The general secretary of the Communist Party of Italy said that the world workers’ movement had lost one of its greatest leaders and visionaries: “Today nothing can fill our devastated souls!” The bit about devastated souls particularly touched Dijana. She pulled a wadded tissue out of her sleeve and wiped her nose with it.
When in the latter months of her term, when the time for an abortion had long since passed, she thought about the moment when she’d conceived; images of the two funerals kept coming back to her, one live and one televised. She was unable to begin the tale of her child in any other way, a child with whom she would spend the rest of her life and never be free again. The time when the doctor had told her that she was pregnant seemed so murky, and the act between her and Vid, when the biological causes of what she would attribute to later events had come into existence, was in her memory completely unbelievable. She remembered Vid turning his back to her as he put on the condom; he always did that, as if it were the most shameful part of sex; she clearly saw his vertebrae catching the dim light. She saw the moment before he entered her, when she grabbed him by the cock as she always did. Then he gave a deep sigh, and she actually checked whether he had put on the condom well or was trying to trick her so his semen would, as if by accident, pour into her. The condom was always on right, so how did what happened happen? This was a mystery to Dijana, something that would remain unanswered. And so twenty years later, when Mirna asked her where she and her brother had been conceived, she would stutter trying to think up some lie because the actual truth, or so it seemed to Dijana, didn’t even exist.
That summer the Olympics were held in Moscow, and she sat in front of the television for days on end, gobbled down unbelievable amounts of potato chips, and watched every last bit of live coverage and reports from the strangest competitions, including the steeplechases and lawn hockey. She vainly cheered for the Indian hockey team, in which all the players were surnamed Singh, so Dijana imagined that they all belonged to some big, happy family in which there were so many brothers and relatives that they didn’t even know each other that well—they met each other on the street and passed each other by like strangers, and no one could pester any of the others with his personal problems. That was the only way, she thought, that you could have a happy family. Hundreds of them under the same roof, and all they had in common was that they all played lawn hockey. Her palms sweated as the Singh family tried to break through the granite defense of the Pakistani team and almost didn’t notice her belly growing bigger with each day, and in the folds of her first wrinkles there were now little pockets of fat, which would soon change Dijana’s physiognomy and in a matter of months change her from a young and pretty woman into a middle-aged postal official whom the perennial tourists would no longer recognize. What she blamed on her pregnancy and hormonal imbalance had more to do with the potato chips and the Olympics, which postponed Dijana’s fits of depression and beat back any thought of the fact that she should do something with her life.
In the swimming competitions she took notice of Darjan Petrič, a sixteen-year-old Slovene with the face of a boy and the body of a man from one’s dreams, and she decided that if she had a boy, she’d name him Darijan. Years later she realized that she hadn’t even done that right and had thrown in an extra i that had appeared in his name in Cyrillic at the top of the television screen because someone in the Soviet television service had erroneously transcribed Petrič’s name.
Seeing what her daughter was turning into, Regina washed her hands of trying to tear her away from the television. Here and there she would gripe about what was going to happen when the municipal inspection discovered that she’d broken the official seal on the television set and crushed the wax red star, thereby dishonoring both the state and her deceased husband. Dijana said nothing in response but continued munching on potato chips and watching the quarterfinals of the handball tournament, and so her mom would go off into the kitchen or to the neighbors, whom she told that her daughter was already half-mad for lack of a man and that she was afraid of something terrible happening to her. But of course she wasn’t afraid but needed something that would make her the center of attention, which was greater and more important than the ills of old age and the problems of meager pensions, the only things her women friends talked about.
But it seems that her imagination summoned the devil. Two days after the Olympics were over, Dijana got in a tub of hot water and tried to slit her wrists. She ran into the kitchen completely naked, firmly gripping her left wrist, which was flowing with dark, red blood. Regina nearly fainted because of the blood and because she didn’t see a thick fleece under her daughter’s round belly. Her freshly shaved mons veneris with its pinkish canyon gleamed like the city’s towers in the August sun. That was Dijana’s last attack of nerves that was properly hushed up because Regina didn’t say anything even to their immediate neighbors. The laceration was sewed up in the emergency room, where Dijana received a referral for a psychiatrist. She didn’t go since she had no idea what she would say to anyone, let alone a stranger, about herself.
With the arrival of autumn she calmed completely and no longer even spent days sitting in front of the television. She was reconciling herself to her fate and waiting for the birth of her child, having succeeded in convincing herself that when that happened, her life would take such a path that she would be like one of the Singhs who didn’t have to think about one another. She only got upset when every few weeks one of Vid’s brothers would come by to ask her if she needed anything and whose arrival would remind her to whose lifelong loyalty she had sworn herself, but that would happen less and less frequently as the days of mourning passed on and they began to realize what kind of woman from hell their Vid had run off after. They stopped all contact with the Delavale house after Dijana said in response to a suggestion by one of them that she name the child Vid or Vida that it was out of the question, not in the least because she thought it was an ugly name in both its male and female versions, but more importantly because it would remind her for the rest of her life of someone who was dead and might put a curse on her child so that it might suffer its father’s fate.
After that the six Kraljev men never darkened their doorstep; Nusreta would only call occasionally, asking how she was feeling, whether she wanted anything or would like her to send some oranges from their garden. But Dijana’s pregnant state didn’t produce any special wishes, nor did it awaken any desire for certain foods, as is often the case, or at least fruit, which would let a woman divine the character of her child in its future life. If an expecting woman obsessively asked for strawberries, then she was probably going to have a daughter, but if she had a boy, he would have a number of birthmarks all over his body, pale skin, and effeminate movements. If she wanted lemons and oranges, she was going to have a son who’d be loved by everyone, always ready for fun and jokes, and would have it easy in life, or a daughter whose beauty would be unbearable for her competition. But if the woman wanted red meat, she was going to have sickly children who wouldn’t be distinguished by anything else or be bestowed with special talents or beauty, but not curses either . . . Thus, it was known what every expecting mother’s wish meant, and so those who were well intentioned and those not so well intentioned were just waiting to hear what she would say and would jump to fulfill her every wish, no matter what it was or what it meant, convinced that they were the couriers of a fate that was already written down and couldn’t be changed. Dijana, however, was a mystery. Although she ate beyond any measure, she didn’t care what she ate. When Nusreta would ask, “Don’t you want some oranges, girl?” she would only laugh and say for the hundredth time that she didn’t.
She gave birth on the twenty-first of December. At first Mirna came into the world easily and quickly, and then Dr. Žižić shouted, “There’s one more!”
Dijana howled both from the pain and because she had reconciled herself to having her dead Vid’s child but not his twins. Darijan took much longer to come out, a
s if he’d burrowed into his mother’s womb, clutching her uterus with his little claws, not wanting to come out at all.
He was born just as the radio broadcast two twelve-gun artillery salutes fired inside the capital, Belgrade, and two six-gun salutes in the capitals of the socialist republics, which marked Army Day in memory of the day, thirty-nine years before, when Comrade Tito had organized the First Proletarian Brigade in the small Bosnian town of Rudo. The speaker pointed out that this was the first time that they were marking this date without their greatest son and glorious military leader, and Dijana was finally able to breathe.
The news that the newborns were twins, a boy and a girl, spread through the hospital, and this information likewise had to be a sign that needed only to be read so we would know what fate was telling us through its little emissaries, the condottieri of a new age, in the face of whom everyone felt fear and wanted to allay it in every way.
“Well, now I can relax,” Regina whispered over their wall to her neighbor Emilija, who happened to be weeding dead marigolds from her frozen garden so they wouldn’t come up in the spring.
Her warty face smiled bitterly: “Well, it’s good that you’re relaxing too!”
As Regina went down the steps of the hillside lane, she heard Emilija repeating, “Well, my Regina, oh, my Regina . . .” For every uprooted marigold stalk she would say Oh, my Regina once, and there were so many dead marigolds that she was still repeating her formula when Regina was long gone and could no longer hear her.
She went on repeating it for a full forty minutes, when she lay down among the marigolds, taking care not to crush any of them, and died.
XI
Dijana ran away from home for the first time when she was twenty-five. If one can really call what she did running away and if at that age, regardless of the circumstances, you aren’t in control of your own life.
She packed her things while Regina was out and left a note on the table saying that she was going to leave with the one she loved, that she was ready to sacrifice everything to be with him, and so was doing just that. She pushed her bags and suitcases through the bathroom window so the neighbors wouldn’t see and her mother wouldn’t find out about it before she got back home. She left the house as if she were only stepping out into the garden, then grabbed her luggage, which had crushed a whole patch of green onions, and threw it over the stone wall, where a taxi was already waiting.
Unfortunately, that was the first and last romantic episode in Dijana’s flight from home. Everything that would happen over the next nine months was more like those dark French films that were in fashion in those years than it was the escape from home and love story that she had been imagining.
Dijana sat in the bus station waiting room. She looked through a glass door and watched swimmers in a swimming pool that had been built on that spot according to someone’s crazy idea of good architecture, and it occurred to her how easy it was to act rashly. She scolded herself for not having known that earlier. Heartfelt desires confuse people, especially if they desire something that’s easy to get provided they give up something else. Now, for example, people about to leave on trips were watching the swimmers with longing in their hearts. The swimmers, on the other hand, watched the travelers and longed to be going on a trip. Dijana believed she had risen above those travelers and swimmers. She was going to a city she had never seen before, to be with a man she loved, though she knew almost nothing about him. But she wasn’t worried about that either. Love isn’t a crime and doesn’t depend on dossiers full of all kinds of data and facts that pigeonhole someone in one way or another. You fall in love and that’s it, she thought, and nobody, least of all Regina, was going to tell her she was wrong.
She left the platform, which was bathed in sunlight, and the city, whose painful August glare was one of the reasons the tourists needed to see it only once to remember it their entire lives. And there was only one tiny cloud over her joyous mood. She had forgotten her sunglasses on the shoe cabinet.
Eight hours later, the bus was making its way into Sarajevo through fog and deep snow. The driver had to force the men out into the cold several times. In short-sleeve T-shirts, almost barefoot, they pushed the vehicle through snowdrifts. They cursed in the name of God and the Virgin Mary, cursing both meteorologists and Bosnia itself, a small country that seemed like it ought to be close to the sea but had by some mistake actually been planted at the North Pole. Only the night before the news on the television had said that Yugoslavia would wake up to a sunny morning—a wonderful opportunity to take advantage of the charm of late summer and head for the beaches, rivers, and lakes to relax after another day of hard work.
That was exactly what Kamenko Katić, the preeminent weather expert, said as pictures of empty Adriatic beaches drifted across the screen, showing only a few swimmers sporting looks typical of the 1960s.
One male swimmer, whose long hair came down over his eyes and whose sideburns were shaped like little battleaxes, looked like a cross between a guest worker and a street revolutionary. With eyebrows plucked in the shape of thin crescent moons and a rubber swim cap to protect her cold perm from seawater, a female swimmer looked like Brigitte Bardot’s East European sister. Watching them smile into the camera, full of optimism and faith in a better future, Dijana couldn’t but believe Kamenko’s words.
As the bus passed through Hadžići and Tarčin and slipped into a pall of lead-gray Sarajevo fog, Dijana shivered in nothing but a light shirt because all her sweaters and her only winter coat were in the luggage compartment below. What she could see through the window frightened her: shadows of high-rises; a long row of military barracks, conscripts standing guard; streets along which fathers pulled their children on sleds; tall, slim minarets likely to puzzle those who saw them the first time and didn’t know what to do when passing by them—whether they should do anything other than what they did or didn’t do when standing under a church tower.
Such thoughts probably wouldn’t have bothered her if the weather forecast hadn’t been so completely wrong and if she hadn’t felt that she was outside the region mentioned by Kamenko Katić, far away from the country where she felt secure. There was none of Yugoslavia in Sarajevo, though the television and the newspapers always said that the city was a “Yugoslavia in miniature.”
Dijana didn’t understand the point of this ideological trick, which might not have seemed like a trick by those who weren’t arriving there in the late summer from the sunny south, and the way in which she thought about it was pretty much in line with the spirit of the time. If Sarajevo was indeed a “Yugoslavia in miniature” and if the whole of Bosnia was given the same label whenever needed, then why did Yugoslavia never—not even in the boldest party metaphors—become a “big Sarajevo” or a “big Bosnia”? Was it because ideological metaphors don’t obey the principles of formal logic or because a metaphor in the opposite direction wouldn’t have had enough appeal?
The real reason doesn’t matter here. If a story about the great in the small could have been recast into a story about the small in the great, the history of our country would look very different, and we would seem more normal to those who will one day study it. But Dijana didn’t spend even five minutes of her life thinking about it.
Outside the bus she was greeted by a winter like she had never experienced and the heavy smell of burning coal, which she would never get used to but would stay with her for all her life as the dominant sensory memory of her months in Sarajevo. That smell would also bring her thoughts back to the city and the first time she left home, as an unmistakable harbinger or a symptom of a bad mood. She kept trying to push through the crowd to the conductor handing out the luggage so she could slip on her coat as quickly as possible, but other passengers were stronger or quicker on their feet, so she ended up being one of the last ones in line.
“You’re almost naked, girl!” said a man with a mustache wearing a blue Centrotrans smock. “And look how many bags you have, you crazy woman,” he add
ed in disbelief as he handed her bag number four and she pointed to yet another large suitcase.
She was barely able to move all her luggage off the platform and carry it into the grimy bar at the station while fighting off a bunch of Gypsy children demanding money. When she finally sank down into a squeaky wooden chair and opened her suitcase, which was crammed full, its contents sprang out on the muddy floor. She somehow managed to get a hold of her coat, so she tried to put everything else back into the suitcase and shut it again. From a corner the bloodshot eyes of the station drunkards watched her mutely. They were clearly not used to seeing female passengers like her. With her hair disheveled and wearing only a summer dress under a heavy winter coat, she climbed onto the suitcase and began jumping on it until a waitress came up to her and said “Hold on, girl! What do you think you’re doing?”
The Walnut Mansion Page 13
