Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Of all the medicines in the whole world none will be better for your son than sea air, dry and warm, full of medicinal salts and fennel that the wind brings from the mainland and the sea. I can’t give you a guarantee that Aris will find his cure in the sea; I don’t know whether it’s too late for him or how the illness will develop. There are various kinds of tuberculosis, just as various people get it, and each kind takes its own course. We can only hope that Aris’s type is one of those that Adriatic winds carry away,” Dr. Simeon Mušicki wrote, embellishing his story for the older Berberijan, who cried like a small child in the middle of Mušicki’s office in front of the nurses, who were trying to comfort him, and his son Aris, who was coughing into a handkerchief.

But it wasn’t clear why exactly the older Berberijan was crying. Was it because the best doctor in the kingdom was telling him that his only son was going to die? Or was it because his law office was going to be closed down— the oldest in Vojvodina— which had been established by his grandfather Aleksej when he came to the Austro-Hungarian Empire after leaving Erevan and studying law in Berlin?

Jovan Berberijan was a good lawyer and a “patron of the poor.” His rates for those who went around town bragging that he was handling their legal affairs were exorbitant, but he represented any pauper or wretch who was accused of something by the state or a wealthy landlord for free. At the same time, that compassionate man was an unbelievably harsh father. He punished his son for anything that he thought might turn him from the path that had been laid out for him from the moment he’d been conceived.

Aris was two years old when he brought him into his office “so that the child can study and grow fond of the job that he’ll do his whole life.”

His mother, Saveta, tried in vain to tell Jovan that it was too early for such things and that it was better to let Aris play with the other children.

“My father Sokrat took me to the office when I was two. The first word I learned after ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ was ‘law.’ My father’s father, Aleksej, took him to the office when he was two, and the first word he knew was ‘justice,’” Jovan would answer, and at that point his mother would give up.

In the beginning he let the boy play in front of his black desk while he talked with clients. How surprised people were when in the middle of their talk a blond child would peer out and say that he had to pee or poop! Then the famed Berberijan would tap on a little bell, and Janoš, his hunchbacked, gray-haired assistant, would come running, take Aris by the hand, and lead him to the toilet. No matter how serious and dramatic the case that brought the lawyer’s clients to him— and there were people who needed to save their sons and brothers from the death penalty— each one of them thought that the appearance of the child was a good sign. And when Berberijan revealed the reason why the boy didn’t leave the office, they were even more confident in his expertise. Especially because it had never occurred to them to prepare their own children for their future careers in that way. That man was a little crazy and what he did with his child was abnormal, but he was a lawyer!

When Aris turned four, his father began to pose fairly simple problems to him, to test his son’s intelligence, his power of reasoning, and his sense of justice.

“Who is more guilty, Laza the drunk because he stole from the cashbox of the rowing club or the treasurer Steva because he left the cashbox unlocked. .? Mr. Jozika’s chickens kept passing through his neighbor Milka’s fence for a year, and the whole time she warned Jozika about that problem, and then one day she wrung the neck of his rooster. But she didn’t do it in her yard but his— who’s guilty. .? Two men are stabbing at each other with pitchforks and they both die, and the wife of the one who started it seeks compensation. Is she in the right, and what does the other one need to do. .? It was raining, Mr. Ištvan’s cellar flooded and all his wine was ruined, and now the tavern owners, who had paid in advance, are taking him to court. He’s willing to return their money, but they aren’t happy with that because they’ve suffered more damage than the price of the wine. What should the court decide?”

Jovan Berberijan questioned the boy, and he would answer as long as it was fun for him, and most of his answers were correct. But a boy’s attention span is short. After ten or so minutes, Aris would grow tired of his father’s questions. He would want to play or would give the wrong answers on purpose out of pure mischief, whereupon Jovan wouldn’t stop, as anyone else would, but would keep asking newer and newer questions, with the patience of an old village horse that cannot be annoyed and provoked into tossing off its saddle and an awkward rider. It rarely happened that he even realized that the child was giving the wrong answers because it didn’t enter his mind that there could be someone in this world, even a small boy, who might give frivolous answers to questions of justice and injustice.

Soon Aris began to give wrong answers from the very first question, and then Jovan Berberijan introduced a system of rewards for correct answers. For five correct answers, a soft drink; for ten correct answers, cotton candy; for fifteen, ice cream; and for fifty correct answers, a trip to the circus. In this way he captured his son’s attention, or it would be better to say that he bought it, convinced that making a deal always worked. It worked for five full years, whereupon the idyll of his law office was again destroyed, and for the first time there was an open conflict between father and son. He came home completely out of sorts because Aris had told him that he was a fat old ass. Saveta tried to comfort him, but her comfort was as sincere as the Sunday confessions of Melita the prostitute. His mother knew well what was going on between the two men and what the little one had decided to do to the big one, but she’d given up on trying to explain it to Jovan.

But here’s what happened: there was a long time in which Aris got the bonus for fifty correct answers once, twice, or even three times a week, and Jovan had to take him to the circus as many times. If by some chance no troupe was appearing in Novi Sad, they would go to Subotica, Sombor, Bačka Palanka, or even Vukovar or Belgrade. Wherever there was a circus. They would stay the night in a hotel and return home in the early morning. And so alongside law, the circus became the only work that Aris saw and knew something about: the names of all the elephants who set foot on the territory of the kingdom, the lions, tigers, horses, rattlesnakes, and white mice that could find their way out of a labyrinth from which a man would never emerge— he knew all of them even better than the circus owners. He also learned to tell the difference between the lions whose teeth had been removed out of caution and those that could really bite off the trainer’s head when he put it between their jaws. He became an expert in acrobatic figures and magic tricks, and at seven he could already argue with authority about whether a particular clown belonged to the Russian or the French school.

For Aris, the difference between those two schools was a fact of the utmost importance, and in his eyes the French and the Russians were two bitterly inimical nations that would sooner or later, on a battlefield with hundreds of thousands of dead, decide whose clowns would rule the world. From somewhere, probably from the circus performers, he found out where the French fared better and where the Russians did. He circled cities on a map with colored pencils: blue marked cities that valued the Russian clowns, and red marked those that were inclined to the French ones, and he circled Berlin, Belgrade, and Bucharest with green because in those cities people were equally enthusiastic about both kinds of clowns.