“And what’ll we do now?” Đuzepe asked stupidly.
“We’ll wait and everything will happen by itself,” Bepo said calmly and straightened out his mother’s legs and put her hands together across her breast. Aunt Angelina sat by the stove and mumbled the two prayers that she knew at all, the Our Father and the Hail Mary. Đovani’s blood returned to his head; he grinned sarcastically at his aunt and tried to get her to notice.
But Kata’s sister didn’t see anything any more, nor did she hear what was going on around her. She fell into that special metaphysical trance that seizes non-religious women and those free of the Holy Spirit who are inclined to fashionable shouts and submissive in the face of all folk traditions. She devotedly recited her mantra and swayed like an eastern mystic, actually enjoying everything that was happening and what was yet to happen. It would have been unfair to say that she didn’t pity her sister; she loved her purely and devotedly, as do people with simple hearts and souls without a great deal of intelligence. But that was no reason at all not to give herself over to a long, attractive series of post-mortem rituals and customs. Soon everyone would come to her to express their condolences. She would buy a black hat and veil, faint behind her sister’s corpse, and firm male hands would take her under the arms and lead her all the way to the grave. She would speak words of her greatest sorrow, yield to a poetic delirium, and—what was most important— everyone would listen to her. Her mourning would make their skin crawl. It would be a long time before they forgot the moment Kata Sikirić was committed to the earth, that poor woman who was the mother of five living children and a sixth that had died in her arms. Angelina would make it so that all the other funerals would be forgotten after that one greatest, most mournful, and most beautiful funeral of all. She would spill her tears before them like pearls, humiliate them with her talent for sorrow, and elevate the deceased woman to a place that she should have had while she was alive but that wasn’t granted to her by these heartless people.
But Aunt Angelina was wretched in fact. She was as good as gold and dull as an ax used for chopping beechwood. Wicked Đovani was practicing his first pubescent ironies on her. Bepo was too ashamed to look at her. The simpleminded Đuzepe tried to comfort her. He put his hands on her shoulders and brushed the tears from her cheeks, as if the death of his mother were a trifle compared to the tragedy of Angelina, whose sister had died. In fact, he could have been her son because he resembled his aunt more than anyone in the family, and it was no wonder that he loved her most. She was closer to him than his mother Kata because she didn’t expect anything from him, nor did she compare him to other children but let him be what he was: the odd one in the family, a kind of timid mountain creature to which civilization only caused torment and for whom school was the source of the greatest fear in his life. After the news arrived that Đuzepe had been murdered in cold blood in a Chetnik reprisal, only his Aunt Angelina would light a candle for him, shed a tear, and say a hundred Our Fathers and Hail Marys. No one else cared, or they felt relieved that he would no longer show up in the family house and remind the world that it was composed of countless oddities but that most of them cause people awkwardness and shame. The Sikirićes felt shame on their own account but also for Angelina and Đuzepe, which is also the reason they didn’t like them very much.
Regina said nothing; almost all the feelings a living being can bear deep in its heart were mixing and blurring in her head. She wasn’t sure whether she mourned that woman, whether it hurt her that her mother would forever be under the ground she walked on, or whether she was happy that the one according to whose standards her world also had to be tailored was gone. Kata hadn’t forced her to do anything, nor did she mention marriage, though from her perspective twenty-two years was the final deadline for a woman to lie under a man and start bearing his children. But just the fact that she was as she was, that she breathed next to her and worked around the house from dawn to dusk, created awkwardness for Regina. Now that she was gone, there wouldn’t be any awkwardness either. Her little fists covered with dough would never move again. Those little fists that protruded from oversized sleeves covered with countless images of camomile flowers that had faded from washing. She’d watched those sleeves and flowers from the day she was born, and they’d been getting tinier and tinier, paler and paler. She didn’t remember ever having seen her in another blouse. And now she was looking at those flowers for the last time. They wouldn’t fade any more; they wouldn’t exist any more. They were a grievous source of sadness for Regina, a grief the size of the universe with which we see off holy women when they leave this world. Women who during their lives don’t do anything to call into question the pure innocence of the sleeve of their only blouse.
