“I won’t stand for this!” he shouted, which Onofri understood as a challenge to a fight. He overturned the desk with his computer and lunged at his junior colleague. At that moment, to compound the tragedy, the young doctor walked in, which prevented a fist fight but served as new evidence for the chief physician’s claim. What was she doing here if she wasn’t on duty? And she should have left the hospital four hours ago.
After threats and insults, only some of which were returned, chief physician Onofri left the room to order the head nurse to untie Mrs. Regina Delavale because no one was to be tied up in his ward, where there were no dangerous psychiatric cases. After he did this and threatened to take the harshest disciplinary measures against the head nurse, whom he considered responsible from this moment on if the woman were tied up again, chief physician Onofri went home.
That night Dr. Vlahović four times ordered the head nurse to give Mrs. Regina Delavale an intramuscular injection with tranquilizers. Each time the ninety-seven-year-old woman had to be held down by three male nurses, two of which had to be called over from the traumatology ward. He ordered the dose to be doubled each time, but after a short respite of calm, the old woman got out of the bed and went off on another rampage. In doing so, she displayed amazing physical strength and vitality, completely inconsistent not only with her age but also her gender. When Dr. Vlahović ordered the head nurse to double the dose for the fourth time, she warned him—though as a first-rate anesthesiologist he had to know (as would any first-year medical student)—that the dose was lethal. That is, it would cause death even to a young, stout male. To that Dr. Vlahović only repeated his order. Forty-five minutes later Regina Delavale was pronounced dead.
In the morning Dr. Onofri reported the incident to the police, after he’d reached the conclusion that a murder had taken place from the patient’s file. He most likely also informed journalists, who went on to write about the Dr. Mengele of our hospital, and the affair, the worst since the end of the war, shook the city overnight.
The myth of the brilliant young anesthesiologist was shattered by the very people who had created it, mostly with the same arguments, the only difference being that what had yesterday been accepted as a reason for praise today was the source of the harshest rebuke. He had excelled so much in his studies because even at that time he had planned a perfect murder with medications. Calm and composure actually confirmed his callous nature, characteristic of psychopaths in white coats, of which, as we know, there have been many in history. His handsome and clean face revealed that the greatest criminals don’t look like criminals at all.
Of course, no one considered the fact that Dr. Vlahović had left behind a paper trail. The patient’s file had recorded the precise dosage of the sedatives, and by virtue of this the crime could not be perfect, nor should the story of his cold callousness ever been told. This and other details that contradicted the fabrications of the press and the street were hushed up and dismissed as if this were a screenplay and not life and there was no room for anything that might unduly complicate the story or violate the conventions of its genre.
For love, the unfortunate Ares had run into difficulties from which he would have a hard time extricating himself. In particular, Dr. Onofri’s crass comment concerning the affair with Dr. Fočić had a basis in reality: Vlahović would never have returned to the city if she hadn’t been there. Nor, had he not been in love, would he have let himself get mixed up in the lives of people who were of no concern to him and thus condemn Regina Delavale to death, a woman whom he did not know but who was the mother of another woman whose fate had aroused such pity in his lover. It was a lie that she’d persuaded him to double the dosage to a lethal level; Dr. Fočić had left the hospital in tears long before that happened, but Ares knew what she expected of him and what she would have done if she’d found herself in the same situation. Just as she saw her own grandmother in the sleeping old woman, so she saw in crazy Manda something that had no reason for its existence other than to make the surrounding world miserable. Both the one and the other were completely understandable, made sense emotionally, and testified to the nobility of the soul with which Ares had fallen in love more than with her physical beauty. However, nothing of this could serve as an argument, either before people or before prosecutors and judges, because then law books would fill more volumes than there are in the Library of Congress, and no one except maybe God would know them so thoroughly as to be able to pass judgments in complete concord with the nature of the human soul.
All of this was clear to Dijana after she signed for receipt of the death certificate of Regina Delavale, and the tears that she cried at the cemetery, which surprised her children and satisfied her family and friends, were meant for the handsome Ares and the young doctor. The earth thudding on the black veneer of the coffin wasn’t burying Dijana’s mother because she’d long been dead, but it was burying those two young people who—it was no exaggeration to say—had caught her eye and with whom she’d fallen in love in a way that was not without its erotic nuances. Perhaps more than the moral act and the obligation that Ares had created with his sacrifice, what attracted Dijana to him and his young companion was their pure beauty, intensified by the meaning of their white overcoats and their babylike details, such as the orange sock with the little soccer balls on it.
She felt the murder charges against Ares to be crazy Manda’s final revenge, which lent her three-month bout of insanity its ultimate criminal aspect. She departed from this world on her own account and pressing her seal on the lives of those who saw her off. In this way her ninety-seven years were continuing and would last as long as there were those whose paths she’d changed. Three people, two women and one man, would remember her as long as they lived and carry her evil inside their souls only to pass it on to others if they completely lost hope, thus making the curse of crazy Manda immortal.
