The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “Grandma, what’s wrong with me?” she asked, following her into the kitchen and wringing her hands.

  “Damn you, how should I know?! But there’s certainly someone who does,” the old woman answered.

  “Go and ask, please; ask somebody,” Mirna begged her desperately.

  “How can I ask?! You think I should go and say that my child has grown a tit like a cantaloupe, but only one, and ask what that might be? They’d put me in the nuthouse. No, somebody’s got to come see.”

  The wheels started turning in Mirna’s head: she’ll bring people to look at her; oh no, no way. She’d rather die, as she very well might. But when? How much time did she have left until the gigantic breast pulled her down to the ground? Seven more days or seven more years? Would she stay forever locked up at home to hide her shameful deformity, until the very day the gravediggers carried her out or her growth was given its place in a jar of formaldehyde, on the morning television program, among unborn children, smokers’ lungs, and the last specimens of extinct animals? She didn’t think that grandma meant her any harm, but maybe there was just a little malice in her plan. Not only was she old, but an elderly something had grown on her granddaughter, and now she wanted to show it off so she might become a little younger and justify the fact that she was still alive, although every morning for years already she had called out to the black earth, and more recently to God as well, to take her and put an end to her suffering.

  Who knew what Regina Delavale actually thought, but that very afternoon she called all the older women in the neighborhood to the kitchen—there were nine of them—and sat them down around the table and beside the wood stove.

  “Now you’ll see something,” she said and went to get Mirna. They didn’t say a word. The younger ones looked at each other, signaled something with frowns, and were struck with fear in the face of the strange spectacle that Regina hadn’t told them anything about, though they knew that it would be something very strange, while the two oldest, wearing the perennial black headscarves of widows and eyeglasses that were always about to fall off their noses, tirelessly crocheted their white lace ornaments, as if they knew that they had little time left to live and would go straight to hell if they didn’t finish their decorative tablecloths or television doilies.

  “Let’s go to the kitchen,” said grandma.

  “Please, don’t,” Mirna said, pulling a sheet over her shame.

  “It’s too late now. You have to. The women have come. They know about this,” she said and pulled her out of the bed. “It’s better for you to go downstairs than for me to bring them up here.”

  Mirna didn’t resist any more, thinking that it was true and that it was all over and that her body was no longer exclusively her property because they would look at her dead body and turn her over however they each wished. She wouldn’t care when she was dead, so she might as well get used to it.

  Regina pushed her granddaughter ahead of her out into the kitchen. When she saw all those women, Mirna reflexively took a step back, but there was no way to leave now.

  “Lift up your T-shirt,” grandma ordered her, but the child couldn’t move a muscle. The old woman lifted up the T-shirt with a quick movement from behind; her arms went up all by themselves, and the white fabric covered her eyes. She saw black silhouettes. The voices of her neighbors mingled with each other: “Christ almighty, the poor girl; she’s half woman, half man. As if one half of her was made on one day and the other half on the next. Like this, when you cover the other half, and her face—you shouldn’t look her in the face. It’s good like this when you can see half her body and her head is covered. And has anything grown between her legs? Does she have any curls? How did it start? Overnight, you say? Yesterday she was the same on both sides. No she wasn’t. What’s wrong with you? Oh, let me feel it. Oh, it’s so soft. Poor child . . .”

  Mirna listened to them without moving; it seemed to her that all this was the same voice, which was sometimes deep, sometimes shrill, hoarse, and childlike, and she could have stood like that for hours, as long as they didn’t lower the shirt from her face.

  “Can I feel it too?” she heard someone say and immediately felt their cold fingers on her breast, squeezing it as if it weren’t alive, the way they would grab a head of cabbage in the garden or snap a pod of green beans. No one had ever touched her arms, face, and body so roughly, which was proof that the strange and hateful growth wasn’t something vital and precious but a torment and misery, like stones that have to be cleared from the ground where grapevines are to be planted, like heavy showers that wash away all the soil, carrying it to the sea and leaving instead of grapevines only bare rock. Breasts were a curse, whether they came in a pair or only singly, she realized.

  “Cover yourself; what are you standing there for like a wooden Virgin Mary?” Regina shouted, a little afraid that her granddaughter was enjoying having people look at her naked. Only then did Mirna awaken from her daze, in which the women could do with her what they wanted—cut her with kitchen knives and sprinkle hot ashes on her chest—she wouldn’t have cried out. Terror seized her, and she ran into her room shouting like a lunatic. She threw herself onto the bed and started shaking as if electrical wires were connected to her every nerve. She didn’t think anything, didn’t feel anything, nor could she tell the difference between life and death. She was free of pain and only wished for everything to be over as soon as possible, no matter what it was and what the outcome would be. Only from time to time in her dull trembling would it seem to her that she felt icy, rough fingers on her breast, and she would throw herself onto the other end of the bed, trying to flee from what there was no longer any running away from because it’d happened and would thus remain.

