Dijana had met Gabriel the previous autumn. He’d come to the city as a tour guide for a group of Austrian pensioners who wanted first to see where Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated and then the cultural and historical sights of the most beautiful city on the Yugoslav coast of the Adriatic. But as a perforated appendix had sent the driver of the Bosnatours bus to the hospital, Gabriel had to be both their guide and driver. This was his first time driving a bus since the army and the first time ever on such a long route. Everything went fine except that for some reason he missed the turn for Dubrovnik. Instead of returning to the main road, he tried to find a shortcut by maneuvering the bus through the narrow streets, eventually getting stuck right in front of the entrance to Dijana’s house, at the end of a street ending in a flight of stairs.
From the kitchen, the mother and daughter heard an engine raging right on the other side of the wall. Then they heard panicked male and female voices, German vowels and Bosnian curses. They’d come out of the house right when the bus scraped the stone wall of their house. Regina stopped in her tracks, staring with her mouth agape at the metal monstrosity that had never before appeared on this street, which was rarely used by anyone on foot, let alone in a small car. After starting forward and backward several times, scraping the wall even more, Gabriel turned off the engine and got out of the bus. Thin as he was, he barely managed to slip between the wall and the door. Paying no attention to the two women standing just a few steps away, of which the older one was already clasping her hands together as if in prayer, he walked back and forth nervously like a hamster in a cage, trying to come up with a solution.
Dijana thought he looked funny, with his beard and long hair, wearing an ugly suit with a Bosnatours emblem on the breast pocket. But he would have looked just as strange if she’d seen him in normal circumstances. Then he peeked back into the bus and said something, after which the old men and women all hurried toward the exit. Three thin ones managed to pull through somehow, but then it was the turn of a slightly overweight lady who couldn’t get through no matter what. She became frightened and tried as hard as she could until she got completely stuck, unable to move either way. She began to cry for help and shout, and by that time all of the neighbors had gathered around. As shocked as Regina, they simply stood there, watching this wonder of a bus. Only when Gabriel began to push the overweight lady back into the vehicle because he couldn’t get her out did Bartol speak: “Young man, young man, push a little to the left, to the left, yes, that’s right, yeah . . .”
He got the old woman back in the bus, but this only increased the panicked rush of the passengers to be evacuated. Everyone, male and female alike, headed for the door. Some did so probably because they thought themselves thinner than others, the rest because fear had robbed them of their sense and they thought this bus would be their Titanic then and there, in the middle of Yugoslavia, the land of communists and partisans and those who’d killed their archduke. So they trampled each other, elbows and knees gouging the bodies of those next to them, the ladies clawing at the windows with their fingernails. It was up to the onlookers to decide whether they were watching a tragedy or a comedy and whether to laugh or offer help. Gabriel was trying to soothe the distraught elderly tourists, begging them to calm down and kicking all those who were trying to push their fat bellies out, only to explode in the end: “Why don’t you all go fuck yourselves?!”
He waved his hand angrily and walked away from the bus. It was obvious that he didn’t know what to do—he started down the stairs, then came back and stopped again.
Dijana believed that she’d never seen a stranger and more endearing man in her life. Soon neither she nor the other onlookers cared about what happened to the Austrian pensioners. They didn’t seem like real people but were more like characters in a movie or a circus that had ended up putting on a performance in front of their houses. They watched them silently pushing, shouting and weeping, falling on the seats, and tussling with one another. They could have even died like that, suffocated from poison gas and decomposed from chemical weapons; it wouldn’t have mattered.
Before Bartol called in the police to try to control the situation, seven of the Austrians managed to get out of the bus. The locals gave them water and wine to drink, brought chairs out into the yard, and revived German vocabulary from their school years, until the foreigners finally turned their gazes from their trapped countrymen and took their smiling place in the free world. When they remembered their comrades, they did it without a great deal of understanding for the situation in which they had found themselves a little earlier and tried to calm them with words of comfort that they obviously didn’t mean.
