Instead of entering the annals of history with a heroic act and, together with the unknown girl, becoming a part of a myth that would be the subject of books, theater pieces, and movies and lend its name to streets and schools, Đovani let the Wehrmacht troops march right on by Napoleon’s triumphal arch. Ashamed and angry, since someone might think that he’d come to greet the occupiers, he missed the ceremonial formation and the speech of a German officer who told the Parisians that he was not coming like one who would subjugate France, but he and his army were there in transit, as protection for European culture from the barbarians. Đovani went off to the café where he and Trajče Bogoev had said good-bye to find his student ID and his wallet, but the café was closed. For the next five days he would go there each morning to find it closed, and only on the sixth day, when that quiet protest against the occupation no longer made sense, did the café open up again. People were reading newspapers, sitting and talking, the same faces, the same waiters, and the same manager. However, his ID and wallet weren’t there. Evidently they hadn’t fallen out of his pocket while he was putting on his jacket. Someone had stolen them, most likely Trajče, in order to spite him for some reason. He wondered for a long time what use the Bulgarian would have for his things, and nothing came to mind but the idea that it was a way to harass someone who’d decided to stay in the city regardless of the arrival of the occupiers. If he survived the war, Trajče Bogoev would one day tell his grandchildren about that heroic deed.
Alone, with history and a fellow student having made an ass of him, Đovani Sikirić stood in the middle of a Parisian avenue and didn’t know where to go. All the reasons that kept him going and made him give up, motivated him and depressed him, also inflamed and cooled his entire generation. That was 1940, the year when half of Europe was in flames, but the war hadn’t yet filled the human heart and completely covered the pages of the newspapers. In March a truce was signed between Finland and Russia, and a few months later the term Blitzkrieg entered into popular usage. A five-year-old Tibetan named Llamo Thandup became the thirteenth Dalai Lama with the holy name Tenzing Gyatso. In Rome the Palazzo della Civilità del Lavoro was opened, and an Australian named Howard Florey and a German named Ernst Chain perfected penicillin, so its mass production began in the United States. Đovani couldn’t decide which way to go.
Exactly one year later, in the spring of 1941, his older brother Đuzepe Sikirić realized his life’s dream and through a fictional business transaction acquired his own tavern. He’d worked as a waiter in railway station restaurants and taverns along the Dubrovnik-Mostar-Sarajevo narrow-gauge railway. He’d made his way through Trebinje, Konjic, Jablanica, Hadžići, Blažuj, and back again from station to station, from bar to bar, living without a home and the peace of home, sleeping in warehouses and on café tables he’d pulled together, amid barrels of wine and brandy, sacks of flour, and bales of Herzegovinian tobacco.
In one waiter’s career Đuzepe had covered more distance than one of Napoleon’s admirals had in ten wars; in 1929 he’d gotten a bayonet between his ribs from a drunken man from Solun. Fortunately, after half a bottle of brandy the man had managed to stab it into him only halfway. A few years later a brawl broke out in the station bar in Konjic after a procession; though he was completely innocent, he ended up with a pocketknife in his belly. In the autumn of 1934 the gendarmerie beat him up because they could hear people singing in the café during the mourning period for King Aleksandar, and afterward he spent three days in jail. In April of 1941 in Čapljina a non-commissioned officer of the Royal Army put a revolver to his temple and screamed:
“Shit, you treacherous scum! If you don’t shit your pants, I’ll blow your brains all over the floor!”
And what could Đuzepe do? He squeezed his bowels so hard veins popped out on his forehead, and he turned as red as a beet. The whole tavern laughed and cheered, some of them for him, but most for the non-commissioned officer, telling him not to wait so long but to shoot immediately because his order hadn’t been carried out as soon as it was issued. The shit, fortunately, came, and Đuzepe got out of that mess with his head on his shoulders.
