Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Because of all that it is perhaps likely that when Klein read the signature of Regina Della Valle at the end of a fairly impudent but at the same time bureaucratic and extremely private message, he recognized one of Ivo’s two loves. Maybe he thought bitterly that such a woman wasn’t worthy of him; maybe he was comforted by his belief that Ivo was now in America with that other, better love. But maybe he had something else in mind, something that human fantasy couldn’t reach and remained hidden in documents of public and private history. Yet the fact remains that his response was too heartfelt and deep, stripped of all farcical style and frivolity, for anyone to believe that he’d sent it to someone about whom he knew nothing and who actually didn’t concern him.

“My advice to you is to look for him for some other, more noble, reason. Then the dear Lord will grant that you find him!” That was what Samuel F. Klein wrote to Regina Delavale when she tried to inquire about a nonexistent brother in order to find out the truth about the lover of her deceased husband.

Behind Regina’s complex formula, and the muddled reasons that led to it, were lies that were supposed to hide the blind desire for revenge. In that desire Regina was a product of her time. Because of unrequited loves, betrayals, and slanders people took revenge on one another. But instead of the real reasons, which leaders in ceremonies of collective hysteria discovered in the souls of their people, they invented lies in the face of revenge. Samuel F. Klein’s answer was also typical. In it, though an atheist, he invoked the Lord and His will. That was an example of poetry after Auschwitz: God would provide what people hadn’t, though it was clear that God was no longer among men.

Nor was Regina’s invention of a brother for whom she was searching unusual either. Besides Luka, who was alive and well in 1951, when she was writing to Haifa, and Bepo, who’d died two years earlier in the Sarajevo insane asylum, she had three more brothers: Lino, Đuzepe, and Đovani. All three were deceased. Lino had died from the Spanish flu during the First World War. As for Đuzepe and Đovani, there might still be something to say about the reasons why their fates weren’t of great concern to their sister. Maybe. But Regina didn’t see any kind of miracle in her brothers; they certainly weren’t miraculous enough for her to superstitiously worry about shielding them from curses. Where there were five of them, she could invent a sixth.

On the twelfth of June, 1940, someone stole Đovani Sikirić’s wallet and student ID on the Place de la Concorde. It happened late in the afternoon, when, as during the entire previous week, most of the cafés and shops were closed. Few people were out on the street; everyone was behind closed windows and lowered shutters, awaiting the moment when the Germans would enter the city. A few weeks before Marshal Philippe Pétain, the victor of the Battle of Verdun, a national hero and vice president of Paul Reynaud’s government, had sacrificed the homeland for peace, convinced that resistance to Hitler’s troops made no sense and couldn’t be effective. Aware that France had enough military victories to her credit and that this capitulation wouldn’t cost her her honor, he gave the order for the army not to defend the city. Those who disagreed with Pétain had already left Paris and gone to the south. Those who guessed that the Germans threatened them with personal ruin for racial, ideological, or political reasons had also left. For days Đovani had watched them leaving the city. And he knew why many of them were leaving: they were students and professors of Jewish extraction and Russian émigrés, almost all of whom were socialists, communists, Trotskyites, social democrats, anarchists, or members of a dozen or so revolutionary organizations who’d found refuge in Paris as early as the October Revolution. And then there was the liberal citizenry, who feared the German breakthrough like the devil himself, fearing it in proportion to their previous sense of superiority over those same Germans. Painters fled, as did philosophers and writers, newcomers who had already fled from those same Germans when in 1936 Hitler had begun to expand and draw borders around the German living space. Lastly, students from East European countries left the city before the end of the fall semester— the sons of Bulgarian, Romanian, and Hungarian ministers and industrialists— in the belief that they were subject to less danger in their little metropolises, which, as the general conviction held, would not be struck by the great fury of history.

“Paris, and not London, is the main obstacle to European unification under Hitler,” Trajče Bogoev told Đovani as they parted. He was an art student who boasted that his father was the chief of the Bulgarian counterintelligence service, which Đovani didn’t take very seriously because if such a relational connection were true, no one in their right mind would brag about it. And by the way, wasn’t it strange that all those boys were from nowhere else but Eastern Europe? Why was it that the Bulgarians, Romanians, Greeks, and Albanians were the sons of people with the wildest biographies— spies, magicians, imperial murderers, and phony stamp-cutters— and that none of them came from ordinary families, like every French, Dutch, or Swiss student in Paris?

Some uncorroborated, unsubstantiated lie accompanied their every step, and Trajče was no exception in this regard. This Bulgarian was a fairly talented portrait artist yet lacked a real artistic education and had no feel at all for beauty. He produced unbearable little kitsch paintings and would use them to develop and analyze conspiracy theories and geostrategic paradoxes. He would paint the Eiffel Tower, and above it he would brush in three black oak beams that an invisible force kept from crashing down on the city. If that force disappeared, some kind of hell would follow, probably in the same kitschy manner.

“Paris is a symbol standing in Hitler’s way, and I have no intention of getting killed for a symbol,” Trajče said. He downed one last vodka, paid the bill, kissed Đovani three times, and got into a Mercedes of the Bulgarian consulate that would take him to Lyons.

Half an hour later, on the Place de la Concorde, Đovani noticed that his wallet and student ID were missing. He went back to the bar in which they’d sat and talked, but it was already closed; the metal shutters had been lowered and locked with a giant padlock. He banged on the door with his fist a few times, hoping that someone was inside and that they would hear him, but there was only the metallic echo of an empty hall.

He was sure that his ID card and wallet had fallen out as he put on his blazer and that he would find them the next day with the waiter. There was almost no money in his wallet; indeed there was just enough for a metro ticket, and no one would find that worth stealing. Nor would a thief have any use for his student ID. And Đovani had to find his ID card because the university was no longer in session, and no one would be able to confirm that he was a student. There was a difference between a student and an unemployed young man from Yugoslavia, especially in a time of war and an impending German occupation.

That night he slept poorly, tossed and turned in his bed, listened to the trains in the distance, and sank into dark thoughts and a slumber in which he couldn’t tell what was an illusion from what might be a real threat. For the first time he started to lose his bearings in this city and wasn’t sure whether he’d been smart not to flee when they tried to get him to leave. Or when they told him that it wasn’t honorable to meet the Germans upon their entrance into the city and that nothing like that would make any sense for someone who didn’t have any family in Paris. But he wondered whether it was more honorable to leave the city that had taken him in and made him better and more worldly, and he stayed.