The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “That’s how it is,” said Klein instructively. “When you mess with life a lot, then life starts messing with you back.” Ivo didn’t know what to say to him. Samuel was right. But if everything else was leading to harm and ruin, at least he’d found a friend.

  As in a romantic comedy from the early days of talking movies, they hugged and kissed one another on the Rijeka promenade, resolved to survive the war and travel their route from Banja Luka to the sea once again by car. They would stop at all the taverns, which after the war would practically line the roads. And they would drink, eat, and carouse until dawn. A dawn for every tavern. Samuel F. Klein believed in their agreement, at least until the moment he went into the cellar office of Erwin Stieglitz, who would provide him with forged papers in the name of Gustav Toehni, with which he would journey to London and on to Palestine, while Ivo Delavale knew then that he would never see Samuel again. In the catalogue of his friends, Klein would occupy an important spot, but like the others with whom he’d gone to school, drunk, sailed, or met at various ends and beginnings of the world, he too would be a man without an address, lost in a universe of faces and voices. A friend who disappears after the first parting. Ivo had never made anything of the accidental encounters he’d experienced that would last him his whole life, and those are the only kind men have. True, his friends hadn’t made much of an effort themselves, in the mistaken belief that a man couldn’t disappear just like that or appear randomly again, bursting through one’s doorway or coming along like a random passerby in any city anywhere in the world. And they would think that it was him—that it was his handsome head appearing above a crowd of people in the bowels of the city market, in front of a mosque at the time of the jumu’ah prayer, or in the distance at the end of Kalelarga Street. They would run to call to him, but it wouldn’t be Ivo, not even someone who looked like him. No matter how much they were disappointed, their feeling that a friendship had been spoiled by nothing would be even greater. Ivo hadn’t betrayed any of those men before he disappeared from their lives.

  Samuel F. Klein thought he saw Delavale’s phantom ten or so times in various places in Syria, Egypt, and Israel, and he was always equally sure that it was him. The last time was in Haifa, ten days before he died. He surfaced out of a mound of oranges, in a worker’s outfit, with a notebook in which he was writing something. He wasn’t any older than the day they parted on the Rijeka promenade. Klein tried to walk up to him, but by the time he’d made his thirty small steps and gone ten full meters, which took several minutes, both the oranges and the worker had disappeared, and there wasn’t anything but the parking lot of a construction company where cranes, bulldozers, excavators, and trench diggers waited, ready to build houses for poor Russian and Ukrainian Jews, somewhere on a rectangular desert border, within rifle shot of enemy armies or only a stone’s throw away from Arab poor folk. That was the spot of the first and last hallucination of Samuel F. Klein. On that spot, if metaphysical truths make sense, there remained forever a monument to Ivo Delavale, a sailor on the Leonica and a brave man who valued the life of a friend as much as his own, who had compassion for all he knew and those he didn’t, and who had poured tears on the grave of a Gypsy orchestra.

  Because of all that it is perhaps likely that when Klein read the signature of Regina Della Valle at the end of a fairly impudent but at the same time bureaucratic and extremely private message, he recognized one of Ivo’s two loves. Maybe he thought bitterly that such a woman wasn’t worthy of him; maybe he was comforted by his belief that Ivo was now in America with that other, better love. But maybe he had something else in mind, something that human fantasy couldn’t reach and remained hidden in documents of public and private history. Yet the fact remains that his response was too heartfelt and deep, stripped of all farcical style and frivolity, for anyone to believe that he’d sent it to someone about whom he knew nothing and who actually didn’t concern him.

  “My advice to you is to look for him for some other, more noble, reason. Then the dear Lord will grant that you find him!” That was what Samuel F. Klein wrote to Regina Delavale when she tried to inquire about a nonexistent brother in order to find out the truth about the lover of her deceased husband.

  Behind Regina’s complex formula, and the muddled reasons that led to it, were lies that were supposed to hide the blind desire for revenge. In that desire Regina was a product of her time. Because of unrequited loves, betrayals, and slanders people took revenge on one another. But instead of the real reasons, which leaders in ceremonies of collective hysteria discovered in the souls of their people, they invented lies in the face of revenge. Samuel F. Klein’s answer was also typical. In it, though an atheist, he invoked the Lord and His will. That was an example of poetry after Auschwitz: God would provide what people hadn’t, though it was clear that God was no longer among men.

  Nor was Regina’s invention of a brother for whom she was searching unusual either. Besides Luka, who was alive and well in 1951, when she was writing to Haifa, and Bepo, who’d died two years earlier in the Sarajevo insane asylum, she had three more brothers: Lino, Đuzepe, and Đovani. All three were deceased. Lino had died from the Spanish flu during the First World War. As for Đuzepe and Đovani, there might still be something to say about the reasons why their fates weren’t of great concern to their sister. Maybe. But Regina didn’t see any kind of miracle in her brothers; they certainly weren’t miraculous enough for her to superstitiously worry about shielding them from curses. Where there were five of them, she could invent a sixth.

