Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

But the money that he’d given him for Klein had run out in two weeks, and afterward Franjo had to make do however he could. Yet that wasn’t what bothered Franjo the most — where there’s enough for one mouth, there’s enough for two, and the care of his attic guest wasn’t difficult; it was easier to put up with someone he already knew well than with someone new. There was something else that prevented him from getting a wink of sleep for nights on end. And when he did fall asleep, nightmares were quick to follow him and in them — a knife to his throat. Namely, the fact that he hadn’t been seeing Panther could only mean that the Ustashas had discovered and imprisoned him and were now torturing him, right until he confessed and revealed everything about his activities. Who knew what all they were doing to him, Franjo thought, and wondered whether Panther would be able to withstand it. He was a tough man and foolishly courageous — what Home Guard major would involve himself in smuggling Jews and communists into the woods or to the Italians? It was easier for Panther to do that work than it would be for anyone else because the Ustashas wouldn’t suspect him. But he also needed more courage: they’d hang, shoot, or cut the throat of anyone else, but they’d cut him into pieces and cook him in boiling water. Franjo was convinced for a long time that Panther had been arrested and that it was just a matter of days before the Ustashas would find out everything. But when two months passed, he concluded that no one would be able to withstand so much torture (Panther would die or give everything away), so something else must have happened to him. Franjo had no idea what that might have been, but he slept peacefully.

It wasn’t until several years after the war that Franjo the prep school janitor realized with whom he’d been dealing. He ended up holding a copy of the first edition of the monograph National Heroes of Yugoslavia, where on page one hundred twelve he would see Panther’s photograph under the name Ivan Skočibuha — a.k.a. Kameni — and then read the following:

Comrade Kameni joined the Podgrmeč partisan units in the winter of 1942.

In the recollection of Comrade Mustafa Mulalić-Olaf, it happened like this: We were sitting around the campfire when the sentry brought before us a bumpkin in a Home Guard uniform who was carrying a mortar on his back, that heavy German one that three men can hardly lift. This is me and this is my cigarette holder, said Comrade Kameni and dropped the mortar on the ground. My comrades didn’t utter a word. We looked a little at him and a little at the mortar and couldn’t believe our eyes. Nobody suspected that he was an agent-provocateur, though we weren’t always sure about comrades who left the Home Guard to join the people’s liberation movement. But a man who walks twenty-some kilometers with a mortar on his back can’t be an agent-provocateur. Comrade Kameni proved himself in the first engagement with the enemy. He grabbed the hot barrel of a German machine gun with his bare hands and tore it out of the hands of a stunned fascist. You should have seen the face of the enemy whenever Ivan Skočibuha-Kameni appeared in front of them! Around Podgrmeč his heroism has become the stuff of legend, but I can confirm that words cannot describe what Comrade Kameni was really like. No such words have been invented yet! When in the last days of the war he lost his life driving the fascists and their domestic henchmen in a panic-stricken flight across Slovenia, all of Bosnian Krajina wept for him. May his deeds be an inspiration to future generations in the struggle for socialism and a better tomorrow.

Franjo the janitor couldn’t believe his eyes as he read the hagiography of Comrade Ivan Skočibuha-Kameni in the same little room in which he’d spent his whole working life, among brooms, cleaning rags, and rusty buckets. At that time one street in a suburb already bore his name, and his bronze bust had been ceremoniously uncovered in the city park. Franjo, to be sure, could have passed by it a thousand times without recognizing Panther’s face underneath the worried brow and the visionary gaze. It wasn’t that the bust of Comrade Kameni wasn’t a likeness of Panther, especially since the famed sculptor had faithfully rendered his handsome male face. But he’d given him an expression and a seriousness that Panther had never had at any moment in his life. Good-for-nothings would say that there maybe were such moments when he looked like that: when he was sitting on the toilet. It’s only on busts that one sees that an expression is a man’s best disguise, far better than fake mustaches and beards.

Reading the entry in National Heroes of Yugoslavia, Franjo suspected that there was something dirty and smelly behind Panther’s heroism — something filthy, rotten. He looked the bust over and concluded that Comrade Skočibuha was a great fraud. Even a fool could see that if he compared the dice player to the bronze head with the vision.

Franjo would learn the nature of the lie only before his death, when on one post-retirement stroll Ferid Kodžalić, formerly a teacher in the prep school as well as an Ustasha major — on account of which he’d done fifteen years of hard labor in Foča and Zenica — told him in the strictest of confidence why the Home Guard major Ivan Skočibuha had fled to the partisans. Franjo laughed so hard at that story that tears flowed from his eyes, though it showed him to be a dupe and cost him torment, misery, and fear.

The story went like this: after playing dice for months with low-ranking officers and Banja Luka’s lowlifes and winning at the game, Panther went to the Christmas reception of the district prefect, and in a side hall into which only select people were admitted, he learned the basic rules of American poker from the Italian military attaché, Fernando Noa Marinetti, and lost his entire monthly salary that same evening at poker. He couldn’t figure out how or why he’d lost. So he quit dice and started playing poker every day. He played with experts but also with third-rate dice players whom he himself would teach the game. He lost against both.

In three months Panther’s poker debts exceeded the income of three Home Guard regiments, and since the people to whom he owed money weren’t harmless or inclined to forgiveness — all the more so because he’d flayed them at dice for years — he stole a mortar from a military warehouse and fled to the partisans. He knew that gambling debts are only paid to the victors in war. If the communists won the war, he wouldn’t owe anyone anything, and if they lost, the victors would kill them all anyway. He cared about saving his skin and did the most logical thing in the world and naturally didn’t inform anyone that Comrade Samuel F. Klein was in mortal danger in the attic of the Banja Luka prep school. Maybe he would have told someone had Klein been a sympathizer of the people’s liberation movement and not merely a ruined shipowner and a Jew. Like this he only risked his comrades finding out that he’d been charging a lot of money to save people’s skin.

However, just as he didn’t reveal his illegal dealings to the partisans, he also failed to inform the people in the network that had been working to save people, partly for altruistic and partly for material reasons, of his departure. Panther was the only one who knew who all made up the network. The others knew only two names in the conspiracy: the name of the one behind them and the name of the one ahead of them. And since he’d organized his people in such an ingenious manner, all kinds of people took part in the same work, or mission — communist sympathizers, friars, university professors, and humanists, along with professional smugglers, Ustasha and Chetnik cutthroats, lone murderers, and all manner of lowlifes who earned a fortune on the torment and misfortunes of others.