The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “What did you say, you Gypsy shit?” the man with the revolver asked, enraged.

  “Don’t in the name of Allah!” the horn player said, misunderstanding the rebuke, which enraged the man more, and he jerked on his ear. He was trying to pull it off, but it didn’t work because the man’s earlobe kept slipping between his index finger and his thumb; the ear struggled like an eel, and no amount of force could take firm hold of it. That brought laughter from the group of men sitting on the other side of the fire.

  The man with the revolver didn’t think that they were laughing at the horn player’s expense, especially after his ear had slipped between the captain’s fingers for the fifth or sixth time and he had covered his ears with his palms and started whining and praying at the top of his lungs. But he was no longer invoking God in any of his names, but Pavelić, the Independent State of Croatia, and his own pure Catholic origins, which were known to everyone in Pitomača and to Zovko, the canon in Novska. It was pure chance that he, a baptized Catholic, had ended up in a Gypsy ensemble.

  His outcry made the captain waver for a moment. Maybe the Gypsy wasn’t lying, and maybe he wasn’t a Gypsy at all? His skin wasn’t that dark, there were boys in the company with darker skin, and hardly anyone would see a Gypsy in that loudmouth, except maybe because of his clothes. But then he realized what a shame it would be if he yielded now. If he said, “Yeah, you’re not a Gypsy, I was wrong!” and kicked him in the butt and sent him home, half the company would think that Captain Heinrich was a softy, and the other half would think he was an idiot because a Gypsy had managed to convince him that he was a Croat, and only a blind man couldn’t see the difference between a Gypsy and a Croat, even if they each had an equally dark complexion. Even if the Gypsy had blue eyes.

  “Well why didn’t you say so, dammit? A big Croat! And I thought you were one of Pharaoh’s people. Hey, no problem, we’ll check that out now. C’mon over here for a bit,” Captain Heinrich said, luring the horn player to get up. “Now bend down here, right, just like that, so I can see your face in the fire.”

  The horn player stopped a couple of feet from the fire and smiled, pleasantly assured of his salvation.

  “Good; now let’s see, how could I have been so mistaken?” Heinrich asked in surprise and tapped the horn player on the back of his head, as if he were petting a good hunting dog. Then he suddenly grabbed his hair and, moving like a Croatian national athlete, he knocked one of his feet out from under him, and the horn player slammed down on the ground and his face went right into the fire. Heinrich held him by the hair and pushed his head deeper into the charred oak logs. The horn player flailed with his hands and feet, trying to extricate himself.

  In the dead silence the only thing that could be heard were the horn player’s hands and feet pounding the ground. It sounded like a big bear crossing a dusty country road.

  Heinrich was sweating from the exertion, and the fire probably singed his hand. A few times it seemed that he was going to let up and the horn player would pull his head out of the coals, but then the captain would summon a little more strength from somewhere and press his head harder. That was the strength that a man doesn’t know he has until he’s found himself in mortal danger or in a position to save his loved ones or, which was perhaps the strongest motive, to prove his strength before a crowd of onlookers. To keep from giving up and yielding to the fire and the desperate struggling of the victim, Captain Antun Heinrich was probably motivated most by the thought that the men in his company, at least one among them, maybe two, seven, or all of them, would be struck with wonder at his power, that they would realize what kind of a he-man they were watching through the flames of the campfire as he sweated and struggled but didn’t give up. Because a real Ustasha never gave up, a real man who didn’t shrink from wolves and wild animals, from hellish fires, enemies, and fear, from a heart that trembled in his chest and asked, “What is that you’re doing, black Antun? You’ll burn in hell for this!”

  Who cared about hell?—The whole world could go to hell, but until then one had to carry out what his children and their children’s children would remember and be grateful for as they prayed over their graves for the homeland and for peace.

  Antun Heinrich held out longer than anyone would have thought. The horn player’s body struggled and resisted for ten whole minutes. Maybe more. Or maybe it only seemed so to those who were watching. Maybe he pushed his head too deep and maybe the horn player’s face extinguished the coals, but the body was alive for just as long as it takes to bake a potato. After it finally stopped moving, the captain kept holding the head in the fire a little longer so that no one would get the idea that he couldn’t endure it any longer, and then he pulled it out. Klein closed his eyes.

