Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Strange was the path that led the student Đovani Sikirić before a picture of St. Panteleimon. He’d roamed for a year through occupied Paris and fed himself in public kitchens, even in a Jewish one that the other unfortunates avoided for fear that someone might think they were racial filth. He kept company with those few foreigners who had remained in Paris and dared to speak against the collaborationist authorities. The majority of Đovani’s acquaintances and former friends fled from him and his words as from the plague. People were afraid of spies and provocateurs, or they simply didn’t feel like waging war against the great German power, if only in their thoughts. The exceptions included a few Serbian students, small industrialists, former communists, and Trotskyites, mainly from Belgrade and Bosnia, who gathered in the Hilandar Tavern, which was operated by a Greek in a southern suburb of the city. In the Hilandar the erstwhile secretary of the Royal Yugoslav Consulate in Paris, Joakim Radak, called on Đovani to go with him, after the latter, thoroughly indignant, had told him how the Nazis had strolled over Pigalle.

“Where to?” Đovani asked him.

“Where the world values honor more than the heel on a Kraut rifle butt,” responded Radak with pathos.

No matter how much Đovani would have laughed at such words the day before, now he waved them off and went on his way. But it was probably the fact that he didn’t know where to go, or which path he was on, that made him take Radak seriously and even think positively about Radak’s words.

Three weeks later he was already on Mt. Jelica, deep inside Serbia and on the other side of all the eastern borders his mind had ever reached. He sat at a rough-hewn oak table, face to face with Colonel Dragoljub Mihailović. The two of them were alone in a blockhouse, as a summer storm raged above the mountain. The Colonel’s eyes blinked from behind the round glasses of a placid Jewish businessman and smiled mildly when Đovani jumped up because a thunderbolt had struck somewhere nearby. Đovani was terribly afraid of thunder, and now, you see, he had lived to see himself tremble and sweat an icy sweat in front of the leader of the only resistance movement in Europe. Instead of throwing him out and spitting on him as a coward, as Đovani thought any soldier would do, the Colonel tried to calm him down.

“Every man is afraid now and then. Only an idiot is fearless. Some fear spiders or that a horse will kick them, and you, you see, are afraid of thunder,” he said. Then he told of what Paris had looked like in ’20-something, when he’d gone on an excursion as a cadet. He spoke of the sun that was reflected in windowpanes in a special way and scattered over the sidewalk, “. . before our feet, which still hadn’t gotten used to anything other than pointed peasant shoes and will never walk those streets with an appropriate stride.”

He spoke of the sound of street organs and French accordions that weren’t any less monotonous than their own gusles but whose repetitions sounded noble.

“We sing of our bloody history like we’re sawing wood, but the French have created beauty from their own, equally bloody, history. That’s why the French survive every defeat, and we emerge from every defeat even bigger turds,” said Colonel Dragoljub Mihailović in the midst of a summer storm in a hut on Mt. Jelica.

Đovani saw a god in him then. The first one he’d seen in his life. Or at the very least an angel of salvation. If Paris was his Jerusalem, then Mihailović was the one who was missing in Jerusalem. If he’d been there, Paris wouldn’t have fallen, nor would the French have protected their honor with wooden shutters on their windows. The nation had spoiled like cream.

The very next day Đovani was wearing an English infantry uniform and a cap with a cockade. He found himself among a hundred or so fighters loyal to the king and the fatherland, who in keeping with a tradition from a time when Serbia had been reestablished on the west bank of the Drina were called Chetniks, an expression that Colonel Mihailović hadn’t liked in the early days.

He wanted an army, not folklore or banditry. However, he soon realized that he would have no benefit whatsoever from what he’d learned at the military academy and had tried to implement before the war wherever he’d been assigned, despite the culture of the old veterans of the Salonika Front, which was responsible for the severity of their defeat at the hands of the Wehrmacht in April. Besides, even a cursory glance at the battalion in which Đovani found himself was enough for any intelligent man to realize the real difference between guerilla war and organized war.

Here there were illiterate villagers from central Serbia who’d never held a rifle in their hands because they’d withdrawn unarmed in 1915 through Albania in order to rush just as unarmed three years later over positions that the Krauts had already abandoned. There were reserve officers and non-commissioned officers who did indeed have some kind of training, but instead of learning military science, they’d only learned the harsh treatment of those weaker than themselves. There were overgrown boys from well-to-do Belgrade houses who arrived with two suitcases in which their mommies had packed silk pajamas and underwear. There was riffraff from towns, smugglers, swindlers, and maybe even murderers who, on the run from the gendarmerie, ended up as fighters for the king and the fatherland. There were a few Slovenes and Croats, fiery idealists who believed in the same ideal as Colonel Mihailović. They believed in Yugoslavia, the kingdom of Slavic tribes with equal rights, in one people that was united by the same origin and the same bloody history. They believed in a Yugoslavia in which there would exist one faith and one hope— in oneself and one’s own origin— so that no center of spiritual or political support needed to be sought in the Vatican, Germany, or Russia.

However, the problem was that no one believed in anything like that except Colonel Mihailović and his fanatics— not even the villagers from central Serbia or the Serbian refugees from eastern Herzegovina, who were only waiting for a chance to die as heroes, because as they stood over their burned houses, it didn’t occur to them to do anything else. Not even such men took the Colonel’s belief seriously! They thought that it was part of a wartime strategy and that the real aim was something else. Exactly what was known only to the sages in London, the wise men surrounding the young King Petar.

Đovani felt completely lost in such company in the middle of Serbia. He couldn’t abide by Colonel Mihailović’s visions of the state and the people, nor did his heart favor any of the Yugoslav tribes. He was agitated by the humiliation in front of Napoleon’s triumphal arch and those Mohammedan scum in the black suits who would saunter through history unpunished because they didn’t belong to either of the warring sides— neither those who had crushed Paris nor those who’d seen their city crushed.

The villagers who kept bad brandy in rusty tin canteens and argued about whether Russia would help their Serb brothers or the English would send tanks to Mihailović were as distant from Đovani as those on account of whom he’d renounced his share of the family inheritance and decided to become a Parisian. Those people, so he thought, resembled his brothers and neighbors, only they were dirtier and forever stank of onions and animal dung and were ready at any moment to die if the Colonel told them the time for dying had come. Their stench stopped bothering him when he grasped the latter. There was an erotic excitement in meeting people who didn’t consider their lives more valuable than freedom, whatever that word may have meant to them. Every one of them was a little heroic death waiting to happen, and just as a lover’s body stinks of sweat, so the heroes from the mountains stank of onions, dung, and bad brandy. That was the smell of sacrifice for the fatherland. Đovani realized that great things don’t smell very good.