After Đuro left, Hoffman no longer had any superiors. No one in Sarajevo had the slightest interest in what he was doing with the mental patients, and the ministry of health traditionally did not answer letters from Jagomir because since Đuro had been there, they’d thought that there was no great difference between the doctors and the patients in the Sarajevo mental hospital. But the freedom to do as he pleased without having to answer to anyone only deepened Hoffman’s fears. It was easier to be the lowest in some social hierarchy than to be outside of one. He realized this in the last days of the kingdom, when all of Sarajevo was in a lather and on the move because everyone was going to those they felt they belonged to. Communists sought out communists, Orthodox sought out the Orthodox, Muslims Muslims, and Catholics Catholics. Only the Sarajevo Jews tried to stay on good terms with everyone in town at the same time so no one would take offense or get any ideas. He watched those unhappy and frightened Jews gesture to the communists, give alms to poor Catholics, and chat with the market bosses about the good old days of the viziers and knew that they had chosen the worst possible way to protect themselves from what was coming. For completely personal and egotistical reasons the Jews used their own blood to make the only glue bonding groups that had all started going their own ways. They were the mortar in a structure threatened with collapse, and in the end they would pay for their surfeit of caution with their lives. They found themselves on the outside of the hierarchy that was set up in the city in the first days of April 1941, outside of which the only ones apart from them were Dr. Hoffman and his patients.
In the summer of 1942 he refused, with open disgust, to turn over a list of his patients that contained their religious affiliations to an Ustasha captain.
No matter how much he was afraid for his own skin and no matter how much it seemed that history had conspired against him and a few like him since that noonday of the twenty-eighth of February, 1933, he was unable to comply with the captain’s request. Among the patients there were ten or so Orthodox Christians and one Jew—Sarah Nolan, a mongoloid girl who’d died in April of 1941 so that there wouldn’t have been a great deal of harm had Hoffman turned over the list of patients. If the Ustashas had tried to take away the Orthodox Christians, he could have easily called Dr. Savo Besarović to intervene on their behalf, and there could be no doubt that nothing would have happened to them. Hoffman, however, couldn’t accept anyone treating mental patients as anything other than patients because in that case everything would have come to nothing. Everything that he’d done at Jagomir all those years. And he’d have to accept the fact that they’d sent him from Vienna to Sarajevo as punishment, as a life sentence of hard labor. If someone had maybe thought of punishing him by sending him to the Turkish provinces and if there were those who believed that Franz Hoffman was a bad doctor—because if he’d been a good one, the Austrian emperor wouldn’t have sent him so far away—he hadn’t felt punished or felt himself to be professionally inferior to his colleagues.
“As far as the human soul is concerned, medicine basically gropes in the dark, and we haven’t advanced far beyond treatments with spells,” he would say to his colleagues. “No matter how much some future psychologists and psychiatrists will make fun of us and ridicule us—if it weren’t for us, they will not have done anything either.” He was proud of these words; he considered them to be witty, as if someone else had said them. If he’d given in to the captain’s threats, not even those words would have meant anything any more.
But the very next day he went straight to the city leadership and to the German command post.
He told the Ustashas that he and his people were glad that the historic city of Sarajevo, the old Croatian Vrhbosna, had finally become part of the Independent State of Croatia, into whose fabric the centuries-old aspirations of this people had been woven through the efforts of their leader, Dr. Pavelić. And if the mental hospital at Jagomir, which he’d called an asylum, a clinic, or a hospital, depending on the circumstances, could assist in any way in the blossoming and defense of their precious homeland, he, Dr. Franz Hoffman, would be deeply offended if they didn’t let him know.
In a ten-minute audience Hoffman told the deputy commander of all German units stationed in central Bosnia, a rather impolite Bavarian, that he felt himself to be a German and had always felt that way and would be happy if the military and civilian representatives of the Third Reich would keep in mind that people such as he had been living in this city and that for decades they’d been trying to civilize this wild country.
Neither the Croats nor the Germans were particularly taken with his declaration of loyalty. It was probably clear to them that someone who acted thus couldn’t have a completely clear conscience. But they didn’t check anything in his background, nor were they interested at all in the case of the head of a mental hospital. Jagomir was on the edge of the city and moreover on the side that was out of the way and where only Chetnik or partisan bandits were likely to turn up. But not even they would know where to go from the nuthouse so that Franz Hoffman was left to his own devices, alone with his fears.
The captain never came back, and it was clear that he hadn’t wanted the list of patients on an order from anyone but had been out on his own hunting for a Jew to arrest so he could then brag about it in the taverns of Zagreb’s old town.
But when the war neared its end and it was a matter of days until the partisans entered the city, Franz Hoffman remembered the sin he’d committed. He was sweating bullets at the prospect of the communists’ finding reports of his visits to the Ustasha and German authorities among the documents they captured. Secretaries had been present in both places and had written things down, and he was certain that his name was on some paper somewhere. It was difficult to believe that they’d only been tricking him. Both the Germans and the Ustashas had taken pains to convince the cocky psychiatrist who praised Pavelić and Hitler that he’d come somewhere important and that he was getting bureaucratic attention there.
