The same day Luka planned out his last journey. He telephoned the Yugoslav ambassador in Rome to inquire about his status. Two hours later the ambassador informed him that he wasn’t wanted, nor were there any special reasons why he should be afraid to return home. He even offered him a Yugoslav passport to assure him that he was not the subject of any proceedings in the country.
“A lot has changed in the last fifteen years,” the ambassador said. Luka didn’t answer him, but he would have liked to tell him that things change in fifteen days, let alone fifteen years, and there was no country and embassy at any time that hadn’t always said that things were now better, that there was more freedom and the laws more reasonable than fifteen years before. The problem was only that freedom never seemed to increase or the laws to weaken enough for a man not to have to inquire if he was still guilty of something before those from whom he’d fled.
Besides, Luka didn’t completely believe the ambassador. He decided to pay off the customs officials just in case, send some gift packages of cheese to Marshal Tito in Belgrade and a wheel of parmesan the size of a tractor tire both to the municipality of Dubrovnik and the city commission. If they all accepted their cheese, that would be a sign that they were really not unhappy with him, he thought naïvely, and waited for days for the arrival of the signed delivery slips showing that the gifts had been received. And they arrived two days after he could no longer get out of bed. He traveled in an ambulance, entertaining nurse Patricia, carefree, happy, and truly convinced that he’d bought his freedom with the cheese. The customs officers wouldn’t accept any money, nor did they understand why he was offering any, but they held him up for hours at the border and tried to check which service these travelers had gotten into trouble with and were now trying to buy their way past the customs officials. But the driver, Patricia, and the Italian citizen Luka Sikirić were all as innocent as newborn babies. Up until the collapse of the Yugoslav government, at the Opićina border crossing generations of customs officials passed on the story of some ill man who had offered a large sum of money to enter Yugoslavia although his papers were valid and he wasn’t wanted by any police force in this world. Maybe even today some grandpa tells his grandchildren softly, so no one will hear him, about what a country that was, that people even offered to pay gold for things that it offered for free and that they were entitled to according to the law.
Luka died in his sleep, tired and happy because he’d spent a day with those dear to him. Patricia didn’t have to close his eyelids. She lowered his hand back down on the pillow and pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket that he’d given to her when they were starting out on their trip.
“If I die in the middle of the night, go ahead and go to my sister and wake her up. She’s a light sleeper, and she’ll be awake as soon as you enter her room. If that doesn’t happen, that’ll mean she’s died before me, and our plan has come to nothing. Well, since that’s not likely, then you’ll bow down to her and sing O tu che in seno agli angeli. That was her favorite song, and she’ll be touched that I remembered. But don’t be too serious. You can wave your arms about, dance a little, so it’s cheery. And it can’t go on for too long, or she’ll get angry and chase you out. When it’s over, lean down again and say, ‘Luka’s dead.’ Tell her just like that, not in Italian because she might act like she doesn’t understand you. C’mon, repeat after me: ‘Luka’s dead, Luka’s dead!’ Good, but I’ll write it down so you don’t forget how to say it.”
Before she went into Regina’s room, she took a look at the piece of paper, drew a breath, and started singing, loudly, as Luka had said. She didn’t exactly sound like Mario Lanza, but no one besides him has ever sung O tu che in seno agli angeli properly, along with the crackling of a worn-out record album and at a tempo slightly accelerated at seventy eight revolutions per minute, in the spirit of the last era in which artists weren’t people but puppets on the strings of the universe, and there wasn’t the slightest difference among Mario Lanza, Enrico Caruso, Rudolf Valentino, and Charlie Chaplin. Luka Sikirić was Chaplin in the lives of those he had entertained and thus proved that when the angels of silent film and wind-up gramophones disappeared, they left the world without something that was more important than technological progress and the need for pictures to be more accurate than reality.
But in 1969 it was already too late to mourn for angels. Nurse Patricia sang their song as best she could, along with choreography that she’d seen in one of Fred Astaire’s movies, which might not have been what Mario Lanza was trying to achieve, but it would have brought joy to anyone who treasures all the past and isn’t concerned with the disparities among decades. Fred and Mario were equally removed from the twenty-three-year-old Patricia; she knew nothing about them except that they belonged to the world of her aunts and uncles, in which it was customary to stress one’s every inclination with tears. They cried during television comedies; they cried as soon as they heard a song they liked on the radio; it was enough to say the name Verdi for the men and women in the family to take their handkerchiefs out of their pockets; they even cried if someone mentioned the name of a shoe polish that people had used thirty years before.
She’d never understood those tears or why people cried when they weren’t unhappy or what that sorrow was that people enjoyed more than any kind of happiness. They were fretful and irritable, all those uncles and aunts, as soon as the conversation turned to something that was still alive and in existence and for which they would, or so Patricia thought, shed tears like that at some later date.
When Fanelli, the head doctor, had assembled his nurses and asked them who knew how to sing, and when three of them responded that they did, and when he then called them into his office for auditions, Patricia thought that the old guy had lost his mind, which was evidently a common occurrence in that generation. Like many of her aunts and uncles, he must have felt like summoning his youth with the singing, but as soon as he chose her, folded his hands, and said, “Wow, that’s really beautiful!” she began to get seriously worried that he had some dishonorable intentions in all of this. But then he went on: “A patient of ours for some years now, Mr. Sikirić, otherwise a wonderful person, a cheese merchant, but what cheese it was! I’ve been all around France and Holland, and I know cheese; I can vouch that I’ve never seen such a selection of cheese anywhere. Well, Mr. Sikirić’s carcinoma is in its terminal phase. I told him ‘Luka, we’re friends; I don’t want to lie to you.’ And he says, ‘My dear Fanelli, is there a friendship in which no lies are told?—You only tell the truth to taxpayers and women you don’t love!’ Okay, I won’t go on about that. You’re young, you’re not interested in that stuff, and it’s not nice to tell about your personal secrets, though I’d like to. You know, Luka is a very witty man, but fine; that’s not what this is about. Rather, he wants to die in his city, on the other side of the Adriatic, and he asked me to pick out a nurse who can sing well to accompany him on his trip. He didn’t tell me why he needs a singer, but I have no doubt that it’s something very good. You, Patricia, are ideal for this. You know your work, you’re beautiful, and you sing well. This isn’t just work but something more important than work. You’ll see! You’ll never forget Luka.”
Patricia’s knees almost gave out from fear. She believed that the last wish of a dying patient could only be something erotic in nature. He certainly wasn’t interested in her only to burst into tears in the end, and if it weren’t that, why would he want a pretty young singer? She didn’t dare say “no” to Fanelli, but she was prepared to quit her job if the patient that she was accompanying crossed the line. Which line? Well, the one that she would draw.
For two days she thought about where that line should be, and the more she thought about it, the greater her confusion became. At first she decided firmly that she wouldn’t allow the man to touch her. She would satisfy him in everything that didn’t require touching him. Maybe he wanted her to perform some deathbed striptease to a dirty song. Was it okay to agree to tha
t? Of course not. There was no difference between stripping for money and sex for money. So he could forget the striptease! It was amazing how lowlifes remained lowlifes in their final hour.
But what if she liked him? What if he was a lovable and precious guy, just the type she’d been dreaming of? What if he was the type that she would fall in love with if she met him in different circumstances and by a happier twist of fate? Why wouldn’t she strip for someone like that? Because it was a matter of principles that you dared not abandon. Yes, but you regret having acted on such principles more often than you do if you’ve given them up. She decided that she would strip if it turned out that Luka was her type of man. But what if he wanted more than that? If he tried to get more than that, then he certainly wasn’t her type. As a rule that was true, but rules were the same as principles. Those two words kind of had the same meaning but just sounded a little different to her, so if one could have regrets because of principles, one could also have regrets because of rules. In the end she decided to act depending on the situation, but with that her fear of meeting Luka Sikirić was not lessened. “Am I a whore now?” she wondered as she packed her suitcase.
After only half an hour of traveling together with that male skeleton, whose skin had an unhealthy reddish-gray hue and had become as thin as tracing paper from his illness, on whose face the only living things were his eyes and scars, whereas everything else on his body looked like an artificial corpse, Patricia could tell that he was just her type of man. He might have looked different, been less alive, with open, putrescent sores and macerated lesions; he could have stunk and had the head of a brontosaurus and wooden pegs instead of hands, but Luka would still have been the same, the one that she’d wanted, thinking that such men existed only in her imagination. Where else were there funny princes who found all the reasons for their happiness in their princesses and thought only of entertaining them?
She decided to agree to do anything Luka might want and was disappointed when she realized that she’d been chosen for something that was supposed to happen only after he was dead. This would pain her for years, and for years she would want someone to whom she could tell how she’d wanted to strip and sing in front of the man of her life when she’d met him in the last days of his. The man who didn’t think that strange would be her husband. And there was no chance of her getting married to anyone who didn’t understand her love story or thought that it was perverse, that she was led by dark desires. Patricia’s desires were as innocent as Luka Sikirić had been innocent.
She sang his last wish as it grew light outside, as hung-over men hauled empty crates from one end of the market to the other, small wooden boats sailed out to sea, birds and cats awoke, and a woman in a nightgown curled up against the wall at the head of her bed, as if she were unsure whether she was dreaming. Tears streamed down her face even before Patricia said, “Luka’s dead.” Because she’d realized what had happened or because she too was like Patricia’s aunts and uncles.
That was how Regina lost her last brother.
IX
“Comrade, when did your child die?” asked a bowlegged midget who was hurrying after Regina. He could have been sixty, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been only thirty. Among lunatics and ne’er-do-wells, whom God endowed with the intelligence of a five-year-old, it wasn’t always easy to tell who was how old. Their time flowed differently than it did for everyone else: for some of them it was quicker, for others it was slower, but never as it was for the people who considered themselves normal. That was the most obvious difference between the sane and insane. If not the only difference that was completely reliable.
“Comrade, what did your child die from?” the midget persisted, and as soon as she turned around to chase him off, he ran and hid behind a tree. He came back when she started walking again, keeping two steps behind her and asking another question: “Comrade, does your heart ache? You carried your child under your heart, and now it’s empty there.” She grabbed a rock and threw it at him to scare him. He jumped and squealed like a little dog when someone steps on its tail, though the rock missed him by three meters.
“Comrade, take me; I’ll be a good child. No mother gave birth to me; I came from the war. Take me; I’m war booty,” he said, offering himself.
Regina tried to ignore him. Fortunately the road to Jagomir was empty, and no one saw the woman in black and the bald little monkey chasing her, because an onlooker would have surely laughed, made some smart-aleck remark, or grabbed the midget and beaten him up, convinced that he was doing it to protect normal people from lunatics.
The midget gave up only when they arrived at the gate of the insane asylum, an old Austro-Hungarian building shaded by oak trees that had been planted long ago in the belief that the eyes of the insane would rest and calm down under their thick, green crowns, which in the meantime had turned into a jungle just as wild and unkempt as their souls.
“I’m not going in there. The people in there are crazy. You’re crazy too!” he said, frightened and disappointed.
He’d probably already been inside, or maybe his family had threatened to send him to the insane asylum if he didn’t behave.
On the grounds men in gray pajamas were standing or walking around slowly. Some wore tattered partisan overcoats over their pajamas. One of them had an officer’s belt drawn tight around him; he was evidently proud of it because he tightened it as much as he could and waddled around like a goose.
When she went through the gate, all of them fixed their eyes on her. They didn’t try to come closer; each of them watched her from where he was, wherever he happened to be when she came, no matter whether he was only five or fifty meters distant.
Those who were further away might have envied those who were closer but didn’t try to get a better spot. Regina felt awkward in front of their hundred big, languid eyes. Especially because the eyes of her Bepo might be among them.
She’d come to Sarajevo at the request of Dr. Hoffman; he’d informed her that Bepo Sikirić had been refusing to eat for six days and might change his decision never to eat again if his sister came to see him. He hadn’t seen her since December 1945, when he’d been transferred from the Tuzla barracks, first to the psychiatric ward of the local city hospital, and three weeks later to the Jagomir insane asylum in Sarajevo, the oldest clinic of its kind in Bosnia. It had been established during the reign of Franz Joseph, which was when Franz Hoffman had come as a young doctor from Vienna. Regina had never visited her brother because she was afraid of seeing him crazy. She shuddered at the thought of entering an insane asylum because she thought that in such a place she would go nuts herself. If any illness was contagious, it was losing your mind. It didn’t matter that books said otherwise. The plague and cholera passed from body to body, just as pollen passed from plant to plant, if the wind and temperature were right and if a body’s resistance had already been lowered and it was susceptible to viruses and bacteria. And insanity spread with the terrifying logic of the elements. Reason was weak in the face of all forms of insanity because reason was the exception and not the cosmic rule. The path to insanity was a return to the logic of cliffs and rocks, amoebae, brackens, and all life that wasn’t human. She walked through the grounds certain that the plague was slowly overcoming her, but she had no choice. She couldn’t just let Bepo die of hunger like that.
In front of the entrance there was a young man sitting on a stool wearing blue work overalls. He was sharpening pencils with a large hunting knife and putting them in a little metal box. When he saw Regina, he got up. She took a step back from the knife, and the young man smiled and said, “Don’t worry. I work here. I’m Hamdija.”
He took the knife in his other hand and extended his right hand. He was over six feet tall, and his hand was the size of an oar, warm and soft. “Dr. Hoffman is waiting for you. He asked me three times whether you’d arrived. You know how it is—an old man, old school from Vienna.”
“This guy surely beats them,” Regina th
ought, “but he acts proper when families come because they might report him.”
He led her through dark, windowless corridors; there was only one light bulb burning in each of them; the paint was peeling and coming off the walls in big flakes. “So this is what my Bepo fought for?” she wondered.
“We have patients that have been here for more than fifty years, but most of them are old partisans,” Hamdija began, speaking in the tone of a tour guide. Regina thought that this was a place where they could read everyone’s mind.
“We have two colonels, a few majors, some captains, company commanders, political commissars, and one national hero. Most of them went through the battles of Sutjeska and the Neretva. Four years in the woods, and then in their first three months of freedom they all had nervous breakdowns. They fell apart so much that no one can put them back together again. It’s terrible, ma’am.”
She was taken aback that Hamdija called her “ma’am.” That wasn’t forbidden, but it was a sign, and a dangerous one. People only said “ma’am” or “mister” if they were making a threat or working out some kind of plot with someone. Maybe they wanted to poison Bepo and intended to get her involved.
“Damn, sometimes I feel guilty before these people. Dr. Hoffman tells me that isn’t good, but there’s no helping it. That’s how it is. How could I be right if I’m the only one who’s normal among all these men who fought for this country? I didn’t fight because I was still in school, and now it’s me who’s healthy and all of them who are sick. Oh, ma’am, if you stayed here a little longer you’d know that one can’t rightly say who’s crazy and who’s normal,” he said as they passed from one corridor to another for the third time already, walking through labyrinths and catacombs in which they didn’t meet a soul.
The Walnut Mansion Page 25
