The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “Are there still Turks in Sarajevo, and what are people saying?— How long will our people put up with them?”

  “Will Jesus return to Earth if the whole world ever believes in Him?”

  “Does anything exist that is faster than the railway, or is the railway faster than a swallow?”

  “Do people in Sarajevo eat baklava?”

  “Is there anyone who doesn’t believe in God?”

  “Are there any foreign languages besides Turkish that you haven’t learned?”

  “How do you say poached apples in Latin?”

  “About how much smarter is a person when they finish all their schooling?”

  He had to answer all their questions, and if he didn’t know the answer or the question didn’t make any sense, Rafo made something up and lied. They believed everything he said— would an educated man lie?— and were content because he was clearing up things about which they’d been confused all their lives, things about which they’d racked their brains for years, and now in a second everything was becoming clear.

  For seven days they treated Rafo and led him from one get-together to another. They sat him in the front pew for the midnight Mass, right next to the city elders and military representatives. Before the Christmas meal the district courier brought him a card and gifts from the emperor, and a day later a correspondent of the Vienna newspaper wanted to see him who intended to remind the forgetful public of the first Herzeg-Bosnian godchild of the Austro-Hungarian sovereign. He endured all of that and waited for a moment when he would tell Ivan, his oldest brother and the head of the family, that he wasn’t going back to Sarajevo. When he had an opportunity he didn’t have the courage, and when he had the courage, Ivan wasn’t there, and in the end he realized that there was an easier and simpler way to save himself from the prep school and everything that oppressed and tormented him.

  In the early morning before New Year’s in 1892, he got out of bed before everyone else, grabbed a rope for tying up young bulls before they were castrated, climbed onto a plum tree in the yard and tied it to the lowest branch, and tied a noose in the other end. He could barely pull it down over his head; the rope was almost as thick as his arm. He looked at the windows behind which his clan was sleeping the sleep of the just, then up at the sky above the verandah, and finally at the pavement that surrounded the plum tree. At the moment when he slipped down, Rafo didn’t miss anything. Nothing mattered to him for one more fraction of a second in which the visible world shot upward, and then he felt a terrible power jerk his head, his eardrums pop, his breath stop, and instead of stopping, his heart started beating like crazy . . . He forgot everything he knew and why he’d climbed up on the tree and was no longer the old Rafo; he wasn’t a person but a being— maybe an animal, maybe a sinful soul in hell— that was trying to find solid ground under its feet.

  No one knew how long he hung there, and no one knew how long he would have hung beside the Sikirić house if Brother Ambroz Galonja hadn’t come walking by. He was a friar who suffered from insomnia and so liked to study the influence of the dawn on plant life. Brother Ambroz jumped over the low stone fence, grabbed Rafo’s legs, and began to call loudly for help. His sister Slavica ran out of the house first and climbed up the tree barefoot. The friar saw her breasts full of milk fall out of her blouse— it hadn’t been ten days since she’d given birth for the sixth time. He wanted not to look, but he didn’t have anywhere else to turn and didn’t think of closing his eyes because he was overcome with horror at the rasping coming from Rafo’s throat. His breath rasped like that of old men when they died— Brother Ambroz had seen hundreds of them off to the hereafter. Slavica tried to untie the knot, but it didn’t work; a man’s strength was needed for that. Her breasts pressed on a rough branch of the old tree, red imprints were left on her white skin; Brother Ambroz looked at them, beside himself with fear, and for a moment it seemed that this wasn’t real but that he’d lost his mind from the lack of so much sleep.

  Feces were seeping down out of Rafo’s underwear and slowly, like a snake on a hot rock, went down the friar’s shoulder, leaving an ugly yellowish trail on his habit.

  Rafo had the fortune or misfortune that the rope was too thick and didn’t cinch around his neck. Instead of dying, he experienced only the pain of death; everything hurt, and he lost his voice. He lay in bed as the members of the Sikirić clan took turns at his side. Brother Ambroz held his hand and kept mumbling the Our Father and Hail Mary. He did that so no one would ask him anything, not because he thought that prayer would help the boy. Not five minutes had passed since they’d taken Rafo down from the plum tree and Ivan Sikirić was already shoving five ducats into Brother Ambroz’s fist, only so he wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened. Rafo’s brother wanted to pay him off before he even knew whether Rafo would live or not. The friar went hazy in the head, as if someone had opened the gates of hell for a moment to air out all the stench of its sinners. It seemed to him that he wouldn’t be able to come to his senses again. He shoved Ivan’s hand away; the ducats jingled on the pavement. He followed the child into the house so that he wouldn’t ever have to look Ivan in the eye again. There he stood, saying the prayers he could remember, waiting for the moment when he could flee that house. God had put him on earth so he could care for grass, trees, and fruit trees and not for human misfortune. That should be in the care of the monastery’s brothers who more easily bore misfortune.

  The very next day, of course, all of Trebinje knew that the emperor’s godchild had tried to kill himself. God knows how word got out and whose mouth let out the shame, but it was certain that Brother Ambroz Galonja hadn’t said anything to anyone. And since no one outside the house knew about Rafo’s hanging and no outsiders had been at his bedside, there could be no doubt that it was the Sikirićes themselves— that is to say, one of them— who’d broadcast the news to everyone else. Either one of the deceased Josip’s daughters, daughters-in-law, or granddaughters had taken it into her head to portray herself to the neighbor women as a martyr and babble what had happened, or one of the brothers had gotten dead drunk in Aladin’s bar and told all the town drunks why he was drinking.

  Ivan Sikirić went around Trebinje for days like a Turkish ghazi, yelling so everyone could hear him: “Where’s that pig of a friar? I’ll dig out his liver with a pocketknife! I gave him money to keep his mouth shut, may Mujo Bašaga fuck him in his filthy ass!”

  Apart from the fact that Ivan had sinned by cursing the monk who’d saved his brother (and he himself knew that he was sinning), though it was easier for him to slander an innocent than rack his brains with bitterness and anger in his heart, Ivan roused the fury of hell when he invoked the name of the deceased Mujo Bašaga, an adventurer and soldier who in some battle or another had come down with syphilis and deteriorated before the eyes of the town for years, from open sores and the fact that the disease had gotten into his head. In the end his nose turned into a scab, and it was whispered that his cock had fallen off and that instead of a male organ he had a split, as when an overripe watermelon bursts or as if, God forgive me, by some punishment he’d turned into a woman. Some swore that they’d seen him in the yard behind his house digging a hole and burying his manliness and saying a prayer over the grave, but no one believed them because those were people who hated Turkish soldiers and everything Muslim and tended to make up all kinds of things about their neighbors of the other faith. The story about Mujo Bašaga’s lost cock was conceived in fear of him and his disease. Violent as he was, and well aware of his condition and the way in which he’d ended up in it, Mujo didn’t threaten anyone with a dagger or an axe. Stout and strong, he would tell anyone who got in his way that he would await him after dark, him or one of his people, and cram his terrible organ into his ass, cunt, or eye socket . . . People feared him and kept out of his way as much as they could, and only when he died did they begin mentioning his name under their breath in various jokes and pranks.

  However, no one cut loose like Iv
an Sikirić; no one shouted about him on the town square because they knew that the deceased Mujo had two sons, bigger than their papa and more excessive in their violence, to the degree that youth is more violent than old age. His son Hamid was already in his fifth year in the Sarajevo prison because he’d robbed and killed a French traveler, and the younger one, Medžid, had worked in Dubrovnik as a porter. And since Ivan had been repeating his curse for days, someone told Medžid that Sikirić was slandering his deceased father on the town square.

  It was Saturday when Medžid Bašaga appeared with a fishing hook for sharks in his right hand and a string in his left hand. He didn’t say anything, didn’t greet anyone; he just walked around aimlessly, and people withdrew inside their houses and shops and knew well whom he was trying to find. No one turned up to warn Ivan about the return of the young Bašaga, and he himself was so foolish and preoccupied with his own misery that he didn’t even step back when he appeared before him on Arslanagić Bridge.

  He didn’t hit him a single time. He stopped in front of Sikirić, looked him in the eye for a long time, long enough for a shadow to pass from one end of the string to the other, and when Ivan tried to go around him, deathly afraid but still unsure what he’d done to cross Medžid, the giant dropped the string and grabbed Ivan by the hinges of his jaw. He squeezed him with his thumb and middle finger; Ivan groaned and his mouth gaped instinctively. Medžid took the hook and ran it through his cheek. Blood streamed out, and Sikirić fell on his knees in shock, but that didn’t hold up Bašaga at all. He bent over just enough, and just as if he were puttering about a chest with a broken lock, he tied the string to the hook, leisurely, pedantically. When he’d tightened the knot, he tugged the string, and Ivan thought he was going to tear his face from his skull, but Medžid just whispered a little louder, “Let’s go, dog, to lick Mujo Bašaga’s grave!”

  Ivan Sikirić passed through the market square on his knees, amid people who passed around him and acted as if they didn’t see him or as if Medžid was leading around a greyhound and not a man. He moaned because it hurt and because the hook was tearing an ever larger hole in his cheek, but he knew that no one would help him. Nor would he have helped him if he’d been in their place. When they arrived at the cemetery, Medžid sat down on the neighboring grave, and Ivan licked the gravestones and the earth on Mujo’s grave. When he licked all of one side of the grave, Medžid would whisper:

  “Lick the master’s other leg.” And Ivan would go to the other side.

  “Lick his arms . . .

  “Lick his hero’s chest . . .

  “Lick the putrid cock of Mujo Bašaga, you infidel dog!”

  Medžid would shout the last command, and Ivan expected him to hit him. But he didn’t hit him once, though the series of commands was repeated in the same tone and order for hours. Night came; Medžid put a bag of tobacco on his knees and started rolling one cigarette after another. Ivan would look at him askance, whereupon he would only hiss, “Lick it . . . ! Lick it . . . ! Lick it!. . . ”

  When he found himself on the side of the grave opposite Medžid, Ivan jumped up and started running. He clasped the hook with his hands and would step on the string, which would jerk the hook and hurt him even more; he howled, pleaded, and cried, expecting a blow to the back of his head, and couldn’t even collect himself enough to realize that the giant wasn’t running after him. Medžid had remained sitting on the grave opposite his father’s, smoking and looking uninterestedly in the other direction. Had anyone come along and seen him like that, he would have thought that the son had grown sad and come to talk with his dead father in his thoughts.

  It took time for Ivan’s rage to return. He squealed and called for his mother while his sisters took out the hook. Tears came to his eyes when they tried to clean the wound with brandy and stop the bleeding. In the end they sewed up the wound with a length of fishing line because the bleeding wouldn’t stop. But that wasn’t enough. Every minute he spat blood into a metal basin, folded his hands as if he were at prayer, and his eyes sought someone to help him. Rafo was lying in the next room, frightened to death because he’d seen how people die and was aware that he was to blame for what had happened to his brother. It would have been nice to disappear, but people aren’t snow and can’t just melt away. He realized this a little too late.

  He dreamed of Alija Čuljak and the two nuns. They were sitting in the dining room of Karadža’s villa, eating and laughing. Before them were empty plates from which they were taking pieces of nothing, putting them into their mouths, and chewing. He tried to call to them, tell them that the plates were empty and that no matter how much they ate they would still be hungry, but they didn’t hear him. The same dream went on until morning. There were five more days until his trip back to Sarajevo. Actually, until the day that they would try to take him back there.

