In the Belgrade newspaper Politika a Soviet meteorologist announced that “if the Americans continue detonating bombs, planet Earth will cease to exist in its present form by the year two thousand.” Instead of being frightened, judging from the letters to the editor, the readership was comforted.
“By the beginning of the twenty-first century there will be colonies of humans on the planet Venus. Those who survive the explosion will abandon Earth as a great garbage dump,” wrote Aleksej Navadin, an amateur futurologist from Sombor.
It was already past midnight when Dijana woke up, in the middle of Sarajevo, with her head in Gabriel’s lap. He wasn’t moving because he didn’t want to wake her up. Since Goga and Musa had gone, he’d been sitting in the dark, smoking and wondering whether he wanted this of all things: for his seaside girl to move in with him and move his life from one phase to another. That was in any case better than its getting off track but not so good that he wouldn’t be afraid now. It was true that for months he had been inviting Dijana to come to Sarajevo. But he’d done that because she wouldn’t stop complaining about her mother and telling him about monstrous daily episodes that he didn’t quite believe—what mother would behave like that toward her own child, especially a daughter? And after she told him about her day on the telephone, it was normal for him to invite her to come to him. He’d invited others like that and knew that they wouldn’t come. This kind of invitation doesn’t have its own name, but everyone knows about such invitations and understands that they serve to ease the spirit of the person you invite. Who would think that such an invitation is really an invitation?
Dijana didn’t think that either up until three weeks before, when she said, “Fine; I’m coming; we’ll live together and be happy!” It sounded as if it were copied out of a romance novel.
It didn’t occur to Gabriel to think about what he’d said or to ask himself whether or not he wanted what he had suggested. He simply didn’t know what to do with her, and all of a sudden everything having to do with Dijana had become a problem. From the fact that she would live there and he wouldn’t be alone in his house or be able to keep his habits, including pissing in the kitchen sink, which he’d suddenly become so fond of, to the problem of her walking the streets of this city, which wasn’t anything like what he had told her and in which she couldn’t lead the life to which she was accustomed. He felt so stupid, and all that occurred to him were stupidities. He was afraid.
“You woke up,” he said in the darkness when he thought she’d opened her eyes.
“Everything hurts,” she moaned, “and I think I’ve got a fever.”
“You have a what?”
“A temperature. I’ve gotten sick.”
“C’mon. How could you’ve gotten sick? You were asleep, and you woke up. You want me to turn on the light?” he asked and put her head down on the divan. Dijana covered her eyes with her palms, expecting a flash of light.
“Everything will be all right, believe me,” he said as she squinted at him through her fingers. He didn’t sound convincing. She sat up and put her palm on her forehead.
“I’m burning up,” she said. He grabbed her by the forearm and touched his lips to her cheek: she was shivering like a freshly awakened bat. Nothing more than that. At least that could be considered comforting.
By sunrise Gabriel had told Dijana everything that he hadn’t said a word about since they’d met. Not once did he mention his father Mijo, or Žućo the farter, but as if afflicted by a strange mental disorder, he said all the worst things about himself that he could remember. At first she dismissed this and tried to get a word in, but then she just played with an empty brandy glass and used the wet bottom of the glass to trap grains of coal dust on the veneer of the tabletop. She listened to him and wondered what had happened to Gabriel’s cheer and whether there had even been that night when she’d kissed him in the ear while he imagined funeral services for the passengers who perished in his motor-coach Titanic, pondering out loud the words that relatives and priests would use in speaking about them in the cemetery. She now had someone else before her who only looked like that guy but whose every facial feature said the opposite and was a different sign. With such a big nose and long hair, with a goatlike beard in which every whisker grew in a different direction, he’d looked like Don Quixote at the time. But now he was nothing other than the black bird that medieval plague doctors would disguise themselves as.
“I’m just a shit of a man; I’m constantly saying that things are fine and dandy when they’re fucked up. When you know me better, you see how bad they are. I just try to figure out how to get away. No matter what I’ve done or where I’ve been, it’s always been the same. As long as there’s something to eat and drink, I’m good, but as soon as it’s about something more, I’m useless. Kill me, but I can’t! Do you have any idea what all I’ve done in my life, I mean, what jobs I’ve done? We met when I was a tour guide, and that was my best job. When I was little, I learned German because my grandma was a Kraut, so I led the old folks around, and thank God no one thought twice about what I was telling them. This mosque is older than the pyramids in Egypt, Hitler stayed in this hotel when he was in Kladanj, and according to local tradition this water heals members of your family. You drink your fill, and your uncle in Hanover or your aunt in Chicago is well again. And it’s true: I enjoyed that job because the little old ladies gaped at me as if they expected Soyuz 5 to fly into their mouths and believed everything I said, and I didn’t give a shit. I could bullshit them as much as I wanted and think—wow, look at all those old apes, fuck them; they should be buried while they can still walk so the gravediggers won’t have to bother carrying their coffins around. You understand, Dijana? That’s me, and not what you think I am. Now I’m working in the National Theater as a joiner. I hammer in nails, and that’s my whole job. You know when a nail comes out on the other side and a carpenter hammers it into the wood so nobody will cut themselves on it? Well, I can’t be bothered. I don’t give a shit if the third herald in Hamlet bloodies himself on a nail in the middle of the performance. Or maybe I relish the thought of him hurting himself; I dunno. I should have told you all this before, but I fucked you over too, like I fuck over everybody. And now I’m sorry. Now it’s all there for you to see, to hell with it.”