The day after the city was liberated, on the seventh of April, 1945, Franz Hoffman went to the market square and had two flags sewn for himself: one Yugoslav and one Soviet. He paid the tailor Hakija Čengić extra for the express order and because Hakija had to send his apprentice to Kreševo since there was no red fabric anywhere in the city. On the eighth of April the banners of the victors were already fluttering on the Jagomir insane asylum, but Hoffman shuddered with fear in his office for months afterward.
He rested easier when they began to bring ill partisans, both men and women, to the clinic. The ones without commissions were brought in ambulances or military jeeps, but the comrades with commissions arrived escorted by officers of the State Security Service, who would take the doctor aside and warn him that the name of Major Horvat or Colonel šaković had to be kept strictly confidential. He was also duty bound to provide them with special treatment, not to forget the rank each had acquired in the struggle against the occupiers and collaborators, because the fact that they’d gone crazy didn’t mean that anyone had forgotten their merits in the people’s war of liberation and the socialist revolution. He was forbidden from giving them electroshocks under threat of the most severe punishment or from torturing them in other ways. The security service agent would then threaten to make regular inquiries about the condition of the comrade in question.
It had now been almost four years since the first mentally disturbed officers had arrived at Jagomir, and no one had taken any interest in them. No one had even made any phone calls. The families of the ill partisans didn’t come to visit them either, and so Bepo Sikirić was no exception at all.
But it didn’t matter. Dr. Hoffman didn’t dare violate any of the orders he’d received regarding the partisans. Nor did he have any particular reasons for doing so. The thirty or so of them—twenty of whom had military commissions—could be divided into two groups. The first group consisted of those who saw the enemy at every step and stopped fighting only when they were asleep. In their battles they
saved Comrade Tito and Savo Kovačević, forced the Neretva bridgehead and crossed the Sutjeska, changed their names and identities daily, and all behaved the same, without individual features.
The other group consisted of the quiet and peaceful ones. Two of them hadn’t spoken a word since they’d arrived at Jagomir, and nothing apart from their silence indicated that they were mentally ill. And they gladly took part in the springtime cleanings of the park, went to fetch water, and chopped wood. At first Hoffman forbade them from working, fearing that someone might accuse him of humiliating them with menial jobs, especially Major Seid Redža. But then he realized that neither Redža nor Ivan Rukljač (the other one who never spoke and fortunately didn’t have a commission) enjoyed anything besides cleaning the park and going to fetch water. Besides, Hoffman didn’t even believe that either of them was mentally ill. Had it been up to him, he would have sent them home. A man could live and be useful to society even if he didn’t say anything. Redža and Rukljač were living proof that this was true. Sometimes at the end of a workday during summer heat waves, he would sit down with Redža on a bench under the thick treetops, offer him a cigarette, and they would smoke in the peace and quiet, like friends who’d already said everything they had to say to one another. Hoffman didn’t feel like going home because he knew that he would sweat like a pig on his way to Koševsko Brdo, where he lived. It was so pleasant under the old oaks, almost cool, and what sane person would want to go out into the sunlight? If something was bothering him or if he was caught up in all of his fears and sighed a few more times, Redža would give him a hug and smile at him with that wide, self-assured smile from placards that called for volunteers to help construct the Brčko-Banovići railway line. Who would then dare to say that Major Seid Redža was mentally ill?
Different from him and Ivan Rukljač were the Jagomir depressives and suicidal types—that is, a third group, of whom there were six or seven. One had to watch them for days at a time and keep them in isolation so they wouldn’t get their hands on something that they might use to hang themselves or slit their wrists. They loved to talk, especially to Hamdija, because they were terrified of Dr. Hoffman. Because he was the supreme authority, a kind of nuthouse Tito; because he was a Kraut and acted like it; and because he was average height, which for them—mostly Montenegrins and all of them almost six feet tall—was an obvious sign of inferiority. Hamdija made a good impression on them. They called him the “Turkish Archpriest” and didn’t object when he locked all of them up in their rooms. For them he was the acceptable authority to whom they were to submit even if they were fighters and revolutionaries. If it hadn’t been for him, Hoffman would have had a hard time dealing with the depressive element of his partisan unit.
There were also some who did nothing but cry, others who retold tales about the deaths of their sons and daughters, who’d never even existed, and finally there were three of them who were completely oblivious. They had no idea who or what they were; they’d forgotten both the war and their roles in it, as well as Yugoslavia and communism, and were, as Hamdija said, completely peaceful in the absence of their minds. They didn’t bother anyone, nor were they of any use for anything. And you can be damned sure that nothing surprised them.
Bepo Sikirić numbered among the depressives and potential suicides, although he wasn’t in fact downtrodden, nor had he previously exhibited any inclination for suicide. But that was how life was organized at Jagomir: if you weren’t aggressive, then you were a depressive. The fact that you’d never actually been depressive didn’t matter at all because everything revolved around the way life was organized and not around what your illness was.
