The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Marija went back to waiting. She turned the hourglass over twenty more times, and one more day was over. As she started for home and took the coffee cups to put them on the radiator in front of her office, where the boy in the black-and-white outfit would pick them up, she remembered her guest once more, probably for the last time. Someone else would be interested in that story, she thought. People were too curious; that was why so many tragedies occurred in their lives. If you (and your loved ones, if you had any) didn’t stick your nose where it didn’t belong and only knew what you had to, many of those bad things would steer clear of you. Content with herself, she locked her office and disappeared.

  XIV

  The morning after crazy Manda broke the thick, milky glass on the kitchen door with her fist in one of her nightly rampages, Dijana found her lying pale in a pool of blood and excrement as if all the life in her had already drained out, and she called an ambulance. The lies and deception were over; she could no longer hide from the city what it in fact already knew—that her mother had lost her mind in her ninety-seventh year. But what a way to lose your mind: swearing and cursing the most hideous oaths and in the worst ways, wrenching the guts of those closest to her, and showing parts of herself that one doesn’t even show when one’s young. She would strip naked, thin as a ghost, grab herself by the nipple, and shout: “Want some milk, harbor slut? Want me to breast-feed all your bastards?” Or she would grab herself between the legs and, releasing a stream of urine, say, “Look, you dry cunt, at what a woman has!” Dijana tried to shield her children from this and even worse things as best she could. But what was worse than what was happening to their souls was that someone else might hear crazy Manda—as Darijan had called his grandma Regina one night. And the three of them called her that from then on, probably trying to convince themselves that she had nothing to do with the woman with whom they’d used to live. Two and a half months earlier, a little after the worst had started, Dijana had tried to get her mother committed to the municipal psychiatric ward, but that was no place for sane people, let alone the insane. Ten or so chronic cases that had been abandoned by their families had been taking up a half of the ward for years, while the other half fell to shell-shocked veterans of the war and a few sons and daughters of better houses who’d already passed through the ninth circle of drugs and had no hope of recovery and whose parents wanted to keep them out of sight. No space could be found for an aggressive, berserk old woman. There might have been in other wards, and Regina suffered from a hundred conditions anyway, but if Dijana could reconcile herself to letting psychiatrists see what her mother had turned into, letting other doctors see this had been out of the question, until that morning.

  The ambulance arrived an hour after she made the call.

  “What’s this, does a herd of wild pigs live here?” asked a fat medic with a shaven head, unable to keep his mouth shut. Dijana tried frantically to think up some lie; she’d been busy at this since she’d called the ambulance, but she couldn’t think of anything that might explain an apartment that had been completely torn apart and soiled with excrement, urine, and blood. She told Mirna and Darijan to stay in the bedroom and not to come out until crazy Manda had been taken away. It was better for the medics not to see them.

  “C’mon, granny, let’s go,” said the bald medic and tried to pick her up by her underarms while his partner, a weedy, older man with glasses, went for her legs. But crazy Manda spun around like lightning and bit his arm. “Sweet Mother of Jesus!” he exclaimed, jumping back a couple of meters, and then yelled at Dijana, “Why don’t you say something? Goddammit, get her to calm down!” Dijana was standing against a wall that was soiled with traces of filth that the old woman had smeared on it on one of the previous nights; she said nothing and looked down at the floor.

  “She’s not right in the head,” she said finally.

  “Oh really?! And we thought you just keep her here to guard the house and bite mailmen!” said the one with the gray hair. The bald one started toward crazy Manda again, approaching her this time more directly from behind, but she slipped away like a cat and flashed her teeth.

  “This ain’t our job; let’s go!” said the one with gray hair.

  “Wait, please don’t go!” Dijana cried.

  “Signorina, we’re here to save you from a stroke or pneumonia; if you need help with that, call us, but for this you need to call someone else,” said the one with the gray hair. The bald one was standing over crazy Manda and looking down at her and thinking: I’d love to kick you in the head!

  She grinned at him furiously, flashing her thin, sharp yellow teeth, waiting for a chance to grab him by the balls.

  Here Dijana realized whom she should be playing, resolved as she was to finish what she’d started at any price. “Take her away, please!” she said, folding her hands before the bald one.

  “Where should we take her when we can’t even figure out how to get a hold of her?”

  “To the hospital. She’ll bleed to death.”

  “If she hasn’t already, she won’t now,” the gray-haired one interjected again. “Let’s go, Damir, before the old bag gets you by the ass. You know there’s no anti-tetanus serum in the hospital,” he joked, making every effort to humiliate Dijana in any way he could. “No one will believe this when we tell them . . .”

  “Would you do it for a hundred marks?” she begged the bald one.

  “Not even for five hundred!” the gray-haired one said, peering back at her over his shoulder.

  “Have some compassion, for God’s sake!” she begged.

  “C’mon, granny’ll give you a piece of pussy!” said crazy Manda, suddenly enthusiastic about the idea of them taking her somewhere.

  “Okay, give us each a hundred marks,” said the bald one, taking pity.

