She knew: connections were bad, stamps were expensive, letters didn’t arrive, and ships carrying the mail sank in naval battles and storms.
But other women’s husbands got in touch with them while at sea. If he’d sent word to her just once, she would have known that the Montenegrin was lying and would have crammed that tin box down over his ears because her Ivo had written that he was alive and well, and it couldn’t be that he’d just up and died.
And maybe Ivo had written her ten times, sent packages and messages with people, but as chance had it nothing had arrived? Maybe he was now worrying about her just like she was worrying about him, anxious about whether she was alive and well? And if not her, then the child. Every father wondered at least ten times a day how his children were. If terrible images flashed before a mother’s eyes and she ran into the room to see whether her child was sleeping or dead, what must it have been like for a father who hadn’t seen his child for so long? It was much harder for Ivo than for her.
Nausea rose up from her stomach. Sorrow would overcome her, and she would cry, wonder what had happened to him, believe in the truth of the tin box under the sink, and bid farewell to her love, without whom life had no meaning. Nights passed like this, and that was the reason, when the head of the post office came up to her, why it seemed that time wouldn’t wash away the Montenegrin sailor’s lie.
Vito, a postal clerk, tried at first to get through to Radio Zagreb. He dialed the number on the black office telephone (which had been there ever since Habsburg times) at least twenty times, but all he heard in the receiver was silence or noise and static in which it was impossible to make out a human voice. Then he tried to call Sarajevo, but no one in the radio station picked up. “Fucking Bosnia,” he mumbled and tried once more. Then he called Radio Belgrade. “You’ve got a connection,” he said and held out the receiver to Regina.
“Hello, hello, hello,” she shouted, though she could hear the female voice on the other end of the line clearly. But she didn’t know how to begin or what to say.
“My husband Ivo Delavale . . . ,” she tried to put a question together.
“According to information that we’ve received from Chicago, Comrade Ivo Delavale, formerly a sailor of the merchant marine of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, passed away on the first of January in that city. His body was cremated, and the ashes were released to an American citizen, Diana Vichedemonni, who paid for all expenses,” the female voice recited. “Please accept our condolences. Goodbye!” the voice said, and the connection went dead.
Regina stood with the receiver in her hand and nodded, repeating, “Yes, yes, yes . . .” long after the woman on the other end had hung up. “Thank you and goodbye,” she said when there was no longer any doubt in her mind.
Vito, the post office clerk, waited, curious to see what would happen—when Ivo’s widow would start crying and wailing, because that was what happened whenever a wife called to inquire about her husband. The times were such that all people received were telegrams of death. However, she smiled, so Ivo must not have been dead.
“How much do I owe?” she asked.
“Good news is on me,” he said and pushed the money back across the counter. “If there were more such news, I’d pay for all of it out of my pocket,” he said, refusing to give in when she still tried to pay.
“Oh, how lucky you are,” he thought as she went out. “You have no idea how lucky you are. It’s only in misfortune that a man knows how good or bad he’s got it and never any time else.” Vito Anaf looked at his telephone, and he was glad for that woman.
But she’d done everything in her power to hold back her tears and keep her face from betraying any burden or anguish, convinced as she was that the postal clerk would take pleasure from the truth: that Ivo was dead and that the Belgrade woman had hung up before she’d managed to ask anything . . . Everyone enjoys things like that, even when they pretend they’re sorry, even if they’re ready to help you.
When she got outside, her mind focused on something that had overshadowed all her reasons for sorrow and despair in a split second: who was that woman who had “paid all expenses”? It was hardly possible that she was a good soul, a rich woman who saw those who had no one of their own in America into the other world. But she might have believed that, more from a desire for belief and love that was more important than truth, if only that woman’s name hadn’t been Diana! If the Belgrade lady had given some other name, if the stenographer in Radio Belgrade had made a mistake, or if the connection had been worse and if Regina had heard something else instead of Diana, her life would again have taken a different course. She would have worn black for Ivo her whole life; she would have kept the photograph of him in his royal sailor’s uniform on her nightstand. She wouldn’t have lived to ninety-seven but would have died when her time came, reconciled with her world and her fate. No great rage at life would have been born inside her that wouldn’t let her heart stop beating. All her tenderness and fear turned into rage like wine turning into vinegar.