Along with around twenty civilian patients, not all of whom were even civilians because Franz Hoffman had in his clinic two men who’d gone crazy during the First World War and one non-commissioned officer in the Home Guard who’d been brought to him in 1944, those thirty partisans made up for an unbelievably complex social structure, and its functioning worried the staff at Jagomir for days at a time. Thus, not even Hoffman’s work had a lot to do with medicine and treatment. He could forget most of what he’d learned at the university and rely on the experience he’d gained from head doctor Đuro. Psychoanalytical writings and books, which he’d never ceased to acquire and study, were of no use to him at all. It didn’t matter that after the war Freud’s theories had found their way into the parlors of the most prestigious psychiatrists in Belgrade and Zagreb. He, who read and knew the most about them, didn’t have his own parlor, nor was he in a position to talk at length about his favorite topic. When he would take a week’s vacation, usually in August, he’d lay down his Tidža in the shade under a plum tree in the yard and would play psychoanalyst a little with her, try to hypnotize her, ask her strange questions, and made a mockery of both himself and Sigmund Freud. Actually, he would start out completely serious, and then he would start to realize how little sense any of it made if you did it under a plum tree with your own wife. But no matter how much fun those games were for him and Tidža, in his heart of hearts Hoffman realized more and more that he’d wasted his time because he wasn’t even doing as much as head doctor Đuro had—he prescribed electroshocks and submersion in ice water only rarely. Nor was he utilizing what he believed in and what would tomorrow be the most important psychiatric method throughout the world. At the same time he derived no comfort from the fact that he’d believed in psychoanalysis before others had even heard about it. He had his Jagomir, his little empire that he ruled and with which he eluded all those rebellions and wars and about which no one cared a whit because it didn’t stand in anyone’s way.
“Drink some brandy. There’s no medicine like strong brandy!” he said, trying to bring Regina around, since she couldn’t calm down after seeing Bepo. Hamdija stood at the door and waited for Dr. Hoffman to think of something. He was ready for everything. Even to force-feed the uncooperative colonel, if only his boss concluded that there was no other solution.
“Have a drink, ma’am, please!” he insisted. Regina raised her eyes, and instead of one she saw two old men. He offered her a handkerchief; it smelled of roses. In that smell there was peace, family harmony, and something that had been irrevocably lost in all those wars along with the soul of her Bepo. If she thought about it even for only a moment longer, she would start crying again, and who knew how long it would take for her tears to stop. She blew her nose loudly. That noise was ugly and shameful, but at least she could be certain that she wouldn’t cry any more. The first time she sighed without stopping her sobs. This doesn’t make any sense, she thought, neither sobbing nor burping.
“Ma’am, please drink some brandy,” Hoffman pestered her.
“No, brandy makes me burp,” she lied.
She sat a little while longer with that old man and his assistant, and it seemed that no one there had anything else to do. Those two wouldn’t help Bepo because they couldn’t and didn’t know how. They knew about as much as she did about the things that happen to people to make them go crazy. A full moon, the sirocco, nightmares, fear, decapitated human heads, ghosts, dragons, evil spirits and demons, betrayals and deceits, insomnia, inexplicable pain . . . All of this had taken its toll on Bepo. She knew this well, as did everyone, but people acted as if something else were going on, as if there were some kind of secret in the human soul. There was, in fact, no secret, but it was difficult to accept that sane people were just as close to going crazy as crazy people were to being sane. She wanted to leave this place as quickly as possible and forget her brother, who was beyond hope. But how could she do that as long as this old man was expecting something from her?
“Do you know what’s going to happen now?” Hoffman asked. “Your brother will starve for about fifteen more days, and then he’ll fall into a coma, and we’ll feed him intravenously, and if he recovers, everything will start all over again. Until he dies.” He folded his hands as if he were closing a book. She didn’t answer him. She asked for her coat, and Hamdija showed her to
the gate.
“Don’t you want to see him again?” the doctor asked as they parted. She smiled at him and wished him all the best.
But it turned out that she hadn’t seen Hamdija for the last time. Two hours later he was running after her on the railway platform; the train for Mostar was just about to pull away.
“Ma’am, wait!” he shouted. Regina had already stepped onto the iron step of the railway car when he grabbed her by the hand and said, “He’s dead; please come with me! For God’s sake, don’t leave.”
She was calm and didn’t shed a tear; they went out onto the road in front of the railway station when Hamdija stopped, leaned on the wall, and started vomiting. She thought that he’d drunk too much and felt embarrassed because people were passing by and seeing her in such company. She was wearing black for her dead husband, her brother had just died, and that young man was throwing up. It would be so good to go because she couldn’t make anything right now anyway.
“How did he die?” she asked Hamdija when he regained some of his composure. “A heart attack. That was his third in a year. I tried to tell him to take care of himself, but he didn’t listen . . .”
“You didn’t tell me that,” she said in surprise.
“Tell you what?”
“That Bepo had heart problems!” she said, enraged, finally in a position to accuse someone for what had happened to her brother.
The Walnut Mansion Page 28
