The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Since he’d moved to Trsteno from Tolma— and that was years and years ago since he’d been there for half his life— August Liščar had never touched another wood with his chisel. Those who liked oak and pine, they could just make tables, coffins, and doors for poor men’s houses. They could hew and keep quiet! When God was creating the world, he had first created artists and dilettantes and then walnut and oak for each. He commanded the former to make his world more beautiful, and the latter he obligated to hew and keep quiet. They could work so the poor folk didn’t rise up! But they weren’t supposed to say anything! As soon as their kind started talking, August would leave the tavern, even if he left a half a bottle of wine on the table.

  He knew what he was talking about because he’d traveled halfway around the world on horseback or by train, from škofja Loka to Salonika, and all he’d ever bought was walnut. You had to travel because the wood wouldn’t come walking to you on its own, and people didn’t cut down their own walnut trees unless they were in deep trouble or had some compelling need. Once, when he was passing through Buna, Mostar, and Lištica and saw beautiful trees whose trunks played Mozart and Brahms when you knocked on them, it occurred to him to get a rifle, assemble a band of highwaymen, and go to the gates of those houses and tell the owners, “Your walnut or your life!” But that was just a joke; his mama Fanika and his papa Pepi hadn’t raised him to be a robber, nor would he have ever taken anything against someone’s will. He also understood that walnut trees were important to people; they cared about the nuts they produced and their ancestors who’d planted them. For them a walnut tree in their yard was like a coat of arms over the entryways of the houses of Dubrovnik nobles. There was no difference! Both the one and the other showed that a person had struck roots there. But those people didn’t know, nor could they know, how much the soul of a felled walnut tree was worth.

  There was no misfortune greater than war and pestilence! That was written in the holy scripture, so August couldn’t object, but wars and epidemics were good for his work and his art. In the summer of 1878 he had cut down more than enough walnut trees in Herzegovina and Bosnia for a whole lifetime. Fortunately, he had still been young, had strength, and had been assisted by two apprentices, Feriz and Josip— who knew what they were doing now?! They’d cut trees in every village and city, and people had sold them their trees for peanuts. Embittered by their defeat and the arrival of Christian rule, they had sold their property if someone wanted to buy it and left for Turkey. August had done them a favor because they received money for something they had never even expected to be able to sell. But it didn’t matter; every one of those beys, agas, or whatever they were, each one of them, wearing his turban or fez, would stand in the middle of his grove or yard with tears streaming down his face when they cut down his walnut tree. It was hard to watch a grown man cry! When that happened, the world lost something that not even God could replace. When a man cried, that was a sign that empires were collapsing, customs were changing and better times were coming for unborn children, and times of death had arrived for everyone who bowed to old banners. Only when their walnut trees were cut down did these men understand what it meant to leave the place where they’d been born. Maybe a few of them would repent and accept the Austrian emperor, but it was already too late because their walnut trees were already gone.

  And then the barren years came, typhus and diphtheria reigned, and there were rebellions in Serbia and Macedonia. It was a time of lawlessness in the former Turkish provinces; the minarets in the Užica district came crashing down like rotten poplars. Misery and poverty spread more quickly than enthusiasm for the newly won freedom and the rulers who crossed themselves and went to church. August wandered around the devastated areas and cut down walnut trees, sometimes with his apprentices but often alone. At the time when his business was going strongest, he had five warehouses and as many workshops: in šabac, Sarajevo, Mostar, Split, and Trsteno.

  He made furniture for Austrian administrative buildings, churches, and mosques; carved likenesses of rulers and national heroes; made gusle for kings and highwaymen, up until times changed again. As far as others were concerned, they’d gotten better, and as far as he was concerned, they’d gotten worse than ever. Walnut wood was hard to come by, and there were fewer and fewer orders. Furniture arrived from Vienna, and dilettantes began to take over who made gusle from any kind of wood in large numbers. The world was losing its sense of esthetics. Everyone had started to entertain and celebrate things, wandering theater troupes appeared, operettas were performed, and balls and celebrations were organized and held in the Parisian and Viennese fashion. People were slowly but surely losing their minds. At first August was despondent about this, but then he began to take wicked pleasure in the coming disaster. All he had left was his house in Trsteno. He’d sold the others because he had no reason to hold on to them; he was getting up in years. More and more often he couldn’t work because of his rheumatism. He was losing his strength in his hands. His children had gotten married in Zagreb and Karlovac, and all he had left was his Matilda.

  Still, he didn’t have it bad! August didn’t complain except to his closest friends! He didn’t even speak to anyone else, and friends are there for you to complain to them sometimes. He knew that they would grow tired of his whining, so when they stopped coming to his place, August was not angry but went to them. To Dubrovnik, Čapljina, Sarajevo . . . He always brought them a gift that he’d fashioned: he took a carved wooden medicine cabinet that he’d copied from pictures of a Baghdad mosque to Ilidža for Karlo Stubler, his oldest friend, a railway official. Stubler was naturally thrilled. August had been complaining of his rheumatism to him for a good seven years, and his friend had tried to comfort him and would never have thought of mentioning his heart problems. He took a figure of King Tomislav on a rearing horse to Ivo Solda in Čapljina, and it still stood there, in a special place in Solda’s hotel beside a portrait of the emperor. He carved a Venetian gondolier for Mijo Ćipik and gave him Mijo’s face. It took Mijo’s wife Zdenka ten days to get over her astonishment at how accurate he’d made the likeness . . .