As she was walking home, she was trying to think up a way to get to Diana Vichedemonni and to answer the question of what that woman was to Ivo. Although she was already sure she knew the answer. When Ivo had burst into their house that night a month before she gave birth, she had been terrified to see him because the city was covered in wanted posters with his name on them. And she thought he was safe and secure on Vis, in England, or wherever Tito’s sailors were.
“Are you thinking about this child at all?” she asked, rebuking him as the sleep left her eyes.
“We won’t see each other for a long time,” he said and lay down next to her though he was fully dressed; he hugged her from behind and caressed her belly with the palm of his hand.
“They’ll hammer nails under your fingernails if they catch you,” she said, nestling into his embrace.
“Stay like that,” he said, stopping her when she wanted to turn around to face him, “just this one more time,” he said, and she laughed.
He always said that same thing—“just this one more time, just this one more time”—regardless of whether they’d been together every night or he’d just come to her bed after having been away for months or years. Ivo liked being behind her, for her to snuggle against his body and to sleep like that or do what they did. Regina thought it strange, though she didn’t know how others embraced and slept. But it seemed to her that this was a little unbecoming and that women didn’t agree to do it even when their men wanted them to. And men thought up all sorts of things. Men were children and demons at the same time. A woman’s mind couldn’t imagine the things they would do in bed. Ivo had it easy with her, but others weren’t like that. Especially if they went to church every Sunday. No ass that rubbed against a male member and mounted it would sit down on a pew, just as knees that knelt before a man didn’t go down onto a prie-dieu. She didn’t like it the first time he had pushed her head down and told her to kneel down in front of the bed and kiss what lips were not supposed to kiss. Did women who went to Mass every Sunday do that?! Regina didn’t think so. And it bothered her because she knew where Ivo had learned what some women were ready to do and what kinds of depravities they could commit in bed. When he told her which harbors his ship had docked in, Regina’s eyes filled with a parade of all those cross-eyed, long-haired blondes and brunettes, women who looked like monkeys and had flat noses and big mouths and you didn’t know how men could find them attractive. She was sure that they spread their legs for Ivo, kneeled in front of him; that they wiggled their dark asses, invited him into them, and took him in as the ground takes in a mole. And what else would sailors do in a harbor besides go to the prostitutes? He never mentioned them, but did any man talk to his wife about such things? She wouldn’t have felt jealous, nor would she have been afraid of catching diseases that came into the city from distant shores and about which people spoke in low tones because every woman on the coast was afraid of her husband bringing her gonorrhea from Sin
gapore or the clap from black Africa. So they didn’t dare relish the misfortune of those sad women whose husbands, it was told, had brought them, as a gift from warm seas, the drip, which no doctor in Zagreb or Belgrade could cure. It was something else that tormented Regina: whenever Ivo came home from the sea, she was afraid of the first night that she would spend with him in bed. She was also afraid of the third and fourth because who knew when it would occur to him, or how long it would take him, to get the courage to ask her to do to him what the harbor prostitutes had taught him. Would she be able to bring herself to do it? Would she know, and would she even be able to understand what she was supposed to do? Those women studied day and night what sailors’ wives were supposed to know as soon as their husbands returned home from the sea. They had accumulated knowledge about everything a man could desire. Every desire of every last man in the world. And just as people are different, so their desires are also different. Black men don’t want the same thing as our men, Regina thought, just as there were certainly differences between Japanese and American men. Just as their eyes and faces were different, so they differed in those parts of their bodies that only prostitutes saw. She didn’t know anything about that; they knew everything. They also knew that men were insatiable children and wanted what wasn’t meant for them but for others. And then prostitutes gave it to them. Whatever they gave to them, the sailors expected it from their wives later.
