Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Someone must have taken this into account,” he said. “It would be hard for someone to believe that a green pill would make them pee. That’s like reducing a fever with red pills. Damn, they could only cure people with Daltonism! It’s like graphic artists are condemned to die as soon as they fall ill! Haven’t you thought about that? Of course not; I’m not surprised. You’re young. Your time to think about it will come.”

That’s how the old master philosophized as Vid lugged cameras and tripods behind him. Loaded up like a mule, he thought about simply strolling off some afternoon during Pardžik’s break and going to the bus station, buying a ticket, and leaving the old man alone to occupy himself with the only thing that interested him, for which he needed neither cameras nor tripods. He would have done that on the first trip, when they were supposed to photograph the spa in Kladanj, but he was afraid that in the best case his desertion would get him banned from exhibitions, if they didn’t simply arrest him for sabotage.

Every other day Comrade Fejzić called from the Bosnian Central Committee and inquired about how the work was going. Pardžik left the conversations with him to Vid. And he lied, saying that at that moment Comrade Petar was touring the locations, waiting for the morning or afternoon light to illuminate the building, or he would think up something unbelievably stupid — say, that the old man was carrying out a technical inspection of the lenses or that he was coordinating the plan and the alternative plan, which made Fejzić particularly enthusiastic.

“Keep up the good work,” he would say. “The working people and citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be grateful to you.”

At first Vid thought that Fejzić was bullshitting them, but then he realized with horror that the man was deadly serious and that the gratitude of the working people and citizens was really a kind of threat about what would happen if the work weren’t completed in the best manner possible. And that threat concerned him alone, and not Petar Pardžik, the respected artist and hero of socialist labor who was already above suspicion because of his age and prior achievements, whereas Vid, a youngish forty-year-old assistant, still had to prove himself and might very well die trying.

“Why don’t you quit?” he asked Pardžik after he had spent the sixth day walking hunched over because he had pinched a nerve between two vertebrae.

“Quit what, my dear man? This isn’t work that you just quit! You’d better understand that while there’s still time. When you photograph some bigwig for the first time, you think you’ve torn a star from the sky. Do you know what an honor it was for me in 1913 when I was invited to the Royal Palace to photograph His Majesty Petar? And I had no idea what it meant. I got out of the poorhouse for the rest of my life, and they fucked me good. Both at the same time. I’ve always been able to wear nice suits, I could afford the best restaurants, I went to Paris every year and was never broke, but I couldn’t ever turn them down after I photographed the first one. What would have happened to me if I had said ‘No’ when they asked me to take the first pictures of Aleksandar Karađorđević as the new king? I’d have ended up doing hard labor, my good man! Or if afterward I’d refused to photograph General Pero Živković, his family, and their dog? God, I even had to take portraits of that idiot’s dog. Please, taking pictures of dogs is the worst humiliation a photographer can suffer because you have to make an unbelievable fool of yourself to get a dog to pose for you. It’s hard to be a fool and be famous. It’s better to be just a fool. Later I photographed General Nedić, and Dimitrije Ljotić and the Germans, and I would have taken Uncle Draža’s picture if I hadn’t hidden from his agents. God, why would I go to Ravna Gora just to get killed on the way? Oh, if they’d kept me there a few years! And I knew that Draža didn’t have a chance and wouldn’t come around and ask, ‘Well now, Pero, why didn’t you want to take my picture? Am I really the only ugly one around here, goddammit?’ Uncle Draža was naïve, but I’d better be quiet about that. Well, and then it was ’45. Could I refuse Tito? I could have; of course, then I’d have been able to choose whether to be hanged or shot. It’s just that his little toadies reproduced like amoebas. Six republics, at least twenty Tito wannabees in each republic, so my job was to make my way from Triglav to Đevđelija and take pictures of everyone. Fuck them! And the very next year they’re replaced, and I have to take pictures of the new ones. Don’t think I’m for the king; I don’t give a fuck about him or the monarchy, but then it was clear how many there were who could come tell Petar Pardžik, ‘Hey, Pero, come take a picture of this genius!’ Besides the king there was only the head of the government and Prince Paul and maybe someone else in extraordinary circumstances. But under Tito they were countless. In ’50-something they ordered me to photograph our soccer team that beat the Russians in Finland. Krcun, the minister of the police, came and ordered me to do it, and I said to him: How can I photograph a bunch of clods kicking a ball back and forth across a field, who live out their lives doing nothing? And do you know what Krcun said to me? He said, ‘Well now, comrade, would you photograph the Russians if they’d won?’ What could I do? I photographed them too. If I hadn’t, I’d have ended up on Goli Otok. And the same thing now. They got me out of bed to photograph this Bosnian shit, and I just said, ‘Yessir!’ But you didn’t have to. If you’d said you don’t know how, that you don’t have enough experience, that you’re stupid or a jerk, they’d leave you alone and wouldn’t ever call you again. But now it’s all over. You’re in the machine, and there’s no way out. But it’ll be easier for you when the greenbacks rustle under your nose. Then you’ll forget and you won’t know what you did, until they call you up the next time. And then you’ll suffer some again. First the pleasure and then the pain. That’s the way this work is. That’s the way life is. First the pleasure and then the pain. Only I don’t have time for pleasure any more. There you have it. I won’t have time to spend my money. I got screwed early in the game! But Uncle Pero will show them something from the grave! When they drive me on a caisson down the Boulevard of Titans, I’ll know that it’s over. No more ‘Take a picture of this guy, take a picture of that guy.’”

And so Vid had been lugging the equipment from one end of the spa to another for days, listening to Pardžik’s stories about the distant past and his laments over pills, without the old photographer taking a single picture. Only on the day before they left or the day they were traveling would Petar Pardžik take about twenty hasty shots without any special preparations and regardless of the angle of the morning or afternoon shadows, without even switching cameras or lenses. Later the comrades on the committees and tourist associations would admire his genius, and the newspapers would run reviews of those photographs in their culture sections, which were written by eminent Yugoslav authorities on artistic photography, art historians, and university professors of esthetics, although those photographs differed in no way from dilettantish photographs taken by rheumatic retirees passing the time between therapies in the spas. It had been a long time since the old man had actually been a photographer, and he’d had enough of art since the time he’d photographed General Pero Živković. He knew all this and wasn’t afraid of others finding it out too. He showed Vid Kraljev what the passions of youth turn into and what happens to artists who gain the admiration of kings. It could even be said that there was an unusual relish in Pardžik’s disclosure of all of this. He had no interest in teaching the young, forty-year-old man about life; he wouldn’t have done it if Vid had been half as old, nor was it important to him that Vid avoid his fate. He made his confession only as a small act of vengeance on everyone, from Petar I the Unifier to Marshal Tito, including his own positive critics, who took away his belief that photography was a miracle because it showed the naked truth of the eye.