The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  And so people went in and out, until Roko Ronson appeared, a mechanic and ship’s engineer who lived above the shop and had probably been drawn down by Dijana’s racket.

  “Hold on; I’ll bring something that’ll remove any glue or cement,” Ronson said and came back with a bottle of thinner or something similar.

  Half an hour later, after much anguish and waiting, Dijana had her hands again, but instead of hair all she saw in the mirror was a disgusting, dirty clump of a hairball, like the clump of hemp fiber that Uncle Luka used to wipe his boat motor.

  “What do we do now?” šime asked. “Well, girl, I’m afraid you’re going to be bald a while like me!” Roko Ronson said and laughed.

  Dijana lost her will and the power to resist; she yielded to fate and the barber’s hands. At first he took a pair of the large scissors barbers have and cut off the clump of hair and glue and then took a pair of clippers and slowly removed the hair that remained. Every so often he would oil the teeth of the clippers, study his work in the mirror, and continue working, satisfied because he could finally again do what he was trained to do and what all barbers usually did. šime was indeed convinced that he was the only one people came to with such crazy problems and that he’d spent half of his career dealing with people’s idiocy and not haircuts. And that career had been going on for a long time because he’d been in this barbershop since 1925, at first as an apprentice to the deceased Karlo Karakuna, and then as his employee. When the master barber became feeble, he left the shop and everything in it to him on condition that he take care of him until he died. And he had taken better care of the barber than his own father and wept more at his funeral than he had at his father’s.

  After he shaved the last of Dijana’s hair, he cheerfully slapped the girl on the back of her head.

  “There you go; now you look just like a boy!” he said, brushed off her bald head with a feather brush, and put baby cream on her skin. “Hey, Uncle šime will give you the Nivea for free! There’s usually a special charge for that!” he said, trying to cheer up the child somehow.

  She stared at the mirror, motionless and aghast, and saw someone there who did resemble her but wasn’t her and couldn’t be her because it had large, terrible eyes and two eyebrows like black crescent moons, above which red-gray skin rose like on the heads of Gypsies and rachitic Bosnian children who were brought every summer in trucks to the front of the Villa Magnolia to relax and, as their teacher put it, have the sea and fresh air full of the scent of pines boost their blood count and strengthen their bones.

  “Those are your comrades,” she explained to the class, “who will build our homeland and socialism with you!”

  The pupils listened as if what she were saying was the silliest thing on the face of the earth or she were trying to tell them a lie that no two-year-old would believe. The boys in the back rows couldn’t contain their giggles because how could they believe that their teacher was in her right mind when she tried to convince them that they were no different from those bald Bosnian monkeys with the aquamarine eyes and the huge heads? They were there, were normal, had hair, and spoke like people speak. They would have sooner believed it if the teacher told them that the goat munching leaves and almonds behind the school was actually an elephant than agree to be the same as Bosnians. The latter were ugly, warty, and dirty, no matter how much they bathed in the sea.

  “Tito loves you and them the same!” the teacher said, making her last argument, which wasn’t any more convincing, but not even the bravest in the classroom would laugh at that.

  Dijana was looking at one of those Bosnians right now, one who blinked when she blinked. He moved his nose, bit his lip, and did everything that she did. She was ashamed because the little Bosnian she was looking at was her. That shame was greater than her hatred for her mother, the horror at her hands being stuck to her head, her fear of the dark, her rage at being made fun of in school, or her sorrow and melancholy and everything else she thought and felt. There was no longer anything in the world that she was stronger than and that she might stand up against. As soon as she went outside—she knew well—everyone would look at her as they looked at those anemic and brittle-boned creatures that were brought to the villas of local landowners, which were where the history and culture of the city had been born. The partisans humiliated that culture in the most horrible way, showing the people of the city in no uncertain terms that they placed more importance on some rachitic children from the midst of Turkish cities than the civilized customs of these city walls. It was as if they’d let swine in to root around in the villas of our noblemen! Dijana wasn’t aware of the essence of that humiliation, but she understood its significance well. She walked behind her mother with her head bowed; the breeze that blew softly on her skin reminded her that she was naked and condemned to be another.

