Mina was very disturbed and didn’t go into Petka’s apartment. For two full years. So she wouldn’t see that image or another even more terrible one.
And yet now she was unlocking the door while Rudolph Valentino stood behind her. Actually a perfect likeness of him; Mina wasn’t crazy enough to believe in priests’ tales! And how could Rudolph Valentino know their language? He was breathing behind her as if he were frightened too.
“He’s so handsome,” Mina whispered, covered her lips with her index finger, and pointed up at the ceiling.
“What’s up with you?” Regina asked, confused. Her friend had never spoken first, and it had never happened that she found her just sitting amid stockings that needed darning and doing nothing. She just widened her eyes like those lizards that in summertime slip into cold bedrooms from the terraced soil outside and watch people napping in the afternoon with the gaze of elderly people when they stop in front of something pretty lying in the dirt on a road.
“He’s so handsome, dearie! You can’t imagine,” Mina continued.
“Who are you talking about?” asked Regina. Maybe Mina had gone crazy from so much solitude. Her years weighed heavily on her, more years than you can imagine when you’re a girl and only twenty-six years old, and what’s more you know that even twenty-six is a lot, too old for everything you haven’t begun but should have. Especially for everything that’s come to pass since the day your childhood ended but couldn’t stir you to act. Mina was an old turtle; her little head smiled from inside its oversized armor, and you wondered whether that was a beak in the middle of her face or maybe still a nose. Did turtles have beaks or noses? No one knew because no one cared. Too old for anything, Mina was slowly crossing from one side to the other. Something on the other side frightened Regina that morning, and it would have frightened anyone who knew Mina and loved her. There weren’t very many such people, and Regina was first among them. That was what she thought. Or used to think. When Mina got old, Regina would take care of her and be the substitute for the man she’d never met. People got married mainly with thoughts of old age, their own infirmity, and death. They imagined that the other one would look after them, feed them chicken soup, and salt the earth that would cover them. No other reasons existed. That was the only one. And then you wondered whether it was selfish for every man and woman to think that they would die first. And either she or he would watch over you and rearrange the black clothes in the closets. The men’s black clothes were always under the women’s because that’s the way the world was. One always had to please the man. However, there was justice in the fact that it was often they who died first. No one could set that up any differently; death takes us away as it sees fit and not according to the choices of men. And people who die alone are the ones who lose out. Mina wasn’t going to die alone! Regina had decided that long ago, but now she was wavering. Mina was suffering from insanity, and her young friend didn’t want to have anything to do with insanity. Insanity was a disgrace, and no one lost his mind by accident. With every crazy person there is a tiny decision to become insane. No one dies of his own free will; people always lose their minds of their own volition. Regina was convinced of this in the early spring of 1931. And she often thought about it. About insanity and crazy people. About Bepo Ozretić, who mumbled old Turkish curses, recognized no one, didn’t turn around or twitch when children called out his name. And he smelled of urine and shit. It couldn’t be that he didn’t want that. He’d been the captain of a ship, had a family and a gray stone coat of arms over the entrance to his house. First he took a hammer and knocked off the coat of arms, and then he started smelling like urine and shit. That’s what he wanted, that’s what he deserved, and it made sense that his family and in-laws had abandoned him.
“Mina, you’re frightening me. Just so you know— you’re frightening me. So later you won’t say that you didn’t know what was happening to me,” she threatened, turning serious.
“You know when Rudolph Valentino kisses the desert rose, extends it to that girl with the small mouth, but the rose slips away from her and falls into the sea, and he looks at her and it’s the end? And we don’t know what happened further. Well, dearie, he’s upstairs now— I don’t mean in heaven but right there in dead Petka’s apartment. This morning I went to the post office; Vito was just looking for my packages when he appeared. He was carrying two suitcases and said he needed an apartment. And I don’t know what got into me. I said I had an empty apartment. I’m not crazy. Go up and take a look.”
Regina got up angrily; the chair scraped along the stone floor of the workshop. She started down the stairs, resolved not to show her face in Mina’s shop for at least five days after she saw that upstairs there wasn’t anyone or anything. But midway up the stairs she was seized with fear. What if there was someone up there after all? It couldn’t be! Mina was toying with her nerves and knew that Regina was sensitive to this kind of thing in particular. She would forgive anything but expected others to be serious when talking to her or at least be serious and silent. She reached out for the doorknob with her left, her weaker hand. The door of Petka’s apartment was unlocked. Mina had really lost her mind if she’d unlocked it after two years. There was no one in the living room. It smelled of dust. A graveyard of bees, ants, and other household pests. The armchairs were covered with white sheets; the carpet was half eaten by moths; they were the only thing to survive in graves. In the bedroom, above the double beds hung a photograph of her father and mother. The wooden floor creaked. In the kitchen there was dry, desert air; no one had turned on the faucet for a long time. So there wasn’t anyone; there was only one more door left. Just like in the tale about Bluebeard! Was it the seventh or ninth door? Here it was only the fourth or fifth, depending on where you started counting.