No matter how much she scorned them or at least tried to think about them as the whole city did, she felt respect for the prostitutes. The respect one has for doctors, lawyers, and magicians, people who possess knowledge without which the world wouldn’t come to an end, but on which the world was based. And she was afraid whenever Ivo returned from the sea, wondering whether she would be able to do what they could.
When she first took him into her mouth and tasted the salty taste of what, as she believed, the majority of women didn’t know, she believed it to have been sent from Africa or Singapore. She tasted cinnamon and nutmeg, spices of decadence that had no place in any food.
That last night, while he embraced her and monitored the life of his child with his palm, Ivo didn’t ask for any of what the world had taught him. He lay there dressed, but she felt him through the silk and cotton. She would have felt him if there had been a stone wall between them and felt a powerful urge to take off her clothes and do whatever he wanted. Even what no whore could have showed him, and what a woman’s body wasn’t made for, and what would have killed her. Regina could have done everything and wanted everything, in love as she was that night with a love greater than the city and its walls, greater than its patron saint, greater than the war and all armies combined, greater than those who would have strung up her Ivo had they known he was there. She was so proud and felt herself to be the most fulfilled woman since the beginning of time because her husband had risked his life only to come to her and slip into her bed. If she’d doubted Ivo and if she’d thought what all women thought, that she wasn’t anything important in his life and that she was just there by accident—just as some other woman could have been there—now she was sure of the fact that she’d been chosen, sure of the fact that she’d been created for him and that he would never exchange her for another woman. She moved in his embrace, snuggled and wiggled like a whore, and grabbed at his hard member and was then ashamed because he asked:
“It’s going to be a girl, right?”
“That’s what the Gypsy women said,” she said and withdrew her hand quickly, hoping that she’d done it in time.
“Dijana,” he said, “That’s a nice name, Dijana.”
She didn’t answer him but was later deathly afraid that she would have a boy. That would have been a betrayal. Fortunately, she gave birth to none other than Dijana.
Every moment of that last night went through her mind as she returned home from the post office with the child in her arms. Shame and rage mingled, and she was disgusted by everything that she’d done for him in life. Everything that he had tricked her into doing. She felt his masculinity burning and blazing and wanting to make her as miserable as possible. She had a painful sore on the tip of her tongue. As if she’d stuffed herself eating green figs. Ivo’s taste was so near that it seemed to her that all she needed to do was hurry a little or shout his name and he would appear here before her, naked, sticky, and hairy. Ivo Delavale! She would ask him who Diana Vichedemonni was, and no matter what he answered, she would do the same thing: cut him up in pieces, burn his wounds with glowing hot pine logs, and drip hot sap down his scrotum and pour it into his anus, that February almond blossom that one was forbidden to touch. He hadn’t let her. And now she knew why! So she wouldn’t think that he’d been doing things not only with the prostitutes but also with his comrades on the ship!
He wouldn’t have been able to bear such suspicion. He would have fallen apart like an old marine engine, stopped being a man. If only once she’d recognized in him Geza Mađar, whose ear the local men had cut off, marking him so the whole city knew that it shouldn’t get close to him because someone had seen him under the big windlass in the shipyard while a black man, an American sailor, was thrusting his cock into his ass. They’d beaten the black man all morning until all that was left of him was a bloody mass and one wasn’t sure whether that was a man or someone had tossed a rotting bull’s carcass next to the rusted shipyard dumpsters in the mud, grease, and petroleum. But they didn’t beat Geza Mađar; rather they sent little Đivo, the five-year-old son of the barber Karlo Karakuna, to get his dad’s razor. The little boy didn’t know what they wanted the razor for, but he brought it.
