Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

And there were also those who didn’t plead or implore but would use up the little life left to them casting spells, curses, and oaths that would make one’s blood freeze in his veins because these would go back for nine generations and far into the future. They invoked illness, fear, itching, mange, nightmares— any and every kind of misfortune. Everything that would afflict the Chetniks, their children, and their children’s children from that day on could be explained by the curses of those women. There was no point in thinking about justice or humanity or about the fact that children and grandchildren weren’t guilty of the crimes of their fathers and grandfathers because the curses were uttered by women who were fated to die now. The history of family and tribal curses was even older than those who slaughtered and were slaughtered, and it didn’t matter whether someone believed in them or not. They made everything happen, so it wasn’t impossible that the slaughter in eastern Herzegovina in the autumn and winter was the fulfillment of some older curses that Orthodox women had cast on their Muslim neighbors into the tenth generation. Even if there hadn’t been any such curse, everything unfolded according to its logic.

Men write history with knives, and women summon it with words. It was that way this time too, at the edge of every ravine, gorge, and animal dumping ground.

After the Muslim women finished pleading and cursing and their husbands, brothers, and fathers had turned into figures of terror and shame without uttering a word, only trembling and looking down at the ground under their feet, the duke would pick out the weakest of all the Chetniks— say, the one who’d wandered into the unit with the idea that the fatherland was a wheat field and the deep blue sea— grab him by the collar, drag him over to the woman who had cursed the loudest, and shove a knife into his hand if he didn’t already happen to have one.

That was usually also the most exciting moment of the whole performance because it was the meeting of two souls that were disintegrating, two terrors that at first glance had nothing in common but at the same moment bade farewell to everything they’d been until then. The woman bade farewell to a lie and regretted the curses she’d uttered or because she’d been the loudest and so the weakest and least confident of all the murderers had been chosen to be her adversary, the one who hadn’t even killed a chicken and didn’t know how to handle a knife so that her torment would be harder and longer. And the Chetnik realized that he’d ended up beyond the point of no return, that he would cut people’s throats and kill them, and that he would never again be who he’d been, not even in his own heart. If he didn’t do it, he would be scorned and disinherited; his family would disown him. He would be betraying everything for which he’d been created in this world and might even end up in the woman’s place. His brothers would kill him to show how there wasn’t and couldn’t be any forgiveness before one or the other side carried out an investigation.

And they stood face to face for a while, woman and man, while everyone around them waited to see what would happen. Bets were made, and the leader fiercely wanted for his weakest brother to become a man. This wait always lasted too long, regardless of whether it was a matter of seconds or minutes or of the way in which it was interrupted: by her spitting into the face of her foe, in the belief that this might awaken the animal in him that would, led by instinct, put her out of her misery, or by him deciding to end his own agony and rushing at her, plunging the knife into her chest or trying to cut her throat. However, that was a difficult job for someone who hadn’t ever done it before or for someone who saw before him human eyes, a woman’s body, nostrils that inhaled and exhaled air. It was difficult because the future murderer felt a life that existed and didn’t give him any reason to snuff it out.

As soon as their weakling bloodied his knife, the performance turned into a choral orgy. The main characters disappeared; people lost their names and faces. Everyone grabbed his victim the best he knew how. Some got at those they’d been waiting to get at from the beginning— a child, a pretty girl, or an old man, according to their own impulses and passions. Most often passion doesn’t arise in pure hatred, but comes from something that’s distantly connected to the passion of love, which causes the male member to stiffen. God created it so that he didn’t have to create man anew every time; rather, man could do that himself. But people get lost, forget their scope and the direction they’ve taken, and so instead of giving birth and multiplying, they start slaughtering each other. The explanation is banal but true.

In less than half an hour all their throats were cut, a few breasts, ears, and noses cut off, or people’s eyes and scrotums slid down the rocks. Sometimes the duke spared the life of the youngest child, and it would run off somewhere without a sound. God probably arranged it according to his own plan. Because after every slaughter there had to remain a living image in the eyes of one of the victims.

One morning the protectors of Pavelić’s picture disappeared from Gacko. They left without saying anything to Đuzepe Sikirić, who loved the Leader with the purest heart. The disturbance lasted a few moments. Someone opened all the chicken coops and stalls. The animals ran all over the lanes and the street, but the people were frozen in place. Boss Miloš Davidović came in wearing a fur hat, girdled with heavy bandoliers. He took the picture from the wall of his bar and smashed it over Đuzepe’s head, as in an old silent comedy.

“Boss, don’t, for Christ’s sake!” said a dull visage peering from a wooden frame instead of a cattle yoke. Miloš wouldn’t let him take off the picture frame all the way to the Duhovnjačka ravine, which was covered in scrub below the road to Mostar.

“We didn’t agree to that,” he kept repeating and kicking him in the behind with a heavy boot. Tears were streaming down Đuzepe’s face, though he didn’t know what he had coming. Aware that his ownership of the café had come to an end, he wasn’t even thinking about what else might happen to him. Nothing was more terrible for him than the memory of the years when he’d been a nobody and nothing.

Đuzepe Sikirić became the main character in the performance above Duhovnjačka. Boss Miloš cut his throat with a large butcher knife. He did it expertly and according to the regulations, so the unfortunate wretch gave up the ghost quickly and easily. He hardly flailed about on the rocks at all. Then Miloš broke his neck with his bare hands, cut up his skin and veins, cut off his head, and threw it into the ravine. He left the body to lie at the feet of those whose turn had not yet come, amid the varnished little pieces of wood that at one time had made up the frame of a funny picture.

The news of Đuzepe’s death reached Regina in late 1945. It was a sunny and unexpectedly pleasant day. She was sitting in the yard in front of the house when her neighbor Bartol came along, hugged her, and said:

“I don’t know how to tell you this.” He sighed and held out a piece of paper for her. “He collaborated with the occupiers,” he said, thinking to comfort her and then bit his lip, realizing what he’d said.

She smiled. She rarely did that, and Bartol thought that her smile was a prelude and that at the next moment she would burst into tears. She signed the paper. He quickly put it in his pocket and hurried on, regretting his inappropriate words.

They would torment him to the end of his life. He would think that it would be good to sort it out with her, but there wasn’t ever a good opportunity, nor could Bartol summon the courage. As the times changed and every human suffering, no matter how it was overcome, received its quiet rights, Bartol wouldn’t be able to get over the fact that he’d called Đuzepe a collaborator with the occupiers in front of his sister. He would thereby become the only one who remembered him at all.