The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Gabriel sat for half an hour in his seat and didn’t budge so as not to spoil anything before Inspector Jere came back. But instead of him a guy in a uniform appeared. Gabriel jumped up.

  “Turn around and put your hands behind your back!” the policeman yelled.

  Three minutes later Gabriel was in a room without windows, between walls painted with a greasy green paint, in handcuffs that wouldn’t be removed from him until the next day, when despite the fact that it was Sunday and no one was working, he was led before a police magistrate and was sentenced to sixty days imprisonment because he’d supported the singing of nationalist songs in front of the National Theater in Sarajevo and expressed regret that he was unable to sing along.

  And so Gabriel suffered on account of Zrinski. That was the year he’d first complained that he’d been born in this backwater and not in America, from where even in Sarajevo people had been hearing the first rumors of a festival on the private farm of one Max Yasgur, in a place called Woodstock, where one generation won the right to renounce the history of its parents that had been written up for it, to renounce the state, the flag, the law, and everything else that no one could live with any longer. Gabriel too believed for a short time that he would be protected by that Woodstock, if only because he’d heard of it and gotten drunk at Goga’s and Musa’s place to songs that had been played there. And they had about as much to do with the aria To Battle, To Battle as he did with his Uncle Bruno.

  His hope died out, as do all hopes and beliefs that you can be outside the world and escape the troubles that started on their paths before you were born and before anyone or anything besides those troubles reckoned with the possibility that you would one day be there. As he squatted in his green cell, all of Gabriel’s problems came down to one. Actually two: pissing and shitting. The one and the other urge seized him, and he stopped thinking about other urges.

  Dijana spent the night with Katarina Katzer without managing to get a word in edgewise or think about herself and Gabriel very much. Katarina told her about her whole life, packed full of dead aunts and curses that a Galician priest had cast on the Katzers two hundred years before, because of which every male member of the family loved men. With time the curses deepened, and the Katzer women started loving women. This curse was the downfall of her great-grandfather, her grandfather, and her father and all five of her father’s sisters, who all killed themselves in turn in Vienna because of some actresses and ballerinas. Every two years one of them would stick her head into an oven and turn on the gas, and her relatives in Sarajevo would go to the funeral.

  Katarina didn’t say anything about whether that Galician curse had affected her. But Dijana cautiously moved away whenever in the fervor of her story Katarina reached for her hand. Dijana laughed and cried at the unbelievable confessions of a Sarajevo ballerina, in which there were certainly lies and a strange delirium that drove the girl to talk without end and caused her to talk faster than she could think, so that she would fly back and forth between different times and would no longer know where she was or in which character.

  Then she would stop for a moment, look up at the ceiling, frightened that it was going to collapse, and instead of finishing the story she’d begun, she’d begin another. About the Moscow ballet school and about how when she was eighteen she’d stopped menstruating, but she wasn’t worried about it because she would start again when she broke her leg one day, the same month that her dancing career would come to an end. Horses and ballerinas break their legs only once, the difference being that horses are shot but ballerinas are given pensions so they can have something to spend on their youth. Katarina knew that she was going to break her leg; she’d had the same dream several times and knew exactly where it would happen. But she didn’t know when. Nor was it important: six of one, half a dozen of the other. Menstruation would replace Swan Lake.

  At about six Dijana put her in the bed under the crucifix, and Katarina fell asleep in mid-sentence. Dijana went back into the living room, lay down on the divan, watched the flames in the stove until she dropped off. At eight a police car stopped in front of the house, and the same policeman who’d led Gabriel away rang the doorbell until he woke Dijana and handed her a summons for an interview in the State Security Service, where she was supposed to come on Monday at ten. She asked him where her boyfriend was; he said that he didn’t know but that he was sure he was safe.