“Uncle Mate asked for it,” he told his father, and he, foolish as he was, didn’t think at all about what a child might do with a razor but gave it to him and said, “tell Uncle Mate to bring it right back.” The boy was happy that he could be of use and believed that he was entering the world of adults then and there. He was a little confused when he saw Uncle Mate holding Uncle Geza Mađar by the legs and Ale Pjevač squeezing his head in a headlock.
“Hand it over, boy!” Ivanko said, who was a student in Zagreb and the best swimmer in the city; he took the razor, grabbed Geza’s ear, and cut it off in one stroke. Mađar started yelling, but Ivanko shoved the ear in his mouth:
“Eat it, you fucking faggot, eat it! If you don’t eat it, I’ll cut off your cock! You don’t need it anyway!”
And so Geza Mađar ate his own ear. Đivo watched all that and didn’t say a thing; he was frozen stiff with horror and watched what happens to people who aren’t like other people and what one was supposed to do to a man whose dreams and desires differed from those who were holding him.
He’d known that Geza Mađar wasn’t like other people in the city, but he wasn’t sure how he was different. Because he was fat and limp, because he laughed as he greeted everyone, because he talked with the women who sold fish at the market and walked across the square as if the stones were going to move out from under his feet and he had to watch how he was going to step on each one, or was he different from others only because he was all alone and there were so many of them?
Đivo wasn’t sure what was going on, but he asked Ivanko to give him the razor back. His dad would kill him if he didn’t bring it back.
“Spit on him, and I’ll give it to you!” the student said to him.
And so little Đivo spat on Geza Mađar while blood was gushing from his head.
“Tell him, ‘Fuck your shitty ass!’” the student said.
And Đivo said that too, just to get the razor back. It was bloody, and so he wiped it off on his underwear on the way, and then he remembered that his mother would bawl him out because of that and he wanted to wipe away the blood, but how can you wipe away a stain? In the end he cut his finger. A thin, bloody cut opened. It didn’t hurt, but as soon as he clenched his fist the cut widened, and the blood flowed out and it hurt. He would have cried, but he didn’t dare and didn’t have anyone to cry to. All that was important for him was to g
et the razor back.
Well, Ivo was afraid of Regina seeing in him something that was in Geza Mađar, and that was why he would jump away on the bed whenever she accidentally touched his almond blossom.
“What’s wrong? I didn’t mean to!” she would tell him, ashamed, so he wouldn’t think that she’d intentionally gone there with her fingers. And it wasn’t easy to tell where a man’s desire—one that the prostitutes had taught him—ended and where the forbidden parts of his body began. The parts that distinguished ordinary men from the one-eared freaks one finds in every Dalmatian town.
However, her almond blossom, as he called it when on one of those nights, all smooth, erect, and purple, he’d wanted to enter her there, wasn’t a forbidden spot. He decided that it wouldn’t be. But how could it be that one of those body parts that men and women shared was for him a bastion of his honor but for her was an almond blossom that was to be deflowered?
Everything that ran through Regina’s head, increasing her hatred with every step, had only to do with the nights that she’d spent with Ivo. The whole world fit into her bed, so she didn’t think about what happened between them during the day and outside the bedroom. Her reasons for revenge, which would become greater than any of the other reasons she had to live, originated in her sense that Ivo hadn’t been sleeping with her but with some other woman in his head, on account of whom he didn’t want for her to be facing him in bed. He paid money to prostitutes but just lied to her. Everything else was the same, and he didn’t see any difference between her and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of women whom he’d come to know in the harbors of the world. He’d loved only one and so had wanted to give his daughter her name.
She put Dijana down on the ottoman, grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil, and wrote: “It is with sorrow in our hearts that we announce that Ivo (Etorea) Delavale has died in America. He will be buried tomorrow, on Tuesday, in the family plot of Lovre Sikirić. He is mourned by his wife Regina and his daughter Dijana.”
The Walnut Mansion Page 30