But a month later, luck finally smiled on him. The owner of the largest bar in Gacko and the surrounding area, Miloš Davidović, with whom he’d been employed since he’d left Čapljina, was aware that the market square would never forget how a waiter had shit his pants, and his boss didn’t want to hang on to him either because he was convinced that a waiter who’d been compromised in that way would drive away customers. So he called Đuzepe over to his house one evening, sat him down at the table, poured both of them a brandy, and said:
“The situation, if you’ll pardon me, has gotten shitty. This is territory of the State of Croatia now, and I am, beg pardon, Orthodox. And let’s not lie to ourselves— there’s no place for Orthodox in this state. I know it, you know it. This house is my inheritance, and that café is also my inheritance. My heart would stop beating if someone burned my inheritance, and I’m not dumb as a doorknob— I won’t wait in my inheritance for the Ustashas to cut my throat. So I was thinking this: I could sign both the house and the café over to you. In fact, I’d be selling them to you. We’ll write up a contract that will say you paid me a thousand ducats, and all this is now yours. I’m counting on the authorities recognizing that contract because you’re Catholic. But I’m also counting on this state not lasting so long. It’ll disappear just like it appeared. It’s created too many enemies, and there are those who’ll set about tearing it down. Maybe you think differently. So be it! Everyone has the right to think what he wants. This is what I think, and you think what you want. I wouldn’t want to go into that. Now take a look at how our little joint plan works out: this will be yours as long as there’s a Croatia. When there’s no Croatia any more, the contract will be invalid because those who come to power won’t recognize business conducted with ducats. They won’t recognize a deal that arose in this way. Then you’ll give me back my inheritance, and I’ll be grateful to my dying day. I’ll take you back as a waiter if you don’t earn enough to open your own tavern. And I’ll help you in any way I can. If I’m not right, and this state lasts longer than I do or they do me in, everything remains yours forever. But I won’t let them set fire to my inheritance. So there you have it; I’ve said what I have to say, and now you can have your say.”
Đuzepe had to hold himself back from jumping for joy and kissing Miloš not once but twice on both cheeks. It took an enormous effort for him to click his tongue worriedly, shake his head, and turn his palms up toward the ceiling, showing with those strange gestures, which no one has believed for ages, that the trouble was not only Miloš’s but everyone’s together and no one could be happy as long as the life of another was at stake and the foundation of his inheritance smoldered.
That evening the contract was drawn up and signed. The very next day Miloš Davidović left Gacko with his wife and children, and Đuzepe Sikirić, Regina’s older brother, the family dimwit and shame of a fine urban household, had finally become a boss. He hung a framed picture of Ante Pavelić, dressed in an admiral’s uniform and gazing into the distance, on a spot on the wall where a reproduction of Predić’s Kosovo Maiden had hung before the war. He’d ordered it from Sarajevo and taken it to be colored to Puba Weiss. And with a lot of effort and care Puba gave a reddish hue to his cheeks and managed to get a shade of blue in his eyes. He didn’t have an easy time because in the photograph Pavelić’s eyes were blacker than Banovići coal. Puba Weiss tried in vain to convince his client that there was no way that the Leader had blue eyes. Đuzepe insisted that they were blue, fairly firmly convinced that Puba said the opposite because he was a Jew and that was the only reason why he didn’t know that Ante Pavelić’s eyes had to be as blue as the Adriatic Sea and the clearest summer sky over Herzegovina.
And Đuzepe would be sorry in the autumn of the same year when they smashed the only photography shop in Gacko and Puba met his end in a ravine on the way to Nevesinj
e. Đuzepe would sit alone in the bar that morning, gaze at Puba’s last work, the portrait of the Leader in which he had the ruddy cheeks of a young mower girl and the blue eyes of a patron saint, and try to comprehend what the world was coming to, what kind of demon was taking hold of people if Puba Weiss had perished, a man who was able to make the Leader more handsome than those who had led him off to the ravine could imagine. But Đuzepe’s thoughts were short-lived. He would chase them away, telling himself that he wasn’t smart enough to comprehend global politics. Because if he were, then he’d be in Zagreb, Berlin, or London making decisions about different peoples and their fates. His scale was this bar, and he shouldn’t let his thoughts leap outside, out of the bar, where bigger things were at stake. Apart from the fact that God hadn’t created him for that, it wasn’t advisable anyway. It was hard to keep your head on your shoulders. Puba Weiss wouldn’t have reproached him for keeping his head on his shoulders. Just as Đuzepe wouldn’t reproach Puba if the situation were reversed and he, Đuzepe, was being led off, God forbid, as a Jew, to the ravine.
