The Walnut Mansion Read online

  At another point, the narrator slips in a more general comment that reveals the novel’s approach to history at the end of some reflections on Bosnia as a “Yugoslavia in miniature”: “If a story about the great in the small could have been recast into a story about the small in the great, the history of our country would look very different, and we would seem more normal to those who will one day study it.”

  This is an important point, and it adds to the comments made above regarding the focus of the novel on the common problems of common people: a superficial familiarity with the history of the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans leaves one with the impression of a region of eternal memory and almost continual bloodletting and strife that “has produced more history than it could consume locally,” as Churchill is alleged to have said. (This false impression finds one of its most extreme presentations in Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts.) Of course, many of the characters in The Walnut Mansion are colorful, to say the least, but they are nevertheless ordinary people—people in whom most readers from anywhere ought to be able to recognize some of themselves.

  The novel also makes the point, slowly, concentrically, that the edifices of an age are made small by the passing of time. Indeed, Regina’s brother Bepo, living out his days in an asylum, states the idea in a fresh, prospective way:

  We believe that communism is something great and eternal. We think so because it is in proportion to us, but it won’t be for our children and our children’s children. The little ones can’t understand the big people, just as we can’t understand them. We know only that communism will seem trivial to them. They’ll take a red banner between two fingers, like this, and will walk across Russia in three steps because Russia will seem small to them too, much smaller than Pelješac. You just watch children growing big and you see that there’s no point in measuring the world on a scale bigger than your own life.

  Russia is not the heart of the matter; one need only substitute “Russia” with “Yugoslavia” or some other cultural titan to bring the idea home. The children of today will walk over our edifices as if they were toys.

  Inextricably linked with its telling of history through the eyes of ordinary people is the aforementioned reverse chronological order of the narrative. In recent years, reverse chronology has been a popular device in novels (e.g., Viktor Pelevin’s The Yellow Arrow) and movies (e.g., Memento, Irreversible). Though it is often considered a postmodern technique, Jergović maintains that he employed reverse chronology simply to “follow the logic of an individual human history, the logic of memory.”4 Indeed, at one point the narrator suggests that “every whole human story starts from the end.” This adherence to the logic of memory can explain the segues into the stories of peripheral characters that some reviewers have found distracting.5 But it is precisely these digressions into the “lateral zones” of the plot that provide a fuller picture of life and enrich the historical perspective. The so-called digressions and nested narratives are far from alien to the literature of the region but recall the digressive nature of its folk epics, as well as the narrative approach of none other than Ivo Andrić (as in, for example, The Damned Yard).6

  Jergović’s emphasis on memory in the novel calls to mind Danilo Kiš’s short story “The Encyclopedia of the Dead.” In this story a woman dreams of a trip to Sweden, where in the Royal Library she finds the Encyclopedia of the Dead, a massive set of volumes that provides detailed chronicles of the lives of ordinary people, and reads its detailed account of her deceased father’s life. She describes the Encyclopedia as a “treasury” of memory produced by writers who “record and value every life, every affliction, every human lifetime.” These words could almost be a description of the approach to historical narrative of The Walnut Mansion. Likewise, the temporal structure of The Walnut Mansion is very reminiscent of that of the Encyclopedia, as described by the narrator: “Every period of time was rendered in a kind of poetic quintessence and metaphor, not always chronologically, but in a strange symbiosis of different times—past, present and future. How else can one explain a sad comment in that text, in that ‘picture book’ of the first five years he spent at his grandfather’s in Komogovina, which reads, if I remember correctly, ‘Those would be the best years of his life’?”

  Not only does the reverse chronology of The Walnut Mansion produce such a “strange symbiosis of different times,” but it even employs the future-in-the-past quite frequently, as in the following random example taken from early on in the novel: “That evening saw the occurrence of everything that would lead to the death of Regina Delavale, or crazy Manda” (my emphasis—SMD).

