The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “Ma’am, I beg your pardon; it’s Dr. Hoffman who’s dead—not your brother!”

  Soon enough it would become clear that it didn’t make any sense for her to stay any longer. Hamdija had simply lost his head; after so many years of working for Dr. Hoffman, he’d probably become a little paranoid himself and thought that this woman, who was the last one to see the doctor alive, would be needed to testify that no one had killed him. But he’d had something completely different in mind, which he no longer remembered after he regained his composure and began to apologize because she’d missed all the trains that day. In the end he took Regina to his relatives in Bistrik to spend the night at their place, while he himself went off to Jagomir, where the hearse had already come for Hoffman’s body and Dr. Niko Sršen had already shown up to take over the duties as head of the clinic temporarily. The police weren’t there, nor did anyone ask Hamdija about the death of Dr. Franz Hoffman. He couldn’t believe it. Shouldn’t someone have been interested in how and why a man had died? Had they asked Hamdija, he would have told the truth: he’d died of fear because a partisan colonel was refusing his food and because the boss would have been made responsible for his death!

  Horrified and disgusted, instead of going home to Bistrik, he ended up in the City Café, where he drank until dawn with strangers and cursed a world in which it was possible for such a man to die like a dog only because in that country no one trusted anything anyone said.

  Thus, Hamdija sought justice and would seek it until the end of his days, becoming a greater fool with every day because there was hardly anyone who realized what it meant when he was drunk and said that Hoffman was second only to Freud. And maybe even better than him because Freud only analyzed people as if they were microbes, but Hoffman saved the little intelligence that they had left after everything. Soon the whole city would laugh at him, and his new boss would fire him because he was uneducated and drank a lot. He would end up like one of the lunatics who weren’t lucky enough to have some Hoffman accept them into his clinic but instead spent their days on the streets and their nights in the city’s taverns.

  Regina spent the night in the home of Fuad and Begzada, peaceful and quiet people who didn’t ask her anything, and she was glad that she didn’t have to tell them anything about herself. They sat her down on their divan, offered her baklava and other sweets, asked her about the weather in Dubrovnik and what was blooming and what was ripening at this time of the year. He explained to her in detail how to make jam from plums and how to keep the plums from turning sour. Begzada nodded and added her comments here and there. Then she told what it had been like when the Germans had withdrawn from Sarajevo and what a sorry sight they’d been, whereas four years earlier they’d all come young, handsome, and blond, full of strength and haughtiness and thought that they would stay a hundred years. As the Russians chased Hitler’s divisions across Ukraine and Poland, every German in Bosnia—or anywhere else in the world—aged and became more and more feeble. In the end the whole German people was for the old folks’ home, Begzada concluded. Then the spouses fell silent for a while because each of them knew what the other was thinking. In their thoughts they were in agreement and comforted this unknown woman with their silence.

  “Oh, the poor doctor! He gave his life for Jagomir,” Hamdija’s father said finally but didn’t go on so that the woman who’d come as a guest to their house wouldn’t think that she too had to say something about dead doctor Franz and then reveal why she’d come to Jagomir and whom she’d come to see. That was something that wasn’t asked because it was one of those torments that one didn’t talk about but kept silent. So if you knew, you knew; if you didn’t, you weren’t a person because you didn’t realize that the same thing might happen to you.

  “May the good God have mercy on him,” said Hamdija’s mother. Regina said nothing and drank rose juice that smelled like Hoffman’s handkerchief.

  “And it’s hard for you too,” added Fuad, judging from her black dress that those words made sense and wouldn’t be misunderstood.

  When they said good-bye the next morning, Begzada kissed her as if they were sisters or best friends. Regina would quickly forget her night in Bistrik and wouldn’t remember those people any more when life was difficult for her. But maybe she should have. As they hadn’t burdened her with anything, they could only be forgotten. If there were more such people, life would be easier and nicer. And it wouldn’t last as long because it would all be forgotten.

  A month later a telegram arrived from Sarajevo in which Dr. Niko Sršen informed the family that his patient, Bepo Sikirić, had passed away due to natural causes in the intensive care unit of the Clinic for Internal Medicine in Koševo, where he’d been transferred nine days before in a comatose state. The body of Comrade Sikirić, a colonel in the Yugoslav National Army, had been taken to his home city by the authorized services of the Sarajevo garrison that were responsible for his transport. The colonel’s death was a loss not only for his immediate family, but also for our entire socialist society, which was left without one of its visionaries and one of the champions of its cause.

  Regina got distracted thinking about what exactly champion of its cause was supposed to mean.

  Bepo was buried in the same tomb in which Ivo Delavale had already been lying for two years. These two men, who hadn’t had anything in common, so absolutely nothing that they couldn’t even be one another’s enemies, ended up next to one another on two concrete slabs. Bepo lay in a massive coffin of oak, with a communist star carved at the top, and Ivo in a rusted tin can with a picture of a laughing black woman with big breasts.

  VIII

  The news that Alphonse Capone, the greatest gangster in journalistic history and one of the main stars of the newsreels, had died on his estate in Florida was announced in Yugoslavia with a three-month delay and only in the Belgrade Politika, above the Mickey Mouse comic strip. Capone died in late January, when Ivo Delavale was just starting out on his last voyage, traveling in an old tin Brazilian Santos coffee can, which had been packed into the bottom of the sailor’s trunk of one Milo Milidrag. As the ship sailed out of the harbor, a great Italian family was mourning its godfather, and the morning that it sailed into Gruž harbor in Dubrovnik, the Belgrade newspaper would publish the news of Capone’s death.

  That coincidence confirmed how far away America was from Yugoslavia in the year 1947. If America had been closer, Regina would have learned of her husband’s death earlier, right after the New Year, when he didn’t get up off the floor in a Chicago bar. Everyone thought he was dead drunk, but he was in fact just dead. Not even Milo Milidrag could tell Regina who’d paid for his cremation or who’d put his ashes inside a coffee can. He hadn’t known Ivo Delavale and had only heard the story of his death from the man who’d given him the can and the address and passed on the request that upon his return he deliver the ashes to the deceased man’s wife. Milidrag had forgotten what the man’s name was, and Regina’s attempts to learn anything else from the man were futile. Either this Montenegrin sailor was acting more stupid than he was because he wanted to hide something, or he really was completely oblivious. But the way that she learned of Ivo’s death and the fact that the ashes in the box could be anyone’s, or simply ash from someone’s stove, aroused her suspicion. It could hardly have been any different. No one had provided her with a death certificate, Milo Milidrag hadn’t given her Ivo’s personal effects, and there wasn’t really anything that would indicate the authenticity of the can with a laughing black woman on it. She put it under the sink, next to the waste basket, and decided not to say anything to anyone before she learned the whole truth. If it turned out that Ivo was alive and that a sailor had duped her, the tale would spread through the city like wildfire, and she wouldn’t be able to shake it until the day she died. A woman puts on a black mourning dress, arranges for a funeral, calls in the priests and buries a box of Brazilian coffee, and then her husband comes home alive and well!

  Things would have b
een different if Ivo Delavale hadn’t had ten dollars in his wallet at the moment he died. Or if Milo Milidrag had been more honest—if there’d been any fear of God in him and he’d believed that whoever stole from the dead ended up in hell. In that case Regina’s life and the life of her daughter, who was three years old at the time of her father’s death, would have taken a different turn, and most of what happened would never have come to pass. One could say that a single ten-dollar bill determined the course of fate.

  The man whose name Milidrag had forgotten was Petar Pognar. He was a block leader in some Croatian association in Chicago that mostly took care of arrangements for the deceased. Besides the tin box with the ashes, he’d given the sailor the dead man’s wallet, in which there was in addition to the ten dollars a photograph of Dijana at three months, a Yugoslav military service booklet, and registrations of six or seven places of residence in the name of Ivo Delavale. He had also given him a worker’s visor cap and two handkerchiefs, which Pognar’s wife had washed so that there would be no shame for the deceased, and a small brass crucifix on a chain, of no monetary value at all.

  Regina knew all those objects: she’d bought the handkerchiefs in Čapljina; he’d worn the visor cap instead of a sailor’s hat; and the cross had belonged to Ivo’s brother Radovan, who had been killed fighting for the Austrians on the River Soča in the summer of 1915. Had any of these objects reached Regina, she would have known that her Ivo was dead. She would have mourned and wept for him for a long time, sincerely, and would never have tried to see if any of the story checked out. But Milidrag threw those objects into the Atlantic after he found the ten dollars, convinced that it was the only way to cover up his crime. He would have thrown the tin box with the ashes overboard as well, but he was hoping for some token of gratitude after he turned it over to the widow. When she failed to show any such gratitude and got him off her doorstep more quickly than she would the postman, he regretted not having scattered the ashes into the sea. He didn’t have a guilty conscience about having stolen a dead man’s money.

  Regina wrote the shipping company for which Ivo had been working but received no answer. Then she reported her husband’s disappearance to the police, sent a letter to the Yugoslav embassy in Washington, made inquiries to émigré societies, and put notices in newspapers and on the radio. The announcer read the name Ivo Delavale every Friday on the nighttime broadcast, intended for the families of those who’d disappeared in the war. Among the thousands who hadn’t returned and whose bodies hadn’t been located and who’d served in various armies and were last seen in the oddest places—Dachau, Stalingrad, Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, Steinbrück, Železno, Trieste, Udin, Blagoevgrad, Bucharest, Sutjeska, Foča, Zvonimirova Street in Zagreb, Blagaj, Vis, Biokovo, and El Shatt—there was also Ivo Delavale, a ship’s engineer who, according to the last reliable information, had sailed from the port of Bari in the autumn of 1944 on the American warship Iron Star. He’d been one of a team of sailors that would on an order from the free Yugoslav government take over the remnants of the royal merchant fleet, which had lain anchored off American harbors for three years.

  Every Friday Regina listened to the radio program and waited for someone to contact her. She remembered the names of the missing and soon knew around two hundred of them, which were repeated constantly because news about them never came. Their relatives had probably memorized Ivo’s name, and now it seemed like they were familiar and close, though they’d never met. Just as children remembered the names of soccer players and could recite from memory the eleven team members who would go to next year’s Olympics, so the wives and daughters of missing soldiers and sailors could recite the names they heard every Friday on the radio and would read them for years, as long as there was anyone alive who didn’t know the fate of their loved ones.

  “I know Ivo’s alive; he’s boozing with blacks and chasing whores. What the hell does he care about our communism?!” Luka said to comfort her. Regina grabbed a bottle from the table that would have hit him in the head if he’d been slower in shutting the door. Dijana started wailing like a ship’s siren, and creamed spinach dribbled down her chin. Her eyes were almost bulging out of their sockets, and she looked like a very strange creature—an African monkey that had been bitten by a rabid fox in the zoo. Regina took her daughter in her arms and hugged her firmly, less out of motherly concern than so she wouldn’t see her like that. The green slime smeared on her white blouse, and broken glass crunched under her feet at every step. She tried to recall the words to some lullaby but couldn’t from all the shouting and racket. She started singing Sweet Little Marijana and tried to sing louder than Dijana was crying. Since she wasn’t very musical and the child wailed louder the more she sang, anyone who heard them might have concluded that Regina’s mind was starting to go from grief for her husband. The windows were open, and people listened to what came out of their neighbors’ windows more attentively than they listened to Radio London.

  She was desperate and distraught for days. Whenever she threw potato peels and fish bones into the trash, she would see the box with the laughing black woman. Then it would hit her that her Ivo was dead, and she was overcome with sorrow in an instant. Five minutes later she would already be remembering Milo Milidrag and his dull face: that wasn’t what a herald of misfortune looked like. Whoever brought such news had to be different or at least be wearing a solemn uniform. It’s hard to believe that the lives of your loved ones can be taken away by bums, ne’er-do-wells, and cheats. And Milo Milidrag was all three—even a blind man could see that. Though she didn’t believe in God, Regina felt that souls were nevertheless aligned in the universe according to some sort of logic that had no place for Montenegrin sailors from the Bay of Kotor and tin boxes.

  She’d heard that in the Bay of Kotor relatives would get married and no one paid any attention to whether a husband and wife had the same uncles and grandfathers, so that they gave birth to children with two heads, and that there were many adult men with the brains of three-year-olds. She remembered everything she’d ever heard about people from the Bay of Kotor and was more and more certain that Milo Milidrag had made up the death of her Ivo in the hope that he would get some reward for passing on the bad news. If the sailor had been from Korčula, Hvar, or Split or was a Herzegovinian, Regina would have grabbed for other tales and legends because there is no shortage of them for anyone from anywhere, but since he was from the Bay of Kotor and nowhere else, she began to hate all people from that bay. She needed that to keep from believing that the love of her life was resting in that coffee can.

  On the twelfth Friday the man on the radio announced that news had arrived from America about the sailor Ivo Delavale and asked his family to call the radio station’s number in Zagreb, Belgrade, or Sarajevo, where they could receive more detailed information. Regina was beside herself with joy; what she’d barely been able to hope for had happened because in the three months that she’d been listening to the broadcast, only twice had anyone learned anything about someone who was missing. And more than that: the announcer had not said “the deceased Ivo Delavale” but only “Ivo Delavale.” From this she concluded that he was alive and forgot that the word “deceased” was never used on that program. It was almost prohibited, as it were, because so many people were sitting next to their radios in the hope that they would never hear it. If they heard that one of those whose names they’d memorized was deceased, they might lose all hope and give up, and after such a big war no one should presume to give up until every one of the missing had received a plot in a cemetery. She ran through the house as if she were crazy, turning the lights on and off, hugging Dijana, saying, “Daddy’s called us! Our daddy!” and the child would squeal briefly, rejecting all her mother’s offers and invitations to something that wasn’t sleep.

  As soon as the sun came up, she took Dijana in her arms and went off to the post office, sat down on a low stone wall, and waited for it to open. Her child was sleeping on her shoulder and was as heavy as a co
rpse; by six o’clock her arms and legs were already numb, and she thought that it might have been better to leave Dijana at home. But who would have taken care that the little girl wouldn’t suffocate in a pillow, fall out of bed, or wake unexpectedly and wander the empty house in terror? If she hadn’t given birth to her so late in life, maybe she would have left her at home more easily and worried about her less. But at forty a mother’s instincts probably start to wane; women no longer know what’s natural, what you can and can’t do with a child.

  “Old mothers don’t have good milk,” Zajka Mujić had told her when she’d come to help her with the childbirth, “so go ahead and find yourself a young nursemaid so your child won’t be scrofulous.” Afterward she looked at her breasts as at buckets full of cow’s milk that had either been forgotten or as if someone had abducted the milkmaid, cut her throat, and thrown her into a ditch in the woods. Black images in a black time: it was 1944, Italy was in ruins, the Ustashas were raging, the Chetniks had descended on the city, there were all kinds of terrible tales about the partisans, and Regina was giving birth at the last possible moment in the worst time in which one could have brought a new life into the world. And everything turned out all right; the child was lucky enough to make it through the war. But then Bepo had gone crazy, and Milo Milidrag had knocked on her door, as if he’d come straight out of Bepo’s head.

  It seemed that there was a clear connection between those two tragedies and that fifteen months hadn’t passed from the time of the first piece of bad news to that of the second. The first was true; the second was a lie. But it was one of those lies that can’t make anything better and continues to exist even after it has been exposed. She couldn’t forget her sleepless nights, and at times she bade farewell to her husband and mourned his every tenderness but at others raged at the bearer of the news. And then her rage would spill over against Ivo, who hadn’t sent word of himself for more than two years.