Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

At seven in the morning Luka came by drunk to say good-bye to Regina and Dijana. The little girl had just gotten out of bed and was getting ready for school, and his sister was sitting beside the stove and shelling beans.

“I’m going, and we might never see each other again,” he said.

“Don’t talk shit while you’re drunk!” Regina responded calmly.

He lifted Dijana up into the air. “Dijana, sweetheart. .,” he said but didn’t know what else to say. “Don’t give up, sweetie!” he said, left a thousand dollars on the table, and left.

He didn’t say “farewell” or “good-bye,” and Regina sighed: that damned brandy would kill him. Only when she was done with the beans and got up did she see the money. She nearly fainted; she knew well how much a thousand dollars was worth. Dear departed Ivo wouldn’t have earned that much in six months of voyaging. She was seized with panic. She ran outside to look for her brother, but she was smart enough not to tell anyone about the American money because if she had, Luka would have been arrested before he reached Gorica. “He’s gone off to hang himself, woe to me, mama!” she cried, running around the yard, and raised the neighbors to search for him. They looked into each attic, searched for him in hidden inlets and parks, and when he didn’t turn up for two days, they reported his disappearance to the police.

A month later a postcard arrived from Milan that read: “I’m well and healthy. I don’t talk shit while I’m drunk. And I won’t give up. Yours, Stijepo Bobek!”

He was afraid that they would be accused of some misdeeds if he signed his name, and so he put the name of a popular soccer player, one of the members of the team that had beaten the Russians at the Olympics in Finland. He knew that both of them would know who had written them and would be glad to read what he’d written. In a few months he’d spent the money he still had on Milanese hotels and socializing with the strange people whom misfortune had brought there from all corners of the earth. There were Russian dukes and professors of mathematics, who in 1918 had come in coats into which hundreds of ducats had been sewn, with pockets full of diamonds, and with a sorrow that spent all their wealth in a minute, so that they were reduced to begging and rummaging through garbage bins in the area. There were renegade members of the Comintern, who in ’30-something had managed to save their skins from Stalin and had already been hiding there for twenty years either from Mussolini, the Italian partisans and communists, or from themselves because apart from the revolution they had no other work. In Milan there were gentlemen from Zagreb and Belgrade who’d fled in 1941 from the Germans, Nedić’s men, the Ustashas, or the mobilizations, or in 1945 from the communists and their lust for revenge. There were Jews of every kind: German Jews, Polish Jews, Zagreb Jews, Hungarian Jews, Romanian Jews, and those happy-go-lucky ones — the Bosnian Jews, who were constantly pulling someone’s leg, telling vulgar jokes and anecdotes. But when they gathered among themselves in a corner of the railway station or in the barracks for collective accommodation, they spoke sadly in a strange language that was and wasn’t Spanish and would then break into a melancholy Bosnian song that was nice to listen to but made you lose your will to live. There was also a Chetnik rabble in Milan that moved among two or three taverns owned by Italians with surnames ending in — ić, where they blathered on about international politics and the intentions of King Peter—“a thug and not a king, the fucking bastard!” They fell into bouts of depression because they realized that Peter didn’t have anything in mind and would drink themselves blind drunk and shout so loudly that the sky over Italy would shake, and the police would draw a wide berth around them. But Luka would sit with them too, treat them to drinks, and try to explain to them in a roundabout way that they were all brothers because they spoke the same language, to which they would nod in agreement. But after that he would tell them that the Bosnian Muslims were their brothers and even the communists too.

“You’re a good person but also a complete idiot,” they would say and look at him with pity in their eyes, convinced that one day he would pay with his head for telling people things they didn’t want to hear. What he said sounded good in church or on one’s deathbed but couldn’t be true in real life. If such truths existed, the whole world would have burned in hell after the last war.

There were also poor Ustashas in Milan. They hurried along the facades as if they’d sold their own shadows and were ashamed that people might notice. They had the eyes of wild deer, and all of them introduced themselves as engineers, old Zagreb nobility, or Travnik beys. But they weren’t any of those. They needed something to hold on to and for which the world would take pity on them. But they realized bitterly that no one would take pity on them of all people because there were no sins that were greater and more despicable than theirs. No matter how much he’d seen who the Ustashas were and what they’d done in and around Dubrovnik during the war, Luka couldn’t believe that these men were the same people. “The eyes of a swine or a man who hunted Serbs and Jews to slake his thirst for blood, those eyes never turn into the eyes of a doe,” he thought and offered them help. But they fled, convinced that he was a provocateur, an agent of the secret police, that he would blow out their brains on the spot or cram them into trucks and take them to Yugoslavia, where he would sic Serbian and Jewish dogs on them. In Milan there were two or three Catholic priests, Croats who’d been sent from Rome, who gathered up those big-eyed ne’er-do-wells, hid them in monasteries, and provided them with papers for countries across the ocean. Luka even tried to make contact with them. They would smile at him condescendingly and in their nasal bishops’ tones bless the moment that Luka would move on and leave them in peace.

There were people of all kinds in Milan in 1953. If anyone had filmed it, it would have been one of the sadder films. So many people who had nothing except what they carried in their hearts and heads and had no place to call their own.

It wasn’t until Luka spent his last dollar that he felt that he belonged to the world of those people, and he began to be wearied by the thought that he was far away from the place he called home. He listened to nostalgic stories of cities and homelands — Chełmno, Kraków, Vukovar, Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Chernopol´ye, Bitola, Zagreb, Belgrade, Split, Sarajevo, Skoplje, Koprivnica, Subotica, Travnik, Vienna, Banja Luka, Odessa, Mostar, Talinn, Bucharest, and Dubrovnik. He listened to one man’s lament for his city and was surprised to find that he didn’t feel sorrow. That man, whose name was Moritz Ferrara, had fled Dubrovnik in 1943 to save his skin from his neighbors, to whom state law gave the opportunity to consider everything that had been his to be theirs, including his life. Ten years later Moritz was ready to forgive them for everything if only they would let him come back and act as if nothing had happened. But he knew it wasn’t possible because he wasn’t the one who was given the right to forgive; rather his neighbors were supposed to forgive him because he’d put them in the difficult situation of having to persecute him, only for world history to be shaken up later. New laws were passed that declared the old ones to be criminal, and those who’d carried them out — that is to say, Moritz’s neighbors — to be criminals. As if those people had ever made any kind of laws or opposed them. If it hadn’t been for him, they wouldn’t have been living in fear then, and even if they forgave him for everything else, they couldn’t forgive him for that fear. Moritz Ferrara would die from an illness that had no name but could be most accurately described as a tumor of the soul. His homeland would grow inside of him, until it sucked in all his vital fluids, softened his bones, and killed him in the end, either in Milan or in some other city.