious idea occurred to him and at that be angry only because his wife wasn’t around. He went down into the cellar, stretching himself so he could touch the beams in the ceiling, but he was still a centimeter or so too short. That was precisely how much he’d shrunk in the last few years. After he drank a glass of milk, he was going to go to the lumberyard and pick out the five most beautiful pieces of walnut there. He would need at least five for what he’d thought up. More wood would be used for a toy for a child that was yet to be born than for a small church altar. That was the way it should be! The church served to correct and rework people who were already finished and thus incorrigible. This was for someone who still did not need an altar and, God willing, would never need one.

In a book entitled Modern Interiors of Cities of the Future, published by Ćelap Booksellers, he found a plan and a cutaway view of the kind of house that the majority of Europeans would live in around 1950, that is to say, in exactly forty-five years. The preface said that the book’s author, an engineer named Adolf Foose, had taken into account all the current and future achievements of the technological revolution, the cultural progress of our civilization, and generally man’s spiritual ascent to a higher stage of humanity, the not-too-distant future in which brotherhood and equality would reign. . August had bought Modern Interiors of Cities of the Future the previous year in Zagreb, leafed through it on his way back to Trsteno, and then fallen into a deep depression and decided not to pick it up again.

If he were to live to see that year of 1950, which was downright impossible, he would be a hundred and ten years old and would be too old for all the pleasures that would be available then. He’d been born too late and lived in the twilight of a dark age full of ignorance and primitivism, wars, rebellions, and pointless bloodletting. The day before they’d still burned witches, and Turkish soldiers galloped all over the place with drawn sabers, ready to lop off the head of anyone who resisted them. That had probably gone on for around a thousand years, but then something happened: the telegraph was invented, railroad trains started rolling, gas lamps turned night into day, and the people of the world started at an accelerated pace toward happiness, welfare, and all kinds of pleasures. It killed him to know that without being able to live to see the fruits of those changes. And that was why he decided not to open that book again. He thought about taking it to Dubrovnik, to Salamon Levi, and to give it to his used bookstore for half the price. Fortunately he hadn’t gotten around to it because then this ingenious idea would never have crossed his mind: to build a house that Europeans would live in in 1950! That would be a toy for a child of the future, and it didn’t matter whether it was a boy or a girl. A house was the only thing in this sad world that belonged to men and women alike.

On the ground floor there was a reception room with three armchairs, a tea table, and a divan in the three colors of the French flag. In one corner there was a shoe polishing machine and a moving mirror. Here there was also a refrigerator with refreshing drinks, a movie projector, and a household telegraph. On the first floor, in addition to a toilet and a large bathroom, there was a parlor for social games, with a pool table, a piano, and Japanese bamboo furniture, that led to a kitchen with an electric stove, a refrigerator, and a series of devices whose purpose August was unable to discover. Maybe the author had placed them there just in case, without himself knowing what their function was. Here there was also a bedroom with a master bed, closets, and an electric massage table. On the second floor there were two more rooms, and in the attic, a roomy storage space in which Adolf Foose had put household objects from the past. He had done that to emphasize the contrast, but August realized that it was a precautionary measure. If the future led to ruin or the people ever had enough of it (and that was possible too!), then they would simply take down the old stuff from the attic and go back to where they had once been. The house of the future was perpetually bathed in sunlight because an electric motor rotated the house to face the sun. It had large windows and a view of an Alpine lake, above which snowy peaks rose and predatory birds flew. One day, in the distant year of 1950, cities would coexist with nature; they would be located alongside the habitats of wild animals and in the middle of forests, where there was fresh air and the colors of nature were appealing to the eye. Industrial zones would be moved to the Sahara Desert and underneath the surface of the sea, and it wasn’t even impossible that they would be moved to the Moon. . People would travel by means of electric trains, electric carriages, balloons and electric flying machines. Walking would be reduced to a minimum, and all animals would live free. No one would eat meat, the flatlands of Europe would glow golden in fields of grain, there wouldn’t be states or governments, the king would change every year, and his name would be pulled out of a drum. Kingly rule would be allowed to every adult citizen who hadn’t previously broken the law. .

Okay, August didn’t believe every word of it! But Foose’s house was a good basis for what he’d imagined on his own, without electrical appliances, multi-functional furniture, and an excess of optimism. Besides, in 1950 the future child would be forty-five years old, which was not a time when one started to live. August would create a house that would be equally good both tomorrow and in 1950.

He sent a letter to the French ambassador in which he informed him with regret that he would be unable to make the gusle for King Nikola. He told Captain Vojko that nothing would come of the Santa Maria delle Grazia because it was beneath his honor to make a model of a ship that had never existed.

“You should be ashamed for trying to deceive your own children. Admit to them that you sailed the world on low ships and not on Columbus’s caravels!” he wrote to him and told him that he shouldn’t try to find him and talk him into it because if August Liščar decided something today, it wouldn’t change for the rest of his life! He was proud of himself. He was refusing work again, as he’d done in the best of times, and had quit behaving like a frightened old man who was convinced that no one needed him any more.

For the next few months he worked from dawn until dusk making the walnut house. His back didn’t ache once, his joints didn’t swell, and in his arms and hands he felt the same strength that he’d had when long ago, somewhere in Bosnia, he’d lifted the trunk of a hundred-year-old walnut tree off the ground. He made the basic shape quickly, in seven or eight days. He didn’t need more to divide the house into rooms and make the interior staircases, but the real work began with the doors, the furniture, and the household accessories. At first he had to fashion needles, razors, and nail scissors into tools with which he would, for example, hollow out a bathtub the size of a thumb or kneading troughs that were smaller than a fingernail. He worked on the kneading troughs for two days, working harder than he had on ten heads of Prince Marko. But in the end they looked real. It was even more difficult to decorate the period furniture, put door-knobs on the doors, and make a set of miniature kitchen knives. He adhered to the rule that there was nothing so tiny that it couldn’t be made. He made kitchen rags from little pieces of silk and rugs from Matilda’s formal dresses.