  “Not me, dammit!” the gray-haired one said, resisting.

  “Oh yes you will, Tripun,” the bald one said. “And don’t you watch this!” he said to Dijana and seized the old woman by the neck with his middle finger and thumb. She wheezed.

  “It hurts, doesn’t it, you old hag? Well, if you bite me, I won’t let go the next time,” he said and grabbed her under the arm. Crazy Manda was probably too surprised to respond quickly, but since Tripun hadn’t gotten her by the legs, she started stomping furiously on the parquet floor.

  “Hold her, Tripun!” said the bald one, which Tripun tried to do when he figured that he’d probably stalled long enough. But since the old woman had suddenly gained strength again, he had a hard time of it, and every so often she got him in the chin or the nose.

  “You’re done, you old whore!” he shouted after he had finally managed to get a hold of her scrawny knees. His thumbs could feel her kneecaps scraping against the worn ends of her bones. He shuddered as if he had scratched a blackboard with his fingernails.

  As they carried her down the stairs, crazy Manda howled, “Help me, people; they’ll shoot me, they’ll cut my throat!” But nothing could be seen except the covers of the peepholes moving; the neighbors were peering out and remembering what they saw. Dijana went a few steps behind them, in her house slippers, with a black lacquered purse over her shoulder and two hundred marks in her sweaty hand.

  In the ambulance the bald one took out a syringe, and while Dijana and Tripun barely managed to hold the old woman down on the stretcher, he thrust the needle into her buttock right through her house robe: “Hey, granny, now you’ll relax!” Five minutes later Regina Delavale lay motionless, like a mummified body, with a faint smile on her calm, still face, in which Dijana then saw something of her mother for the last time. When she’s asleep, she’s just like she used to be, she thought, certain that she would rather spend the rest of her life by the side of that sleeping body and caring for it than for crazy Manda to awaken in it once more, even for only five minutes.

  Just before they arrived at the hospital, the bald one gave her one more injection. “Look, I could lose my job because of what I’m doing right now,” he s
aid. “At the reception desk you’ll say you found her unconscious from blood loss. Don’t you dare tell them what I did to her because I’ll find you no matter where you are and rip your tongue out, got it?”

  Dijana nodded.

  “You must be crazy. How can you believe her?!” Tripun said and sighed. “Now let’s see the money!”

  Dijana held out two hundred marks for the bald one. He took only one of the notes. “Give the other one to him!” he said, pointing with his index finger as if forcing her. “Hey, I never thought I’d see the day when a woman pays me!” joked Tripun, extending his empty palm.

  At the reception desk Dijana presented Regina’s health record booklet and told all the necessary lies to the young female doctor, probably an intern, a beauty with big brown eyes who was equally beautiful whether she was smiling or fretting.

  “Don’t worry at all; everything will be all right,” the doctor said, caressing her upper arm with her palm. “I’ll look after her like my own grandmother!” Without warning Dijana’s eyes filled with tears. She wept bitterly on the full bosom of an unfamiliar young woman who saw her own grandmother in the unconscious crazy Manda and whom Dijana had deceived like no one in her life. She wept and couldn’t stop, for herself and that girl and what would happen when crazy Manda woke up and the girl realized what horror is and what a pretty, touching story can turn into.

  “Forgive me, please,” she sobbed, and the young doctor had no idea why she should forgive her; nor had anyone prepared her for such cases. When she’d begun working, they’d surely given her a hundred pieces of advice about how to conduct herself with patients and their families, when to lie and when to tell the truth, but they hadn’t said what to do when you’re holding a woman in your arms who could be your mother, whose hot tears are the strangest thing you’ve ever felt on your skin. Perhaps most similar to the paraffin that had run down a candle long ago on a winter night in Koločep, and she had grabbed it with her bare palm.

  As she returned home with a list of things that the young doctor had written out for her to bring for crazy Manda in the afternoon—pajamas, a house robe, soap, hairpins, and a toothbrush—Dijana knew that before she set foot in the apartment, the old woman would already be awake and the shameful scheme would unravel. The whole hospital would learn the truth, that Regina Delavale hadn’t fallen into a coma from blood loss but had been sedated with something so they could slip a crazy woman into the hands of the doctors. Nothing like this had ever happened before, at least she’d never heard of it, so the story would be all the more interesting and spread like wildfire until it reached the last fishwife. And then people would start spouting her name, and this would go on for years and till the end of time, outliving crazy Manda and Dijana and becoming a permanent addition to the family name, harder than the city walls and stronger than the power of a patron saint. In these parts it takes centuries for people to forget the lunatics in a family. Memories of half-witted children who died before their seventh birthday pass from generation to generation, just as generation after generation remembers whose brother raped a fourteen-year-old girl and threw her in a crevasse above Popovo Polje, or whose great-grandmother ran off with a Turk and dropped her drawers in the alleys of Izmir to put out for French traders and travelogue writers. People remember each and every bastard child born way back when this city was only a heap of rocks overlooking the sea. They’ve scribbled down news of events in far eastern ports, every case of gonorrhea, clap, and drip. There’s no family that’s been in the city for more than a generation without being accompanied by at least ten such shameful stories, against which you can defend yourself only by cultivating blights in the gardens and family trees of others and preserving the memory of their abominations and monstrosities. She knew she had to reconcile herself to that, but she wasn’t ready for reconciliation. She was gripped by terror at the thought of having to respond in the same manner to anyone who might reproach her or about whom she heard that they had passed on the story and relished it. The children weren’t home when she got there. They’d run out as they were wont to do, as they had been doing for months. And what would they do inside in rooms in which there was nothing to sit down on and in which you couldn’t pick anything up for fear of it being soiled with filth? She stood in the middle of what had been the living room, powerless to do anything at all. A broom and a scrubbing brush couldn’t clean what would have been too much for a municipal garbage truck and a pest control team: filth that you can clean only if it is someone else’s. It would have been best to lock and seal that terrible place, never return there, and keep everyone out forever. Crazy Manda had succeeded in destroying everything in the house that might be considered a souvenir and that people miss when their houses burn. This apartment no longer meant anything to Dijana; it was no longer hers, only a place where she spent the night.

