Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“So, do you love her?” Klein asked so that Ivo might quit beating around the bush.

“I love both of them,” he said as they descended a mountain path overlooking Delnice. “But that’s not the real question. The problem is that I don’t know which continent is mine. Actually, I knew that until that gringo off the coast of Florida took my American papers and I started going backward. Like a crab, and now I’m continually going backward. I said, okay old boy, you did what you did, ran away from your wife and your house; you’ll be an American, you’ll die like an American, you’ll never have any contact with her or your family again. It isn’t human, it isn’t honest, but that’s how it turned out. Nobody’s to blame for it, and I’m not even terribly guilty. And then what happened? — They sent me back to Europe like a crate of rotten apples. Now I’m here, and who the hell knows whether I’ll ever see America again? That’s how I got involved in all this. But it’s a miracle I’m even alive.”

In a way it was a miracle. Namely, the ship De Amicis, which Ivo Delavale had boarded in Portugal as a stowaway, had been attacked by Greek pirates at the Strait of Otranto. They killed most of the crew, and the only ones who got away were Ivo and two sailors. He swam and when he reached the Albanian shore, he was captured by an Italian military guard. They held him in a prison for seven days, forced him to drink castor oil, and tried to get him to confess to something. They didn’t know what kind of confession they were expecting, but he was evidently the first one they’d managed to get their hands on in the middle of a thriving smuggling route, so their ambition was to promote Ivo to the level of a serious criminal. He, however, had no idea about where he’d ended up or what was being smuggled in those parts, so he couldn’t even help himself with lies. Instead he endured the castor oil treatment, and in the end they threw him out on his ass. Afterward there was a journey through Albanian and Montenegrin mountains and gorges, encounters with Chetniks and partisans, and ferocious village guards who almost did him in because it seemed that village defenders had fewer problems in detecting enemies than any Balkan army. They saw an enemy in any stranger, and Ivo Delavale was probably the strangest character who’d ever set foot in the villages around Kolašin. The only reason they didn’t liquidate him was probably due to the fact that not even this time around did he have any idea about what they were questioning him about. He had neither heard of Sekula Drljević, nor did he have any idea about who Pavle Đurišić was and could only shrug his shoulders like the biggest idiot on earth when they slyly tried to lure him into telling which one of them he thought was more handsome. The villagers didn’t care whose beauty he preferred; they would have stuck him like a pig on account of the one or the other, but they couldn’t cut his throat if all he did was hem and haw like a fool when they mentioned either Sekula or Pavle.

After he made his way through Montenegro and crossed the Drina at Višegrad, he fell into the hands of the partisans. He felt better already because he knew a little about Marx, Engels, and Lenin and the exploitation of the American proletariat. He lied that he’d left Chicago to go fight the fascist occupiers for a just society. He fascinated his comrades with his knowledge of foreign languages. They nicknamed him “Brains,” dressed him in a tattered uniform of the Royal Army, stuck a garrison cap with a red star on his head, and sent him into combat. The next day he was captured by Croatian Home Guardsmen near Ustikolina. They took him to Sarajevo, where they turned him over to the Germans because someone had concluded that he was a prominent bandit, too smart and eloquent for an ordinary partisan. The Germans questioned him for two days and decided to transfer him to Slavonski Brod and later to somewhere else. Probably to a concentration camp. But near Doboj the partisans attacked the column of trucks he was in and freed him. He promptly lied and told them that he’d been captured on his way to Dubrovnik, where he’d been sent on orders from the staff of the supreme command, and requested that they immediately allow him to continue his trip. He was lucky that this was one of the more poorly integrated and organized units, in which no one knew how to establish contact with the supreme command and verify Ivo’s account. But they didn’t even suspect him because he made a serious impression on them. And so they decided to convey him to Dubrovnik via an illegal network, and in fact via Ivan Skočibuha — a.k.a. Panther — and his men. The first and last station on that trip was the attic of the Banja Luka prep school.

“That’s how it is,” said Klein instructively. “When you mess with life a lot, then life starts messing with you back.” Ivo didn’t know what to say to him. Samuel was right. But if everything else was leading to harm and ruin, at least he’d found a friend.

As in a romantic comedy from the early days of talking movies, they hugged and kissed one another on the Rijeka promenade, resolved to survive the war and travel their route from Banja Luka to the sea once again by car. They would stop at all the taverns, which after the war would practically line the roads. And they would drink, eat, and carouse until dawn. A dawn for every tavern. Samuel F. Klein believed in their agreement, at least until the moment he went into the cellar office of Erwin Stieglitz, who would provide him with forged papers in the name of Gustav Toehni, with which he would journey to London and on to Palestine, while Ivo Delavale knew then that he would never see Samuel again. In the catalogue of his friends, Klein would occupy an important spot, but like the others with whom he’d gone to school, drunk, sailed, or met at various ends and beginnings of the world, he too would be a man without an address, lost in a universe of faces and voices. A friend who disappears after the first parting. Ivo had never made anything of the accidental encounters he’d experienced that would last him his whole life, and those are the only kind men have. True, his friends hadn’t made much of an effort themselves, in the mistaken belief that a man couldn’t disappear just like that or appear randomly again, bursting through one’s doorway or coming along like a random passerby in any city anywhere in the world. And they would think that it was him — that it was his handsome head appearing above a crowd of people in the bowels of the city market, in front of a mosque at the time of the jumu ’ ah prayer, or in the distance at the end of Kalelarga Street. They would run to call to him, but it wouldn’t be Ivo, not even someone who looked like him. No matter how much they were disappointed, their feeling that a friendship had been spoiled by nothing would be even greater. Ivo hadn’t betrayed any of those men before he disappeared from their lives.

Samuel F. Klein thought he saw Delavale’s phantom ten or so times in various places in Syria, Egypt, and Israel, and he was always equally sure that it was him. The last time was in Haifa, ten days before he died. He surfaced out of a mound of oranges, in a worker’s outfit, with a notebook in which he was writing something. He wasn’t any older than the day they parted on the Rijeka promenade. Klein tried to walk up to him, but by the time he’d made his thirty small steps and gone ten full meters, which took several minutes, both the oranges and the worker had disappeared, and there wasn’t anything but the parking lot of a construction company where cranes, bulldozers, excavators, and trench diggers waited, ready to build houses for poor Russian and Ukrainian Jews, somewhere on a rectangular desert border, within rifle shot of enemy armies or only a stone’s throw away from Arab poor folk. That was the spot of the first and last hallucination of Samuel F. Klein. On that spot, if metaphysical truths make sense, there remained forever a monument to Ivo Delavale, a sailor on the Leonica and a brave man who valued the life of a friend as much as his own, who had compassion for all he knew and those he didn’t, and who had poured tears on the grave of a Gypsy orchestra.