Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Soldiers don’t think about their souls, nor do officers think about the mental health of their soldiers because if they thought about such things, no one would ever fight wars.

Well, it wasn’t just the assassination in Sarajevo that had inspired Franz Hoffman to die for a higher cause! Four years later, when the empire went to hell, Bosnia was in the grips of hunger and misery, and anyone with a Kraut name and surname was looking to pack up his things and leave for Vienna, he slammed his fist down on the table: “One doesn’t abandon a people who have accepted and fed you! No, not when the people have got it bad.” He turned around, and without saying anything else, he left the meeting that Professor Ernst Erlich, the retired director of the Land Bank, had convened at his villa at Vrelo Bosne; this meeting was supposed to decide on an SOS letter that they were going to send to Vienna asking the royal palace not to forget its sons and daughters imprisoned in the Turkish provinces, not even in those times, which posed the greatest difficulties for the people and the crown. He never saw most of the people at Erlich’s villa again, and he hardly ever greeted those who stayed in Sarajevo.

He no longer wanted to have anything to do with Austria, the Austrians, or his German roots. A new state was being created, a great kingdom of the South Slavs, in which Hoffman had decided to be a Slav by his own choice. A few days after Serbian troops entered Sarajevo, he heroically stepped into the local registrar’s office and asked a scowling Serbian officer to Slavicize his name and surname on the spot. But since the latter was only half-literate or at least fairly sloppy, he simply entered the name Franz Hoffman in Cyrillic script. Thus he became only half Yugoslav, whereas half of him remained what he’d been before. But that didn’t bother him: “If our King Petar the Unifier ever needs a good warrior, you can always find me in the sanatorium for the mentally ill in Jagomir!” he shouted, stepping right into the face of the officer. He thought that was necessary and that shouting was a Serbian folk custom because all the Serbs he’d seen in recent days had been hollering at the top of their lungs. Hoffman didn’t connect that with the fact that every one of them was in uniform and that he’d never seen a Serb in civilian dress because before the war they’d only seldom crossed the Drina and came to Sarajevo only very rarely. Or maybe he’d seen those people, but didn’t know they were from Serbia. Somehow he thought that they had to be very different, cockier than Bosnians.

“Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, you shit; you want me to tie your ears in knots?” the officer replied in an even louder voice. Hoffman ran out of the office and couldn’t understand why the officer had gotten angry at him.

It was a good time; one’s soul didn’t cramp up from hardship, and there were so many things to be happy about and for which it paid to have courage. Afterward there wasn’t a single one. Whether this was because people were getting older or because the times were topsy-turvy, this was something that Franz Hoffman often wondered about.

And the worst of times — times of mental unrest, depression, and dyslexia — began for him on the twenty-eighth of February, 1933. He was sitting in the café of the Hotel Europa; outside it was snowing. In the corner someone was playing Mozart on the piano. It was approaching noon and the regular patrons were already starting to go home for lunch when Hoffman opened the Belgrade Politika and on the third page read the following headline: “Reichstag Burns to Ashes and Cinders! Chancellor Hitler Accuses Communists and Social-Democrats!” There had been even worse news that he’d read in the newspaper, but none had ever worried him like this. A heavy stone, like those used to press sauerkraut in crocks, fell on his stomach. He began to gasp and couldn’t get enough air. “This is panic,” he thought, “female hysteria, or arrhythmia.” He checked his pulse; his heart was beating powerfully and regularly. He folded the newspaper and looked at the wall for a few minutes.

“Are you all right?” asked Rudo, his waiter. When he calmed down a little, he opened the newspaper to page three, and had the same reaction. As soon as he came home, he told Tidža to pack their bags; they were going to Opatija for a vacation because his work and the patients were driving him crazy. They stayed in Opatija for three weeks. He didn’t read the newspapers or listen to the news. They went for walks by the sea and went to concerts every evening, listening to hit songs, both Strausses — the older and the younger one — Russian romantic songs performed by an ensemble from Novgorod. . But Hoffman didn’t become himself again.

When he returned to the asylum, he told the head doctor, Đuro Sandić, that he thought he was starting to have mental problems and asked for permission to go visit Dr. Freud in Vienna. Đuro roared with laughter and turned as red as a tomato, fat and stocky as he was. He liked Franz, though he would get a little irritated at his innovations and all that idiocy that he picked up from the literature in Vienna and London, where they were making a philosophy of psychiatry: “It’s as if mental patients, God forgive me, are smarter than mentally healthy people, who have to find ways to outsmart them.”

Head doctor Đuro was a good and generous man and genuinely suffered the agony of his patients, even more than Hoffman had ever done, but he believed that there was simply no better treatment for severe mental conditions than cold water and electroshocks.

“My good Franz, you need to give your head a good shake-up, and maybe things will settle in the right places. And maybe not. But no benefit will come of all the talk and hocus-pocus that your phonies write about,” he explained to Hoffman when he’d arrived in Jagomir full of enthusiasm about an article he’d read on psychoanalysis.

He tried a few more times to convince head doctor Đuro about the advantages of modern methods of treating mental illnesses, but he would always laugh at him or act as if he were angry. He made phony threats about dismissing him and turning him into the ministry in Belgrade. But when Hoffman came to him with his tale of how he was starting to have mental problems himself and that he would end up as a patient in his asylum if Đuro didn’t let him go to Freud in Vienna, his boss couldn’t stop laughing. He thought that he would suffer a stroke; his lungs were close to bursting, and he was already hot in his heart and belly. No one had ever said something so silly to him with such a serious expression. It was as if Franz were a small child and was imagining that he was sick only so that he would let him go to that Jewish good-for-nothing. Of course he would let him go! The young man could have his fun. There wouldn’t be any harm in it, and it was better if the subordinates were content, especially Hoffman, to whom he was going to leave the clinic when he retired.

“How long do you want to stay in Vienna, you damn sniveler?” Đuro asked him, holding his belly.

“A month, if at all possible,” Hoffman said, ashamed. His boss was around fifteen years his senior, but he acted as if he were his grandfather.

“Here, take three months, but come back healthy! And don’t think of coming back here and pestering me with whatever that fool fills your head with because I’ll pack you off into an isolation cell and electroshock that psychoanalysis out of your head. Watch out, Franz, my pops slept with wolves on Mt. Vlašić, and I’m no better! There’s no touchy-feely with us peasants!”

Hoffman wouldn’t understand the part about no touchy-feely until much later. It was as if Đuro hadn’t let him go off to Vienna to see Freud because he was a good man and because his lies (or what he thought were lies) had made him laugh but because head doctor Đuro figured that there couldn’t be too much harm in those innovations. And there might even be some benefit when later people around Sarajevo and throughout the whole kingdom told how he, Dr. Đuro Sandić, allowed the spirit of Freud into the Jagomir clinic. If it were all foolishness, as he thought, it would be easy for that spirit to head for the hills, but if there was something to that damned psychoanalysis — which Đuro wasn’t going to get caught up in even if it were true — then his name would be inscribed in gilt letters in the annals of Bosnian mental health, and his frowning bust would stare out in front of the Jagomir asylum. He was already proud of that bust, regardless of the fact that its bronze head wouldn’t look anything like him and that it would show generations of mental patients how lucky they were because they hadn’t fallen into the hands of such a gloomy man. No matter how little he cared for earnest posturing and was always playing the clown and teddy bear as he laughed and joked with his patients, superiors, and subordinates, head doctor Đuro envisioned his posthumous role as a serious and scowling one.