Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Luka didn’t believe that he would ever come down with that illness. His reasons for leaving were almost inconsequential in comparison to those of Moritz Ferrara. He was simply different from those among whom he’d lived, and he couldn’t change, or he arrogantly thought that he might be bypassed by the stupidity that had made blood flow in rivers and on account of which everyone felt guilty afterward.

Thus, something existed that was more important for him than his homeland, so it was logical that he never fell ill because of it. Maybe he wouldn’t have even fallen ill or the illness would have been delayed longer if he hadn’t been so spendthrift or if he’d had more American dollars. But on the day when he first thought that he should save his money for later instead of feeding a bunch of washouts in the first tavern he entered, Luka was close to the realization that Milan wasn’t a place where he wanted to spend the rest of his life. And when he held the first lira that he’d earned in his hand, after he’d had a role as an extra in a film about a pauper who ran after the rays of the sun and flew off into the sky in the end, he could already understand the endless sorrow of Moritz Ferrara and the railway-station history of the Jewish simpletons from Chełmno and the reasons why the Russian aristocrats spent all their ducats and diamonds instead of investing them in something and living the same life they’d lived in Moscow and Petrograd. As soon as you can’t go back to where you came from, you begin the life in railway lobbies; everything is temporary and you have no reason to plan anything or start anything anew because you’re waiting for your train, and nothing can be important besides waiting and chatting with others who are waiting. That train will never come, as everyone who has ever waited for it knows, but you don’t think about that until you spend your last ducat, diamond, and dollar.

After his first year in Milan, when he was already living the life of a European railway bum and singing the sad love songs of his homeland, Luka decided to move to Trieste. They tried to dissuade him and warned him that that city was half in Yugoslavia and was teeming with Tito’s agents. Abductions and murders were common, and the Italians and Americans were fairly indifferent to them. It might happen that he would fall asleep in Trieste and wake up in the Zenica prison. And it wasn’t likely that he would find work in Trieste. The locals there lived badly. And there were many Istrians who had the right to live there and didn’t look kindly on Yugoslav emigrants if they were Slavs. .

But nothing could dissuade him. Or he was a little attracted by what they were trying to frighten him with. Trieste was closer. It didn’t matter what it was closer to, but it was closer and by virtue of this fact it was more his. He went there with an unmuddled feeling that life could and had to be happiness, cheer, and idleness and that only obscurantists, those who were hard on themselves and those around them, seriously planned every step they took and were deathly afraid of not having anything to live on. It was only natural that they ended up destitute and died of hunger. If someone never thought of poverty, it was most likely that they wouldn’t become poor — Luka Sikirić was convinced of this, and in his case it turned out to be true.

On his very first day in Trieste he met both the State Security Service agents and those who were hiding from them. The Yugoslav spies, secret agents, and cutthroats drank in one bar, seemingly incognito, and in another, a few hundred meters away, there were gatherings, just as incognito, of deserters, losers, tax officials, distrainers of defunct states, and the commanders of Quisling armies, but most of all there were those who simply bet on the wrong side. This they’d done too publicly, so after losing in the betting office of history, they took to their heels. Those in the first bar spoke about those in the second as if they were a gang that needed to be taken out, while those in the second bar spoke about those in the first as if they were a gang that would be taken out by the English, Americans, and the free world as soon as they pulled themselves together and realized that Tito had screwed them over in 1945. The phrase “the free world” was used by those who were not free, more as the name and surname of a fairy tale hero than as a political label or a literary metaphor. When they said “the free world,” it seemed as if those people saw clearly the shape of the nose, the eye color, and the high brow of its imaginary prince.

None of them, neither the pursuers nor the pursued, were in any particular hurry. The bosses of the spies and agents had evidently given them no deadlines for finishing all their work, and they would rather drag out these jobs than get new ones, while their victims continued to believe that it was a matter of days until the Allies would take out Tito and the communists and they would return home. True, something always happened to delay American action in Yugoslavia. At first the tensions with the Russians were too great because Harry Truman wasn’t as smart as his predecessor. Then there was the unfortunate war in Korea that prevented them from moving on Yugoslavia. And Stalin’s death didn’t come at the best time either. .

Luka started dropping in at both bars right away. He told everyone who he was and where he’d come from and why he’d fled Yugoslavia. And everyone, of course, was sure that he was lying. A quiet suspicion arose among the agents that he was actually a high-ranking officer and that he’d been sent from Belgrade to check up on them, whereas the fugitives were sure that Luka was a secret policeman and that he’d been sent from the other bar to infiltrate them and acquire as much reliable information as possible. However, both sides were mystified about why he didn’t ever ask any questions or start political discussions but told jokes, fooled around, pulled people’s legs, and hid corkscrews from waiters.

“He’s a fucking dope!” said Raško Pribojac a.k.a. šajkača, the main figure in the agents’ bar.

“He’s not stupid, but he’s not all there either,” remarked Husref-beg Urumlić, the clearest thinker among the fugitives, who had been a communist before the war and an Ustasha official in Janja during the war.

“Should we give him a scare?” asked Lojze Bohinjc, the youngest and most ambitious among the spies.

“I’d like to knock some sense into him — beat on his kidneys, toss him into a canal, and then see how he recovers!” said Rudolf Zovko, the only Ustasha officer in the fugitives’ bar.

“Let the idiot be,” said šajkača dismissively.

“God protects idiots,” said Husref-beg.

But Luka Sikirić realized soon enough that no one in the two bars laughed or had any fun and that it was impossible to get those people to warm up or at least get them to say something about something that didn’t have anything to do with the war and politics. He saw that the time he spent among them only depressed him and that he shared nothing with them apart from the language they spoke. Everything else was all too familiar to him but odd and hateful as only your own world can be hateful and odd. And so he quit going to the agents’ and the fugitives’ bars, without anyone even noticing that he wasn’t there.

He found a job selling cheese in the city market. He worked for an old peasant, a Slovene by origin, who had a goat farm in the Italian Karst and was on the verge of financial ruin because middlemen were swindling him, taking cheese, and never showing their faces again. And he was a strange character himself, one of those highlanders who become distrustful and paranoid after years of living alone and are suspicious if they see someone on the neighboring hill, let alone the market middlemen.