  Thus, Kiš’s description of the Encyclopedia of the Dead seems at the same time to be a fairly accurate outline of the narrative strategy of The Walnut Mansion. The Encyclopedia of the Dead is of course a fantasy, even within the world of Kiš’s story, but the tale of Regina Delavale reads almost like a sprawling entry in the Encyclopedia. In any case, one cannot read The Walnut Mansion and come away unconvinced that Jergović is a writer who “values every life, every affliction, every human lifetime.”

  Jergović tips his hat to numerous writers of the lands of the former Yugoslavia, and Kiš is only one of them. (There are, by the way, other allusions to Kiš in the novel. For example, Jergović makes a passing play on Kiš’s story “Last Respects,” which tells of the honors bestowed upon a prostitute at her funeral. The honors are inverted in The Walnut Mansion: a group of prostitutes gathers to honor the memory of Luka, their spendthrift faux-client.)

  I have already mentioned the focus on the effect of history on ordinary people common to The Walnut Mansion and Andrić’s The Woman from Sarajevo. On a more general level (and leaving aside the reverse chronology of The Walnut Mansion), Jergović’s narrative style shares many similarities with that of Andrić. This is not surprising, as both Andrić and Jergović were raised in Bosnia, a land where oral traditions have been strong and the people take delight in storytelling. And Jergović has certainly made no efforts to distance himself from Andrić’s writing, even or especially at times when Andrić came under fire in both Croatia and Bosnia itself for his Serbian self-identification.

  An important similarity is the multitude of voices in their stories. Like Andrić’s prose, The Walnut Mansion is decidedly polyphonic: a great many voices tell stories and anecdotes that contribute to the overall depiction of life in twentieth-century Yugoslavia. And as with Andrić, though there is an omniscient narrator who does not narrate in a distinct voice, that omniscient narrator does occasionally comment directly on the plot or its themes as if actually speaking with the reader. A further feature that Jergović shares with Andrić is the frequent employment of free indirect discourse, which allows the omniscient narrator to seamlessly render the characters’ thoughts.

  Other writers to whom an attentive reader can find allusions are those as different as the Serb Borislav Pekić, the Croat Miroslav Krleža, and the Bosnian Meša Selimović (and there are certainly others that have escaped my attention). It thus makes no sense to try to pigeonhole Jergović as a writer who self-identifies with only one of the increasingly ethnically homogeneous enclaves that have risen out of the ashes of the former Yugoslavia. And it should be pointed out that he does not “long for [the state of ] Yugoslavia; what perished had to.”7 Rather, Jergović appears to be an odd thing—a post-Yugoslav writer, in the literal sense of the term, and in a cultural sense, as opposed to a political one. It is doubtful that he would agree to be considered anything else. And his work, including The Walnut Mansion, is the richer for it.

  One last point worth mentioning is that the story of Regina Delavale’s life lends itself to interpretation as an allegory of the fate of Yugoslavia. Regina’s rampages in the final days of her life, in which she lays waste to an entire apartment (a container of life, much as states are), seem to be a metaphor for the bloody rampages of paramilitaries that ended the state of Yugoslavia. And the reader travels back slowly to her childhood and then to her birth,
when she is given a toy house carved in walnut. The little wooden house stands as a symbol of the novel’s idea that the legacies left by a generation seem tiny to future generations. (Indeed, Tito’s Yugoslavia was destroyed by politicians who belonged to the generation that came after its founders.) And in this way the little house in walnut can also be seen as a metaphor for the state granted to the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes by Woodrow Wilson and the Western powers after the First World War. Thus, the reverse chronology of the novel is oddly suitable for outside readers, the majority of whom first learned about Yugoslavia at its bloody end and only slowly worked their way backward to learn the history of the country.

  Notes

  1. Http://www.jergovic.com/bio-bibliografija/.

  2. This label should not be confused with “Bosnian Croat”—that is, a Croat born and raised in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  3. Http://arhiv.slobodnadalmacija.hr/20030716/forum01.asp. Translations of his remarks in this interview are mine.

