Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Let’s go!” he ordered. Klein shook the dust off his pants, wishing to act as if nothing had happened. He could walk, think about whatever he wanted. He was calm and collected and felt as he did every day. Weeks of walking and wandering around had strengthened him, and he was proud of himself. He let these thoughts roll around in his mind.

“Someone should bury these people,” he said when they went outside.

“Someone should,” Ivo agreed.

“We don’t have anything to do it with,” Klein said.

“Even if we did, it would take us three days to bury them,” Ivo said.

“Maybe even longer,” said Klein.

They didn’t feel like going; they couldn’t leave just like that. This was one of those rare occasions when both the one and the other felt the same way at the same time. They were confused and didn’t know what one should do in such circumstances — as if such situations occurred at other times and there were people who knew.

“Do you know a prayer?” Klein asked.

“Don’t start that,” said Ivo.

“Well what should we do?”

“I don’t know. .”

“I can’t just leave people like that,” Klein said and paused, as if he were imagining what kind of people they were. “They were alive! We saw them while they were alive. .”

“Yes, we sure did,” Ivo said bitterly.

Then he started toward the dead men. Klein just watched him. He bent over the first one, the little bass tambouritza player, the youngest one in the ensemble, touched his hand, and whispered something to him. He touched the second one, and the third, and all of them to the last one, saying something that Klein couldn’t hear.

“What did you say to them?” he asked when they had gone a couple of miles.

“Fortaleza, Natal, Joao Pessoa, Sergipe, Espirito Santo, Nova Iguacu, Vitoria, Celatina, Sao Luis, Curtiba, Sao Mateus, Santa Cruz Cabrália. That’s what I said to them,” Ivo answered, and with every word he felt sobs welling up in his throat.

“What kind of prayer is that?”

“It’s not a prayer. Those are towns on the Brazilian coast. Beautiful places, one more beautiful than the next,” Delavale said and started crying.

They stood under a huge willow tree, at the bank of a creek that was so narrow that a child could step across it but loud as little creeks seem when one hasn’t taken a good drink from them. And they both wept, each from his own sorrow, for the twelve dead Gypsies. For plates of goulash eaten in the middle of a Hungarian plain in late autumn in 1930-something. For Balkan dictators with little black mustaches whose visits to Paris were reported in the yellow press. For embroidered wedding towels whipped in the wind over the Vrbas River as a bride and groom ran to get out of the rain. For a procession that saw a mayor’s son off to the army while his drunken godfather poured brandy on anthills. For the battles of Kajmakčalan and Mohacs Field. For defeats and victories celebrated in song and sealed behind seven locks of the Royal Bank in Bucharest. For a dead Croatian poet in a Spanish almshouse. For Mary’s Congregation of Young Women, which in 1937 at number 7 Cracow Street was celebrating its anniversary and had hired Gypsies to play the music because they were cheaper than the orchestra of the Hotel Europa. For the Majdan Hardware and Precious Metals Shop owned by Isidor A. Altarc, Klein’s uncle, about whom he’d heard nothing for a year already. For the Orfelin bookstore, owned by Milutin D. Stanojević, on St. Sava Street in Belgrade, where in 1932 Ivo had bought Regina an autograph album with the title It Is Written in My Heart, I Love You Most, and she’d known who’d sent it to her in the mail, even though he was too shy to sign his name. For a Russian émigré who a year later jumped from the Revelin fortress and who was buried along the cemetery wall, without a name or a marker. For the clear juice of rose petals sold on the Split quay on the day the news arrived that King Aleksandar had been assassinated, when the gendarmerie had forbidden the people to drink rose juice as a sign of mourning, except for children younger than twelve. For party-colored Zagreb umbrellas that leaked drops of rain. For sea crabs on the beach in Crikvenica in late 1912, as tuberculosis patients from Prague and Požun lay dying in chaises longues with a view of the sunset. For the leather merchant Majir Alkalaj, who upholstered the command cabin of the ship Leonica with quality pigskin. For the Professional Association of Cinemas of Sava Province at number 6 Warsaw Street in Zagreb, which ordered reels of the newest American movies through Samuel F. Klein but whose business was ruined after a year because Rudolph Valentino died. For the copper trays and pots from the bazaar by the Old Bridge in Mostar, which Klein bought for his business partners in Hamburg and Ostend. For the Zagreb musicians who played in variety shows in Paris and London. For the blind lottery ticket vendor in the Vinkovci railway station who repeated the call, “Mouse of white, my luck’s so bright!” and in a cage on his stand was an enormous gray rat. For the Albanian king, whose escort included three fierce Ottoman soldiers and whose ferocity seemed funny to the crowds in Paris because each one was more than eighty years old. For the criers who in 1935 went through the streets and lanes of Livno, Duvno, and Bugoj beating drums and advertising Bata shoes, “which make paupers feel like kings.” For the ship sirens that wailed mournfully before the body of Stjepan Radić in August of 1928, while the wooden doors on the women’s cabins slammed in a bitter wind and the lifeguards searched for gold on the beaches out of boredom. For the mustached revolutionaries and fighters who struggled against the tobacco monopoly and whom the gendarmerie led in chains down Stradun as children ran alongside them and spat on them. For the clockmaker Josef Kopelman of number 55 Aleksandar Street, Sarajevo, who had sold Klein a pocket watch with an engraved monogram of a Mexican prince, and for doctor Grigorij Merkulov of number 71 on the same street, to whom he’d gone after he’d gotten crabs in the Elezar & Sons hostel in Konjic. For the little boats that had drifted around in the harbor of Korčula after someone unmoored them one night as some kind of payback.

Samuel F. Klein and Ivo Delavale wept until they could weep no more, under that willow, each one for his own story, which was connected in some way (understandable to their souls) to the twelve dead Gypsies, and they didn’t say anything to one another. A brotherhood of tears, which was stronger than a brotherhood of blood because it wasn’t something they decided on or a matter of male friendship, brought them closer together and changed something in the way they experienced one another.

Over the next two months, the time that it took for them to reach the sea in the autumn of 1942, traveling at night and during the day and staying in one place for five or six days at a time because they would hear shooting on the next hill, Ivo told Klein the story of his two women on two continents. Of one who was his, with whom he’d gotten married and intended to spend his life and of another, whom he loved more than anyone in the world and with whom he’d become an American. She knew that he was married somewhere over there in Europe, but that place seemed so far away to her that nothing that happened there could reach her heart. If he by chance turned to look at a pretty girl on the streets of Chicago, she was jealous, but she felt nothing regarding Ivo’s wife. Or he only thought she didn’t, Klein thought. He didn’t tell his real wife anything about the American girl because — in his exact words — she would have pulled out his fingernails and never let him go to sea again. For her, Ivo speculated, America was much closer than Europe was for the American girl. Such are our men and women. Although they live on the edge of the world, in the remotest provinces of all except maybe for those of Russia, they experience the whole world as someplace close by so that what happens in Chicago is just as shameful as what happens in Čapljina.