“You’re not the police,” said Dijana.
“As if it matters. You can check who I am when I’m finished,” the Colonel explained.
“Please don’t kill him,” she said, folding her hands; “he’s not what you think he is . . .”
“Girl, I don’t think; I do. If I’d thought in my life, I’d never have achieved what I have.”
“Don’t kill him!”
“Why? Try and tell me why! You left your old mother to die from worry and sorrow and ran off with this enemy of the people. You see, girl, I’d kill him even if it weren’t my job. Because my stupid head can’t fathom how somebody can do what you’ve done to your mother.”
“I didn’t want to . . .”
“Didn’t want to what, you harbor whore?!” the Colonel roared so loud that the house shook.
“Don’t kill him,” she begged.
“Now you listen to me,” the Colonel said softly, walking from one end of the room to another; “you’ve got twenty-four hours to get out of Sarajevo. Pack your crap and go back to where you came from. I can see whether there’s any chance of us sparing this guy’s life, but I won’t guarantee anything! But if you don’t do what I say and I find you here tomorrow, I’ll blow his brains out on the spot and you’ll go off to hard labor. And you’ll be older than your old lady when you get out. And don’t think of calling him on the phone because we’ll know about it! Or, God forbid, to try to meet him anywhere! Don’t come back to Sarajevo, and he won’t be going to the seaside soon. There you have it, girl; that’s what I can offer you now, and the Federal Secretariat will decide what to do with you, boy.”
It was noon, a cool day in May, when Dijana left for home from the same platform where she’d arrived nine months before, with the same suitcase and five bags. She left Gabriel without a kiss, convinced that this was all some kind of lie, that someone was dreaming all of this, and she was just a character in someone’s nightmare.
She never saw him again, nor did she ever ask anyone about him, and she passed through Sarajevo only once more, in a train that was headed for Belgrade. She knew that they hadn’t killed Gabriel, and with time she realized that that guy who’d separated them had done her a favor, no matter who he was or how crazy.
On the twenty-first of February in 1975 Dijana would hold the Belgrade daily Politika, waiting on a young man with whom she’d run away in the Vuk’s Inn restaurant. But she would skip the page with the obituaries because she was still young enough not to read the names of the dead. She’d flip through Politika and wouldn’t see a familiar face, which she would doubtless have recognized. The caption under his photograph read as follows: “On the nineteenth of February the heroic heart of Colonel Nikola Radonjić, a recipient of the Partisan 1941 and Heroes of Socialist Labor decorations, stopped beating. He tragically died on assignment, and his friends and colleagues wish to express their admiration and praise for the man.” Dijana’s Belgrade episode was less important than that obituary and everything that had preceded it.
Every year, when autumn arrived, she left home, leaving her mother a note saying that she’d found the love of her life and would never be returning home. But she came back in three days or three months; the duration of the escape wasn’t important because Regina knew that Dijana always came back and that there was no need to get the Colonel and sell olive groves and vineyards. Eternal love was a calendrical phenomenon and lasted no longer than a season. That was in the Delavale lineage, and it’s no different anywhere where there are men and women who fall fatally in love.
At the swimming pool by the bus station the first bathers exposed their pale winter skin to the sun. In Sarajevo, as soon as spring arrives women bring their carpets outside, spread them out on the asphalt, kneel, and scrub the accumulated filth. If a car comes along, they run onto the sidewalk and curse the driver who ruined their efforts. Dijana saw no difference between those women and the people at the swimming pool. All of them laid out what was most valuable to them when the sun warmed up, and the cycles of nature began anew. Hers consisted in returning to what she couldn’t escape from, no matter how far and long she ran. In her first attempt there had still been faith and hope, or she still simply hadn’t known what she would feel up to the time her mother died. A power stronger than love was needed to tear out the roots that held her to Regina. And she didn’t have that strength within her, nor did she know where to find it beyond her.
Regina met her daughter’s return feigning complete indifference. She helped Dijana carry her things inside; babbled about how everything in the house had broken, burst, and fallen apart since she’d left; showed her the new washing machine, which, unlike the old one, did everything itself and you didn’t have to start it again every half hour. Naturally, she didn’t tell her that she’d bought it because the Colonel had lowered the price of his investigation by two hundred thousand dinars. She didn’t mention that she’d sold the Delavale villa. But not because she wanted to hide it. The washing machine was more important. In this Regina didn’t differ from the majority of Yugoslav women who thought that the change from semi-automatic washing machines to those that had a built-in programmer was the greatest social advance since the Second World War.
Dijana would discover on her own that there was no longer a Delavale villa, two months later, when she was traveling with Vid around Pelješac, where he was negotiating the purchase of the autumn harvest for a vintner in Cavtat, and when in the evening they went to spend the night in the family vacation home and saw that the lock had been changed and the stone inscription had been chiseled away.
