Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Ma’am, please drink some brandy,” Hoffman pestered her.

“No, brandy makes me burp,” she lied.

She sat a little while longer with that old man and his assistant, and it seemed that no one there had anything else to do. Those two wouldn’t help Bepo because they couldn’t and didn’t know how. They knew about as much as she did about the things that happen to people to make them go crazy. A full moon, the sirocco, nightmares, fear, decapitated human heads, ghosts, dragons, evil spirits and demons, betrayals and deceits, insomnia, inexplicable pain. . All of this had taken its toll on Bepo. She knew this well, as did everyone, but people acted as if something else were going on, as if there were some kind of secret in the human soul. There was, in fact, no secret, but it was difficult to accept that sane people were just as close to going crazy as crazy people were to being sane. She wanted to leave this place as quickly as possible and forget her brother, who was beyond hope. But how could she do that as long as this old man was expecting something from her?

“Do you know what’s going to happen now?” Hoffman asked. “Your brother will starve for about fifteen more days, and then he’ll fall into a coma, and we’ll feed him intravenously, and if he recovers, everything will start all over again. Until he dies.” He folded his hands as if he were closing a book. She didn’t answer him. She asked for her coat, and Hamdija showed her to the gate.

“Don’t you want to see him again?” the doctor asked as they parted. She smiled at him and wished him all the best.

But it turned out that she hadn’t seen Hamdija for the last time. Two hours later he was running after her on the railway platform; the train for Mostar was just about to pull away.

“Ma’am, wait!” he shouted. Regina had already stepped onto the iron step of the railway car when he grabbed her by the hand and said, “He’s dead; please come with me! For God’s sake, don’t leave.”

She was calm and didn’t shed a tear; they went out onto the road in front of the railway station when Hamdija stopped, leaned on the wall, and started vomiting. She thought that he’d drunk too much and felt embarrassed because people were passing by and seeing her in such company. She was wearing black for her dead husband, her brother had just died, and that young man was throwing up. It would be so good to go because she couldn’t make anything right now anyway.

“How did he die?” she asked Hamdija when he regained some of his composure. “A heart attack. That was his third in a year. I tried to tell him to take care of himself, but he didn’t listen. .”

“You didn’t tell me that,” she said in surprise.

“Tell you what?”

“That Bepo had heart problems!” she said, enraged, finally in a position to accuse someone for what had happened to her brother.

“Ma’am, I beg your pardon; it’s Dr. Hoffman who’s dead — not your brother!”

Soon enough it would become clear that it didn’t make any sense for her to stay any longer. Hamdija had simply lost his head; after so many years of working for Dr. Hoffman, he’d probably become a little paranoid himself and thought that this woman, who was the last one to see the doctor alive, would be needed to testify that no one had killed him. But he’d had something completely different in mind, which he no longer remembered after he regained his composure and began to apologize because she’d missed all the trains that day. In the end he took Regina to his relatives in Bistrik to spend the night at their place, while he himself went off to Jagomir, where the hearse had already come for Hoffman’s body and Dr. Niko Sršen had already shown up to take over the duties as head of the clinic temporarily. The police weren’t there, nor did anyone ask Hamdija about the death of Dr. Franz Hoffman. He couldn’t believe it. Shouldn’t someone have been interested in how and why a man had died? Had they asked Hamdija, he would have told the truth: he’d died of fear because a partisan colonel was refusing his food and because the boss would have been made responsible for his death!

Horrified and disgusted, instead of going home to Bistrik, he ended up in the City Café, where he drank until dawn with strangers and cursed a world in which it was possible for such a man to die like a dog only because in that country no one trusted anything anyone said.

Thus, Hamdija sought justice and would seek it until the end of his days, becoming a greater fool with every day because there was hardly anyone who realized what it meant when he was drunk and said that Hoffman was second only to Freud. And maybe even better than him because Freud only analyzed people as if they were microbes, but Hoffman saved the little intelligence that they had left after everything. Soon the whole city would laugh at him, and his new boss would fire him because he was uneducated and drank a lot. He would end up like one of the lunatics who weren’t lucky enough to have some Hoffman accept them into his clinic but instead spent their days on the streets and their nights in the city’s taverns.

Regina spent the night in the home of Fuad and Begzada, peaceful and quiet people who didn’t ask her anything, and she was glad that she didn’t have to tell them anything about herself. They sat her down on their divan, offered her baklava and other sweets, asked her about the weather in Dubrovnik and what was blooming and what was ripening at this time of the year. He explained to her in detail how to make jam from plums and how to keep the plums from turning sour. Begzada nodded and added her comments here and there. Then she told what it had been like when the Germans had withdrawn from Sarajevo and what a sorry sight they’d been, whereas four years earlier they’d all come young, handsome, and blond, full of strength and haughtiness and thought that they would stay a hundred years. As the Russians chased Hitler’s divisions across Ukraine and Poland, every German in Bosnia — or anywhere else in the world — aged and became more and more feeble. In the end the whole German people was for the old folks’ home, Begzada concluded. Then the spouses fell silent for a while because each of them knew what the other was thinking. In their thoughts they were in agreement and comforted this unknown woman with their silence.

“Oh, the poor doctor! He gave his life for Jagomir,” Hamdija’s father said finally but didn’t go on so that the woman who’d come as a guest to their house wouldn’t think that she too had to say something about dead doctor Franz and then reveal why she’d come to Jagomir and whom she’d come to see. That was something that wasn’t asked because it was one of those torments that one didn’t talk about but kept silent. So if you knew, you knew; if you didn’t, you weren’t a person because you didn’t realize that the same thing might happen to you.

“May the good God have mercy on him,” said Hamdija’s mother. Regina said nothing and drank rose juice that smelled like Hoffman’s handkerchief.

“And it’s hard for you too,” added Fuad, judging from her black dress that those words made sense and wouldn’t be misunderstood.

When they said good-bye the next morning, Begzada kissed her as if they were sisters or best friends. Regina would quickly forget her night in Bistrik and wouldn’t remember those people any more when life was difficult for her. But maybe she should have. As they hadn’t burdened her with anything, they could only be forgotten. If there were more such people, life would be easier and nicer. And it wouldn’t last as long because it would all be forgotten.

A month later a telegram arrived from Sarajevo in which Dr. Niko Sršen informed the family that his patient, Bepo Sikirić, had passed away due to natural causes in the intensive care unit of the Clinic for Internal Medicine in Koševo, where he’d been transferred nine days before in a comatose state. The body of Comrade Sikirić, a colonel in the Yugoslav National Army, had been taken to his home city by the authorized services of the Sarajevo garrison that were responsible for his transport. The colonel’s death was a loss not only for his immediate family, but also for our entire socialist society, which was left without one of its visionaries and one of the champions of its cause.