The silence and calm surrounding the dead Kata lasted less than an hour. Then Father Ivan knocked on the door, a black raven that had already somehow learned about the latest deceased in his parish. Bepo let him in without a word, and Angelina readily jumped up from her chair to join the ritual, while the others pretended the priest didn’t exist. Đovani cleaned his fingernails, Regina didn’t take her eyes off the field of chamomile, and Đuzepe ran outside. He was afraid of priests because he didn’t know what to do in their presence— when to cross himself, when to mumble something, and when to fold his hands piously. He did, however, remember that he’d gotten more thrashings from catechism instructors than from all other teachers combined. And they beat him like a rented mule because he endured it and never cried. They thought that Đuzepe was spiting them and kept to the age-old pedagogical principle according to which one should thrash a boy until his tear glands dry up.
Little Luka sat on the floor, and it seemed that not even he was particularly interested in Father Ivan’s appearance. He was more interested in a lizard that ran through the kitchen and slipped under the china closet. And the priest, of course, knew his parishioners well and what kind of house he was coming into, so he didn’t pay attention to those who were there. With Angelina’s mute assistance he said his prayers quickly, crossed the air over dead Kata, extended his hand to everyone, and went outside hastily and without saying good-bye. It was Christmas Eve, and it was almost indecent to die on Christmas Eve.
Father Ivan had hardly left when Dara Živoderka showed up, a woman in her late fifties who ran an unregistered funeral home in the city. Stout and strong, with arms like a circus weightlifter’s, she would take care of everything that a mourning family wasn’t ready for or trained to do. She carried Kata into the bedroom by herself, laid her down on the floor beside the bed, and took all of the necessary equipment out of a large leather suitcase that she carried with her: a tin basin, wooden clamps for straightening out crooked joints (in case the deceased had stiffened in an irregular position), a silk kerchief for closing jaws, various pairs of scissors, and polished medical instruments that resembled gynecological ones that had no practical purpose apart from convincing families of the seriousness of Dara’s work. She ordered all the men to leave the room and sent Regina to fill the basin. When she came back, she found her mother already completely naked.
“Stand here and don’t ask anything,” the woman ordered. She moistened a sponge and started to wash the dead body. She was agile, with a routine in her movements that one sees only in professional dishwashers in large hotels. She knew the anatomy of the human body, its folds, depressions, and bulges better than the Creator.
“Get the clothes ready that you’re going to move your mother in,” she said, cleaning the dough off Kata’s hands. Regina didn’t understand her right away. What move? Probably to avoid deluges of tears, Dara made efforts not to say death, procession, or funeral ceremony, and somewhere she’d probably heard how Muslims talked about all of that. The deceased moves to the akhira and continues on, according to her merits, to jannah, where the souls of the blessed reside, or to jahannam, where the sinful are subjected to the torments of hell. It was the same as with the Christians, in fact, but without words that would summon tears.
/> Regina got out her mother’s black dress clothes from the closet— a skirt, a blouse, and a hood that Kata wore when she went to funerals. Dara dressed the deceased again without anyone’s help.
“What about underwear?” the daughter asked softly.
“She won’t need it,” she answered firmly, placed the body on an even bed, folded the dead fingers on her chest, and said, “Okay; now don’t move her any more, and you can light a candle, but be careful so nothing catches fire.”
As she left the room, Dara crossed herself, just for herself and without looking any more at the result of her work. She did that as protection against curses and bad dreams. She charged a lot for her services, and left to wait and see whether death would bring sorrow to any other homes on that day before Christmas.
