“Christ has arisen. Today or in two weeks. Don’t be sad, child; you have no reason.”
Before New Year’s in 1933 Aris and Jana had their first fight, without even knowing what it was about. A plainclothes policeman knocked on the kitchen window, and Regina shrugged her shoulders when he told her that Mina was dead and they weren’t sure whether she’d killed herself or someone had murdered her— she lay with her throat cut on the bed, whose pillow no longer smelled of lavender.
“I’m not going to that old slut’s funeral!” she shouted and slammed the door, and blood started flowing from Luka’s nose.
“Look at him; he could kill a lion with his fist,” Jana said, admiring Mussolini, who was bawling about workers’ rights from a balcony in Rome. Aris couldn’t hide his jealousy.
“Fascist faggot!” he said.
That same day Luka told Regina that Adolf Hitler had become the German chancellor, and she said that it would be smarter for him to study for school than to sit listening to the radio all day long at Svetinović’s, that customs guard.
“Do you love me?” Aris asked and blinked as the Reichstag burned.
Jana was practicing with twelve bowling pins and when they were all up in the air said, “You’ve asked me that thirty times today already. I’m not going to answer!”
Luka hit his fist on the table, and Regina slapped him, the first and last time in her life.
“You’re a lunatic, a common lunatic,” he shouted through his tears, and she cracked her knuckles. The joints popped like a hot pine stump in an autumn rain.
“I’ll groom horses; I know everything about them,” Aris told the circus owner, Tibor Timošenko.
“So you don’t have any more money, huh?” the old acrobat asked and squinted at him.
“When he spends his last dinar, he’ll come back to me,” Regina whispered to Luka through the prison grate.
“And what if they convict me?” he asked, but the English consul didn’t bring any charges.
“You fall asleep in Austria and wake up in Germany,” Timošenko said and sighed as prep school students paraded through Vienna’s Ringstraße shouting slogans about German unification.
“We’re finished,” Jana said and sighed.
“We’ll fight,” Aris answered. “Hitler can’t conquer the world.”
She looked at him sadly: “He doesn’t have anything to do with you and me.”
That same evening an Arab horse named Hafez struck Aris in the forehead with its hoof, and he lost consciousness briefly. The very next day he remembered everything except that he’d ever been with Regina. That detail would come back to his memory only when he died in 1940 in Paris, in the arms of Tibor Timošenko, who’d lost a bet that his trapeze artist Aris Berberijan could do a double somersault with his eyes blindfolded and without a safety net and grab onto the arms of Alija the Turk, the strongest man in the Levant. The knuckles of their middle fingers only brushed each other, and Aris fell into the abyss and broke his spine.
Two days after the Anschluss, Ivo Delavale kissed Regina for the first time.
“I’m sailing out tomorrow,” he said, “and you’ll wait for me if you love me.”
She looked at him with yearning, as a beaver looks at a broken dam. “I won’t wait for you,” she said, shaking her head. “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.” And he pressed her in his embrace and with his fingers he imitated ants climbing up her underarm. He tickled her until tears came to her eyes and then left.
The next year was the happiest in her life. She forgot one man and wasn’t really waiting for the other. She didn’t believe him because she’d decided not to. If you survive being in love, you can decide what you want, and you won’t make a mistake or give in.
Everything went well until that May evening when she ran out of the Cosmos Cinema in tears, horrified by the Hindenburg disaster. She realized that she was thirty- two years old and wouldn’t live to see the advances in science and technology repair what Aris had broken. What had been broken by both Aris and Mina, who’d died to pay some terrible debt, and also by her fear, which was the reason she’d waited so long and then ended up with the wrong man. Everything was wrong, and only the hope that she would fly into the clouds with kings and princes held her soul together. However, the Hindenburg went down in flames. And what else was left for her to do but to give herself over to the one whom she didn’t believe and, when he finally came back, to create faith in him. And that faith, of course, wasn’t a faith borne of love but a faith borne of fear. One of many religions that leave no holy books or stories behind. Neither holy wars nor the blood of innocents strengthen them. They have no armies of infidels arrayed against them. And no one recognized hers to be a faith because it didn’t belong to anyone other than this desperate woman who’d created a new faith. Regina created hers around the Hindenburg, and many men of her generation created theirs around the Spanish Republic.
