The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

“He shouldn’t do this,” Đuzepe said, laughing. “He shouldn’t do this at all,” he kept saying when he caught his breath. Regina couldn’t get up, her eyes were tearing up, and she was already completely wet; a feeling of the coming disaster spread throughout her body. If the end of the world came, those who knew what had happened would laugh just like this.

  In the bedroom lay Kata, ready for the grave. Aunt Angelina had lain down beside her and immediately fallen asleep. One could hear the murmur of thousands of people who, on the only night when the living stay up, were going to churches, calling out to one another across inlets or standing alone in the harbor, looking into the black seawater between the boats and feeling sorry for themselves. The living Sikirićes saw one more Christmas.

  That night they ate and drank like never before. They talked over one another, praised the food, told each other everything they would otherwise have kept silent, everything that got lost in the dead silence of brotherly and sisterly antipathy. It was strange to be one of five children of the same father and mother and for almost nothing to tie you to the others. And then there comes a time to reassemble a disassembled world, for shared words to gush forth, and for little wonders to multiply, which give people the strength to live on long afterward.

  Christmas Eve in that year of 1927 was a moment of the closest bonding— and in a strange way happiness too— in the lives of Kata’s children. If history were measured in the lives of last survivors, then in the history that ended on the day Regina Delavale née Sikirić died in a delirium, there was no greater holiday. Unfortunately, no one would ever write down or tell what they said to one another, what little bits of tenderness they exchanged, or how much anguish and distrust they erased with their laughter. All five of them would fall asleep on the kitchen floor, with crusts of bread in their hands and eels’ heads in their laps, and wake up hung over and with headaches, without the lesson that sudden happiness brings to the heroes of fairy tales. Nothing of that experience remained with them. The kitchen was full of trash, their dead mother lay in the other room, and Aunt Angelina stood like a statue, pressing her face with her fists, her eyes bulging, sure that she’d lost her mind and that what she was seeing couldn’t be true. She couldn’t remember falling asleep, but what she saw said that in the meantime something horrible had happened.

  Christmas passed in silence, fear, and headaches. Đovani was kneeling in front of the toilet bowl and vomiting. That was the first time he had been drunk, and for the next fifteen years, until the apparitions of Orthodox saints and his intoxication with revenge, it would remain the only time. Đuzepe didn’t dare look his aunt in the eye. He emptied pots of half-eaten codfish, and she took them and washed them without a word. Luka slept with his head on Regina’s lap. She stroked his hair and thought about the time that would pass before that little boy became a man and began taking care of himself and left. When kittens lose their mothers, they totter about in yards and streets, tumble head over heels down stairways, and their meows won’t let people sleep. The moment you hear them, you know that tonight or one of the following nights some sleepy man will run out of his house and break the back of the first kitten he finds. In the morning worried women will catch the other little animals, wring their necks like chickens, or drown them in shallow pools of seawater. One kitten nevertheless survives. The one that’s the strongest or the luckiest. He continues the species and prolongs the suffering of the cat world. And its happiness, too, if animals know what that is. And so that’s why cats have so many young. Not all of them ever survive. But children are born one by one, and someone has to care for them when they lose their mothers. She was fated to care for Luka. She would do that the best she could, as long as she had the strength, until she was overcome with despair and the boy got up on his own two feet.

  Bepo went to Father Ivan to see when the funeral would be, but the priest had left for somewhere in Herzegovina to conduct a Christmas Mass. Fat Adžem, a lay friar and the priest’s assistant in all affairs secular and religious, had been dead drunk since the early morning, slurred his words, and offered Bepo herbed brandy. He almost fell down the stairs when he accompanied Bepo out of his office. Antonijo the usher was spending the holiday in contemplation, somewhere on the Elaphite Islands, so there was no one to take care of funerals. The municipal building was locked; people were celebrating, some in church, others at table, still others with a bottle in their hands, each in his own way and in accordance with his own sense of God. People went from church to church, and as the Masses began at different times, their morning passed at divine services.

