The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “Mother, what’s that?” she asked, and her mother laughed furiously, as if she had expected just such a question.

  “Nothing; soon they’ll come and slaughter both of us like pigs! They won’t ask which one of us is a pig and which isn’t.”

  These words shocked Dijana more than the explosions did. No matter how she could be, the old lady had never talked like that.

  “Mother, what’s wrong with you?”

  “You’re asking me what’s wrong with me, you’re asking me that! There are your two children; ask them to tell you! Take a look at your little girl if you’re a mother, and then ask me something.”

  “And what should I look at on her? You mean her tit? So I should look at that?! If I’d known what you’re like, I’d never have gone.”

  “And it would have been better if you hadn’t.”

  “Get lost, you old cactus; you’ve ruined my life. My every day is bitter because of you.”

  And so, while shells were falling around in the city, the two of them argued and scuffled, and for the first time they showed no mercy to each other, nor was there anything that they remembered about each other and didn’t say as soon as it occurred to them. That fight wouldn’t be forgotten. They were each a millstone around the other’s neck in life, like two uninvited guests in the same house that suddenly didn’t belong to anyone. They preyed on one another even when they spent days together in complete silence because at any moment it was clear who was thinking what.

  “You sure got your fill sucking black cock, you Gruž slut!” the old woman said just when Darijan came into the kitchen.

  “The siren is sounding. That means we have to get down into the shelter,” he said calmly and went out.

  The following month, which was as long as the war lasted in Dubrovnik, would be the most difficult in Dijana’s life, worse than the three months she spent with crazy Manda. Her son and especially her daughter rejected her and treated her like a stranger. They didn’t forgive her for being away, but she didn’t know why because no one had told her what had been going on with Mirna’s left breast, nor would she ever learn about the gathering of the old crows in the kitchen, which culminated in something that was almost like a rape. She was unable to bear the scorn in her children’s eyes or their sudden cruelty, which was even greater for Regina than for her.

  Their relations would improve a little only on the twenty-third day of the fighting. While they were in the shelter an incendiary shell hit their house and it burned to the ground, leaving nothing to serve as a remembrance of their previous life. When the fighting suddenly ended, just as suddenly as it had begun for her, Dijana would feel naked and barefoot, with the three of them to worry about. Then it was duty and not love that tied her to her mother and children, which she knew herself because not a day would pass without her thinking that if it weren’t for them, she would go off to Cairo and board an ocean liner with Marko, the only person who had made her happy, work as a cook or maid, and finally find what she was looking for in life.

  Years would pass before she would feel something for Mirna and Darijan that she could confess to others. In the meantime she would experience them as a widow’s inheritance, something that resembled most the black dress that wives of seafarers and fishermen would put on and never take off again.

  Apart from that blaze in which the family memorabilia burned up, none of the four of them felt the war. The topic that would set the tone of life of the city for years to come didn’t concern them because it was smaller and less tempestuous than the episodes of their familial discord, which would continue to the end of Regina’s life, when Dijana was already slowly entering the beginnings of old age. After the gathering of the neighbor women to see her granddaughter’s breast, Regina would behave like a murderer who was hiding from the police and simultaneously trying to think of an alibi, a new one every day. She would find people to blame for what she had done all over the place, most often in Dijana, who was incapable of being a real mother because her female organ was stronger than her soul. Then she found the culprit in Mirna, who had struck the same roots and at ten was already a little slut, on account of which she had to be physically marked as well. She also found a culprit in Klara, whose eccentricity rubbed off on her pupils. And she also blamed all who could have been connected to the monstrous appearances in the Delavale family. For example, after a few months she remembered that right before the swelling of her breast, the little girl had been vaccinated against tetanus. There must have been something in that vaccine. Someone was conducting experiments on the children, and that was the reason for her granddaughter’s suffering. This discovery didn’t put her in a rage but put her in a state of deep depression. And the depression would last until the next alibi was found. In that experiment, Regina Delavale saw something that created a bond between two fates and tragedies of life, that of her and that of the girl, realizing for the umpteenth time that in this world one is condemned to suffering, misery, and shame once one is born a girl.

  Mirna’s maturation occurred out of order and beyond the rules according to which children had been entering the world of adults since there had been people. At first she was continually hateful toward her mother, indirectly blaming her for what had happened to her; this was followed by a long period of indifference, until they both grew accustomed to that as some kind of natural relationship, which obligated neither of them to anything. Thus a wide space of freedom opened up before her, which she would use as long as there was anything to use.

  It wasn’t three days after her first cigarette and she was already smoking in front of Dijana; she would go through boyfriends as if they were on a conveyor belt, especially in the summertime, and scandalize the city with licentious behavior on beaches and in parks. Right until the day when she would have a two-month sailing adventure around the Kornati Islands with a Swede named Max, a forty-year-old sailing enthusiast and owner of a huge yacht who was spending his immense family fortune sailing warm seas the year round. Max’s love would be expressed in tens of thousands of dollars that he managed to spend in Adriatic restaurants, nightclubs, casinos, and other places where one can spend as much money as it takes to spend one’s way into becoming everything one couldn’t be in life.