After the funeral Dijana sat on the bed in her bedroom and looked at her children, confused and upset as they were, not knowing what to do or where to go now that what had filled their lives with fear and torment no longer existed. And now that it was gone, she was unable to feel any happiness.
“Well, now that’s over,” said Mirna and grabbed her left breast mechanically. Darijan gave a laugh; she shuddered, realizing what she’d done, and started laughing like crazy.
“Come on, stop it already!” Dijana said trying to be stern, but it didn’t sound that way, nor was there actually any reason for sternness. Then she started laughing herself, uncontrollably and inconsolably, and the more she laughed, the more joy and sadness mixed within her, as seawater and fresh water mix, creating deep, powerful whirlpools in which foreigners and suicides drown and into which punctured balls, beer bottles, and plastic toy boats sink forever, the victims of neglect, indifference, or simply old age.
Mirna grabbed her left breast once more, this time deliberately, thinking that in this way she would keep up the reason for their laughter, but in fact she put an end to it.
XIII
Mirna had turned ten when her left breast grew large over the course of two months. The right one was still completely flat, like on boys of her age, but the left one was big, robust, and firm, almost like a half melon, with the nipple of a real mature woman, which protruded when it touched the cold side of the bathtub. Darijan said it was like a little prick, and so she no longer allowed him in the bathroom while she was showering. The nipple on her right breast was hardly there; it was small, light, and invisible and did not react to either warmth or coldness. She would test it every day, uncertain which side she feared more or which one confirmed in a disgusting way that something was not right with her. She knew nothing about her femininity because Dijana was convinced that the time had not come for her to be told about that. Moreover, at the time when Mirna’s breast had started to grow, Dijana had just left on a trip to Cairo and would spend four crazy months crisscrossing Africa with Marko Radica, a captain on long voyages with whom she’d been head over heel
s in love and who’d accepted her children as his own, or so she believed. She’d left them in the care of her eighty-five-year-old mother, which scandalized the whole neighborhood, and the talk around town was that Dijana, widow of the late Vid Kraljev, had abandoned her children and run off with a black man whose member, so it was claimed by widows in headscarves, was so large that he could shake mulberries off a tree without climbing it.
Such gossip didn’t bother Regina Delavale. She had already put so much behind her and had herself already badmouthed half the city, so it was okay in a way if it came back around to her. Besides, she even derived a certain amount of pleasure from the role that she’d been cast in. It was rare that women of that age became martyrs again, if only in the talk of the town, who singlehandedly cared for two small children. That seemed like another shot at youth, a third set of teeth, a miraculous rebirth, something in which every torment was sweet. She knew that her newly acquired prestige would not last long because Dijana would come back, and in the eyes of the town she would again be an old woman worth only a little more than dogs that sun themselves on the main square. But for now everyone greeted her with respect, inquired about her health and whether she needed anything, all in hopes that she would complain to them and thereby add new details to the story of the whore that had run off with the well-hung black man. But she told them that she was doing well and couldn’t figure out why everyone was whining about the south wind when she didn’t feel a thing.
“An old lady doesn’t complain if her bones ache only if she can’t get a piece of a man!” she said to the horror of those who would pass on what she said and add that there was something to it because blood was thicker than water, and it was clear who the Negro-loving whore took after.
“There are women whose pussies are so deep that none of us can fill them! And then they go looking for black men,” was the expert remark of Mijo Alavanja, who was Regina’s age and had been a local stud since the late ’20s. His nose had fallen off after an affair with some German woman in his youth, which was the end of one career and the beginning of another. He changed from a great lover to a local wise man and expert on all things erotic and on reproduction in man and animal. He would shut himself in a stable and talk each steed, bull, and boar into jumping on a female. No one knew how he managed to accomplish this, and he jealously guarded the secret of his skill to earn large sums of money. It was also told that Mijo Alavanja even cured men of impotence in a similar way; legend has it that he managed to make some Ahma, a major in the partisans from Gacko who had lost both testicles in the Battle of the Neretva, capable of fathering children. So Mijo was a reliable source of information, and people believed what he said about some women needing a black cock for anatomical reasons. Husbands could only hope that their wives didn’t number among them.
Regina didn’t want to let anyone get the better of her, nor did she worry about the tale of black sexual prowess, and she was just as resolute in this as she was in her intention of exploiting the opportunity that she would never have had if Dijana hadn’t gone crazy over that Marko Radica. Moreover, the children weren’t a lot of work. She had to wash and iron their things, make sure that they were well dressed when they went out into the cold, and that they had something to eat. In any case there was no need to cook for them because they never even tried her chicken but naughtily wrinkled their noses and made disgusting grimaces while it was cooking in their biggest, green pot. Instead they ate their Eurocream spreads and patés, which didn’t bother Regina all that much, though she couldn’t understand how someone could turn down boiled chicken, when she would eat one up in two days and would still be licking her fingers, just as everyone in her family would. New customs came with new generations, and it wouldn’t have surprised her if a time came when no one cooked chicken in a pot any more and everyone retched at the sight of three-toed, plucked legs sticking up out of boiling water, just as her granddaughter retched. It could be said that there was gastronomic pleasure in the fact that Dijana had left her alone with the children. She could cook chicken whenever she wanted, without her daughter’s complaining that she’d forgotten that they had eaten it the day before and was cooking the same thing today.
Mirna tried to conceal from her grandmother the wonder that had grown out of her. She would call Darijan, who would wrap her upper body tightly in a wide military bandage. She wore wide shirts and fled from Regina’s sight. It wasn’t as bad at school as it was at home, even after the kids had started to notice that her left side was thicker than her right side and the boys were tripping over themselves to check it out with their own hands, to see if she was maybe abnormal, and she would whack them with whatever was within reach. But somehow it seemed to her that her deformation wasn’t so abnormal in those surroundings. She comforted herself with the idea that that breast was still less of a stigma than faces full of fibrous acne scars, the hump on orphan Ana’s back, and the water on the brain of Nazif in the first row, but when after three months of growth the melon-like bulge neared its peak, Mirna realized that it was more terrible than all pimples or any hump because it was unstoppable, fatal, and shameful. In the end that breast would grow too large and kill her like a cancer. Maybe it was cancer. She didn’t know, just as she didn’t know why she was overcome with shame when the bathroom mirror showed her only half of what she’d seen on the bodies of grown women on the beaches of Mljet and Korčula (on account of which her mother covered her eyes) and what she suspected was underneath her grandmother’s black sweater. When she was eleven, she’d believed that women grew breasts only after childbirth and that they were the only way that one could tell whether a woman had had children or not. She imagined them to be like milk cartons that remained on the body for the rest of one’s life, and as she peered at the naked women swimming on Mljet, she was certain that she would never give birth because she was disgusted at the thought of spoiled milk underneath the skin of elderly women’s bodies. And now, you see, she’d grown a breast, but only one, which easily led to the conclusion that she was abnormal, a freak. And it was only a question of time when everyone, and not just Darijan, would become aware of her freakishness.
He didn’t think the change in his sister was such a big deal because he’d never thought about the meaning of breasts on a woman’s body. Mirna had been different from him her whole life in one detail, the one between her legs, and he thought of her enormous breast, which seemed to have been stolen from the cover of a magazine in the display of a newspaper kiosk, as an extension of that difference, something that certainly wasn’t his problem, and he wasn’t surprised at all by the asymmetry on her body. He even thought that it was more normal for her to grow one and not two. He would have probably become jealous of a second one because it wouldn’t have meant a difference in sex but in age, and he surely would no longer have wanted to take a bath with his sister after his mother came back from Africa. Namely, Dijana would stick both of them in the tub and scrub them clean in one go, paying no heed to Regina’s comments that such big children needed to take a bath alone and wash themselves. She didn’t want to have to worry about whether they’d washed their ears, feet, and backs well and feel ashamed before people who would say that she didn’t take care of her children. Instead, she would wash them in twenty minutes and then let them splash around in the tub, so small and naked, unaware of the difference between them and its meaning and without a single hair on their bodies. Dijana stuck to the view that her twins were the same sex until they grew pubic hair. Only then would she separate them and teach them the shame that divides the sexes. She couldn’t imagine (nor had she heard of something like that happening) that her daughter would first grow one breast, far outgrowing both of Dijana’s, before everything else came along.
After her breast visibly increased in size over the course of a weekend, on Monday morning Mirna told Darijan that he didn’t have to bring the bandage because she wasn’t going to school. She was going to stay in bed, and he should tell her teacher that she was sick.
He didn’t care. He packed his schoolbag, put on his shoes, and went out.
“Where’s your sister?” their grandmother asked as he was leaving the apartment.
“She’s off in her room; she says she’s sick,” he shouted to her and vanished. Regina panicked, thinking that the child really wasn’t feeling well because the little star student never played hooky, and she didn’t want to have to find a doctor right then. So she rushed into her room, where there was something to see. Underneath the translucent sleeping gown of her little granddaughter she could see the contour of something that made her think for a moment that she had lost her mind.
She couldn’t believe her eyes! One big tit, with a nipple at the tip, stuck out as if it was mocking her age.
“Whoa, girl, what’s that?” she asked.
Mirna burst into tears, seeing that her small, negligible, but nevertheless bright hope that she was carrying something quite ordinary on her had evaporated. This hope was the reason why she’d even decided to show grandma her breast, clutching herself as someone condemned to death would cling to his last possible salvation. There was no longer any way to hide what she had hidden for three months, and now, she realized that that phantasmagorical breast was more terrible than she had thought. Grandma put her hand over her mouth, which she had done only one other time in front of her: when Admiral Boško Alać had jumped from his apartment on the tenth floor and hit the ground right in front of them. The breast was something just as terrifying as the smashed head of the admiral, which had oozed a grayish-yellow substance similar to the feces that fishermen fling over the beach when they remove it from a large tuna.
The Walnut Mansion Page 6