  Before a cock could crow twice, everyone in the Gypsy ensemble was killed with knives, fire, and bullets. Captain Heinrich killed nine of them with his own hands and left the men who played the accordion, the bass tambouritza, and the second horn to the guards. They performed their task without the least amount of passion. They ordered all three of them to kneel and cut their throats with hunting knives. And so, sometime around two thirty in the morning, the picnic came to an end. The men all got up off the ground complaining of pains in their knees and of the hard soldier’s life in which you have neither chairs nor beds. They spread out their gray army blankets and soon fell asleep amid the scattered instruments, a few meters distant from the dead bodies. Captain Heinrich didn’t assign anyone for sentry duty. He either forgot about it due to his physical exhaustion and weariness or he knew that there weren’t any partisans in the area.

  Samuel F. Klein and Ivo Delavale kept watching from the attic for a long time, looking at the men who were snoring and farting loudly, moaning in their sleep, and calling to their mothers, passing from a time of war to a time of peace and from their adult male bodies into the souls of children. One could hear them crying in their sleep, the way armies cry since there has been a world and wars in it, with the sadness of men who find themselves far from their wives and mothers, from their own lives and everyday civilian gentleness.

  “If I were a soldier,” Klein whispered, “I’d go down there, steal up to the nearest rifle, and kill all of them. If I were only a soldier,” he repeated as if it were something he longed for. Ivo didn’t answer. His tongue was stuck to his palate or had turned into a smooth chunk of stone, into a pillar of salt that melted in his mouth, which made him thirstier and thirstier, and he cursed himself, his stupid head, because he hadn’t filled their bottles with water. It seemed to him that nothing in his mouth could make a sound any more and that he would die of thirst before the morning. He grabbed Samuel by the arm and signaled with his finger to be quiet. They remained awake until the morning. They watched the soldiers wake up, eat breakfast, pack their things, and leave. Then they watched the extinguished campfire, the horns gleaming in the sun, and the dead men. It wasn’t until around ten that Ivo moved.

  “Let’s go!” he ordered. Klein shook the dust off his pants, wishing to act as if nothing had happened. He could walk, think about whatever he wanted. He was calm and collected and felt as he did every day. Weeks of walking and wandering around had strengthened him, and he was proud of himself. He let these thoughts roll around in his mind.

  “Someone should bury these people,” he said when they went outside.

  “Someone should,” Ivo agreed.

  “We don’t have anything to do it with,” Klein said.

  “Even if we did, it would take us three days to bury them,” Ivo said.

  “Maybe even longer,” said Klein.

  They didn’t feel like going; they couldn’t leave just like that. This was one of those rare occasions when both the one and the other felt the same way at the same time. They were confused and didn’t know what one should do in such circumstances—as if such situations occurred at other times and there were people who knew.

  “Do you know a prayer?” Klein asked.

  “Don’t st
art that,” said Ivo.

  “Well what should we do?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “I can’t just leave people like that,” Klein said and paused, as if he were imagining what kind of people they were. “They were alive! We saw them while they were alive . . .”

  “Yes, we sure did,” Ivo said bitterly.

  Then he started toward the dead men. Klein just watched him. He bent over the first one, the little bass tambouritza player, the youngest one in the ensemble, touched his hand, and whispered something to him. He touched the second one, and the third, and all of them to the last one, saying something that Klein couldn’t hear.

  “What did you say to them?” he asked when they had gone a couple of miles.

  “Fortaleza, Natal, Joao Pessoa, Sergipe, Espirito Santo, Nova Iguacu, Vitoria, Celatina, Sao Luis, Curtiba, Sao Mateus, Santa Cruz Cabrália. That’s what I said to them,” Ivo answered, and with every word he felt sobs welling up in his throat.

  “What kind of prayer is that?”

  “It’s not a prayer. Those are towns on the Brazilian coast. Beautiful places, one more beautiful than the next,” Delavale said and started crying.

