The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “Let the idiot be,” said šajkača dismissively.

  “God protects idiots,” said Husref-beg.

  But Luka Sikirić realized soon enough that no one in the two bars laughed or had any fun and that it was impossible to get those people to warm up or at least get them to say something about something that didn’t have anything to do with the war and politics. He saw that the time he spent among them only depressed him and that he shared nothing with them apart from the language they spoke. Everything else was all too familiar to him but odd and hateful as only your own world can be hateful and odd. And so he quit going to the agents’ and the fugitives’ bars, without anyone even noticing that he wasn’t there.

  He found a job selling cheese in the city market. He worked for an old peasant, a Slovene by origin, who had a goat farm in the Italian Karst and was on the verge of financial ruin because middlemen were swindling him, taking cheese, and never showing their faces again. And he was a strange character himself, one of those highlanders who become distrustful and paranoid after years of living alone and are suspicious if they see someone on the neighboring hill, let alone the market middlemen.

  “You’ve got a nice watch. How old is it?” he asked Luka after two hours of sizing him up, and Luka decided he wanted to leave and looked at his watch to find a pretext for being in a hurry.

  “About a hundred years old. Maybe even more,” he answered.

  “Is it worth a lot?” the peasant asked, his interest growing.

  “I don’t know. It’s valuable to me because it was my grandfather’s,” Luka said.

  “Did you love your grandfather?” the old man asked, continuing to pester him.

  Luka wasn’t sure what he wanted. He started fidgeting and getting nervous. “I loved him. Why would I keep the watch if I didn’t? I’d have sold it by now.”

  The peasant lit up, jumped from his chair, and extended his hand. Luka took it, still sitting, very confused in his soul.

  “We’ve got a deal,” shouted the peasant, “I’ll give you cheese, and you give me the watch as security that you won’t cheat me! I’ll give it back to you when you bring me the money from the cheese.”

  Luka took out the watch without a word and held it out to the peasant. He didn’t do it because he was dead set on getting this job. He liked the story; he would certainly tell it to someone later in life. Besides, it would have been stupid to disappoint the old man, who was so happy about his perfect idea.

  The job selling cheese was, to tell the truth, the first job that Luka had had in his life. But instead of being a miserable burden to him, it turned out that his daily trip to the market wasn’t any different than going to a café, except that the people who came to the market were more interesting.

  The sellers came to the market at five in the morning, to occupy the counters and sell their goods as soon as possible, but Luka came at nine, unfolded a camping table, stacked as many cheeses as would fit on it, and then began his show. Either he would shout out the names of all the cheeses he’d ever heard of, or he would tell jokes and funny stories in Croatian about famous generals and dictators, and the old Italian ladies would stop and look at him as at the ninth wonder of the world.

  “And Napoleon, my good people, Napoleon couldn’t eat or drink very much. He had a bad stomach or had a nervous disorder or God hadn’t given him enough enzymes and acid to digest food without problems. The real truth of history hasn’t been written down, but as there are no living witnesses, it’s simplest to say that Napoleon never ate lunch or dinner like ordinary people. Instead of eating, he conquered the world. Instead of drinking, he waged war. So was Napoleon, my good people, a great man? Well, missus, you tell me: Would you rather have your husband grab a rifle and shoot up the street, kill all the neighbors, and go on a war of conquest instead of lunching on those delicious mackerels you bought?”

  The lady smiled, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged her shoulders. Maybe because she didn’t understand him, though the majority of people in Trieste knew Slovene or Croatian, or maybe because one wasn’t supposed to answer such questions so as not to take time away from the continuation of the story.

