Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

On the fifth of April, 1905, at precisely four in the afternoon, a child was born. The last scream was as long as a trip to the end of the world, sharp as the saber in the hand of the world’s last hero and as high as the noonday sun. At that moment nothing more important could happen under the stars. Wars stopped if they were being fought somewhere; the hunger and rage of the sailors on the battleship Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky subsided for a moment; Czar Nicholas II paused, a cup of tea halfway to his lips; a Finnish fisherman with a knife that he was going to plunge into a friend of his became lost in thought; José Manitas looked at a bull and saw his brother in the beast; John Eldar Evian didn’t sneeze after he took a pinch of snuff; Natasha Vassilevna looked back for the last time at a young man who would never forget her; Emperor Franz Joseph stopped in mid-sentence and no one thought it was senility; old man Boro took a little white dog onto his lap; a king’s assassin removed a splinter from a boy’s eye; a beaver finished its dam and rested; the Japanese emperor spit out a cherry pit. . Everything on the Earth that walked, talked, and felt stopped for a moment when that child was born.

“That’s impossible! That’s impossible!” people shouted when they heard about it. But how could they know what was possible and what wasn’t? How could they when they weren’t there? But August knew. He wept as he waited, third in line, for the midwife to place the newborn girl in his arms. Everyone there wept, except Kata and the little walnut family.

That was the end. But it was the beginning of a life. For some reason it seemed so. A child is born, and those that receive it into the world have a sense— along with all their joy and happiness— that something has come to an end. And that, at least as far as they are concerned, something is gone forever. But that’s not at all a sad feeling, and there’s no fear in it. At least August didn’t feel any. Neither did Grandfather. Or Rafo. Or Kata. But one of them— and it’s hard now to know who because their souls have mingled with one another, and their thoughts have forgotten whose they were— thought how easy it would be to die and how death would come with no fear at all if one died on a bed on which a child was coming into the world and at the same time. Such thoughts, like dreams, are forgotten easily and quickly. And the feeling that they accompany disappears as well, and sometimes one is even ashamed of them. Or he thinks that someone was lying to someone in all of this.

August took the awl and scratched The Walnut Mansion in small, cursive letters above the gate of the happy house. He woke up the little wooden girl and placed her in front of the gate. She was happy forever and ever.

MILJENKO JERGOVIĆ is a Croatian writer. He is one of the most significant writers in the region of the former Yugoslavia. He was born in 1966 in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and lives nowadays in Zagreb (Croatia). He is the author of more than thirty novels, short story collections, and poetry volumes and has received numerous national and international literary awards, such as the Erich-Maria Remarque Peace Award (1995), the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour (2003), and the Angelus Literary Award for the best novel in Middle Europe (Poland, 2012). He is the most widely read writer in the region.

STEPHEN M. DICKEY was born and raised in the United States. He studied German and Russian as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas and received his MA and PhD in Slavic linguistics from Indiana University (the latter in 1997). He teaches at the University of Kansas, where he is an associate professor.

JANJA PAVETIĆ-DICKEY was born and raised in Croatia. She studied English and German at the University of Zagreb and the University of Cologne and received her MA in English literature at the University of Leiden. She was a staff translator and interpreter at the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and currently lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas.