The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

“Where the world values honor more than the heel on a Kraut rifle butt,” responded Radak with pathos.

  No matter how much Đovani would have laughed at such words the day before, now he waved them off and went on his way. But it was probably the fact that he didn’t know where to go, or which path he was on, that made him take Radak seriously and even think positively about Radak’s words.

  Three weeks later he was already on Mt. Jelica, deep inside Serbia and on the other side of all the eastern borders his mind had ever reached. He sat at a rough-hewn oak table, face to face with Colonel Dragoljub Mihailović. The two of them were alone in a blockhouse, as a summer storm raged above the mountain. The Colonel’s eyes blinked from behind the round glasses of a placid Jewish businessman and smiled mildly when Đovani jumped up because a thunderbolt had struck somewhere nearby. Đovani was terribly afraid of thunder, and now, you see, he had lived to see himself tremble and sweat an icy sweat in front of the leader of the only resistance movement in Europe. Instead of throwing him out and spitting on him as a coward, as Đovani thought any soldier would do, the Colonel tried to calm him down.

  “Every man is afraid now and then. Only an idiot is fearless. Some fear spiders or that a horse will kick them, and you, you see, are afraid of thunder,” he said. Then he told of what Paris had looked like in ’20-something, when he’d gone on an excursion as a cadet. He spoke of the sun that was reflected in windowpanes in a special way and scattered over the sidewalk, “. . . before our feet, which still hadn’t gotten used to anything other than pointed peasant shoes and will never walk those streets with an appropriate stride.”

  He spoke of the sound of street organs and French accordions that weren’t any less monotonous than their own gusles but whose repetitions sounded noble.

  “We sing of our bloody history like we’re sawing wood, but the French have created beauty from their own, equally bloody, history. That’s why the French survive every defeat, and we emerge from every defeat even bigger turds,” said Colonel Dragoljub Mihailović in the midst of a summer storm in a hut on Mt. Jelica.

  Đovani saw a god in him then. The first one he’d seen in his life. Or at the very least an angel of salvation. If Paris was his Jerusalem, then Mihailović was the one who was missing in Jerusalem. If he’d been there, Paris wouldn’t have fallen, nor would the French have protected their honor with wooden shutters on their windows. The nation had spoiled like cream.

  The very next day Đovani was wearing an English infantry uniform and a cap with a cockade. He found himself among a hundred or so fighters loyal to the king and the fatherland, who in keeping with a tradition from a time when Serbia had been reestablished on the west bank of the Drina were called Chetniks, an expression that Colonel Mihailović hadn’t liked in the early days.

  He wanted an army, not folklore or banditry. However, he soon realized that he would have no benefit whatsoever from what he’d learned at the military academy and had tried to implement before the war wherever he’d been assigned, despite the culture of the old veterans of the Salonika Front, which was responsible for the severity of their defeat at the hands of the Wehrmacht in April. Besides, even a cursory glance at the battalion in which Đovani found himself was enough for any intelligent man to realize the real difference between guerilla war and organized war.

  Here there were illiterate villagers from central Serbia who’d never held a rifle in their hands because they’d withdrawn unarmed in 1915 through Albania in order to rush just as unarmed three years later over positions that the Krauts had already abandoned. There were reserve officers and non-commissioned officers who did indeed have some kind of training, but instead of learning military science, they’d only learned the harsh treatment of those weaker than themselves. There were overgrown boys from well-to-do Belgrade houses who arrived with two suitcases in which their mommies had packed silk pajamas and underwear. There was riffraff from towns, smugglers, swindlers, and maybe even murderers who, on the run from the gendarmerie, ended up as fighters for the king and the fatherland. There were a few Slovenes and Croats, fiery idealists who believed in the same ideal as Colonel Mihailović. They believed in Yugoslavia, the kingdom of Slavic tribes with equal rights, in one people that was united by the same origin and the same bloody history. They believed in a Yugoslavia in which there would exist one faith and one hope— in oneself and one’s own origin— so that no center of spiritual or political support needed to be sought in the Vatican, Germany, or Russia.

  However, the problem was that no one believed in anything like that except Colonel Mihailović and his fanatics— not even the villagers from central Serbia or the Serbian refugees from eastern Herzegovina, who were only waiting for a chance to die as heroes, because as they stood over their burned houses, it didn’t occur to them to do anything else. Not even such men took the Colonel’s belief seriously! They thought that it was part of a wartime strategy and that the real aim was something else. Exactly what was known only to the sages in London, the wise men surrounding the young King Petar.

  Đovani felt completely lost in such company in the middle of Serbia. He couldn’t abide by Colonel Mihailović’s visions of the state and the people, nor did his heart favor any of the Yugoslav tribes. He was agitated by the humiliation in front of Napoleon’s triumphal arch and those Mohammedan scum in the black suits who would saunter through history unpunished because they didn’t belong to either of the warring sides— neither those who had crushed Paris nor those who’d seen their city crushed.

  The villagers who kept bad brandy in rusty tin canteens and argued about whether Russia would help their Serb brothers or the English would send tanks to Mihailović were as distant from Đovani as those on account of whom he’d renounced his share of the family inheritance and decided to become a Parisian. Those people, so he thought, resembled his brothers and neighbors, only they were dirtier and forever stank of onions and animal dung and were ready at any moment to die if the Colonel told them the time for dying had come. Their stench stopped bothering him when he grasped the latter. There was an erotic excitement in meeting people who didn’t consider their lives more valuable than freedom, whatever that word may have meant to them. Every one of them was a little heroic death waiting to happen, and just as a lover’s body stinks of sweat, so the heroes from the mountains stank of onions, dung, and bad brandy. That was the smell of sacrifice for the fatherland. Đovani realized that great things don’t smell very good.

  He crossed the Drina with Lieutenant Lazar Kobilović’s unit and descended into eastern Herzegovina via Kalinovik. Mihailović hadn’t sent them to fight, take revenge, or sabotage railway lines and roads used by the Italian and German troops. The mission of Kobilović’s group was more important, maybe even decisive for the fate of the Ravna Gora movement: propaganda and propagating ideas about the struggle against the occupiers among the unruly Serbian villagers and bands of highway robbers who’d proliferated in the territory under Ustasha control but were not under the command of the Royal Yugoslav Army in the Homeland or under the high command of the partisans. Colonel Mihailović thought it important to win those people over for two reasons: it would strengthen his position in any possible negotiations with Tito concerning their possible unification under a joint command, and he would have more arguments in seeking aid from the English, who’d already been hearing rumors that the Chetniks weren’t fighting against the Germans but were only going on revengeful rampages against the Muslim and Catholic populations. Those rumors were correct, which seriously concerned the Colonel, because he would have a difficult time convincing the English that the units taking part in such revenge weren’t under his control.

  But on the way to Nevesinje, which was the farthest point west that Kobilović’s unit would reach, the nature of the mission changed. As they passed through burned and slaughtered villages, meeting armed holdouts with all kinds of insignia on their caps, Lieutenant Kobilović concluded along with his thirty men that what was going on in Herzegovina had
nothing at all to do with Mihailović’s ideal Yugoslav state. Talking about one people and several tribes and about Yugoslavia as a parliamentary democracy could only get one killed. But what was more important for Lazar was that losing one’s life meant losing one’s honor too. It wasn’t possible to be a brother to a brother who’d renounced you; it wasn’t possible to create a home with someone who was going to cut your throat. This was a time when men had only one choice: either kill or be killed. On the evening before Đovani Sikirić would cross himself three times before a miraculous picture of St. Panteleimon, Lazar Kobilović called him to his room.