  4. Http://arhiv.slobodnadalmacija.hr/20030716/forum01.asp.

  5. See, for example, the review in the July 24, 2007, issue of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

  6. I’m grateful to Aida Vidan for pointing these aspects out to me.

  7. Http://bhknjiga.com/intervjumiljenko-jergovic-hrvati-su-sretniji-od-srba-zene-ce-im-prije-postati-europske-sobarice.html. Translation mine.

  TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

  Like Jergović’s other prose works, The Walnut Mansion is written in a lucid, colloquial style; the language itself presents few unusual challenges to a translator, and only a handful of small changes in content for an Anglophone readership have been necessary.

  One of the biggest issues presents itself in the title. The Croatian word dvori has no real equivalent in English, as it refers to a specific type of house in coastal Croatia. The word is defined as “a house with several rooms of solid construction, made of stone in coastal areas, usually with a portico, a rain cistern and a storeroom.” Not exactly a mansion in our current conception, but since “mansion” is defined simply as “a large, impressive house,” it works best, as the kind of house in question was often larger than average homes, and a portico represents a modicum of luxury.

  A greater problem for a foreign readership is the very frequent mention of various names, places, and events unfamiliar to those who are not well-versed in the history of the former Yugoslavia. On the one hand, there are far too many of these to explain in footnotes or a glossary; on the other, removing them or translating some of them descriptively would in our view make the translation anemic. Thus, we have left all such references in the text intact. Though these references may impede the comprehension of the uninitiated in places, the vast majority if not all of these names are easily found on the Internet, and the curious reader should be able to find explanations of them there in English without difficulty.

  Another problem for an Anglophone readership is the names of the characters. Given that the novel has some fifty of them, most of whom have distinctly Croatian, Bosnian, or Serbian names, the task of finding suitable equivalents is impossible. In our view, transliterating these names makes them very ugly, and this is normally not the practice in the media, which simply delete any pesky diacritics (e.g., “Milosevic” in place of “Milošević”), though this is no solution either. Therefore, we have opted to keep the names in their original form, including all diacritics. The following table will demystify their pronunciation.

  B/C/S

  English

  c

  Like ts

  č, ć

  Like ch

  dž, đ

  Like j in jam

  i

  Like y in yes

  lj

  Like ly in tell ya

  nj

  Like ny in lanyard

  š

  Like sh

  ž

  Like ge in rouge

  Finally, Jergović uses various words referring to Croatian and Balkan concepts that have no convenient equivalents in English. As most of these occur in one form or another in the Oxford English Dictionary or the Merriam-Webster Unabridged, we have retained them in their attested Anglicized forms. They and two frequent political terms mentioned in the introduction are defined below; the reader may refer to these definitions when these words occur. The definitions given below are based on those in the aforementioned dictionaries except that we have tailored them slightly to reflect their meaning in Croatia and the Balkans.

  borek

  A savory pie made of puff pastry, containing a variety of fillings such as cheese, meat, and potatoes

  boza

  A popular hot drink in Turkey and the Middle East, made by fermenting an infusion of millet seeds

  briscola

  An Italian trump card game played in the Mediterranean and Adriatic

  Chetnik

  A guerilla fighter in the Balkans; more specifically, a member of Serbian royalist guerillas in World War II

  gusle

  A bowed string musical instrument in the Balkans that usually has only one string

  hodja

  A teacher in a Muslim school

  salep

  A hot drink made by sweetening an infusion of a four of the same name made from orchidaceous plants (cf. British saloop)

  tekke

  A dervish monastery

  Ustasha

  A member of a party of separatist Croats before World War II; during the war a term for officials of the fascist Independent State of Croatia

  zikr

  A Muslim ritual prayer recited by dervishes in which an expression of praise is continually repeated

