But in that same hospital only three days later Aris would pass through Regina’s hidden lips and be where no man had been before. It happened on Sunday evening, while the doctor on call, the old Gjulio Devera, was sleeping according to his habit in the laundry room, and Hamza Begaja, the nurse, was counting the dinars that he’d received from Aris and listening in on the voices that he heard from the other side of the wall. It seemed to him that he was hearing the yelps of a bird dog that had gotten caught in a fox trap or the crying of the young Ms. Rizvanbegovica after she had miscarried her child and lost her mind. Hamza, who didn’t know about the birds and the bees, was frightened by what he heard. He felt guilty and was sure that he’d lose his job on account of this if he didn’t end up in prison. He was the only one who felt bad that night.
Regina didn’t end up with a limp. In only three weeks she was walking normally, and the doctors again thought it had to be a miracle. Little bones heal the slowest and fuse crookedly more often than not. But, you see, her bones fused quickly, with everything in its place and in the order that God had determined. The crock that she’d smashed with her foot brought her first real love. Then she strolled through the town holding hands with the stranger and thereby confirmed what everyone already knew. Though not every woman who held hands with an unmarried man was considered an easy woman, Regina immediately became a whore. The reason lay in Aris’s beauty. The old women remembered the parish priest’s words on the death of Rudolph Valentino. The women who’d unleashed a scandal when they left the Mass that day had grown old full of dissatisfaction and hatred for themselves and were even harsher toward Regina. In all that she saw only a game in which she felt victorious beforehand. She wasn’t bothered by the reproachful clicking of their tongues, which could be heard from the darkness of people’s cellars, nor did she give a damn when women would conspicuously cross over to the other side of the street when they came across them.
“The bitch has really gotten full of herself,” said Brother Dominko Miljuš, crossed himself three times, and smeared garlic on the knob on the door to the monastery. Just in case someone grabbed it whose hand had touched Regina, if only accidentally and in passing. Brother Dominko had a metaphysical hunch that the devil was soon coming to collect— crosses would be stuck in the ground upside down, people’s mouths would turn inward, and the whites of their eyes would be full of blood and darkness. Generally speaking, he was right. Millions of Europeans felt the same thing, but just as Abraham’s sons didn’t know where the threat to them was coming from, neither was he able to recognize the face of the Evil One. Historians would later be of the view that his face was visible at every step, but Brother Dominko, a product of his time, saw it in the love of a pretty city girl and a painfully handsome stranger. He smeared garlic on the doorknob and recited the prayers that were close to his heart. Against hunger, the plague and the Evil One; against those who didn’t understand anything; against baptized and unbaptized souls that consciously or subconsciously found themselves on the path to the devil. He always prayed against something, in the firm belief that the Almighty Himself knew on whom to bestow his mercy, but maybe he forgot whom all he had to send to the deepest chambers of hell in order for the world to be saved.
For nine full months (the time that the friar smeared the doorknob) the palms of the young divinity students smelled of garlic. In that year of 1931 a season of shallow and tepid contemplation lasted from spring until winter. It was revealed that in the rituals of the church the stench of garlic did more harm than the smell of incense did good. The good Lord probably would have forgotten his children without hearing the voices of their hearts if that love had lasted and if Aris Berberijan hadn’t disappeared from the city as suddenly as he’d appeared. After that the bitch also lowered her tail, and her eyes filled with tears.
Why did Aris run away from Regina? She would never find an answer to that question, and as long as she sought it, it would determine the course of her life and take her in directions in which, if it hadn’t been for him, she would never have gone. After the first nights they spent together in the hospital, they became everything that lovers can be for one another. She’d found the man of her life, with whom she would bear children and build a house on the coast, far from neighbors and vicious rumors outside their four walls, a man with whom she would sit on a verandah under an arbor and listen to bees buzzing above clusters of grapes that were bursting under the September sun and watch sails out on the high sea under which industrialists from Prague were enjoying their cruises; she’d found a man with whom she’d spend time while the sun set and alongside whom she would await her dying hour, on a shared bed, at the same moment, holding hands under their wedding photograph, which their grandchildren would inherit and take with them to other cities and countries.
In no time he forgot his father and the ground in which he was preparing to lie in eternal sleep, the law office that was already covered in dust, and under the door of which there was a growing pile of invitations to diplomatic balls, firemen’s parties and soirées with colleagues, a gathering of criminal law specialists in Opatija, and congratulations on forgotten anniversaries and verdicts that had saved the skins of murderers. Aris didn’t have an answer to the question of whether he’d really fallen in love with Regina or she’d just helped him to split with his past and flee the deceit that he’d committed. Nor did he give it any serious thought. Regardless, Aris had no doubt about it. Love was everything that didn’t remind one of indifference, unhappiness, or hatred.
But the first step he took toward her was also his last. He would have agreed to live like that to the end of his life, fifty meters away from her home, receiving her every night into his bed and waking up alone because she ran home at five so no one would notice that she wasn’t there. He was afraid of anything more than that. Or he couldn’t endure the rhythm to which she planned their future life.