  VI

  On the twelfth of June, 1940, someone stole Đovani Sikirić’s wallet and student ID on the Place de la Concorde. It happened late in the afternoon, when, as during the entire previous week, most of the cafés and shops were closed. Few people were out on the street; everyone was behind closed windows and lowered shutters, awaiting the moment when the Germans would enter the city. A few weeks before Marshal Philippe Pétain, the victor of the Battle of Verdun, a national hero and vice president of Paul Reynaud’s government, had sacrificed the homeland for peace, convinced that resistance to Hitler’s troops made no sense and couldn’t be effective. Aware that France had enough military victories to her credit and that this capitulation wouldn’t cost her her honor, he gave the order for the army not to defend the city. Those who disagreed with Pétain had already left Paris and gone to the south. Those who guessed that the Germans threatened them with personal ruin for racial, ideological, or political reasons had also left. For days Đovani had watched them leaving the city. And he knew why many of them were leaving: they were students and professors of Jewish extraction and Russian émigrés, almost all of whom were socialists, communists, Trotskyites, social democrats, anarchists, or members of a dozen or so revolutionary organizations who’d found refuge in Paris as early as the October Revolution. And then there was the liberal citizenry, who feared the German breakthrough like the devil himself, fearing it in proportion to their previous sense of superiority over those same Germans. Painters fled, as did philosophers and writers, newcomers who had already fled from those same Germans when in 1936 Hitler had begun to expand and draw borders around the German living space. Lastly, students from East European countries left the city before the end of the fall semester— the sons of Bulgarian, Romanian, and Hungarian ministers and industrialists— in the belief that they were subject to less danger in their little metropolises, which, as the general conviction held, would not be struck by the great fury of history.

  “Paris, and not London, is the main obstacle to European unification under Hitler,” Trajče Bogoev told Đovani as they parted. He was an art student who boasted that his father was the chief of the Bulgarian counterintelligence service, which Đovani didn’t take very seriously because if such a relational connection were true, no one in their right mind would brag about it. And by the way, wasn’t it strange that all those boys were from nowhere else but Eastern Europe? Why was it that the Bulgarians, Romanians, Greeks, and Albania
ns were the sons of people with the wildest biographies— spies, magicians, imperial murderers, and phony stamp-cutters— and that none of them came from ordinary families, like every French, Dutch, or Swiss student in Paris?

  Some uncorroborated, unsubstantiated lie accompanied their every step, and Trajče was no exception in this regard. This Bulgarian was a fairly talented portrait artist yet lacked a real artistic education and had no feel at all for beauty. He produced unbearable little kitsch paintings and would use them to develop and analyze conspiracy theories and geostrategic paradoxes. He would paint the Eiffel Tower, and above it he would brush in three black oak beams that an invisible force kept from crashing down on the city. If that force disappeared, some kind of hell would follow, probably in the same kitschy manner.

  “Paris is a symbol standing in Hitler’s way, and I have no intention of getting killed for a symbol,” Trajče said. He downed one last vodka, paid the bill, kissed Đovani three times, and got into a Mercedes of the Bulgarian consulate that would take him to Lyons.

  Half an hour later, on the Place de la Concorde, Đovani noticed that his wallet and student ID were missing. He went back to the bar in which they’d sat and talked, but it was already closed; the metal shutters had been lowered and locked with a giant padlock. He banged on the door with his fist a few times, hoping that someone was inside and that they would hear him, but there was only the metallic echo of an empty hall.

  He was sure that his ID card and wallet had fallen out as he put on his blazer and that he would find them the next day with the waiter. There was almost no money in his wallet; indeed there was just enough for a metro ticket, and no one would find that worth stealing. Nor would a thief have any use for his student ID. And Đovani had to find his ID card because the university was no longer in session, and no one would be able to confirm that he was a student. There was a difference between a student and an unemployed young man from Yugoslavia, especially in a time of war and an impending German occupation.

  That night he slept poorly, tossed and turned in his bed, listened to the trains in the distance, and sank into dark thoughts and a slumber in which he couldn’t tell what was an illusion from what might be a real threat. For the first time he started to lose his bearings in this city and wasn’t sure whether he’d been smart not to flee when they tried to get him to leave. Or when they told him that it wasn’t honorable to meet the Germans upon their entrance into the city and that nothing like that would make any sense for someone who didn’t have any family in Paris. But he wondered whether it was more honorable to leave the city that had taken him in and made him better and more worldly, and he stayed.

  He could barely wait for the wall clock to chime seven o’clock. He got dressed and ran outside to reach that café before it opened at eight. There were no people on the street, but everywhere he heard a strange sound, like the knocking of an old, empty loom. That sound followed him all the way to Pigalle. There he realized that it wasn’t a loom or any kind of machine or device but the sound of thousands of rubber soles rhythmically striking the asphalt. Those were long, eight-row columns of German soldiers moving at a leisurely pace— that is, not marching— toward the Étoile.