When years and decades would pass and the twentieth century came to an end, their grandchildren would ask what had happened to their grandfathers, what kind of romantic chaos had taken hold of their souls and led them to go thousands of kilometers away to defend something that belonged to someone else so that they died for Barcelona and Madrid and in French camps they awaited the Nazis, who then sent them to eastern Poland to death camps, gas chambers, and crematoriums, where their great illusion finally went up in smoke and ash. Their grandchildren, to be sure, wouldn’t know that the old men in their families had fought for something of their own and not something that belonged to someone else! Spain fell to them as the last great hope of the world, breathing its dying breath. Hope replaced God because God didn’t live to see the twentieth century. He died with the last great Requiem Masses and oratorios. Mozart still believed in him, but with Wagner faith had already become a myth. Bepo Sikirić went to defend Spain in the name of hope. And during that time his sister waited for the Hindenburg to land at Popovo Polje; millions of men and women all over the world hoped for hundreds of thousands of their own miracles and in doing so scorned one another because the hopes of others almost always seemed trivial. The problem came about because the majority of men believed in organized and collective miracles, those for which it was worth spilling blood. The blood of others if they were stronger and were on the attack, and their own if they were weaker and on the defensive. That was the most probable reason why revolutions broke out, stronger than all considerations of class and nationality cited in history books. In a world without God, cities, countries, and whole nations suffered on account of the hopes of men, but on account of the hopes of women no one usually suffered except the woman who hoped. Only in exceptional circumstances did whole families suffer. If a man’s thinking didn’t do them in with war. True, it sometimes happened that the roles were reversed and that the hopes of men became the hopes of women.
So it happened that Olga Benario, the daughter of a rich Munich lawyer, went in those years to start a revolution in Latin America. No matter whether she was disgusted at what was happening in the beer halls of her own city, or had ceased believing that Europe could become a continent of freedom and justice, or whether she was carried away by the musical melodies of the Hispanic languages, she arrived in Brazil and fell in love with Luis Carlos Prestes, a Marxist and the leader of an insurrectionist march through the jungles of Brazil. Together with him she went through a little revolution that for political reasons wasn’t mentioned in the European newspapers, neither the Western ones nor the Soviet ones, and history mostly passes her over in silence because in our century the rule is that history doesn’t record what the newspapers haven’t already reported.
In that revolution Olga Benario saw blood, death, and villages in flames, but she also saw a flower that after her death would spread through the Mediterranean and be known by the name bougainvillea. In the Amazon jungle, where it was warm and wet, that flower was almost always a white color, but on the Adriatic coast it was blue, dark pink, and violet, depending on how much
the plant lacked warmth. She liked that white flower but not because she was a woman (as one who clearly divides the world into a male and a female half might assume), but she liked it as would anyone who had a pure eye and saw something for the first time. Luis acknowledged its beauty, though he’d never noticed it before. Because he’d been looking at it all his life.
“You see, that’s good. People need to mingle in order to learn to see. That’s why the revolution will win,” he shouted. “The Internationale is in the eye of woman and man!”
And the unfortunate Luis Carlos Prestes deceived himself. The uprising failed, and the Brazilian government extradited his Olga to Germany. She died in a concentration camp, and the date of her death, and the deaths of the majority of the camp inmates, was every date of every year for her loved ones. Olga Benario is worth remembering not only because she was guided by hope like Regina, but because one of the first bougainvilleas in the Adriatic was planted in the garden in back of the Sikirić house.