  They stood under a huge willow tree, at the bank of a creek that was so narrow that a child could step across it but loud as little creeks seem when one hasn’t taken a good drink from them. And they both wept, each from his own sorrow, for the twelve dead Gypsies. For plates of goulash eaten in the middle of a Hungarian plain in late autumn in 1930-something. For Balkan dictators with little black mustaches whose visits to Paris were reported in the yellow press. For embroidered wedding towels whipped in the wind over the Vrbas River as a bride and groom ran to get out of the rain. For a procession that saw a mayor’s son off to the army while his drunken godfather poured brandy on anthills. For the battles of Kajmakčalan and Mohacs Field. For defeats and victories celebrated in song and sealed behind seven locks of the Royal Bank in Bucharest. For a dead Croatian poet in a Spanish almshouse. For Mary’s Congregation of Young Women, which in 1937 at number 7 Cracow Street was celebrating its anniversary and had hired Gypsies to play the music because they were cheaper than the orchestra of the Hotel Europa. For the Majdan Hardware and Precious Metals Shop owned by Isidor A. Altarc, Klein’s uncle, about whom he’d heard nothing for a year already. For the Orfelin bookstore, owned by Milutin D. Stanojević, on St. Sava Street in Belgrade, where in 1932 Ivo had bought Regina an autograph album with the title It Is Written in My Heart, I Love You Most, and she’d known who’d sent it to her in the mail, even though he was too shy to sign his name. For a Russian émigré who a year later jumped from the Revelin fortress and who was buried along the cemetery wall, without a name or a marker. For the clear juice of rose petals sold on the Split quay on the day the news arrived that King Aleksandar had been assassinated, when the gendarmerie had forbidden the people to drink rose juice as a sign of mourning, except for children younger than twelve. For party-colored Zagreb umbrellas that leaked drops of rain. For sea crabs on the beach in Crikvenica in late 1912, as tuberculosis patients from Prague and Požun lay dying in chaises longues with a view of the sunset. For the leather merchant Majir Alkalaj, who upholstered the command cabin of the ship Leonica with quality pigskin. For the Professional Association of Cinemas of Sava Province at number 6 Warsaw Street in Zagreb, which ordered reels of the newest American movies through Samuel F. Klein but whose business was ruined after a year because Rudolph Valentino died. For the copper trays and pots from the bazaar by the Old Bridge in Mostar, which Klein bought for his business partners in Hamburg and Ostend. For the Zagreb musicians who played in variety shows in Paris and London. For the blind lottery ticket vendor in the Vinkovci railway station who repeated the call, “Mouse of white, my luck’s so bright!” and in a cage on his stand was an enormous gray rat. For the Albanian king, whose escort included three fierce Ottoman soldiers and whose ferocity seemed funny to the crowds in Paris because each one was more than eighty years old. For the criers who in 1935 went through the streets and lanes of Livno, Duvno, and Bugoj beating drums and advertising Bata shoes, “which make paupers feel like kings.” For the ship sirens that wailed mournfully before the body of Stjepan Radić in August of 1928, while the wooden doors on the women’s cabins slammed in a bitter wind and the lifeguards searched for gold on the beaches out of boredom. For the mustached revolutionaries and fighters who struggled against the tobacco monopoly and whom the gendarmerie led in chains down Stradun as children ran alongside them and spat on them. For the clockmaker Josef Kopelman of number 55 Aleksandar Street, Sarajevo, who had sold Klein a pocket watch with an engraved monogram of a Mexican prince, and for doctor Grigorij Merkulov of number 71 on the same street, to whom he’d gone after he’d gotten crabs in the Elezar & Sons hostel in Konjic. For the little boats that had drifted around in the harbor of Korčula after someone unmoored them one night as some kind of payback.

  Samuel F. Klein and Ivo Delavale wept until they could weep no more, under that willow, each one for his own story, which was connected in some way (understandable to their souls) to the twelve dead Gypsies, and they didn’t say anything to one another. A brotherhood of tears, which was stronger than a brotherhood of blood because it wasn’t something they decided on or a matter of male friendship, brought them closer together and changed something in the way they experienced one another.

  Over the next two months, the time that it took for them to reach the sea in the autumn of 1942, traveling at night and during the day and staying in one place for five or six days at a time because they would hear shooting on the next hill, Ivo told Klein the story of his two women on two continents. Of one who was his, with whom he’d gotten married and intended to spend his life and of another, whom he loved more than anyone in the world and with whom he’d become an American. She knew that he was married somewhere over there in Europe, but that place seemed so far away to her that nothing that happened there could reach her heart. If he by chance turned to look at a pretty girl on the streets of Chicago, she was jealous, but she felt nothing regarding Ivo’s wife. Or he only thought she didn’t, Klein thought. He didn’t tell his real wife anything about the American girl because—in his exact words—she would have pulled out his fingernails and never let him go to sea again. For her, Ivo speculated, America was much closer than Europe was for the American girl. Such are our men and women. Although they live on the edge of the world, in the remotest provinces of all except maybe for those of Russia, they experience the whole world as someplace close by so that what happens in Chicago is just as shameful as what happens in Čapljina.

