Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

He could barely wait for the wall clock to chime seven o’clock. He got dressed and ran outside to reach that café before it opened at eight. There were no people on the street, but everywhere he heard a strange sound, like the knocking of an old, empty loom. That sound followed him all the way to Pigalle. There he realized that it wasn’t a loom or any kind of machine or device but the sound of thousands of rubber soles rhythmically striking the asphalt. Those were long, eight-row columns of German soldiers moving at a leisurely pace— that is, not marching— toward the Étoile.

His throat constricted from fear. But a few moments later, he realized that the scene wasn’t out of the newsreels showing military parades in Berlin and their entry into Prague and Bratislava. The Germans weren’t stepping loudly and powerfully but seemed more like they were going to the theater. Now Đovani was overcome by a new feeling. Rage grew within him, especially after he saw two women of the night following the column with laughter and squeals and immediately thereafter little groups of ten or so dark-skinned men— evidently Arabs, Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans— dressed in formal black suits and bow ties who were waiting, with their heads raised high and with the dignity of tribal leaders, and walking alongside the German troops. Apart from these people, no one was out on the empty Pigalle. There were no Frenchmen. Đovani was galled— so much so that tears of fury ran down his face— by the betrayal that had just been committed by people who’d brought their faith with them into Christian Paris. They strolled through the Champs-Élysées with fezzes and turbans or wrapped in those sheets of the Bedouins; no one tried to prevent them; no one chased them or shouted anything at them. But they nevertheless greeted the Germans with their quiet enthusiasm. They’d bought formal European suits and removed the fezzes from their heads to show their respect for them. That was the moment when they became closer to Europe; their hands extended to another civilization, a gesture with which different worlds are united, fused, and permeated with one another. They’d been waiting for Hitler to remove their fezzes and turbans because without him Europe was unworthy of that act. They were betraying a city into which they didn’t want to assimilate, he thought, and were taking the side of someone about whom they knew less than about Paris, but they were impressed that he’d come to quash Paris under his boot. The community of hatred and the cosmopolitanism of savagery.

He would never forget those people who were happy about the occupation, nor the closed and darkened windows behind which sat the motionless and saddened inhabitants of a city that Đovani had thought was the strongest and most invincible. Whoever came to Paris and managed to stay there was forever spared of everything that had driven him to leave the place he’d left. He believed that from the day when he decided to go to Paris to study geology and thereby cut all his ties with home and renounced the family inheritance. So he would never again see or hear his sister, his brothers, or any one of those from whose world he was fleeing.

From Arabs who’d been arrested he heard that the entire German army was going to gather on the Place de la Concorde, and he hurried over there, less from curiosity than from the hope that something might happen in front of the Arc de Triomphe. The French had to defend that place; it was unimaginable that the occupiers could pass just like that under Napoleon’s arch of glory without bloodshed and resistance. If the government had already surrendered, leaving the decaying republic to the mercy of Hitler’s savagery, there would nevertheless be Frenchmen who would defend the national pride with their lives and blood. It didn’t matter how many of them there would be, three or a hundred and three; no matter how many of them there were, they wouldn’t be able to stop the German troops. But one day there would be a brass plaque with their names at the base of the Arc de Triomphe. “They defended France as the world slept the slumber of the just,” it would say, Đovani thought, ready to add his name to the names of the heroes of the future.

He ran breathless down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and arrived at the triumphal arch before the column of troops. But apart from German officers, who were continually glancing at their watches, and the Islamic high dignitaries with turbans and tarbushes on their heads, there was no one at the monument itself. Fifty meters from the triumphal arch two young men stood with a young woman with long, blond hair. She wept, loudly and inconsolably, as if she were alone in a movie theater watching a sad movie in which Greta Garbo was dying on a canopy bed; the two of them stood with their hands in their pockets and didn’t try to comfort her. One of those officers could approach her and ask why she was crying on such a day, he thought, and then the officer would lead all three of them away. That too was a kind of protest. However, the girl wept, and no one went up to her. The step of thousands of soldiers was heard all around; they lifted their heels and lowered them onto the asphalt in unison. Without any assonant variation, arrhythmia, or little noises that would detract from that great noise, the German army drew nearer to Napoleon’s triumphal arch.

Apart from the sobbing girl and her friends, Đovani Sikirić alone experienced that scene as a blow to the soul, that inflated sac in his chest that Hitler’s army was kicking with its boot like Ivica Bek, a Zagreb dribbler, had kicked a soccer ball around in the stadiums and soccer fields of Paris a few years before. Đovani liked that Bek because he’d come, by some chance at the same time as he had, to seek salvation in a more elegant world.

“If she jumps in front of the troops, I’ll do something too!” he thought, clenching his sweaty fists and watching the banners with the swastikas and behind them the endless formation. But when they were about fifty meters from the Arc de Triomphe and the same distance from the four onlookers, they changed direction and instead of marching under the triumphal arch, they passed alongside it.

The German command had probably decided on that action, which has been largely ignored in the history books and was unknown even to Winston Churchill as he wrote his memoirs, to avoid humiliating the French or at least avoid irritating them unnecessarily, thinking that there was an important difference between them and the Poles and Czechs. The same difference that existed between Warsaw and Paris. In a way, the Nazis looked upon that city with the same eyes as Đovani Sikirić.

Instead of entering the annals of history with a heroic act and, together with the unknown girl, becoming a part of a myth that would be the subject of books, theater pieces, and movies and lend its name to streets and schools, Đovani let the Wehrmacht troops march right on by Napoleon’s triumphal arch. Ashamed and angry, since someone might think that he’d come to greet the occupiers, he missed the ceremonial formation and the speech of a German officer who told the Parisians that he was not coming like one who would subjugate France, but he and his army were there in transit, as protection for European culture from the barbarians. Đovani went off to the café where he and Trajče Bogoev had said good-bye to find his student ID and his wallet, but the café was closed. For the next five days he would go there each morning to find it closed, and only on the sixth day, when that quiet protest against the occupation no longer made sense, did the café open up again. People were reading newspapers, sitting and talking, the same faces, the same waiters, and the same manager. However, his ID and wallet weren’t there. Evidently they hadn’t fallen out of his pocket while he was putting on his jacket. Someone had stolen them, most likely Trajče, in order to spite him for some reason. He wondered for a long time what use the Bulgarian would have for his things, and nothing came to mind but the idea that it was a way to harass someone who’d decided to stay in the city regardless of the arrival of the occupiers. If he survived the war, Trajče Bogoev would one day tell his grandchildren about that heroic deed.