Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“They’ll kill me, my dear,” he said, trying to make her understand that this time it was serious.

“Oh, Franz, people talk about all sorts of things, and you talk about how someone’s going to kill you. You’ve been doing it for twenty years now. First it was Hitler who was going to kill you because you went to Vienna to study with Freud and because people saw you reading his books in cafés, then the Ustashas wanted to kill you when you wouldn’t show them the papers that told what religion the patients were, and then the partisans wanted to kill you because you’re a Kraut and because you went to the Ustasha and German celebrations at Christmas and Bayram. Oh, if I only knew who wants to kill you now! But for God’s sake, don’t tell me! I’ll sleep easier. And when will you come to your senses for once? Who might kill me? And who would deal with all the crazies if it weren’t for you? People aren’t stupid. They pray for you to live as long as possible. If you die, the crazies will be walking around the market squares, and then nothing will help at all, not socialism, not Truman’s eggs,” Tidža said, and he realized that there was nothing he could say to convince her that his life depended on Bepo Sikirić’s.

He breathed a little more easily when he and Regina talked on the phone and she agreed to come and talk to her brother. He thought she wouldn’t, that there was no chance of that woman overcoming the reasons why she’d never visited him before. He didn’t know what those reasons were, nor was he particularly interested. The reasons why relatives didn’t come to visit patients were always the same and didn’t differ that much from the reasons why others came to visit every week and inquired when their relatives would recover. Both kinds of people were irrational. The former, because they believed that their fathers and sons were already dead. But they weren’t — they were all too alive. God knew how much longer they would live, and they were often very concerned about someone coming and visiting them. And those who came to visit were irrational because they thought it was simply a matter of days before their sons and fathers would get right in the head. As if their heads were full of water and all one had to do was wait for the sludge to settle on the bottom. But the fact that Regina nevertheless said she would come was the first good sign in a long series of bad signs that had combined in recent days to lower a gravestone over the head of Dr. Hoffman.

Hamdija came in with their coffees. On three copper trays were three small copper pots, each with a lid that had a crescent moon and a star, as atop minarets on postcards. Golden floral decorations were painted on the coffee cups, and in each little sugar dish were two cubes of sugar.

“Prewar coppersmith work,” Hoffman said, full of pride, as if he had hammered out the pots himself. “My sister sends the sugar from Vienna. It’s not easy to find it there either, but she manages. I won’t drink coffee unless it’s got sugar in cubes,” he continued and dipped a cube into his coffee as a demonstration. A brown color spread through the white of the sugar.

“A pity,” she thought as she watched the crystals melt and disappear. A sweet taste on the palate wasn’t something that could take the place of the beautiful, symmetrical cube, the product of Viennese masters and international smugglers, and it was more of a rarity and a wonder than ancient statues, cathedrals, and the stone arches in the atrium of the Franciscan monastery and everything else created by human hands that had survived the war. She plopped in both her cubes quickly and pushed them down with the little silver spoon so that they wouldn’t dissolve slowly but would disappear at once.

“Will he recognize me?” Regina asked.

“Of course. He hasn’t forgotten anyone. He thinks the same things about people that he did when he was healthy. It’s just that his attitude toward himself and life is a little different,” Hoffman said, and it seemed to him that she might think that was a reproach for her not having come all these years, “but he lives in a different world, on a different planet, not on ours. On some Saturn because it’s easier for him. It seems to me that it’s easier for him, although I know as much about it as you do. That is — nothing!” he said, trying to look at her as a co-conspirator and hoping that this might open her up so she would do something to persuade her brother to start eating. Though she was dressed in black, she looked to him as if she were under forty and was, at least in the eyes of Dr. Hoffman, very pretty. She had pale skin and a regular face, which was a rarity among Mediterranean women, and she looked like an actress in Fritz Lang’s silent movie. He couldn’t remember the name of the movie or the name of the actress, but the whole world revolved around her, and men took care not to get shot and to come back from every war for her.

“Do you want to see him?” he asked after Regina had drunk the last of her coffee. She shrugged her shoulders and looked at the floor.

“Don’t be afraid; I’ll come with you,” Hamdija said in encouragement.

“What would she be afraid of, I beg your pardon!” Hoffman snapped, feigning indignation.

Bepo was alone in his room. He sat on an army bunk and was looking at the wall on which there were two photographs: one of Vladimir Ilich Lenin delivering a speech to workers and another of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

“You came!” he said, astonished. “Hamdija, this is my sister, my only sister! Oh, I’m really crazy; you must have already met,” he said and hugged Regina.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” said the young man.

Regina felt a flush of unexpected joy because Bepo wasn’t like she thought he would be. For years she’d looked away when she ran into a retarded child or one of the city’s four oddballs. Regina saw her brother in every grimacing visage, in people who were very drunk, or in market sellers when they blew up because a customer had cheated them. Their distorted faces, warped with hatred and fear, were the closest thing to insanity that she could think of.

The last time she had seen him healthy was when he’d received three days’ leave after the liberation of Belgrade. At that time there wasn’t anything noticeably different about him, no signs of the war. He wasn’t even worn out; he looked as if he were coming home from vacation, all tanned and muscular, better looking than he had been before. He laughed a lot and took an interest in everything. He walked around the house and looked over everything he was going to repair and patch up after the war was over.

“Just a few more months and you’ll have me home,” he said when they said good-bye, and every evening Regina had only one thought: Don’t let the last bullet hit him; don’t let him fall in the last battle; don’t let him be like that soldier in the story who died because a general spent three more seconds signing the cease-fire because he had a surname with seventeen and not seven letters or because the pen ran out of ink. Or the courier got to drinking in a village tavern and arrived late with news of the end of the war.

When they sent word that Bepo was in the hospital because of an attack of nerves, she thought that it couldn’t be anything serious. If he was alive and well and nothing hurt, he would have to be okay in the end. His soul wasn’t yet an open wound that would bleed him to death. All the lunatics in Regina’s life had been lunatics from birth or lunatics because they just wanted to be that way. But Bepo had been born the most ordinary man under the stars.

But after he’d been transferred to the Sarajevo asylum and after his revolver, service booklet, and decorations had been delivered to her at home, she realized that something bad was happening. Only the dead are stripped of their weapons and decorations, and only then are sisters asked whether they need any help. The army had to care for the families of dead comrades; yet her Bepo hadn’t been killed — he was going through something else. She didn’t know what, but it was certainly terrible if they were awarding him with posthumous honors.