  That went on until the morning they were sitting in a café on the šibenik waterfront and Mirna told him that she was pregnant. He jumped up with joy, poured champagne down the throats of all the guests on the café terrace, bought drinks for the whole waterfront, ran off somewhere, and returned with a beautiful pink kimono, told Mirna to wait for him for ten more minutes so he could just go to the bank for money, and then set sail, never to show his face again, probably feverishly wondering whether he had maybe already given that girl his address and telephone number in Malmo because if he had, problems would arise that he would be unable to solve. Mirna waited for Max until nightfall, and then without a kuna in her pocket she went out on the highway and waited for someone to stop and drive her in the direction of Dubrovnik. With the pink kimono and her identity card in her pocket, without anything that would remind her of what had been happening to her in the last two months except what she was carrying in her belly, she felt like those refugees whom someone kicked out of their beds at three in the morning and thrust thousands of miles from their homes. The abortion was performed in the same hospital in which crazy Manda would meet her end.

  After Dijana returned from Africa, Darijan withdrew into himself. He hid from his mother’s and his grandmother’s quarrels, fled from Mirna, to whom his debt grew from day to day, until in the end he was ready to leave and never come back to the charred remains of the family house. Up to the time of Regina’s death he wouldn’t do this for the simple reason that there hadn’t yet been a good occasion for him to go off somewhere.

  Klara the teacher had on several occasions during the last year she was the homeroom teacher for the twins attempted to tell Dijana something about what had happened during her journey to Africa, but she gave up in the end
, as she was rebuffed in the most vulgar way, with open allusions to her sexual preferences. In a surfeit of rage that she could not express in her own home, Dijana used fragments of Regina’s insane fantasies about the teacher’s stay in Mirna’s room and thus calmed her conscience and preserved a pure remembrance of Marko Radica, who was nevertheless most important to her.

  “If you stay, I know she’ll curse you, but you’ll have me until I die,” he told her on their last night in Cairo. She lay with her head on his breast, wept bitterly, and in fits of rage worthy of an American movie actress, she plucked hair from his chest. By morning she hadn’t responded to his offer; nor did he repeat it. He knew that something like that was impossible because she wouldn’t leave her children and go with him, just as he wasn’t going to return to his city. They’d met ten years too late, and that couldn’t be helped. She would live far from him, waiting for postcards from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Liverpool, until one day they stopped coming and the fire in her died out.

  Six months after that month of war, Mirna’s right breast grew to the size of her left one. But that, like her first day of menstruation, wasn’t of interest to anyone.

  XII

  “I thought you were smarter than that,” Dijana’s mother told her the day it became definitively clear that her period wasn’t late and that Vid had sowed his unwanted seed, which was now swelling and from which in all likelihood a life would be born. And from that, love between a man and a woman.

  “That’s all you have to say?” she asked Regina.

  “Everything will be all right,” the old woman answered laconically, with no intention of going into the problems that were developing in Dijana’s head in any detail.

  “Mother, what should I do?”

  “Nothing, child; everything will happen naturally since it began like that . . .”

  “Mother, I don’t have much time to decide,” she wrung her hands, expecting to receive some kind of approval or for Regina to take responsibility for the decision that she couldn’t make herself.

  “And what are you talking about, please? Killing what’s growing inside your tummy? You can; no one’s keeping you from doing it. But you won’t feel better then. I’m telling you you won’t,” Regina said, with no desire to encourage or comfort her because no one had comforted her when at thirty-eight she had given birth to Dijana.

  “I don’t know whether I love him,” her daughter said, trying once again.

  “As if one can know that,” her mother responded. She put on her slippers and went out into the garden to see how the seeds she had planted were coming up.

  It was late April 1980, and the city was quieter than usual. All one could hear on the square was the clicking of cameras and the clamor of German, English, and Italian kids. The locals kept quiet in accordance with a long, public ceremony that had begun around New Year’s, when the leg of their state’s president for life, and the most beloved person in the meager and bloody history of romance among the Balkan peoples and nations, had been amputated in a hospital in Ljubljana. Every day an unnamed medical advisory council issued brief reports containing upbeat and encouraging news about his imminent recovery, which in fact sent word of his impending death. No one dared mention it out loud or even in a whisper because such an outcome was socially unacceptable. It wasn’t only political reasons that forbade the country’s eldest son from dying, but something else that was planted much more deeply in the collective and in each of its members. The life that was fading in Ljubljana was an archetype that had been handed down to the people regardless of whether they belonged to the majority, who were blindly in love with the state and all its written rules and customs, or to the barely visible minority, who hated that same state, who responded to it in kind or with worse measures. That man was something much larger than a father or a king and more real than God. He was irreplaceable, both on the throne and in the minds of his subjects. The fact that he’d been elected as president for life a few years earlier wasn’t so much a sign of his absolutism as it was of the sincerest wish and desire of the majority of the citizens. Limiting the mandate of such a man was just as unimaginable as putting one’s aging parents in an old folks’ home. Yes, people did do that, but not in good homes and not in Yugoslavia.

  In all the churches of the city people said heartfelt prayers for his recovery, urging the Almighty to make allowances for one atheist, and God was already supposed to know why he should act on their request. In creating man, God had also created competition for himself. If he didn’t listen to the prayers for Tito’s recovery, he would soon see for himself what kind of monsters his most perfect creations could turn into.

  Dijana’s pregnancy had thus come at a time when no decision that men could make about themselves and their lives could seem more important than what was happening in the Ljubljana medical center. Even then someone probably knew that this was all an illusion and that everyone wouldn’t die with the eighty-eight-year-old patient, but in the reports of his critical condition Dijana found a good reason not to decide anything concerning the life that was growing inside of her. She had neither accepted it as her own nor rejected it but was simply waiting: the nightly news on television, the morning paper, months of pregnancy and months of illness, and the moment when it would be too late for any decision and the new life would have to be accepted as a gift from providence.

  The May Day briefing of the medical council quit hiding the truth. The captains of the ship admitted it was sinking, and they made that admission to everyone in the form of a terse, lucid sentence that did not mention death but that, in contrast to the sentences of the previous statements, which had all been stylistically eloquent, was devoid of hope. Instead of a comma—the punctuation mark dearest to the heart that relativizes the meaning of every misfortune—there came a period, the finality of which was beyond doubt due to the very structure of the obituary from the president’s physicians. It was just a matter of when, on which day, and at what time of the day the life support monitors would be turned off in the Ljubljana hospital and how the news would be announced that the man whose undoubted immortality had been sung in hundreds of thousands of verses—more than had been any other subject in their language—was dead.

  On that Thursday, all day long, Dijana sat in front of the television. Behind her an old Avala radio set was also turned on. A newspaper was spread out on the table, and she was crying and couldn’t stop even when Regina came in the room and went out again, comforting, scolding, and hugging her and then giving up. Regina kept telling her how beautiful it was to give birth to a child and that it was her last chance to do it because her biological clock was ticking. And she told her that she could also abort it. There was no shame in that, and life without children had its advantages. Then she offered to raise her children for her—she would probably live a while longer; people in her family lived to a ripe old age. Then she suggested that they go to the hospital, to pay the doctors for an abortion under full anesthesia . . .

  She offered Dijana everything that otherwise she wasn’t ready to offer and didn’t even occur to her as a possibility, only to get her to stop crying and calm down. She did this because she was afraid that her daughter might be getting one of those hysterias of pregnancy that would grow and develop until it completely dimmed Dijana’s consciousness and extinguished all her senses. And then she would be beyond the point of no return. She sensed how difficult it was to come back from a state of mental confusion full of hallucinated images and voices, when there’s no longer any space in your heart or mind, where you are what you really are, because everything you see and feel is a warped perception or an alien thought. Most terrible is the fact that that world is incomparably more convincing than any reality. Reality is pale and ambiguous, but insanity is powerful and true. There’s no greater truth than insanity.

  However, all Regina’s attempts were in vain. Not even slaps and threats to throw herself under a bus if Dijana didn’t stop could help. Dijana wept for Tito and was imperviou
s to any thought that didn’t have to do with him. Nothing Regina could say on that May Day could compete with him.

  Later she would remember her mother’s words and offers—not without a guilty conscience—as one of Regina’s rare acts of motherly heroism, and in any case her last. She would wonder how that heroism vanished and where it had come from in the first place. But she wouldn’t find the answer, although it was clear and could be found in stories from Regina’s past, which were not unknown to her. She would likewise wonder about the real reasons for her May Day despair and conclude that she’d been more sensitive than others because of her pregnancy, which was why she’d wept bitterly, enough for the whole town and half the country. In any case, she rejected the idea—which would surface in the first years of Mirna’s and Darijan’s lives—that the birth of her children (or rather her failure to make the other decision) had been determined by the death of Josip Broz Tito.

  Finally, around ten o’clock, sleep swallowed Dijana’s tears, and the next morning she awoke with a painful case of pinkeye and in a state of depression. Her first thought was that her life, just like the life that was growing in her womb, brought nothing but suffering and that fear was the only real reason why she hadn’t killed herself ages ago. The next thing she realized was that on that morning she felt none of that fear. When a person is truly miserable, he ceases being afraid, and according to her own assessment Dijana was truly miserable on that second of May in 1980 and concluded that this was something to be exploited.

  She went into the bathroom, filled the bathtub with warm water, and took Vid’s razor blades from the shelves behind the mirror. She lay down in the tub and decided to wait for her body to get used to the temperature of the water. In some movie she’d seen that this was how it was done. Not long after, her knees began to hurt. She’d dreamed for years of buying a large bathtub in which she would be able to stretch out and relax.