  That evening everyone would discuss how things had been in which church and which priest had had the best Christmas sermon. They would gossip about Father Ivan because he had, as always, left his parish for the holiday and left the church to two young priests from the Bay of Kotor whose dreams of celebrating Christmas Mass in the city had come true, and he had gone off to some one-horse village near Gacko, where there were maybe twenty Catholics in all. It was there that some Andro a.k.a. Kismet had built a church all made of marble so that he might atone for his sins, which he, as was told, had racked up while working as a mine supervisor in Australia. Andro a.k.a. Kismet had killed and raped, the God-fearing people whispered, though they’d never seen Andro. And what they heard about him was so unreliable that it would have been no wonder if it turned out that no one by that name and nickname had ever existed. The story about him was important only in one respect: at the end people said that Father Ivan received a handsome sum of money for his trips to hold Christmas Mass there, and he put it all in his own pocket.

  After kissing the gate to the municipal building and inquiring in vain about what to do with his dead mother, Bepo came home with the job unfinished. Aunt Angelina had washed all the dishes, Regina had swept the kitchen, and it seemed that everything was again in the best order. Indeed, just as it had been until the previous day, before Kata had stuck her fingers into the dough and couldn’t get them out again alive. But no one, not even Aunt Angelina, was glad that noon had already passed and the deceased hadn’t been taken away. And what was worst, Bepo couldn’t say when the medical examiners would come. Luka played by rushing off toward the other room. Regina would catch him in her arms and slap his hands, but the boy wouldn’t quit. He knew that his mother lay inside, that she was no longer moving, and that this was the reason why no one was letting him into the room. He didn’t know what his dead mother might do, but why should he be afraid of it? He could tell that Regina was afraid, which was enough for fun. It was easy to play with adults when they were worried about you and weren’t playing at all. It was harder when they wanted to play and didn’t know how to do it.

  “God help us, she’s starting to smell!” Aunt Angelina said and crossed herself.

  “It can’t be; it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours,” Bepo said and shook his head.

  “Oh, yes she has; can’t you smell it? It’s the south wind, damn her!” Aunt Angelina insisted.

  Nothing stank of course, and least of all Kata’s corpse, but the mere thought of that was enough for one’s nostrils to sniff the sweetish smell of flesh through which blood no longer flowed, the smell of a slaughterhouse, an open grave, a stuffy cemetery chapel, a cave with animal remains, everything that occurs to people who have ever smelled the stench of a human corpse and imagine it to be a compound of all known unpleasant odors. Regina tried to no avail to change the subject, and it didn’t even help that neighbors were coming every so often again and asking if they needed anything and taking away their plates and pots.

  “The deceased is starting to smell, God forgive me, my sister!” Aunt Angelina would squeal, and any neighbors there made sure to get out as soon as possible. Thus noon passed and evening fell on Christmas Day. No one turned on the light; they each sat in their corners; Luka fell asleep in his sister’s lap, and one could hear Aunt Angelina sniffing the air and announcing a catastrophe like a blind, deaf dachshund. On that night of horror everyone exce
pt for the little brother would experience moments when they hated their mother Kata with a hatred greater than any love. Kata would luckily never learn that each of her children, except the youngest and the one who’d died, had hidden her on Christmas Eve. That would have horrified her. She would have gone crazy. She would have died four times in a row, or her soul would have moved in between the covers of the holy books, where holy women, saints, and prophets endured their eternal torments together with the Son of God, who in a spectacular way had ended the history of the suffering of holy men, whereupon the history of sinners began.

  By the standards of the time in which she lived, Kata Sikirić was in every respect sinful, and it wasn’t unusual for her own children to renounce her when they smelled the false smell of her death in their nostrils.

