Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

He didn’t leave Kras, not even during the most heated battles in the First World War. He didn’t think of leaving thirty years later, when it wasn’t clear where the border between Italy and Tito’s state would run and people tried to frighten him with the idea that the communists would take away his goats. What would the communists do with his goats? Attack Berlin and Budapest, hunt down the bourgeoisie, and demolish churches? Goats were no use for such things, nor were goatherds. So it didn’t matter where the border ran and what colors would be on his flag. Neither the one king nor the other was to be believed, and their jobs mattered to men only in time of war, and he had to keep an eye on his goats so they wouldn’t eat leaves soiled with human brains or bloodstained grass.

Such was the old man’s belief, and since it differed from what others believed in, he kept people at arm’s length. Up until that funny Dalmatian came along, took his cheese, left his watch as security, and created a bond between them forever. He sold cheese in a way that no one had ever used to sell anything and made up things that weren’t in cheese, or maybe they were, but no one had known about them before. Cheese probably isn’t just cheese, the old man thought, and was happy that there was something outside the world of goats that one should fight for. If it hadn’t been for Luka Sikirić, he would never have arrived at that himself. The fact that he now wanted to take his watch and disappear forever hit the old man harder than if some great, unreal thunderbolt struck and killed all of his one thousand two hundred goats in an instant. The idea of his own death seemed much easier for him to take. You can’t be such a softy that you wail about the fact that you’ll be gone.

In the end Luka had to leave his watch with the old man and promise that he would come to see him again. This lie wasn’t hard for him to tell. The old man had bewildered and frightened him because there was no way Luka could get him to laugh, fool what was left of the child in him, and lead him across the river to see that the other side was also just a riverbank and that one shouldn’t get upset when it’s time to go. As they parted, the old man came out of his house, which he hadn’t ever done before because he would start going about his work as soon as he locked the box. He waved from the stone doorstep until Luka’s car disappeared around the corner.

The same day Luka planned out his last journey. He telephoned the Yugoslav ambassador in Rome to inquire about his status. Two hours later the ambassador informed him that he wasn’t wanted, nor were there any special reasons why he should be afraid to return home. He even offered him a Yugoslav passport to assure him that he was not the subject of any proceedings in the country.

“A lot has changed in the last fifteen years,” the ambassador said. Luka didn’t answer him, but he would have liked to tell him that things change in fifteen days, let alone fifteen years, and there was no country and embassy at any time that hadn’t always said that things were now better, that there was more freedom and the laws more reasonable than fifteen years before. The problem was only that freedom never seemed to increase or the laws to weaken enough for a man not to have to inquire if he was still guilty of something before those from whom he’d fled.

Besides, Luka didn’t completely believe the ambassador. He decided to pay off the customs officials just in case, send some gift packages of cheese to Marshal Tito in Belgrade and a wheel of parmesan the size of a tractor tire both to the municipality of Dubrovnik and the city commission. If they all accepted their cheese, that would be a sign that they were really not unhappy with him, he thought naïvely, and waited for days for the arrival of the signed delivery slips showing that the gifts had been received. And they arrived two days after he could no longer get out of bed. He traveled in an ambulance, entertaining nurse Patricia, carefree, happy, and truly convinced that he’d bought his freedom with the cheese. The customs officers wouldn’t accept any money, nor did they understand why he was offering any, but they held him up for hours at the border and tried to check which service these travelers had gotten into trouble with and were now trying to buy their way past the customs officials. But the driver, Patricia, and the Italian citizen Luka Sikirić were all as innocent as newborn babies. Up until the collapse of the Yugoslav government, at the Opićina border crossing generations of customs officials passed on the story of some ill man who had offered a large sum of money to enter Yugoslavia although his papers were valid and he wasn’t wanted by any police force in this world. Maybe even today some grandpa tells his grandchildren softly, so no one will hear him, about what a country that was, that people even offered to pay gold for things that it offered for free and that they were entitled to according to the law.

Luka died in his sleep, tired and happy because he’d spent a day with those dear to him. Patricia didn’t have to close his eyelids. She lowered his hand back down on the pillow and pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket that he’d given to her when they were starting out on their trip.

“If I die in the middle of the night, go ahead and go to my sister and wake her up. She’s a light sleeper, and she’ll be awake as soon as you enter her room. If that doesn’t happen, that’ll mean she’s died before me, and our plan has come to nothing. Well, since that’s not likely, then you’ll bow down to her and sing O tu che in seno agli angeli. That was her favorite song, and she’ll be touched that I remembered. But don’t be too serious. You can wave your arms about, dance a little, so it’s cheery. And it can’t go on for too long, or she’ll get angry and chase you out. When it’s over, lean down again and say, ‘Luka’s dead.’ Tell her just like that, not in Italian because she might act like she doesn’t understand you. C’mon, repeat after me: ‘Luka’s dead, Luka’s dead!’ Good, but I’ll write it down so you don’t forget how to say it.”

Before she went into Regina’s room, she took a look at the piece of paper, drew a breath, and started singing, loudly, as Luka had said. She didn’t exactly sound like Mario Lanza, but no one besides him has ever sung O tu che in seno agli angeli properly, along with the crackling of a worn-out record album and at a tempo slightly accelerated at seventy eight revolutions per minute, in the spirit of the last era in which artists weren’t people but puppets on the strings of the universe, and there wasn’t the slightest difference among Mario Lanza, Enrico Caruso, Rudolf Valentino, and Charlie Chaplin. Luka Sikirić was Chaplin in the lives of those he had entertained and thus proved that when the angels of silent film and wind-up gramophones disappeared, they left the world without something that was more important than technological progress and the need for pictures to be more accurate than reality.

But in 1969 it was already too late to mourn for angels. Nurse Patricia sang their song as best she could, along with choreography that she’d seen in one of Fred Astaire’s movies, which might not have been what Mario Lanza was trying to achieve, but it would have brought joy to anyone who treasures all the past and isn’t concerned with the disparities among decades. Fred and Mario were equally removed from the twenty-three-year-old Patricia; she knew nothing about them except that they belonged to the world of her aunts and uncles, in which it was customary to stress one’s every inclination with tears. They cried during television comedies; they cried as soon as they heard a song they liked on the radio; it was enough to say the name Verdi for the men and women in the family to take their handkerchiefs out of their pockets; they even cried if someone mentioned the name of a shoe polish that people had used thirty years before.