Gabriel kept pacing back and forth and swearing, certain that his career as a tour guide was over, and figured that he’d be lucky if he didn’t have to pay for the damage to the bus out of his own pocket. He passed by Dijana, who followed him back and forth with her eyes, enchanted by the appearance of this stranger. He was like Tarzan in New York, completely out of place anywhere but in passageways hidden deep in the jungle. Regina, of course, noticed the look she gave him and was not at all happy about it.
The police first registered the case, and then there began a long consultation about what to do from there. They managed to get two more of the thinner old women out of the bus. An ambulance also arrived because one of them had also suffered a heart attack. People from all over that part of town gathered around. The police tried unsuccessfully to clear the area, and people pushed their way to wherever they could get the best view of what was going on inside the bus. Some children climbed onto the surrounding rooftops. Bartol warned them to get down because they might break the roof tiles, and then a tow truck arrived. The driver squeezed back into the bus to ovations from the crowd and tried to back it out of the jam, but he couldn’t do anything except smash the left headlight and further scrape the side of the bus against the wall of Regina’s house. Whenever the metal started scraping against the rock, Gabriel would grimace as if someone were running a razor over his fingernails.
“Do you want me to bring you a brandy?” Dijana asked him.
“How about a pistol so I can shoot myself?” he responded without taking his eyes off the bus. He himself was slowly turning into a battered and rusted wreck.
“Wouldn’t a little brandy still be better?” she insisted. And then Gabriel finally took a good look at her. She wasn’t that pretty, but there was something intimate in the way she spoke to him and looked at him, something he usually attained with women only after months of laboring and waiting on them, if at all.
“Hey, girl, you saved my life,” he said when he took a slurp of brandy from the glass, and Dijana laughed as if he’d said something very witty and took him by the hand. That touch was somehow excessive.
The bus with the captive Austrian pensioners remained there overnight. The people went home, the nine rescued tourists were put up in a hotel, and Gabriel, like a real sea captain, decided to wait out the morning on the steps, so that the unfortunate elderly tourists would see that he hadn’t abandoned them. Around nine, after Regina had already fallen asleep, Dijana sneaked out of the house with a plate of beans and a piece of bread and spent the night out on the steps with Gabriel. There wasn’t much space, their sides touched, and so words flowed more quickly and closely than they usually do between a man and a woman who’ve just met. They chatted about anything and everything, only not about themselves.
He told stories about his father Mijo and his card partner Žućo, who had a strange ability: an hour after eating two plates of beans, he could fart the song When I Left for Bentbaša from start to finish.
Gabriel spoke of breaking wind cheerfully and without any shame or the usual excuses, as if that were something one obviously had to tell a girl when he met her. What girl wouldn’t be fascinated by explanations of how one gets the low notes and what one had to do to get the large intestine to produce a high C, which, as Gabriel said, came out of that instrument in a
much more pure form than from a clarinet or saxophone. It was also very important for the beans not to have too much roux in them and that they be cooked with dried and not raw meat. Roux and raw meat decreased the melodiousness and increased the odor of farts.
Then he told about Hurem, another friend of his father’s, whose nickname was Cathead. Why Cathead? Because when he had an erection his glans was the size of a cat’s head, so big it couldn’t fit into a jam jar. When women saw that, they fled as fast as their legs could carry them.
Dijana’s head spun from such stories, which would have been disgusting if she’d heard them from anyone else or if they’d been told in a different way. However, they attracted her to Gabriel instead of making her repulsed by him.
When dawn came, Dijana was already prepared to follow that man to the ends of the earth, certain that whatever might happen to her with him would be different from everything else she’d experienced with men. Men had come like princes and gone like villains; at first they were head over heels in love, and then they would tell her that they were leaving her because she was too good for them and they didn’t deserve her. Never did it happen that a man left her saying that she was a stupid cow; rather, they all left claiming they were jerks and would regret it for the rest of their lives. But this man sitting beside her and telling her how the prostitutes in some Doboj brothel had beaten up his father because he discovered that he’d forgotten his wallet only after being serviced—he was surely no prince and wouldn’t exit her life like a deserter.
For his part, Gabriel was happy that he’d met a woman who could listen to the story about Žućo farting without feeling obligated to react with expressions of disgust but laughed like any normal person should. He didn’t like the fact that most women acted as if they had never pooted in their lives but only blew on dandelions and spread the scent of roses around themselves. If they couldn’t tell the truth about that, they’d lie about everything else too.
In the morning a rescue team from the city’s traffic department arrived with a special vehicle that towed the Bosnatours bus out of its predicament with a winch and steel cables. The tourists were freed and flew that very day back to Vienna and never even considered going back to Yugoslavia. Meho Obučina, director of the Sarajevo branch of Bosnatours, told Gabriel to keep out of his sight and to forget about ever getting another job in a Yugoslav tourist agency; he’d better get a job in the city garbage service because he didn’t have a future in any other profession! Gabriel told Meho to go get fucked and slammed down the telephone receiver.
“Calm down, Gabriel, please,” Dijana said, hugging him. “How can I calm down, damn his eyes?—I’ll tear him apart when I get a hold of him!” Gabriel shouted, and everyone in the post office looked to see what kind of maniac Mrs. Delavale’s daughter was mixed up with.
They spent the next ten days frolicking in hidden inlets and Vid’s house. Namely, Dijana had asked Vid to rent out a room to a guy from Sarajevo who was down on his luck; he had no money now, but she vouched for the fact that he would send him the money as soon as he got home.
“And what’s he to you?” Vid asked.
“Nothing, what would he be? He’s someone in need of help, and in this town there’s no one to expect that from,” she answered reproachfully.
Those first days they tried to keep Vid from noticing what had begun between them, but then one Friday he returned home from work earlier than usual and found them fucking in the middle of the kitchen. She was bent over the table on which she’d just been cleaning mackerels that were now knocked all over it; she still had the knife in her hand and fish scales in the corner of her mouth, and he was slamming into her raised white behind, covered in sweat and with the look of a tiger.
Vid stopped in his tracks and didn’t know whether he should say or do anything before he got out of there.
“Those are mackerel, right?” he asked idiotically. Dijana stared at him with a foggy gaze and gripped the knife, and he thought she looked like a cow that was going to slaughter itself. The man behind her kept on thrusting into her, his eyes closed; he hadn’t heard Vid and was unaware that someone had come in.
“Mackerel, huh?” he asked again, but she didn’t answer. But she surely had heard him. She must have.
That was without doubt the moment when Vid was closest to forgetting her forever and giving up on what would last for eleven more years before Dijana finally became his. Maybe then he would have left her if he’d had the strength to kick the guy from Sarajevo out of his house. But he didn’t know how to do that, and he wouldn’t have known how in a less delicate situation, all the more so because at that moment he found justification for him. The guy was nice and witty; he hadn’t arrived on false pretenses; he hadn’t lied about anything and most likely had no idea what he was getting himself into. It would have been stupid to tell him now that he couldn’t stay here any longer. Why should he kick him out? Because on the middle of Vid’s kitchen table he was screwing a girl that he evidently liked? It would have been petty to tell him to go.
For the next two days Gabriel tried to find a way to talk to him one-on-one and explain everything to him, but Vid stubbornly avoided him, more and more ashamed.
“I’m so embarrassed I could kill myself, but I love her!” the guy from Sarajevo told him when they were alone together for a minute.
“No doubt,” Vid answered, and the words came out of his constricted throat like grains of rice from the windpipe of a child that has swallowed the wrong way.
It was only because she hadn’t let herself be seen too much on the square with her new lover that Dijana managed to hide Gabriel from Regina. Her mother, of course, suspected that something had happened between her and that Bosnian, but this was just one of several dozen suspicions of the same or greater intensity, and so it never occurred to her that Dijana had fled to Sarajevo and that Vid’s house had been the scene of an incident that, if such things could be measured in cubic meters and register tons, surpassed her previous affairs. But Regina would nevertheless go to Vid, for she knew that he might, for obvious reasons, know the most about the disappearance of her daughter and believed that he would tell her everything so he might shorten his path to Dijana’s heart.