  The council in the kitchen went on for hours. Some of their neighbors believed that the devil had taken possession of the little girl, and if they drove him out, the shameful breast would shrink all on its own.

  For an exorcist they suggested some Mljet hermit and defrocked priest, or some monk from Sinj, and one other man who’d done twenty years of hard labor in Zenica because he had remotely exorcized a demon from Boris Kidrič, which resulted in Kidrič’s sudden death. And so the communists, as the eldest of the old women claimed while feverishly continuing her crocheting, convicted the exorcist, who was otherwise a Dominican monk and a white friar, for that voodoo magic.

  But maybe it would be worth calling that hodja from Trebinje, regardless of the difference in faith and all the dangers that stemmed from that, because he’d freed more possessed children from spells in eastern Herzegovina and Podrinje than all Catholic priests together.

  Regina didn’t like the idea of exorcizing a demon from her granddaughter, although she’d recently begun to discover God and the church for the first time in her life. But she still didn’t understand the point of exorcisms, nor could she believe that the devil slipped into people like a drunkard into his coat. She was inclined to believe that this was some inherited disorder. There was a lot of talk about such things on television, and it overlapped perfectly with what she thought about Vid Kraljev, Dijana’s dead husband. She wasn’t opposed to the idea that it was something inherited from Ivo Delavale, her departed husband and Mirna’s grandfather. It even seemed logical that female curses were carried on the father’s side of the family. There could never be as much evil in a woman as there was in her husband’s or father’s legacy to her.

  One neighbor woman claimed that this was a medical problem and that the child should be taken to the doctor as soon as possible; there were hormone tablets, injections, and various miracles of medicine. Because that tit could kill the little girl or disfigure her for life. The doctors had to stop it from growing so the other one could catch up to its size when the time came. But she was quickly shut up, both by the other women and by Regina. It was unlikely that this was a known illness because someone would have already heard of such cases. Such girls would be seen on the street and on the beach. It was even less likely that
there was a cure for such a huge tit in the hospital. And if they did take the girl to the hospital, then inside of three days the whole city would know about the deformity of the little Kraljev girl, and shame would erode the stone walls of the Delavale house.

  Of course, all nine women swore not to say a word about what they’d seen. They agreed that it would be a sin against the child before God if they said anything. But in not three but only two days the whole city was already abuzz about the oddity on Old Mulberry Street. In no time the breast on the body of the ten-year-old girl grew beyond its real size and became the biggest in the long and glorious history of the city. Milk was already streaming out of it, and three long, thick black hairs grew out around the nipple. Rumor had it that doctors were coming from America to see this wonder, and the owners of an Italian circus would soon arrive as well—maybe the little girl would grow a beard too. The story of the breast was a source of entertainment for primitive and semiliterate salesgirls at the farmer’s market and the fish market, just as it was for the intellectual elite—teachers and journalists as well as directors and actors in the local theater, who would gather in the City Café on Saturdays to tell jokes about the little Amazon girl and the reasons why she had appeared here of all places and now of all times, when the country’s political situation was becoming ever more complicated and the threat of war was in the air.

  “Maybe she’ll call us to arms and lead us in the defense of these city walls?” wondered a local poet and layabout, who in the absence of talent and inspiration found all his artistic life on a corner of a table in the City Café. His quip was followed by expressions of disgust on the faces of those at the table. It was neither a good joke nor a particularly clever comment. Was there a third possibility?

  Mirna was unable to pull herself together before evening. Darijan found her on the bed, shaking all over, and between sobs she gave incoherent answers to his questions. He ran to grandma and asked her what had happened.

  “It’s nothing for boys to worry about,” she told him.

  “You’ll see who’ll worry about what when our mother gets back,” he retorted and went to his sister.

  He sat at her side all night long and tried to find out what had happened, but at first she couldn’t tell him, and later she didn’t want to. God only knows what was going through his mind then, but her brother never found out the reason for Mirna’s distress. Before he knew anything about men and women, he would ask every so often, but after he began to learn and comprehend their differences, more instinctively than consciously, he would stop mentioning that day.

  One evening when Darijan was twelve years old, he saw Bergman’s Virgin Spring and learned what the word “rape” meant. He convinced himself that on that day, while he was in school and then went out looking for doves’ nests, his sister had been raped. He would believe that up until they lowered crazy Manda into her grave, and the feeling of guilt that was born while watching Bergman’s scene of the father of a raped daughter thrashing himself with birch branches would never leave him. It didn’t occur to him that Mirna’s breakdown might have had something to do with her breast, nor did the fact that the whole city was talking about it tell him anything.

  Being the only one who saw nothing monstrous in her giant breast, he had no idea that it was the source of the whole problem, which depressed him and weighed down on him for quite some time.

  After that sleepless night, brother and sister slept the whole morning. Regina didn’t want to wake them up because sleep was more important than school. She even took care to make as little noise as possible; she didn’t take pots from the cabinet, didn’t call out to her neighbors from window to window. She knew that they hadn’t slept the night before. She loved those children more than her own daughter because children are guilty of nothing, but her love for them was meager, harsh, and inconstant. And that love made its appearance only when they were afflicted with some evil, when they were sick, crying, or sleeping.

