Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

But even without that, and if he’d been one hundred percent certain that Freud was a complete idiot, he would still have let Hoffman go. One should never keep others from what makes them happy without a compelling need or reason. Head doctor Đuro didn’t believe in God, but he believed that something like that would have been an unforgiveable sin.

Franz Hoffman lost seven days waiting for Freud to see him. He already had the impression that the doctor was avoiding him and had started worrying that he would be forced to try to solve the problem of his obsession with the newspaper headline of the twenty-eighth of February on his own or, maybe, get used to the fact that overnight he’d become a coward and that there was no longer any ideal that was more valuable than life.

Actually, in those days he couldn’t remember a single ideal that was worth anything at all. Maybe that was one more oriental influence, he thought as he shambled through the streets of a city that had once been his. Maybe years of living in the market-square district and among its people had turned him into just another little hodja or shopkeeper, into a man who didn’t want to look farther than his mosque or his shop front. But how could that happen to a Kraut who was born far from Bosnia, Islam, and everything that makes oriental Slavs so passive and obsessed solely with their own trivial human pleasures? It would have to be that this was a case of some strange neurosis, a mental disorder in the broadest sense of the term, about which Dr. Freud could certainly tell him something.

On the eighth day he saw him going into the building in which he had an unregistered practice; he ran after him: “Doctor, Doctor!”

Freud didn’t turn around; he was probably lost in thought, or he was pretending not to hear. Hoffman stopped him on the steps just when Freud had ascended to the fourth step. He looked at him in surprise, trying to remember whether he knew this man, and that glance from up above — because Hoffman was standing down on the first step — was like a revelation for Hoffman. He felt as any old woman from Kraljevska Sutjeska with a tattooed cross on her arm would feel if the Pope had received her in the center of Rome.

He started babbling something incoherent, saying that he’d come from Bosnia but that he’d studied in Vienna and was a native Viennese and had been working for years in a Sarajevo mental hospital and begged the doctor for a bit of his precious time — he wanted him to give him some directions and advice and maybe some help in solving a strange mental problem.

Freud was probably in a dilemma: should he run or maybe chase this troublemaker away or talk with him regardless? An interest in various psychiatric conditions that define a person is not at all the same as an interest in street characters and troublemakers. And this guy seemed to be just that. It was hard to get rid of such types. The reason they approached you in the first place was because they felt that you were incapable of telling them off.

Hoffman told Dr. Freud what had happened to him. He listened without moving or changing his expression. He seemed tense, like someone who’d been suffering from an ulcus duodeni since the spring and would suffer from the pain for days at a time. When Hoffman finished, Freud continued his silence. Probably because he hadn’t been asked a question, and Hoffman couldn’t actually come up with a question for him. He squirmed like a student who had an idea of what a professor wanted to hear from him but didn’t dare speak so he wouldn’t blurt out something stupid.

“Are you a Jew?” Freud asked quietly.

“No, I’m an Austrian and a Catholic,” he answered and immediately realized that he’d said something inappropriate. As if a Jew couldn’t be an Austrian.

But Freud didn’t catch that at all.

“Are you sure? Maybe some grandmother of yours is nevertheless Jewish? Or a distant ancestor?” he asked insistently.

“No, really none of my family are Jewish. My ancestors came during the time of Maria Theresa to Vienna from Swabia. They were Lutherans and converted to Catholicism. But what does that matter to you?” Hoffman asked, feeling more and more uncomfortable.

“If you’re not a Jew, and it’s clear that you’re not a communist, I don’t know why the burning of the Reichstag hit you so hard personally. And I don’t know why you think that I might be able to answer your questions.”

Dr. Freud continued making his way up the stairs, and the conversation was over.

Franz Hoffman left Vienna deeply disappointed. He continued to believe that the doctor was a genius, but he couldn’t forgive him for that insult. Freud left him alone in the world, never again to find someone in whom he might confide his fears and weakness. After he’d lost Jesus Christ as a boy, the loss of Sigmund Freud was for Hoffman the loss of his last link to divinity, what was beyond man and served as a support for his courage. And that was his final farewell to his home city.

Before he descended from the one step that he’d ascended, he’d already forgotten his imaginary mental illness and accepted what until then had seemed to him to be completely beneath his dignity. Yes, he’d become a coward. He was frightened as old people are frightened and those without protection, rich relatives, or a secure place to call home.

He stayed in Vienna for two more days, visited a few bookstores, stood for a while in front of his childhood home and looked into the windows, behind which some strangers were living.

Head doctor Đuro was surprised by Hoffman’s early return but didn’t ask him any questions about it, nor did he make any jokes at his expense. He never asked him what had happened to him in Vienna, and so the story of Hoffman’s mental illness that could only be helped by Sigmund Freud could be forgotten.

The months and years following the newspaper headline that had changed him were a part of the general conspiracy of fear. There was a prolonged bloody war in Ethiopia, the League of Nations ridiculed Emperor Selassie, the junta generals from the Canary Islands began their attempt to destroy the Spanish republic, Hitler annexed Austria, Vienna became a German city, and there were articles about laws that curtailed the rights of Jews in Germany. In the Belgrade assembly representatives of all three Yugoslav tribes could be heard saying that the same or similar laws should be passed in their country. .

Franz Hoffman read all that — a mountain of leaden letters that forbade him from thinking about anything other than what he might see in the newspapers. He stopped going to Mt. Trebević, Mt. Jahorina, and Mt. Treskavica with the mountaineering society, and he refused invitations to Sunday card games in the Two Bulls tavern. And so soon he no longer had anyone to spend time with apart from his patients, head doctor Đuro, and his wife Tidža. The lax pace of oriental life, which he’d appreciated for years and in which his Viennese principles had sunk without a trace, now turned into a depression that he felt within himself and saw all around him.

In the summer of 1939 head doctor Đuro was forced to retire by law. He left Jagomir in tears, after sending several letters to the royal regent, Paul, and the presidents of the royal governments requesting that an exception be made and his retirement age be raised because his experience was necessary for the clinic, its staff, and — what was most important — its patients. Hoffman countersigned each of Đuro’s letters and knew they wouldn’t help. But at least he preserved his unhappy boss’s faith in loyalty and friendship.

The last letter, sent three days before the decision on his retirement would arrive from Belgrade, was signed by everyone: stokers, porters, cooks, nurses and doctors, and even patients who were literate and lucid enough to sign. To no avail. No answer ever came in response to that extremely unusual petition. For two months head doctor Đuro came to his clinic as a retiree, and with the first autumn rains he disappeared. Hoffman didn’t even see him at Sunday coffee in the Hotel Europa.