  “So, do you love her?” Klein asked so that Ivo might quit beating around the bush.

  “I love both of them,” he said as they descended a mountain path overlooking Delnice. “But that’s not the real question. The problem is that I don’t know which continent is mine. Actually, I knew that until that gringo off the coast of Florida took my American papers and I started going backward. Like a crab, and now I’m continually going backward. I said, okay old boy, you did what you did, ran away from your wife and your house; you’ll be an American, you’ll die like an American, you’ll never have any contact with her or your family again. It isn’t human, it isn’t honest, but that’s how it turned out. Nobody’s to blame for it, and I’m not even terribly guilty. And then what happened?—They sent me back to Europe like a crate of rotten apples. Now I’m here, and who the hell knows whether I’ll ever see America again? That’s how I got involved in all this. But it’s a miracle I’m even alive.”

  In a way it was a miracle. Namely, the ship De Amicis, which Ivo Delavale had boarded in Portugal as a stowaway, had been attacked by Greek pirates at the Strait of Otranto. They killed most of the crew, and the only ones who got away were Ivo and two sailors. He swam and when he reached the Albanian shore, he was captured by an Italian military guard. They held him in a prison for seven days, forced him to drink castor oil, and tried to get him to confess to someth
ing. They didn’t know what kind of confession they were expecting, but he was evidently the first one they’d managed to get their hands on in the middle of a thriving smuggling route, so their ambition was to promote Ivo to the level of a serious criminal. He, however, had no idea about where he’d ended up or what was being smuggled in those parts, so he couldn’t even help himself with lies. Instead he endured the castor oil treatment, and in the end they threw him out on his ass. Afterward there was a journey through Albanian and Montenegrin mountains and gorges, encounters with Chetniks and partisans, and ferocious village guards who almost did him in because it seemed that village defenders had fewer problems in detecting enemies than any Balkan army. They saw an enemy in any stranger, and Ivo Delavale was probably the strangest character who’d ever set foot in the villages around Kolašin. The only reason they didn’t liquidate him was probably due to the fact that not even this time around did he have any idea about what they were questioning him about. He had neither heard of Sekula Drljević, nor did he have any idea about who Pavle Đurišić was and could only shrug his shoulders like the biggest idiot on earth when they slyly tried to lure him into telling which one of them he thought was more handsome. The villagers didn’t care whose beauty he preferred; they would have stuck him like a pig on account of the one or the other, but they couldn’t cut his throat if all he did was hem and haw like a fool when they mentioned either Sekula or Pavle.

  After he made his way through Montenegro and crossed the Drina at Višegrad, he fell into the hands of the partisans. He felt better already because he knew a little about Marx, Engels, and Lenin and the exploitation of the American proletariat. He lied that he’d left Chicago to go fight the fascist occupiers for a just society. He fascinated his comrades with his knowledge of foreign languages. They nicknamed him “Brains,” dressed him in a tattered uniform of the Royal Army, stuck a garrison cap with a red star on his head, and sent him into combat. The next day he was captured by Croatian Home Guardsmen near Ustikolina. They took him to Sarajevo, where they turned him over to the Germans because someone had concluded that he was a prominent bandit, too smart and eloquent for an ordinary partisan. The Germans questioned him for two days and decided to transfer him to Slavonski Brod and later to somewhere else. Probably to a concentration camp. But near Doboj the partisans attacked the column of trucks he was in and freed him. He promptly lied and told them that he’d been captured on his way to Dubrovnik, where he’d been sent on orders from the staff of the supreme command, and requested that they immediately allow him to continue his trip. He was lucky that this was one of the more poorly integrated and organized units, in which no one knew how to establish contact with the supreme command and verify Ivo’s account. But they didn’t even suspect him because he made a serious impression on them. And so they decided to convey him to Dubrovnik via an illegal network, and in fact via Ivan Skočibuha—a.k.a. Panther—and his men. The first and last station on that trip was the attic of the Banja Luka prep school.