  Only a day later did Dijana learn that Gabriel had been sentenced to sixty days in prison and that he was in the central prison, which bore the name Miljacka, a small river in the city that absorbed all the Sarajevo sewage and thus stank even in winter. At the police station they asked Dijana the usual questions about the man with whom she was living, where she’d met him and how, whether he’d said what his uncle had been during the Second World War, and what her thoughts on that were. With whom they socialized and whom they saw, what they talked about, and which films they watched. And when the inspector asked her when they had made love for the first time, she answered that it wasn’t his business, whereupon he only laughed and went on to something else.

  “Stop by from time to time,” he said when they parted, “especially if you notice something suspicious. You have to develop a culture of security. You’ve seen yourself how theater culture ends up.”

  After she saw Gabriel despondent for the first time, and with his head shaved bare—“I had to sign that I was getting my hair cut on my own volition; they say it’s because of lice,” he said—Dijana suddenly forgot what had happened between them since she’d moved in. She was resolved to be a support for this man, regardless of what would happen, because they’d told him that this wasn’t the end and that there would be criminal charges, pursuant to Article 114 of the Law on Criminal Procedure, for counterrevolutionary activity and violation of the constitutional order of the SFRY. She was prepared for everything and not for a moment in the next two months did she waver. Nothing was more important to her than her Gabriel being released and coming home to peace and family harmony.

  That time, no matter how hard it was and no matter how ugly those few people she’d met, including Goga and Musa, showed themselves to be, was the time of the greatest love in Dijana’s life. The greatest up until the tragically late appearance of Marko Radica. She loved Gabriel because he was suffering, and she considered that suffering to be some kind of emotional debt, and she loved him because he wasn’t there next to her and she could imagine him as he’d never been, like Joan of Arc in that silent movie, her head shaved and her eyes full of suffering, stripped of all masculinity.

  She tried to call Goga and Musa for days on end, thinking that she might find some work through them, because there was no money in the house, and in the theater they wouldn’t hear of giving Gabriel’s pay to her. Goga and Musa didn’t answer the phone, nor did they open the door when she would ring. She knew that they were home and didn’t want to let her in. The light was on the fifth story of the building on King Tomislav Street, and one could hear Bob Dylan’s voice all the way out on the street. She didn’t give up because she simply didn’t know whom else to approach to get help. After a week of passing by their place trying to get a hold of them and after she’d borrowed money from Katarina for the third time, she sat down on a bench across the street from their entrance. Sooner or later one of them would go outside. Not ten minutes had passed before Goga appeared.

  But before Dijana managed to open her mouth, the girl opened fire: “I don’t know what you want from us! Leave us alone from now on, goddammit! I don’t know who you are or what the hell he thought he was doing getting thrown in jail! He didn’t ask us when he did what he did, and don’t go dragging us into your stories. And I’d advise you as a comrade not to mess around our house any more. You’re just lucky I found you. Musa would rip out your cunt if he saw you! Beware of him! The Chetniks cut the skin off his grandfather’s back while he was still alive, and he doesn’t like all your stunts with the singing. Now you know, and you can get th
e hell out of here, and don’t greet me on the street if you see me.”

  Without saying a thing, Dijana turned on a dime, like a soldier in Chaplin’s movie, and left, eased of one worry in life.

  She kept taking the crucifix down in the evening and putting it up again in the morning. Gabriel told her a hundred times not to put it back up. If she didn’t like it, then it didn’t need to be on the wall because in this house everything was in some accidental order and arrangement anyway, and he didn’t feel like starting a job that would never end, and this was why he lived in the disorder that he’d inherited from his deceased aunt. But she hadn’t listened to him and stubbornly returned the crucifix to the wall. That was a kind of ritual that she clung to, and it made life easier. If on the first day she’d moved the bucket with coal somewhere else, she would have repeated that every day, but since she’d been tired from the trip and frightened of the contorted Christ, she moved it. And so, while she prepared the crucifix for sleep, sure that there was no one left who might help her find work, it occurred to Dijana to go to church the following day, to tell everything to a priest and ask him to find her some work. She didn’t really know why people in the church would be more compassionate about Gabriel’s agony. And how could she when she’d grown up among nothing but atheists and pagans, because in the whole neighborhood barely two old women went to mass. But when there had been reason to really make someone’s life hell, usually some uncle would be found who’d been a priest and had fled to Argentina with the Ustashas, and Dijana had a hunch that it might be possible to find room in the church for the avuncular sins of Gabriel’s soul.