It was brought there by a Dr. Elsner, from a meeting of botanists in Padua, and he planted it there because he had no garden of his own. Elsner also died in a camp but not because of hopes and ideals but because he was a Jew. The bougainvillea grew and flourished, and its flowers were always violet. It survived the Second World War and all the misery that followed. It was still there after the bombardment in 1991, when the house burned, and lived to the end of the century, as big as the biggest pine and as old as the oldest olive tree. It outlived everyone who remembered it. It was the only constant in this story.
Regina fell asleep right before dawn, inconsolable like the country of Poland and furious at a world that felt no sympathy for what had happened in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
When she woke up, the sun was already in an afternoon hour, and she was waiting for her sailor. That was how her romance with Ivo Delavale began, which no one opposed and could have ended differently if at one moment the fates that were mutually involved hadn’t crossed. Regina’s, about which we know most everything, and the fate of Diana Vichedemonni, about which we won’t learn anything. Such is, to be sure, the logic of life. Those who pass judgment usually don’t know that they’ve passed judgment on someone. Just as those who are condemned don’t learn anything about those passing judgment either, no matter how hard they try and no matter how sweet revenge seems. No one succeeds in taking revenge on anyone in this short life. We would have to live a thousand years, as in the Old Testament, and know more than any one person can ever know if we were going to be able to take revenge.
IV
On Christmas Eve in 1927 Kata Sikirić cursed God. Her hands clenched into fists in the black bread dough she was kneading, and she couldn’t unclench them. At first a sharp pain shot through her left hand, and immediately thereafter she lost all feeling in it. She could still move the fingers on her right hand, though she couldn’t free them from the dough, whereas the fingers on her left hand felt as if they’d been fused with the hard stone of the Revelin fortress. Kata wasn’t overcome with fear, only with confusion perhaps. In the few seconds that the whole episode lasted, she wavered between two thoughts, two conflicting feelings: the thought about the yeast that had stopped working in the dough and, instead of making the Christmas bread rise, turned it into something sad and yeastless, a cake of pious Jews, and the thought of the curse she’d uttered aloud right before she felt the sharp pain. Rage came with the first thought and wonder with the second. Either God was taking revenge on her for the curse, which would mean that He existed after all, or she would have to take revenge on him because he was so powerless that he couldn’t even give yeast any power.
Kata waited for a resolution of her dilemma: it was the longest wait in her forty-two years, and soon there was nothing left but the waiting. No hands clenched in the dough, no eyes about to pop out of their orbits, no thoughts, neither the first nor the second, no feet, and no wood floor underneath them. A moment later when Regina let out a scream, waiting was the only thing left of Kata Sikirić.
Ten minutes later the entire neighborhood was already there, even one-hundred-year-old blind Slava Tutin. The old woman’s grandson, Captain Bariša, held her by the arm as she whispered, “Where’s the deceased, where’s she lying, are all the windows shut . . . ?”
Young people were pushing in from all sides. The women smelled of salt cod that had already been soaking in water for three days, and the men pursed their lips while their cheeks puffed out like those of forest dormice. They wheezed through their noses and turned red, careful not to let the smell of brandy escape through their mouths on a fasting day like this. The stronger and more agile ones pushed their way to the kitchen table, beyond which Kata was lying. Those behind them stood on their tiptoes trying to see something. Some were even eyeing the table, wondering whether to climb up on it and—as impolite as that may be— take a look at their deceased neighbor one last time from the best vantage in the room. True, they would see her once more at the chapel before the funeral. The casket would be open because that was the custom, and the deceased’s face had not been disfigured by illness or an accident so the family would have to hide it. But that wasn’t the same. People saw dead people who’d been tidied up, bathed, and dressed in good clothes at least once a week because people they knew died about that often, people whose graves one visits at the cemetery, whereas something like this only happened once in so many years. Her eyes hadn’t even been closed yet; they stared up at a chandelier where a spider was busy spinning his web, and it seemed as if Kata was angry at him for doing that. She looked just like that, no different. This must have been a sign; the older women would have to know what it meant when a dead person saw a spider spinning a web. Did it mean that Kata had worked hard in her life and would now go to heaven to rest, or did it mean something else? And perhaps the sign had nothing to do with the deceased but had something to do with her home? Had fate spun a web of misfortune over this home, and was the worst yet to come? Some recoiled a little at this thought, and two women crossed themselves.