He spoke and swigged brandy from the bottle until he started drifting off to sleep. “I’ll stay here; you can go into the room. You can find a duvet and pillow in there. Sorry, Dijana.”
She turned out the light, grabbed her suitcase in the hallway, and opened doors one after another until she finally came to the bedroom. On the wall above the bare double bed hung a large wooden crucifix with a contorted Christ that had two semiprecious stones instead of eyes and looked so awful that she had to take it down from the wall. She shoved it under the bed and was going to put it back up in the morning before Gabriel woke up. A black, dusty outline of the cross was left on the wall, and it seemed to Dijana that no one had moved that crucifix for at least twenty years. In a huge oak cabinet she found hundreds of sheets, pillowcases, and duvet covers piled in several neat rows. She was surprised by their firmness. The linens had been starched so much that they seemed to be made of cardboard. They smelled of dampness, naphthalene, and dust. She somehow drew a sheet over the bed, put covers on a pillow and a duvet, took her nightgown from her suitcase, and went off in search of the bathroom. She found it at the end of the hallway, behind the sixth door. In the darkness she couldn’t guess what was in the other five rooms, and she didn’t want to turn on the light because she was afraid of seeing something like the contorted Jesus.
Her shock was probably not only due to the fact that the Savior in Gabriel’s bedroom had a face from horror movies, but also because when she had imagined Sarajevo and tried in advance to get used to the idea of life in that city, she had expected the Turks Regina spoke of, Muslims who were completely unknown to her, saccharine looks and greetings from Vid’s mother Nusreta, whom at first she believed wanted h
er for a daughter-in-law, only to realize later that Auntie Nusreta greeted everyone like that and believed that a caring smile for everyone and everything was a sign of decency and a good upbringing. With such smiles you ease in others what you want them to ease in you. Nusreta didn’t stop doing that, though she’d lived for a long time among people who never returned the favor because it wasn’t their custom. But in its soul the Orient doesn’t envisage life from one day to the next. The fanaticism of Islam consists of doing your own thing without hoping for a reward and all for some distant future (which perhaps is not located concretely in time) when someone will finally answer you.
To Dijana it really seemed that even Gabriel, despite his name and regardless of the fact that he’d crossed himself and kneeled when she’d taken him into the cathedral, was like someone of that world of mosques, baklava, and shades of Lawrence of Arabia, which, apart from those television shows with Zaim Imamović, Nada Mamula, and Rejhan Demirdžić, was her first vision of that imagined Sarajevo.
The crucifix with the terrible Christ contrasted with the oriental world but also differed from the Christian bliss and gold to which she was accustomed in her city and smashed her first illusion of the attraction of this adventure in the unknown. The grimacing Christ with the glassy blue eyes would remain a deep memory of Sarajevo, second only to the stench of coal smoke.
The bathroom was a large, cold room, with an antique bathtub and a toilet bowl decorated with blue and pink climbing roses. Oily, yellowish paint was peeling from the walls, and there was no warm water in the boiler. And the cold water was so icy that Dijana jerked her palm away because she thought it was hot water. She stood in the middle of the bathroom, saw her own breath as if she were on the street and not in a house, and didn’t know what to do. She’d never gone to bed more dirty in her life.
She shot up from her sleep as if she’d been torn out of it by a garbage truck, her heart pounding, and at the first moment she didn’t know where she was. When she collected herself, she pulled on her damp shoes and went to get the rest of her luggage. She opened up the suitcase and each bag in the middle of the room and tried on the things that she was going to wear. She returned the crucifix to its place (Christ didn’t look any more docile in the daylight), started for the bathroom, and then changed her mind. There was certainly still no hot water; she dressed herself as warmly as she could and went to find Gabriel. However, he wasn’t there, and as his shoes and jacket were missing, she realized that he’d gone out. She again looked out through the window at the snow-covered city, and it seemed smaller to her than it had the day before. It was a sunny day, with no fog or clouds. One could hear noise in the gutters. The snow would melt quickly. This was probably the order of things at this time of year, she thought crossly. Before she managed to sit down, she heard a key in the door.
“Dijanaaa, look who’s hoooome!” Gabriel said with the voice of a child; “look what I brought youuuuuuu!” He put a canvas bag full of hot flatbreads down on the table and took two yogurts out of his jacket pocket.
If thirty years later someone had asked Dijana when she’d had the best meal in her life, she would have remembered that day and her first flatbread. There are certainly differences between one kind of bread and another, but they aren’t big enough for different kinds of bread to be known by their names instead of just their color and the kind of flour. This flatbread was also bread, but it had earned its different name.
Dijana would know everything in this city that she came to love by its taste. Her other senses would be shocked and disgusted, but her palate would remember those nine months in Sarajevo with nostalgia.