  She went to school with a hat pulled down over her head, and when the teacher told her to take it off, asking how she could be so uncouth as to sit in the classroom with a hat on, Dijana burst into tears, thrust her face into her palms, so miserable and helpless that those in the back rows started to giggle again.

  Vlaho Andrijić, a star student in the first row, said: “Comrade, she won’t take her hat off because šime shaved her bald!”

  At this point the whole class burst into laughter, and as the teacher hadn’t realized what this was all about or who šime was and what had happened, she thought that Vlaho was smarting off again, which was a habit of his anyway, and grabbed him by a lock of hair above his ear. He wailed, and she sent him to the corner as punishment.

  “And now you get that hat off!” she shouted in a strict tone, proud of the fact that a deathly silence had come over the classroom. Dijana didn’t answer. She was hiding her face and crawling along the school bench. The teacher approached her with a firm stride—oh how well things were going today!—and grabbed the hat. Dijana covered her head with her hands; her little palms could hardly cover the shameful spot, and she froze like a statue. The teacher was befuddled; she didn’t know what to say (it was terrible to be at a loss for words in front of thirty living mouths) and then regretted bitterly what she’d done. She succeeded so rarely in imposing her authority, and when she had, now this of all things had to happen. She squatted down by Dijana’s bench; tears were dripping on the black wooden floor.

  “I’m sorry, child,” she whispered. Then she got up, clapped her hands twice and said, “We’re going outside; PE is next!”

  Everyone forgot the bald sensation in a moment. “Hurray!” shouted the gigglers in the back rows, and the classroom emptied as quickly as a fire station does when a fire breaks out. Only three remained in the room: the teacher, Dijana, and Vlaho, who continued to smart off. If he was being punished, well, he might as well be punished for something!

  “Andrijić, get outside!”

  She asked Dijana what had happened—was she being punished for something at home, or had she gotten lice? But the girl didn’t say anything: “Comrade, don’t! Comrade, don’t! Comrade, don’t!” was her response to each question.

  Well, not two weeks had passed before Dijana went off to school without the raincoat again! And in such bad weather to boot! Regina no longer knew what to do or how to bring her to her senses. There had been ten days of peace in the house; she hadn’t resisted anything, hadn’t dug in her heels about anything, and then everything started all over again. It was shameful to think, let alone say it, but Regina would have liked most to beat her with a rolling pin until she broke the devil in her. If the devil could be broken at all and if he hadn’t crawled too far down inside her. She would kill her only to make a woman of her, Regina thought in a rage as the bora outside grew stronger and stronger. The roofs of the houses distended, the beams in the garrets creaked, the crown of the old mulberry tree vanished, the one that had always been visible from the window, over behind the house toward the city center. That’s how easy it is for people to end up alone, she thought. You can’t leave the house or call out t
o anyone; the bora carries you away as soon as you poke your nose outside. And it was the same for everyone. Only some were at home with their families, and she was all alone and might die now without anyone knowing or caring. Every house in the city was like an island. There are two kinds of islands—those that have been settled and the barren ones. On the barren ones there isn’t a living soul, and the settled ones are full of people. Regina was the only one who was on an island that didn’t belong to either kind and was living alone when she didn’t care for solitude. And the minute she felt good on her own, everyone was crowding around her, she thought, feeling sorry for herself. She would have shed tears if only there had been a man to take them into his soul. She was still under fifty; she had a small child and nothing but death to look forward to.

  She pulled a kerchief out of the dresser that smelled of starch and lavender and sighed a little. “O God, woe is me,” she said as if someone were listening.