  Just as every whole human story starts from the end, it would be better to examine the list of Kata’s sins from the last to the first. A month before her death she complained that she hadn’t grown snobbish in time, that she’d fallen for the first man who looked at her, that she hadn’t finished school and run far away but had instead borne him children one after another and built a tower to heaven and created six times what the Lord created only once when He created Adam and Eve. She scorned the Lord— if He even existed! But everything she thought and felt was put together and imagined as if He existed. Kata could imagine that there was no God; as more misfortunes accumulated in her life, that possibility seemed more and more probable. But she couldn’t imagine that there was anything under the vault of heaven that wouldn’t be in accord with the holy teachings. In short: maybe God hadn’t created Adam and Eve, but there was no doubt at all that Eve had eaten the apple.

  And what happened to make Kata complain about her lack of haughtiness? One morning while she was waiting for the bread dough to rise, she took Regina’s magazines from the window. She liked to flip through them; they were full of the wonders of the world, photographs of big cities and famous men and women whose biographies were likewise wonders of the world. No less than saints’ lives. However, these miracles weren’t made of goodness and suffering but something else. Kata didn’t know what, nor did she feel like thinking about that kind of thing.

  Well, that morning she read about the death of a woman named Isadora Duncan in World magazine. She’d been a dancer, the widow of a Russian poet who’d committed suicide, and the whole world was at her feet. It’s too bad that you only learn about people like that when they die, she thought, midway through the article, and by the time she’d finished it, Kata was desperate and was convinced that she herself could have saved Isadora Duncan’s life. And who was the cow that had woven Isadora such a long shawl? Because if her shawl hadn’t been so long, it wouldn’t have gotten wound around that car tire, and she would still be alive. Why was the shawl so long? It must have dragged in the dirt before she died. Isadora must have had to take care not to step on it when she was hurrying to the theater and make sure the ends didn’t end up in the mud as soon as it started raining. Otherwise she would have had to wash it all the time. And when you wash shawls like that too often, the colors fade. Maybe it would have been better for the unfortunate woman to have thrown it away after three washings; then this wouldn’t have happened. Or if she’d thought twice about the witch who wove such long shawls before buying anything from her. That woman must have charged for their length. The longer the shawl, the more expensive it was. In faraway places more lace certainly cost more than less lace. That’s how it was in other countries: everything came with a price and nothing was done out of love.

  Love is the happiness of the poor. The happiness of the rich is made of wealth. And that’s what did in the unfortunate Isadora. She was rich and didn’t think as she was buying the long shawl and loved as poor folk love and wore that shawl so she would be more beautiful for the one who loved her. That’s what Kata thought as she read about the tragic fate of Isadora Duncan, and then two things struck her. It was better to die like her than to live in a world in which no one admires you, in which there are no eyes that will see a miracle in you, that will look at you as at huge groupers taken by trickery, which you see only once in twenty years and whose lives are worth more than the lives of the fishermen on whose tridents they died. And the second thing: you can only be such a woman if God granted that you belong to the beautiful species. If you’re a fish, then he could either create you as a lowly mackerel or sardine or give you the aspect of a heavenly being whose death is the humiliation of its killer. If you’re a woman, then God let you choose for yourself whether you’d be a lowly mackerel or a beautiful grouper. At birth there was no difference between her and Isadora. Kata understood that well. The difference was created by life, which granted to some only that they would bring forth more of God’s creatures, something the church cherished, but which wasn’t really any more important than the work of railway porters. Life granted to other women that they would be actresses and ballerinas whose beauty would be admired by every thinking being. But in order for life to grant you something like that, you had to renounce your faith, your humility, and the prie-dieu that waited for your knees and made you one of hundreds of thousands. Instead of doing that, you waited on heaven even after you realized that there wasn’t any heaven. Just so, out of habit or because it was too late to trade in your life for another. You didn’t renounce what you didn’t believe in, and that was your greatest punishment.

  Until one day you read in the newspaper that the most beautiful woman of our time had died, and you realized that you could have saved her if you’d had the strength to save yourself.

  She cut out Isadora’s picture from the magazine and put it in the bottom of a box of papers. If there was war or the house burned, that box contained everything with which Kata could claim her right and her children’s right to a new life. And now she’d put something into it that didn’t belong and that in some way— never spoken and so never even molded into a clear thought— meant that she was renouncing them and that they’d become hateful to her. She would still have given her life for them, died once for each child, but she no longer loved them with that pure love of the Blessed Virgin gazing at her infant in a little painting above the altar that was already completely dark from the sighs of a hundred thousand souls that had prayed before it in the last two hundred years. Her renunciation of her own children was Kata’s last and greatest sin. She’d stopped believing in the most touching of all the holy teachings.

  The real truth is: Baby Jesus also made a mere mackerel of Mary.

  Thus, Kata renounced her offspring, only to have her offspring soon renounce her. There were no words spoken in these renunciations. The children couldn’t have even suspected what had happened, and their mother didn’t learn of their renunciation because she was already dead. Though no one knew anything, the misfortune nevertheless mushroomed with their unspoken feelings, and it would have been easy to follow the fates of all the Sikirićes in line with that. If there hadn’t been that shocking story about the death of Isadora Duncan, published in a Zagreb magazine, if Regina hadn’t left the magazine in the kitchen, and if Kata hadn’t read it, her children would have probably lived and died differently. At this time Darwin’s theory was not yet generally accepted, and the beliefs of the church were entering their greatest crisis in history; almost nothing was known about psychoanalysis, and ideas about historical determinism were concerned only with peoples and states— not with families. But according to all teachings, beliefs, and ideologies, the twentieth century would have passed differently for one family if only the illusion of motherly love had survived.

  It would be better if the preceding claim could be made in a more gentle or at least less binding manner because in that way one would avoid the false impression not only of Kata’s strength and greatness, but also the gravity of her final sin (which was more important). But now that her previous sins have been mentioned, it should be clear that this woman wasn’t strong or great and that her soul was full of a little of everythi
ng but not much of anything. Completely free of malice, simpleminded, she seemed to have been born at the wrong time. If she’d come into the world a few hundred years earlier, during the Inquisition or the witch trials, she would have been one of those undoubted model women who rendered the agony of the world and her own sex endurable and lent everything a sense of goodness. Maybe she would have ended up as an abbess, a caregiver for lepers and plague victims, because the reliance on the logic and flow of the holy teachings would have given her a strength greater than the strength of real faith. Belief in a fable was, in her case at least but maybe also as a general rule, more powerful than belief in God. People doubt his existence sooner or later because things don’t flow according to some imagined ethical plan, whereas no one can doubt a story. However, since she was born at a time when miracles were no longer born in men’s minds but were created by machines without souls or hearts, there was no benefit in life from belief in a fable. Fate had determined that she would live and die a very confused soul.

  She loved her man because that was how it was supposed to be and she didn’t know anything else. Kata didn’t know; maybe some did. But they weren’t her concern. She ran out when women started badmouthing their husbands: some beat their wives; some went out whoring every Friday; some vanished without a trace though they’d said they were just going to Herzegovina for tobacco . . . When they started talking like that, and they would start whenever more than two of them got together— during the grape harvest, before a wedding, or after a funeral— it seemed to Kata that every meeting of a man and a woman only brought unhappiness. But it couldn’t be like that, nor should it be! If it was, we should live as if it weren’t. How could those women not know that, and why didn’t they feel pain at least— since they weren’t ashamed— while they were talking about their men like that? She never said an unkind word about her husband. Nor did she have an unkind thought. True, he didn’t beat her or leave the house more than he had to. And he didn’t go to Herzegovina to get tobacco. He sat on a three-legged stool next to the chimney, sorting nails into three wooden boxes and sighing. For twenty years he’d been trying to make sure that the largest were in the first box, the smaller ones in the middle box, and the smallest in the third box. There were many of them— she could have studded her whole house all the way around with them, but even the most languid human being wouldn’t have needed more than two days to put each nail in the right box. Yet he never finished the job.