Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Alone, with history and a fellow student having made an ass of him, Đovani Sikirić stood in the middle of a Parisian avenue and didn’t know where to go. All the reasons that kept him going and made him give up, motivated him and depressed him, also inflamed and cooled his entire generation. That was 1940, the year when half of Europe was in flames, but the war hadn’t yet filled the human heart and completely covered the pages of the newspapers. In March a truce was signed between Finland and Russia, and a few months later the term Blitzkrieg entered into popular usage. A five-year-old Tibetan named Llamo Thandup became the thirteenth Dalai Lama with the holy name Tenzing Gyatso. In Rome the Palazzo della Civilità del Lavoro was opened, and an Australian named Howard Florey and a German named Ernst Chain perfected penicillin, so its mass production began in the United States. Đovani couldn’t decide which way to go.

Exactly one year later, in the spring of 1941, his older brother Đuzepe Sikirić realized his life’s dream and through a fictional business transaction acquired his own tavern. He’d worked as a waiter in railway station restaurants and taverns along the Dubrovnik-Mostar-Sarajevo narrow-gauge railway. He’d made his way through Trebinje, Konjic, Jablanica, Hadžići, Blažuj, and back again from station to station, from bar to bar, living without a home and the peace of home, sleeping in warehouses and on café tables he’d pulled together, amid barrels of wine and brandy, sacks of flour, and bales of Herzegovinian tobacco.

In one waiter’s career Đuzepe had covered more distance than one of Napoleon’s admirals had in ten wars; in 1929 he’d gotten a bayonet between his ribs from a drunken man from Solun. Fortunately, after half a bottle of brandy the man had managed to stab it into him only halfway. A few years later a brawl broke out in the station bar in Konjic after a procession; though he was completely innocent, he ended up with a pocketknife in his belly. In the autumn of 1934 the gendarmerie beat him up because they could hear people singing in the café during the mourning period for King Aleksandar, and afterward he spent three days in jail. In April of 1941 in Čapljina a non-commissioned officer of the Royal Army put a revolver to his temple and screamed:

“Shit, you treacherous scum! If you don’t shit your pants, I’ll blow your brains all over the floor!”

And what could Đuzepe do? He squeezed his bowels so hard veins popped out on his forehead, and he turned as red as a beet. The whole tavern laughed and cheered, some of them for him, but most for the non-commissioned officer, telling him not to wait so long but to shoot immediately because his order hadn’t been carried out as soon as it was issued. The shit, fortunately, came, and Đuzepe got out of that mess with his head on his shoulders.

But a month later, luck finally smiled on him. The owner of the largest bar in Gacko and the surrounding area, Miloš Davidović, with whom he’d been employed since he’d left Čapljina, was aware that the market square would never forget how a waiter had shit his pants, and his boss didn’t want to hang on to him either because he was convinced that a waiter who’d been compromised in that way would drive away customers. So he called Đuzepe over to his house one evening, sat him down at the table, poured both of them a brandy, and said:

“The situation, if you’ll pardon me, has gotten shitty. This is territory of the State of Croatia now, and I am, beg pardon, Orthodox. And let’s not lie to ourselves— there’s no place for Orthodox in this state. I know it, you know it. This house is my inheritance, and that café is also my inheritance. My heart would stop beating if someone burned my inheritance, and I’m not dumb as a doorknob— I won’t wait in my inheritance for the Ustashas to cut my throat. So I was thinking this: I could sign both the house and the café over to you. In fact, I’d be selling them to you. We’ll write up a contract that will say you paid me a thousand ducats, and all this is now yours. I’m counting on the authorities recognizing that contract because you’re Catholic. But I’m also counting on this state not lasting so long. It’ll disappear just like it appeared. It’s created too many enemies, and there are those who’ll set about tearing it down. Maybe you think differently. So be it! Everyone has the right to think what he wants. This is what I think, and you think what you want. I wouldn’t want to go into that. Now take a look at how our little joint plan works out: this will be yours as long as there’s a Croatia. When there’s no Croatia any more, the contract will be invalid because those who come to power won’t recognize business conducted with ducats. They won’t recognize a deal that arose in this way. Then you’ll give me back my inheritance, and I’ll be grateful to my dying day. I’ll take you back as a waiter if you don’t earn enough to open your own tavern. And I’ll help you in any way I can. If I’m not right, and this state lasts longer than I do or they do me in, everything remains yours forever. But I won’t let them set fire to my inheritance. So there you have it; I’ve said what I have to say, and now you can have your say.”

Đuzepe had to hold himself back from jumping for joy and kissing Miloš not once but twice on both cheeks. It took an enormous effort for him to click his tongue worriedly, shake his head, and turn his palms up toward the ceiling, showing with those strange gestures, which no one has believed for ages, that the trouble was not only Miloš’s but everyone’s together and no one could be happy as long as the life of another was at stake and the foundation of his inheritance smoldered.

That evening the contract was drawn up and signed. The very next day Miloš Davidović left Gacko with his wife and children, and Đuzepe Sikirić, Regina’s older brother, the family dimwit and shame of a fine urban household, had finally become a boss. He hung a framed picture of Ante Pavelić, dressed in an admiral’s uniform and gazing into the distance, on a spot on the wall where a reproduction of Predić’s Kosovo Maiden had hung before the war. He’d ordered it from Sarajevo and taken it to be colored to Puba Weiss. And with a lot of effort and care Puba gave a reddish hue to his cheeks and managed to get a shade of blue in his eyes. He didn’t have an easy time because in the photograph Pavelić’s eyes were blacker than Banovići coal. Puba Weiss tried in vain to convince his client that there was no way that the Leader had blue eyes. Đuzepe insisted that they were blue, fairly firmly convinced that Puba said the opposite because he was a Jew and that was the only reason why he didn’t know that Ante Pavelić’s eyes had to be as blue as the Adriatic Sea and the clearest summer sky over Herzegovina.

And Đuzepe would be sorry in the autumn of the same year when they smashed the only photography shop in Gacko and Puba met his end in a ravine on the way to Nevesinje. Đuzepe would sit alone in the bar that morning, gaze at Puba’s last work, the portrait of the Leader in which he had the ruddy cheeks of a young mower girl and the blue eyes of a patron saint, and try to comprehend what the world was coming to, what kind of demon was taking hold of people if Puba Weiss had perished, a man who was able to make the Leader more handsome than those who had led him off to the ravine could imagine. But Đuzepe’s thoughts were short-lived. He would chase them away, telling himself that he wasn’t smart enough to comprehend global politics. Because if he were, then he’d be in Zagreb, Berlin, or London making decisions about different peoples and their fates. His scale was this bar, and he shouldn’t let his thoughts leap outside, out of the bar, where bigger things were at stake. Apart from the fact that God hadn’t created him for that, it wasn’t advisable anyway. It was hard to keep your head on your shoulders. Puba Weiss wouldn’t have reproached him for keeping his head on his shoulders. Just as Đuzepe wouldn’t reproach Puba if the situation were reversed and he, Đuzepe, was being led off, God forbid, as a Jew, to the ravine.