Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Luka looked at him in disbelief: “Four thousand dollars! I’m in even less of a position to put my head on the block for four thousand. Tell me what’s in the boxes, and we can make a deal. But, you know, if it’s weapons or propaganda materials, count me out.”

No matter how indifferent he was toward Tito and the party, Luka had no intention of passing flyers and guns to some Chetniks or Ustashas just because the Americans thought they’d fucked up by helping out the partisans. Moreover, he didn’t even believe that they’d fucked up. Or at least they hadn’t fucked us up because if someone else had come along instead of the communists in 1945, it wouldn’t be people that were missing but whole nationalities, and who knows when the war would have ended.

“It’s not guns or propaganda,” the American said; “it’s medicine, penicillin, so children won’t die from the most common colds, which the communists will use for their own propaganda purposes.” Oliver turned serious before he mentioned the communists.

“And that’s why you decided to smuggle penicillin. I have to tell you that you’re a lunatic. But fine, okay, I agree! I’ll take that to Jablanica and take your four thousand dollars.” But Luka’s extended hand hung in the air.

“Three thousand, because I told you what you’re carrying,” said the American.

“Forget it!” said Luka and got up, offended and resolved not even to agree to four thousand now. Reed dragged him around the square for a while, refusing to let him go, telling him that in San Pedro he had a wife and sick child and had to do what he was doing.

“Then take your penicillin and give it to him !”

Reed asked him if he didn’t feel sorry for the people he could save and whether he’d thought about what he could do in life with four thousand dollars. He said he’d told him three thousand because he thought that people in Yugoslavia loved to haggle, and now he was apologizing and begging him on his knees to accept the job.

While Luka was on his way to Trebinje and farther on to Mostar and Jablanica, driving a van borrowed from the Dupin swimming club, a riddled piece of Italian junk captured in the war, two things weren’t clear to him and he tried feverishly to figure them out. First, why had the sailor picked him of all people for this job? Second, what made him think that he was going to bring him the money when he could drive off in any direction with all the money in his pocket and let the American eat his dust?

There were no checkpoints along the way to stop him. The roads were empty. All around were burned villages and a bridge that Tito had blown up to save the wounded rested peacefully in the green waters of the Neretva. Close-cropped Bosnian children tumbled around in the dust; small, stubby horses pulled beams out of a ditch while a peasant in an army blouse lashed them savagely with a whip; a butcher led two lambs to slaughter.

Women dressed in shalwars and wearing kerchiefs around their heads stood with folded arms, watching the van pass in the belief that it was a sign that something was being done so that things would be better for them all and that if not people, then dear Allah would provide food and drink for this grateful and beautiful little country. The van connected two distant places that they had never been to, but they believed that in those places everything important was being decided and thus that people who covered such distances were important too. In those months, angels of all three faiths raced every sunny day from one horizon to the other.

In Jablanica at the prearranged location — in the Edhem Pivac café—he was awaited by a very fat young man who wore a good-natured expression on his face and had extraordinarily pretty eyes, the kind that seem like puppy’s eyes and you believe them even when they lie to you. He said his name was Orhan Velić, but Luka didn’t put any stock in that, just to be on the safe side. They exchanged the goods behind the café. Orhan checked the contents of the boxes, and Luka counted up the ten thousand dollars.

“Why are you doing this?” Luka couldn’t help asking as they parted.

Orhan laughed and said, “If I told you it’s because I’m a good person, would you believe me?” He turned around and waddled away along a row of poplars, on which black and green death notices were pinned, one next to another.

Luka stood glued to the spot, watching him until he disappeared between two poplars. He remembered the man with the dog’s eyes later, on the day of his great death-bed joy. “If he’d been a dog, he’d certainly have succeeded in life. As he was a man, they certainly beat him like a dog,” he said as Regina, Dijana, and the nurse Patricia, who didn’t even know Croatian, split their sides laughing. Then, in the spring of 1969, Luka Sikirić, settling his accounts, thought that he had only once been at a loss in life. People laughed even when he said something serious or sad. But he wasn’t sorry, and he laughed along with them, over the unknown grave of the pretty-eyed Orhan Velić.

As Luka gave him his six thousand dollars, the American jumped for joy and started hugging and kissing him. Luka couldn’t understand any of this. And it’s better that he didn’t because in Jablanica he’d given Velić phony penicillin that the Sarajevo underground bought up, after Reed’s deal with Albanians had fallen through at the last moment and after which he could choose either to throw the boxes into the sea or attempt something that had little chance of success. First, to find someone who would deliver the phony penicillin to Orhan Velić, which from his position on a moored American ship seemed impossible, and then to make sure that Orhan gave the money to the courier instead of killing him because if he’d killed him, no one would have come after him for it, and he’d have had ten thousand dollars that he could have then passed on to his own people. And finally, the guy that Velić gave the money to had to be honest enough to bring it back to him. When he’d offered Luka three and then four thousand dollars as a fee, he was already sure that his deal was ruined. He tried it with him in the crazy belief of pioneers in the Wild West who didn’t quit as long as there was even a glimmer of hope for success. It was true that Oliver Reed wasn’t risking anything, apart from the life of an unknown man whom fate had determined would pay someone else’s bill.

And so the next winter people who’d been treated with phony penicillin died throughout Bosnia, hoping until the end that they would get better because they were taking American medicine. Maybe they would have lived if it hadn’t been for Luka Sikirić, just as Luka might not have survived if Orhan Velić hadn’t thought he was a nice guy. Luka didn’t look like a smuggler or a criminal at all to him — it was obvious he liked the way Luka looked.

On the night before his escape to Italy, Luka Sikirić assembled all the harbor prostitutes in the abandoned shipyard. There was eating and drinking until dawn; whether anything else went on is hard to say, but it’s unlikely that it did. Luka was the only man among the thirty of them and wasn’t in good repute with women. Once a year he would lie on one to see whether anything had changed, or he would slip his hand under the skirt of one of them in front of other men to show how good he was with the prostitutes. And that was all. When they parted, he gave each of them enough money so they wouldn’t have to do anything for a month except live like queens, and then he left. Maybe everyone else would have thought that Luka Sikirić was crazy, but the prostitutes, to the very last one, were sure that he was an angel. Sixteen years later every one of them who was still alive came to his funeral. Younger ones came too because of those good old days that they had never experienced. It was comforting to know that there were such days once and that people and angels existed that gave prostitutes money, smoked and drank with them, without asking for anything in return.