  It wasn’t long before lightning started outside, and thunder could already be heard from the far side of the hill, although out at sea the horizon was in sunlight and it seemed that there wasn’t even any wind blowing out there. Whoever wasn’t preoccupied with themselves and their miseries, real and imagined, had to feel fear. Nature was all topsy-turvy, and that fifth of March would be remembered and retold as a day when a bora blew unlike any other and brought rain from parts of the world that never sent rain this way. Or maybe it wasn’t like that because clouds have always come from every corner of the sky and winds have swept through wherever they could pass, but the fifth of March, 1953, had to be remembered for something that had never happened before. People had to invent a story about it.

  Regina thought she heard someone knocking on the door. It was probably some shutters that had torn open and were now banging in the wind. A few moments later there was the same noise again. So it wasn’t the bora, but if it wasn’t, what was it then? No one went out for a walk in such weather, and if some trouble had put someone outside and sent him to her door, it was better not to open up for such a visitor. They could go somewhere else. To Bartol—he was a good man. And he had connections that always came in handy. Fear took hold of her; she didn’t know of what, but she felt as if it was late at night and she was stuck out in the mountains. Still, curiosity drove her to tiptoe over to the door, ready to jump back in a flash if someone burst in. And there was knocking again. A male fist; there was no doubt.

  “Open up, dammit, woman; I know you’re in there!” Luka shouted, trying to be heard above the wind, and she finally heard him.

  “You’re crazy! Do you know how afraid I was?!” she said, and he hurried past her into the house, soaked, bedraggled, and coatless.

  “We were playing cards and that špiro says, ‘Let’s listen to the news from Radio London!’

  ‘Ah, now that you’re losing you feel like listening to the news. Why didn’t we do that when you were winning?’ I say to him. He turns on the radio, and you know what?! You don’t—how could you when you only listen to Radio Zagreb? They say Stalin is dead! Wow, imagine that; Stalin’s dead! They say the news comes from unofficial sources but that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet has made an announcement. So he’s dead!” he said without taking a breath, as if he were afraid that she would interrupt him and say it wasn’t true, that he was only fantasizing, and that Radio London was lying like everyone else, and the only question was where you lived and whose lies you became accustomed to living by.

  Luka had become accustomed to living by the news of Radio London and not the news of Radio Zagreb, Belgrade, or Moscow (when it had still been a time for Radio Moscow). He had hated Stalin even before the resolution of the Informburo, a time when unflattering words about him could cost you your head.

  But Luka didn’t watch what he said, nor did the city spies take what he was saying seriously. He rambled on, and Regina told him, “Don’t; be quiet; you’ll catch the devil’s ear and disappear into the night; we’ll all suffer because of you . . .”

  She told him to remember how Bepo, their older brother, had ended up in a nuthouse. She asked him if he knew what might happen if those who didn’t already know heard the news that their second oldest brother, Đovani, hadn’t gone to Australia never to be heard from again but had changed his name to Jovan and gone off with Draža Mihailović to Ravna Gora and—as rumor had it—killed and murdered? If anyone found out about that, then everyone would know why Luka was saying such things about Comrade Stalin, and he wouldn’t need a court or a prosecutor. After the Cominform Resolution, when it seemed that Luka had finally found his place, he went around the city telling every partisan and party member to his face that he’d known who and what Stalin was long ago, when others were praising him to the high heavens and putting him above Tito. And he’d repeated to everyone word for word the phrases they’d spoken in Stalin’s honor.

  People didn’t like it at all. Either someone had reported that he was talking too much bullshit, or maybe he’d reminded someone in the security agency or the secret police when and where they’d praised Stalin, but one morning they came for Luka and led him away for questioning.

  Different investigators came and went; in the nine hours of questioning seven or eight of them each came in and asked him only one thing: “Why, Comrade Sikirić, did you attack Stalin before the summer of 1948, and what were your reasons for doing so?”

