Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

In the early autumn of 1940 he would learn from one of Đuro’s relatives that the head doctor had died three months before and that the funeral had been as for a real pauper because according to the deceased’s wishes no one had been informed of his death, nor was the news published in the newspapers. He was buried in the Orthodox cemetery in Mrkonjić Grad. After the war Hoffman went to find Đuro’s grave. He thought that the clinic should have an appropriately dignified tombstone made for its long-serving director. But there was no grave, and as the registers of the dead had burned and Đuro’s family had scattered all over the globe, there was no longer anyone who might know where he lay, that man who’d secretly dreamed of his bronze bust, for the sake of which he’d been ready to allow psychoanalysis into his clinic.

After Đuro left, Hoffman no longer had any superiors. No one in Sarajevo had the slightest interest in what he was doing with the mental patients, and the ministry of health traditionally did not answer letters from Jagomir because since Đuro had been there, they’d thought that there was no great difference between the doctors and the patients in the Sarajevo mental hospital. But the freedom to do as he pleased without having to answer to anyone only deepened Hoffman’s fears. It was easier to be the lowest in some social hierarchy than to be outside of one. He realized this in the last days of the kingdom, when all of Sarajevo was in a lather and on the move because everyone was going to those they felt they belonged to. Communists sought out communists, Orthodox sought out the Orthodox, Muslims Muslims, and Catholics Catholics. Only the Sarajevo Jews tried to stay on good terms with everyone in town at the same time so no one would take offense or get any ideas. He watched those unhappy and frightened Jews gesture to the communists, give alms to poor Catholics, and chat with the market bosses about the good old days of the viziers and knew that they had chosen the worst possible way to protect themselves from what was coming. For completely personal and egotistical reasons the Jews used their own blood to make the only glue bonding groups that had all started going their own ways. They were the mortar in a structure threatened with collapse, and in the end they would pay for their surfeit of caution with their lives. They found themselves on the outside of the hierarchy that was set up in the city in the first days of April 1941, outside of which the only ones apart from them were Dr. Hoffman and his patients.

In the summer of 1942 he refused, with open disgust, to turn over a list of his patients that contained their religious affiliations to an Ustasha captain.

No matter how much he was afraid for his own skin and no matter how much it seemed that history had conspired against him and a few like him since that noonday of the twenty-eighth of February, 1933, he was unable to comply with the captain’s request. Among the patients there were ten or so Orthodox Christians and one Jew — Sarah Nolan, a mongoloid girl who’d died in April of 1941 so that there wouldn’t have been a great deal of harm had Hoffman turned over the list of patients. If the Ustashas had tried to take away the Orthodox Christians, he could have easily called Dr. Savo Besarović to intervene on their behalf, and there could be no doubt that nothing would have happened to them. Hoffman, however, couldn’t accept anyone treating mental patients as anything other than patients because in that case everything would have come to nothing. Everything that he’d done at Jagomir all those years. And he’d have to accept the fact that they’d sent him from Vienna to Sarajevo as punishment, as a life sentence of hard labor. If someone had maybe thought of punishing him by sending him to the Turkish provinces and if there were those who believed that Franz Hoffman was a bad doctor — because if he’d been a good one, the Austrian emperor wouldn’t have sent him so far away — he hadn’t felt punished or felt himself to be professionally inferior to his colleagues.

“As far as the human soul is concerned, medicine basically gropes in the dark, and we haven’t advanced far beyond treatments with spells,” he would say to his colleagues. “No matter how much some future psychologists and psychiatrists will make fun of us and ridicule us — if it weren’t for us, they will not have done anything either.” He was proud of these words; he considered them to be witty, as if someone else had said them. If he’d given in to the captain’s threats, not even those words would have meant anything any more.

But the very next day he went straight to the city leadership and to the German command post.

He told the Ustashas that he and his people were glad that the historic city of Sarajevo, the old Croatian Vrhbosna, had finally become part of the Independent State of Croatia, into whose fabric the centuries-old aspirations of this people had been woven through the efforts of their leader, Dr. Pavelić. And if the mental hospital at Jagomir, which he’d called an asylum, a clinic, or a hospital, depending on the circumstances, could assist in any way in the blossoming and defense of their precious homeland, he, Dr. Franz Hoffman, would be deeply offended if they didn’t let him know.

In a ten-minute audience Hoffman told the deputy commander of all German units stationed in central Bosnia, a rather impolite Bavarian, that he felt himself to be a German and had always felt that way and would be happy if the military and civilian representatives of the Third Reich would keep in mind that people such as he had been living in this city and that for decades they’d been trying to civilize this wild country.

Neither the Croats nor the Germans were particularly taken with his declaration of loyalty. It was probably clear to them that someone who acted thus couldn’t have a completely clear conscience. But they didn’t check anything in his background, nor were they interested at all in the case of the head of a mental hospital. Jagomir was on the edge of the city and moreover on the side that was out of the way and where only Chetnik or partisan bandits were likely to turn up. But not even they would know where to go from the nuthouse so that Franz Hoffman was left to his own devices, alone with his fears.

The captain never came back, and it was clear that he hadn’t wanted the list of patients on an order from anyone but had been out on his own hunting for a Jew to arrest so he could then brag about it in the taverns of Zagreb’s old town.

But when the war neared its end and it was a matter of days until the partisans entered the city, Franz Hoffman remembered the sin he’d committed. He was sweating bullets at the prospect of the communists’ finding reports of his visits to the Ustasha and German authorities among the documents they captured. Secretaries had been present in both places and had written things down, and he was certain that his name was on some paper somewhere. It was difficult to believe that they’d only been tricking him. Both the Germans and the Ustashas had taken pains to convince the cocky psychiatrist who praised Pavelić and Hitler that he’d come somewhere important and that he was getting bureaucratic attention there.

The day after the city was liberated, on the seventh of April, 1945, Franz Hoffman went to the market square and had two flags sewn for himself: one Yugoslav and one Soviet. He paid the tailor Hakija Čengić extra for the express order and because Hakija had to send his apprentice to Kreševo since there was no red fabric anywhere in the city. On the eighth of April the banners of the victors were already fluttering on the Jagomir insane asylum, but Hoffman shuddered with fear in his office for months afterward.

He rested easier when they began to bring ill partisans, both men and women, to the clinic. The ones without commissions were brought in ambulances or military jeeps, but the comrades with commissions arrived escorted by officers of the State Security Service, who would take the doctor aside and warn him that the name of Major Horvat or Colonel šaković had to be kept strictly confidential. He was also duty bound to provide them with special treatment, not to forget the rank each had acquired in the struggle against the occupiers and collaborators, because the fact that they’d gone crazy didn’t mean that anyone had forgotten their merits in the people’s war of liberation and the socialist revolution. He was forbidden from giving them electroshocks under threat of the most severe punishment or from torturing them in other ways. The security service agent would then threaten to make regular inquiries about the condition of the comrade in question.