  Father Antun was a tall and thin young man, maybe younger than Dijana. He met her in the parish palace, dressed in a black suit with a collar that squeezed his neck, and he continually pulled on it with his index finger, as do people who are unused to neckties.

  “You’ve been here for half a year, yet you haven’t come to church and waited for your problems to bring you here. It’s fine this way too. Many have turned to the church because troubles forced them to. But there’s a long way from turning to the church to converting! No matter; the majority crosses it and returns to belief in the Lord. And your poor victim, with whom you live outside of marriage, did he go to church? You don’t know?! Of course, if you didn’t go yourself, how could you know about him? It doesn’t matter. The largest church that exists is the human heart. Faith is in the heart and not in walls. Walls come and go. You’d like for the church to help you out with some everyday things, right? One has to live on something, that’s clear. But how can the church help you if it can’t help itself? People say, ‘The Lord will provide!’ The Lord provides, but he can’t provide more than the people take. That’s how it is, you poor woman. I can’t chase you from the doorstep, but to tell the truth, I don’t know how I could help you. Here, you can have the leftovers from lunch. You can eat just as we do! No more, no less. But I’m afraid that even that won’t be enough. You have to help that unfortunate friend of yours. He’s yours, although you live together, God forgive me, like animals. Go at least to the city hall and get married, if you won’t do it before the Lord. Look, maybe you could clean stairs at the seminary. I can ask, if you don’t consider it beneath you to do that. But no work should be beneath a child of God. You didn’t tell me: have you received any of the holy sacraments? Oh, Mary in Heaven, what kind of world do we live in? Okay, I’ll ask around about work.”

  Father Antun asked around, which Dijana would never forget. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that she remembered him with gratitude. She cleaned stairs every other day, until the end of her stay in Sarajevo. They paid her little, much less than they’d have paid a full-time cleaning lady, but at least they paid her on time; every other Friday at five in the afternoon she would knock on the door of the office of the lay priest Branko Zidarić, the business manager and director of the seminary, and he would give her an envelope with money in it, always sending her off with the same words: “May the Lord help you, and don’t spend too much!”

  Maybe finding help in a church when there was none else around would have awakened faith in some people, but in Dijana’s case something like that wasn’t possible. She passed by crucifixes, religious paintings and chapels, young seminary students with fervent eyes, and professors in habits who watched her go with fatherly smiles with the same indifference with which she’d listened to Father Antun’s words of condescension and scorn.

  She was only grateful to the contorted Christ with the blue eyes, which had given her the idea that had saved her and which would be the main character in her nightmares after she left the city. She would dream of it taking her back to Sarajevo without her being able to resist.

  What it was that Colonel Nikola Radonjić actually investigated, with whom he spoke, and who told him that Dijana had fled to Sarajevo would remain a secret of his detective work (Vid certainly hadn’t because he didn’t even go to his place), but the day after Gabriel was released from prison the Colonel appeared in Sarajevo. He rented a room in the Hotel Europe, told the receptionist that he was staying for three days and not to tell anyone who tried to phone him or otherwise get a hold of him that he’d stayed there. The receptionist, Halid Lizdo, thought these demands to be suspicious, of course. He called whomever he was supposed to call, but they told him, probably after checking, to do what the Colonel ordered. Lizdo concluded that some bigwig was in room 112 and told the cleaning ladies to be doubly careful around that guest. If in other rooms there were two towels each, in room 112 there should be four; if they replaced bars of soap every two days, in that room they were to do it every day; and if they cleaned other rooms only in the morning, this one needed to be cleaned in the morning and in the evening. Just as they did for guests sent by the Central Committee and the presidency.