  Those little sparrows, death’s little brother and sister, one could hardly see them breathing.

  She liked to sleep a lot herself but never had enough time for sleep and felt pity for the both of them and their dreams, letting all the tenderness of her heart flood through that morning thought of her grandchildren. This happened whenever she recognized something of herself in Mirna and Darijan, the same feelings, desires, and especially fears. She would hug and shield them fervently, which always amazed Dijana. She attributed Regina’s fits of affection for the grandchildren to her years, her senility or insanity, which she’d always noticed in small doses in her mother. She didn’t figure out that Regina loved in her grandchildren only what she felt and knew in herself. And she couldn’t have figured this out because Regina’s bursts of tenderness and sweetness occurred very rarely, whereas she otherwise seemed indifferent and uninterested. Sometimes she was even unbelievably cold in situations involving her grandchildren that would have touched every other grandmother on this planet.

  Living in her imploded world, Regina Delavale shared with others only what they emitted from their intact, untouched souls, as random signs of recognition. She was obsessed with what was going on inside herself, and had someone been able to enter into her heart, they would have found a woman who hadn’t gotten over insults, disappointments, and years stolen in deceit. That is to say, a woman who was pushing fifty without a husband and not an old lady who was already eighty-five. This misunderstanding between body and soul, in which the former endured in conformity with its years and the latter was young in misfortune, was likely the cause of the long life of Regina Delavale. There are two natural ways to depart from this world: either you leave like most people reconciled with a lost life, or you lose your mind because the soul cannot endure the lack of reconciliation. The intensity of one’s insanity in the end always determines the length of one’s life.

  The same afternoon Mirna told her grandma that she wasn’t going to go to school any more.

  “Your mother will kill you when she comes back!” the old woman said, trying to scare her, but it was no use. The girl had decided that she could never again leave the house and show her shame to the world. Besides, she didn’t believe that she would live to see her mother return from her African journey. That was still around twenty days away, which seemed far too long a time to a dying girl like her. She lay on her bed and looked at the wall on which there were pictures of actors and pop singers, relics of a distant careless time that had ended a few days after her mother left on her journey, when she first noticed that the left side of her chest was bigger than the right. If her mother hadn’t left, maybe everything would have been different; maybe she would have taken her to a doctor in time, done something that needed to be done; now it was too late for hope. There was no way that anyone could even her out again or halt the wild swelling of her flesh. She took pity on herself, without a father, abandoned by her mother, all alone in the world. Tears began to flow, and Mirna finally found something she recognized, a feeling that wasn’t new and in which she could calm herself, for a while at least.

  The next day her teacher, Klara šeremet, a gray-haired old maid who was fanatically patient with her pupils but reputed in the city to be an eccentric, so much so that parents signed petitions with requests for her to be forced into early retirement, asked Darijan where he’d been the day before and why his sister hadn’t been in school for three days now. He lied and said that his stomach had hurt and that Mirna was sick. He feverishly tried to remember what she was sick with, but it took too long for anything to come to mind.

  “Your mother hasn’t come back from her trip?” she asked, breaking his train of thought.

  “Not yet; she’ll be here soon,” he answered.

  “And how’s your grandma?” she asked, sounding gentle and caring, not suspecting anything.

  Darijan was encouraged by that; he thought that she hadn’t caught his lie, as when she acted as if she didn’t notice when bad pupils copied from the good ones, on accoun
t of which she was reputed to be the most stupid and by virtue of this the best teacher. “Grandma’s fine; she’s the only one who’s not sick,” he said, perhaps too cheerfully.

  She nodded in approval, and just when he thought it was over and she would leave him alone, she asked suddenly, “Did you forget to tell me anything?”

  “No,” he answered and knew it wasn’t going to end there.

  It was five o’clock in the afternoon when Regina opened the door of her house for the teacher Klara šeremet. Her face couldn’t conceal a slight expression of disgust; she couldn’t stand that woman. No one knew why, but Regina had been one of the women who’d spread word around town that Klara was attracted to women and that for this reason she went off to Germany during every winter break, though the teacher gave no reason for this or other wicked rumors that followed her. She went to Germany simply because she was German on her mother’s side and in Hamburg had five half-brothers and half-sisters, all rich or at least well-off people who tried to persuade her to stay there. They bought her an apartment; she had a car waiting for her in the garage. But she didn’t want to leave her solitude in that wicked Mediterranean city and the school that compensated for any possible shortcoming arising from her extremely lonely life. She didn’t marry because she’d never even fallen in love. That didn’t cause her pain; she didn’t think it important, nor did she have anyone who might have brought her attention to it. Like someone who never smokes a cigarette can’t imagine enjoying tobacco and so pities the victims of nicotine dependency, so Klara šeremet pitied, quietly, without a word, all those who add someone else’s difficulties to their own.