“Poor Kata, and she gave birth to five children,” one said.
“Not five but six; one of them died from the Spanish flu,” another corrected her.
“That wasn’t her child; it was her sister’s,” the first retorted.
“What’re you talking about? Her sister gave birth to three, and all of them are still alive,” her neighbor said, ready for a fight.
“Are you both crazy, what sister? She doesn’t have any sisters besides Angelina. Those are her uncle’s children,” a third woman said.
“Shut up, goddammit,” a large man hissed at them. He was most likely the first woman’s husband, and he jerked her by the arm and pushed her behind his back. There she kept grumbling for a while but eventually fell silent.
“Look, the dough on her hands still hasn’t dried . . .”
“She’s clenching those fists so hard they would crush a rock if she were holding one . . .”
“It was her heart, her heart, I’m telling you.”
“Or a blood vessel in her brain burst.”
“No, no, when a vessel bursts in the brain, the face is disfigured, and look at Kata: everything is just like it was.”
“Even better than it was! All her worries have disappeared.”
“Lord, she looks so beautiful.”
“And young, the poor woman.”
Gentle voices filled the room; one compliment and admiring remark came after another. Kata hadn’t heard this much praise lavished on her in all her life. Regina stood hard as a stone to one side; she wanted to shout and chase the vermin away, but her voice wouldn’t do it, and her joints were as soft as cotton. The crowd of people soon stopped noticing her; they kept coming and pushing in front of her, and soon she found herself leaning against a wall in a corner of the kitchen, all alone and far away from her dead mother. She would have remained like that until evening while the audience kept changing if her brothers Đuzepe, Bepo, and Đovani hadn’t arrived within five m
inutes of one another.
“What are you doing with my mother?!” the oldest thundered, and in the blink of an eye the kitchen and house began to empty. Their neighbors, ashamed, their eyes fixed on the floor, hurried out. Chairs scraped the floor and rattled; the door slammed against the wall; one heard a muffled groan from a squashed corn; they ran like children when someone smashes a window at a school. Maybe not even two minutes had passed and they were alone, the four of them, along with Kata’s clenched fists. Bepo closed her eyes, Đuzepe started quietly crying, and Đovani turned pale and started trembling. The boy had never seen a corpse before.
A little later Aunt Angelina, Kata’s sister, came running, carrying Luka in her arms. She started wailing as soon as she reached the door. The little one said nothing and waited for his aunt to put him on the floor, and she didn’t do it for too long. Instead she carried him around the table as she lamented, “My sister, my dear heart, these poor orphans were born of your flesh and blood . . .”
Then she bent down over dead Kata still holding Luka in her arms, but the child was heavy and nearly caused her to lose her balance. When she realized what she was doing and that it made no sense, Angelina tried to extricate herself:
“Okay, dearest, kiss your mother one last time!”
Almost upside down, Luka kissed Kata on the cheek. He did that calmly and without any fear. He knew that his mother was dead by the fact that she wasn’t moving. That’s not so bad, he thought; you just stop moving and that’s it. He wouldn’t remember that happening. He would forget it so completely that he laughed when Regina tried to remind him of it much later. She also mentioned his hysterical Aunt Angelina and the kiss on Kata’s cheek on that crazy and joyful night when he returned forty years later from Trieste and was himself bidding farewell to life. But Luka only laughed and waved his hands, as if driving away the annoying specters of invented nightmares.
The Walnut Mansion Page 46
