Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

The soldiers and policemen forgot about the Jews because in such circumstances they were of no concern to anyone. Not to General Carmona, not to his minister of finance Oliveira Salazar, nor to their Estado Novo. Far from its imperial glory, somewhere on the very fringe of Europe, it had been caught in the midst of an ordinary storm. Sensing what the storm meant, the people ran, into the wind and in all directions, and so two hours later, when the storm subsided, not a single passenger from the Zamzam was still in the port of Figuera de Foz. The ship was gone too because the sea had torn it apart. Or maybe it had disappeared, following the steps of its real captain. Those were the ’40s, and such things were possible. People, cities, freight trains, and whole nations were disappearing, and so why wouldn’t a single ship disappear too? Up into the sky, along with Chagall’s fellow villagers.

Soldiers roamed the docks in vain, their rifles at the ready, and they tried in vain to figure out whether the ship full of Jews had really existed or whether it had been an apparition, another miracle à la Fátima that the Virgin uses to warn people of something they’ll never comprehend anyway.

In Setúbal, after two weeks of hiding and sleeping in the cellars of abandoned houses on the seashore, Ivo Delavale boarded the Italian merchant ship De Amicis as a stowaway. For three days and nights he didn’t emerge from a container full of oranges, and then, figuring that they could no longer send him back, he went out on deck and turned himself in. Instead of locking him in the hold, beating him up, or at least assigning him to the cook to peel potatoes, Captain Gordone and the crew split their sides laughing at a man who’d fed himself on unripe oranges for three days, and then they couldn’t believe that he was fleeing to Italy from Portugal. He told them that he was going home, that he hadn’t seen his wife in a long time and no longer cared how near he was to the front lines. The war was everywhere; it had engulfed the entire world, and it didn’t matter whether you were in Brazil or Dalmatia. Gordone shook his head: “Oh, yes, it does matter, but if he loves his wife so much, then let him go right ahead; let him see what real war is like.” Apart from the devil having gotten him to go on the hunt for German submarines with a gray-haired fantast, Ivo Delavale hadn’t really seen war or even thought much about it. In fact, he thought about it as much as the average American, as much as Diana, who, usually before her period or during a full moon, would fall into a fright about a Japanese paratroop drop on Chicago. But since the coast guard sergeant had taken his papers and he’d been continually traveling in the opposite direction from what he wanted, not knowing whether he was dreaming or everything was really happening to him, Ivo had begun to imagine war too as one more personal stroke of bad luck. Something that would spoil his plans for life but wouldn’t cost him his head. Here he saw a difference between himself and the Jews on the Zamzam. No matter how much he pitied those people, empathized with them, and was ready to help them, they were still something like Martians to him. At least as far as he was concerned, the Second World War had smashed the globe into several planets. At the time when the war began, Ivo was in America and could consider himself an American.

The fact that the funny little man in the prep school attic was Samuel F. Klein, the man from the photograph at the head of the dining hall of the beautiful Leonica, was only one in a series of oddities that had happened to him, but it was the first that he took to be a sign of fate.

“Don’t you be afraid; I’ll carry you to the sea like a sack of potatoes,” he told him and dragged him out into the night almost by force. Klein squealed like a little animal but quit putting up a fight. Hypnotized by fear, he found himself under a wide starry sky, on a cobbled pavement that reflected the moonlight and looked almost like it was plated with silver. That much silver could buy up all the souls in that country.

“Conquistadors,” Klein whispered.

“What?” Ivo asked, turning around.

“Nothing,” said the little man, tiptoeing, frightened and enthused. His fear came from noises that echoed across through the market district, betraying every living being, and his enthusiasm was made of the silver and shadows, the gleaming cobblestones and dark upper-story porches, and the sky, which was so vast and black that the stars gleamed brightly, like a thousand suns. He felt like explaining all that to his sailor, first his discovery of the silver, gold, and precious stones and the fact that riches were more valuable to people than life itself. And why wouldn’t they be when the primeval image was so beautiful, there in the sky and on the cobblestones? And was there any living creature that would see more in its own flesh and bone than this miracle? He also wanted to tell him about the way that silver and gold are turned into money, securities, and checks, into things stripped of all beauty but that still found their backing in it. And he would also have told him that there wouldn’t be anything if it weren’t for fear. And living creatures don’t notice anything until they become very frightened and their lives hang on a thread. Klein hurried along with small steps and tried to remember everything that he had to tell the sailor if he survived that night. There was a lot, the bulk of which would be forgotten. Which wasn’t a great pity because if he thought about it, it was all babbling, and he was a babbler. That was what people thought of him, and for all he cared, they could think it because they were right. And so it was enough to repeat “Conquistadors.” And he’d already said enough, too much for what he was. He hadn’t accepted anything in life completely, nor had he thought about anything long enough to be able to say now: Look, I’ve been thinking about such-and-such all my life, and I’ve concluded such-and-such, and there is such-and-such benefit from that! There was no benefit, he thought, as he followed Ivo’s steps. Well, if that man hadn’t been in front of him, he wouldn’t have even known where to go. But Ivo certainly did. God forbid he didn’t!

Ivo, of course, had no idea in which direction they should go. Franjo the janitor had kicked them out of the prep school without any instructions about the schedules and routes of the Ustasha patrols and the easiest way to get out of the city.

“If you’re good men, you won’t give me away,” he said and slipped into the darkness. And from there they were on their own.

They walked through the market district for two full hours without Klein’s noticing that they were going in circles and that they had passed by the Hilmina Inn twice. Ivo’s hands were sweaty; his heart pounded against his breastbone. He felt panic coming over him and that with every moment he was further away from exiting that labyrinth. He silently cursed the Turks and their architectural logic, cursed Emperor Franz Joseph, who had only built his villas, mansions, shops, and ironbound storefronts to fit into it. None of them differed from any of the others at all. There was that deadly oriental need not to run afoul of your neighbor, to build a shop that wouldn’t be an inch higher than his and wouldn’t differ in color or form, so that one day when someone had a need to flee through the market district, he would go in circles like a caged mouse in a biology lab.

Nevertheless, they finally slipped out of the city without running into anyone, which Ivo counted among the signs of luck, whereas Klein didn’t even notice. They reached the first groves and stands of willow trees along the Vrbas River and then a shed in which they would spend the day hidden in the hay. There the little man would sneeze, cough, and whine and raise a ruckus loud enough, Ivo thought, to draw the attention of three German armies and Pavelić’s bodyguard. But nothing like that happened. Not the first day, nor during the next three months of their journey together. Whenever they hid in hay or walked through mowed meadows, Klein sneezed and coughed, as if he were just asking for trouble. Soon Ivo grew used to it and managed to convince himself that they weren’t fated to die or fall into the hands of the army.