  “You’re a good man, but you’re not a Serb,” Kobilović told him. “And this isn’t the war of Uncle Draža’s fairy tales. There’s no Yugoslavia here, no King Petar, no brothers of three faiths. This, my son, is a hellish cauldron, and we’re all stewing in it. And only some of us will make it out alive. Either they’ll walk over our bodies, or we’ll walk over theirs. There can be no mercy as long as the slaughter continues. Mercy, my Đovani, comes with peace. Then we’ll forgive and be forgiven. Well, that’s what I wanted to tell you. And now, listen up! I’ve packed you half a flatbread and all the bacon and cheese there is in this sack. There’s a revolver too so that you can defend yourself if someone attacks you. Here are some civilian clothes. I can’t tell you any more, and you don’t need to say anything, but make up your mind yourself. Every bird flies to its flock, and it’s good that way. I’ll know that on the other side is someone I can say is a good man. And you’ll be like a brother to me.”

  Đovani listened to the lieutenant, and his heart rose into his throat. He opened his mouth to say something, but the latter grabbed him by the hand: “Quiet; don’t sell your honor for cheap money. Think it over till morning. And if you go, know that you’ve been forgiven.”

  That night Đovani slept peacefully, without thinking about what Lazar Kobilović had told him. In the morning they kissed each other on the cheek, and the lieutenant’s eyes were full of tears.

  “Brother Jovan, from today your blood is my blood,” he said to Đovani.

  And so on the day of St. Panteleimon began the ruin of one Parisian university student, Regina’s smartest and most sophisticated brother, who’d absorbed all the scorn of the nobility for the vulgarity of the poor and the ugliness of the plebs from his home city (or from some unknown distant forefather). From that day on everyone who saw him alive would call him Jovan.

  In that autumn of 1942, the partisans fled from Herzegovina, torn asunder by betrayal, and Pavelić, trying to carve out a border along the Drina, left that rocky southern wasteland to the care of the Italians (“If the sea is theirs, then let them fight for the karst too!”). So the Ustasha forces withdrew ahead of the Chetniks without putting up any resistance and left the care of the old land of Hum to the local population, which was mainly Muslim. The ravines, which were already halfway full of God’s Orthodox children, were filled overnight with Muslims and Catholics from Popovo Polje, as well as craftsmen and tradesmen with Czech, Polish, and Austrian names and surnames who were considered to be Croats, probably according to the logic of the cross.

  Everything happened quickly and suddenly. Thus it happened that overnight the Ustasha sentries, city authorities, and mobile courts-martial disappeared, and when people awoke in the morning, Chetniks with fairly long beards were already to be seen herding women in shalwars, old men and children, and a few adult men who (probably because of heavy sleep) hadn’t escaped through a window. (“If you’re a Muslim or a Catholic— and you are, because what could you have been here until yesterday— you knew that someone would come for you like this.”) They would take them to a ravine, if there was one nearby; to a gorge, if the village was on high ground; or to a remote place where the villagers tossed animal carcasses. And there the ritual would begin.

  First they would pick out an old man. A Chetnik officer or squad leader, whom they often called a duke, would order the old man to remove his hat or fez and kneel down and would approach him from behind. The head of the victim would reach up to his waist. Some would lean their members and scrotums against the crown of the victim’s head so they might feel the fear of the old Turks, but others would simply grab him by the hair, jerk his head backward, and cut his throat with an English army knife or a dagger. If they were at a ravine or gorge, then he would kick the victim in the back, and the latter would disappear without a sound. But if there was no ravine, then a real agony would begin before the eyes of all there who were going to kill or be killed. Namely, either there is some technical difference between slaughtering pigs and slaughtering men, or the squad leader would regularly be the least skilled in his work, but the death of the first victim usually went on longest. The old man would flop around on the ground trying to stop the blood with both hands, gurgling, gasping, and flailing with his feet in the dirt for some time, or in some not altogether rare cases, he would jump up and start running, and the Chetniks would have to get out of the way so the crimson spray wouldn’t get all over them, stiff and strong as the jets of water from the hoses gentlemen use to water their gardens. Those runs, however, were short. Never more than thirty meters, when the man would fall and remain lying motionless on the ground. Dying like that was easier because it didn’t take very long.

