Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Was I crazy?” he would ask a Coptic priest in ’50-something in Jerusalem. The priest would stroke his cheek as he would a boy who’d come for religious instruction and wouldn’t answer. God knew what that old Copt thought or whether he understood the story at all.

“Captain, don’t, for Christ’s sake!” the horn player pleaded, falling to his knees. The man with the revolver grabbed him by the ears; the young man groaned in pain.

“What did you say, you Gypsy shit?” the man with the revolver asked, enraged.

“Don’t in the name of Allah!” the horn player said, misunderstanding the rebuke, which enraged the man more, and he jerked on his ear. He was trying to pull it off, but it didn’t work because the man’s earlobe kept slipping between his index finger and his thumb; the ear struggled like an eel, and no amount of force could take firm hold of it. That brought laughter from the group of men sitting on the other side of the fire.

The man with the revolver didn’t think that they were laughing at the horn player’s expense, especially after his ear had slipped between the captain’s fingers for the fifth or sixth time and he had covered his ears with his palms and started whining and praying at the top of his lungs. But he was no longer invoking God in any of his names, but Pavelić, the Independent State of Croatia, and his own pure Catholic origins, which were known to everyone in Pitomača and to Zovko, the canon in Novska. It was pure chance that he, a baptized Catholic, had ended up in a Gypsy ensemble.

His outcry made the captain waver for a moment. Maybe the Gypsy wasn’t lying, and maybe he wasn’t a Gypsy at all? His skin wasn’t that dark, there were boys in the company with darker skin, and hardly anyone would see a Gypsy in that loudmouth, except maybe because of his clothes. But then he realized what a shame it would be if he yielded now. If he said, “Yeah, you’re not a Gypsy, I was wrong!” and kicked him in the butt and sent him home, half the company would think that Captain Heinrich was a softy, and the other half would think he was an idiot because a Gypsy had managed to convince him that he was a Croat, and only a blind man couldn’t see the difference between a Gypsy and a Croat, even if they each had an equally dark complexion. Even if the Gypsy had blue eyes.

“Well why didn’t you say so, dammit? A big Croat! And I thought you were one of Pharaoh’s people. Hey, no problem, we’ll check that out now. C’mon over here for a bit,” Captain Heinrich said, luring the horn player to get up. “Now bend down here, right, just like that, so I can see your face in the fire.”

The horn player stopped a couple of feet from the fire and smiled, pleasantly assured of his salvation.

“Good; now let’s see, how could I have been so mistaken?” Heinrich asked in surprise and tapped the horn player on the back of his head, as if he were petting a good hunting dog. Then he suddenly grabbed his hair and, moving like a Croatian national athlete, he knocked one of his feet out from under him, and the horn player slammed down on the ground and his face went right into the fire. Heinrich held him by the hair and pushed his head deeper into the charred oak logs. The horn player flailed with his hands and feet, trying to extricate himself.

In the dead silence the only thing that could be heard were the horn player’s hands and feet pounding the ground. It sounded like a big bear crossing a dusty country road.

Heinrich was sweating from the exertion, and the fire probably singed his hand. A few times it seemed that he was going to let up and the horn player would pull his head out of the coals, but then the captain would summon a little more strength from somewhere and press his head harder. That was the strength that a man doesn’t know he has until he’s found himself in mortal danger or in a position to save his loved ones or, which was perhaps the strongest motive, to prove his strength before a crowd of onlookers. To keep from giving up and yielding to the fire and the desperate struggling of the victim, Captain Antun Heinrich was probably motivated most by the thought that the men in his company, at least one among them, maybe two, seven, or all of them, would be struck with wonder at his power, that they would realize what kind of a he-man they were watching through the flames of the campfire as he sweated and struggled but didn’t give up. Because a real Ustasha never gave up, a real man who didn’t shrink from wolves and wild animals, from hellish fires, enemies, and fear, from a heart that trembled in his chest and asked, “What is that you’re doing, black Antun? You’ll burn in hell for this!”

Who cared about hell? — The whole world could go to hell, but until then one had to carry out what his children and their children’s children would remember and be grateful for as they prayed over their graves for the homeland and for peace.

Antun Heinrich held out longer than anyone would have thought. The horn player’s body struggled and resisted for ten whole minutes. Maybe more. Or maybe it only seemed so to those who were watching. Maybe he pushed his head too deep and maybe the horn player’s face extinguished the coals, but the body was alive for just as long as it takes to bake a potato. After it finally stopped moving, the captain kept holding the head in the fire a little longer so that no one would get the idea that he couldn’t endure it any longer, and then he pulled it out. Klein closed his eyes.

Before a cock could crow twice, everyone in the Gypsy ensemble was killed with knives, fire, and bullets. Captain Heinrich killed nine of them with his own hands and left the men who played the accordion, the bass tambouritza, and the second horn to the guards. They performed their task without the least amount of passion. They ordered all three of them to kneel and cut their throats with hunting knives. And so, sometime around two thirty in the morning, the picnic came to an end. The men all got up off the ground complaining of pains in their knees and of the hard soldier’s life in which you have neither chairs nor beds. They spread out their gray army blankets and soon fell asleep amid the scattered instruments, a few meters distant from the dead bodies. Captain Heinrich didn’t assign anyone for sentry duty. He either forgot about it due to his physical exhaustion and weariness or he knew that there weren’t any partisans in the area.

Samuel F. Klein and Ivo Delavale kept watching from the attic for a long time, looking at the men who were snoring and farting loudly, moaning in their sleep, and calling to their mothers, passing from a time of war to a time of peace and from their adult male bodies into the souls of children. One could hear them crying in their sleep, the way armies cry since there has been a world and wars in it, with the sadness of men who find themselves far from their wives and mothers, from their own lives and everyday civilian gentleness.

“If I were a soldier,” Klein whispered, “I’d go down there, steal up to the nearest rifle, and kill all of them. If I were only a soldier,” he repeated as if it were something he longed for. Ivo didn’t answer. His tongue was stuck to his palate or had turned into a smooth chunk of stone, into a pillar of salt that melted in his mouth, which made him thirstier and thirstier, and he cursed himself, his stupid head, because he hadn’t filled their bottles with water. It seemed to him that nothing in his mouth could make a sound any more and that he would die of thirst before the morning. He grabbed Samuel by the arm and signaled with his finger to be quiet. They remained awake until the morning. They watched the soldiers wake up, eat breakfast, pack their things, and leave. Then they watched the extinguished campfire, the horns gleaming in the sun, and the dead men. It wasn’t until around ten that Ivo moved.