  “Of course you wouldn’t! You’ll fry him up some mackerels, whip up a marinade for him, feed him and give him something to drink, and then you’ll both lie down for a little while after lunch, listen to the gulls wrangle over fish heads, smell the pines, and think about how nice life is. But it wasn’t nice for Napoleon! Napoleon was unhappy. He couldn’t eat or drink, and everything life had given him could be measured in millions of decares of other people’s land and the millions of lives of his soldiers. Napoleon wasn’t a great man!” he yelled as he finished with his index finger raised high. He held it in the air for a few moments, and then in a softer and calmer tone he would say, “My good people, this cheese is excellent; I eat it every evening, and I’m still not tired of it; please buy some!”

  The people who had gathered around would buy Luka’s cheese as if bewitched, and by around ten everything was sold out. Soon it started happening that some of the people wouldn’t be able to get their cheese, and so he would have to apologize to the women and cheer them up with new stories. He already spoke Italian like a native, but he would always tell his culinary jokes and stories about generals and dictators in Croatian. It seemed more suited to him: not every language is suited to every foolishness.

  After he finished work at the market, he went to the old man and gave him the money. He would pull out the watch from a wooden box and put it in front of Luka, go off to get more baskets full of cheeses, and when Luka took them, the old man would take the watch back, lock it up in the box, and always repeat the same thing: “You give me liras, I give you the watch!”

  They’d already been working together like this for a year, the herd of goats had doubled in size, and the old man had found five more workers for the farm so he could produce as much cheese as Luka needed, but he would always put the watch back in the box. There was nothing bad about this, or Luka couldn’t see anything bad about it. It was funny and in some way special, as children’s stories are special in which crazy kings, hermits, and elves do things that no one in the world can understand but which in the end save the world.

  “Do you really still not trust me?” he asked the old man after he’d rented a van because the demand for his cheese had become too great for Luka to carry it in baskets.

  The old man blushed, lowered his gaze, and started scratching a splinter off the table, like a pupil that didn’t know an answer.

  “It doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t matter!” Luka said, sorry that he’d made the old man feel awkward.

  “I trust you. And I did after the first time when you didn’t cheat me. I wanted to give you the watch back, but then I thought that something would take a bad turn if I gave it back. I didn’t think you would cheat me but that something else would happen: there would be an epidemic, the whole herd would die, lightning would strike, my heart would give out. And that’s how it was every time. I’d give you the watch back; I feel awful about taking it; I could die of shame, but the more I feel ashamed, the more I fear that something bad might happen.”

  And so the watch stayed with the old man. Luka didn’t take it back even after the man opened his first shop in Trieste and started selling cheeses from all over Italy and France, not even after he opened shops like it in Bologna and Milan. Among the most famed cheeses of Europe, a place of honor was always reserved for the goat cheese from Kras, “The Cheese with a Story.” Everyone who bought it received a booklet of Luka’s tales, which had been compiled by a local journalist. The booklet told about the evils inflicted on the world by people who didn’t enjoy food.

  Luka Sikirić acquired a great amount of money and again lived the life of someone who didn’t have to do anything, but at least once a week he went to Kras. The old man placed the watch on the table, Luka got out the money, the maid brought two baskets with cheese, and everything was supposed to be like that
first time. But there was nevertheless a feeling that this was a game that lengthens your life and reminds you of good times. People become aware of the beauty of such times only after they pass.

  “All of this is killing me,” he complained to the old man, who said nothing and felt as he had when the middlemen had swindled him, taking his cheese and vanishing, except that he no longer had anyone to be angry at, nor could anyone understand where the deceit was and what it was that tormented these two men, who, doing only what they’d wanted in life, had reached the end. The end didn’t make them happy.