  But instead of it pleasing the Colonel, he was suspicious when he returned in the evening to find his bed made. Who knows whom he suspected and of what and to whom he was indebted, but that was enough for him to change his plans. So instead of taking care of the case of Dijana Delavale and her lover in three days, he decided to do it immediately. It was past midnight when he found the door to Gabriel’s house. He banged on it resolutely like the police and yelled, “Open up! Police!”

  Gabriel jumped out of bed, stopped in the doorway, and shook as if he were having an epileptic seizure. Thin as he was, weighing forty pounds less than he had when he went into prison—and even then he hadn’t been fat—he looked like a mental patient who was being taken away for electroshock treatment. This was too much for Dijana: she wasn’t going to let them take him away from her even if they killed her or sent both of them to do hard labor.

  “Open up or we’ll knock down the door!” the Colonel bawled.

  She ran into the kitchen and grabbed a rusty butcher’s knife that was hanging under the cupboard and probably hadn’t been touched since the time of the Munich Agreement.

  “Dijana, don’t! Please!” Gabriel pleaded, shaking.

  The Colonel slammed into the door, and pieces of plaster fell from above the doorframe. She stood by the door and raised the butcher’s knife, determined to split the head of whoever came through the doorway. It was probably that image, which promised something worse than the worst imaginable, that made Gabriel come to, clear his head, run up to the door, take the butcher’s knife away from Dijana, and open the door.

  “Oh, you see a Winnetou! Yeah, and whatcha gonna do with that tomahawk? Come at the people’s police?” the Colonel said in Montenegrin, probably banking on the general opinion that the Montenegrin police were the craziest ever.

  “What do you want from him?” Dijana yelled.

  “So the girl is leading the dance, huh? Ain’t that right, mister hero? Get some clothes on! Look at him, in pajamas like an old woman! . . .”

  “You’re not taking him anywhere!” said Dijana and stood in front of Gabriel.

  “Okay, fine. Then we can do it here,” said the Colonel and pulled
out a Colt.

  Dijana gaped in shock because this was the first time she’d seen a revolver; it seemed larger than in the movies, and it had never occurred to her that they might kill Gabriel. He dropped the butcher’s knife. Dijana began to cry, standing motionless half a yard away from the man with the cowboy pistol; she sobbed loudly and inconsolably, like Cinderella when she was left alone.

  “That’s more like it; now you’re acting like a real girl. Move it!” he said, forcing them into the living room and setting them down on the couch beside one another. He stopped and looked through the window, lost in thought:

  “What a pretty city; the man who’s seen it is lucky. Why would you want to bring down socialism in a town like this? If you tried to do it in Nikšić, I’d understand! Maybe I’d give you a hand, help you out like when one neighbor helps the other slaughter sheep. But trying to bring down socialism here?! Damn, that’s too much. In Nikšić you’d get a bullet in the forehead and that’s it, but in Bosnia the people are different. Soft. So they have to call me to finish the job with guys like you.”

  Gabriel felt himself getting warm around his groin, and the warmth spread and went down, until he felt that where he was sitting was wet. Dijana sobbed and tried to say something, but nothing came out of her mouth.

  “Want this tablet?” the Colonel asked, pulling a vial out of his pocket, “to take yourself? You won’t suffer. Ten minutes and your heart stops. Or I can shoot you. You got a toilet here, some kind of bathtub? It’s best there. I don’t like to soil people’s homes. I only shoot people in the head, and the brains and blood won’t come out even with a month of cleaning, and I can see that your girl isn’t much for work; she’d just wail and snivel. That’s why I like to do it in the tub. You sit down like you’re going to take a bath, close your eyes. and that’s it. It’s easier than getting circumcised when you’re a Muslim! Let’s get it over with, so I can get home for dinner! And your girl here surely has work to do, so let’s not hold her up,” he said, poking Gabriel in the shoulder with the Colt.