Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“A girl from the coast.”

“I didn’t know about her. But why did you let her move in?”

“Well, you see, that’s the problem. I didn’t let her; I invited her.”

“Great, and what do you want now? You invited her, she came; nothing better! Now you can have kids.”

“It’s not quite like that.”

“Well, how is it, for God’s sake?”

“I didn’t really think she’d move in.”

“Oh, I didn’t think my Fazila would get married to a Pezer when I asked her, but you see — she did, and now I put up with it!” Meho said and laughed. He was already in a better mood, although he acted like he didn’t understand anything.

“Meho, I can’t get married,” Gabriel said, his voice quivering.

“Why not? You like men? If that’s the reason, get away from me. And now lift that thing; Hamlet won’t have anywhere to fuck with Ophelia.”

Gabriel’s confession ended here, but the next day half the theater would know about his unhappy romance. Meho, of course, knew very well what was going on, understood everything, and told whoever needed to hear it, pitying the unhappy young man. This only secured Gabriel respect among the acting community, which took open pleasure in its tragic love stories, failing marriages, fictitious nervous breakdowns, and other emotional occasions for the consumption of large quantities of alcohol.

It was the fact that as a stagehand and assistant decorator Gabriel had acquired something that was considered to be the mark of a high caste that led Viktor Barilla, the director of Hamlet, to give him a minor role as the second herald after the old Jozef Černi ended up in the hospital due to a stroke. Thus Gabriel became one of the actors, which from his point of view was the only good thing in connection with his nine-month common-law marriage to Dijana Delavale.

They went to the seventh row of the orchestra and sat down in seats ten and eleven, which were permanently reserved for members of the party or state delegations from non-aligned countries that arrived in the city on a daily basis to conclude trade agreements for arms and petroleum, in case one of them wished to see a stage performance outside of protocol. Since this had never happened, the two best seats in the seventh row were always given to stagehands, but they didn’t use them either, unless one of the younger ones had found a girl who was open to being charmed with courtship in a theater.

Hamlet was mind-numbingly boring. It dragged on and on in complete harmony with the fact that it was directed by a man who’d done the same job in the same theater twenty-five years before when he was young, brave, and full of potential, under the Ustashas and the German occupation. And this performance in 1969 was supposed to be a kind of quiet rehabilitation for him, after his having been forbidden to work in Sarajevo for a quarter of a century.

As with every other rehabilitation in those years, this too presupposed an act of repentance, humility, and complete discretion, to which Barilla kept so successfully that this performance was completely unwatchable for anyone, which again wasn’t a reason for him not to win the praise of newspaper critics or to be invited to participate in several Yugoslav and foreign festivals. No one, apart from the secret police and the comrades in the Committee for Work with Ideas in the Central Committee, remembered Barilla’s wartime productions and his errant youth before packed auditoriums whose applause at the premieres was orchestrated by Mile Budak, the minister of religion of the Independent State of Croatia. Nor was there an actor in the 1969 staging of Hamlet who knew why the maestro was so indisposed, why he didn’t say a word at the rehearsals, and gave only one instruction to the actors: “Tone it down a little; you’re not at a demonstration!”

The problem that came between a theater director and the government was solved at the expense of the audience, who understood nothing, least of all why it was suddenly supposed to be bored to tears at a performance directed by someone who’d received acclaim in Zagreb and Belgrade and who bore the honorary title of the “Nestor” of Yugoslav theater. The audiences didn’t know — not because they didn’t want to but because they weren’t told — that the great Viktor Barilla was in Sarajevo to remedy something that couldn’t be remedied, his own past and the past of that city. But worst of all was that he wasn’t the only one involved in this project.

People came to Sarajevo from Zagreb and Belgrade mainly to atone for their sins. While a few were punished for a lack of talent and — after being rejected in the theaters of the eastern and western metropolises — went to Bosnia, others, such as Barilla — as the greatest names of Yugoslav arts — went to Sarajevo to atone for sins that had been bequeathed to them by Ante Pavelić, Milan Nedić, or Stalin. Few of those who atoned for such sins with an awareness of their own creative dignity and name would be remembered. In Sarajevo they usually directed and acted blindly, as if before a morgue or a commemorative grave full of the frightening skulls of murdered victims. And the audience was left equally confused and more and more convinced that it was the city itself that oozed boredom and not the motives of those who came there.

But that’s no reason to be too hard on Viktor Barilla! In contrast to others, he didn’t go to Sarajevo because of some humiliation in Zagreb or Belgrade. He’d been celebrated in those cities, and avant-garde theatrical styles had been named after him. He taught in theater departments and was the aspiration of the finest intellectuals, and people from party committees bowed down to the black earth before him. However, in his twilight years he decided to try to resolve his misunderstanding with a city to which he didn’t need to go because apart from two stints of directing during the Independent State of Croatia, nothing tied him to Sarajevo. He wanted to die reconciled with that city, which is perhaps worthy of some respect. No matter how futile his effort was. .

They both dozed on and off for three and a half hours, touching each other in rhythm to the king’s long monologues.

“Hey, look, that’s the head of Piro Trola,” he said and poked Dijana with his elbow during Hamlet’s chat with the skull.

“Whose head?” she asked, not understanding what he was trying to show her.

“Piro Trola, the city fool. He didn’t have any family, and when he died, they didn’t bury him but cut him up for use by the School of Medicine. The theater loaned the head. I suggested that we put Piro Trola on the poster, among the names of the cast, but they didn’t listen to me. I don’t know why; his head has been on the stage longer than those of the people whose names are on the posters.”

For the rest of the scene Dijana stared at that skull, which looked like every other skull but was more terrible than any better-looking, anonymous, decomposing corpse because it had a first and last name. Her stomach turned at the thought that it had been a living person, that Gabriel had known him and was now happy to see him up on the stage, and it didn’t occur to him that he had a similar such skull, which someone might skin tomorrow and declare to be for the stage props.

“You’re really weird,” she said and left to go pee. In the darkness she tripped over the feet of high school students who’d been brought to the performance.

That evening they had their first fight. Actually, Dijana had never before quarreled so seriously and bitterly with anyone other than her mother. She told him she couldn’t believe that such Neanderthals existed.

“What would you do if you knew they were going to carry your head into the theater?”