Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

The same afternoon Mirna told her grandma that she wasn’t going to go to school any more.

“Your mother will kill you when she comes back!” the old woman said, trying to scare her, but it was no use. The girl had decided that she could never again leave the house and show her shame to the world. Besides, she didn’t believe that she would live to see her mother return from her African journey. That was still around twenty days away, which seemed far too long a time to a dying girl like her. She lay on her bed and looked at the wall on which there were pictures of actors and pop singers, relics of a distant careless time that had ended a few days after her mother left on her journey, when she first noticed that the left side of her chest was bigger than the right. If her mother hadn’t left, maybe everything would have been different; maybe she would have taken her to a doctor in time, done something that needed to be done; now it was too late for hope. There was no way that anyone could even her out again or halt the wild swelling of her flesh. She took pity on herself, without a father, abandoned by her mother, all alone in the world. Tears began to flow, and Mirna finally found something she recognized, a feeling that wasn’t new and in which she could calm herself, for a while at least.

The next day her teacher, Klara šeremet, a gray-haired old maid who was fanatically patient with her pupils but reputed in the city to be an eccentric, so much so that parents signed petitions with requests for her to be forced into early retirement, asked Darijan where he’d been the day before and why his sister hadn’t been in school for three days now. He lied and said that his stomach had hurt and that Mirna was sick. He feverishly tried to remember what she was sick with, but it took too long for anything to come to mind.

“Your mother hasn’t come back from her trip?” she asked, breaking his train of thought.

“Not yet; she’ll be here soon,” he answered.

“And how’s your grandma?” she asked, sounding gentle and caring, not suspecting anything.

Darijan was encouraged by that; he thought that she hadn’t caught his lie, as when she acted as if she didn’t notice when bad pupils copied from the good ones, on account of which she was reputed to be the most stupid and by virtue of this the best teacher. “Grandma’s fine; she’s the only one who’s not sick,” he said, perhaps too cheerfully.

She nodded in approval, and just when he thought it was over and she would leave him alone, she asked suddenly, “Did you forget to tell me anything?”

“No,” he answered and knew it wasn’t going to end there.

It was five o’clock in the afternoon when Regina opened the door of her house for the teacher Klara šeremet. Her face couldn’t conceal a slight expression of disgust; she couldn’t stand that woman. No one knew why, but Regina had been one of the women who’d spread word around town that Klara was attracted to women and that for this reason she went off to Germany during every winter break, though the teacher gave no reason for this or other wicked rumors that followed her. She went to Germany simply because she was German on her mother’s side and in Hamburg had five half-brothers and half-sisters, all rich or at least well-off people who tried to persuade her to stay there. They bought her an apartment; she had a car waiting for her in the garage. But she didn’t want to leave her solitude in that wicked Mediterranean city and the school that compensated for any possible shortcoming arising from her extremely lonely life. She didn’t marry because she’d never even fallen in love. That didn’t cause her pain; she didn’t think it important, nor did she have anyone who might have brought her attention to it. Like someone who never smokes a cigarette can’t imagine enjoying tobacco and so pities the victims of nicotine dependency, so Klara šeremet pitied, quietly, without a word, all those who add someone else’s difficulties to their own.

Her father, a sign maker in Mostar and later the owner of the Orion Cinema, had been condemned to death before a partisan court because for four years of war he’d received into his house Italian and German officers and had gone on outings with them on summer nights to the banks of the Neretva. Just as he’d received communist fugitives and given them what they asked for. Despite the horror of his wife Gudrun, Klara’s mother, he’d also hidden a wounded partisan, Paloma Levi, in his cellar, and when she recovered somewhat, he drove her secretly in his Mercedes past all manner of patrols and sentries, all the way to Jablanica. Old šeremet was against Hitler, but he couldn’t be against decent people, regardless of their uniforms and insignias, and such people were the only ones he socialized with. Nazis were hateful as long as he saw them from afar, but whenever they came closer, before he even got to know them, he could understand that they were elegant and polite people who, if it weren’t for the war, would be collecting oddly shaped stones on the banks of the Neretva or would be in the vicinity of Glavatičeva hunting for strange plants that one could not find in Germany and recording their finds.

Impetuous and gallant, he spent the war living it up, paying no heed to what was said in the town and openly scorning the Ustashas because he found no decent and cultured people among them, nor did he have any wish to get to know them. And so he managed to earn the enmity of everyone who had spent the war hungry or in fear or lost someone of their own. In actuality, he was hated by everyone he hadn’t helped, and there were those to be found who would forget what he had done for them.

A few months before the liberation of Mostar, Franko Rebac, a communist since the Vukovar congress, had come and warned him to leave the town for a few days: his wife was German, he’d earned money off the Italians and Germans and had been a friend to so many of them. .

Gajo šeremet laughed: “My brother, who would lay a hand on me? Those are fine people.”

Franko wasn’t sure who šeremet thought was fine — the fascists or the communists. He only told him, “With the fine ones comes the dross.” When he left, Gudrun asked him what the word dross meant.

He answered, “You wouldn’t believe it, but I don’t know. I’ve been hearing about the dross since I was born, and I’ll be damned if I haven’t said it a thousand times myself, but to this day I haven’t asked anyone what dross is. And you see why it’s good that you’re a German. You ask about things I think I know but really don’t. So the first chance I get I’ll ask someone with a brain to tell me what the dross really is.”

But before he had managed to ask anyone, the partisans entered the town; he was arrested and brought before a court. And more witnesses came forward against Gajo šeremet than against the worst murderers. Some lied, others told a truth that was no prettier than the lies, and he sat with his hands in chains, listening to the audience behind him shout out wartime slogans, and couldn’t believe at all that the prosecution and the judge would not in the end see that this was a mistake. He even thought that the purpose of the trial was to frighten him because they obviously didn’t like the fact that for four full years he hadn’t let the war get to him or turn him into the dross that would carry out its own justice at the expense of others. He was seriously afraid for the first time when his defense attorney requested that his client be simply shot instead of hung, as the prosecution had suggested. But he kept believing that someone would come and ask, “Do you know who this man is?” And then he would go off laughing and joking to that bar under the Old Bridge and drink himself silly. Not only he but the judge, the prosecutor, and the defense attorney, and everyone else too, and he would pay the bill like a real gentleman.