The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Then she thought a little and first crossed out the bit about sorrow in their hearts, and in place of the words about mourning she wrote, “He will be returned to the earth.” And then she deleted the name of her daughter. She took the piece of paper and the box with the laughing black woman and went off to a funeral home.

  Only when she’d left the house did she remember that she’d left Dijana. She stopped for a moment and then continued going down the stairs. That was the first time she had left Dijana alone at home. At first the undertakers didn’t want to accept the metal box, but she threatened to open it and spread the ashes on the floor and they could deal with that. She refused the idea of finding a nice urn in town, for example, one of those in an apothecary’s shop that contain ingredients for medicines.

  “No, I’ll bury him just like they sent him!” she said, rebuffing them, and the men in black didn’t think of giving her any more problems.

  The funeral didn’t last long; there were no eulogies or priests. Luka brought a wreath; the neighbor ladies peered into the open vault, trying to check the condition of great-grandfather Lovro, who had died in eighteen hundred something, and the other dead relatives that had followed him, but they couldn’t have seen much because it was dark inside the vault and there was no particular smell. It stank of stone and dampness, like the flooded cellars of houses destroyed in the war. The undertaker, dressed in black, brought the box of Ivo’s ashes covered with a black kerchief.

  “Get that goddamned kerchief out of here!” his widow shouted; “take it off, dammit!” She walked up and jerked the kerchief away, as in that magic trick with the rabbit and the hat. There were sighs of shock. Even Luka felt awkward, though he didn’t stand on graveside formalities and hated the kind of people who went to funerals. But it had never happened that someone had been buried in a coffee can.

  “She’s gone wacko!” said the old women in their headscarves as they left the cemetery. “Isn’t she afraid of God?” they said out loud when Regina could no longer hear them.

  “You picked a fine time to wet yourself, you little devil!” Regina yelled at Dijana and slapped her on the cheek. The child squealed, and she slapped her again.

  “What’s wrong with you, woman?” Luka asked. He ran up and tore the girl out of Regina’s arms. Finding herself in safe hands, Dijana began to wail at full throttle. Her uncle picked her up in his arms and said, “Your uncle will give you some sugar,” trying to comfort the girl and to catch up with Regina, who was hastening furiously onward. He hustled after her all the way home, and the more he quickened his pace, the more she hurried on, keeping three or four meters ahead of him.

  She never told Luka the whole truth about why she’d acted as she did, and Luka didn’t ask too many questions. His sister was seventeen years older than he was. She’d behaved as a mother figure toward little Luka since he’d been young; in fact she’d largely replaced his mother after she died of heart trouble in 1927. She rarely shouted at him and didn’t get upset at his whims but would defend him in front of his older brothers, who’d already wanted to kick him out of the house when he was thirteen because he’d caused a scandal with the British consul at the Pile gates, on account of which the police had been called to their house.

  Luka thought it strange that Regina lost her temper, that she hit her child for no reason and didn’t shed a tear for Ivo. He thought there must be something behind this, that she would explain it to him and tell him what he ought to know.

  “He had some whore in Chicago,” she said that same evening.

  “Are you sure?” he asked instead of saying that every or almost every sailor had a woman somewhere and that she shouldn’t get upset about it.

  Regina just looked at him and didn’t answer. Dijana was sitting on the potty next to the sink and didn’t dare say that she didn’t need to pee or poop. She didn’t say anything and looked a little at her mother and a little at her uncle, until Luka finally realized that she’d been sitting on the potty for more than an hour and hadn’t let out a peep. He clapped his hands and asked:

  “Are we done, Brother Socrates?” He grabbed Dijana and turned her upside down to inspect the situation. There was a completely regular and clear red circle on her bottom, the imprint of the edge of the potty.

  “Nothing happened?” he asked, acting strict, smelling her bottom. She laughed like crazy and was never afraid again.

  Luka asked, “Are we done, Brother Socrates?” five or six times a day. He wiped Dijana’s bottom, changed her diaper when she got to playing and wet herself, and took her along into town, from café to café. And she would sit peacefully for hours while her uncle played cards. That was the rule. When uncle played cards, you had to be quiet and calm. So that no other uncles would chase them away.

  “Sit still and think about me getting the best cards. If you think about it hard enough, I’ll get them,” he told her, and she would think as hard as she could. Although uncle hadn’t said exactly how it worked, she worked out the best combinations of aunts, kings, and cops. And she always kept an ace in her heart because that was the card that her uncle liked best.

  Although the image in Dijana’s head didn’t correspond to what Luka had in his hands (because if it had, Luka would have lost money), he began a long winning streak that would last until Dijana started going to school.

  At first he thought it was luck, but he soon came to believe in Dijana’s supernatural abilities. Or he believed that the child belonged to him and that he belonged to her according to some higher law of the universe. Luka wasn’t just Dijana’s uncle, nor was she just some little niece of his. Their being together logically produced his success at gambling. While she sat in the corner, crossed her fingers, frowned, and thought hard, he won. And whenever she stayed at home because she’d caught a cold or her mother objected to his taking her out all the time, his card game went nowhere and he would start losing.