  August didn’t need money to live on! He’d earned enough for three lifetimes, but he couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he was getting on in years— Matilda told him a hundred times a day that he needed to rest! He got upset when no one came with orders for work, and he only made gifts for friends. In those days and months he was furious at everyone— neither the authorities nor the priests were worth anything. The newspapers that his children sent from Zagreb irritated him. He would get short with Matilda. But what was worse— when there was no work, August aged more and more quickly and generally went downhill. He began to forget things; in the evening he couldn’t remember what he’d said in the morning. Names slipped from his mind; he couldn’t remember where he’d put his glasses; he’d leave for Dubrovnik and halfway there he didn’t know why he’d gone . . . He was downcast then, but Matilda was even worse. She was afraid of losing him and that the old man would kick the bucket before his time, bite the big one, take a dirt nap— as he said in jest— and she would be left on her own. That was why it was so difficult to describe the joy in the Liščar household in Trsteno when, after six empty months, four orders came in as many days! A gusle for the king, a ship for Captain Vojko, Prince Marko for the mountain climbers, and the fourth order: toys for the unborn grandchild of someone in Dubrovnik.

  That man had come to him to tell him that his daughter had conceived, and was actually in her fourth month, and that he wanted to give the child toys made of walnut wood. It didn’t matter what they cost! That was what he’d said. A happy-go-lucky type, a little crazy, but August liked him. If he hadn’t, he would surely have refused him. First: he’d never made children’s toys in his life! Second: wasn’t it an insult to the noble wood to be piddled around with for such purposes? Third: August wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was a little afraid of having to make something for the first time. And fourth and mos
t important: that man wanted toys to put next to the cradle as soon as the child was born and for the toys to work for both a male and a female child! August had never received such a difficult order. For days and nights already he’d been thinking about what the male and female worlds had in common. He started from what boys and girls would like to play with, but very quickly he raised his inquiry to a universal level, philosophizing about sexual differences, reading what scholarly books said about it, and ordered philosophical and theological treatises sent to him from Zagreb.

  He went to Zaostrog for a talk with Brother Anđelo, a monastery librarian, a learned but also progressive man who reconciled the ice of the church with the fire of modern life and had read all the important books on the one and the other side. First he asked indirectly, and the monk started going on at length about how there was no difference in intelligence between men and women but that women were more sensitive and men were more rash. “Only their feelings make the world happier, whereas their rashness brings misfortune. That’s the basic difference between men and women!” Brother Anđelo exclaimed, but August didn’t see any great benefit from this wisdom, so he simply stated his problem to him:

  “What kind of toys should I make for the child if I don’t know whether it’s going to be a boy or a girl?”

  The monk was confused; his eyes seemed to have teared up in the face of a question that had no answer. Then he thought for a long time and looked at August on and off— some other priest or smart-ass would have certainly gotten out of it by saying that toys were a waste of time and there was nothing to think about them, but Brother Anđelo wasn’t of that type. For him there were no questions of lesser importance. From how many legs an ant has to why Peter betrayed Christ, he thought every answer was important.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Brother August,” he said with the tone of an Old Testament penitent. “Could you make a crib instead of toys?”

  No, for August that would be tantamount to admitting that there was something that he couldn’t make out of walnut wood. He would have been confirming that he’d grown old, spitting on everything he had built in his life. And in the end he would have been lying to a customer! He would have been lying to the man from Dubrovnik, saying that there was something that couldn’t be fashioned from walnut wood. There wasn’t anything, except stoves! A stove was the only thing that you couldn’t make out of walnut wood. For everything else all one needed was smarts and skill. It couldn’t be that he’d lost his smarts.

  August wasn’t sitting under the stairs as he otherwise did when he tried to see what purpose there was in a piece of wood. He toyed around with gusle, Prince Marko, and the ship Santa Maria delle Grazia, but in fact all he had on his mind were toys. He hadn’t done anything for hours already, and when his nerves gave out from the tension and his hands froze up, August tapped on the chisel. There were shallow cuts in the wood, but he couldn’t get working. In the end he would reconcile himself to his fate— there was still time before the child was born— and he would start on what was easiest. In two days he would turn a piece of wood into the head of Prince Marko, a dark-mustached man with a low brow and lowered eyebrows under which one could sense the gaze of a bull that was about to start on a decisive run to clash with Musa Kesedžija. In thirty years August had made a few hundred Prince Markos. Every time he strove to carve the same head, without changing the expression or the shape of the nose, because there was no other way to imagine the portrait of a man when no one knew what he’d actually looked like. Every sculptor or painter, artist or dilettante, made his own Marko, and the more times he repeated the same work, the greater was the chance that people would believe that the famed hero had looked just like that. August, there was no denying it, was about to become the creator of the definitive likeness of Prince Marko. Long ago people had started copying his work and that angered him, but he was aware that in that way they were also helping him. A low brow, lowered eyebrows, and the look of a bull! If that were really Prince Marko, let it be known that he hadn’t been created like that by God but by the master from Tolmin, the earl of walnut, August Liščar!