The people of Gacko, regardless of their faith and position, treated him like an idiot and a nitwit. The tavern was considered to be both his and not his, and it was clear to everyone, including the Ustashas, why Miloš Davidović had signed his property over to the waiter. What disagreement there was only concerned the ducats. The majority thought that there weren’t any ducats involved, but there were those who believed that the Serb had made a lot of money when he left and that this dolt certainly had thousands more if he’d already given Miloš a thousand for the house and the café. The unfortunate Đuzepe assured some that the ducats were an inheritance from his uncle in America and that he’d paid honestly for what was now his, whereas he tried to convince the others, who actually even believed that, all of them the local Ustashas, of something else. He himself didn’t actually know of what. He smiled, shook his head, and used his index finger to trace circles above his head, made allusions concerning the Orthodox and a votive candle that burned for a long time but would, as everyone knew, burn out one day. He stubbornly tried to explain to the Ustashas that he was actually a poor man and that the tavern and the house were a miracle. More or less like the founding of the Independent State of Croatia. They didn’t believe him no matter what he said, but his lies somehow settled in on the atmosphere of those troubled times, and it was as if they did everyone good: those who were on the side of evil (because they didn’t question their evil deeds) and those who had only good thoughts (because they would believe that every evil deed was just as stupid as Đuzepe’s).
He spent the first year of his ownership of the bar torn between two inner powers. In the morning, as soon as he went into the café, he would feel a stark, limitless happiness because he was his own boss and not someone else’s servant, a wretch, and a good-for-nothing. At the sight of the clean, empty glasses and full bottles and barrels, he would fold his hands and praise God (wherever he was and whatever his name was) and the Leader, without whom God’s will could not even be carried out. Without the great work of the Leader, Đuzepe would have remained a waiter to the end of his life and wouldn’t have known how nice it is to have the big worries of a boss instead of the little worries of a waiter. Instead of being dumbfounded with fear because he’d forgotten whether Captain Zovko drank grape or plum brandy or whether Mr. Hamzić had paid his monthly tab or needed to be reminded, it was his place to worry about whether the wine from Konavle would arrive on Thursday or Friday and whether bandits in the woods had attacked the wagon with cheese that was supposed to arrive from Travnik, slaughtering the deliveryman and stealing the goods, which had already been paid for.
When a man is his own boss, no loss, no deficit in the cash box is too great. That was what Đuzepe Sikirić thought and was filled with joy every morning. But as the day went on and all kinds of people passed through the bar and told all kinds of jokes at his expense, most often about the thousand ducats that he’d paid to be boss, he grew more apprehensive so that by evening he was deathly afraid. It couldn’t be as it seemed because this had never happened since there have been people in the world. No one acquired wealth like that, and it wasn’t possible that there wasn’t any price to be paid for rising from the lowest to the highest in the market square and the town. And what could his payment have been in if not in ducats? That question tormented him until he fell asleep and in his slumber he forgot the terrible answers. In the morning he would awaken happy as a child who had been allowed to begin life anew with every new day.
