Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“If he’s accepted, I’ll chop up my podium with an ax! I’ll shit all over honor and doctorates, and this school and this town will never see me again!” Professor Matuszewski yelled when someone arrived from the Royal Palace to inter-cede. The old Cracow ace couldn’t fathom the idea that students could skirt the rules and regulations to enroll in a course of study that was supposed to teach justice and the law.

But in the end Aris got in, and Gregor Matuszewski was retired by a ministerial decree. He was awarded the Karađorđe Star for his particular achievements, those in the First World War. An article was published in the daily Politika, along with a photograph in which Prince Paul was pinning a star on the professor’s breast and thus “crowning with the glory of immortals a man who knew when to pick up a rifle and when to pick up pen and ink to defend and build the fatherland with legal expertise.” One could detect a wince in the smile on Gregor’s face, as if the prince had not only pierced the lapel of a borrowed tuxedo, but also one of the nipples on his chest.

For years Petar Pardžik, the palace photographer, showed none other than this photograph from Politika to his assistants as an example of poor work.

“The man’s face can’t be seen. People’s faces show their real mood for nine-tenths of a second and tell a lie for one-tenth of a second. A good artist knows when he’s caught the subject in the wrong tenth of a second,” he told them.

Aris’s first months in Belgrade were like the discovery of a new world. He spent days and nights in the bars, spending the riches he’d earned answering questions about what was just and what wasn’t. By Christmas he already had the reputation of the biggest spendthrift in the long drunken history of Skadarlija because his daily tab was as a rule greater than what everyone else spent together. He treated anyone who came to his table, and at moments of particular inspiration, or if there happened to be a pretty young lady nearby, he smashed crystal glasses one after another. The waiter would bring him ten at a time on a silver platter. In the end Aris would grab the broken glass with his hands and explain the difference between glass and crystal. You cut up your hands on glass, but crystal was like diamonds, tender and fine if handled by a gentleman’s hands. The girls whom he was trying to impress with this ran away as fast as their legs could carry them. They saw in Aris either a haughty thug or someone who’d decided to kill himself and wanted to spend everything he had before doing so. And at that time at least, neither the one nor the other was a good recommendation for a suitor.

Before the end of the first semester Aris realized that nothing would come of his scholarly education. At the lectures, when he managed to go to them, he mainly dozed, sat hung-over, and tried to calm his stomach, which was raging inside him. And what the teachers were trying to teach him was uninteresting anyway. For two reasons. He was supposed to learn the basics, but as a boy he’d already passed through the advanced material. He knew how charges were brought and trials were conducted; what use would he have from learning the preliminary steps again? But the other reason why he had no desire to study was more important. He saw that he had eighteen years of torment behind him, of which he hadn’t been aware while it was going on. If he continued down the path on which his father had sent him, his whole life would be miserable. Without knowing what he really wanted, because he didn’t enjoy anything except Skadarlija, Aris sought a way to free himself from his father. Since nothing but death could deter Jovan Berberijan from passing on his law office to his son, Aris decided to feign tuberculosis. At first he planned on actually trying to get infected, but he gave up when people told him that that wasn’t so simple. Not everyone could catch tuberculosis, and no one could know how long it would take for the illness to progress far enough to free him from his studies. He didn’t have time because exams were approaching, and if he didn’t pass them, his father would realize what was going on and where his son was spending his days and nights in Belgrade.

He gave all his remaining money to Dr. Mušicki for the phony diagnosis. It was worth it because Mušicki acted out his part so well that he didn’t need to explain to the older Berberijan how the illness often progresses without the patient knowing he’s ill, and caverns begin to open up in people who were healthy the day before. All Berberijan did was crumple the paper on which the death sentence was written. Tears flowed down his motionless face, and Simeon Mušicki felt a great need to comfort him, as one comforted the fathers whose only sons were dying on such occasions. But since that was counter to the agreement that he’d made with the young man, the doctor said nothing and sighed. For each unspoken word of comfort, a sigh.

And so Mušicki earned the biggest money in his life, and Jovan Berberijan lost his reason to live. On Monday he sent Aris to the seaside, and on Wednesday he’d already fallen onto a sick bed from which he would never arise. Saveta washed, fed, and turned him from side to side for a full three years and despaired when he died. She loved him, no matter how he treated others, but she never reproached her son, though she knew that he’d made up the story about tuberculosis and that that story had killed Jovan. If she couldn’t change the situation, bawl out her husband, tell him that he was bringing misfortune upon their house, then she could at least accept and pity the both of them with that kind of tenderness that people usually call love, whereas they call the women who live in such love martyrs.

Aris Berberijan arrived in Dubrovnik in the early spring of 1931. He rented an apartment in the house of Mina Elez, an old maid who lived two houses down from the Sikirićes. Mina had a shop in her cellar for mending and darning women’s stockings and pleating women’s skirts. Regina often stopped by her place when a fair amount of bad stockings piled up in her house, but most often for no reason in particular, to look through fashion magazines that a nephew of Mina’s sent her every week from Munich or to talk a little with someone who understood her. Whereas others badgered her— What was she waiting for? Why didn’t she get married? Her time would pass! — Mina understood everything clearly. She only nodded, “Hey, dearie, I know how it is,” and kept on darning a stocking while Regina would detail her bad luck with men whom she found attractive or with others who found her attractive (and things were even harder with the latter).

Who knows how much Mina actually listened to her and how much of it all she even heard, because those stories were so typical, as if they’d been copied right out of an autograph album or one of Mir-Jam’s novels. Regina’s problems differed from those of other girls in only one respect. Whether it was fear or exaggerated pride, it’s hard to say, but she didn’t dare to strike out, dive, and plunge into the waters of love for the first time. Either the cliff was too high, or the sea below was shallow or too deep; she stood up above, started, and then stopped, afterward only to discover and invent everything that wasn’t right about the guy for whom she was supposed to take the plunge. The catalogue of male deficiencies was like a little picture printed in a hundred thousand copies that Regina’s entire generation carried close to its heart, especially the women, as had several generations before her. What was recorded in that catalogue wasn’t to be said out loud or written down because no one would believe it, and they would impute the whole affair to the wickedness and idleness of whoever was telling it. People scorn commonplaces and don’t believe that there is anything under the vault of heaven that might satisfy some general criteria, so then such things are simply not said and a great deal of human history is omitted from the history books. The part that can be described and explained only with the help of commonplaces ends up being the gray area of every historiography, an apparently uninhabited and unresearched area, a mysterious outline, a warping of space in the universe, or in any case something that scientists have been making up since the beginning of the century in order to return to reality the peculiarity that existed in it while God’s presence in the world was an absolute certainty. Therefore, Regina’s problem is only worth pointing out, and there’s no need to say any more about it.