  The Walnut Mansion

  XV

  “Oh, Mrs. Marija, I’m a daughter, not a monster! I took care of her for thirty years. My life passed me by while I was doing that, and I didn’t complain to anybody. I didn’t run away, like so many children do from their parents. They run all the way to the other end of the world. And it’s no wonder they do—with what passes for parents around here. But I didn’t do that, and now I have the right to say something. I’ve been going from room to room all morning long. They sent me from the second floor to the fifth floor and back again. I don’t know why they’ve been doing that. Would they do it if I came to report a murder? Mrs. Marija, I’m not a monster, believe me, but I did feel a load was taken off my shoulders, make no mistake about it. It was as if I had my life again. And the children had theirs again too. Can you imagine what it’s like to watch your own mother turn into a monster, into a freak, into—I don’t even know what to call it? She was my mother, for better or worse—it doesn’t matter. I don’t know whether I’m a good mother to my children, and so I won’t judge her. But I loved her! I can say that, and I know very well what I’m saying. But for the last three months she hasn’t been the same person. A demon got a hold of her. Now I don’t believe in demons, spells, or spirits—so don’t think I’m making this up. But at night we locked ourselves in the bedroom because that was the only way we dared to go to sleep. Me and my two children. In the morning I would clean up what she’d broken. I cleaned her . . . her excrement from all over the house. It was everywhere—on the walls, on the ceilings. It was terrible—you have no idea how much of it can come out of one living being. In a month everything in the house had been defiled or smashed. A big oaken cabinet, a hundred years old and weighing at least half a ton—she chopped it up one night with an axe. With one of those big axes that not even a man can lift just like that! So, Mrs. Marija, that was the ninety-seven-year-old woman that all the newspapers have been writing about yesterday and today. I understand that; they think she was some dear old granny, like one of those little old grandmas on Stradun Street. Everyone had one. A heart-rending figure, like a seal being killed or a dog in the pound. Everyone wants to tear that boy limb from limb, and they’ll do it in the end! He’s done for. He’ll never work as a doctor again, and who knows what he’ll be like when he gets out of prison? They’ll convict him, I’m sure
of it. But why didn’t you hide him? People will kill him! Why don’t you stick him in jail for now? Is it that you’re expecting them to come after him and string him up like in the Wild West? That would put an end to the whole affair. Without the hassle of a trial and you getting involved in a tragedy. That’s right, Mrs. Marija, this is a tragedy! But the victim isn’t some ninety-seven-year-old woman—it’s the young man who saved us. Me and my children! I could keep quiet because my agony is over, but I won’t, even if I end up just like him. If someone needs to be torn limb from limb, you’ve got us; we’re already used to it. Nothing can happen to us that we haven’t already had to endure. There are things more terrible than death, Mrs. Marija! What a person lives through is worse. Nor is shame the worst thing in the world. There are things much worse than that, and God forbid you ever suffer them, you or anybody in your family! I won’t be able to go on living if something bad happens to that young man on account of her. I can’t take it; I don’t care if you think I’m a monster instead of someone’s child a hundred times over! But that . . . that . . . I don’t know what you call it, that wasn’t my mother! If I thought it was, I’d jump out of this window this instant; I’d squeeze through the bars; I just wouldn’t be able to take it if something like that brought me into this world. You think I’m crazy? Oh yes, you must think I’m crazy, that I’m in shock, that what I’m telling you isn’t true, and that everything will be different tomorrow, after someone has a talk with me, convinces me it’s not true, explains everything to me, sends me to a psychiatrist, shoots me full of sedatives like a goose. But you’re wrong! You don’t know how wrong you are and how many times in the last three months I wished I could do what had to be done to save myself and my children, but I didn’t have the courage. I didn’t know how to do it, and today I’m sorry; I’ll never forgive myself because I’m the reason why that young man’s life is falling apart. That’s right; I’d have killed her and my hand wouldn’t have shaken at all, if only I’d known . . .”