Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

The midget gave up only when they arrived at the gate of the insane asylum, an old Austro-Hungarian building shaded by oak trees that had been planted long ago in the belief that the eyes of the insane would rest and calm down under their thick, green crowns, which in the meantime had turned into a jungle just as wild and unkempt as their souls.

“I’m not going in there. The people in there are crazy. You’re crazy too!” he said, frightened and disappointed.

He’d probably already been inside, or maybe his family had threatened to send him to the insane asylum if he didn’t behave.

On the grounds men in gray pajamas were standing or walking around slowly. Some wore tattered partisan overcoats over their pajamas. One of them had an officer’s belt drawn tight around him; he was evidently proud of it because he tightened it as much as he could and waddled around like a goose.

When she went through the gate, all of them fixed their eyes on her. They didn’t try to come closer; each of them watched her from where he was, wherever he happened to be when she came, no matter whether he was only five or fifty meters distant.

Those who were further away might have envied those who were closer but didn’t try to get a better spot. Regina felt awkward in front of their hundred big, languid eyes. Especially because the eyes of her Bepo might be among them.

She’d come to Sarajevo at the request of Dr. Hoffman; he’d informed her that Bepo Sikirić had been refusing to eat for six days and might change his decision never to eat again if his sister came to see him. He hadn’t seen her since December 1945, when he’d been transferred from the Tuzla barracks, first to the psychiatric ward of the local city hospital, and three weeks later to the Jagomir insane asylum in Sarajevo, the oldest clinic of its kind in Bosnia. It had been established during the reign of Franz Joseph, which was when Franz Hoffman had come as a young doctor from Vienna. Regina had never visited her brother because she was afraid of seeing him crazy. She shuddered at the thought of entering an insane asylum because she thought that in such a place she would go nuts herself. If any illness was contagious, it was losing your mind. It didn’t matter that books said otherwise. The plague and cholera passed from body to body, just as pollen passed from plant to plant, if the wind and temperature were right and if a body’s resistance had already been lowered and it was susceptible to viruses and bacteria. And insanity spread with the terrifying logic of the elements. Reason was weak in the face of all forms of insanity because reason was the exception and not the cosmic rule. The path to insanity was a return to the logic of cliffs and rocks, amoebae, brackens, and all life that wasn’t human. She walked through the grounds certain that the plague was slowly overcoming her, but she had no choice. She couldn’t just let Bepo die of hunger like that.

In front of the entrance there was a young man sitting on a stool wearing blue work overalls. He was sharpening pencils with a large hunting knife and putting them in a little metal box. When he saw Regina, he got up. She took a step back from the knife, and the young man smiled and said, “Don’t worry. I work here. I’m Hamdija.”

He took the knife in his other hand and extended his right hand. He was over six feet tall, and his hand was the size of an oar, warm and soft. “Dr. Hoffman is waiting for you. He asked me three times whether you’d arrived. You know how it is — an old man, old school from Vienna.”

“This guy surely beats them,” Regina thought, “but he acts proper when families come because they might report him.”

He led her through dark, windowless corridors; there was only one light bulb burning in each of them; the paint was peeling and coming off the walls in big flakes. “So this is what my Bepo fought for?” she wondered.

“We have patients that have been here for more than fifty years, but most of them are old partisans,” Hamdija began, speaking in the tone of a tour guide. Regina thought that this was a place where they could read everyone’s mind.

“We have two colonels, a few majors, some captains, company commanders, political commissars, and one national hero. Most of them went through the battles of Sutjeska and the Neretva. Four years in the woods, and then in their first three months of freedom they all had nervous breakdowns. They fell apart so much that no one can put them back together again. It’s terrible, ma’am.”

She was taken aback that Hamdija called her “ma’am.” That wasn’t forbidden, but it was a sign, and a dangerous one. People only said “ma’am” or “mister” if they were making a threat or working out some kind of plot with someone. Maybe they wanted to poison Bepo and intended to get her involved.

“Damn, sometimes I feel guilty before these people. Dr. Hoffman tells me that isn’t good, but there’s no helping it. That’s how it is. How could I be right if I’m the only one who’s normal among all these men who fought for this country? I didn’t fight because I was still in school, and now it’s me who’s healthy and all of them who are sick. Oh, ma’am, if you stayed here a little longer you’d know that one can’t rightly say who’s crazy and who’s normal,” he said as they passed from one corridor to another for the third time already, walking through labyrinths and catacombs in which they didn’t meet a soul.

“Don’t worry about me; I say all kinds of crap,” he said dismissively when he noticed how Regina was looking at him.

Franz Hoffman was seventy-five and looked good for his age. He had curly gray hair, a mustache in which every whisker went in a different direction and so looked as if he had purposely tussled it. He looked like the Serbian poet Laza Kostić in the one photograph that was reproduced in school textbooks and encyclopedias during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He jumped up when they entered the room and kissed Regina’s hand. That frightened her even more. No one had showed the fairer sex that honor in at least fifteen years.

“Sit down, please, sit down! Hamdija, boy, make the lady some coffee,” the old man said, fussing about as if guests were arriving for the first time in years. “How was your trip?”

Regina nodded— good, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. She thought that anything she might say would come out wrong and would do her and Bepo some harm. What kind of harm, she didn’t know, nor could she know in such a place, among these people.

“Yes, it’s far, really far away. I haven’t been to Dubrovnik since ’23. But the city is beautiful, especially when you’re a young man, and then later you remember it and don’t know which was more beautiful — your bygone youth or the city,” Hoffman said, trying to calm down and win the good will of a woman who, he was sure, held his life in her hands. But instead of making a nice remark, what he said came out garbled and idiotic, so he laughed and tapped himself on the forehead with his fingertips. That didn’t change anything either. She kept her hands in her lap and looked at him as if she didn’t understand the meaning of his existence in the world.

After the patient Bepo Sikirić had refused his food for the first time and stated that he’d eaten what there was to eat in life and had no intention of continuing to eat the ground bones of his dead comrades baked into bread (because enemies of the people and wartime speculators cut corners to save flour), Dr. Hoffman spent the night tossing and turning in his bed and thinking about what might happen if a colonel in Tito’s army starved to death, someone who was also a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and a revolutionary. How would he convince the secret police, the State Security Service (and who knew whom else) that he wasn’t to blame for his death? They would take him out in front of the wall of the asylum, where he’d worked for more than fifty years, and shoot him before he could get a word in. And he’d be lucky if they didn’t torture him before they shot him. After the patient had refused his food the next day and then refused it for three more days, Franz Hoffman wrote a last will. He also told his Tidža, with whom he’d lived since 1907, when they’d gotten married in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna and she’d converted to Catholicism and taken the name Margaret (people in Sarajevo didn’t know anything about this and continued calling her Tidža), that he had a feeling that he’d been pushed up against a wall, both in reality and metaphorically. And that this time there was no chance of escape. Tidža mumbled something, took a rolling pin, and started vigorously rolling out a layer of dough, stretching it to the point where it was paper thin. But unlike his life, it would never tear. And for years he’d been waiting for Tidža to make a mistake and for the dough to get a hole so she would have to start rolling it out all over again, until finally he realized that there was no chance of her making that mistake.