  Soon others linked her presence with his luck, and they told him not to bring the girl any more. Who ever heard of someone bringing a child to a card game?! He asked them what kind of men and gamblers were afraid of a four-year-old girl. If she could beat them, then they should forget cards and grab their hoes. In the end it was decided that Dijana could be present but not always. She could come only during the week; on the weekends they would play alone.

  Thus, just like a real working man, Luka earned money on the weekdays, and on the weekends he spent what he’d earned or didn’t go play cards at all but would go out on adventures with his niece. They would get into a rowboat and row—instead of an oar, she would slap the water with a big cooking spoon—to one of the little islands and play Robinson Crusoe all day long. He would catch fish on a line, light a fire by striking flint on the rocks, and they would cook the fish they’d caught and imagine how many years they’d been there and when it was that they’d seen a ship in the distance the last time. They’d usually been there for more than twenty years and seen a ship seven years before. Dijana was thrilled that in this game there was no one else in the world except them, and Luka wasn’t unhappy to pretend that he was left alone with that child and no longer had to deal with people, who’d been savages for too long already.

  They’d become savages not long after naked Mrs. Simpson and Edward had sunned themselves on their beaches, and he’d watched the princess, thinking how beautiful she was and how happy her queendom would be. That was the final scene of a romantic and joyful world, the one that had existed before the advent of talking movies. After Mrs. Simpson and Edward left for good, the noise of explosions began, spreading from city to city and country to country, and was followed by the rattle of daggers and knives. Italian soldiers marched through the city with plumes of rooster tail feathers on their helmets, men went to war, women baked flatbread for long trips, and it was shameful to remain outside that crazy bloodbath.

  For him, however, shame was more familiar and more preferable than living the life of the brave and those who were dying. He didn’t see any gr
eat politics behind what was happening or anything else that wouldn’t be clear to any sane person. He wasn’t interested in Germany, Croatia, or even the fight against fascism. Maybe he liked Stalin better than Hitler, and Churchill better than Mussolini, and maybe he cheered for Tito because his brother Bepo was in the partisans, but Luka was more concerned about convincing the city of his harmlessness. Playing the clown and the fool, the one who wasn’t the rival of any man and didn’t seek love from any woman, he was actually asking to be excepted from everything that was the lot of others by their hearts or through misfortune. However, he didn’t lose his awareness of what he was doing and how hard it was to turn a whole city to his advantage and always keep it convinced of that. Nothing changed, not even with the end of the war because then the champions and the avengers came, whom he also had to convince that he wasn’t standing in their way and wasn’t worthy of their ire. And in 1947 and the following years that ire was terrible and at times seemed more terrible than the war.

  If an adult could believe in it, and Luka believed in it without any problem, the Robinson Crusoe game was one of the best ways to get a respite from every ire.

  Besides playing cards and Robinson Crusoe, they had one more adventure. Every month they went to Kuna, to the Delavale summer home. He pruned the grapevines or harvested grapes or would negotiate the olive harvest in the village. After Ivo died and the summer home was passed on to Regina, Luka toyed with the idea of moving to Kuna, weeding the grapevines, planting olive trees, and living his life like that. But that idea didn’t hold him for long. He didn’t have the will or intelligence for serious plans and would only make them until they left the kingdom of his imagination, after which he left them to take their own paths, farther and farther away from him. Because who would dig vineyards their whole life long, plant olive trees, and worry about peronospores, siroccos, and boras, about storms and thunderstorms and bouts of the flu that would come as soon as one had to dig or prune something? When a man plans like that, then he’s figuring on a wife and children, and a wife and children would have been another source of worry for him, complications and still more serious plans in which there was no happiness. In the twenty-fifth year of his life he believed that he would never have children and was fairly certain that he wouldn’t get married. Until two or three years before it had really bothered him that he’d never slept with a woman and all those who’d gone with him to school had, or at least said they had. If there had been any prostitutes left in the city, he would have certainly collected his money and gone off to one of them to open his eyes, as one used to say then. But this was in 1944 and 1945, and the prostitutes had fled in the face of all the dying and creating of states. Then his desire passed, and he realized that entry into the world of men would do him more harm than good. Sex and love between men and women were like opium—once you tried it, you had to have it for the rest of your life. And nothing that obliges a man in such a way can be pleasure. When he arrived with Dijana at the Delavale summer home, he again chose games instead of life. He felt like a rich drunk and an heir to large properties, and so he communicated with the village, paid for their wine in the village tavern, and offered to let them harvest his olive grove so cheaply that in the end they believed that he had money to burn. It suited him that they thought this and treated Dijana like a princess.

  “She’s not a child, you uneducated lout; she’s a lady!” he yelled at the tavern keeper, who’d said that he didn’t have any drinks for children. “Bring her a glass of water! The main distinction between you and her is that the lady knows that water is the most healthy drink on earth.”