“I know what she means to you,” Regina began. “And you know how a mother’s heart is; nothing can deceive it. Dijana is my child, my bones, my veins,” she continued, grabbing herself by her left tit, so he could see what a heart was. “And I’d like her to be with you; I know how good you’d be to her. You wouldn’t even look at her crossways, right? Oh, you see how a mother knows! But a devil has gotten into her, and she doesn’t know what’s good for her. That’s what women are like, my dear. Like those moths that fly up to a light bulb and burn their wings, and afterward everyone says, ‘Look at the slut!’ But my Dijana’s no slut. She’s something else; she has a heart this big, but she doesn’t know how to get to it. That’s the hardest thing for her. Women, Vid, aren’t made of one gut. A woman has many different guts. And Dijana’s a woman. She’s not a child; I do know that. And her heart, woe to me her mother, isn’t of just one gut either. It’s got more, Vid; only those other guts lead to depravity and search out depravity. Her guts have an itch because they’re looking for a man, looking for depravity, and she now feels like doing depraved things. But she doesn’t know it! I’ll split in two; my head will explode like a melon if I don’t help her now. And how can I, poor me? A widow without anyone to help me and lend me a hand. It would be different if her father were alive. Daughters need fathers, my dear Vid! Only a man’s hand can put every gut in its place, so that she thinks with her head and feels with her heart instead of—God forgive me—both with her ass! There’s no other way to put it. So I’m asking you now, my dear Vid, my child, mother’s little angel, to help me and tell me if you know anything. And I know that you know and that your heart is leading you to my Dijana. Where is she now? Tell me, Vid.”
He looked at the old woman and knew that she couldn’t stand the
sight of him. She hated the other men who hung around her daughter and hated and scorned him too, as heartless women don’t pity and scorn men who’ve been rejected. He could tell her where Dijana was now; he assumed she was in Sarajevo and that her love for the long-haired bus driver hadn’t left her. Another reason why he knew this was because she’d driven him away and avoided him all these months, as she always did when she was in love. He might even manage to keep Dijana from ever finding out that he was the one who’d given her away: by not telling Regina what he thought, but indirectly by reminding her in a way of that day when the bus had gotten stuck in front of their house and Dijana had stayed out until sunrise keeping the Bosnian guy company on the steps.
But the thought that in doing so he’d help the old woman, whose imagination was more disgusting than a table full of mackerel, made him just shrug his shoulders, nod, and say a few comforting and soothing words of the aged.
“I’m sure she’ll come back,” he said; “I can feel it, believe me.”
Regina, naturally, didn’t believe him, but she didn’t show it. Instead she patted him on the cheek.
“Someday you’ll be my son-in-law!” she said. Vid blushed and lowered his eyes and then suddenly raised his head because he thought the old woman would think he wanted to cry. Of course he didn’t feel like crying. Rather, his stomach was turning, and he could hardly wait for her to go away.
She waved to him as she went down through the garden in the darkness, in which no crickets were chirping though the night was hot, worse than any summer night. Nature had been turned upside down, and the seasons had started to change places as in a game of musical chairs. Would eternal summer take hold or would it be winter forever?—No one knew yet. But lately people had begun talking about why the seasons weren’t as they’d been before. Almond trees bloomed in December, and frost would kill them during Christmas; the hills above the sea were white with snow in May, and then two days later a Saharan heat-wave hit . . . Older people saw Lucifer’s hand in this—when he came down to earth everything would burn or freeze—whereas the younger ones and those with schooling believed that everything was the fault of nuclear tests on the Bikini atoll and in the Nevada desert. But everyone agreed that it couldn’t last long. Either the world would come to its senses or judgment day was coming.
The Walnut Mansion Page 15