  To each of them he impudently answered that the reason behind everything he said was common sense and that he didn’t understand what reasons others had had before the Cominform Resolution. This went on until he gave this answer to a one-armed Slovene, whom he didn’t recognize though he’d seen him around the city and couldn’t have forgotten him or confused him with someone else. That Slovene, with his hair combed back and his thick, tangled mustache, looked like one of those members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks who had Georgian, Armenian, or Caucasian surnames, who would without doubt be condemned to death for treason and Hitlerian-Churchillian espionage but still declare their love for Stalin in front of a firing squad. After the war the city had become full of broods of all kinds of characters who bore a natural resemblance to minor characters in the novels of Maxim Gorky and Nikolay Ostrovsky or did everything in their power to become like them, just as normal people sometimes wish to look like James Stewart. But none of them looked like their idols quite as much as that one-armed man with the mustache did. His resemblance was so close, it seemed that he looked like his idol more than the latter looked like himself.

  “So, Comrade Sikirić,” the Slovene began after Luka had recited to him his answer about his reason being common sense, “you knew that Stalin was a fool and a traitor while others had no idea. But, you see, I lost my arm for Comrade Stalin. It was an honor for me to liberate Belgrade with the heroes of the Red Army, and I was sure that he was watching me from somewhere. The great leader of the world proletariat! I didn’t let out a peep when my arm was torn off. I’d have been ashamed in front of Comrade Stalin! And during that time you were hiding under women’s skirts and speaking against him and thought we were all idiots. You’re still not ashamed. Sikirić, I don’t know you, but I do know that you’re a worm and that I should squash you under my boot and walk away. You think you’ve gotten out of this? Well, you haven’t! You think that your cause has won? Well, it hasn’t, and it never will! Someone has to flush turds like you down the toilet! No one gave you the right to insult Stalin!”

  Luka’s smile went cold. He regretted that he hadn’t listened to the voice telling him to avoid this man and try to be invisible in his presence, as he’d done whenever he met him on the street.

  “We loved him. All of us! Every honest citizen of Yugoslavia, every antifascist, every man in this city who wasn’t a local traitor, an Ustasha, a Chetnik, or a White Guardsman. Or a worm like you, Sikirić! How is it that you don’t know what you’re doing when you call out honest men, antifascists and partisans whose boots scum like you aren’t wort
hy of cleaning? You’re not worthy of cleaning our boots. And you dare to speak against Stalin! We shot anyone who would say a word against him. Every honest man pulled the trigger. And now we’ll shoot those who were against Stalin before his betrayal!”

  “This guy is crazy,” thought Luka and started trying to figure out how to call someone in to save him because this idiot might really pull out a pistol and shoot him like a dog.

  “If we bowed down before people like you, we’d be spitting on the war against fascism, on our dead comrades from Granada to Vladivostok, on the battles for Mt. Kozara and the River Neretva, on dead mothers and children; we’d be spitting on our youth. And, Sikirić, we’re not going to do that! We won’t for the sake of ourselves. Are we to become slaves and you a saint? You filth; do you think Hitler would have lost the war if it hadn’t been for Stalin and the glorious Red Army? Who’d have beaten the Germans? Maybe the Americans, or the English, the handful of them that dared to strike at the fascists? The only thing they did was drop atomic bombs and burn undefended cities. Boy, that was their war against Hitler, but the Red Army bled. And we bled under the same banner! And no one else. You see this arm?! I’ll take it and slit your throat after I shit in your mouth and make you lick my ass if I ever get word that you’ve told anyone you’re against Stalin or if I hear that you’ve let that name cross your lips again. Now get the hell out of here and make sure I never see you again as long as I live.”

  Luka realized then that this wasn’t a country in which he wanted to grow old and that the people whom he passed on the street weren’t worth being afraid of. They asked Luka whether his belly ached, why he was frowning when he’d never done so before—had someone he knew died? And he only thought how nice it would be if they never saw his face again. The Slovene, in fact, was right. Everyone loved Stalin, and even today when they no longer loved him, they couldn’t forgive Luka for badmouthing Stalin. Their God had fallen from the heavens like a meteor. He no longer existed, and no one prayed to him any more. But the crime of godlessness didn’t thereby become less grave. If they weren’t telling him this, they certainly thought it. What else would they think?