Regina grabbed the doorknob and gave the door a powerful push. She was angry and needed to show it— the door could slam against the wall for all she cared. And it did. And a completely naked man appeared in front of her. She didn’t see his face, only his eyes. And his eyes were huge and full of darkness.
She lowered her gaze in a flash, as if fearing that those eyes might cast a spell on her. And down below his thing hung, and then shot up twice. She’d only seen one in pictures, but in real life it looked different. Like a rubber children’s toy that moved and twisted all on its own. Like white blood sausage made from pig’s blood, fat and greasy, with dark blue, knotted veins and a big head.
She yelled, “Mina-a-a-a! Mina-a-a-a! Mary Mother of God!” and raced down the stairs.
Either by some miracle or because it’s normal, she didn’t tumble down the stairs as Mina had done when her sister had died, though she wasn’t any less frantic. Her heart was pounding like crazy, fear had completely consumed her, and she wished she could just hide in the cap of an acorn. It seemed to her that she couldn’t move her arms, though she was waving them like a windmill. It seemed to her that her legs wouldn’t move, though she ran downstairs faster than the world record holders in the long history of sprinting.
She stood in front of Mina, panting to catch her breath, and was unable to say anything. What she wanted to say was swallowed by her next thought and sentence, and those by the next ones, and on and on, so she stuttered and breathed and shook like a sparrow in the corner of a room from which it’s been trying to escape all morning, and when it’s finally let out, it doesn’t know to fly away.
“I told you!” Mina said and grabbed the first stocking of the day. “Dearie, a spitting image of Rudolph Valentino. Rodolpho Alphonso Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla. He wanted to give her a rose, and the girl let the rose fall into the sea. Hah, damned woman. And all that just to kiss her!”
Regina really didn’t go to Mina’s for the next five days. Not only that, she didn’t even poke her nose out of the house. She was afraid of meeting them. Him or her, it didn’t matter. She probably wouldn’t recognize him with his clothes on, but he would recognize her! Maybe he would come up to her, apologi
ze for being naked, or ask her what she thought she was doing going into someone else’s bathroom without knocking. Or he would begin with one of those vulgar, dirty male stories, proud that she’d seen him at his largest. Men like it when that happens— she didn’t know how she knew they did, but they certainly did. And what on earth was he even thinking about and what had he told Mina and what did Mina answer him? She certainly didn’t say “dearie” to him.
The moment she realized that she didn’t know how Mina addressed men, or what she said to them instead of “dearie” (and she certainly said something to them because it couldn’t be that she said even less to them or didn’t need any crutch words and phrases), Regina was overcome with jealousy. For starters, it wasn’t what she meant to him that bothered her but what he meant to her— that was what really bothered her. She and Mina were the best of friends; not a day had passed without their seeing one another, and now, you see, it was the fifth day since she hadn’t seen her, and she probably hadn’t crossed her mind. Why would she when Mina was probably holding that thick, greasy thing in her hand and didn’t know where to stick it, the old bag?!
“Has it occurred to her that I might be sick?” she thought. “Or that I might be dead? That I climbed up in the attic, threw a rope over a beam, and have a noose around my neck, weighing whether to stay in this world or not? Or maybe a wasp stung me and I’m all swollen, and there’s no one at home to bring me ice to reduce the swelling? In the end, I might have fallen down the stairs like Petka because things repeat in life. If you’ve ever done something really wrong, you’ll do it again. If you’ve ever brought great misfortune on yourself, you’ll do it again,” Regina thought, standing at the top of the steps that went down to the city, and tried to figure out how she might get her foot to catch on something, break her neck, and fall to the account of her disloyal friend. She didn’t do it. She probably would have if there had only been someone there to push her. So much rage and despair had accumulated in her because Mina had remained alone with Rodolpho Alphonso Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla, whose enormous member, like a divine scourge in the eyes of a sinner, grew bigger and bigger and turned into an obelisk that, instead of rising out of the ground, fell down toward her and almost touched that tiny crawling female being that kneeled alongside Calvary. Later, Regina would think this ridiculous. Her own torments would seem silly to her, and she would miss them because they would never come again in the same form.
On the sixth day, she opened a drawer and took out two pairs of old torn stockings that should have been thrown out and not darned, resolved to humiliate Mina. She wouldn’t ask her anything; she would just throw the stockings in front of her. Mend them, girl! Mend them, you miserable dry cunt! That was what she came up with, and that’s what she would say to her, so she would know what her place was or at least would realize for a moment what she’d lost when she took up with that young devil and threw her out of her house and tore apart a friendship more important than life.
She went into the shop. Mina was pleating a black skirt, one of twenty for a girls’ choir that was traveling to Belgrade for the celebration of the king’s birthday.
“Where have you been all these days, my poor girl? We got worried about you. He got worried!”
Regina took a look around to see what there was to smash. Should she punch the windowpane with her fist? No, that would be too much! So she kicked an old crock with all her might. It was an imitation of a Chinese vase, bought once long ago in Trieste, and her rare male customers put their canes and umbrellas in it. The crock flew over to the other end of the shop and broke into little pieces.
“You damned dry cunt!” she yelled, and the skirt fell out of Mina’s hands.
That would have indeed been an effective end to a friendship and the beginning of a great lifelong jealousy if Regina hadn’t overdone it a bit or the crock hadn’t been such bad workmanship, made of heavy baked clay, massive like the pots holding African palms in front of the Hotel Astoria. When she tried to run out of the shop, her leg started hurting with a pain like she’d never felt, and in an instant she was aware that she wouldn’t be leaving that place. She was flushed with shame because she was losing everything she’d gained over the past five days; she tried to stand on her foot again, and she got foggy in the head. She felt as if she were sinking into big bales of cotton that had been unloaded from an English ship long ago, in the first month of the Great War; the ship had left Egypt and couldn’t continue its course. Regina thought she might be dying and felt a little better.
The last thing she saw were Mina’s legs, white like spoiled sheep’s cheese, with bluish-pink veins that had burst one after the other. When the last one burst, that woman would be dead. She thought of a bas-relief of healthy blue veins and sank into darkness.
And then she saw his face over herself. In fact, she felt his hand brushing her hair from her face. He did it carefully, so as not to touch her skin. She opened her eyes and then immediately closed them, pretending to sleep, pretending that she wasn’t there. She was dead but by some miracle was breathing. That couldn’t last very long because as soon as that handsome man began to slap her cheeks, which he’d certainly seen in movies about Russian counts, she could definitely see; she shot through him with eyes as wild as Hiawatha’s and tried to think up a curse that would put him in the same place she’d already put her friend. But of all the ugly words, only one came to Regina’s mind, the one she couldn’t say because she would have died of shame. Between her lips was the word that on that day in dear departed Petka’s bathroom had gone from being a swearword to a living torment.
It was Sunday when Aris Berberijan carried Regina Sikirić in his arms all the way to the city hospital. She had her arms around his neck. Mina walked beside them and every so often held up her hurt leg, as if that would help, and he heroically held up the heaviest burden he’d ever lifted in his life. Not once did he put her down to rest, not once did he open his mouth and say anything, nor did his hands start to shake. They went down the steps and toward the city center, and everyone who was supposed to see them did.
That afternoon women became particularly hateful toward their husbands; young women shut themselves up in their rooms, threw their quilts over their heads, and wept bitterly in the hope that they would suffocate. That evening not one husband in the houses along the way that led from the Sikirić house to the hospital got dinner. That night not a single child was conceived. The menfolk found themselves completely baffled. And only those who hid the shameful seeds of pederasty within themselves knew what was going on. And the womenfolk found in themselves the shared and unspoken reason for jealousy and hatred, which would accompany Regina’s shadow from that day until the day she died.
Never again would the thighs of living women yearn from windows and verandahs for Aris Berberijan to carry them like that, but their jealousy and hatred would live on unabated.
“There are cracks in three bones,” said Dr. Mikulić. “In all likelihood you’ll always have a limp.”
Regina shrugged her shoulders and turned her head away. She didn’t know that doctors always said things like that. Aris put his hand down on her hair again, this time to touch her and comfort her. He still didn’t feel anything definite for her. As often happens with men of great beauty, those small-time Apollos, he too lacked the talent or skill to see himself with the eyes of the other sex and sense when his aura met another aura.
The Walnut Mansion Page 44
