The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  “See, I was right,” said Petar Pardžik, and those were the last words uttered in the official white Volkswagen Golf of the Commission for Information of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Central Committee.

  Either the car hit a gasoline slick on the road or it spun out of control because of a pothole; it was never established because the police investigation was conducted very hastily, which was justified by the objective circumstances and the confusion on account of the death of Marshal Tito. To make a long story short, the Golf slid into the other lane, in which at that moment a bus was heading from Zenica to Teslić. The driver, Stipo Valjan, was unable to brake in time and struck the passenger’s side of the car; the bus pushed the Golf around twenty meters before it stopped. Stipo Valjan’s head smashed into the windshield, and for a minute or two he was unconscious. Then he got out, his head bleeding, all alone, because he wasn’t driving a single passenger. He’d asked the station chief whether he was going to cancel the buses and was told that at this moment it was most important for the buses to run normally and to be on time, as if it should be the holy duty of every working man and citizen to honor the memory of their greatest son. And how are memories honored? By honoring the deeds of great men for the living.

  This country was thus born from memories, and that was the reason why Stipo Valjan happened to be driving his empty bus toward Teslić.

  All bloodied, he staggered up to the driver of the Golf, who was sitting pinned amid crushed metal, parts of which had passed through his belly and his left thigh. Yet it didn’t seem that he was injured but that as if by some miracle the metal had sprouted from him in those places, just as isolated pines grow out of cliffs above the Neretva canyon, amid bare rock, without any soil at all. The driver of the Golf smiled at the guy with the bloodied head as if he were someone he knew but hadn’t seen for a long time, then opened his mouth to ask if it were true that the President was dead, but his lips didn’t move. There was no sound in his throat; his lower jaw seemed to be riveted to his head. Vid was truly surprised by all this, and that was the last thing that happened before he breathed his last.

  Half an hour later the police and an ambulance arrived. Stipo Valjan would spend three days in the Zenica hospital and would be summoned to the State Security Service in Sarajevo to give a statement because all accidents in which party or state automobiles were involved had to be investigated by the service. After he spent the whole of May on sick leave, he was already driving his old route again on the first of June. His head would ache when the weather changed, but that, along with Vid Kraljev’s meek smile, was the only aftereffect of the accident.

  That smile came to him in dreams and calmed him for years, and the unfortunate driver couldn’t figure out what kind of spirits were visiting him and what heartless man lived within him for that terrible event to be remembered only positively and through the tender smile of a man.

  It took three workers of the Zenica railway service all night using blowtorches to remove what remained of the famed Yugoslav photographer, probably the greatest after Skrigin, Dabac, and Afrić, and his promising assistant, whose few but exceptional works, as it said in the obituaries, had created one of the more memorable branches of Yugoslav modernism and experimental photography. The police had roused the workers from their sleep and brought them there still sluggish and hung over to do a job for which otherwise one would have had to wait until a special team from Sarajevo arrived the next morning. There would have been an interrepublican scandal had people from the Belgrade Academy of the Arts arrived before the body of Petar Pardžik, their emeritus professor and long-serving dean, had been extricated from the wreckage, and so the three railway workers had to do what they’d never had to do before, under the supervision of the same mustached policeman. They sighed and complained without saying a word, and through the night three acetylene torches glowed and threw sparks. Their blue light seemed to be the same as that cast by the televisions, which for the first time in the history of Bosnian roads cast their glow right until morning.

  At one in the morning the phone rang in Regina Delavale’s kitchen. She heard it through the walls in her sleep and waited for it to stop. It would stop for a few seconds and then started ringing again. The on-duty inspector in the Maglaj police station probably dialed the number he’d been sent from Sarajevo and let it ring for the full twelve rings each time before an elderly female voice spoke on the other end.

  “Maglaj police station on the line. Is this the number of Dijana Kraljev?”

  Regina froze with fear; it even occurred to her to say that they had called the wrong number because the militia had no reason to call Dijana.

  “It is,” she said nevertheless.

  “Are you her?” the voice asked, leaving no possibility for her to refrain from answering or lie.

  “I’m her mother,” she admitted.

  “I’m obliged to inform you that your son-in-law Vid Kraljev was involved in a traffic accident on the Tešanj-Zenica road and that he died from his injuries at the scene.”

  Regina held the receiver and said nothing. If she didn’t say anything, maybe what she was hearing hadn’t happened.

  “Are you on the line? Did you hear me?” the voice asked without changing its tone.

  “I’m on the line,” Regina answered.

  “Then please accept my condolences,” the voice said and hung up.

  Regina sat down on a kitchen chair and put her elbows, which someone had just filled with lead, on the table. She didn’t know what to do now. She’d been alive for seventy-five years and had never faced anything like this. Maybe she should have a cry and then go like that to Dijana—but how should she wake her? By shouting in front of her bedroom door or by going in quietly and calling her, shaking her shoulder? She didn’t know how she would do it, and though any other woman in her place would have simply despaired and made a racket from pure sorrow or unease at having something like this happen to her, she sat there, staring at three kitchen rags hanging on hooks and repeating, “Ah, poor Vid, poor child . . .”

  It couldn’t be said that she really meant it when she spoke those words, but they seemed to her to be the most suitable for the situation she found herself in. In fact she would have preferred to lie back down in bed and think about what she’d heard only in the morning, but she couldn’t do something like that.

  She sat down on the foot of Dijana’s bed, and before she touched her, her daughter woke up.

  “Vid’s dead,” was all she said.

  “Not Vid, Mother, but Comrade Tito,” Dijana said softly without moving.

  “Vid. He died in Bosnia. It’s Vid, Dijana, him. They just informed us.”

  Dijana sat up straight with the movements of a mechanical doll; she looked at her mother and couldn’t understand what she was saying: “Who informed us . . . ?”

  “The Bosnian police.”

  “How do they know that?” she asked, watching Regina dully, thinking that she was making something up. Her bad side was doing this; she didn’t like Vid, just as she didn’t like any of Dijana’s other young men and not a single man who approached their house.

  “There was an accident and Vid is dead now. That’s what’s happened, my child,” Regina said in a serious tone, with language that she otherwise didn’t speak, and it sounded like the words of a television anchor.

  “Oh, Mother!” Dijana said, reaching out with her arms and grabbing the old woman firmly. She didn’t let go of her for a long time and didn’t think anything, except that she’d forgotten or lost something, but she couldn’t remember what it was at all. Like her keys when she was looking for change in her purse.

  Vid was buried on the sixth of May, in the old cemetery above the city, amid gray stones with the names of long dead families. His grave, seen from afar, was a single oasis of flowers and greenery amid the gray, waterless stone wasteland.

  Dijana stood between Vid’s older brothers. There were six of them, all dressed in the same black suits and ties; they
looked like teary-eyed Neapolitan weapons smugglers, and only the dandruff on their collars contradicted this impression, turning them into what they were. She was the only one who wasn’t weeping; she clutched a bouquet of roses and felt a prickling between her legs, as when Vid hadn’t shaved for two days and went down on her in the middle of the night, ignoring Dijana’s giggling, which came from an inner feeling of unease that awoke whenever he did things that surpassed her love. What she’d done a few days before and would excite her as soon as she thought of it, she felt to be the first act in a story that had to end in a graveyard. The poor guy; he’d have been so surprised, she thought, to see her or feel her shaved mons under his fingers, certainly more so than if she’d said that she were pregnant, and who knows what would have happened further and how Vid’s head would have reconciled motherhood and those other things that one imagines more than talks about.

  Her thoughts fled from the place where she was; she tried not to look over at Regina, who was standing alongside Vid’s mother, Aunt Nusreta, holding her by the arm, comforting her as she wept and sobbing as soon as she stopped. She treated her like her best friend, like a cousin in need, although she openly scorned her, both for her “Turkish” name and behavior, which with its gentleness and discretion rubbed Regina the wrong way, and for the fact that she’d given birth to seven sons and raised them, which offended Regina to her marrow and led her to spend hours analyzing Nusreta’s physical makeup and the organs through which so many children had passed. And if Vid were at home, she made subtle jibes concerning his mother, convinced that he didn’t understand them. Dijana made a horrible scene on several occasions when this had happened, trying to shame her or force her to shut up, but it was futile because Nusreta was one of Regina’s obsessive subjects, on account of which she developed a whole theory about Muslim child-bearing women, based on something that she’d read in the newspaper or seen on television, in which people with Muslim names and surnames usually appeared in the roles of brutal warriors and their primitive women made up for their defeats in wars by procreation. But during the burial ceremony she hugged Nusreta as if she were one of her own, in order to find a place for herself as well in that festival of sadness.

  After the procession the column went to the Hotel Otrant, where Vid’s brothers had already reserved a long ceremonial table because going straight home from a cemetery brought bad luck.

  Death should be left at some wayside place, best in a tavern, where, intoxicated with alcohol, it will approach someone else and leave the mourning family in peace for a while. They reserved the head of the table for Dijana, where she was again surrounded by Vid’s brothers, who addressed her exclusively as “our bride” and saw in her their eternal widow, whom they would honor and care for right until she remarried, whereupon she would become their greatest enemy—she who’d spat on the grave of her dearest and broken a vow that was measured only by her life. She felt that and wanted to run home as soon as she could, but she couldn’t because they were making posthumous toasts to her Vid, one after another. They would pour half a glass of stiff grape brandy onto the hotel’s green carpeting—the custom was to give the dead soul a drink—and they would down the other half in one draught, both the men and the women, the young and the old. Nusreta did the same and with her, of course, Regina, who after the fifth brandy was already so drunk that she got up, raised her arms to quiet the people, and said:

  “I’ll tell you something that not even the deceased Vid knew but should have found out yesterday, poor child; God have mercy on his soul. The bride is with child. Dijana is carrying Vid’s child!”

  She shouted out the last words and collapsed in her chair. The six brothers stared at their widow, and she lowered her eyes, hoping the earth under her would open up.

  Petar Pardžik was buried a day later, on the Boulevard of Great Men in Belgrade, with twelve-gun salutes and a military orchestra and in the attendance of the Yugoslav cultural and public elite. There were few politicians, probably because they were saving themselves for Marshal Tito’s funeral two days later, but a high party delegation arrived from Sarajevo, headed by Comrade Fejzić, who said of the last and unfinished work of the great photographer and activist, “He was consumed in flames and gave his life for art and the ideals of the working class, and for generations to come no one should forget Petar Pardžik and all those named and unnamed men who gave their lives to lay the foundations of our socialist order at Sutjeska and the Neretva, Kozara, and Romanija.”

  After Fejzić spoke, Pardžik’s friends, art critics, and professors each said a few words, and then his body was lowered into the grave accompanied by the sounds of the Internationale.

  However, this death was hardly mentioned in the newspapers and on television because it was difficult to find space for any grief other than that greatest sorrow, and it might have even looked suspicious if Pardžik’s passing were met with an overly strong expression of grief. But the prize for a lifetime achievement in artistic photography was named after him and would bear his name after the fall of communism and the breakup of Yugoslavia. That was fair in a way because Pardžik had bestowed equal honor on all rulers, states, and political systems and would have shown the same respect for those whose time he did not have the fortune to live to see.

  After the procession it was decided to give a monetary award to the widow of the master’s faithful and final assistant, in the amount of an average yearly Yugoslav salary.

  On the day of Tito’s funeral, while sirens wailed outside and the sounds of Lenin’s March and television sets could be heard through open windows in the neighborhood, Regina and Dijana sat in front of a television that was sealed and wrapped in blue packing paper. Namely, her mother had called an official from the municipality and in spite of Dijana’s objections had had him seal the television during the period of mourning in the family, as was the local custom. She did this so there wouldn’t be any stories of Regina Delavale singing and dancing instead of mourning her son-in-law. No matter how attached she was to television and how little she was concerned about the gossip in the city and the neighborhood, Regina wanted in no way to be denied anything that brought grief to the household. Dressed strictly in black and with a kerchief around her head, she went out, she accepted condolences from friends and strangers alike and told for the hundredth time about the circumstances of the traffic accident in which Vid had died. “After they heard that Tito had died, they hurried home to see their loved ones, as would anyone else, and so you see, fate’s a tricky vixen; you never know which curve is hiding your grave,” she said and nodded, as big-butted women at the fish market clucked their tongues and offered her their fresh sepiolas, which had been pulled from the sea that very morning—she should take some home to her pregnant daughter, that unfortunate girl who was carrying the child of a dead man in her womb.

  For some reason people were quite excited by the fact that the woman was going to give birth to a child for a man who no longer existed; it was something like a calf with two heads, a black man with an elephant’s head, or similar circus attractions. Giving birth to the child of a dead father seemed to the street to be more interesting than having a stillborn child. Although this was not the first time this had happened in the city (there’d been similar cases now and then over the last fifty years, as far as the streets could remember and revive old news) but it was evident that it would be just as strange even if it happened every year. The child in Dijana’s womb (and until the day of birth no one would have any idea that there were even two) was for the city something that was at the same time both a bastard child and an immaculately conceived little Jesus. That’s how it was, though there were no real reasons for it, nor had they ever existed.

  Dijana wouldn’t forgive her mother for having told everyone about her pregnancy. At first she wouldn’t even talk to her, and then she would open her mouth only when she had to or when other noises became too much for her to take in their silence. She didn’t feel like leaving the house. She’d rec
eived seven days off from work due to a death in the family and had no one to whom she could tell the truth about Vid and about that seed of his that now kept growing in her. She felt dull and the only thing that kept her going was her fear of falling into depression and despair again or falling into some heretofore unknown form of despair. And so she sat in her armchair, listening to the sounds of the great funeral in Belgrade, which came with a breeze and the scent of the sea and pine trees, the distant barking of dogs, and cries of seagulls fighting somewhere down below over some fish innards and rotten animal parts that the sea had brought from who knows where. Regina sat beside her, furiously crocheting on some embroidery that would hem a ceremonial white tablecloth because her daughter was behaving like an ass, just pouting and trudging from the armchair to the toilet and back again. And Tito’s funeral was going on, without her seeing anything.

  She would crochet like that until the late afternoon, when she would leave the house without a word, knock on the window of her neighbor Tereza, and tell her that she couldn’t take it and that she needed someone. And then on Tereza’s television she would see the Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda standing over the white marble grave and wiping tears from his eyes with a large kerchief on the end of his little finger. That enormous black man with a kerchief the size of a café tablecloth awoke a sudden television sadness in these neighbors. They looked at the screen as if it happened to be showing a series about a family tragedy in the American south. They turned to one another when Kaunda plunged his face into the kerchief. His shoulders shook as if a herd of antelope were galloping across them. They looked each other in the eyes and still deeper, into their pupils, and at the same moment they burst into tears.

  “Oh, the poor man; he made such a journey to find his friend dead.”

  Dijana would sit a while longer in front of the sealed television set, and then everything boiled up inside of her. She took the scissors, cut the seals away, cut up the blue paper, turned on the Niš Electronics Ambassador, and came in at the moment when a Kakanj miner came out of a shaft and told how the Marshal was for him a light, the earth, water, and the air he breathed, and two tears left pure white trails down his sooty face. She nestled herself in the armchair, curled up her legs under herself, and was happy because she was returning to the community of the sad, which was in any case more pleasant than the confused loneliness that issued from everything she could think of. She pitied Vid as we pity mutts we pass by on rainy days, with full awareness that we could make them happy for life if we only took them home. She could have been his Madonna, and everything would have been nice and simple for both of them; they would have stayed together to the end, without Vid ever betraying her. Because if he’d waited on her for twenty years, he would have lived out the remaining twenty or forty as a reward and providence, the finger of divine fate that confirms that persistence in desires makes sense. He would have solved all her future problems, she thought, because each of them was simpler than what had begun it all, and that one was that she didn’t love him and never could have. She could have done what she wanted, cheated on him, acted viciously and haughtily, lived her own life, and left him to worry about everything that was both of theirs or was the price for such a life. He would have done everything and wouldn’t ever have rebuked her. So it seemed to her now that Vid was no longer there, and she felt relieved because of this.