  In the summer of 1968 the old man turned eighty-five, and Luka Sikirić was told in a Paris cancer clinic that he had three months to live. He strolled down streets where children played war. They turned over cars, smashed display windows, pulled granite cobblestones from the street, and hurled them at the police, shouting their revolutionary slogans. The policemen shot tear gas at them and swung their batons, and many of them ended up in the hospital with bloody heads. They were forbidden from shooting at the children. The parents, against whom the revolution was started, forbade it. The stupid cops’ brains couldn’t comprehend this as the nurses tended to their wounds, and not even the most intelligent people would have comprehended this were it not for books, movies, and especially philosophical treatises that would turn 1968 into a significant historical event, more important than all the wars fought in French colonial Africa and maybe more important than the war in Vietnam, in which thousands and millions, mainly nameless slant-eyed primates, were being killed in the name of the same ideals against which the children of Europe had risen up. No answer would ever be given to the question of how a revolution, in which the counterrevolutionaries were not allowed to shoot, could be such an important historical event, but its meaning would finally be known in ten or fifteen years, when the children in the streets of Paris had grown up into replicas of their fathers.

  As in an educational documentary film, in which sailors from Kronstadt moved past, the Aurora and Winter Palace were stormed, Rosa and Karl gave fiery oratories and fled in the face of enraged veterans of 1914, Mao called on his fighters to go on the Long March, the Khmer Rouge turned temples into schools in which the pupils taught the teachers, Stalin said “No” to Tito and Tito said “No” to Stalin, and it wasn’t Maxim Gorky but an ugly little man with spectacles who was leading the children. The difference between him and Gorky was actually the difference between a game and a real revolution. Gorky’s revolution had been bloody and powerful, and it was no wonder that people had fallen in love with Maxim’s mustache and his gray, dull novellas, but the game was ugly and miserable because not even the children, no matter how carried away and furious they were, had counted on their little street party to change the world. They had only wanted to live out a few romantic moments that had been denied to them because they’d been born too late. And in the West, which had never had the Red October Revolution! That was a time of longing for the East, both European and Asian, for a history that was so attractive when it happened to others, and even more attractive if it was turned into a performance and games in the street.

  As Luka watched them rush at De Gaulle’s cops and challenge the operatic power of a wise old general, he knew that they would come home sweaty and dazed from tear gas and that when they grew up, they would remember with fondness the day when the streets of Paris looked like an advanced Leninist kindergarten. That was probably the most important difference between a revolution and a party with a revolutionary theme. Whereas no one at all remembers a revolution with warmth in their hearts, not even those who never renounced it, not even that Slovene who lost his arm in a Red Army assault, revolutionary parties are remembered as the most beautiful moments in human history.

  In the end, war memorials aren’t worth anything, whereas memorials of 1968 and invitations to the red party can later be shown to one’s grandchildren, who then think how their grandfathers have turned into such conservative monsters in the meantime.

  On the train to Trieste he tried to make peace with the thought of the coming end. Instead of despair and mortal fear, which someone else in his position might have felt, Luka was tormented only by disbelief. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself that he was dying, something inside him said that it wasn’t possible. Death is a cinematic illusion in which people either believe or don’t believe, except you don’t have to go to the movies if you don’t believe that those moving pictures are life and you’ll die one way or another. Luka wanted some awareness of it because he wasn’t a squid or a moth! But it simply didn’t come. The idea of nonexistence ran contrary to common sense. The scenes that passed along the railway track, the smells of the people who got on and off at the stations, their voices and exclamations, the way they looked at him without sorrow or fear, unconcerned with whether they would ever see him again—all this couldn’t disappear just like that, in three months, ninety days, two thousand hours. If he was there and so present and himself a part of that presence, no less alive than the handle on the door of the compartment, the flies on the dirty blue curtain, the Italian conductor who asked him how he managed to get out of Paris alive, the old leather conductor’s pouch that the man had worn during the reign of Mussolini—he or his colleague who was long retired, in retirement, or in the Trieste cemetery among merchants and sea captains.

  Luka didn’t want to be buried there, just one more foreigner whose unknown fate would be the subject of pity for pairs of imaginative young lovers. He would be buried in his city, in a cemetery full of familiar faces, where someone might be your relative or enemy, and where nothing is indifferent to anything else. It was nice and soothing to live on the other side of the world, or at least a thousand miles away from his hometown, but being buried in a foreign land was a misfortune. Every man should be buried where he was born or where he learned to speak and whence he decided to leave. As soon as he felt that the end was near, he would make arrangements to be taken back across the border, even if he had to pay the customs officials and the police, and to be driven to his sister’s place so that he could await what he couldn’t believe in and with which it was actually easy to reconcile himself.

