Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“I wouldn’t give a shit. That’s what I’d do. .”

“Can you say a single sentence without a shit or a fuck ?”

“Can you shut up, or do you want me to slap your face so you can hear some music?”

“Gabriel!”

“Yes, dear?! Please, please dear!” he shouted, stepping into her face and swinging his huge hands.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she continued in a softer tone. “You’re mistaken if you think I’m afraid of you. Only cowards shout like that. You’re a coward. You shit your pants because I came. Ain’t that true, Gabriel? — You shit your pants? But why did you invite me? Because it sounded nice, huh?! You hoped you could play a knight in shining armor, but mostly, you know, from afar. You’re such a shit. Let me tell you, you’re such a shit.”

She was trying to provoke him, just as she would do if she knew it were the end. She wanted to do everything to make sure she would never again hear some guy telling her he didn’t deserve her. But instead of completely blowing his top, Gabriel stopped, muttered something, and burst into tears like an actor in a bad Indian film a little before the girls’ choir starts singing an ode to the Brahmaputra. And no matter how furious she was and ready to run out of the house without a dinar in her pocket or anywhere to go, Dijana didn’t know what to do. She stood in the middle of the room, her fists clenched and her feet apart, and panted like a bull when the toreador runs out of the arena.

Such fights would be repeated at least once a week, with slight variations in the insults and the particular bone of contention, and they were always about something that had to do with both Gabriel and the city to which she’d come. It seemed to Dijana that everything bad and ugly that she’d experienced in Sarajevo lived in his person, as if he were infected with all the illnesses one could catch out on the street. She raged because he’d deceived her and won her over with pretty words and a charm that lasted until she settled into his world and then disappeared like the glittering on lake water on a sunny morning. She attacked him and tried to chase Sarajevo out of Gabriel since she still wasn’t ready to chase herself out of Sarajevo.

In the end he would burst into tears or run out of the house, leaving her on her own all night long to wander among the rooms full of heaped furniture and rolled carpets, piles of German books, and prewar newspapers, nothing but posthumous remains that, like Piro Trola’s skull, were crassly put on public display.

She didn’t learn very much about the life of that house or Gabriel’s Uncle Bruno Ekert and Aunt Fanika because that was one of the few things — actually the only one — about which Gabriel didn’t talk at length. Instead, he would slip out of that topic and hurry into tales that were often more painful and terrible than that of his uncle could have been, at least in Dijana’s opinion.

Basically, she knew that in 1945 Bruno Ekert had been sentenced to death for collaborating with the occupier — what kind of collaboration he wouldn’t tell her. Then his sentence was commuted to twenty years of hard labor and the confiscation of his entire property, which, due to an administrative error, was never carried out but also not retracted, so that this was and wasn’t Gabriel’s house. His Aunt Fanika committed suicide five years later by drinking essence, so from 1951 until six years earlier, when Gabriel had moved in, no one had lived in the house, nor had anyone entered it. Bruno Ekert hung himself in the Zenica prison on the twenty-eighth of May, 1966, two days before his sentence ended and he was to be released.

That was all that she managed to get out of Gabriel. He shut up and blushed when it came to the other part of the story, as if he were awkwardly hiding some incurable family disease. Leaving her in the middle of the night alone in the dead house of two suicides, Gabriel punished Dijana in the worst way.

If they weren’t at home arguing and fighting or at Goga’s and Musa’s parties, which lasted all night long, complete with the music of Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan and Afghan hashish, Gabriel and Dijana spent their time in the national theater. In four and a half months they saw all the plays, operas, and ballets several times. They even saw Branislav Nušić’s A Suspicious Person seven times. The only thing they avoided was Barilla’s Hamlet, which, however, was performed twice weekly, though the audience grew smaller and smaller after all the elementary and high school kids had come, as well as those on school excursions from Tuzla and Zenica, who on an instruction from the republican secretary of science, education, and culture were required to see precisely this performance. When Gabriel began to play the second herald instead of the ill Černi, Dijana would wait for him in the Theater Café.

The trips to the theater were for both him and her the best way to kill time in the evening. She didn’t have to go hopping from one Sarajevo café to another and listen to everyone who noticed that she wasn’t a local tell her that there was nowhere in the world where one could have a better time than in Sarajevo because nowhere were there people like those in Sarajevo, and he didn’t have to sit in fear of her looks and comments that tore his city apart.

Apart from this, as soon as he went out somewhere with her, all kinds of crap would happen that he’d never experienced before. Either out of the clear blue sky people would knife each other before Dijana’s eyes, or the waiter in the Morića Inn would trip in a doorway and spill a bowl of hot stew on Dijana’s head, or it would happen, as in a legend that everyone had heard but no one had ever seen in real life, that in the middle of the market square some bumpkin with a shaved head would come up to them and force Gabriel to buy a brick for five hundred dinars. With each new day reality would bear out Dijana’s newly acquired biases, and there was no help but to take refuge in the theater.

If Sarajevo were the city that she saw and experienced every day, no one would have lived there, Gabriel thought, reconciled to the fact that there was no place in the world that he could share with Dijana that would be the same for both of them.

And then there was that tragic Friday and the premiere of Nikola šubić Zrinski. It was never clear whose idea it was or why the national opera of the Croats, in which the protagonist dies fighting the Turks, would be performed in Sarajevo, that bastion of “brotherhood and unity” and communist orthodoxy, but rumor had it that this was done on a directive from the supreme leadership of the party, as part of a broader effort to win over the Croats in western Herzegovina, an area that had lived under a kind of martial law for twenty some-odd years, under a stigma because of its mass collaboration with the Ustashas in the Second World War. Children can’t be guilty for what their fathers and grandfathers did — this was the new party slogan. But people also pointed out that then that opera should be performed in Lištica or Ljubuški, because what did Sarajevo have to do with the Ustashas and why would those injustices be corrected by the story of a Croatian lord who fought the Turks?

It wasn’t that Sarajevo pined for the Ottoman Empire and the time of the sultans; no one remembered any of that, but they hadn’t ever liked the whole bit about fighting and pursuing the Turks. They had an instinctive feeling that all those folk songs and tales, in which some Jovan and Ivo were killed by some Sulejman, nevertheless in a roundabout way had something to do with them and any Bosnian who had a Turkish name. If nothing else, it seemed that Bosnians didn’t have a right to their heroic legends because they hadn’t fought against Ottoman despotism, about which one learned in school that it had lasted for five centuries, though the calendar showed that it was only four centuries. So at that time it had barely been five centuries since the Turks had come to Bosnia — but how many years had it been since they’d already been gone?! So many that only the cobblestones remembered a Turkish foot stepping on them. Over in the cemetery in the city center a public toilet was opened so the people would know that not even the dead have the same rights. It would never happen that the smell of shit would waft over Catholic or Orthodox graves, though they contained people who had died at the same time as those who were now bathing in shit.