  In the morning Ivan grabbed a hunting rifle and left the house without a word. He spat blood every few steps, walked quickly, and looked grimly into the dirt. He walked around the market square three times, but didn’t find the man he was looking for. If he was even looking for him. If Ivan Sikirić had dared at all to shoot at Medžid Bašaga. No, he wouldn’t have shot at him or at anyone else! He’d taken the rifle to make himself look frightening and to drive the anguish from his soul. As his rage came back and he was no longer a crybaby but a man who’d long since passed fifty, despair grew inside him. That was a frequent scene for the market square. It happened often, especially in spring, when the blood in people’s veins went bad and their nerves frayed, that a prominent and respected man would stroll around with a weapon in his hands. One took a rifle, another an axe, a third a pitchfork. He would stagger around for a bit, scowl at everyone he saw, firing looks like cannonballs meant to destroy the city, but as a rule he wouldn’t run across the one who was the cause of his misery. People would click their tongues and sigh, ostensibly in pity, but the truth was that the majority of them watched it with malicious pleasure because one more person’s soul had been torn asunder, his life burst before their eyes, or his mind started leaking out, and the day would soon come when he would completely lose it, so instead of a local bigwig, a head of a household who commanded respect, we would get one more town idiot, fool, dolt, jackass, and wretch. Soon women would chase him— a filthy, soiled, crazed man— with brooms out of the yards of the town. The respected Muslims of Trebinje, those who’d withdrawn into their homes since the arrival of the Austrians, particularly enjoyed such spectacles because now there were incomparably more cases of imbecility and springtime insanity than there had been in the time of the Turks, and the majority of those afflicted were Christians or the Muslim common folk— who were all the same to them. These people tried to convince themselves, and then the town, that such things didn’t happen in honest Muslim families, which was of course a lie. Beys, their sons and daughters lost their minds too, only they wouldn’t shamble around the town square but would endure their mental anguish within four walls. When Ivan Sikirić appeared with the rifle and a large wound across his cheek, no one thought he was looking for Medžid Bašaga and that there might be trouble. The town wrote his name down in the register of present and future idiots.

  And so in two days three scandals had befallen the Sikirić family, all as bad as could be: their youngest, Rafo, had tried to kill himself; their oldest, Ivan, had been forced to lick the grave of Mujo Bašaga, whereupon— at least in the eyes of the town— he’d lost his mind. The same sorrow darkened all the houses inhabited by Matija’s and Josip’s offspring. They kept their eyes to the ground, said nothing, and sighed here and there, or the women would sniffle over the pots in which they were boiling their laundry. Someone would start coughing; a child would squeal because someone had suddenly opened a door behind which it was playing. A cat meowed, a dog barked, but no one said a word. In the households into which the Sikirić women had married their husbands glared grimly at their swollen ankles and calves but didn’t say anything. Even their mothers-in-law, who wer
e otherwise the first to have something to say about the family of their daughters-in-law, kept silent. But until the previous day they’d gone around with their heads held high because one of their in-laws was the emperor’s godchild, and they used that to threaten a grocer who’d sold them moist salt, or they’d boasted to their neighbors how Franz Joseph would soon invite them to Vienna to show them the imperial palace. Whoever in Trebinje bore the name Sikirić and into whose house one of the Sikirić girls married began to feel a little like a Habsburg. Whenever a neighbor woman would mention her godparent Stevo from Nikšić, who was coming for Easter with three Njeguši hams, she could expect the following answer:

  “Well, just what is our godparent in Vienna going to send us?! Who gives a damn about Stevo from Nikšić when your godparent is the Austrian emperor?!”

  The neighbor woman would lower her gaze; rage would gather in the corner of her lips. Then the emperor’s in-law would offer her another cup of coffee— solely to hear the tone in which she would refuse it. Ah, now the time had come to settle accounts! Rafo had hung himself from a plum tree, and the imperial crown had fallen from many heads.

  Ivan’s shame upset them less. Though he was the oldest and commanded respect not only among his younger brothers but also in the homes of their in-laws, it was easy to renounce him because he wasn’t the first or the last to lose his mind and his reputation because of his own foolish behavior. If there were a curse, it would only fall on his house and the houses of his children. His sisters would lament him, his brothers would clam up and never mention him, and it wouldn’t be long before the town forgot who was whose brother. Ivan understood that. He hadn’t fired the rifle he’d carried through the market, and Medžid Bašaga had gone back to Dubrovnik. The oldest Sikirić had crumbled like a pillar of plaster. He had only one trump card left in his hands, but that was the strongest. The emperor’s godchild was lying in his house.