The next spring they would get married, and a year later they would have their first child. And then they already needed to be thinking about building a house! Or maybe it would be better to forget everything and leave the city immediately? To go to America? Maybe Italy? They said that New Zealand was heaven on earth, though it was far away, in the middle of the ocean. And it was better to be as far away as possible. Where those you’re running away from can’t reach you. And maybe Zagreb or Novi Sad? That was simpler. Building a nest among one’s own people and surrounded by customs that weren’t foreign.
He patiently refused Regina’s offers and ideas. He would find a bad spot or a factory error in every one of them, and she would smile and say:
“Yes, I hadn’t thought of that.” But not half an hour later she had something new in mind, some happiness that he then found to have some defect. Instead of thinking that Aris in fact didn’t want it, which any rational woman would have realized, Regina had the impression that something was wrong with her. She planned badly, silly things came to her mind, and she would have already lost her head if it hadn’t been for him. Fortunately, Aris was as smart as he was handsome, so he always told her what was wrong with what she’d thought up. But he was also just as good, allowing her to keep coming up with ideas, plans, and fantasies. Another would have forced his will on her, but he wouldn’t! He waited for her to discover something that would make them happy and was clever at the same time! Months passed in that imaginary waiting game, right until Aris realized that he’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Regina’s plans for happiness resembled his father’s questions about what was just. The time to run away again was drawing near.
Mina darned stockings, pleated skirts, and pretended not to notice and not to realize what was going on. The man who had settled into the house of fear and sadness had liberated her from Petka’s death. She opened every door, went through the rooms, including the one in which the strand of spittle with the little droplet at the end had broken. She wiped away the dust and rearranged things that had been fated never to be moved from where the dead hand of
her angel had placed them. On days when there was no southerly wind, when the air was like clear water, and the stars were aligned for a childlike happiness, Mina smiled at herself. She was the master of fate and fear; she mutely spread her arms and nodded, instructively as if someone were watching her. The days, months, and years when she’d avoided the empty house seemed silly. But there was no going back— it had happened once and wouldn’t happen again! You’re the slave of your images, and you always will be. When you emerge from bondage— which was possible with a lot of luck and if your angel was so inclined— the years you lost remained in the fetters. She could sense this on nice days as she cleaned Aris’s rooms and lifted clouds of dust that could remember Petka’s epithelium, hair, and fingernails. A ray of the sun is contoured best in a cloud of dust. Only then do you see its edges clearly, when it is sharply refracted in the crystalline mirror or a young woman’s vanity.
Why is it that women’s dressing tables are called the same thing as the futility of human endeavor? Because in city apartments young women’s dressing tables are the cenotaphs of young souls. That was where Petka primped herself, combed her hair, and put on makeup for a love that never came. The mind is the place for a young woman’s hope, and hope is the most a soul can have. A soul without hope is the soul of an old woman. Old age comes early, much earlier than the time when men stop turning around to look at you. Old age comes when you build bulwarks around yourself that love can’t scale. Petka built them early, and Mina took after her older sister. They turned into old maids, which was the second biggest scandal in this city. The biggest would have been for people to declare them to be whores. Or even worse (and there are such cases), if people had spoken about them both as old maids and as whores. In that case there wouldn’t have been any quiet compassion, according to which people draw a distinction between women without love and women who go too far in love. The change that Aris brought into Mina’s life was like a belated revolution, but the harvest it produced was one of a kind of quiet happiness. At least on clear and sunny days and on nights when the stars were perfectly aligned. Then she had the temerity to do what she’d never dared before. She would talk with Petka’s shadow, laugh out loud at her fears, wipe away the dust that was turning into a gray sheep’s fleece under her hand. And then her heart would start pounding when she touched one of his things. A shaving brush, a razor with an ivory handle, a belt with a buckle in the shape of an eagle’s head, the smooth and firm leather of his shoes. In their polished black surface she could see her own face, a wrinkled and deformed dwarf laughing silently. And then she would grow afraid of Aris’s coming back unexpectedly. She skipped across the parquet floor and didn’t know where to go. She was bathed in alternating waves of hot and cold sweat. Everything that the man left behind was so dangerous and attractive. She found a little red rubber pump for enemas; she could feel a handful of hazelnuts in her throat; she couldn’t breathe. Poor man, if he’d told her, she’d have mixed him some tea for such problems! She quickly chased away an inappropriate thought. She squeezed the pump with her ring finger; it hissed air and there was the smell of chamomile; a few grains of dust flew up toward the sky. She ran out of the room and locked the door. If he came unexpectedly, she’d tell him that she’d grown afraid. She lay down on his bed. The pillow had absorbed the lavender in Aris’s hair; her heart beat like ten galley slaves trying to escape from a sinking ship. For a few seconds she didn’t know what to do and ran toward the bathroom and wet herself halfway there.
