Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

When Dijana was born, he stood over her cradle for two months, making faces and sticking out his tongue. The women tried to no avail to explain to him that the child couldn’t see him and wasn’t amused by his jokes. He didn’t believe those old wives’ tales, nor would he ever have believed in them even if he’d heard them from the smartest man in the world because it wasn’t possible that there was a single person, whether two days or two hundred years old, who wouldn’t laugh. After the two-month-old baby finally laughed, Luka wept tears of joy. He put Dijana on his lap and said, “My dear child, my little dove, my pretty flower.” He cried and everyone was astonished that she didn’t burst into tears. And she would howl as soon as others put her on their lap or said something to her instead of merely being quiet and breathing.

And so, instead of working, Luka stole time. True, many others in his generation did the same thing. If during the war someone hadn’t joined the Ustashas or the partisans but had hidden out, forging documents, cheating the state and the people, usually that person didn’t bust his ass trying to get a job after the war either. People probably figured that whoever was able to cheat the military and avoid making a sacrifice for the homeland would in the end cheat life too. The city folk scorned such young men and often even openly hated them. Not infrequently there were reports to the Ustasha police, and later to the partisan authorities, that some deserter was being hidden in a cellar or that someone’s papers certifying that he was unfit for military service should be checked. Deserters fared worse among the people than criminals or enemy sympathizers. Informants were the same in both regimes and fared better when power changed hands or the government changed than those who turned in Ustashas to the royal authorities or reported some hidden communist to the Ustashas. No one considered it a crime to turn someone in if he’d tried to save his ass from the jaws of historical imperatives: while young men were shedding their blood in Stalingrad and defending Croatia’s border on the Drina (or liberating Belgrade and holding the Srem Front and laying the foundations of a new Yugoslavia), and the elderly feared that they might starve or the British or Germans would bomb the city to cinders, shirking one’s military duty was an insult of the worst kind.

The only one who was allowed to do this was Luka. People needed someone to make them laugh. But it was still awful to hear Dijana as a tiny little girl say that when she grew up she wanted to be Uncle Luka.

At around eight he decided that he was going to celebrate Stalin’s death with anyone who was celebrating. Regina tried to hold him back, in vain. She told him that it was late and that he’d had too much to drink, but if he wanted more — here was another bottle, and he could do whatever the hell he wanted as long as he stayed right where he was. He wanted to be with people; the brandy had the effect of making him forget what their happiness was made of and what had made them happy in times past. He went out, and Regina barely managed to put Ivo’s coat over him, telling him that he shouldn’t because in his heart he had been warmed by the hot stove of the revolution. The next day he couldn’t remember what had happened after that. He woke up in a ditch along a road leading to villages up in the mountains, beat up, with broken bones and soiled with excrement. Whoever had beaten him had taken care to disfigure his face as much as possible. With a smashed nose that had bone and cartilage protruding from it, with his upper jaw bones broken and eyes he couldn’t open, Luka Sikirić was unrecognizable. They took him to the city hospital, where doctors patched up what could be patched and reset the bones that could be reset and said that all one could do was wait. If he survived to the next day, his chances of pulling through were good.

“Stalin came for his head!” a whisper went around the square. People shook their heads worriedly — like a field of dandelions in the wind — and everyone felt sorry. Those who didn’t shook their heads even more.

As he lay in the hospital, Luka was convinced that this had all been arranged by the Slovene investigator and that it was the secret police that had beaten him. Months later he would realize that it could have been the work of any of those whom he’d reminded of how they’d praised Stalin or those who knew that he had something to remind them of. It took him three weeks to get out of bed. He was unsure on his feet, and his face didn’t resemble the face he’d had before. The problem wasn’t so much the scars but how much his expression had changed. In place of a cheerful and youthful thirty-year-old who could pass as a high school senior to girls in Metković and Mostar, the mirror showed a middle-aged man with cloudy and expressionless eyes, a high forehead, and a flattened nose. The only living things left on that head were two rather floppy ears. But not even these could be funny to anyone any more.

But Luka had been frightened to death by something else. In the mirror he saw the face of his oldest brother, Bepo, who’d gone crazy after returning from the war and died in Sarajevo’s Jagomir sanatorium. Bepo had never resembled him. People said that Bepo, compared to his brothers and Regina, seemed not to have come from the same father and mother. Luka thought that maybe this was a sign that he would meet the same end if he remained there, in that rotten city and crazy country.

So he decided to flee Yugoslavia. He wouldn’t request a passport because he would never get one, and if he did, he would be suspect. Rather, he would flee like one fled across state borders, along with wolves and bears, robbers, criminals, industrialists, and prostitutes, degenerates who fled justice and the same degenerates who were convinced that they were following capital. It didn’t matter with whom they grouped him because as soon as you emigrated, you loaded your head with the sins of all those who’d done the same thing any time, anywhere.

For a month he collected his strength and money. The square was amazed at how serious Luka had become. And he was better off that way because you couldn’t live from revelry alone! One should think hard about life; wine doesn’t like being stirred up, but one should rack one’s brains, or so the retirees said as they strolled along Porporela beach. Through some harbor prostitutes Luka met an American sailor named Oliver Reed. He never forgot his name, and that sailor offered him a job that consisted of the following: he would take three packages that he had on his ship to Jablanica and give them to a man there. That man would give Luka money that he would give to Reed, and that was the whole job!

“What’s in the packages?” he asked the American.

“That’s not your problem,” he told him.

“Fine; if it’s not my problem, then no job,” Luka said in a conciliatory tone, thinking more about how to get his hand up Renata’s skirt — she was the youngest and most exclusive prostitute — while she squealed and moved away from him bit by bit.

“The pay is three thousand dollars,” Oliver said, knowing that Luka had never seen that much money in all his life. After the war three thousand dollars could buy everything that the state still hadn’t nationalized — houses, vineyards, fields — and you would still have some left over.

“I’m not in a position to agree to do that. And I don’t know what the situation would have to be for me to agree to your offer,” he said. And since he hadn’t succeeded in getting his hand between Renata’s legs, he grabbed her by the tit, whereupon she slapped him.

“Boy, that costs money; watch out!” the American said, laughing. “Look, I can offer you four thousand, but that’s my last offer.”