In those years Dara Živoderka was probably the most hated person in the city but maybe also the only woman about whom people didn’t make comments when she passed. Nor was she followed by loud gossip. If anything was said about Dara, it was done under one’s breath, in a whisper, and with the strictest discretion. People superstitiously feared her powers, and you never knew when you might need them. She came mostly without an invitation, after Father Ivan had finished his work, so people believed that she and the parish priest had some kind of business arrangement. The people of the city couldn’t agree on whether the priest took a part of her fee or whether the agreement with Dara was a part of his curatic mission. Naturally, the pious believed in the second and the godless in the first. On the basis of such things, one could tell what kind of attitude people took toward the Almighty better than from their behavior at Mass every week.
But everyone agreed on one thing: Dara occupied a higher position in the social hierarchy than Father Ivan. Parish priests come and go, but she remained in eternal collusion with death. The world recoiled from the dead, from evil spirits and the superstition that dying was infectious. They didn’t want to see the naked bodies of their parents, brothers and sisters, or dead children. Especially not withered genitalia, pudenda that had lost their last hair, members that had created them and of which all that remained was a wrinkled tobacco pouch, what you know exists but has to remain hidden. It’s terrible to touch icy skin and move stiff limbs, to see those close to you turning into useless, lifeless objects. Not even the most fervent believers could accept Father Ivan’s comfort completely. They too needed Dara Živoderka to liberate them from death. And everyone was glad that she came alone and uninvited because it wasn’t pleasant to pass by her house, let alone knock on her door.
She lived outside the city walls, below the hospital, with a Czech woman named Jarmila who had come on vacation before the war and never gone back to Prague again. They rarely saw that woman. She never went down into the city, but in the summertime she would sun herself and swim on the hidden rocks in the direction of Trsteno. Fishermen saw her lying alone in the sun and were enchanted by her naked body. She would be wearing only men’s military underwear and nothing else. But one didn’t talk much about that either, out of fear of Dara. Nor did they talk about what the two women meant to one another. Four years later, in the summer of 1931, it would be shown that there exist things much worse than open gossip, when one of the most sickening crimes in the history of the city took place. Dara Živoderka found Jarmila’s mutilated body, minus its head and breasts, on the hidden rocks after her friend hadn’t come home for two nights. The police didn’t find the murderer, nor was Jarmila’s head ever found.
Until her death in the late ’60s a crazed Dara searched for Jarmila’s skull, and the people of the city could hardly get used to the idea of preparing the deceased for the hereafter without anyone’s help. In the summer of 1931 an unspoken love was ended, and there was no longer anyone to care for the bodies of the dead.
Their neighbor Mare Laptalinka had evidently been waiting in front of their house for Dara Živoderka to finish her work so she could knock on their kitchen window. Bepo rolled his eyes and said nothing. Mare had pushed the most to get the best look possible at the deceased, and now she was there again.
“You should live, my children!” she said and held out a pan of stewed codfish. She looked around; Kata was no longer there. “Here, children, if you need anything . . . ,” she mumbled and ran out.
Đuzepe had hardly opened the pan, filling the room with an aroma that gives a kitchen color and form, when someone else was already knocking on the door.
Stjepo Alar, Bartol’s father and an old widower, was holding a dish full of fritters. He smiled as if to apologize, extended his hand to the two older sons, opened his mouth to say something to Regina, but couldn’t remember what he wanted to say.
“My Mirica, she wasn’t yet twenty, also died of heart trouble. It used to be that only men died of heart trouble. This world’s gone crazy . . .”
Bepo offered him brandy, but Stjepo was in a hurry because there were already tears in his eyes. It had been fifteen years since Mirica had died. Bartol was only nine months old at the time, and his father had had to replace his mother. He changed him, cooked for him, did the washing, ironing, and everything that was a shame for men. For Stjepo it wasn’t shameful, but it was sorrowful. Whatever he did, it reminded him of Mirica, and every so often tears would run down his cheeks. He cried a whole sea of tears and couldn’t make his peace with it at all. People pitied him at first, but soon they started saying how Stjepo was a little flighty. A poor child with such a daddy! Because it wasn’t normal to cry so much for a woman. Maybe she’d been good to him, but she certainly wasn’t the only woman under the sun. He shunned company and withdrew into his house, partly because he couldn’t stop crying in front of strangers and partly because of an insult that he couldn’t endure. As soon as someone said that there were still good women and that he should find a mother for the child (even if they had the best of intentions), it was as if someone had driven a knife into his heart. Mirica was the only woman for him because she was his first and had departed like that. Such loves are hard to get over.
