Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Klein dreamed an old dream of his, which had followed him since the day he’d started school as a boy, in which he’d lost his left shoe in the middle of a street and didn’t know how that had happened to him and was looking for it. Sometimes he awoke from that dream in sweat and tears, desperate because he had to return to his father and mother missing a shoe. But over the years he’d grown accustomed to his dream and accepted it as nightly entertainment and a respite from all his daily worries. He sought his lost shoe leisurely, putting off waking up and knowing that he wouldn’t find it because he hadn’t ever found it before, and who knew what would happen to his dream if the shoe ever turned up? Maybe he’d die then, he thought, and maybe he would really die if he found it in the dream. He knew, at least while he was asleep, that that part of the dream was far away.

And so, as Klein sought his shoe, the sound of a fiddle insinuated itself into his thoughts. It was playing a melancholy Bosnian song, and an accordion soon joined in, and when a tambourine sounded, Klein realized that something was wrong with his dream. He quit looking for the shoe and tried to remember if a song had ever been playing in these circumstances before or whether the search had proceeded in silence. He couldn’t summon any kind of sound from his memory. But no silence either. Does an instrument play in dreams or not? Are there colors and odors in dreams?

So he woke up, right when the horns blared. Every hair on his arms was standing on end. He firmly clutched the edges of the quilt and caught sight of Ivo’s eyes, which were bulging with fear. Though he’d already woken up at the first tone of the fiddle, he couldn’t figure out what was going on either.

They stared at one another while a hoarse male voice tried to sing above the horns and the accordion. It sang, “On the far bank of the Pliva there grows a blade of grass,” and then finished even louder: “And every foreign land is a sorrowful expanse.”

When the song was over, someone shouted, “Play ‘Zagreb Girls’!” The horns started up; one could hear squeals and male voices whooping, and a whole choir began to sing: “A young Ustasha under the banner, the battle rages on, the Ustasha banner waves, for freedom and for the home, the Croatian home.”

Klein shuddered as if someone had connected him to an electric current. “Samuel won’t, he won’t,” he whispered to himself, “he won’t, Samuel won’t.” He repeated the formula that protected him from the dark. His grandmother had said, “He won’t, Samuel won’t,” when he lay dying from diphtheria. She had also said, “He won’t, Samuel won’t,” when he had fallen off a fence and broken his leg. This was the first time that Samuel told himself, “He won’t, Samuel won’t.”

They lay at the opening between the roof and the attic floor, which in places was thirty centimeters wide and through which one could see the yard in front of the house and a campfire in the middle of it. Fifteen men in black uniforms were sitting cross-legged in a semicircle on the bare ground. On the other side of the fire were twelve musicians, unbelievably tattered, playing a song about a sweet little Marijana. At their backs were two men in black uniforms with automatic rifles across their chests. The horns gleamed in the firelight and didn’t fit in with the somber scene. If it weren’t for those instruments, the men would have been mere shadows — those who were sitting, the musicians, and the motionless guards. What Klein saw seemed more unreal than his dream, and the music that came from the instruments fit into this scene less than his eternal search for his shoe. It was as if someone had added music to a dead picture in the belief that they could thereby bring it to life. But instead it became more lifeless.

“Play faster!” bellowed a motionless figure next to the fire, and the orchestra started playing faster.

“Sing to me, sing, sing, o falcon, keep away, o falcon,” a voice wailed hoarsely.

“Even faster; we don’t have time!”

They played even faster, each musician playing for himself and in harmony with his own abilities, which were different in each of them, just as fear is different in every man, so they no longer sounded like an ensemble but like musicians who’d begun a song out of tempo with one another: one had started it the day before, another ten years ago, and there was little chance of them ever finding the same key and tempo.

“Sto-o-o-p!” The one who’d been giving orders from the beginning got up from the ground and pulled out his revolver. The others didn’t move.

“And now you’ll play ‘Wide Is the Danube, Flat Is Srijem’ slowly, but so it sounds like in the theater, without faking it. Whoever fakes it will get a bullet between the eyes.”

Silence followed. Evidently no one dared to begin first. Their hands trembled in the nighttime breeze. From the northern reaches, from Pannonia and even farther, maybe even from Siberia or the dark seas of the north, there arrived a current of air that on a night like this in other circumstances might have had a sobering effect on men drinking brandy who were carried away by the lightness of the summer and led them to fall silent for a moment when each would break off a little piece of cheese from a plate painted with three red roses, put it in his mouth, and lose himself in thought about the salt in his body.

“A raid!” shouted the man with the revolver, and someone laughed.

“Look, the fiddler wet his pants,” said the one who’d laughed and pointed his finger at the old man with the violin, who had a stream running down his pant leg. At the same time two other streams started running down his cheeks. Only in silent films could you see so many tears on one face. The man in black put the muzzle of his revolver to his temple.

“Play! ‘Wide Is the Danube, Flat Is Srijem,’” he ordered. “Just you, and then the others will too.” The old man brought the instrument to his cheek, lowered the bow onto the strings, and glanced at the man with the revolver. The round lips of the muzzle pushed into the softest bones of his head, pressing them slightly apart.

He closed his eyes and drew the bow across a string. An unsteady sound came forth, like the creaking of the door of a dollhouse. The man with the revolver swallowed and said, “I think you started the wrong song!”

Then there was a shot, not too loud, as if someone had hit a rock in a creek bed with a wet shirt. The man’s head exploded, its tissue sizzled on the coals of the campfire, and he collapsed sideways and lay there.

In the flames one could clearly see an open, empty skull, like the bottom of a dirty soup bowl. Tufts of hair remained above it, and at the bottom, where there was the clear outline of a crater, as if cut out with a diamond knife, there were human lips and a black mustache, unscathed.

No one moved. The men in the uniforms sat like children watching a puppet show, with those in the back straining to get a better view. The two with the automatic rifles looked disappointed. From their perspective the scene was uninteresting. That body, as far as they were concerned, could be the body of someone sleeping. They couldn’t see what the bullet had done to the man’s head, and they weren’t too happy about that. Ivo and Klein had the view from the gallery, from the royal box. At the base of the skull there was a gnarl; either a piece of tissue had stuck to the bone or the flames of the fire cast a shadow that made it look like there was something there when there actually wasn’t.

Samuel F. Klein would never feel as protected as he did then; a small god whose immortality was unquestionable, ashamed because of everything that he could or should have felt then, everything that makes someone human. He felt an inner need to remove the remaining piece of tissue or move the body so the fire didn’t cast false shadows on it and death would become a completely round piece of porcelain from the table before a Sunday lunch. That aberrant feeling would torment him to the end of his days. He would free himself of everything and forget his fear and the moments when he thought his soul was falling into a thousand rays of light that nothing could ever bring back together. But the fact that he’d seen in a murdered man only an aesthetic fact, the bottom of a pretty porcelain soup dish, gave him no peace.