After she had almost perished because she had lied to the police about Dijana’s age, and after she hadn’t learned anything from Vid, Regina left by bus to Nikšić, to the place of one Nikola Radonjić. He was a former partisan colonel who’d done hard labor for fifteen years because he’d murdered his father-and mother-in-law. A rumor spread along the Adriatic coast and in Montenegro to the effect that he solved cases that the police weren’t in a position to solve. He could find stolen family gold, chased fleeing debtors around Italy, caught and if necessary liquidated known and unknown murderers and rapists. Legends of the Colonel reached the ears of the secret police and the police, but in that year of 1969 they hadn’t yet gotten mixed up in his life. Either they had an arrangement with him, or he was doing dirty jobs for the government.
In fact, the Colonel was the first and only private investigator in Yugoslavia. Only he didn’t have the name of a firm on his door, nor did he give interviews for the newspapers or television.
Regina had gotten his telephone number from Ivka Karabogdanuša, a café singer (and some said a prostitute as well). An Albanian had thrown acid in her face out of revenge because the café owner had cheated him at cards. The Colonel found the Albanian in Milan and brought his passport and both ears packed in a jewelry box to Ivka.
“Here, take a look if you don’t believe me,” she said and opened it before Regina’s eyes. “I didn’t even ask what else he did to him. This is enough for me,” Ivka Karabogdanuša said, hiding the burned half of her face with curls of her enormous blond wig. Two shriveled ears, which stank of an altar suffused with incense, were enough to calm Regina and convince her that the Colonel would solve her case successfully too.
When she called him, a female voice came on the phone and told her that Comrade Radonjić’s first available appointment that day was at ten in the evening, and the next one was in fourteen days. It would turn out that this was a lie and that the Colonel’s secretary always said the same thing, on account of which people from all over hurried to catch buses and trains, fascinated by him even before they saw him. People always want to see people who don’t have time.
Regina told the driver of the green Moskvić taxi to drive to number eleven Sava Kovačević St.
“And you, lady, you’re going straight to the Colonel!” he said immediately. “What trouble brings you to him?” he asked.
“It’s not important,” she responded sharply.
“Hah, you know whether it’s important or not, but it’s better for you if it’s important. You can count on a look from him costing you a million. If you were a young woman, it would cost less, and it might be possible to pay in other ways too, but as it is, I don’t know at all,” the taxi driver joked, evidently unhappy because she didn’t want to tell him what kind of trouble had brought her there.
She rang at the gate of a stone house with small windows that looked like a bunker. Two furious dogs with curly hair ran up and began foaming through the bars, and then he appeared. Tall and upright, he went toward the gate with an old military coat thrown over his shoulder, wide trousers tucked into high officer’s boots, and an unbuttoned white shirt. Regina didn’t think that she’d ever seen a more handsome man in all her life. He shooed the dogs away and let her into the yard. She introduced herself immediately. “The Colonel,” he said, without extending his hand. They passed through a dark hallway to a room with a large office desk and a high, wooden armchair with two eagles carved at the top. He sat down and pointed to a round piano stool on the other side of the desk. The only light in the room was a small night lamp with a forty-watt bulb, facing away from him, so that throughout the conversation the Colonel’s face was in complete darkness.
She told him about her case, mostly telling the truth.
“And you have no trace of her at all, and you don’t know who might know more?” he asked and then wrote down the names of all of Dijana’s male and female friends, everyone whom she’d seen and gone off to see and Regina could remember.
“The fact that you yourself haven’t found anything makes this more expensive,” he said. “Besides, you haven’t said what you want from me. I don’t know what else I could do, except find out your daughter’s whereabouts . . .”
“But couldn’t you get her to come back?”
“How? I’m not God. You don’t even know who she’s with now. I might
be able to give him a scare, and if he’s some robber turn him into the authorities or something like that, but what can we do if he’s not?”
“Well, you investigate . . .”
“So, you want me to find out where your daughter is, who her man is, and whether he’s wanted for something and if so, whether to do anything about it? If that’s what you want, the whole thing’ll cost you around a million and a half dinars, calculated in old dinars, while only finding out where the girl is would come to a hundred and fifty thousand. And if you decide on that, you’ll have to keep working on your own because I only take on finalized jobs. You need to tell me now what you want, and that’s what I’ll do. There can’t be any additional requests later.”
“Fine; I’ll pay for everything.”
“But I don’t guarantee that the girl will come back. I only guarantee that you’ll know everything about him and her. And there’ll only be more if I get anything on him. And one more thing! You give me half the money in seven days and the other half when the work is done,” the Colonel finished.
He rose, and that was a signal that the meeting was over and that he was done asking questions.
The very next day Regina put out word that she needed urgently to sell a house with an olive grove in Kuna on the island of Pelješac for a million and a half dinars. Since the offer was incredibly good because the house was worth at least three million, a buyer with cash turned up immediately, and so because of Dijana’s first attempt to run away from home the Delavale vacation home, which had been passed down in the family for seven generations, was lost, though it had never occurred to any of them to sell it even in the hardest of times.
The Walnut Mansion Page 16