It was nice to live with a secret. Someone might say she realized that too late, but this wasn’t a problem for her. It was better like this, living in love when love was something you no longer had to seek or declare. And when you didn’t expect anything from it, least of all for it to be reciprocated. She was happy that Regina and he loved one another and believed it would always be that way. She was only afraid that they would leave her, go off to America or Australia, it didn’t matter where, and leave her behind. Regina was surprised when Mina told her that the idea of leaving wasn’t a good one, that there was no happiness to be found in an alien world. That was the first time that she was commenting on something and found a defect in an idea that Regina had come up with. Earlier she would have agreed, even if Regina had taken it into her head to attach swan’s wings to herself and fly from the top of Srđ Hill. And she had to say that, though it stung her in her heart, because she couldn’t take the idea of the two of them leaving, for Aris to take his little terrible objects away and for the pillow to stop smelling of his hair. Back home, she drifted off to sleep as the sounds of a mattress creaking came from Petka’s apartment, distant cries that she would never recognize in their daytime voices. But now she knew them, and it seemed as if they were hers. She didn’t want to lose them at all.
A month before Aris ran off, Mina realized what was going to happen. And she also knew why it would happen. Blind with love and passion, Regina clung to him ever more tightly. And she was blind and deaf to all the obvious signs of Aris’s calling it quits.
“Oh, dearie, if you knew how happy you are, you’d really watch your step,” Mina said, once she’d come up with what to say and seized an opportunity to tell her.
Instead of comprehending, or at least suspecting something, Regina just laughed. She laughed from sweetness, at everything people told her, or she kept quiet. She was in love in a way that was excessively rare in human beings. Like a male praying mantis. It goes off to die with full faith and a pure heart, convinced that nothing better exists. When love like that befalls them, people as a rule do survive, but something in them still dies. Every future love is filled with doubt, and every future defeat— if it is even possible in doubt— is harder for them to bear. They emerge from defeat different, worse and more unhappy in any case than they were. They start liking other colors, start hating dishes that they used to like; they become wicked in everything in which they were good; they become skilled at planning unhappiness. They become criminals.
Mina no longer visited Aris’s rooms and tried in vain to reconcile herself with what was coming. She watched him leave the house upset, without saying hello to anyone, and felt relieved when he did come back. She had a harder and harder time enduring Regina’s visits. Her continual babbling started to get on Mina’s nerves. She missed runs in stockings; her needle pricked the tips of her fingers and underneath her fingernails.
“He’s going to leave you,” she yelled one Saturday in late September, “and he won’t come back because you’re a goat. Just so you know: you’re a stupid goat. You’re a goat.”
She repeated it because she couldn’t come up with any other insult, and all she wanted was to tell Regina the most hateful words in the world. For the first time, she was jealous of Regina’s youth. No matter how much it would hurt her, Aris wouldn’t be her last man. But he was the first and the last in Mina’s life, though she’d never laid a hand on him.
The first time Regina fell silent, froze, and looked agape at that woman acting crazy again. That was how it began, and that was how it had to end. She’d brought him, and she would take Rudolph Valentino away. Regina ran out of the shop as soon as strength returned to her legs and heard Mina calling after her:
“Goat! Goat! Goat . . . !”
She shoved past Luka, who was about to say something, and locked herself in her room with both locks. Fear consumed the whole real world, and when she woke up a few hours later, her first thought was that she was gravely ill and couldn’t get up out of bed. Nor could she say a word or call for someone to help her. And she remembered that she’d locked the door and had to get up if she didn’t want to die all alone.
She no longer managed to think about Mina’s fit because his letter was waiting for her on the kitchen table. She opened and read it. With every sentence she forgot the previous one. And the letter was long, ten pages of small handwriting. Evidently he’d been getting it ready for a long time. It hadn’t come to him suddenly, and he certainly wouldn’t be coming back. In ever
y line he wrote that he loved her, and in every line there was one “but” that explained why he was leaving. Regina read the first part of each sentence twice and the second part only once and then forgot everything. When she read the last line of the tenth page, all she understood was that she was alone.
Aris was strolling along the promenade in Split and watching a Czech circus performer, a woman juggling bowling pins, right as Regina was hurling the last plates she found in the china closet through the window. He was traveling with that woman, whose name was Jana, as Regina theatrically tried to hang herself with a clothesline from which she’d removed wet pillowcases and thrown them into the dirt. She was running to claw out Mina’s eyes with the whole neighborhood running after her when Aris kissed Jana for the first time. Regina spat before the door of Mina’s shop and looked her in the eye through the display window, and that was how their acquaintance and friendship ended, while he was telling another woman that he loved her, and she was laughing at him like a tourist laughing at someone selling wooden donkeys. She was promising herself that she would never lay eyes on another man again at the moment when he thought that Jana might be the woman with whom he wanted to spend his life. She shut herself in her room and didn’t go out for a month, and he woke up every morning in a different city. Trieste, Bolzano, Bologna, Milan, Turin, Florence, Rome, Naples. He bought postcards but didn’t have anyone to send them to, and she was waiting for a letter of repentance— she would forgive him everything and would be his slave until the end of her life. On the day before Easter in 1932 Aris spent a crazy night with Jana and her friend Karolina, a sword swallower, and realized that his flame kissed other women as well, and not just him, but it didn’t bother him for a single moment. Regina was kneading dough for walnut bread and crying bitterly when the priest Stevan Bojanić came into the house and said:
The Walnut Mansion Page 45