  And he made one more Marko with his eyes closed! Everything in one go, with no need for any corrections and with half his power and less effort. It had to be like that. In those thirty or so years (in fact it would soon be forty, and if one counted his first carpentry projects, forty-five), August had conquered walnut wood like Napoleon’s army had conquered Europe, but he had to make Prince Marko with that limit in skill and knowledge that was characteristic of a master’s youth. Coarse and feigned imprecision, without the finesse with which he made other objects. Because if he made Marko with these all-knowing hands, then it wouldn’t be Marko any more, and no one would recognize him. Oh, if he were to collect all the heroic heads he’d ever made and line them up one next to the other— what a series that would be! And each one was the same. And not a one of them would reveal to anyone when it was made and how he’d felt as he worked on it, whether he’d been ill or had just had a child, whether he’d been working in the middle of the hellish smithing of the Sarajevo market square, or whether it had come about in šabac. Whom he’d been thinking of while he was working, whether he was having a difficult time . . . Nothing of that could be seen on the heads of Prince Marko. That was why they were art.

  The next day he would go early in the morning to Dubrovnik. To talk with that man and hear what his grandchild was going to be like. Someone would think it stupid to ask a grandfather what his grandchild would be like, but August believed in such things. We’re like people wanted us to be before we were born. Cities were full of princes and princesses, and it was easy to imagine what their grandfathers and grandmothers had thought while they were waiting for their grandchildren. In villages there were more quiet, industrious people who often resembled their own bulls. Mostly they were the seventh or eighth sons of their fathers and mothers. If they’d wanted them, their imaginations were already spent. No one imagined those people, so they came out like that.

  August ruminated as another sunny day opened up over the sea and the grasshoppers tuned their instruments. Like an opera orchestra right before a performance of a work it has played so often that each musician knows his part by heart and tunes his strings and taps his bow on them just for fun.

  The grandfather-to-be was filled with cheer when he saw him.

  “Who’s this I see?!” he exclaimed and hugged him. None of this made any sense, neither speaking like that nor hugging someone whom you barely knew, but it didn’t bother August. He hugged him back so the man wouldn’t feel awkward when he realized how silly his actions had been. And why should one forever be a sourpuss? Matilda didn’t tell him that for nothing. Sometimes even August had to admit that she knew what she was talking about.

  He led him into his house, and the house was exactly as August expected it to be. The house of poor folk in a city, with no lineage or roots, who’d worked hard for generations, weeded their gardens and vineyards, went fishing, sold Herzegovinian tobacco, and saved little by little, ducat by ducat, brick by brick— until they got that house. It wasn’t ugly or beautiful, expensive or cheap, but just as they themselves were. Good people. And his daughter wasn’t some beauty, but you couldn’t say that she was ugly either. A girl of real Dalmatian stock who would grow stocky and fat with the years, stand with her hands on her hips and her legs spread gently at twilight, calling her children. Now he could imagine a version of her in walnut.

  “Your name is Kata? There was once a queen, and her name was Katarina Kosača. She sought justice for her queendom in Rome and died there. Her grave is in the church. They say she was beautiful,” August said, and she laughed. Just as if he’d said that she was beautiful. And that made him glad.

  Her husband was a placid man; he was too quiet, but as soon as he opened his mouth, he started cracking his knuckles. He really cracked them harshly. It was good that he didn’t say more because if he had, he’d have lost his fingers.

>   “It’s going to be a girl,” said her grandfather, speaking in a way that was uncharacteristic for these parts.

  “God only knows,” said the mother. “Maybe it’ll still be a boy!” And the father shrugged his shoulders, cracked his knuckles a little, and thought to himself but didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know what our child will be like. Intelligent and good-looking! It certainly won’t be rich; there’s no one for it to take after to be that. I’m worried less about what it will be like than about how people will treat it. That’s what’s important! Let’s hope it’s not worse than others. Let’s hope it’s not more wicked and that it doesn’t want more for itself than the next one wants for itself. So, that’s what I’d wish for. If it’s like that, there’s a greater chance it will have a happy life and take less misfortune to its grave. But you never know. You don’t even determine what you yourself will be like, nor do others. Not even God does. You know what they say in Herzegovina: I got the shit end of the stick! Well, if you get the shit end of the stick too many times, then nothing else can help. Two fishermen take the same line, the same hook, and the same kind of bait, go together to the same spot, and cast out at the same time. One of them catches a forty-pound dentex, and the other doesn’t catch a thing. The other one got the shit end of the stick.”