Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Regina thought she heard someone knocking on the door. It was probably some shutters that had torn open and were now banging in the wind. A few moments later there was the same noise again. So it wasn’t the bora, but if it wasn’t, what was it then? No one went out for a walk in such weather, and if some trouble had put someone outside and sent him to her door, it was better not to open up for such a visitor. They could go somewhere else. To Bartol — he was a good man. And he had connections that always came in handy. Fear took hold of her; she didn’t know of what, but she felt as if it was late at night and she was stuck out in the mountains. Still, curiosity drove her to tiptoe over to the door, ready to jump back in a flash if someone burst in. And there was knocking again. A male fist; there was no doubt.

“Open up, dammit, woman; I know you’re in there!” Luka shouted, trying to be heard above the wind, and she finally heard him.

“You’re crazy! Do you know how afraid I was?!” she said, and he hurried past her into the house, soaked, bedraggled, and coatless.

“We were playing cards and that špiro says, ‘Let’s listen to the news from Radio London!’

‘Ah, now that you’re losing you feel like listening to the news. Why didn’t we do that when you were winning?’ I say to him. He turns on the radio, and you know what?! You don’t — how could you when you only listen to Radio Zagreb? They say Stalin is dead! Wow, imagine that; Stalin’s dead! They say the news comes from unofficial sources but that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet has made an announcement. So he’s dead!” he said without taking a breath, as if he were afraid that she would interrupt him and say it wasn’t true, that he was only fantasizing, and that Radio London was lying like everyone else, and the only question was where you lived and whose lies you became accustomed to living by.

Luka had become accustomed to living by the news of Radio London and not the news of Radio Zagreb, Belgrade, or Moscow (when it had still been a time for Radio Moscow). He had hated Stalin even before the resolution of the Informburo, a time when unflattering words about him could cost you your head.

But Luka didn’t watch what he said, nor did the city spies take what he was saying seriously. He rambled on, and Regina told him, “Don’t; be quiet; you’ll catch the devil’s ear and disappear into the night; we’ll all suffer because of you. .”

She told him to remember how Bepo, their older brother, had ended up in a nuthouse. She asked him if he knew what might happen if those who didn’t already know heard the news that their second oldest brother, Đovani, hadn’t gone to Australia never to be heard from again but had changed his name to Jovan and gone off with Draža Mihailović to Ravna Gora and — as rumor had it — killed and murdered? If anyone found out about that, then everyone would know why Luka was saying such things about Comrade Stalin, and he wouldn’t need a court or a prosecutor. After the Cominform Resolution, when it seemed that Luka had finally found his place, he went around the city telling every partisan and party member to his face that he’d known who and what Stalin was long ago, when others were praising him to the high heavens and putting him above Tito. And he’d repeated to everyone word for word the phrases they’d spoken in Stalin’s honor.

People didn’t like it at all. Either someone had reported that he was talking too much bullshit, or maybe he’d reminded someone in the security agency or the secret police when and where they’d praised Stalin, but one morning they came for Luka and led him away for questioning.

Different investigators came and went; in the nine hours of questioning seven or eight of them each came in and asked him only one thing: “Why, Comrade Sikirić, did you attack Stalin before the summer of 1948, and what were your reasons for doing so?”

To each of them he impudently answered that the reason behind everything he said was common sense and that he didn’t understand what reasons others had had before the Cominform Resolution. This went on until he gave this answer to a one-armed Slovene, whom he didn’t recognize though he’d seen him around the city and couldn’t have forgotten him or confused him with someone else. That Slovene, with his hair combed back and his thick, tangled mustache, looked like one of those members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks who had Georgian, Armenian, or Caucasian surnames, who would without doubt be condemned to death for treason and Hitlerian-Churchillian espionage but still declare their love for Stalin in front of a firing squad. After the war the city had become full of broods of all kinds of characters who bore a natural resemblance to minor characters in the novels of Maxim Gorky and Nikolay Ostrovsky or did everything in their power to become like them, just as normal people sometimes wish to look like James Stewart. But none of them looked like their idols quite as much as that one-armed man with the mustache did. His resemblance was so close, it seemed that he looked like his idol more than the latter looked like himself.

“So, Comrade Sikirić,” the Slovene began after Luka had recited to him his answer about his reason being common sense, “you knew that Stalin was a fool and a traitor while others had no idea. But, you see, I lost my arm for Comrade Stalin. It was an honor for me to liberate Belgrade with the heroes of the Red Army, and I was sure that he was watching me from somewhere. The great leader of the world proletariat! I didn’t let out a peep when my arm was torn off. I’d have been ashamed in front of Comrade Stalin! And during that time you were hiding under women’s skirts and speaking against him and thought we were all idiots. You’re still not ashamed. Sikirić, I don’t know you, but I do know that you’re a worm and that I should squash you under my boot and walk away. You think you’ve gotten out of this? Well, you haven’t! You think that your cause has won? Well, it hasn’t, and it never will! Someone has to flush turds like you down the toilet! No one gave you the right to insult Stalin!”

Luka’s smile went cold. He regretted that he hadn’t listened to the voice telling him to avoid this man and try to be invisible in his presence, as he’d done whenever he met him on the street.

“We loved him. All of us! Every honest citizen of Yugoslavia, every antifascist, every man in this city who wasn’t a local traitor, an Ustasha, a Chetnik, or a White Guardsman. Or a worm like you, Sikirić! How is it that you don’t know what you’re doing when you call out honest men, antifascists and partisans whose boots scum like you aren’t worthy of cleaning? You’re not worthy of cleaning our boots. And you dare to speak against Stalin! We shot anyone who would say a word against him. Every honest man pulled the trigger. And now we’ll shoot those who were against Stalin before his betrayal!”

“This guy is crazy,” thought Luka and started trying to figure out how to call someone in to save him because this idiot might really pull out a pistol and shoot him like a dog.

“If we bowed down before people like you, we’d be spitting on the war against fascism, on our dead comrades from Granada to Vladivostok, on the battles for Mt. Kozara and the River Neretva, on dead mothers and children; we’d be spitting on our youth. And, Sikirić, we’re not going to do that! We won’t for the sake of ourselves. Are we to become slaves and you a saint? You filth; do you think Hitler would have lost the war if it hadn’t been for Stalin and the glorious Red Army? Who’d have beaten the Germans? Maybe the Americans, or the English, the handful of them that dared to strike at the fascists? The only thing they did was drop atomic bombs and burn undefended cities. Boy, that was their war against Hitler, but the Red Army bled. And we bled under the same banner! And no one else. You see this arm?! I’ll take it and slit your throat after I shit in your mouth and make you lick my ass if I ever get word that you’ve told anyone you’re against Stalin or if I hear that you’ve let that name cross your lips again. Now get the hell out of here and make sure I never see you again as long as I live.”