  She was resolved not to let them send crazy Manda back to her. She would fight like a lion, walk over corpses, risk herself and her whole family, but she wasn’t going to take her back, even if she had to flee the city with Mirna and Darijan and live as a subtenant and clean stairways in apartment buildings. She’d done that before and knew she could survive like that too, and the children were grown; they could fend for themselves. Anything was better than that lunatic coming back and everything starting all over again. But she had no hope of ever getting rid of her while she was alive. She found some old pajamas, grabbed Mirna’s old pink kimono, which she had gotten from that Swede two years before but never wore or wanted to see; she threw some trifles into a vanity case for the beach and stuffed everything into a nylon bag. She knew that crazy Manda wouldn’t need any of these things in the hospital, but that wasn’t important. Dijana was doing this for herself, to convince the doctors that she wasn’t a monster and cared for her mother.

  She went out of the house though it was too early to go back to the hospital. She wanted a few hours to pass, for them to get a little used to crazy Manda, for her to cuss them all out and bite them all over, maybe they would find a straightjacket somewhere, because if she arrived too early, it could happen that she might have some explaining to do or—God forbid—catch the old woman while she was still sleeping. For this reason she made her way to the hospital slowly, putting one foot in front of the other and taking detours. She calculated that like this it would take her at least forty-five minutes. She stopped at every display window, looked at the colorful summer dresses, went inside shops with pots and dishes (they no longer had any in the house), smiled at the salesgirls, and constantly had the impression that she was doing this for the last time because rumors about crazy Manda would soon spread and no one would look at Dijana any more the way they did now.

  “Missus, look at these; they’re real royal dishes; Mrs. Simpson probably ate from them!” said a short shop assistant with a fat belly and the wrinkled face of a circus clown. She seemed as if she’d read every last romance novel ever published and had every story with a tremendously meaningful, sad ending living inside her. Here was someone who wouldn’t be interested in the lunacy of Regina Delavale, Dijana thought and felt close to the midget girl, on account of which she should have said something pretty and memorable to her:

  “She swam in Trsteno once, completely naked, Edward and her. My uncle saw her with his own eyes. He was a child.”

  The little midget girl was surprised and even thought for a moment that the woman was pulling her leg: “Do you mean Mrs. Simpson, who couldn’t be queen, and so then he didn’t want to be king either?”

  Dijana laughed; she would have patted the midget girl on the head if only there hadn’t been anyone there to see it. Her little eyes widened so sweetly, surrounded by nets of deep, Indian wrinkles. “Yes, her,” Dijana said; “didn’t you know that one summer—it might have been in ’35, they came down here and bathed in the nude on the beach . . . ?”

  “Naked?!” the midget girl exclaimed, folding her hands in astonishment.

  “Yes, yes,” Dijana confirmed, as if speak
ing of relatives they both shared.

  She left the shop happy to have made someone’s life better. The little salesgirl of kitchen porcelain now had something to preoccupy herself with for months. Maybe she would go to Trsteno, skip along the cliffs by the sea, and run her hands along the rocks, hoping that Wallis Simpson’s fingers had touched the same pebbles, the same fossil crab, as she bent down to kiss Edward, and one could see the red marks made by pine needles, shells, and sharp rocks on her white bottom. The less love you have in your life, Dijana thought, the more susceptible you are to such stories. As if everyone in the city except the midget girl with Mrs. Simpson’s dishes had spent three quarters of their lives in love and had become completely insensitive to everyone else in this part of town.

  She managed to drag her trip to the hospital out for two hours. At the entrance she inhaled deeply, as if diving into the sea in pursuit of a terrible moray eel, and went firmly forward. If the midget girl could live with herself for a whole lifetime, she could deal with this little bit of life, she thought, encouraging herself, but she had only made five marching steps when the porter stopped her.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he shouted from his booth.

  “I’m here to see Regina Delavale,” she said, leaving out “my mother,” in case word had already gotten around.