Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

From time to time answers came from Lloyd’s and George J. Robinson & Sons, in which they directed Regina to the Yugoslav embassies in London and Washington. A letter also came from Samuel F. Klein, a prewar shipbuilder in Trieste who was living in Haifa in 1951. He wrote her that he didn’t know anything about the fate of his four ships but that all the papers had burned in the fires that had been lit by the black shirts in 1938, that he was sorry that the lady couldn’t locate her brother but was surprised that she was only looking for him on account of the inheritance: “My advice to you is to look for him for some other, more noble reasons. Then the dear Lord will grant that you find him!”

She shed a tear at those words and pitied a man whom fate had led to say such things. That couldn’t be anything other than fate, she thought: from some, death takes away everyone they loved and all those who never did any wrong. She didn’t know that Samuel F. Klein could have told her at least part of the truth about Ivo if she’d only asked the right questions instead of asking for a list of sailors on the ship Leonica. And maybe Klein would have recognized who was writing to him if she’d written her surname as it was properly spelled. Or maybe he even knew and that was the reason why he was telling her to find better and more noble reasons for her search. It’s a difficult claim to make, but it wasn’t impossible that Samuel F. Klein might have saved Regina Delavale in more fortunate circumstances or if her rage had been a little softer and more reasonable. Maybe it would have been enough for her to have known who in fact Samuel F. Klein was.

In the winter of 1942, Samuel F. Klein was a captive in the attic of the Banja Luka prep school. No one had actually captured him; even so, he didn’t dare go out because he was a son of Abraham, one of those whom you could recognize by their noses, as people said. But Klein was given away by more than his big, eagle-like nose, which reached almost all the way down to his chin: he looked just like one of those Nazi character sketches. He was short and hunched, with a narrow chest and legs that were bowed as if he were riding a barrel; he had beady eyes, bushy black eyebrows, and hair that was always greasy (none of the shampoos and pomades he was able to get in good times from London and Paris had helped). Had he gone down from the prep school attic, he wouldn’t have reached Gospodska Street before someone nabbed him. If not the Ustashas, then some conscientious citizens, and there were as many of those in Banja Luka as anywhere else in ordinary times and in states with no racist laws on the books. People who reported stray dogs to the city dog pound would also report Jews and Gypsies after the establishment of the great German Reich or any other Reich.

Klein thought about this as he lay on the dusty ottoman and played with a large school globe. He was bothered by a single memory: in 1919 he’d been sitting in his nephew Hugo’s law office in Sušak, and Hugo, excited about the final establishment of authority and normal life, telephoned the local mayor and warned him of the need to establish a city dog pound because stray dogs had reproduced so much during the war years and the years of anarchy that they threatened epidemics of infectious diseases. Not only did Samuel not object, but he agreed with his nephew and was genuinely surprised by the mayor’s lack of interest in the problem and the rude manner in which he got rid of the Sušak lawyer on the telephone.

Had the dogs really disturbed them? Had they been aggressive, and did their nightly barking annoy the two of them? No matter how he tried to invent positive answers, Samuel F. Klein couldn’t remember a single negative experience with dogs in Sušak. Shaggy and hungry, they steered clear of people and ran when they saw a man fifty meters away. They seemed fairly disappointed by the entire race of bipeds. The dogs of Sušak, Klein thought, had reached a third evolutionary phase: from their wild ancestors and their docile forefathers there had arisen the contemporary kind of dogs: those resigned to their fate, creatures of fear, terror, and philosophical melancholy. When they were left alone, they lay on trash heaps and blinked in the sunlight. Apart from their communication with each other, that was their only interaction with the outside world. The sun alone didn’t threaten them with evil.

Why then had those dogs bothered him and his nephew Hugo? He realized that the dogs hadn’t bothered them. Rather, they’d transformed their euphoria at the birth of a new state into a feeling that measures needed to be taken against stray dogs. It was one of numerous hygienic imperatives. And in times when states were being built, men lived on imperatives. If they hadn’t been so enthusiastic about their new state, they would have in all likelihood realized that there were much greater threats to public hygiene than dogs. Or they wouldn’t have thought about public hygiene at all. Similar rules were in effect now, and because of them he didn’t dare leave the attic. The only difference lay in the fact that the need for dog pounds had been replaced by the need for camps, and the elimination of stray dogs had in the contemporary world been turned into the elimination of Jews, Gypsies, and Orthodox Christians. That is, people. Men weren’t the same as dogs, but the excitement that occurred when a Reich or another state came into being didn’t recognize the difference between men and dogs.

The question that Klein pondered most, and to which there was no answer, was this: would he, if he weren’t a son of Abraham, be an alert and conscientious citizen of the new state and report bipeds without pedigrees? He didn’t understand how people could become wild beasts overnight, and he tried to convince himself that this couldn’t ever happen to him. But then he would remember 1919, the pins with the likeness of King Petar the Liberator; anxious looks toward Rijeka, which people guessed was going to go to the Italians; and the relief that he’d felt when his nephew Hugo decided to offer their joint contribution to the birth of a new state. He took no consolation in the fact that nothing had come of the dog pound or that both of them would have been sorry had they seen people hunting down dogs. The fact that he’d felt or done something on account of the state that he otherwise wouldn’t have was indisputable. Patriotism dribbled all around like honey from a silver spoon, and it sought blood with which it could mix. Whether it was the blood of dogs or men depended more on the nature of the newborn state than it did on the souls that were the source of the patriotism. The new state of 1919 left its citizens the freedom to choose their victims, and so Samuel and Hugo chose stray dogs; the state of 1941 stated clearly in its laws whose blood it sought. And this was written out on every street corner, every signboard, on the emblem and the flag. It was manifest in its military and police uniforms, their colors and cut, the death’s heads and heroic songs of elite units. Patriotism was honey and blood. The living were divided into patriots and those beings whose blood was to be sacrificed. A month of staying in the prep school was enough for Samuel F. Klein to swear that he would never love another state again.

He’d come to Banja Luka in the autumn of 1941 from the village of štivor near Prnjavor, traveling on the horse-drawn wagon of Husnija Hadžalić, under some hay that gave him allergy attacks. He’d thought that he was going to suffocate a dozen times or so in two days. But worse than that was the fact that Husnija, otherwise a gem of a person, had no idea what an allergy was. He was sticking his own neck out to save Klein’s; both of them would have been executed on the spot if someone had discovered a Jew under the hay. And he was deeply disappointed in the man whom he was trying to save: