The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Ten days passed like that, but the contact who was supposed to smuggle Klein into Italy never showed up.

  “It’s happened before,” said Franjo, trying to comfort him. Unsuccessfully, because Samuel was already on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Soon he would either jump off the roof of the prep school or walk outside, and they could catch him and do whatever they wanted with him. There was no way he was going to stay there any longer.

  “Do as you please, effendi!” the janitor said angrily. “You just go ahead and jump, and for all I care, they can quarter you and cut your throat, but why did you come here to me? Do you think I like doing this, keeping Orthodox and Jews up here in the attic? You say some keep goats and chickens, and crazy Franjo took you in so he could give you food and drink to fatten you up! It’s kind of like that, except you don’t lay eggs or give milk, and now you want to turn yourself in to the Ustashas to boot. Well, you know what I’d do to you if you were a chicken? I’d cut your head off! I fed you, and I’ll be the one to cut it off! Since you’re not a chicken, I can only say that you’ve screwed me good,” Franjo said and left the attic without saying good-bye.

  That night he didn’t leave him anything to eat or drink, so Klein, hungry and thirsty, had to think hard about both his stomach and his nerves. This kind of life made no sense, and if half the world wanted to see him dead, then it was really smartest to say, “Fine, here’s my head since it’s worth so much to you! I don’t get much use out of it.” If I do that, Klein thought, nobody has the right to rebuke me for it, not those who are in the same position as me, not even God if he exists. Klein was ready to end his suffering and was, as Husnija said, done with life. His kin were condemned to disappear, over there where he was called a Yid and here where they called him a Jew and in every corner of the globe where he was called thousands of various names, and it made no sense at all. Nor was there any way for Samuel F. Klein of all people to resist it.

  If all Jews had to disappear and that was the way of the world, what factors might make him, just one of many Jews, an exception to that general rule? Hoping for that was like hoping that the force of gravity wouldn’t apply to him alone. It was easy to walk on water when you were a Catholic saint and hundreds of millions of people believed that you were really walking on water, but how could he do the same thing without anyone believing in it? He could only regret that he’d been born into the sons of Abraham so late, right at the time when it was decided that they were no longer supposed to exist. Had every generation of his forefathers going back two thousand years ago married and reproduced just a month earlier, he would be living in happier times, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century or even earlier. He would have had his own little shop and synagogue and would have died like a man. From the plague, cholera, or syphilis, without suffering on account of something for which he wasn’t to blame and wasn’t responsible.

  Klein’s Jewishness, like every other group membership, was for him an unsolvable mathematical problem. There were probably people who’d figured out what it meant to be a Jew, a Catholic, a Muslim, or a Buddhist. Those were people who deserved an A-plus in arithmetic. They knew how to calculate differences in weight, height, and the depth of air. But Klein was a bad mathematician in those areas. If Jewishness was something that could be measured in register tones or monetary units, he wouldn’t have had a hard time with it and certainly wouldn’t have ended up in the attic of the Banja Luka prep school. True, he celebrated Hanukkah and Passover. But was that really a reason why he and the whole tribe of Abraham had to disappear from the face of the earth? He drank alcohol, worked on the Sabbath, and didn’t give alms to poor Jews, and now God was punishing him. But why was he punishing him along with those who hadn’t sinned against a single earthly or heavenly rule?

  He couldn’t figure any of it out, but during the night of fasting that the janitor had imposed on him, Klein nevertheless came to an important conclusion. Of the two worries, his and that of his feeder, the second was more powerful, and he should try to accommodate it. Jumping off the roof and thereby causing harm to Franjo was out of the question. His conscience started bothering him and he felt guilty. The less a person’s circumstances offer him opportunities to be guilty, the stronger his feelings of guilt.

  He could hardly wait for the next morning, the time when Franjo came for the potty. Franjo came in frowning, angry.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” he said and grabbed Franjo by the sleeve, but he pulled away. “I’ve got something to tell you,” he insisted. “Please, sit down!”

  The janitor sat down on the ottoman, holding the chamber pot with Klein’s stool on his lap, as if it were a ceremonial chalice that he was going to present to the winners of the European Czech Handball championship. But the frown didn’t leave his face. Klein thought about telling him to put the potty down so the stench wouldn’t bother both of them. But he was afraid that this might anger Franjo and that he would leave again, and then he would have to wait until evening. So he decided not to pay attention to the shit for now.

  “Forgive me; my nerves have given out. I won’t do what a chicken or a goat wouldn’t do,” he said.

  “Are you messing with me?” Franjo asked him in an icy tone. He didn’t like his mentioning animals.

  “I made a mistake,” Klein said.

  “You made more than a mistake. You stuck a knife in my heart!” Franjo said more cheerily and raised the ceremonial chalice as if he wanted to emphasize his words.

  From that morning onward there were no more misunderstandings of that kind between the two men. Klein no longer mentioned the contact who was to transfer him to Italian territory, and Franjo would only occasionally, once or twice a week, confirm that they weren’t coming and that it was bad that they weren’t coming. Just as it was bad when there was an unexpected snowfall or when it was cloudy when it was supposed to be sunny. He brought him food and water and took away his stools and urine. Klein lived to the rhythm of the sunrise and sunset, as the holy books of all monotheistic religions prescribe and how people had lived in distant times when they followed the changes of the day and the seasons. And so Klein lived like a chicken.

  During the day he would sit on the ottoman, shifting from buttock to buttock, doze, and wait for the chickens to hatch, and at night he would sleep or go searching around the attic in the complete darkness for something that might give him a little bit of entertainment. By groping around, he recognized old school registers for the lower and higher grades of the prep school and placed them by the ottoman so that he would have something to read the next day. He had laid off the newspapers for a while, realizing that they made him more sick. And he’d already grown tired of the globe. He knew every state, city, and mountain by heart. And he’d studied the map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire so thoroughly that there wasn’t a single hamlet from Bratislava to Višegrad that he hadn’t visited in his fantasies.

  After he learned everything there was to learn about places, he started studying people. Long-gone prep school pupils were lined up one after the other. Klein followed them from year to year, and from their grades he arrived at conclusions about their mental crises and loves, about their temperaments and characters, and about what had happened to those people after they had graduated. Could one conclude from the fact that someone had had a hard time with Latin in the first grade of prep school that he ended up a murderer? Or was it the straight-A students who became murderers? He developed a system of reading fates from school grades, according to which the consistent pupils—those who passed from start to finish with an “A” or a “C” (it didn’t matter which)—became people who would turn up any time a state needed anything done. But the pupils whose grades varied would become defenders of justice who wouldn’t acquiesce in a single crime. During the day he categorized them, and at night he assessed the previous day according to the results of his statistics. If the inconsistent pupils predominated, those who hadn’t become murderers or accessories to murder, the day was a goo
d one. But if the straight-A students and lowlifes took the lead, then the day was assessed as bad. Klein played and remembered: all the countries, cities, mountain peaks, villages, rivers, streams, and all the pupils of the Banja Luka prep school from its foundation to 1934, the year of the last register. He wouldn’t forget a single name until his death in 1967 in Haifa, just as he wouldn’t forget any of hundreds of thousands of other, equally pointless, pieces of information that he’d collected in his head. Samuel F. Klein was one of those people whose miraculous and peculiar memory was the wonder of all who knew him, but he gained no benefit from it because it absorbed only useless things and classified them in a still more useless fashion. He was incapable of remembering three telephone numbers, but he memorized the school grades of people about whom he knew nothing else. He would forget the names of his own ships but not the names of all the little rivers and streams that flow into the Drina.

  Maybe this was how he remembered the name of Ivo’s wife and recognized it in the contessa Regina Della Valle in her letter of 1951.

  And so spring arrived in the alternation between the same morning and evening rituals, without anyone coming for Klein. He was sure that Franjo knew what was going on and why the contact had never showed up but wasn’t telling him so as not to upset him. However, the janitor didn’t know any more than the one he served. The letter that Husnija Hadžalić had given him along with Klein said to wait. Panther, the contact, was supposed to come in seven days at the latest. If he didn’t come by that time, he should keep waiting and taking care of the friend whom he’d entrusted to him. But Panther didn’t contact them, nor did he ever come, and Franjo didn’t ever see him in town. Before he had run into him every other day, if not on the street, then in those two or three city bars where people played dice. On account of their conspiracy Panther acted as if he didn’t know him, though over the course of six months he’d brought him fourteen men and one woman, some of whom were Jews from Sarajevo or Travnik and some of whom were communists. He always gave him money for the hotel in the attic, and Franjo would have enough left over for his own expenses.

  But the money that he’d given him for Klein had run out in two weeks, and afterward Franjo had to make do however he could. Yet that wasn’t what bothered Franjo the most—where there’s enough for one mouth, there’s enough for two, and the care of his attic guest wasn’t difficult; it was easier to put up with someone he already knew well than with someone new. There was something else that prevented him from getting a wink of sleep for nights on end. And when he did fall asleep, nightmares were quick to follow him and in them—a knife to his throat. Namely, the fact that he hadn’t been seeing Panther could only mean that the Ustashas had discovered and imprisoned him and were now torturing him, right until he confessed and revealed everything about his activities. Who knew what all they were doing to him, Franjo thought, and wondered whether Panther would be able to withstand it. He was a tough man and foolishly courageous—what Home Guard major would involve himself in smuggling Jews and communists into the woods or to the Italians? It was easier for Panther to do that work than it would be for anyone else because the Ustashas wouldn’t suspect him. But he also needed more courage: they’d hang, shoot, or cut the throat of anyone else, but they’d cut him into pieces and cook him in boiling water. Franjo was convinced for a long time that Panther had been arrested and that it was just a matter of days before the Ustashas would find out everything. But when two months passed, he concluded that no one would be able to withstand so much torture (Panther would die or give everything away), so something else must have happened to him. Franjo had no idea what that might have been, but he slept peacefully.

  It wasn’t until several years after the war that Franjo the prep school janitor realized with whom he’d been dealing. He ended up holding a copy of the first edition of the monograph National Heroes of Yugoslavia, where on page one hundred twelve he would see Panther’s photograph under the name Ivan Skočibuha—a.k.a. Kameni—and then read the following:

  Comrade Kameni joined the Podgrmeč partisan units in the winter of 1942.

  In the recollection of Comrade Mustafa Mulalić-Olaf, it happened like this: We were sitting around the campfire when the sentry brought before us a bumpkin in a Home Guard uniform who was carrying a mortar on his back, that heavy German one that three men can hardly lift. This is me and this is my cigarette holder, said Comrade Kameni and dropped the mortar on the ground. My comrades didn’t utter a word. We looked a little at him and a little at the mortar and couldn’t believe our eyes. Nobody suspected that he was an agent-provocateur, though we weren’t always sure about comrades who left the Home Guard to join the people’s liberation movement. But a man who walks twenty-some kilometers with a mortar on his back can’t be an agent-provocateur. Comrade Kameni proved himself in the first engagement with the enemy. He grabbed the hot barrel of a German machine gun with his bare hands and tore it out of the hands of a stunned fascist. You should have seen the face of the enemy whenever Ivan Skočibuha-Kameni appeared in front of them! Around Podgrmeč his heroism has become the stuff of legend, but I can confirm that words cannot describe what Comrade Kameni was really like. No such words have been invented yet! When in the last days of the war he lost his life driving the fascists and their domestic henchmen in a panic-stricken flight across Slovenia, all of Bosnian Krajina wept for him. May his deeds be an inspiration to future generations in the struggle for socialism and a better tomorrow.

  Franjo the janitor couldn’t believe his eyes as he read the hagiography of Comrade Ivan Skočibuha-Kameni in the same little room in which he’d spent his whole working life, among brooms, cleaning rags, and rusty buckets. At that time one street in a suburb already bore his name, and his bronze bust had been ceremoniously uncovered in the city park. Franjo, to be sure, could have passed by it a thousand times without recognizing Panther’s face underneath the worried brow and the visionary gaze. It wasn’t that the bust of Comrade Kameni wasn’t a likeness of Panther, especially since the famed sculptor had faithfully rendered his handsome male face. But he’d given him an expression and a seriousness that Panther had never had at any moment in his life. Good-for-nothings would say that there maybe were such moments when he looked like that: when he was sitting on the toilet. It’s only on busts that one sees that an expression is a man’s best disguise, far better than fake mustaches and beards.

  Reading the entry in National Heroes of Yugoslavia, Franjo suspected that there was something dirty and smelly behind Panther’s heroism—something filthy, rotten. He looked the bust over and concluded that Comrade Skočibuha was a great fraud. Even a fool could see that if he compared the dice player to the bronze head with the vision.

  Franjo would learn the nature of the lie only before his death, when on one post-retirement stroll Ferid Kodžalić, formerly a teacher in the prep school as well as an Ustasha major—on account of which he’d done fifteen years of hard labor in Foča and Zenica—told him in the strictest of confidence why the Home Guard major Ivan Skočibuha had fled to the partisans. Franjo laughed so hard at that story that tears flowed from his eyes, though it showed him to be a dupe and cost him torment, misery, and fear.

  The story went like this: after playing dice for months with low-ranking officers and Banja Luka’s lowlifes and winning at the game, Panther went to the Christmas reception of the district prefect, and in a side hall into which only select people were admitted, he learned the basic rules of American poker from the Italian military attaché, Fernando Noa Marinetti, and lost his entire monthly salary that same evening at poker. He couldn’t figure out how or why he’d lost. So he quit dice and started playing poker every day. He played with experts but also with third-rate dice players whom he himself would teach the game. He lost against both.

  In three months Panther’s poker debts exceeded the income of three Home Guard regiments, and since the people to whom he owed money weren’t harmless or inclined to forgiveness—all the more so because he’d fl
ayed them at dice for years—he stole a mortar from a military warehouse and fled to the partisans. He knew that gambling debts are only paid to the victors in war. If the communists won the war, he wouldn’t owe anyone anything, and if they lost, the victors would kill them all anyway. He cared about saving his skin and did the most logical thing in the world and naturally didn’t inform anyone that Comrade Samuel F. Klein was in mortal danger in the attic of the Banja Luka prep school. Maybe he would have told someone had Klein been a sympathizer of the people’s liberation movement and not merely a ruined shipowner and a Jew. Like this he only risked his comrades finding out that he’d been charging a lot of money to save people’s skin.

  However, just as he didn’t reveal his illegal dealings to the partisans, he also failed to inform the people in the network that had been working to save people, partly for altruistic and partly for material reasons, of his departure. Panther was the only one who knew who all made up the network. The others knew only two names in the conspiracy: the name of the one behind them and the name of the one ahead of them. And since he’d organized his people in such an ingenious manner, all kinds of people took part in the same work, or mission—communist sympathizers, friars, university professors, and humanists, along with professional smugglers, Ustasha and Chetnik cutthroats, lone murderers, and all manner of lowlifes who earned a fortune on the torment and misfortunes of others.

  Unaware either of one another or of Panther’s escape to the partisans, they kept working, and on one starry April night the villager Husnija Hadžalić brought Ivo Delavale to Franjo the janitor. He just dropped him off, without an accompanying letter or money for food, as packages are left at the post office. Franjo complained and held his head in his hands but to no avail. Underneath a pile of dusty placards about tuberculosis, syphilis, cholera, and the “If you wash your hands, you’ve cleared your conscience” campaign, one more ottoman was found in a corner of the attic. And then Franjo completed the household protocol: “During the day keep your lips sealed because everything can be heard, and don’t think anyone gives a fuck about you at night!”