Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

In the summer of 1968 the old man turned eighty-five, and Luka Sikirić was told in a Paris cancer clinic that he had three months to live. He strolled down streets where children played war. They turned over cars, smashed display windows, pulled granite cobblestones from the street, and hurled them at the police, shouting their revolutionary slogans. The policemen shot tear gas at them and swung their batons, and many of them ended up in the hospital with bloody heads. They were forbidden from shooting at the children. The parents, against whom the revolution was started, forbade it. The stupid cops’ brains couldn’t comprehend this as the nurses tended to their wounds, and not even the most intelligent people would have comprehended this were it not for books, movies, and especially philosophical treatises that would turn 1968 into a significant historical event, more important than all the wars fought in French colonial Africa and maybe more important than the war in Vietnam, in which thousands and millions, mainly nameless slant-eyed primates, were being killed in the name of the same ideals against which the children of Europe had risen up. No answer would ever be given to the question of how a revolution, in which the counterrevolutionaries were not allowed to shoot, could be such an important historical event, but its meaning would finally be known in ten or fifteen years, when the children in the streets of Paris had grown up into replicas of their fathers.

As in an educational documentary film, in which sailors from Kronstadt moved past, the Aurora and Winter Palace were stormed, Rosa and Karl gave fiery oratories and fled in the face of enraged veterans of 1914, Mao called on his fighters to go on the Long March, the Khmer Rouge turned temples into schools in which the pupils taught the teachers, Stalin said “No” to Tito and Tito said “No” to Stalin, and it wasn’t Maxim Gorky but an ugly little man with spectacles who was leading the children. The difference between him and Gorky was actually the difference between a game and a real revolution. Gorky’s revolution had been bloody and powerful, and it was no wonder that people had fallen in love with Maxim’s mustache and his gray, dull novellas, but the game was ugly and miserable because not even the children, no matter how carried away and furious they were, had counted on their little street party to change the world. They had only wanted to live out a few romantic moments that had been denied to them because they’d been born too late. And in the West, which had never had the Red October Revolution! That was a time of longing for the East, both European and Asian, for a history that was so attractive when it happened to others, and even more attractive if it was turned into a performance and games in the street.

As Luka watched them rush at De Gaulle’s cops and challenge the operatic power of a wise old general, he knew that they would come home sweaty and dazed from tear gas and that when they grew up, they would remember with fondness the day when the streets of Paris looked like an advanced Leninist kindergarten. That was probably the most important difference between a revolution and a party with a revolutionary theme. Whereas no one at all remembers a revolution with warmth in their hearts, not even those who never renounced it, not even that Slovene who lost his arm in a Red Army assault, revolutionary parties are remembered as the most beautiful moments in human history.

In the end, war memorials aren’t worth anything, whereas memorials of 1968 and invitations to the red party can later be shown to one’s grandchildren, who then think how their grandfathers have turned into such conservative monsters in the meantime.

On the train to Trieste he tried to make peace with the thought of the coming end. Instead of despair and mortal fear, which someone else in his position might have felt, Luka was tormented only by disbelief. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself that he was dying, something inside him said that it wasn’t possible. Death is a cinematic illusion in which people either believe or don’t believe, except you don’t have to go to the movies if you don’t believe that those moving pictures are life and you’ll die one way or another. Luka wanted some awareness of it because he wasn’t a squid or a moth! But it simply didn’t come. The idea of nonexistence ran contrary to common sense. The scenes that passed along the railway track, the smells of the people who got on and off at the stations, their voices and exclamations, the way they looked at him without sorrow or fear, unconcerned with whether they would ever see him again — all this couldn’t disappear just like that, in three months, ninety days, two thousand hours. If he was there and so present and himself a part of that presence, no less alive than the handle on the door of the compartment, the flies on the dirty blue curtain, the Italian conductor who asked him how he managed to get out of Paris alive, the old leather conductor’s pouch that the man had worn during the reign of Mussolini — he or his colleague who was long retired, in retirement, or in the Trieste cemetery among merchants and sea captains.

Luka didn’t want to be buried there, just one more foreigner whose unknown fate would be the subject of pity for pairs of imaginative young lovers. He would be buried in his city, in a cemetery full of familiar faces, where someone might be your relative or enemy, and where nothing is indifferent to anything else. It was nice and soothing to live on the other side of the world, or at least a thousand miles away from his hometown, but being buried in a foreign land was a misfortune. Every man should be buried where he was born or where he learned to speak and whence he decided to leave. As soon as he felt that the end was near, he would make arrangements to be taken back across the border, even if he had to pay the customs officials and the police, and to be driven to his sister’s place so that he could await what he couldn’t believe in and with which it was actually easy to reconcile himself.

Instead of three months, which was what they promised him, he lived for more than a year. Without great suffering or pain, growing thinner from day to day and frightening others more than himself, Luka kept on going, along with his daily rituals. And he continued going to the old man in Kras once a week, taking out the money, looking at the watch, and carrying off two baskets of cheese. Up until the day when he could no longer lift them.

“Franc, I think the time has come for you to give me back my watch,” he said. The old man burst into sobs, begged him not to go, to stay a little longer, told him that it was bad weather and the sirocco was blowing. And as soon as the sirocco starts blowing, people lose their strength and it doesn’t matter how old they are or what they are sick with. Luka tried to console him, tried to get him to laugh, but it didn’t help — what had held together for eighty-five years fell apart before his very eyes in a matter of minutes. There was no longer the coarseness of which the peasant had been so proud because it kept him from hunger, people, and wars as he had moved his goats between two front lines, not yielding even in 1916, when the children of two feuding kings died in the battles of the River Soča and Mt. Meletta, and when he had to keep his animals from grazing on bloody grass and getting used to the taste of human flesh, because if they had, they would then only have eaten such grass, and he wouldn’t have been able to keep them from a wicked habit, one that turned monkeys into humans — a taste for blood that would make a beast of any living creature. He realized then that the only creatures that didn’t feed on flesh and blood were those that chance had kept from ever picking up the scent. But if the wars continued and if a few other peoples bled to death in little mountain streams, then there would no longer be any creatures that grazed on leaves and grass; sheep would slaughter and be slaughtered, and no one would make cheese from their milk. A man has to be hard and tough if he’s not to lose his mind amid dead regiments and divisions and devour himself along with his goats that feed on the corpses of those who believed in their kings.