Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

They’d become savages not long after naked Mrs. Simpson and Edward had sunned themselves on their beaches, and he’d watched the princess, thinking how beautiful she was and how happy her queendom would be. That was the final scene of a romantic and joyful world, the one that had existed before the advent of talking movies. After Mrs. Simpson and Edward left for good, the noise of explosions began, spreading from city to city and country to country, and was followed by the rattle of daggers and knives. Italian soldiers marched through the city with plumes of rooster tail feathers on their helmets, men went to war, women baked flatbread for long trips, and it was shameful to remain outside that crazy bloodbath.

For him, however, shame was more familiar and more preferable than living the life of the brave and those who were dying. He didn’t see any great politics behind what was happening or anything else that wouldn’t be clear to any sane person. He wasn’t interested in Germany, Croatia, or even the fight against fascism. Maybe he liked Stalin better than Hitler, and Churchill better than Mussolini, and maybe he cheered for Tito because his brother Bepo was in the partisans, but Luka was more concerned about convincing the city of his harmlessness. Playing the clown and the fool, the one who wasn’t the rival of any man and didn’t seek love from any woman, he was actually asking to be excepted from everything that was the lot of others by their hearts or through misfortune. However, he didn’t lose his awareness of what he was doing and how hard it was to turn a whole city to his advantage and always keep it convinced of that. Nothing changed, not even with the end of the war because then the champions and the avengers came, whom he also had to convince that he wasn’t standing in their way and wasn’t worthy of their ire. And in 1947 and the following years that ire was terrible and at times seemed more terrible than the war.

If an adult could believe in it, and Luka believed in it without any problem, the Robinson Crusoe game was one of the best ways to get a respite from every ire.

Besides playing cards and Robinson Crusoe, they had one more adventure. Every month they went to Kuna, to the Delavale summer home. He pruned the grapevines or harvested grapes or would negotiate the olive harvest in the village. After Ivo died and the summer home was passed on to Regina, Luka toyed with the idea of moving to Kuna, weeding the grapevines, planting olive trees, and living his life like that. But that idea didn’t hold him for long. He didn’t have the will or intelligence for serious plans and would only make them until they left the kingdom of his imagination, after which he left them to take their own paths, farther and farther away from him. Because who would dig vineyards their whole life long, plant olive trees, and worry about peronospores, siroccos, and boras, about storms and thunderstorms and bouts of the flu that would come as soon as one had to dig or prune something? When a man plans like that, then he’s figuring on a wife and children, and a wife and children would have been another source of worry for him, complications and still more serious plans in which there was no happiness. In the twenty-fifth year of his life he believed that he would never have children and was fairly certain that he wouldn’t get married. Until two or three years before it had really bothered him that he’d never slept with a woman and all those who’d gone with him to school had, or at least said they had. If there had been any prostitutes left in the city, he would have certainly collected his money and gone off to one of them to open his eyes, as one used to say then. But this was in 1944 and 1945, and the prostitutes had fled in the face of all the dying and creating of states. Then his desire passed, and he realized that entry into the world of men would do him more harm than good. Sex and love between men and women were like opium — once you tried it, you had to have it for the rest of your life. And nothing that obliges a man in such a way can be pleasure. When he arrived with Dijana at the Delavale summer home, he again chose games instead of life. He felt like a rich drunk and an heir to large properties, and so he communicated with the village, paid for their wine in the village tavern, and offered to let them harvest his olive grove so cheaply that in the end they believed that he had money to burn. It suited him that they thought this and treated Dijana like a princess.

“She’s not a child, you uneducated lout; she’s a lady!” he yelled at the tavern keeper, who’d said that he didn’t have any drinks for children. “Bring her a glass of water! The main distinction between you and her is that the lady knows that water is the most healthy drink on earth.”

The tavern keeper waddled off to the kitchen while exclamation points swarmed over his head as in Disney’s Mickey Mouse comic strip. He neither knew what the word “distinction” meant, nor did he understand why water should be the most healthy drink in the world, but the comment that he was “uneducated” worried him. He knew what that word meant, but no one had ever used it to describe him. That word was spoken on the radio, in tales of murderers and policemen broadcast from Belgrade. And he would hear it from ministers who held speeches at the ceremonial openings of work actions. “Our youth didn’t even lack education, not even when they charged at enemy bunkers!” Comrade Boris Kidrič used to shout out. That was all the tavern keeper needed to conclude that this man had insulted him. He brought Luka his wine and Dijana her water and went back to the kitchen to get away from them. The world had been turned on its head; there could be no doubt about that, but he was in a bind about what that man was to that girl. They certainly weren’t father and daughter; he would probably be something to her that there hadn’t been before. He would ask around in the village.

“What are you looking at?” he yelled at old Tera, who was peeling potatoes, grabbed his hat, and went out through the back door.

“Do you know that your daddy’s dead?” Luka asked the girl.

“I know,” she said, looking somewhere under the table.

“And do you know what ‘dead’ means?” he asked.

“He won’t be coming back, and mommy is mad at me,” she answered.

“She isn’t mad; why would she be mad?”

“Oh, yes she is; I know.”

“She’s not mad; she’s just having a hard time.”

Dijana shrugged her shoulders. It amounted to the same thing: mother was mad or she was having a hard time. There wasn’t any difference between those two things.

“I’m having a good time,” she said and laughed.

“And I’m having a good time, too,” her uncle said and slammed his glass on the wooden table. “We’ve got it good!”

“Will I always have it good?” the girl asked insistently.

“Only as good as good is good! Whoever’s got it good today will always have it good. That’s the rule, and that’s what was decided in Yalta!”

“And what’s Yalta?” she asked.

“Well, you see, that’s another story, and I don’t think this is the time,” he said and swatted with his hand as if trying to get rid of bees, knowing that this would just lead her to more questions.

“Tell me, tell me; what’s Yalta?” she begged.

“But only if you listen closely and remember everything, so you can tell if someone asks you,” he said, feigning a strict tone.

“I’ll listen. I’ll listen to the whole thing,” she said, fidgeting in her chair like Lindbergh before takeoff.

“It’s like this,” he began. “Yalta was a cellar, or rather a stable where three uncles, or rather hooligans, met.”

“Don’t talk like that,” she interrupted. “Don’t say ‘or rather.’ What are hooligans?”