Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Luka realized then that this wasn’t a country in which he wanted to grow old and that the people whom he passed on the street weren’t worth being afraid of. They asked Luka whether his belly ached, why he was frowning when he’d never done so before — had someone he knew died? And he only thought how nice it would be if they never saw his face again. The Slovene, in fact, was right. Everyone loved Stalin, and even today when they no longer loved him, they couldn’t forgive Luka for badmouthing Stalin. Their God had fallen from the heavens like a meteor. He no longer existed, and no one prayed to him any more. But the crime of godlessness didn’t thereby become less grave. If they weren’t telling him this, they certainly thought it. What else would they think?

There are few reasons in the world why good, intelligent people would agree to publicly humiliate themselves, but the fact that someone else had been against Stalin and he turned out to be right certainly wasn’t one of those reasons. His jokes at Stalin’s expense could be forgiven, but reminders of those jokes couldn’t be. If the whole world admires a murderer, it takes great courage to stand in the middle of a city square and tell people they are wrong, but when the people’s admiration passes, it’s crazy to remind them that they had worshipped a murderer. They would kill you with all the passion of self-denial that is always greater than real love or hate because it was actually the sum of the equation. Yesterday’s love for a dictator and today’s hatred combine to produce the most powerful human passion, which no physical or spiritual power can resist. There was no moral institute or institution, no church or party, that could stand in the way of idiots who wanted to remind someone that they’d been against Stalin even before. That was because everyone, good and bad, had been on the side of Stalin. Idiots who didn’t realize this were fated to have the sky come crashing down around them.

However, it was true that if the Red Army hadn’t sent its soldiers to their deaths, Hitler would have won the war. America and England were only a nice decoration, a fine humanistic decoration on millions of Stalin’s dead soldiers.

When Radio London broadcast the news of Stalin’s death, Luka left the card game and his card buddies; he didn’t put on his coat because it seemed unnecessary to him on this occasion — what could a bora and a storm do to him when Stalin was no more! He went to his sister because she was the only one to whom he could express his joy freely, without his stomach constricting or feeling nauseous if she were happy too. In any case, she didn’t care. Her life took its course with or without Stalin.

“He’s dead and gone,” she said. “And you’re going to catch pneumonia!”

Luka was looking for the bottle of brandy that was in the cupboard, behind the pots and plates. Regina would always hide it in a different place so that it wouldn’t be drunk up so fast and because it irritated her that any time a man came into her house, all he did was look for the brandy.

“C’mon, dammit, give me the bottle; Stalin’s dead!” he said after he couldn’t even find it under the sink. He needed brandy to convince himself that Joseph Vissarionovich was no more.

Around five in the afternoon the bora stopped blowing all of a sudden; everyone came out of their houses and inspected the broken limbs of mulberry and fig trees, pushed at tiles that had fallen from their roofs with the tips of their shoes. They did it carefully, as if they were bombs that might go off.

Though most of the city was left without power and there were only a few who could hear the news of Radio London, everyone knew that Stalin was dead. But no one talked about it. If someone wanted to check to see whether his neighbor knew about it, he would simply flash his eyes and make a face. The answer was the same. That initial expression was passed from face to face until everyone in the city had given and answered the question about Stalin’s death with their eyes and nose. No Parisian master pantomimist could have taught so many different people to do the same thing at the same time. It happened after the great bora on the fifth of March, 1953, continued for an afternoon, and that expression was then lost, vanished forever or until the death of some new Stalin. Not until Radio Zagreb and Radio Belgrade broadcast the news, stressing who and what Stalin had been for the peoples of socialist Yugoslavia, did the people dare to start talking about it. And after everything that had happened, who could know in advance what attitude to take toward Stalin’s death? It was better to hear what Tito and the party had to say first and only then say that Stalin should go fuck himself.

As soon as the bora quieted down, the teacher let her pupils go home. They’d stayed three or four hours after school, but that was better than having furious parents coming the next day. Dijana pulled the hat down over her head and ran home, convinced that her mother wouldn’t believe her when she told her that the teacher had kept them after school. She also wanted to hurry home because children started picking on her as soon as she left school. Someone would take the hat off her head and they would throw it to each other in the schoolyard; she ran from one to the other, but the hat was already with someone else. The whole school was in on the game, and there was no help until one of the instructors or teachers showed up and the kids scattered and Dijana finally managed to grab her hat. She didn’t have another one, and she knew that her mother wouldn’t care if they stole her hat. She’d say, “Steal theirs!”

She ran around the schoolyard for hours like a chicken with its head cut off, horrified by the mere thought of having to go without a hat before her hair grew back. Of course, her persistence only provoked the children, and a game called “Baldy Delavale” gained unusual popularity in the school. It even became more popular than their favorite pastime of catching a cat, hurling it into the sea, and throwing rocks at it when it tried to get out of the water.

She came home, and Uncle Luka was dead drunk. He was singing a Russian song and tugging on Regina to try to get her to sing along. She was cooking and hitting him with a wooden spoon on the ends of his fingers. Uncle Luka would cry out and say that no sacrifice for the revolution was too great. He kept singing, then tugged at the hem of her skirt and got it on the ends of his fingers, cried out, and enjoyed it. Regina was tittering and tried to yell in a strict tone for him to settle down, but she was enjoying these antics. She didn’t ask Dijana anything and said only, “In a few minutes lunch will be ready, lunch or dinner, who knows on a crazy day like this.” And then she would swat Luka’s fingers again.

Dijana loved him as others did, but her uncle was to her what her father and mother couldn’t be. Whenever they asked her what she was going to be when she grew up, she said—“Uncle Luka!” And then everyone would look at one another in awkward silence because Luka had just one flaw. No one had rubbed it in his face, though everyone always had it on their mind, and that was that he’d never done anything with his life; he had no job or profession. He had graduated from the prep school with excellent grades; people said that he was really talented in math and that he should go to the university, but then the war came and nothing came of studying at the university. And if there hadn’t been a war, it was unlikely that he would have ever gotten a degree because there were so many interesting things in life besides being a serious and respected man. Since he’d graduated from the prep school, he could get a job of course, but why should he spend days on end in a legal firm, a municipal office, or some other, worse place and throw his life away like that? He could play cards and chess, talk with children and the elderly, and cheer up people whose lives were dragging them down and might never laugh if it weren’t for him. For him there was nothing greater or more beautiful than seeing people laugh at what he said.