  His throat constricted from fear. But a few moments later, he realized that the scene wasn’t out of the newsreels showing military parades in Berlin and their entry into Prague and Bratislava. The Germans weren’t stepping loudly and powerfully but seemed more like they were going to the theater. Now Đovani was overcome by a new feeling. Rage grew within him, especially after he saw two women of the night following the column with laughter and squeals and immediately thereafter little groups of ten or so dark-skinned men— evidently Arabs, Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans— dressed in formal black suits and bow ties who were waiting, with their heads raised high and with the dignity of tribal leaders, and walking alongside the German troops. Apart from these people, no one was out on the empty Pigalle. There were no Frenchmen. Đovani was galled— so much so that tears of fury ran down his face— by the betrayal that had just been committed by people who’d brought their faith with them into Christian Paris. They strolled through the Champs-Élysées with fezzes and turbans or wrapped in those sheets of the Bedouins; no one tried to prevent them; no one chased them or shouted anything at them. But they nevertheless greeted the Germans with their quiet enthusiasm. They’d bought formal European suits and removed the fezzes from their heads to show their respect for them. That was the moment when they became closer to Europe; their hands extended to another civilization, a gesture with which different worlds are united, fused, and permeated with one another. They’d been waiting for Hitler to remove their fezzes and turbans because without him Europe was unworthy of that act. They were betraying a city into which they didn’t want to assimilate, he thought, and were taking the side of someone about whom they knew less than about Paris, but they were impressed that he’d come to quash Paris under his boot. The community of hatred and the cosmopolitanism of savagery.

  He would never forget those people who were happy about the occupation, nor the closed and darkened windows behind which sat the motionless and saddened inhabitants of a city that Đovani had thought was the strongest and most invincible. Whoever came to Paris and managed to stay there was forever spared of everything that had driven him to leave the place he’d left. He believed that from the day when he decided to go to Paris to study geology and thereby cut all his ties with home and renounced the family inheritance. So he would never again see or hear his sister, his brothers, or any one of those from whose world he was fleeing.

  From Arabs who’d been arrested he heard that the entire German army was going to gather on the Place de la Concorde, and he hurried over there, less from curiosity than from the hope that something might happen in front of the Arc de Triomphe. The French had to defend that place; it was unimaginable that the occupiers could pass just like that under Napoleon’s arch of glory without bloodshed and resistance. If the government had already surrendered, leaving the decaying republic to the mercy of Hitler’s savagery, there would nevertheless be Frenchmen who would defend the national pride with their lives and blood. It didn’t matter how many of them there would be, three or a hundred and three; no matter how many of them there were, they wouldn’t be able to stop the German troops. But one day there would be a brass plaque with their names at the base of the Arc de Triomphe. “They defended France as the world slept the slumber of the just,” it would say, Đovani thought, ready to add his name to the names of the heroes of the future.

  He ran breathless down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and arrived at the triumphal arch before the column of troops. But apart from German officers, who were continually glancing at their watches, and the Islamic high dignitaries with turbans and tarbushes on their heads, there was no one at the monument itself. Fifty meters from the triumphal arch two young men stood with a young woman with long, blond hair. She wept, loudly and inconsolably, as if she were alone in a movie theater watching a sad movie in which Greta Garbo was dying on a canopy bed; the two of them stood with their hands in their pockets and didn’t try to comfort her. One of those officers could approach her and ask why she was crying on such a day, he thought, and then the officer would lead all three of them away. That too was a kind of protest. However, the girl wept, and no one went up to her. The step of thousands of soldiers was heard all around; they lifted their heels and lowered them onto the asphalt in unison. Without any assonant variation, arrhythmia, or little noises that would detract from that great noise, the German army drew nearer to Napoleon’s triumphal arch.

  Apart from the sobbing girl and her friends, Đovani Sikirić alone experienced that scene as a blow to the soul, that inflated sac in his chest that Hitler’s army was kicking with its boot like Ivica Bek, a Zagreb dribbler, had kicked a soccer ball around in the stadiums and soccer fields of Paris a few years before. Đovani liked that Bek because he’d come, by some chance at the same time as he had, to seek salvation i
n a more elegant world.

  “If she jumps in front of the troops, I’ll do something too!” he thought, clenching his sweaty fists and watching the banners with the swastikas and behind them the endless formation. But when they were about fifty meters from the Arc de Triomphe and the same distance from the four onlookers, they changed direction and instead of marching under the triumphal arch, they passed alongside it.

  The German command had probably decided on that action, which has been largely ignored in the history books and was unknown even to Winston Churchill as he wrote his memoirs, to avoid humiliating the French or at least avoid irritating them unnecessarily, thinking that there was an important difference between them and the Poles and Czechs. The same difference that existed between Warsaw and Paris. In a way, the Nazis looked upon that city with the same eyes as Đovani Sikirić.