  Instead of three months, which was what they promised him, he lived for more than a year. Without great suffering or pain, growing thinner from day to day and frightening others more than himself, Luka kept on going, along with his daily rituals. And he continued going to the old man in Kras once a week, taking out the money, looking at the watch, and carrying off two baskets of cheese. Up until the day when he could no longer lift them.

  “Franc, I think the time has come for you to give me back my watch,” he said. The old man burst into sobs, begged him not to go, to stay a little longer, told him that it was bad weather and the sirocco was blowing. And as soon as the sirocco starts blowing, people lose their strength and it doesn’t matter how old they are or what they are sick with. Luka tried to console him, tried to get him to laugh, but it didn’t help—what had held together for eighty-five years fell apart before his very eyes in a matter of minutes. There was no longer the coarseness of which the peasant had been so proud because it kept him from hunger, people, and wars as he had moved his goats between two front lines, not yielding even in 1916, when the children of two feuding kings died in the battles of the River Soča and Mt. Meletta, and when he had to keep his animals from grazing on bloody grass and getting used to the taste of human flesh, because if they had, they would then only have eaten such grass, and he wouldn’t have been able to keep them from a wicked habit, one that turned monkeys into humans—a taste for blood that would make a beast of any living creature. He realized then that the only creatures that didn’t feed on flesh and blood were those that chance had kept from ever picking up the scent. But if the wars continued and if a few other peoples bled to death in little mountain streams, then there would no longer be any creatures that grazed on leaves and grass; sheep would slaughter and be slaughtered, and no one would make cheese from their mi
lk. A man has to be hard and tough if he’s not to lose his mind amid dead regiments and divisions and devour himself along with his goats that feed on the corpses of those who believed in their kings.

  He didn’t leave Kras, not even during the most heated battles in the First World War. He didn’t think of leaving thirty years later, when it wasn’t clear where the border between Italy and Tito’s state would run and people tried to frighten him with the idea that the communists would take away his goats. What would the communists do with his goats? Attack Berlin and Budapest, hunt down the bourgeoisie, and demolish churches? Goats were no use for such things, nor were goatherds. So it didn’t matter where the border ran and what colors would be on his flag. Neither the one king nor the other was to be believed, and their jobs mattered to men only in time of war, and he had to keep an eye on his goats so they wouldn’t eat leaves soiled with human brains or bloodstained grass.

  Such was the old man’s belief, and since it differed from what others believed in, he kept people at arm’s length. Up until that funny Dalmatian came along, took his cheese, left his watch as security, and created a bond between them forever. He sold cheese in a way that no one had ever used to sell anything and made up things that weren’t in cheese, or maybe they were, but no one had known about them before. Cheese probably isn’t just cheese, the old man thought, and was happy that there was something outside the world of goats that one should fight for. If it hadn’t been for Luka Sikirić, he would never have arrived at that himself. The fact that he now wanted to take his watch and disappear forever hit the old man harder than if some great, unreal thunderbolt struck and killed all of his one thousand two hundred goats in an instant. The idea of his own death seemed much easier for him to take. You can’t be such a softy that you wail about the fact that you’ll be gone.

  In the end Luka had to leave his watch with the old man and promise that he would come to see him again. This lie wasn’t hard for him to tell. The old man had bewildered and frightened him because there was no way Luka could get him to laugh, fool what was left of the child in him, and lead him across the river to see that the other side was also just a riverbank and that one shouldn’t get upset when it’s time to go. As they parted, the old man came out of his house, which he hadn’t ever done before because he would start going about his work as soon as he locked the box. He waved from the stone doorstep until Luka’s car disappeared around the corner.