Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Everyone else— the good, the bad and the indifferent, his sister and brothers, the municipal officials, and the state board of statistics for victims of the Second World War— forgot about Đuzepe Sikirić. His name wasn’t written in stone or on paper. The salt of his tears remained on some rocks in Herzegovina.

Đovani went the way of revenge twice with Lazar Kobilović, following the Drina and the towns that had grown up along it. He watched tarbushes and fezzes floating down the river and wondered what made those people, who were blond-haired and blue-eyed, cover their heads with Arab hats and worship God in a manner that was alien to that land and only unnecessarily made them different from their neighbors, to whom they were otherwise so similar. He never killed anyone; he always stood to one side as an observer. He held his hands behind his back and watched the performance unflinchingly or smoked fine Sava tobacco, while his comrades cut throats, gouged out eyes, and flayed captured partisans alive. The victims believed that he was the chief and that they needed to beg him for mercy, and Kobilović believed that someone’s hands, best of all brother Jovan’s, needed to remain clean and unstained by blood because only in that way would he have a witness who knew why and in the name of which justice they’d done what they’d done. He would testify before God and before men that they weren’t animals and murderers but had tried to save their people and land. They had tried to do that at the highest price that living men can pay. They’d lost the peace of their souls— a man whose hands had clutched a knife would no longer caress his own child, grandchild, or a plum tree in the orchard above his house. . They became monsters among men and could only be understood by those who’d cut throats and killed for the other side. The hatred that Kobilović had felt for the Ustashas when he saw the first burned villages and together with brother Jovan crossed himself before the miraculous little picture of St. Panteleimon, turned into a kind of understanding and in the end a kind of affection. Those on the other side had actually done the same thing as he, only in the name of their people and its right to that land. They probably didn’t have it easy either and feared the nightmares that tormented the Chetniks and their leaders to the end of their lives. When they found themselves in the middle of villages and towns that Kobilović’s battalion had passed through, the Ustashas felt what Lazar felt in the villages and towns that Francetić’s legion had passed through. There was no great difference.

Kobilović’s final belief was that the people and their nations were not to blame, but the times that had driven them to commit evil. It was probably not his alone.

That mystical temptation of blood and slaughter lasted until late 1944, when a miracle occurred, some cosmic forces turned inside out, or something happened in the outside world, the one that hardly ever came into contact with the Bosnian mountains and forests. There were no longer any undefended or unburned villages, nor were there any more tarbushes and fezzes to float down the Drina. And it seemed that there were no longer any Ustashas either. However, bloody struggles and evacuations began, and Đovani finally had to pick up a rifle. The path led across Romanija and back again a few times, through partisan positions and ambushes. There was no longer any free territory, the Orthodox villages were taken over by the communists, red banners started waving on all the towers, and Lazar Kobilović realized that the war was over and that the time had come to sell one’s own skin for the highest price possible. There would be songs that would sing his name, he thought, consoling himself. And at least one living creature would remain under the vault of the heavens who would know that he, Lazar, had done good in evil. Lazar placed his hopes in brother Jovan, who’d scorned his own name, in the soft palms of the eternal student and the gleaming city of Paris, which lent his struggle a higher meaning and harmony.

He was certain that Đovani would survive the war and the partisan revenge that was being prepared without anyone knowing on behalf of which people and for which higher justice the partisans intended to seek vengeance. They wouldn’t touch Đovani because he’d neither cut throats nor murdered; nor did he belong to any of the sides that had committed the slaughter and murder. He was a free man, an angel who’d seen evil with his own eyes and held his hands behind his back, to keep them from being sullied with the blood of God’s creatures. He was pure, just as he’d been when he was born. He would lead these people across a river that was ten times wider than the Drina, beyond which there was something that one should believe in and in which Lazar Kobilović believed with all his heart. In Christ and his unfortunate mother, in Joseph who had worked wood and from whose hands their rifle butts had emerged, in St. Panteleimon and all the visages on church walls, whose upwardly turned eyes resembled the eyes of people whose throats had just been cut as blood filled their bowels. Blood that was bright as the sun and dark as the darkest night above Maglić.

Crazed by the changes that had occurred, Lazar Kobilović mixed the domains of heaven and earth more and more often, and it happened that in his morning prayer he sincerely prayed to Christ and Jovan, expecting salvation from both, without knowing what kind.

On Catholic Christmas in 1944 Kobilović’s battalion, actually the fifteen men that were left of it after all the running, stumbled into an ambush near Ustikolina. The battle didn’t last long. After twenty minutes of bursts of partisan machine gun fire, only two men were left in a watermill surrounded by blazes. They were Lazar and Jovan.

“I’m staying, and you, brother, will surrender,” Kobilović said and shot himself in the head before Đovani could say anything.

He went out of the mill with his hands raised high, a bearded apparition all dressed in black with a fur cap on his head, such that he was completely unrecognizable to those who might have recognized him otherwise. They led him to the staff, before Commissar Hurem Alaga, who briefly questioned him and then ordered him to be shot.

The high command would call Alaga to account and condemn him to death before a court in Sarajevo because he had on his own initiative killed the last surviving Chetnik of Kobilović’s infamous group, whose crimes were the worst, at least in eastern Bosnia. Đovani Sikirić could have told what would forever remain a mystery because Lazar didn’t leave any victims alive to testify. From Sikirić they could have gotten the names of the other butchers, of Chetnik deserters who’d maybe joined the people’s liberation movement. Instead of all that, Alaga asked the prisoner only two or three questions, from which history would have no benefit:

“What’s your name? Where are you from? What’s going to happen to your soul?”

The news of Đovani’s fate reached Regina, Luka, and Bepo in squalls, from different directions, and in the form of open threats. At first someone from the committee reported that one of the Sikirić brothers had been liquidated as a Chetnik butcher, but Regina didn’t believe that, knowing who and what Đovani had been. Besides, how and why would he have left Paris and joined the Chetniks? Then in the Belgrade daily Politika, in a feuilleton about the Ravna Gora movement, it was announced that a few Slovenes and Croats had been in Mihailović’s staff, and Đovani’s name was among them. No one in the city commented on the newspaper story or— which was hardly likely— the comments didn’t reach Regina’s ears. The people evidently expected for a committee first to be set up concerning the shame of the Delavale-Sikirić house, and in the committee they waited for an order or directive to come from above. It was a delicate affair to challenge the honor of a family that had simultaneously produced a partisan hero, Comrade Bepo, whose heroism at Sutjeska and the Neretva was increasingly the stuff of legend. Then rumors came from Trebinje that Đovani Sikirić, a.k.a. Bloody Jovan, was one of the worst murderers of Muslims from Gacko to Bileća, and people heard that he’d gone renegade with Lazar Kobilović, for whom not even Draža Mihailović was enough, and slaughtered and burned his way across Bosnia on his own account and for his own kicks.