Regina didn’t ask her daughter a single question about what she’d done or where she’d been for nine months, nor did Dijana want to talk about it. It seemed suspicious to her that her mother knew that Sarajevo was involved. She spoke of the time before and after her return from Sarajevo. But since her suspicion didn’t manage to lead anywhere and Dijana didn’t know how to act on it, it was never a flash point between them. Even if she suspected that Regina had played a role in the story, which was really hard to believe, she had no reason to occupy herself with that, especially in the first two or three days after she returned, while her mother was still quite discreet and, counter to her nature, didn’t poke her nose into her life or make comments when a man greeted her on the street.
Regina’s behavior would change suddenly and return to its old ways after the death of Uncle Luka, her youngest and last living brother, who had come back from Trieste a week after Dijana, where he’d lived for the last sixteen years, to die in his country and home city. They carried him on a stretcher from the ambulance and into the house. A nurse came with him, an Italian named Patricia. They laid him down in the guest room, on a bed on which no one had slept in years and which had never seen a guest and was only called the guest bed by habit. Luka laughed and joked about his illness. Regina hugged him and skipped all around, younger and prettier than Dijana could remember her.
For the first time in a long time she didn’t hide from her mother in the house but sat by the side of Uncle Luka’s bed and enjoyed herself. This was how she was on that Saturday evening. Had the sourest grumps and the most miserable wretch alive found themselves in the Delavale house, they would have split their sides laughing with that mother, daughter, and Trieste nurse by the side of a man who’d seemingly lived his whole life only for his final day, when he would make the whole world laugh. Regina and Dijana went to bed at about midnight, and with the first light Uncle Luka was dead.
“All the city’s whores came to his funeral,” said Regina, “as if he too were a Delavale! And maybe he was; the devil knows who sent the lot of you out into the world.”
It was then that Dijana knew that peace in the house had come to an end. All it took was for something else to happen that was more important than her return. That happened to be Luka’s death. Though it was true that whores had come to his funeral and that they’d wept and covered the grave of his cheerful soul with flowers. That didn’t su
rprise anyone, not even the priest who conducted the service saw anything that would disturb the solemn moment when Luka passed from earthly to eternal life:
“The Lord has a scale with which he weighs all the sins of the deceased, and we can only send our brother Luka Sikirić to him. He made our time in this valley of sorrow more cheerful, and there isn’t a one among us whom he didn’t make laugh at least once, by pure cheer and without malice.”
X
On the fifth of March, 1953, the strongest bora of that winter began to blow. Sometime around ten in the morning it came out of nowhere and caught everyone off guard. It blew away sheets that were hung to dry in front of houses, carried them over rooftops, down streets, and through squares. It cast them far out over the sea, spun them high into the air, as if it weren’t a bora but some unknown weather coming from the north and east that had never blown there before to uproot and smash everything in its path. Women came out of their houses and ran through the city like lunatics, trying to catch their sheets, but they hardly got a one. And if they did, the bora tore it out of the woman’s hands, carried it upward to the sky, and hurled it out over the sea. Had any of the women stubbornly held on to their sheets, it would have carried them up into the sky as well. It was fortunate that this wasn’t a city like those in eastern Poland or Russia and that the people, no matter how crazy, still clung to the land because otherwise the March bora would have hurled them into the sky in all directions so that not even God would have been able to sort them out according to their faith or lack of it or the gravity of their sins. They ran into their houses and waited between stone walls for the storm to pass.
Regina was home alone. She’d packed Dijana off to school early that morning, when no one knew yet what kind of storm was approaching. Dijana went off in light clothing, dressed for the way the weather had been the day before. Regina told her to take her raincoat just in case, but she didn’t want to. The other kids laughed at her, told her that her raincoat had been her dead father’s, which was true, but Regina had worked her hands raw patching and shortening it. It was true that it was a little wide for her and she had to turn the sleeves up three times, but Regina didn’t want to take it in any more or shorten the sleeves, as if it weren’t a raincoat but a ball dress and as if it weren’t for a child but a bride! But no! Dijana said the raincoat was too wide! Other kids laughed at her! As if it mattered that they laughed. You laugh at them, her mother told her a hundred times, whereupon the little girl would start pounding the table with her hands, shouting, and pulling out her hair.
“Don’t pull out your hair,” she said. “Don’t pull out your hair,” she said again. “Don’t pull out your hair; I’m telling you for the last time,” she told Dijana after she had stubbornly refused to wear the raincoat all winter. She wouldn’t put it on even when it was raining, or she would take it off as soon as she went outside and throw it over the wall into the garden. And Regina would spank her when she came home from school with a cold and a fever. One day she’d get pneumonia. Who would take her to the doctor then, fret over her at night because there was no medicine in the city and people died from pneumonia more than from anything else?
But nothing helped—neither gentle words nor spankings, not even pointing out that she’d spent half the school year sick in bed. She could have still somehow dealt with that, but whenever the girl started pulling out her hair and whole tufts flew around the kitchen, Regina felt she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The child was doing what grown women did when they got into swearing matches with their husbands, who then threw them out of the house and they ran around their yards like lunatics, pulling out their hair. What they really wanted to do was kill themselves, but they didn’t know how or what to do it with, and their fear exceeded their hysteria. Or what prostitutes did when sailors ran off without having paid—they pulled their hair out in front of the whole world, as if everyone should rise up because prostitutes hadn’t been paid for fucking, as if their cunts were a public good that everyone should be concerned about like highways, factories, or municipal buildings. As if the party had expropriated and nationalized their cunts and everyone who wasn’t an enemy of communism had to care whether English sailors had paid for fucking our prostitutes! That’s exactly how Dijana would pull out her hair when her mother ordered her to put on the raincoat and told her that if someone laughed at her she should laugh back at them.
