Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

The people of Gacko, regardless of their faith and position, treated him like an idiot and a nitwit. The tavern was considered to be both his and not his, and it was clear to everyone, including the Ustashas, why Miloš Davidović had signed his property over to the waiter. What disagreement there was only concerned the ducats. The majority thought that there weren’t any ducats involved, but there were those who believed that the Serb had made a lot of money when he left and that this dolt certainly had thousands more if he’d already given Miloš a thousand for the house and the café. The unfortunate Đuzepe assured some that the ducats were an inheritance from his uncle in America and that he’d paid honestly for what was now his, whereas he tried to convince the others, who actually even believed that, all of them the local Ustashas, of something else. He himself didn’t actually know of what. He smiled, shook his head, and used his index finger to trace circles above his head, made allusions concerning the Orthodox and a votive candle that burned for a long time but would, as everyone knew, burn out one day. He stubbornly tried to explain to the Ustashas that he was actually a poor man and that the tavern and the house were a miracle. More or less like the founding of the Independent State of Croatia. They didn’t believe him no matter what he said, but his lies somehow settled in on the atmosphere of those troubled times, and it was as if they did everyone good: those who were on the side of evil (because they didn’t question their evil deeds) and those who had only good thoughts (because they would believe that every evil deed was just as stupid as Đuzepe’s).

He spent the first year of his ownership of the bar torn between two inner powers. In the morning, as soon as he went into the café, he would feel a stark, limitless happiness because he was his own boss and not someone else’s servant, a wretch, and a good-for-nothing. At the sight of the clean, empty glasses and full bottles and barrels, he would fold his hands and praise God (wherever he was and whatever his name was) and the Leader, without whom God’s will could not even be carried out. Without the great work of the Leader, Đuzepe would have remained a waiter to the end of his life and wouldn’t have known how nice it is to have the big worries of a boss instead of the little worries of a waiter. Instead of being dumbfounded with fear because he’d forgotten whether Captain Zovko drank grape or plum brandy or whether Mr. Hamzić had paid his monthly tab or needed to be reminded, it was his place to worry about whether the wine from Konavle would arrive on Thursday or Friday and whether bandits in the woods had attacked the wagon with cheese that was supposed to arrive from Travnik, slaughtering the deliveryman and stealing the goods, which had already been paid for.

When a man is his own boss, no loss, no deficit in the cash box is too great. That was what Đuzepe Sikirić thought and was filled with joy every morning. But as the day went on and all kinds of people passed through the bar and told all kinds of jokes at his expense, most often about the thousand ducats that he’d paid to be boss, he grew more apprehensive so that by evening he was deathly afraid. It couldn’t be as it seemed because this had never happened since there have been people in the world. No one acquired wealth like that, and it wasn’t possible that there wasn’t any price to be paid for rising from the lowest to the highest in the market square and the town. And what could his payment have been in if not in ducats? That question tormented him until he fell asleep and in his slumber he forgot the terrible answers. In the morning he would awaken happy as a child who had been allowed to begin life anew with every new day.

On the same day that he took over the café, Đuzepe took on two new waiters because Savo Ekmek, a quiet young man with whom he’d shared the wait shifts and who’d been working for Miloš since the latter had picked him up off the street as a poor ten-year-old boy, had disappeared the same morning as the Davidović family. He took the first two he came across, one Hamo Aličić, an oddball ruffian from Fazlagić Tower, and Joso Domazet, formerly the manager of the station restaurant in Jablanica. Hamo had never worked as a waiter, and Joso had suffered a brain hemorrhage six months before, so he dragged his left foot and had a hard time remembering the orders. But both fulfilled the only criterion that was important to Đuzepe. The townsfolk thought less of them than they did of him, so he believed that they wouldn’t make him look stupid. And it could be said that they didn’t let him down: only the two of them, of all the people who entered the café, were completely indifferent to the question of whether Đuzepe had actually paid Miloš a thousand ducats or not. No matter how poorly they did their work (Hamo was even worse than Joso, and not a day passed when there wasn’t money missing from the cash box), Đuzepe was satisfied because he felt that his people saw just what he wanted to see in himself: a man who’d succeeded in life and whose success couldn’t be diminished by anyone, not one bit. But one had to admit that he had a good heart and in every man looked only at what was most important: whether he was honest and honorable. If he was, then there were no problems. Then as far as boss Đuzepe was concerned, such a man was just as worthy of respect as the man in the ruddy, blue-eyed portrait that he wiped off with his sleeve every morning so it wouldn’t collect dust and the filth of the terrible time they were living in.

One morning in the summer of 1942, while Đuzepe was tidying the Leader’s portrait for that day, only twenty kilometers away, in a hamlet in the direction of Nevesinje, his brother Đovani crossed himself three times before a little picture of St. Panteleimon, which had by some miracle escaped destruction in a house in which the day before everything living or dead had been consumed by flames.

At that moment the brothers were the nearest they’d been to one another in the last ten years; only in terms of geographic distance, of course, because in every other sense they were more distant than brother could be from brother in one story, more distant than people who’d hardly ever met one another. They hadn’t crossed each other’s minds since each of them had realized for himself and for his own reasons that family ties mean little or nothing and that a man is on his own as soon as he stands out in some way. And in the Sikirić clan both Đovani and Đuzepe stood out: the older brother because of the languor of his mind, which is also called stupidity, and by his peasant’s soul, which he’d inherited to the horror of his parents from some great-grandfather of his; the younger one didn’t fit in because his opinion of his father, mother, brothers Luka and Bepo, and especially his sister Regina, was the same as their opinion of Đuzepe. In fact, it was for reasons similar to those that had made his older brother go work as a waiter on the railway line and never come home that the younger brother renounced his inheritance and went off to Paris. He believed that he was leaving forever. And that’s the way it would have been if the command of the German army hadn’t made the decision for its troops not to pass under Napoleon’s triumphal arch or if there had been at least a few more Parisians to defend the city along with Đovani, the weeping girl, and her two friends. As it was, he, who until the day before had been an apostate from all faiths, a skeptic and atheist, found himself deep in the backwater of Herzegovina before a little picture of an Orthodox saint, firmly convinced that he’d seen a miracle. He crossed himself over the ashes of someone’s house, over the carbonized bodies of its inhabitants, over a burned cradle in which there might have been a child (but there was nothing left of it), over Serbs, the only people who’d tried to preserve their honor, the honor of Europe, and the honor of those who sat behind tightly locked gates and windows in metropolises and cities in France and other countries, waiting for the war to end all on its own.