After Stjepo there came at least thirty or so neighbors to the Sikirić house— women and widowers, old ladies, unmarried girls, those who were doing penitence for having enjoyed the image of dead Kata, and those who, like Stjepo, came out of the goodness of their hearts. Each one brought a pot, pan, plate, or skillet . . . On the kitchen table were dishes of cod alla bianco and cod stews, cod alla rosso, marinated sprats, all kinds of seafood stews, shellfish, crabs, conger eels, salted sardine cakes, marinated mackerel, one monkfish stew and one bean stew, corn stew from some poor devil, and fried sardines dried in packing paper. When the holiday delights no longer fit on the table, Regina started lining them up on a festive white tablecloth that she’d spread out on the floor under a window. Here there was walnut bread and fruitcake, carob cakes and dried fig cakes, and a whole pile of fried dough and dark-flour fritters. People brought the dishes, and each one would say two or three words and leave. Outside it was dark; it was going on nine o’clock when they began to get ready for the midnight Mass, and the bustle continued.
The family members were confused, and then they were seized with a strange kind of hysterical exhilaration. Only Aunt Angelina nodded reluctantly, kept saying the Our Father and the Hail Mary halfway through, and broke off in the middle of the prayer, which no longer made sense because the spirit of mourning had been stifled in a way that was incomprehensible to her.
“I’m off to my sister,” she said indignantly and went into the bedroom. Luka started after her, but Đuzepe grabbed him and pulled him up into his arms. The child’s chin started to quiver, and a second later his eyes were full of tears.
“Now your brother will show you how airplane pilots fly,” Đuzepe said and threw him up in the air one more time and then over and over again.
“Do it again! Do it again!” the boy cried, spread his arms, and waited for the moment when he wouldn’t fall back down but would stay suspended in the air like a seagull and fly through the kitchen on his own. And he k
new that it would happen sooner or later, which was why he asked his brother to throw him up every day but only when they were alone because Regina and Bepo got mad when Đuzepe did it.
When Luka was a baby, he’d thrown him up in the air like that, and once he threw him up too hard and Luka stuck to the ceiling like a pancake. Luka didn’t remember that, but everyone said that was what had happened. Except Đuzepe. Đuzepe said it hadn’t happened like that and would throw him up in the air whenever they were by themselves. But now they weren’t alone, and no one was getting angry about it anyway. That was because their mother had died and was no longer moving. It was good when Christmastime came and mother died and everyone was in a good mood and no one thought anything bad would happen, that hot milk would spill all over the floor, that Luka would play with a knife and cut his finger, that his big brother would make him stick to the ceiling like a pancake, or that his sister would cry because that time of the month had come again. Which time of the month? Luka didn’t know, but everyone always said that and giggled as if they’d farted softly and it really stank. Everyone plugged their noses except the one who did it. That one giggled, and that was how you knew that he’d farted. Most often it was Đovani who farted and giggled, and Regina never farted. Women didn’t fart; Luka was sure of that.
Đuzepe threw him up in the air and caught him in his arms for a long time, up until the boy got dizzy and asked him to put him down. The floor swayed under his feet; he stumbled twice among the plates and pots. The chairs that Bepo, Đovani, and Regina were sitting on, each in a corner, rocked back and forth. Bepo laughed briefly and stopped as if he’d remembered something; Đovani slapped his knees: “Ha, ha, ha!” And then his sister started laughing like crazy.
The Walnut Mansion Page 47
