Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“The aria To Battle, To Battle. It’s from the opera.”

“I know, I know; I saw Zrinski when I was in Zagreb. I’ll see it here too, to see which version is better, ours or the Zagreb version. Oh, as it happened, the young rabble were singing to try out their voices. And what do you think, frankly speaking, why did they sing that song and not some other?” asked Barnjak, who, both because of the idiotic smile that didn’t leave his face and the way in which he asked questions, reminded Gabriel of an annoying uncle who comes to visit once a year when you’re little, usually for your birthday, gives you a plastic train as a gift, and won’t let you be until he leaves. He holds you on his knee, grabs you by the cheeks, and asks whether you love him more than your father and whether you have a girlfriend.

“Really, I don’t know why they were singing To Battle, To Battle, ” he said.

“Right; what an idiot I am! How would you know?!” Barnjak scratched his bald spot in confusion.

“But what would you’ve had to say about that song if you’d been out in front of the theater?”

“What would I have had to say? Nothing — what would I have to say? People sing what they’re going to hear in the opera. Seems normal to me,” Gabriel said, as Dijana returned to his thoughts, the fact that she was left alone in the house and was certainly pissed that he wasn’t there or rummaging through the rooms that no one went into.

“Normal, n-o-r-m-a-l!” Barnjak repeated to get the spelling right as he wrote it down. “Fine; if that’s normal to you, then it’s normal for me too,” he said and left the office.

Gabriel sat for half an hour in his seat and didn’t budge so as not to spoil anything before Inspector Jere came back. But instead of him a guy in a uniform appeared. Gabriel jumped up.

“Turn around and put your hands behind your back!” the policeman yelled.

Three minutes later Gabriel was in a room without windows, between walls painted with a greasy green paint, in handcuffs that wouldn’t be removed from him until the next day, when despite the fact that it was Sunday and no one was working, he was led before a police magistrate and was sentenced to sixty days imprisonment because he’d supported the singing of nationalist songs in front of the National Theater in Sarajevo and expressed regret that he was unable to sing along.

And so Gabriel suffered on account of Zrinski. That was the year he’d first complained that he’d been born in this backwater and not in America, from where even in Sarajevo people had been hearing the first rumors of a festival on the private farm of one Max Yasgur, in a place called Woodstock, where one generation won the right to renounce the history of its parents that had been written up for it, to renounce the state, the flag, the law, and everything else that no one could live with any longer. Gabriel too believed for a short time that he would be protected by that Woodstock, if only because he’d heard of it and gotten drunk at Goga’s and Musa’s place to songs that had been played there. And they had about as much to do with the aria To Battle, To Battle as he did with his Uncle Bruno.

His hope died out, as do all hopes and beliefs that you can be outside the world and escape the troubles that started on their paths before you were born and before anyone or anything besides those troubles reckoned with the possibility that you would one day be there. As he squatted in his green cell, all of Gabriel’s problems came down to one. Actually two: pissing and shitting. The one and the other urge seized him, and he stopped thinking about other urges.

Dijana spent the night with Katarina Katzer without managing to get a word in edgewise or think about herself and Gabriel very much. Katarina told her about her whole life, packed full of dead aunts and curses that a Galician priest had cast on the Katzers two hundred years before, because of which every male member of the family loved men. With time the curses deepened, and the Katzer women started loving women. This curse was the downfall of her great-grandfather, her grandfather, and her father and all five of her father’s sisters, who all killed themselves in turn in Vienna because of some actresses and ballerinas. Every two years one of them would stick her head into an oven and turn on the gas, and her relatives in Sarajevo would go to the funeral.

Katarina didn’t say anything about whether that Galician curse had affected her. But Dijana cautiously moved away whenever in the fervor of her story Katarina reached for her hand. Dijana laughed and cried at the unbelievable confessions of a Sarajevo ballerina, in which there were certainly lies and a strange delirium that drove the girl to talk without end and caused her to talk faster than she could think, so that she would fly back and forth between different times and would no longer know where she was or in which character.

Then she would stop for a moment, look up at the ceiling, frightened that it was going to collapse, and instead of finishing the story she’d begun, she’d begin another. About the Moscow ballet school and about how when she was eighteen she’d stopped menstruating, but she wasn’t worried about it because she would start again when she broke her leg one day, the same month that her dancing career would come to an end. Horses and ballerinas break their legs only once, the difference being that horses are shot but ballerinas are given pensions so they can have something to spend on their youth. Katarina knew that she was going to break her leg; she’d had the same dream several times and knew exactly where it would happen. But she didn’t know when. Nor was it important: six of one, half a dozen of the other. Menstruation would replace Swan Lake.

At about six Dijana put her in the bed under the crucifix, and Katarina fell asleep in mid-sentence. Dijana went back into the living room, lay down on the divan, watched the flames in the stove until she dropped off. At eight a police car stopped in front of the house, and the same policeman who’d led Gabriel away rang the doorbell until he woke Dijana and handed her a summons for an interview in the State Security Service, where she was supposed to come on Monday at ten. She asked him where her boyfriend was; he said that he didn’t know but that he was sure he was safe.

Only a day later did Dijana learn that Gabriel had been sentenced to sixty days in prison and that he was in the central prison, which bore the name Miljacka, a small river in the city that absorbed all the Sarajevo sewage and thus stank even in winter. At the police station they asked Dijana the usual questions about the man with whom she was living, where she’d met him and how, whether he’d said what his uncle had been during the Second World War, and what her thoughts on that were. With whom they socialized and whom they saw, what they talked about, and which films they watched. And when the inspector asked her when they had made love for the first time, she answered that it wasn’t his business, whereupon he only laughed and went on to something else.

“Stop by from time to time,” he said when they parted, “especially if you notice something suspicious. You have to develop a culture of security. You’ve seen yourself how theater culture ends up.”

After she saw Gabriel despondent for the first time, and with his head shaved bare—“I had to sign that I was getting my hair cut on my own volition; they say it’s because of lice,” he said — Dijana suddenly forgot what had happened between them since she’d moved in. She was resolved to be a support for this man, regardless of what would happen, because they’d told him that this wasn’t the end and that there would be criminal charges, pursuant to Article 114 of the Law on Criminal Procedure, for counterrevolutionary activity and violation of the constitutional order of the SFRY. She was prepared for everything and not for a moment in the next two months did she waver. Nothing was more important to her than her Gabriel being released and coming home to peace and family harmony.