“Don’t pull out your hair; I’m telling you for the last time!” she said after the girl looked her directly in the eye, grabbed a lock with her right hand, and tore it out with one pull, as if Lucifer himself were giving her strength.
Fine; Regina responded calmly and went down to the cellar. Among Ivo’s tools that lay strewn about, tangled long lines and large fishing rods for scabbard fish, she found a tin of American glue. Ivo had brought it from one of his last prewar sea voyages. That glue was amazing; they’d never seen anything like it. You didn’t need pegs and jugs because that glue glued everything. She opened the tin with a mason’s trowel and took out a glob of the syrupy yellow substance with it. It dribbled down after her as she went through the house, but Regina couldn’t have cared less. She’d decided to teach that child a lesson, no matter what the price. If she wasn’t going to live honestly, better not live at all.
In the meantime Dijana had already calmed down; she was rummaging through her school bag, thinking that her mother had given up and gone about her business and that she was now free to go to school without the raincoat.
At the last moment she saw Regina cocking her arm back and tried to move away and was surprised when it wasn’t her hand that hit her head but something soft and moist.
“Now pull your hair, you animal!” her mother yelled.
Dijana grabbed her head, and her hand stuck to it. In a moment she was seized by a terrible fear and reflexively reached up with her other hand, which also got stuck.
Regina led her down the street with her hands on her head like a prisoner of war. Actually she carried her by the collar more than Dijana walked by herself. Her daughter didn’t know what she’d done and screamed in a voice that was more animal than human. She felt her palms fusing to her head. She was turning into a powerless monster with no will or strength of its own, left completely to Regina’s mercy. It seemed her hands weren’t glued to her head but had grown out of it and into her shoulders. Everything had been inverted, changed into a horror worse than any nightmare, and she didn’t know how or why or what power there was in her mother that could reshape her and turn her into something no one had ever seen before.
“Oh, Mary, Mother of God, what’s this?!” šime the barber asked and folded his hands when Regina carried Dijana into his shop.
“She stuck her head where it doesn’t belong, that’s what,” answered her mother calmly. The barber approached Dijana cautiously, as if he were afraid she would bite him, and looked at her from all sides, taking care not to touch her.
“And now you’ve brought her to me, huh? This isn’t my line. I cut people’s hair and shave them; I don’t know what to do about this,” he said, stalling and assuming an affectation.
From one of the chairs the school principal, Kosta Najdanović, whose face was soaped for shaving, watched in amazement. He was one of those people whom years of experience with children in the city had taught not to be surprised at anything. Had people started walking on the surface of the sea, had soldiers and policemen grown wings on their backs, and had children started riding to school on hogs, Principal Najdanović wouldn’t have been surprised in the least. Or at least he would have pretended he weren’t, in the belief that it was the only way to preserve his authority among the schoolchildren and their parents. But when he saw Dijana with her hands on her head, crying and anguished, not even he could pretend that he was witnessing something that perhaps didn’t fit in with a healthy upbringing and good behavior but wasn’t unknown to him. At first he didn’t recognize the pupil from his school.
“šime, for God’s
sake, help the child. I’ll shave myself,” said Kosta Najdanović, pulling himself together. He picked up the razor and began shaving himself. He was in a hurry to get to the school because there was going to be a session of the teacher’s council on the occasion of the departure of the school’s relay team, which as a part of the Youth Relay would present a baton to Tito on his birthday. Kosta, like any old man, didn’t like to be late and was a little afraid that he might get the blame if the relay didn’t go as planned. He’d moved to the city from Nevesinje and was rather suspect, like every newcomer.
And while he shaved quickly, passing around his nose and ears, and while he ran out of the shop not forgetting to pay, if only for the soaping since he’d done the shaving himself, the barber tried to unstick Dijana’s hands with rubbing alcohol. But not only did it not work, but the skin on her head began to burn, and she droned like a ship’s horn when it goes into a harbor. She was already hoarse, but her wailing could be heard through the walls, and people from outside started coming inside the shop to see what was going on. When someone came in, they would say, “Goodness gracious!” or “Poor child; what do you think you’re doing to her?!” Then they would turn around and walk out.
This frustrated Regina so much that she tried to get šime to close and lock the shop, which was the furthest thing from his mind. Because how can you close a city barbershop in the middle of the day without its causing a scene or making people angry so that they go off to your competition? He’d already been having big problems since that ass-kissing Hurem from Trebinje had opened up a third barber shop in the city, even though šime’s and Andrija’s shops were more than plenty, and the city had never had three barber shops in the thousand years of its history.
The Walnut Mansion Page 20