  The tavern keeper waddled off to the kitchen while exclamation points swarmed over his head as in Disney’s Mickey Mouse comic strip. He neither knew what the word “distinction” meant, nor did he understand why water should be the most healthy drink in the world, but the comment that he was “uneducated” worried him. He knew what that word meant, but no one had ever used it to describe him. That word was spoken on the radio, in tales of murderers and policemen broadcast from Belgrade. And he would hear it from ministers who held speeches at the ceremonial openings of work actions. “Our youth didn’t even lack education, not even when they charged at enemy bunkers!” Comrade Boris Kidrič used to shout out. That was all the tavern keeper needed to conclude that this man had insulted him. He brought Luka his wine and Dijana her water and went back to the kitchen to get away from them. The world had been turned on its head; there could be no doubt about that, but he was in a bind about what that man was to that girl. They certainly weren’t father and daughter; he would probably be something to her that there hadn’t been before. He would ask around in the village.

  “What are you looking at?” he yelled at old Tera, who was peeling potatoes, grabbed his hat, and went out through the back door.

  “Do you know that your daddy’s dead?” Luka asked the girl.

  “I know,” she said, looking somewhere under the table.

  “And do you know what ‘dead’ means?” he asked.

  “He won’t be coming back, and mommy is mad at me,” she answered.

  “She isn’t mad; why would she be mad?”

  “Oh, yes she is; I know.”

  “She’s not mad; she’s just having a hard time.”

  Dijana shrugged her shoulders. It amounted to the same thing: mother was mad or she was having a hard time. There wasn’t any difference between those two things.

  “I’m having a good time,” she said and laughed.

  “And I’m having a good time, too,” her uncle said and slammed his glass on the wooden table. “We’ve got it good!”

  “Will I always have it good?” the girl asked insistently.

  “Only as good as good is good! Whoever’s got it good today will always have it good. That’s the rule, and that’s what was decided in Yalta!”

  “And what’s Yalta?” she asked.

  “Well, you see, that’s another story, and I don’t think this is the time,” he said and swatted with his hand as if trying to get rid of bees, knowing that this would just lead her to more questions.

  “Tell me, tell me; what’s Yalta?” she begged.

  “But only if you listen closely and remember everything, so you can tell if someone asks you,” he said, feigning a strict tone.

  “I’ll listen. I’ll listen to the whole thing,” she said, fidgeting in her chair like Lindbergh before takeoff.

  “It’s like this,” he began. “Yalta was a cellar, or rather a stable where three uncles, or rather hooligans, met.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” she interrupted. “Don’t say ‘or rather.’ What are hooligans?”

  “Well, this is going to be hard without ‘or rather.’ But let’s try. The three of them got together in that stable, and each one had a magic stone. Those were stones that looked like ordinary stones but weren’t ordinary because you could see through them like glass, but they weren’t glass but stones. Don’t ask anything else about the stones because I don’t know anything else myself. If I knew, I’d find one myself. You can do everything with one of those stones. You can decide how long the night will last, and how long the day will last, whether people will walk on their hands or on their legs, and whether houses will sprout up from their roofs or their foundations. Well, there was a problem because each one of those three men had one of the stones, and they had to decide how things were going to be. It wouldn’t work if one of them decided the day would be sixteen hours long and the other decided it would be only five hours long and the third one said there wouldn’t be any day at all. People had to know how things were going to be and what to expect,” he explained.

  Dijana frowned. She didn’t understand why one of the uncles would want the day to last sixteen hours and the other for it to last only five hours. “But were their magic stones exactly the same?” she asked.

  “I have to say that they were. Except they were slightly different colors, but everything else was just the same,” Luk
a said.

  “And each was as powerful as the others?” she asked.

  “Right! That was what was worst; all three stones were equally powerful. Well, the three of them sat down at that Yalta and didn’t come out for three days and three nights.”

  “And how long did those three days and three nights last?” Dijana asked, whereupon he got confused. He didn’t know what to tell her: which one of the uncles had decided how long the days and nights in Yalta would be?

  “That’s a very good question, a good question,” he said, trying to extricate himself, “but they shut themselves up in Yalta so they wouldn’t see when it was day and when it was night but just let the sun go up and go down whenever it wanted until the three stones made an agreement. And they decided that one of the stones would tell the other two, ‘You are the prettiest,’ and the other one would say, ‘You are the smartest,’ and the third would say, ‘You are the strongest.’ Since there were three of them and each one was going to say something to the other two, no one knew any more which one was the prettiest, the smartest, or the strongest. So they decided to divide the world up into three equal parts, and each would decide everything in its part. That’s why it’s nighttime in America when it’s day over here, and that’s why some people are rich and others are poor. Those three men agreed on all of it in Yalta,” he said, disappointed that his fable hadn’t come off.

  It had simply slipped away from him at one moment and turned into something that he hadn’t wanted to tell her and didn’t understand himself.

  “Did they decide in Yalta that mother would be angry and have it bad?” Dijana asked just when the tavern keeper appeared in the doorway.

  He watched them with scorn in the corners of his mouth and nodded. “I know everything,” he said. “Now I understand everything! I understand everything!” he repeated and wiped unseen dust off the tables with a rag.