On the same day that he took over the café, Đuzepe took on two new waiters because Savo Ekmek, a quiet young man with whom he’d shared the wait shifts and who’d been working for Miloš since the latter had picked him up off the street as a poor ten-year-old boy, had disappeared the same morning as the Davidović family. He took the first two he came across, one Hamo Aličić, an oddball ruffian from Fazlagić Tower, and Joso Domazet, formerly the manager of the station restaurant in Jablanica. Hamo had never worked as a waiter, and Joso had suffered a brain hemorrhage six months before, so he dragged his left foot and had a hard time remembering the orders. But both fulfilled the only criterion that was important to Đuzepe. The townsfolk thought less of them than they did of him, so he believed that they wouldn’t make him look stupid. And it could be said that they didn’t let him down: only the two of them, of all the people who entered the café, were completely indifferent to the question of whether Đuzepe had actually paid Miloš a thousand ducats or not. No matter how poorly they did their work (Hamo was even worse than Joso, and not a day passed when there wasn’t money missing from the cash box), Đuzepe was satisfied because he felt that his people saw just what he wanted to see in himself: a man who’d succeeded in life and whose success couldn’t be diminished by anyone, not one bit. But one had to admit that he had a good heart and in every man looked only at what was most important: whether he was honest and honorable. If he was, then there were no problems. Then as far as boss Đuzepe was concerned, such a man was just as worthy of respect as the man in the ruddy, blue-eyed portrait that he wiped off with his sleeve every morning so it wouldn’t collect dust and the filth of the terrible time they were living in.
One morning in the summer of 1942, while Đuzepe was tidying the Leader’s portrait for that day, only twenty kilometers away, in a hamlet in the direction of Nevesinje, his brother Đovani crossed himself three times before a little picture of St. Panteleimon, which had by some miracle escaped destruction in a house in which the day before everything living or dead had been consumed by flames.
At that moment the brothers were the nearest they’d been to one another in the last ten years; only in terms of geographic distance, of course, because in every other sense they were more distant than brother could be from brother in one story, more distant than people who’d hardly ever met one another. They hadn’t crossed each other’s minds since each of them had realized for himself and for his own reasons that family ties mean little or nothing and that a man is on his own as soon as he stands out in some way. And in the Sikirić clan both Đovani and Đuzepe stood out: the older brother because of the languor of his mind, which is also called stupidity, and by his peasant’s soul, which he’d inherited to the horror of his parents from some great-grandfather of his; the younger one didn’t fit in because his opinion of his father, mother, brothers Luka and Bepo, and especially his sister Regina, was the same as their opinion of Đuzepe. In fact, it was for reasons similar to those that had made his older brother go work as a waiter on the railway line and never come home that the younger brother renounced his inheritance and went off to Paris. He believed that he was leaving forever. And that’s the way it would have been if the command of the German army hadn’t made the decision for its troops not to pass under Napoleon’s triumphal arch or if there had been at least a few more Parisians to defend the city along with Đovani, the weeping girl, and her two friends. As it was, he, who until the day before had been an apost
ate from all faiths, a skeptic and atheist, found himself deep in the backwater of Herzegovina before a little picture of an Orthodox saint, firmly convinced that he’d seen a miracle. He crossed himself over the ashes of someone’s house, over the carbonized bodies of its inhabitants, over a burned cradle in which there might have been a child (but there was nothing left of it), over Serbs, the only people who’d tried to preserve their honor, the honor of Europe, and the honor of those who sat behind tightly locked gates and windows in metropolises and cities in France and other countries, waiting for the war to end all on its own.
Strange was the path that led the student Đovani Sikirić before a picture of St. Panteleimon. He’d roamed for a year through occupied Paris and fed himself in public kitchens, even in a Jewish one that the other unfortunates avoided for fear that someone might think they were racial filth. He kept company with those few foreigners who had remained in Paris and dared to speak against the collaborationist authorities. The majority of Đovani’s acquaintances and former friends fled from him and his words as from the plague. People were afraid of spies and provocateurs, or they simply didn’t feel like waging war against the great German power, if only in their thoughts. The exceptions included a few Serbian students, small industrialists, former communists, and Trotskyites, mainly from Belgrade and Bosnia, who gathered in the Hilandar Tavern, which was operated by a Greek in a southern suburb of the city. In the Hilandar the erstwhile secretary of the Royal Yugoslav Consulate in Paris, Joakim Radak, called on Đovani to go with him, after the latter, thoroughly indignant, had told him how the Nazis had strolled over Pigalle.
“Where to?” Đovani asked him.
The Walnut Mansion Page 39