  When the first victim had been finished off, the women started wailing, crying, calling for help, making the strangest pleas that any living man has ever heard. They pleaded in the name of God and all the angels, in the name of their neighbors, friendship, and the fact that someone had saved someone’s life thirty years before or that one of them had breastfed an Orthodox child because its mother had no milk. They pleaded fervently, as no one ever had before. But it was no use because the eyes of the men with the knives were already full of blood. No one can know for sure, but it’s likely that there were no other victims in the whole war anywhere in Europe who pleaded with their murderers like that. Maybe it was because the murderers were mostly people among whom the victims had lived and whom they’d greeted when they met at the market. Some of the women would also remember that their great-grandfathers had been forced to convert to Islam but that they had always celebrated St. Nikola’s name day in the house.

  And there were also those who didn’t plead or implore but would use up the little life left to them casting spells, curses, and oaths that would make one’s blood freeze in his veins because these would go back for nine generations and far into the future. They invoked illness, fear, itching, mange, nightmares— any and every kind of misfortune. Everything that would afflict the Chetniks, their children, and their children’s children from that day on could be explained by the curses of those women. There was no point in thinking about justice or humanity or about the fact that children and grandchildren weren’t guilty of the crimes of their fathers and grandfathers because the curses were uttered by women who were fated to die now. The history of family and tribal curses was even older than those who slaughtered and were slaughtered, and it didn’t matter whether someone believed in them or not. They made everything happen, so it wasn’t impossible that the slaughter in eastern Herzegovina in the autumn and winter was the fulfillment of some older curses that Orthodox women had cast on their Muslim neighbors into the tenth generation. Even if there hadn’t been any such curse, everything unfolded according to its logic.

  Men write history with knives, and women summon it with words. It was that way this time too, at the edge of every ravine, gorge, and animal dumping ground.

  After the Muslim women finished pleading and cursing and their husbands, brothers, and fathers had turned into figures of terror and shame without uttering a word, only trembling and looking down at the ground under their feet, the duke would pick out the weakest of all the Chetniks— say, the one who’d wandered into the unit with the idea that the fatherland was a wheat field and the deep blue sea— grab him by the collar, drag him over to the woman who had cursed the loudest, and shove a knife into his hand if he didn’t al
ready happen to have one.

  That was usually also the most exciting moment of the whole performance because it was the meeting of two souls that were disintegrating, two terrors that at first glance had nothing in common but at the same moment bade farewell to everything they’d been until then. The woman bade farewell to a lie and regretted the curses she’d uttered or because she’d been the loudest and so the weakest and least confident of all the murderers had been chosen to be her adversary, the one who hadn’t even killed a chicken and didn’t know how to handle a knife so that her torment would be harder and longer. And the Chetnik realized that he’d ended up beyond the point of no return, that he would cut people’s throats and kill them, and that he would never again be who he’d been, not even in his own heart. If he didn’t do it, he would be scorned and disinherited; his family would disown him. He would be betraying everything for which he’d been created in this world and might even end up in the woman’s place. His brothers would kill him to show how there wasn’t and couldn’t be any forgiveness before one or the other side carried out an investigation.

  And they stood face to face for a while, woman and man, while everyone around them waited to see what would happen. Bets were made, and the leader fiercely wanted for his weakest brother to become a man. This wait always lasted too long, regardless of whether it was a matter of seconds or minutes or of the way in which it was interrupted: by her spitting into the face of her foe, in the belief that this might awaken the animal in him that would, led by instinct, put her out of her misery, or by him deciding to end his own agony and rushing at her, plunging the knife into her chest or trying to cut her throat. However, that was a difficult job for someone who hadn’t ever done it before or for someone who saw before him human eyes, a woman’s body, nostrils that inhaled and exhaled air. It was difficult because the future murderer felt a life that existed and didn’t give him any reason to snuff it out.